On Pursuits of Happiness

Gross.

This book reads as something way more dated than it has any right to be. In it, Jack Greene pushes back against historians who view New England as the normative experience in colonial American history. In his view, New England was—in truth—an exceptional case. Granted, I think he is right on that. However, where I don’t follow is his argument is that the Chesapeake should be viewed as the real normative case. While he is at pains in the introduction to explain that this is not the case he’s making (he says that he finds that the North American colonies experienced convergence leading up to the Revolution), that’s not what his other chapters demonstrate.

To make this case, he relies primarily on secondary source research. In fact, there is little primary source research being done by Greene for this book. He starts off with an analysis of New England, which he argues is “declensionist”—a society of close cohesion that becomes increasingly individualistic, materialistic, etc. Then, he analyzes the Chesapeake, and he argues that those colonies are “developmentalist”—a society of fierce individualism that becomes communitarian over time. With the “declensionist” and “developmentalists” archetypes defined, he then spends time on a variety of other British colonial regions (i.e. Ireland, the Caribbean islands, the mid-Atlantic, and the lower South), and unsurprisingly finds that they were all “developmentalist,” just like Virginia and not at all like Massachusetts!

My biggest gripe is that “declensionist” and “developmentalist” are horribly useless categories, and I don’t know that there is any utility at all in explaining that the normal American colonial experience is not represented by X colony but by Y colony. The whole project is an exercise in futility, and the sort of modeling that Greene does not strike me as something a responsible historian should spend any time on.