On the Peopling of British North America

This is a profoundly dated book (or really, series of lectures), but it does seem to be an important one. In it, Bailyn shirks some of the main tools that historians have, and opts for a sort of historical sociology in which he surveys the populations of British North America. The key word here is “British.” Although there are discussions of Germans and Dutchmen and French Huguenots, Bailyn situates his subject within a thoroughly British Atlantic, refusing to nod towards the Spanish or African Atlantics. This is a serious problem, given that the book was published in the mid-1980s and, at that point, series of non-Anglocentric studies had already been published

While the book is a series of three lectures, I feel sorry for those who had to sit through the lectures—each one seems incomplete individually, and it’s only by reading all three that we get the sense of a cohesive whole. A large part of this is because Bailyn frames his study around four “propositions,” none of which can be found in a single lecture. The first lecture contains proposition one, where Bailyn argues that British settlement of North America can only be understood by examining domestic British migration patterns. The second lecture contains propositions two and three. In proposition two, Bailyn argues that North America lacked uniformity, but must be recognized as a highly differentiated process. In proposition three, Bailyn argues that the two major stimuli for migration were the need for labor and the importance of land speculation (as a result, the relation between landowners and tenants differed markedly from that of Britain). Finally, the third lecture contains proposition four, where Bailyn argues that British North America must be seen as a “marchland” of the European culture system. As part of that, different European peoples mingled differently in different regions.

To me, the third lecture was the most interesting of the bunch. I’m a sucker for regional analyses, and Bailyn breaks down colonial North America into four separate regions: New England, which tended to be the most homegeneously Anglo and family-based; the space between the Hudson and Delaware Rivers, which was a veritable melting pot with large populations of Dutchmen, Germans, and Swiss; the Chesapeake Bay colonies, which tended to be the most brutal, with the lowest life expectancies, highest rates of indentured servitude, widespread slavery, and a high proportion of men to women; finally, the fourth region is the Carolinas, which tended to be the most black and had very close contacts with the Caribbean. Georgia is mostly excluded, given that it was a barely functional backwater during the colonial period, but it would have definitely been part of the Carolinas.

This book is an illuminating one, but it doesn’t seem to go far enough to give a full picture of settlement in the Americas. Obviously, this is not a comprehensive history of colonial British North America—there is little here on Native peoples, the construction of slavery, etc. It seems, then, that this is more of a Fingerspiel, giving a taste of some of the major themes that Bailyn would discuss in his other 1986 work: Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution. I’ll check that one out some time in the next few weeks—hopefully he does a better job there than he does here.