Alan Taylor’s American
Colonies
Introduction
Conventional “American history”
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English colonies on the east coast spread
westward reaching only to the Appalachian
Mountains by the end of colonization
Seeds of United States first appeared in
Jamestown (1607) and then Plymouth (1620)
French and Spanish were enemies, foreigners to
the English proto-Americans
Happy story of American
exceptionalism
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The making of a new people in a new land
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White men escape rigid customs, social
hierarchies, and limited resources of Europe for
land of abundance and change
Some truths
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Many English colonists did find more land,
greater prosperity and higher status than they
could achieve in England
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Great majority of English in the colonies lived
better than their common contemporaries in
England
Traditional story of American uplift
excludes too many people
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Many English colonists failed in the new world, finding
only intense labor, disease, Indian hostility
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Those who prospered did so by taking land from
Indians and exploiting the labor of indentured servants
and later African slaves
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Between 1492 and 1776, North America lost
population
The population of the Americas
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Disease and wars killed Indians faster than immigration
could replace them
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Most colonial arrivals were Africans forcibly carried to
a land of slavery
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Much colonization carried out by Spain and France;
colonial societies formed from the encounter and
struggle between competing colonizing projects
Red, White, and Black
Three distinct groups of Anglo-American
Colonization
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English
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Indians
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Africans
Diversity within
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British
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Africans
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Welsh, Irish, Scots-Irish, Germans, Swedes, Finns, Dutch,
and French Huguenots, as well the usual English suspects
Africans varied among numerous ethnic identities including
Ashanti, Fulani, Ibo, Malagasy, Mandingo, and Yoruba, with
languages more different from each other than were English
from Spanish and French
Indians
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only became common identity after colonial contact
hundreds of linguistically distinct peoples lived in North
America prior to the age of colonization
Composite culture
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Contact encounters framed by unequal power
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Europeans had ecological, technological, and
organizational advantages
But Europeans never had complete power and were
forced to adjust to cultural resistance, however subtle
Race and Difference
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At first, Europeans drew distinctions between
people on the basis of class
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Mastery of civility and Christianity led elite to draw
few distinctions between laborers, indentured
servants, sailors, soldiers and Africans and Indians
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But the English were more ready to extend some
political rights to common white people
British relied on local militias rather than
institutionalized armies to fight colonization’s battles
a common identity formed around race, as whites
formed a sense of racial identity against the Indians
with whom they fought and the African slaves they
policed
Once race replaced class as the primary marker of
privilege, white elites had to concede greater social
respect and political rights to common white men
Created the fault lines for Revolution and for North
America’s ongoing struggle with racism