American Colonies

The Penguin History of the United States #1

by Alan Taylor

AMERICAN COLONIES starts with the earliest years of human colonization of the American continent and environs with the Siberian migrations across the Bering Strait 15,000 years ago. It ends in around 1800 when the rough outline of the contemporary North America could be perceived.

Dropping the usual Anglocentric description of North America's fate, Taylor brilliantly conveys the far more vivid and startling story of the competing interests--Spanish, French, English, Native, Russian--that over the centuries shaped and reshaped both the continent and its 'suburbs' in the Caribbean and the Pacific. It is one of the greatest of all human stories.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, American, American Revolution, Audiobook, The United States Of America

Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Alan Shaw Taylor is a historian specializing in early American history. He is the author of a number of books about colonial America, the American Revolution, and the Early American Republic. He has won a Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize for his work.

Taylor graduated from Colby College, in Waterville, Maine, in 1977 and earned his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1986. Currently a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, he will join the faculty of the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia in 2014.

Reviews

[Eric Byrd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some reviews on this site mention Taylor’s “leftist bias,” allege a soft-pedaling of Native American violence and environmental impact. I don’t really see it. Sure, Taylor has his moments of passionate phrasing, but a work of this scope and synthesis (all colonial experiments in North America, and most in the Caribbean, from Columbus to the California missions) is a poor vehicle for agitation; the reading, and perhaps the writing, of any lofty historical survey insinuates an abstraction, a detachment, invites a vast indifference. This book can no more take a side than a time-lapsed film of mold spreading on a sandwich can sway one to the mold or to bread. Reading Taylor’s descriptions of the genocidal microbes explorers unwittingly carried, the livestock breeding feral packs that devoured unfenced Indian crops, the hardy Old World weeds that spread in the over-grazed landscape, I begin to think of the Europeans as simply the most sentient and motivated organisms of a rapacious ecosystem, their mastery of navigation just a transit of creatures.


It’s an immediate humanitarianism, without aims of conclusions, that overwhelms me now. I feel a tenderness as if I were seeing with the eyes of a god. I see everyone with the compassion of the world’s only conscious being. Poor hapless men, poor hapless humanity! What are they all doing here? I see all the actions and goals of life, from the simple life of the lungs to the building of cities and the marking off of empires, as a drowsiness, as involuntary dreams or respites in the gap between one reality and another, between one and another day of the Absolute. And like an abstractly maternal being, I lean at night over both the good and the bad children, equal when they sleep and are mine. (Pessoa)


What a panorama of enslavement and extermination the New World presents! Barbados was almost totally deforested and planted with sugar cane “even to the very seaside.” (From the trees that remained recalcitrant slaves were suspended in cages, for slow exemplary deaths from thirst and hunger; a practice called “hanging a man out to dry.”) Food, livestock and lumber had to be imported from New England. As in Brazil, the planters found it cheaper to work slaves to death and purchase replacements, rather than invest in diet and housing. Of the 130,000 Africans brought to the island between 1640 and 1700, only 50,000 were alive in 1700. And it didn’t get any better. During the eighteenth century, at least one-third of slaves died within three years of arrival. Infant mortality hovered around 50%, a figure containing an unknowable number of desperate, Beloved-style infanticides. Suicide is another theme. An English slave ship captain noted that “the Negroes are so wilful and loth to leave their own country, that they have often leap’d out of the canoes, boat, and ship; they having a more dreadful apprehension of Barbadoes than we can have of hell.” Successful planters, Taylor writes, “sought to escape the profitable but troubling world they had made.” Perhaps justly, most died before they could return to England, felled by tropical fevers and an evil-sounding array of pathogens introduced by their slaves—“yaws, guinea worm, leprosy, and elephantiasis” “Parish registers from the 1650s for the white population list four times as many deaths as marriages and three times as many deaths as baptisms.” England; gentility; a green estate…ambitions nearly achieved, flickering finally as the figments of a deathbed delirium…while outside: the sweltering, shade-less island of mass graves!


The holy wars of the New England Puritans and the Pequot, Wampanoag and Narragansett make a grim old chronicle—carved boards, metal clasps and corners, massacrous woodcuts. The Plymouth and Connecticut colonists won the Pequot War of 1636-38 with a massacre whose curt decisiveness fits my image of a more than usually self-righteous people. Guided deep into Pequot territory on the Mystic River by Mohegan allies, the colonists ringed a major fortified village with ranks of musketeers, set the wigwams alight, and cut down anyone who came fleeing out of the flames. Only five of the village’s four hundred inhabitants survived. Plymouth colony governor William Bradford saw his god working in the Puritan victory:

It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.

The heavy death toll from epidemics, defeats like the Mystic River Massacre, and the steady westward encroachment of the colonists discredited tribal shamans and convinced many Indians they were forsaken by their gods. So it was an experience of renewed spiritual power for Wampanoag and Narragansett warriors to wipe out entire settler families and torch their farms when King Philip’s War broke out in 1675. Roger Williams recorded a Narragansett as boasting that “God was with them and Had forsaken us for they had so prospered in Killing and Burning us far beyond What we did against them.”


The New England colonists could not have won King Philip’s war without the aid and instruction in “the skulking way of war” provided by Indian allies, particularly the Mohawk, one of the Iroquois Five Nations. The Five Nations are central to the transformation of intertribal politics and warfare wrought by European guns and germs. In the 1630s, over half of the Five Nations died from European diseases. Dutch-allied, they attributed the epidemics to the sorcery of the Huron, their French-allied rivals in the fur trade. The Huron were also Iroquois-speakers who had insultingly resisted becoming a Sixth nation. Well-armed by the Dutch, the Five Nations launched a “mourning war”—kill the adult males, absorb the women and children, who would take the names and join the families of disease victims—which wiped out the Huron. In the 1650s the war widened to a general rampage around the Great Lakes. A Jesuit priest thought they meant “to ravage everything and become masters everywhere.” The remnants of some Great Lakes tribes withdrew far north, putting a depopulated buffer zone between them and the Five Nations, whose tireless war parties nevertheless periodically erupted out of the wasteland in search of more scalps and captives. Some fled south. One group of refugees, the Westo, who had dwelt near Lake Erie, trickled down to Virginia. Colonists there, mindful of the unconquerable bands of escaped slaves that menaced the Jamaican hinterland, armed and paid the Westo to capture African runaways. In time the Westo drifted to the Carolinas. There they found a profitable niche raiding southerly tribes for captives to sell to Virginia slavers, and later to the transplanted Barbadians who ruled Carolina. “In their violent displacement, new identity, and devastation of other natives, the Westo represented the power of European intrusion to send shock waves of disruption through a succession of Indian peoples living far beyond the colonial settlements.” A jealous faction of Carolina colonists, rivals of the patrons of the Westo, recruited the Shawnee to destroy and enslave them.


The Shawnee, the Creek and the Yamsee were next to ride the tiger of alliance with the whites. This was a Hobbesian nightmare in which, Taylor writes, “victimized peoples desperately sought their own trade connection to procure arms for defense; but to pay for those guns, they had to become raiders, preying upon still other natives, spreading the destruction hundreds of miles beyond Carolina.” In 1702, warriors from the three tribes formed the private army Gov. James Moore led into Spanish Florida. That force destroyed thirty-two villages, enslaved ten-thousand mission Indians and tortured most of their priests to death. Having run out of Indians on which to prey, Shawnee soon fell behind on their debts to the Carolina traders, who hired the Catawba to attack and enslave them. The Yamsee, too, fell behind on their debts; when traders started seizing their children, they revolted, and were soon joined by the Catawba and the Creek; allied, they killed four hundred colonists in 1715, before being crushed by Five Nations Iroquois, who, as in King Philip’s War, hired out their war parties to desperate colonists. The Five, soon Six Nations became a crucial to the balance of power in the New World, playing the French and English off one another, and acting as hired enforcers for use against other tribes. In 1746 the royal governor of New York was sagely advised, “On whose ever side the Iroquois Indians fall, they will cast the balance.” The devastated native world over whose northeastern corner the Iroquois held sway is disturbingly evoked:

Scholars used to assume that nineteenth-century Indian nations were direct and intact survivors from time immemorial in their homelands. In fact, after 1700 most North American Indian "tribes" were relatively new composite groups formed by diverse refugees coping with the massive epidemics and collective violence introduced by colonization.

[Mikey B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very comprehensive and engaging book on the history of the North American continent starting with the European landings in 1492 to the time of the declaration of American Independence (1776). The book is very well written and organized.

It examines the Spanish, English, French, and Dutch settlements. We see the impact each had on the native population. The Spanish and English were relentlessly cruel to the various Indian tribes. The Dutch and French, partially due to having far fewer colonists, were more in need of native assistance. Also, the author narrates that in all probability half the native people died from a variety of diseases passed to them inadvertently from the Europeans. The Europeans over the centuries had acquired immunity to many of these diseases, whereas the native people had not. Also, many Europeans died in the harsh New World environment either from the long winters in the north or the tropical climate in the south. They would not have survived without the sustenance provided by the various Indian tribes.

The author discusses the settlements in the West Indies, Mexico (Spanish), the Carolinas (English), the Chesapeake area (English), Virginia (English), Pennsylvania (English), the New York/Hudson area (Dutch), and the St. Lawrence (French).

All were different. The Carolinas brought slaves over. New England was the most egalitarian in terms of gender and wealth (families came over rather than single men). New England had less slavery and was the most educated. It was important for the Puritans to know and study the Bible – so schools were set-up (it was also the beginning of Harvard). The excess of men in many of the other colonies often led to the physical abuse of women – namely slaves and Indian women.

The English West Indies (settled by England, France, and Spain) were the most profitable to England because they produced the much-valued sugar from the sugar cane plant (think of English tea drinkers). The harvesting from the sugar cane plant was brutal work and this was done by slaves.

The author examines the slave trade and its importance to the economic development of the colonies. Even though the New England colonies, except for the French in New England, had very little slaves they traded extensively with the West Indian colonies.

Page 323 (my book)

Contrary to popular myth, most eighteenth-century emigrants did not come to America of their own free will in search of liberty. Nor were they Europeans. On the contrary, most were enslaved Africans forced across the Atlantic to work on plantations raising American crops for the European market. During the eighteenth century, the British colonies imported 1.5 million slaves – more than three times the number of free immigrants… Only about 1 percent of the blacks living in the British colonies became free prior to the American revolution.

The author brings up the complex interrelationship between colonists and native peoples. The Europeans also brought with them plants and animals which changed the entire ecology of North America. Think of the horse which changed the way of life of not only the native peoples but transformed the landscape. Guns facilitated hunting. Weeds, like dandelions, were brought over on the European boats and soon took hold spreading across the continent. The Indians introduced many useful agricultural products like corn and potatoes – and also the much less beneficial tobacco. All of these (except weeds) were involved in trade between natives and colonists, between different native tribes who competed with each other, and between North America and Europe.

Ironically the defeat of the French by English forces in Quebec City in 1759 led to the call for emancipation from England by the colonies now in the United States. The threat of France on the American colonies no longer existed – so British forces requiring increased taxation were no longer required. The American colonies wanted to go their own way and get more land – and not be impeded by British treaties with native tribes. It gave them the freedom to open up the frontier for their increasing population.

Page 443

Triumphant in the War of the American Revolution (1775 – 83), the new United States embraced continental expansion that the British unleased only to regret. Learning from the abject failure of the British to slow frontier settlement, the American leaders shrewdly dedicated their nation to creating new farms by the thousands to accommodate the proliferating population. In western lands, the Americans meant to reproduce a society of family farmers endowed with household independence… That vision of white liberty depended upon the systematic dispossession of native peoples and, and until the Civil War of the 1860s, upon the perpetuation of black slavery. Thomas Jefferson aptly described the United States as an “empire of liberty”, by and for the white citizenry. The new American empire liberated their enterprise as it provided military assistance to subdue Indians and Hispanics across the continent to the Pacific.

I suspect that the topics brought up in this book are not taught in schools in the United States or Canada. We are given a holistic approach to North American history. We are shown the different forces (various Indian tribes, Europeans and African slaves) that interacted and how Europeans manipulated these in their quest for domination.

[Becky · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this book up off the discount shelf at a bookstore many years ago when I was going through my compulsive accumulation of books. I chose it not knowing anything about it other than it was a history book and that it served my purpose of getting to know history better one day. The title seemed a little boring, the subject a little bland, but oh how looks and initial impressions can be deceiving. Much to my surprise, this is a wonderful and bountiful history book. It abounds in scope, readability, and information. The main thing I enjoyed Alan Taylor for is how he kept Native Americans at the forefront of his story and for his discussing them in a way that stimulated my interest in them where other books have failed. 1491 was such a book that I'd had high hopes for, but was disappointed in. Taylor’s book reignited my hope in getting to know Native American history in the same interesting way that we’re able to learn other people’s histories. I can now actually remember many of the tribe’s names, their geographical locations, their influence on colonization, and their fates. Whereas Daniel J. Boorstin’s book The Americans focuses primarily on the free English colonials and their state of mind, Taylor’s book seems to focus a bit more on the Native Americans while at the same time making good acquaintance with the Spanish, Dutch, French, and Russians. Taylor's book does tell the story of African slaves a bit more than Boorstin's does, but still leaves a lot to be desired in this area. Boorstin’s book is more of an essay style whereas Taylor’s book is more of a sweeping narrative with a tinge of an adventure feel. Taylor starts at the very beginning describing the movement of the Portuguese off the coast of West Africa, the colonies they established on the nearby islands utilizing the type of slavery that would shift to the Americas, and ends in discussing the Russians' colonizing of islands in the northern Pacific and how their presence (albeit distance) ignited further actions by the Spanish and British empires in the way of the colonizing of the California coast and exploration of the Pacific. Taylors’ book is so well organized that I never felt lost or confused. He picks the right starting point to tell his story so that you feel you have enough background to understand what transpires afterwards and then leaves off in a way that makes you feel you’ve been set gently adrift to explore history further. I’m greatly indebted to both Alan Taylor and Daniel J. Boorstin's books for starting me off with such a solid grounding in American history. I actually feel a little guilty I paid so little for Taylor’s book. ;)


1. Memorable = 5
2. Social Relevance = 5
3. Informative = 5
4. Originality = 4 (A very well organized, big picture approach that keeps native American history at the forefront.)
5. Thought Provoking = 4
6. Well Expressed = 5 (Everything was conveyed in a clear, understandable, and memorable way.)
7. Entertaining = 4
8. Inspired Visualization = 3 (The book was so well organized geographically and chronologically that I found myself visualizing a geographical timeline that progressed on a map as the story continued.)
9. Sparks Emotion = 3 (There were a few moments that I felt bursts of outrage over certain things - such as how the Carolina colonials pitted the Indian tribes against one another, how they pitted the Indians and slaves against one another and also the parts of the book that describe the physical conditions of the slave ships. Of course the pitting of the Indians against one another happened throughout the various colonies.)
10.Life Changing = 5 (Gave me a great understanding of how the relationships between the Spanish, French, Dutch, British, Indians, and even Russians fit together throughout colonial history and was very enlightening regarding the influence of commerce on our human history and the state of mind that continues to this day.)

Total 4.3

[Fred R · Rating 3 out of 5]

This would be excellent history except that the narrative is continually interrupted by politically correct qualifications and adjustments. This habit is extremely annoying, particularly when one is reading for edification, not moral ammunition.

Steve Sailer once said: "Besides being useful (in all sorts of hard to predict ways), the truth is really, really interesting, while political correctness is skull-crushingly boring. That's because every truth in the universe is connected somehow to every other truth, while each bit of politically correct cant is just a dead end that doesn't lead anywhere."

Alan Taylor, for instance, cannot quite decide whether the natives on the Eastern Seaboard were lazier than the English colonists, and his opinion varies depending on whether laziness appears to him a good or bad thing in the particular context. In the 10,000 year explosion, which I read immediately after, the authors come right out and say of hunter-gatherers "they were lazy, and they should have been: Being lazy made biological sense" So not only do they teach you a fact where Taylor gives you dead ends, they also, because it is a fact and not a dead end, can tell you why it's true. (In Alan Taylor's book, you also get hints of a gender divide in labor, which sounds a little bit like what I've read of Hoe-culture, but again, he is more concerned with protecting Indian men from charges of misogyny than the truth to really explore this).

[Rebecca Radnor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Taylor does a wonderful job of covering the breath and depth of the development of the colonial period in North America (British, French, Spanish and even Russian), with a strong emphasis on economic drivers that impacted cultural differences in each colony. (Warning, I'm an anthropologist & historian who also studies international business, so seeing this stuff makes me happy.) He offers a great deal of data regarding push/pull economics and demographics between the mother country and the colonies to explain ebbs and flows in immigration numbers, who moved to where as a function of economic incentives or disincentives, etc,, that help to explain the almost self selecting mechanisms that resulted in distinct cultures in each colony. For instance, till now I've never seen a book that first discussed 'in depth' the development of Barbados and how a unique racist culture developed there in direct response to economic needs and THEN explained how it was immigrants from that culture that settled Carolina, making Carolina thereby different from Virginia. When the book first seem to take a tangent and started talking about Barbados I admit was a bit confused as to where he was going, but he went on to build a very a solid argument that I had never seen explained in quite that way. In each case his arguments are mostly economic, and hence it wouldn't hurt to compliment it with a cultural historian, etc., but still this is an excellent, expansive book

[Dimitri · Rating 4 out of 5]

The colonial history of a continent as opposed to of the English colonisation. In other words, nicely rounded and preferential to any accounts in the tradition of Manifest Destiny. The vision of a segmented landmass along the lines of the French and Spanish spheres is not outside the realm of historical possibility.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alan Taylor's "American Colonies" seems like a benign title in what is (or was supposed to be) Penguin Books first volume of the publisher's History of the United States of America, given the content of this well researched, well documented and well referenced book.
The theme of "American Colonies" is enslavement, expansion, exploitation and extermination.
Taylor ends this volume in 1820, but in the preceding decades imperial rivalries between the British, the French, the Spanish and for a brief period, the Dutch, was in essence a competition for wealth ultimately derived from the back breaking, deathly labor of African slaves and native peoples in North America and the West indies. (Two native captives shipped from North America to the West Indies were routinely traded on the "open market" for one West Indies' black slave.)
For the British and wealthier American colonists, the accumulation of wealth and capital -- by way of the slave trade, the plantation system and territorial expansion -- was done within a libertarian and capitalist framework.
Further to Taylor's excellent overview, one can argue that the foundation of finance capital which would draw the curtain on the Industrial Revolution was in large measure built, not by great men, but by shackled men, women and children.........

[Bryan Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Taylor has a great talent for synthesizing so much information into a readable account. You read about different countries, not just England, including neglected regions like the Pacific.

[Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book takes an expansive look at re-examining early colonialism in the Americas, and I picked it up in part because some friends of mine all agreed to take on the Oxford History of the United States. Alan Taylor's work, which was edited by author of the much-hailed Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877, Eric Foner, to divide the colonial period up not by decade, but by colonizing forces. He roughly divides the era into the French, the British, and the Spanish. Because of this setup, it's a little hard not to enforce a "which is worst" framework while reading the book.

(This book is, incidentally, no longer part of the Oxford series on American History and was jettisoned in favor of Peter Mancall's American Origins and Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton's Imperial America: 1674–1763, neither of which have announced publication dates as of yet. The book was part of the series under C. Vann Woodward's reign, who created the series and who is himself a fascinating historian, but when David Kennedy took over after Woodward's death in 1999, the series was revised. This book has since been adopted by the Penguin History of the United States series, which appears to be a blatant ripoff of the Oxford series, as American Colonies is the only title published in the series, and the rest are forthcoming with publication dates yet to be announced. This is, admittedly, a bit frustrating for a completist like me, who would like some kind of comprehensive history of the United States to read, but then, I suppose this is how history goes — it is constantly getting revised and updated.)

The French adopted a colonial model of sending a few French employees to trade with Native Americans, often gaining expertise in local customs and language. This is, of course, why the French ultimately ended up losing so much territory. When fighting British expansion into their northern territory, they had to enlist Natives to fight on their behalf — admittedly not a tough sell, since the Brits were so awful to Native people. The most lasting footprint they left was in New Orleans, in part because they had begun using it as a penal colony. This meant that New Orleans had much less cache in France, since it earned a reputation as a place for vagrants and "savages." But there is a great anecdote about a fort near the Great Lakes that the French ultimately had to abandon due to British expansion. The French burned the fort down when they left, and the British built a fort ten times its size in its stead. That's not to say that the French were always great or that they didn't do some pretty horrible things, but ultimately the French come off the best in the realm of white people who feel entitled to land on another continent already inhabited by a complex network of societies.

The British model was what we more typically think of as colonialism today: Families and whole societies planting their feet on American soil and springing up towns and plantations around them. Taylor divides the british into basically two types of colonists: the New Englanders, who had a much more egalitarian society cultivated through town meetings and collective planning; and the plantation owners of Virginia and the Carolinas — which eventually bled down to Georgia and the rest of the south. In large part because of the plantations, the British in the Virginia and Carolina territories come off as monsters, pretty much. They started promising land to every white man who arrived and worked his way out of indentured servitude. This, of course, led to them stealing more and more land from Natives, who obviously didn't take kindly to this. Then, of course, we get into the who human trafficking/slavery thing (in fairness, this was a practice pioneered by the Spanish). Once the British discovered the Americas were great for growing tobacco, they shipped in a whole lot of African slaves, which eventually outnumbered white settlers nine to one. (Incidentally the passages about "tight packing" and "loose packing" on ships that crossed the Atlantic are horrifying.) One fascinating tidbit: Early colonists in the Carolinas would use slaves to round up cattle, and this is, apparently where the term "cowboy" comes from. These particular colonists also seemed to have a pretty across-the-board anti-Native American strategy. Despite some limited efforts to convert Natives to Christianity (which turned out to be a double-edged sword, as some Natives began pointing out all the ways in which colonists were deviating from Christian teachings, for the most part they treated Navies uniformly poorly, lumping the peaceful ones in with the ones who attacked colonial outposts.

The Spanish also don't come off great. Somewhat like the French, they also deployed a limited number of Spanish to the Americas — virtually all men, so that interracial marriage became extremely common off the bat. This resulted in what we in modern life think of as Hispanic people, a mix of Natives and Spanish. The book takes you through the early island colonial attempts at importing slaves. Like the British, they went crazy for African slave labor, leading to such massive importing that they eventually faced an uprising on Hispaniola. The book also takes you through the Mission model in the Southwest, which was officially an attempt to bring Catholicism to the Natives but unofficially was a method of using Natives for slave labor within the Mission communities. And because they were Catholics, they were so big on the sexual shame that Taylor highlights historical documents revealing that women in Mission communities were often literally locked away in quarters so small, cramped, and in poor condition that even an observer at the time found it to be intolerable.

Finally Taylor touches on some other smaller-scale colonial efforts, like those by the Russians (Alaska), Dutch (New York), and Southeast Asia (Hawaii). It seems that everyone was trying to colonize the American continent. It ultimately became a race to see who could dominate Native populations and harvest the rich natural resources of the continent. It's not hard to say that it was unfortunate that the British — and later the Americans — won that contest.

[Pete · Rating 5 out of 5]

treasure beyond counting, at least past what my crooked fingers can tabulate. Going to have to reread parts of this to extract grit for my fiction writing oyster brain. beyond oyster irritant this is perfect big sweeping history - altering the big picture I had in my mind, stopping often enough to highlight weird moments - zero sentimentality for worn out mythology

[Josh H · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book provides an overview of the different colonization schemes in North America up to the independence movements from 1770 - 1820. It describes the differences between colonies broken down by location and colonizer, ranging from dense sugar plantation colonies in Barbados and Jamaica, to settler colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America, and to remote outposts such as Louisiana, New Mexico, and California.

Empires of the Atlantic World is a more detailed treatment of this topic, with a more explicit comparison between the Spanish and British efforts in the Americas. This book is more rigorous than American Nations in discussing differences between different North American colonies.

I had the distinct impression as I read this book that this entire North Atlantic colonial system was a machine that turned enslaved Africans, indentured Europeans, and co-opted Natives into refined products to be enjoyed in London, Amsterdam, and Paris. It was certainly grim reading.

Number one thing I learned from this: Barbados was a very very bad place to move to.

[Reid tries to read · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Americas were the last continents to be inhabited by humanity, proven by the fact that every human fossil found in North America has been younger than 15,000 years old. The earliest migrants to the Americas most likely came from Siberia. Today, the Bering Strait separates Alaska from Siberia, but in the past this strait was iced over and frozen. It is believed that hunter gatherers, in their constant pursuit of animal herds, unwittingly crossed the strait into North America. 15,000 years ago the Bering Strait land bridge was in perfect condition to allow migrations to America because at the time the globe was warming, making the crossing easier, but it hadn’t warmed so much that the Strait had completely melted.

These Americans would develop far differently than their European counterparts who would “discover” their land in the 1400s. They lacked any domesticated animals larger than a dog, had no steel tools, and no gunpowder. The Europeans, due to their interactions with domesticated animals, had a much higher tolerance to the deadly pathogens and diseases they spread to the American Natives. Technological differences between Europeans and Americans also led to ideological differences. Europeans believed it was their God-given destiny to dominate nature. Indigenous Americans believed that they had to live within nature and that nature was intertwined with them. American Indians believed in animism: a belief that spirituality and divinity were imbued into the natural world and everything else. Spiritual power could be found in everything, from specific geographic features such as rivers and forests to individual rocks, animals, and plants. Power/spirituality was not distributed equally; it ebbed and flowed through all things and at greater degrees in some areas than others. The natural world was, therefore, seen as a volatile and chaotic place that had to be respected. This respect to the dangers of nature led to American Indians not often overexerting their environments. Sometimes the Natives and their shamans believed that they could manipulate nature to their advantage, such as taking a large amount of game or fish from the environment. Often though, they worried about the negative spiritual consequences of doing such, and this religious ideology naturally sprung from their hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence and the relatively low amount of surplus such an existence procured.

The Europeans’ “discovered” the Americas lead to their geopolitical position being transformed from a backwater to a global powerhouse. The Americas provided Europeans with slaves, gold, and entirely new sources of more effective food stuffs. This helped facilitate a population explosion in Europe, a population who would then go on to further colonize the Americas in a positive feedback loop. The European exploration that would eventually go on to land in the Americas was spurred on by a desire to circumvent the Muslim dominance of trade routes to Asia. In the 1400s especially, the Muslim world held a superior position over the Europeans, and at times appeared to be threatening to engulf the entirety of Europe. This fear was starkly epitomized by the Ottoman capture of Constantinople. In the early 1400s, the Portuguese began perfecting the colonial model that they would export to the Americas off of the coast of North Africa on a set of islands known as the Canary Islands. The Portuguese turned the natives of the Canary Islands into slaves who would then work on plantations designed to export commodities back into the European market. Through enslavement, the Portuguese turned what should’ve been adversaries into another benefit of colonialism. In 1483 the Spanish succeeded in both pushing the Portuguese out of the Canary islands and crushed any guerrilla resistance the inhabitants of the islands put up. They use techniques such as divide and conquer rule, unleashing war dogs, taking advantage of the damage their diseases did to the native peoples, and fighting with gunpowder cannons to accomplish this. The Canary Islands were then turned into giant sugar plantations. Often, the natives of the islands would die due to genocidal practices of the Iberians as well as transmission of diseases, so African slaves would have to be imported to fulfill their forced labor duties; this pattern would be repeated throughout the Americas.

The Spanish Empire
Columbus’ exploitation of the Americas would spur on further expeditions to the so-called New World. This occurred due to the invention of the printing press, which allowed for the circulation for more literature about Columbus’ exploits as well as increased general literacy across Europe. This is why Columbus’ voyage was so much more popular than the Vikings’ voyages to Greenland centuries earlier. The Spanish were the first Europeans to conquer the major empires of the Americas, and they did so by hiring out private companies to men called conquistadors, in exchange for 1/5 of their booty being owed to the Spanish crown. The conquistadors, with their loud guns, steel weapons such as swords and crossbows, large attack dogs, and huge horses, terrified the Aztec and Inca empires of the Americas. On top of this, the conquistadors supplemented their ranks with enemies of the Aztecs and Incas whom they had subjugated. These oppressed peoples were willing to work alongside the conquistadors to destroy the empires that had dominated them. The conquistador expeditions were almost entirely profit driven. They were funded by private investors, who supplied almost everything, and they were expected to give these investors a percentage of their plunder, much like they had to give the crown. The Spanish crown used private forces because it was short on manpower, and the men who mainly made up the conquistadors were from the middle classes or gentry. Therefore, being a conquistador was the most assured way of moving oneself upward on the social and economic ladder. Most conquistadors made no money through wages, and thus all through plunder. The richest ones, such as Cortez, made money through a feudal system of fiefdoms imported into the New World known as encomiendas. Under this system, Indians would pay them tribute à la mafia style in order to obtain “protection” against other rivals, tribes, or villages.

By 1585 the bullion forcibly extracted from the Americas accounted for around 25% of Spain’s total revenue. This mass influx of gold and silver helped settle Spain’s (and by extension Europe’s) trade imbalances with Asia, which allowed for Europe to purchase Asian goods, such as spices, in greater quantities than ever before. However, the infusion of bullion expanded the money supply far more rapidly than the expansion of goods and services could keep pace, inflating prices throughout all of Europe. The best way for Europeans to get a hold of Spain’s gold was to simply rob the Spanish through piracy. The growth of European piracy had wide ranging effects. For one thing, it forced Spain to slow their export of gold from the Americas to a near halt to make sure their ships were properly escorted and defended against pirates. This slowdown disadvantaged Spanish merchants, which in turn gave foreign interlopers a growing share of the American market, since these interlopers paid no Spanish taxes (necessary to recoup the costs of lost gold/fund convoy escorts) and did not obey Spanish convoy regulations. At the heart of Spain’s American empire laid horticultural Indians whom the Spanish could leech off of for their crops. Towards the periphery lay the nomadic hunter gatherers, who neither had the crops, cities, or gold the parasitic Spanish longed to ‘repossess’. On top of this, the more nomadic peoples were fierce and mobile warriors whom the Spanish struggled to easily defeat in combat. This halted most of Spain’s territorial expansion, which only continued in any real sense to try and locate supposed mythic cities of gold and riches (which they never found), or as defensive maneuvers against rival European powers. One such maneuver was the Spanish conquest of Florida, which turned into a complete disaster that found neither gold nor proper defensive footing, and instead was a thorn in the side of the Spanish crown for nearly 200 years.

Rivals
Spain’s European rivals (England, France, the Netherlands) began setting up permanent settlements in North America in the 1500s in order to gain better access to the continent’s riches (as opposed to just plundering Spanish towns and raiding Spanish ships). Settlement in the Caribbean would allow for these empires to encroach towards New Spain, making raiding easier, as well as providing fertile grounds for sugar plantations. However, Spain defended the areas within reach of their Florida colony fiercely, destroying all but the most well fortified rival colonies. Higher up North, towards modern Canada, the French would set up safer colonies, albeit ones with less access to lucrative resources or fertile lands. In the North, the French would begin cornering the market on the fur trade, setting up small colonies of a few dozen traders and merchants specifically to supply mainland Europe with furs essential for making hats and fine clothing. Europeans and American Indians engaged in a mutually dependent relationship over the fur trade. Indians required both guns and alcohol from Europeans, which they traded furs to procure. Guns were revolutionary new tools of warfare to the American Indians; no longer were tribal skirmishes limited to relatively few casualties. Now, guns could allow rivals to completely annihilate opposing tribes and then take any survivors back to help replenish the numbers lost due to European diseases, or to sell to Europeans as slaves. Alcoholism ran rampant through Indigenous peoples as well. Alcohol was seen as both a way to dull and release the pains of colonization they were enduring (any acts or violence committed while intoxicated was seen as fair game, since they were believed to be on a deeper spiritual level while drunk), as well as a way to reach higher spiritual planes quicker than ever before (previously Indians had to endure tribulations such as starvation in order to reach the altered states needed for spiritual rituals). The Europeans, on the other hand, required alliances with Northern Indians due to the harsh climates of the North, which meant very few Europeans could be stationed there for a long time. On top of this, it was more efficient to allow the Indians to procure and produce furs, which they had perfected over generations, rather than to do so themselves. Through the fur trade and subsequent trade alliances, Europeans became deeply embroiled in intra-Indian conflicts.

The English Empire
In the 1580s, the English settled their first colony in Virginia, which they named after their queen who was supposedly a virgin. The English had a similar lack of manpower as the Spanish, due partially to the fact that they were playing defense in a war against Spain in Europe. Therefore, they copied the Spanish model of subcontracting colonization to private entities by granting them charters and monopoly rights. The enclosure movement in England, over the course of about 100 years from 1530 to 1630, ended up stripping around 50% of the English peasantry of their homes. This process caused extreme upheaval within English society to the point where England was essentially a failed state. Draconian laws, such as whipping and hanging vagrants, did little to stop their thievery and banditry, and it certainly did nothing to reduce the homeless population in general. The solution would be to export the homeless to the New World as colonists. Ireland functioned for England like the Canary Islands functioned for Spain: it was a land for them to hone in on the colonial skills that they would export to the New World.

In Ireland, England built their imperialist rhetoric by portraying the Irish as “lazy, pagan savages” who deserved whatever brutalities colonialism brought upon them. The promoters who sold new colonists on the dream of the Americas convinced future settlers that the Native Americans would welcome them with open arms and freely provide them with food, giving the colonists all they needed to search for mythical mines of gold. When the Indians did not freely share their small surpluses, the colonists often reacted violently. An example of such ruthless violence was an incident where settlers killed all the men in a village while taking the children captive just to throw them overboard into a river, drowning them, and impaling the surviving women with swords. Colonial elites were just as harsh to the colonists as the colonists were to Natives. This harshness was a result of the elite’s belief that the poor would only work when threatened by punishment and death. Starving people convicted of stealing food could have needles stuck through their tongues, while other colonists could be chained to trees until they starved to death to set examples to other thieves, and others could simply be burnt at the stake. Colonists who ran away to join the Indians received the worst punishments, whether they were hung, shot, or put to the wheel, they received neither pity nor mercy.

Tobacco would become the cash crop of the North American English settlers. Heavily taxed, in the 1660s tobacco would account for around 25% of the customs revenue collected by the royal government. What allowed tobacco plantations to flourish was the system of property ownership imposed in the colonies. Settlers could either outright buy between 50-300 acres of land, or work as indentured servants for an allotted amount of time until they “earned” their own land. This system of creating yeomen was the undergirding driver of productivity in England’s colonies in the mid-1600s. The independence of the small planter drove them. In England they were subordinate to the monarchy and aristocracy, but in America they believed their freedom was only subordinated to their own ingenuity. In 1619 English planters first started importing a small number of slaves to work their plantations. However, as most workers did not survive longer than 5 years, it remained more feasible to hire indentured servants from the metropole rather than rely on slaves. This would eventually change, but as of 1650 the Chesapeake population was made up of around 300 slaves (2% of pop, vs 75% of the pop being indentured servants). Most indentured servants were young (late teens early 20s) and owned nearly nothing. Before 1620 most were criminals sent to the New World as punishment, but after 1620 most went on their own volition to escape hunger and poverty in England for a chance to become small holders in America, and most died to disease and overwork before their servitude ended.

By the 1680s economic progress pushed up wages within the metropole of England, while economic stagnation hurt growth in the colonies, which reduced the number of indentured servants in the colonies greatly. For example, in the 1660s the average York county household had two servants, but by the 1690s they averaged about two servants for every ten households. This massive decline in indentured servitude increased the need for the importation of African slaves. The planter elite therefore replaced one fear of the angry, poor, white freed men with a fear of African slaves. This is why the concept of whiteness was grown, so that a cross class alliance of white men could be cultivated to keep black slaves oppressed. The planters needed the masses of common white men to be on their side and against the slaves in case of slave revolts, which happened frequently enough to haunt the nightmares of the white masters. Legislation was passed specifically in the colonies to promote cross class white solidarity; for example, 30 lashes could be given to any slave that struck any white man regardless of that white man’s class. The Virginia assembly also prevented interracial marriage, and in 1705 promoted white people snitching on slaves that had illegal allotments of land or domestic animals. This was done by ensuring that, if the slaves were caught with these illegal allotments, then those lands would be redistributed to the poor whites. Oppression of black slaves went hand-in-hand with the stripping of rights for free black men. Examples of rights stripped included barring black men from holding office and preventing them from bearing arms. Across the board, much like today, black people were given much harsher punishments for the same crimes committed by a white person. All these tactics were used in an attempt to create division between the white and black lower classes.

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Telling me that the book is going to bring together the many peoples and empires of early America but then spending over half talking about the British colonies hmmmm

[Justin Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

A model work of new-style history. Taylor's book isn't a straight narrative, but it has the grip of one thanks to his eye for detail, his better than passable prose (which, in academic history, is... well, that's very high praise), and his even-handedness. The settling of North America was not a pleasant thing. As ever, the test for a work of history is whether it makes you want to read other books on the same topic, and this one did that in spades.

A friend has done an excellent review of this book, so I don't have to say anything else.

[KJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tour de force by Alan Taylor! The heavy tome might seem daunting at first, but Taylor puts us on a boat to the new world and successfully navigates us not only to Puritan New England, but Spanish South America, the Virginia Company, the middle Colonies, the West Indies, and the Pacific. In many ways, Taylor does not limit our scope. His work simultaneously reveals the colonization of the Americas, one of the first, if not the only work, I have come across to keep things in perspective. Taylor focuses on the micro and the macro; you will see not only Jamestown in 1607 but also Spanish Mexico around the same time. He does not allow us to forget that these colonies were not created in bubbles and each constantly intersects. At the conclusion, an understanding of the colonies chronologically, a broad understanding of their differences, stemming back from the very founding, as well as their similarities, culminates in the moments when these colonies begin to interact.
This book does not narrow its scope to one colony or one superpower colonizer; Taylor spends a full paragraph and a half of 477 pages on the American Revolution. This book is meant to show us the movement of peoples to, within, and among the new world and her colonies. Alan Taylor succeeds beautifully. His prose is light, easy to read, at times unexpectedly humorous, yet always aware of it's scope. A must have for any history buff!

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alan Taylor's American Colonies provides a nice overview of European settlement of the Western Hemisphere. It's basically written and structured as an alternative textbook, which has its merits as an approach (being neatly structured and covering a lot of ground) but also its drawbacks (being a bit dry and fact-heavy in its presentation). Still, it's nice that Taylor expands the usual study of early America to include all settlements: hence chapters not only on the Eastern seaboard and Canada but the Spanish conquest of the Far West, the assorted settlements in the West Indies, even a chapter on Russia's colonization of Alaska, with the Native response well-integrated into the overall framework. Thus Taylor casts his net broad enough to draw attention to just how daunting and transformative the colonial enterprises were, as diverse as the different colonizing powers were in tactics and approach, without losing sight of the cost to the Natives, the introduction of slavery and the introduction of European religious and ethnic tensions to the New World. Worth reading, albeit more to learn than to enjoy.

[Jason Chambers · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is clearly a well-researched book, and had the potential to be great. Unfortunately, it was so politically charged I chose not to finish it. After 100 pages, I no longer trusted that the author reported history fairly, rather than choosing what to include/exclude based on his politics.

[Clare · Rating 5 out of 5]

A friend of mine has been running an online weekly history class since early in the pandemic, when I absolutely did not have the time to do any such thing. But I have much more time now, so I joined the most recent iteration of it when they wrapped up their last “unit” on 19th century Asian empires (which I regret missing) and turned instead to working their way through the Penguin History of the United States, beginning with Alan Taylor’s American Colonies: The Settling of North America.

We did one chapter a week for 20 weeks, which means that I’ve already discussed a lot of my thoughts on this book, at least on a chapter by chapter basis. I’m trying to come up with more holistic thoughts for the last class. Here are a few as such:

The book does a very good job of not centering the British as the, like, main characters of what would later become the United States. The book also doesn’t limit itself to only discussing what would later become the United States, as the whole of both American continents were subjected to various overlapping imperial colonization projects that would only much, much later firm up to today’s national and state borders. So we got to learn a lot more about the Spanish in North America, the French, the English outside of the “thirteen colonies” that would later rebel, the Dutch, and even an interesting segment near the end on Russian Alaska, which I had not previously known anything about. The book also doesn’t shy away from talking about just how brutal colonization was and how delusional and self-serving these imperial “civilizing” missions were, nor does it reduce the native population to one-dimensional, helpless innocents.

The book’s discussion of native nations and their political, cultural, and military developments–both before and after European contact–is a real strength here, at least compared to most US history textbooks, and really makes me want to read more Native American history. Among non-Native Americans, even among ones who intend to be pro-native rights and stuff, there is a tendency to see “Native Americans” as one group, which was uniformly one way from time immemorial until 1492 and then a second way (sad and poor) from 1492 onward. The main contribution towards Awareness that not all native nations are the same in even minimally mainstream discourse in the past 15 years or so has been telling people not to use the term “spirit animal,” partly due to concerns about cultural appropriation but also partly because Twitter discourse warriors are apparently unfamiliar with the concept of an umbrella term. American Colonies instead talks a lot about the various political maneuverings of different native nations and the alliances and enmities thereof, the differences in the ways they resisted, traded with, and sometimes allied with the Spanish, French, and British empires, and the ways they exploited intra-European enmities just as the European empires exploited various intra-Native American tensions. I’m not saying this book is predominantly or even largely about Native American history or viewpoints, but it makes an effort to not reduce them to picturesque little backdrops to the drama of grand European conquest, and as such it made me think about how little I really know about Native American civilizations and how unconscionable that is given that I have lived here my entire life.

This book also doesn’t pussyfoot around the almost total centrality of profit to the European colonial projects. While many of the people involved in these projects were motivated, in whole or in part, by genuine beliefs in other things–mainly religion, science, and nationalism–these colonies were often largely and sometimes wholly commercial projects. Many of the initial colonies were settled by corporations before coming under control of the associated European crown, and the most common motivation for settlers to rebel against the orders of their home countries was when the governments back in Europe tried to mess with their ability to make money. Murder, theft, enslavement, abduction, lying, cheating, smuggling, and every vice or crime you could possibly think of was transformed into an inalienable right on the part of colonizers to set themselves up with land and money. Despite a lot of high-minded rhetoric otherwise (which was also there from the beginning), we are all living with this legacy of hypercommercial violence to this day, as anyone who’s looked at the news lately can see.

Originally posted at The transformation of a continent.

[Cory Lowery · Rating 5 out of 5]

Taylor's work is refreshingly unsentimental in its appraisal of North American history from the mid-1500s to the late 1700s, a period when the continent evolved from a patchwork of Native confederacies and chiefdoms to an arena for the competing ambitions and imperial designs of the incipient empires of the Early Modern period. As a historical survey, this book maintains a remarkably skillful balance between imperial Europeans and the Native peoples who played the various roles of enemy, ally, interlocutor, traitor, and tributary. Even as Taylor refuses to pass over the horrific practice of ritual torture and mutilation commonplace among people like the Iroquois, Catawba, and Cherokee, he also coolly reminds readers that torture and arbitrary executions were routine among colonial and metropolitan Europeans alike, exacted for offenses running the gamut from heresy to petty theft. As Taylor puts it, the Early Modern period was a rough time populated by brutal, sometimes capricious people whose cruelty and profoundly alien worldview make them difficult props for modern narratives about either the glorious march of European civilization or the romantic fiction of peace-loving and tree-hugging Native Americans.

Importantly, Taylor also blows up the common perception that different empires practiced more or less humane forms of colonialism, explaining that the relatively more humane posture adopted by the French towards the Native people of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River resulted more from their small numbers and vulnerability than their beneficent inclinations. This fact is amply demonstrated by the brutal war of revenge and extermination French colonists carried out against the Natchez people who dwelled near the plantations of New Orleans.

In my view, Taylor's book is an archetype of well-conceived and well-executed survey history. While the enormity of the subject matter forces him to pass over specifics in many places, his ability to synthesize the key details of ecology, social history, and political/military affairs into a grand narrative of North America makes particular people and societies more comprehensible as part of their vast geographical and temporal context. It is also crisply written, and Taylor's dry humor and skillful interweaving of grand history and personal narrative make the history easy to digest, even if it would probably be too much to describe 'American Colonies' as a page-turner.

[Tom Oman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a fascinating and well written book. I can see why he won the Pulitzer Prize. Highly recommended.

Side anecdote: at one point the author draws a comparison between the way the English and French set up their fur trading networks with the natives of North America, comparing that with how the Russians established their trade networks with indigenous Siberians and Alaskans. The Russians did this after seeing how lucrative the trade was for the British and French, but the contrast in methods could not be more stark. While the British and French mainly incentivized trade by offering guns, alcohol and other goods, the Russian approach was nothing but sheer brutality and violence. At the least sign of resistance they would go in and decimate villages with horrific displays of rape and torture, designed to shock and serve as a warning to nearby groups. Dragging the wife of a rebellious chief behind a horse from camp to camp as an example, to posting severed heads along popular routes, to bombarding villages with cannon fire when they didn’t meet their quotas. The French and British had their skirmishes with natives and were very nasty by anyone’s measure, but it seems that the Russians took this to a whole new level.

[Pat Rolston · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderfully written story about our national heritage and roots. The reader is provided insight into the indigenous people as well as original explorers who settled America. Much like Howard Zinn's work the author captures the stories of those who historians often overlook as well as the unvarnished truth as related to how cruel were many of our European ancestors. The history here is very readable and well researched and serves as an ideal compliment to Zinn's, "Peoples History of the United States." Highly recommended for everyone wanting to better understand our current society by means of engaging and well written history.

[Anna Radzinski · Rating 3 out of 5]

me and alan taylor have a love hate relationship

[Moses · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pairs very well with Fischer’s Albion’s Seed. Many similar notes, both essential to understanding colonial America.

[Rindis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alan Taylor admits straight-up in the introduction that he took a very expansive view of the subject of the first volume of Penguin's History of the United States series. Geographically, he looks at all of North America, rather than just the broad swath that would become part of the US. Time-wise... well, he does start with the initial migrations across the Bering Strait, but naturally doesn't spend that much time with the spread of humanity across the continent and the changes that wrought. But he does talk about the subject before moving on to the arrival of Europeans from across the Atlantic.

In general, this is the usual 'colonial' focus, with the book winding down once the United States forms (though the last section covers the California coast and Hawaii up to about 1800). The main point of the increased geographical scope is to show the various European projects of conquest and/or settlement, and how they played out differently, or against each other. Regions are looked at in large blocks in the text, which partially undercuts the point, as some relationships end up scattered about, but mostly it works.

Part of why it works is that North America wasn't any sort of unified place from native or European viewpoints in the period, so several stories play out more-or-less independently. They also provide meaningful compare and contrast examples, especially for the Eastern Seaboard colonies. Those sections are split up by the original English administering of them, and explains how the modern states were originally grouped before being split into separate colonies later (a sequence never adequately mentioned, much less explained, in other histories I've seen).

The general thesis through most of the book is how European powers tried to control this new continent, but the ability to have things go the way planned always fell far short of the plans. Past this, there is a good amount of explanation of how native agriculture worked in various regions, and how European settlers inevitably disrupted these patterns, starting the cycle of friction that was only downward as exposure to European diseases rapidly diminished native populations.

Taylor is also at great pains to point out that this was nearly as much a problem for early Spanish authorities, since the main plan was to make use of the huge pool of labor they had conquered... and was now dying off. This leads to needing to import labor, and Taylor goes into the economic process where slave labor crowds out indentured labor (which was more than bad enough). Much of the latter half looks at how various regions evolved slightly differently under these pressures.

There's a fair number of conflicts during this period, and I don't think they're well served here. Conflicts between Europeans and natives, like Metacomet's War, are well-enough handled, but any conflict between European powers feels more glossed over, even within the limitations of such an overview, with some exception for the British conquest of the Dutch colonies.

This is, of course, and overview, and has to be fairly succinct in any subject, but this is definitely a new standard in overviews of the period, and an excellent start to Penguin's series.

[Jack Wolfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay, Goodreads, listen up: fact is that all history writing is political. A historian decides what to leave in and what to leave out. These choices are always going to be beholden to an author's worldview. In "American Colonies," Alan Taylor does not tell a "leftist" history of colonization, but he does choose to focus on things that leftists tend to find interesting (i.e. the experiences of indigenous people, the environment, capitalism, etc)... which means that apparently a lot of people on Goodreads think this one is "bias." So bias!

I think what makes this one so upsetting to some readers-- and so refreshing and agreeable, to me-- is how Taylor doesn't pay any credence to the concepts of American heroism, American nobility, or American mythology. This does not resemble "standard" American history at all, because "standard" American history is almost always about the glorious progress of ideas and freedom. You know-- the thing that's in every president's stump speech-- the Obama thing. "Standard" American history, in other words, parrots the justifications of empire for the destruction of native people and the mass enslavement of Africans. Alan Taylor, god bless him, will have none of that bullshit. His history is about, in two words, greed and violence. Once you stop focusing on individual genius and broaden your scope to include economics, the land, disease, labor, technology, race, power, etc, it's very hard to see America as a "shining city," or whatever the Puritans said their damn little freaky intolerant experiment was. The period of colonization was, to put it mildly, ROUGH, and it's a difficult to imagine a grand narrative about it that could be both "true" and "positive."

What is "positive" history, anyway? All these people complaining about Critical Race Theory and "negative" history... what do they really want out of exploring the past? Do they really want to explore the past? People who are interested in such exploration are gonna find just so much to love about "American Colonies." I had to stop and quote the thing out loud to my long-suffering wife every other page or so. Taylor researched widely and deeply here, and includes the stories not just of British religious dissidents (truly a small part of the colonial experience) but also Spanish missionaries, French fur traders, African rebels in the Caribbean, Dutch and Portuguese and Scandinavian mariners, and even the first Russians in Alaska. Of particular note is how carefully and sympathetically Taylor describes the native experience, which varies wildly from culture to culture and location to location. The main character in this book, in truth, could be the American continent itself, and its variety that spells either possibility or doom for so many different kinds of people.

So yeah... Step away from the bullshit, and you start to see the outlines of history that is ugly, yes, but also so much more interesting than the fairy tale-propaganda-thing most Americans treasure so deeply. I'll be reading Taylor's other books this year. #blessed

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book deserves its plaudits as a kleidoscopic and often surprising vision of America to the end of the 1700s.

It describes Spanish Franciscans converting the pueblo Indians, only to be destroyed in a revolt by the charismatic Indian shaman Pope in 1680. It describes the Russian promyshlenniki, or fur traders, who captured the Aleutian islands in the 1740s and held the natives hostage until they procured enough seal furs. It describes how Hiawatha organized the Iroquois Five Nations into a confederacy in 1700, just as they made peace with the French and British on each side, and then how they formed a "Covenant Chain" alliance with the new New York governor Edmund Andros in order to better attack their true enemies, the Alogonquian tribes. It describes how a band of Dutch investors, including former New York governor Peter Minuit, exploited the Swedish flag and some Swedish colonists to form a new colony in Delaware in 1637, before being overwhelmed by new Dutch Governor Pieter Stuyvesant in 1665. It describes how the introduction of horses and guns allowed the Apache and Comanche to dominate the southwest in the early 1700s, and then how the Apache gradually came under the Spanish suzerainty in the 1750s in order to protect them from Comanches raiders, while the Spanish moved them to estableciemientos de paz ("peace establishments") even while they made peace with Apaches former enemies the Comanches during the "Bourbon reforms" of Spanish King Carlos III.

So yes, this book offers a view on everyone and everything in these years. But as the above description makes clear, it can often degenerate into a blizzard of dates and names with little connecting thread. The connecting thread, such as there is, is the rapaciousness of European colonists and the intelligence of their Indian and African opponents. Such claims have an obvious political valence, and can become tedious at times by reiteration, but, especially when this was published in 2001, it is still a necessary corrective to more common tropes.

On the whole, this book should be a necessary part of one's education in American history. But just be prepared for some slogs going through it.

[Bren fall in love with the sea. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only remembered I read this years ago because I was looking at a Goodreads list about books beginning with the letter A. So make of that what you will.

This is a very long and wordy book but I enjoyed it because I have a real interest in History. I did skim certain parts. The most interesting for me were the parts on Native American History because I have always had a fascination with that.

I could not read a book like this in one sitting. But it tells you about alot of our History and you may remember things that you once learned in school and for whatever reason forgot. It covers American History but other places too like Spain. The book is huge and I think I still have it somewhere but what I did was to read the parts that interested me the most.

In a way it is like being back in History class, although not in a bad way at all. (English and History were always my favorite subjects. It was math that was beyond me.)


We all have our own interests and it wont appeal to everyone. For example I cannot imagine reading a book about accounting. I'd find it dull. While this maybe dull to some people, anyone with an interest in the history of our great country or other countries might want to take a peek at it. (It is long though.)

[Andrew Bohn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is deceptively titled American Colonies when it should be titled Affects of Colonization to American Indians. It is a fine thing to write a book on the affects colonization had on native Americans, but I purchased this book to learn about the American colonies.

This book hardly went into any detail about British colonial life in the 18th century and nearly completely evades speaking at all about the American Revolutionary War and what led up to it. This book also tried its best to avoid any insight on any of the US founding fathers. I understand that American Colonization encompasses more than the framework and details of the revolutionary war, but it’s a pretty essential part of the history that was all together avoided.

This book was also written with a slight anti-American bias which felt like the author was avoiding any successes or positives of the American colonists.

Overall this book was informative and relatively entertaining, but I wish I had looked a little longer when deciding on a book about the American colonies to read.

[Larry Bassett · Rating 4 out of 5]

What we know mostly about the history of North America is that Columbus discovered it in 1492 and the colonists won their freedom in 1776. This book fills in a lot of the other details in a reasonably interesting way.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to read this for my comps list, and it confirmed my earlier opinion (based on skimming). This would work really well as a basic text for the sort of early American history class that I would like to teach. Taylor adopts an Atlantic World/North American approach, so he provides the history of New Spain and New France, as well as the English colonies, and he doesn't limit himself to only the English colonies that became the first thirteen states. The Caribbean colonies play an important role, as they should. Developments in Europe are also included. And Taylor takes the time toward the end to bring in what was happening in the Great Plains and the Pacific World, as those areas play into the history of the United States as well. And we get some good environmental history in here too, which I like.
Taylor is really long winded, as always, but the book would still serve. You wouldn't have to assign the whole thing, either, maybe a half dozen chapters and make the rest optional.