The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction [Paperback]

Bernard Bailyn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 12, 1988

In this introduction to his large-scale work The Peopling of British North America, Bernard Bailyn identifies central themes in a formative passage of our history: the transatlantic transfer of people from the Old World to the North American continent that formed the basis of American society. Voyagers to the West, which covers the British migration in the years just before the American Revolution and is the first major volume in the Peopling project, is also available from Vintage Books.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bailyn, prize-winning Harvard historian (Pulitzer, Bancroft, National Book Award), is writing a multivolume interpretive history of the transatlantic movement of people from Europe to America between 1500 and the Industrial Revolution. This volume, which introduces the series, will be followed by Voyages to the West announced for publication in the fall. Despite the outpouring of specialized studies, Bailyn notes, the transatlantic movement of some 50 million people remains a blur, a story without structure and scale. He shows how the findings of diverse scholars will be brought together in his series by following several lines of interpretation: that migration was an extension of European domestic mobility; led to the creation of widely varying American urban settlements; and (fired by labor needs and land speculation) gave rise by the early 18th century to an America that was a "ragged outer margin" of British culture. These themes whet appetites for what promises to be an important series.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Mr. Bailyn brings a new vividness, authenticity and excitement to the story of the settlement of North America....He sees the past in a more lively and human fashion, and in sharper detail, than have most previous historians....This is a rich canvas of a great folk-wandering over two centuries .... If the Introduction is any guide to what is to follow, the volumes to come will be treasure houses indeed."

-- Esmond Wright, The New York Times Book Review

"With a spare and delicate genius, [Bailyn] sketch[es] out the fiendishly complex essentials of a world where 'everything seems strange close up.'... Bernard Bailyn's work has the grandeur of a Braudel and the humanity of a Michelet. And he's got to the roots."

-- Gwyn A. Williams, The Guardian

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (April 12, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394757793
• ISBN-13: 978-0394757797
• Product Dimensions: 4.9 x 0.5 x 8.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #197,946 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Brief Introduction to Promising "Voyagers to the West", March 21, 2005

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S. Pactor "reader" (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (Paperback)

This is a brief introduction to Bailyn's highly regarded "Voyagers to the West". The book is, as it states, a serious of transcribed lectures that Bailyn delivered to college undergrads. You can tell that these are lectures, but Bailyn has provided ample footnoting at the back of the book.

Understand that this is a short book. It should only take about a couple of hours (maybe less) to read. "Voyagers to the West" runs about 800 pgs, so you'd probably want to read this before that, just to make sure this is what you are interested in.

Bailyn uses four "propositions" to frame the themes of his lectures. The propositions boil down to the idea that the received wisdom we have about the peopling of the British colonies in America is wrong and that the process was more complex then we thought. I would refer those unfamiliar with this approach (that of framing "propostions" for historical inquiry), to the work of the Annales school in France (Marc Bloch, Phillipe Aries, etc).

Fans of David Hackett Fischer's "Albion's Seed" will want to check this one out.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars great, January 1, 2003

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Scholar "18th century student" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (Paperback)

Peopling of British North America: An Introduction.
Surely one of the most important studies of the vast movement of immigrants to the New World is Bernard Bailyn's The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction. In a nuanced thesis regarding the motivations for promoting movement of large numbers of people to the American wilderness, he also shows how long-held traditions with regard to land ownership and tenantry were transformed in America, due largely to the new environment. Bailyn argues that after the "initial phase of colonization, the major stimuli to population recruitment and settlement were...the continuing need for labor, and...land speculation." The land speculation of the 17th and 18th centuries, Bailyn argues, "shaped a relationship between the [land] owners and the workers of the land different from that which prevailed in Europe." (60) Bailyn writes that land speculation was common in America among all classes of men, "a major preoccupation of ambitious people...launched as a universal business." (67) But with all of this pervasive land accumulation came an indispensable caveat; speculators needed settlers to populate the land they claimed, so that an owner could rent or sell his property. "Land speculation was, and remained, boundless, ubiquitous," (74) writes Bailyn, who goes on to describe the various schemes and methods speculators used "to people the land they claimed." (69) Yet as Bailyn points also out, long-held, customary tenancy relationships that British landowners were used to were not adaptable to America. Instead, new methods were needed to attract settlers and clear the land, so that property in the trackless wilderness would become useable, and as a result, valuable. Bailyn argues that, unlike tenancy norms in Britain or Ireland, speculators had to let the land out at very low rates (or none at all) in an attempt to attract settlers who would in turn make improvements on the property themselves, with their own labor. "The land would have a new value and could then be rented profitably or sold...all of this with little or no outlay of funds." (82) This innovative model was quite attractive to migrants, Bailyn concludes, who were free to chose upon which speculator's land to settle, and which lands to avoid. In America, gone were the services tenants typically performed in the old country, rent increases and the caprice of landlords. Bailyn goes on to suggest as well that unlike property limitations in Britain, land in the colonies was "too easily available" and mobility too common among settlers for tenancy to develop permanently, or to "make possible a re-creation of the stable pattern of rentiers that lay at the heart of a traditional landed society." New tenancy and ownership patterns "reveal a new and dynamic process that was a central force in the peopling of America." (84-85)

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction, August 13, 2002

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Joe Zika "Khemprof" (Cincinnati, Ohio) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (Paperback)

The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction writtin by Bernard Bailyn is a book that has three major essays about how North America was settled. These essays are: Worlds in Motion, The Rings of Saturn and A Domesday Book for the Periphery.

In these essays the author brings a new vividness and authenticity to the story of the settlement of North America as the Old World tranfers people to the New World... we see a basis for an American society begining to form... later a British migration solidifies a central theme where people wanted to control their own destiny.

The book is well-written and is documented giving the reader sharp detail. I found the book to be not only educational, but enlightening.