American Colonies: The Settling of North America

In the Introduction, Alan Taylor argues that previous histories of the American colonies were oversimplified because they concentrated exclusively on English colonies and the English white male experience. This Anglocentric narrative is attractive to academics and the public alike because it offers “an appealing simplification that contains important (but partial) truths” (x). But such histories exclude the “losers” of the colonial process: native peoples (whom Taylor broadly refers to as Indians), slaves, poor white men and women, and England’s imperial rivals, France, Spain, and the Netherlands.

The colonial “winners” tended to be middling (roughly equivalent to middle class) or wealthy white men. Their success depended on the capitalistic seizure of land and exploitation of others’ labor. But their power, and European power more broadly, was not absolute. The colonizers had to adapt to each other, the Indians, and the Africans—and vice versa. The unique factor in the American colonies, Taylor contends, was this unprecedented mixing of peoples, which led to a composite culture and “the true measure of American distinctiveness, the true foundation for the diverse America of our time” (xii).

The distinctions between these groups were not always what they are now. In the 16th and early 17th centuries, the inclination was to sort people based on culture (i.