Customer Reviews

From New Babylon to Eden: The Huguenots and Their Migration to Colonial South Carolina (Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World)

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It's been a long times since Arthur Hirsch published the seminal "Huguenots of Colonial South Carolina." This book both expands and updates that classic study.

Dr. van Ruymbeke is the world's leading scholar of Huguenot migration, and a professor of American Civilization at the University of Paris. Potential readers should know that the author wrote this book in English. It is not a translation.

It is a fine piece of scholarship and an important contribution to Atlantic studies. But it is also an easily accessible narrative history of French colonial South Carolina. Yes, the writing is dense, and it definitely reveals a demographic, economic bent. Those things simply enhance the rigor of the study and will not detract the reader from the broader story - French Protestants had a profound influence on the foundation of the United States that far exceeded their relative population.

This book expands on Hirsch's study by examining the respective conditions in France and the British North-American colonies that encouraged migration. The book updates Hirsch's study by incorporating new research from resources in France and South Carolina. Where Hirsch's book emphasized the cultural assimilation of the Huguenots into Anglican colonial South Carolina, van Ruymbeke emphasizes their cultural CONTRIBUTION to colonial South Carolina.

The text is enhanced by illustrations, maps, tables, and an enormous section of appendices, end-notes, and a thoroughly up-to-date bibliography.

If you have specific interest in colonial South Carolina, this book must be in your library.