Customer Reviews

The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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)

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.

this is a brief but fascinating read. although it contains in itself a great deal of interesting material, it really makes you anxious to read the subsequent volume,"Voyagers To The West."

As our family's amateur genealogist I've needed to refer to this text several times when writing anecdotals about our mostly Scotch-Irish ancestors and the reasons for the massive migrations from the UK to this continent. Without my own copy I was often borrowing from my friend and I simply wanted to have my own copy. Pleased I got it; good general reference.

It's unusual for an academic history book to be spellbinding, but this one is. Bailyn's slim, elegant volume contains three lectures (originally given at the University of Wisconsin and in other venues) on immigration and demography in early America. Bailyn argues that immigration from Europe to North America is best understood as an extension of the pre-existing patterns of local and long-distance migration within medieval and early modern Europe. In the final lecture, "A Domesday Book for the Periphery," Bailyn further argues that the diverse and disorderly culture of early America is best understood as a "marchland" (112) of European civilization. The lectures are studded with intriguing data and specific, moving examples. If you want to do in-depth research on this topic, you will need to read Bailyn's longer work, Voyagers to the West, but the ample footnotes in this volume will be enough to get you started on further reading. Truly a classic in the field.

Bailyn's brief book offers an insightful introduction into the patterns and reasons behind the movements of people within the European nations that contributed to the peopling of Britain's American colonies. This book was actually derived from a series of lectures that the author evidently planned as laying the groundwork for further, more comprehensive studies concerning this topic.

Although brief, this book will whet your appetite for wanting to learn more about the peopling of the British colonies in America. The author examines the movements of people within countries like England and Scotland and others to show how these influenced the transatlantic voyages that would lead many to America.

The author touches on who some of these people were, what their status in society was, and the reasons behind their emigrations. With a strong nod toward the social history movement, Bailyn effectively uses such lesser known individuals to examine this topic. Whether they were indentured servants, wealthy land speculators, and so forth, these were the types of people who gave shape and meaning to the process of populating the British colonies in America. Bailyn's use of statistics is also very effective, if merely to give the reader an idea of the magnitude of these emigrations and the kind of impact it had on the countries they left behind. I found it fascinating to consider that there were some in Great Britain who were considering legislation to deal with this emigration predicament.

Bailyn examines what some of the king's representatives would have found in these American colonies if they had been instructed to study the peoples inhabiting the distinct regions as Bailyn discussed; i.e. New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the Carolinas and the other Southern regions. They would have seen what groups of immigrants settled where, what impact slavery had on the development of the areas in which it existed and so forth. In other words, what the decisive comparisons and differences were among these settlers and their way of life.

There are many topics of interest touched upon, if only too briefly, in this fascinating little book. Bailyn displays a true historian's eye for looking behind the surface.

This compact work introduces Bernard Bailyn's multi-volume population history of America. This work offers a colorful portrait of settlement throughout British North America before the American Revolution. Various regions and colonies are considered in detail. For a contrasting consideration of British East Florida, see the relevant essay in The African American Heritage of Florida.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, by Thomas E. Woods, is such a tissue of bare assertions, errors, omissions, and ideological polemics that I feel a urgent need to provide readers with the sort of substantial historiography that Woods ignores and dismisses as mere "politically correct" liberal propaganda. In his presumption, Woods declares that the vast body of historical scholarship, from virtually all the universities of the USA is "as distorted as the histories imposed on the hapless people of the former Soviet Union." Frankly, that's absurd, and Woods's 240 page rebuttal of thousands of scholars and scholarly books is an embarrassment.

The books of Bernard Bailyn (b. 1922) are far more modest in their claims. Bailyn has been a professor of colonial American history at Harvard since the 1960s, when I studied with him there. Twice winner of the Pulitzer prize in history, Bailyn is as respected a scholar as any in the USA, and he's certainly nobody's propagandist. His writing is concise and elegant, and his books are never ponderously long. His research is focused and impartial, and every word he writes represents his conditional understanding of source materials, rather than any pre-formed sociological dogma. Here are some of his available titles, starting with this book, The Peopling of British North America:
*Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours
*Education in the Forming of American Society
*The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
*To Begin Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders
*The Origins of American Politics

Virtually every tendentious assertion in Woods's PIG is forcefully demolished somewhere in one of those texts. However, in order to give people more specific choices, here are the titles of the first five chapters of the PIG, together with books that lay Woods's proclamations to rest:

Chapter 1: The Colonial Origins of American Liberty
(Woods says "The Puritans didn't steal their land from the Indians." That's a disingenuous statement that leaves him plenty of wiggle room, but it's more false than true. I've included several titles concerning New England relation with indigenous peoples.)
*David Hackett Fischer - Albion's Seed
*Woody Holton - Forced Founders
*Allan Gallay - The Indian Slave Trade
*Jill Lepore - The Name of War
*Rafael Demos - The Unredeemed Captive
*Richard White - The Middle Ground
Philip Greven - The Protestant Temperament

Chapter 2 - America's Conservative Revolution
(Woods declares that "the colonists were conservatives," thereby dismissing or ignoring a very large and influential number of the advocates of independence who were social and economic radicals. He also states with reservation that "The American Revolution was NOOT like the French Revolution." Not at all? Not in any way? that's outright silliness.)
*Kevin Phillips - The Cousin's War
*RR Palmer - The Age of the Democratic Revolution
*David Hackett Fischer - Paul Revere's Ride
*Gordon Wood - The radicalism of the American Revolution
*Lance Banning - The Jeffersonian Persuasion
*Isaac Kramnick - Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism
*John Miller - Origins of the American Revolution
*Pauline Maier - From Resistance to Revolution
*Alfred Young - The Shoemaker and the Tea Party

Chapter 3 - The Constitution
(The chief thrust of Woods's 'analysis' of the Constitution is to make an extreme case for 'states' rights", extending to an absolute pronouncement that secession was a constitutional right. This point is critical for his later assertion that the whole Civil War wasn't "about slavery" at all, but about fredom.)
*Mark DeWolfe Howe - The Garden and the Wilderness: Religion and Government in American Constitutional History
*Peter Irons - A People's History of the Supreme Court
*Robert McCloskey - The American Supreme Court
*Susan Jacoby - Freethinkers
*Isaak Kramnick - The Godless Constitution

Chapter 4 - American Government and the "Principles of '98"
(Once again, Woods attempts to "prove" - not to analyze - the extreme states' rights position to have been the "real meaning" of the Constitution. He also denounces the interpretation of the 'general welfare' and 'commerce' clauses, which have been the basis of national growth and prosperity, especially in the West, since the first national road, since the Lewis and Clark Expedition, through countless surveying and mineral exploring expeditions, etc.)
*Stanley Bruchey - The Roots of American Economic Growth
*Leonard Richards - Shay's Rebellion
*Bruce Ackerman - The Failure of the Founding Fathers
*Stanley Elkins - The Age of Federalism
*Bruce Lauren - Artisans into Workers
*Thomas Bender - Toward an Urban Vision

Chapter 5 - The North-South Division
(And here the REAL errors of omission and evasion begin! Read and compare!)
*William Lee Miller - Arguing About Slavery
*Don Fehrenbacher - The Slaveholding Republic
*Eric Foner - Free Soil, Free Labor, Free men
*Bertram Wyatt Brown - Louis Tappan
*David Reynolds - John Brown

I could pull ten more titles for each chapter from my own library, and each of them would make nonsense of Woods's shallow rhetorical pretense of scholarship. These are only the first five chapters out of 18 in the PIG. I'll continue this project under another review heading as soon as I have time.

One of the things that makes Bernard Bailyn a historian's historian is his "falsifiability" in the sense that scientists use the term. Bailyn never packages answers to questions that most readers hadn't even had a chance to ask. He researches, he reports his research, he compares it with the research of others, and he cautiously hypothesizes about possible interpretation of the collective research of the profession. This book is offered by Bailyn as an introduction to one delimited topic, the demographics of settlement. I recommend it as a model of how history should be written.