Providence Island, 1630-1641: The Other Puritan Colony

by Karen Ordahl Kupperman

Providence Island was founded in 1630 at the same time as Massachusetts Bay by English puritans who thought an island off the coast of Nicaragua was far more promising than the cold, rocky shores of New England. Although they expected theirs to become a model godly society, the settlement never succeeded in building the kind of united and orderly community that the New Englanders created. In fact, they began large-scale use of slaves, and plunged into the privateering that invited the colony's extinction by the Spanish in 1641. As a well-planned and well-financed failure, Providence Island offers historians a standard by which to judge other colonies. By examining the failure of Providence Island, the author illuminates the common characteristics in all the successful English settlements, the key institutions without which men and women would not emigrate and a colony's economy could not thrive. This study of Providence Island reveals the remarkable similarities in many basic institutions among the early colonial regions.

Genres: History

412 pages, Paperback

First published October 29, 1993

About the author

Karen Ordahl Kupperman is an American historian who specializes in colonial history in the Atlantic world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
She was born in North Dakota, but moved often during her childhood. She studied History at the University of Missouri, after which she obtained a prestigious Woodrow Wilson fellowship and attended Harvard University, graduating with a MA in 1962. She later attended the University of Cambridge to earn her PhD.

Reviews

[Sanaya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good information. Fascinating topic. Decent (though not perfect) analysis. So disorganized it makes me want to cry. It bounces back and forth and forth and back to the point that I have to look at the footnotes to see what year it's discussing at any given moment. The disorganization leads to excessive repetition. This makes it extremely difficult to use for any sort of research project. Excessive use of quotations and an overly verbose writing style make this book a slower read than it needs to be. In short, this could be a 4-5 star book if it were thoroughly edited.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very detailed study on both the existence of, failure of, and importance of Providence Island. While the work becomes sluggish at times because of all the details (it appears Kupperman did not omit a single fact from the sources), the work is still a fascinating intervention in the way most early American history is taught. Kupperman's work of situating the settlement in the period and from an English and not "American" perspective provides a more correct understanding of early English colonization than what the 'tradition' history of the thirteen colonies provides. I do not completely agree with Kupperman's argument/characterization of why certain colonies succeeded and others did not, as it leans towards a social science model that can then supposedly be applied to any new colonial adventure, her ability to document how Providence Island was different from existing and successful British colonies is well done. She also does a good, if not great, job at explaining the mindset of the leaders of Providence Island, even though they had the knowledge of why other colonies may have been succeeding, which thus helps explain why the leaders (and so many other English colonization projects) continued to fail in their projects.

[Zach Klein · Rating 5 out of 5]

I highly recommend to anyone interested in New World history or frontierism.