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Title: The Peopling of British North America : An Introduction by Bernard Bailyn ISBN: 0-394-75779-3 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 12 April, 1988 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.75 (4 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: great
Comment: Peopling of British North America: An Introduction.
Surely one of the most important studies of the vast movement of immigrants to the New World is Bernard Bailyn's The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction. In a nuanced thesis regarding the motivations for promoting movement of large numbers of people to the American wilderness, he also shows how long-held traditions with regard to land ownership and tenantry were transformed in America, due largely to the new environment. Bailyn argues that after the "initial phase of colonization, the major stimuli to population recruitment and settlement were...the continuing need for labor, and...land speculation." The land speculation of the 17th and 18th centuries, Bailyn argues, "shaped a relationship between the [land] owners and the workers of the land different from that which prevailed in Europe." (60) Bailyn writes that land speculation was common in America among all classes of men, "a major preoccupation of ambitious people...launched as a universal business." (67) But with all of this pervasive land accumulation came an indispensable caveat; speculators needed settlers to populate the land they claimed, so that an owner could rent or sell his property. "Land speculation was, and remained, boundless, ubiquitous," (74) writes Bailyn, who goes on to describe the various schemes and methods speculators used "to people the land they claimed." (69) Yet as Bailyn points also out, long-held, customary tenancy relationships that British landowners were used to were not adaptable to America. Instead, new methods were needed to attract settlers and clear the land, so that property in the trackless wilderness would become useable, and as a result, valuable. Bailyn argues that, unlike tenancy norms in Britain or Ireland, speculators had to let the land out at very low rates (or none at all) in an attempt to attract settlers who would in turn make improvements on the property themselves, with their own labor. "The land would have a new value and could then be rented profitably or sold...all of this with little or no outlay of funds." (82) This innovative model was quite attractive to migrants, Bailyn concludes, who were free to chose upon which speculator's land to settle, and which lands to avoid. In America, gone were the services tenants typically performed in the old country, rent increases and the caprice of landlords. Bailyn goes on to suggest as well that unlike property limitations in Britain, land in the colonies was "too easily available" and mobility too common among settlers for tenancy to develop permanently, or to "make possible a re-creation of the stable pattern of rentiers that lay at the heart of a traditional landed society." New tenancy and ownership patterns "reveal a new and dynamic process that was a central force in the peopling of America." (84-85)
Rating: 5
Summary: The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction
Comment: The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction writtin by Bernard Bailyn is a book that has three major essays about how North America was settled. These essays are: Worlds in Motion, The Rings of Saturn and A Domesday Book for the Periphery.
In these essays the author brings a new vividness and authenticity to the story of the settlement of North America as the Old World tranfers people to the New World... we see a basis for an American society begining to form... later a British migration solidifies a central theme where people wanted to control their own destiny.
The book is well-written and is documented giving the reader sharp detail. I found the book to be not only educational, but enlightening.
Rating: 5
Summary: A magnificent work of American historiography
Comment: This is one fascinating book! I can't believe how successful Mr. Bailyn has been in making the demographics of British North America so interesting. Harvard's eminent historian has written a very lively, very well-researched, immensely entertaining work.
Being an historian in training myself, I find his examination of the elements of population history absolutely exemplary. Bailyn structures his magisterial two-volume study (to which this book is the introduction) around four "propositions" about socio-demographics in Britain's North American colonies. He subsequently answers these "queries" by offering a broad overview of his own research and the field in general.
Among the interesting ways he wished to enter into research was by stating his "propositions" and then assaying to fill them out. For instance, one section of the book is based on an imaginative "proposition": if an 18th-century British King had attempted to do what William the Conqueror did in the 11th century -- to conduct a survey and compile a "Domesday Book" about his realms -- what would he have found? What would have been the trends at work in the empire? How were Old World socio-economic forces intimately linked to the discovery and settlement of the New, not only in England, but also on the European continent? Bailyn carries out a penetrating examination of the great migrations in 17th-century England -- from North to South, from village to village, from the countryside to the city -- and then considers the extension of this process to North America. 250 years after this imaginary census, Bailyn's fascinating analysis is part of what makes "The Peopling of British North America" such a success: he unifies a century's historical research into a comprehensive whole.
Another "proposition" Bailyn outlines is this: how did the movement and interactions of populations in the New World affect the psychology of the colonists? In other words, what was migration's impact on mentality? How could civilization exist side-by-side with barbarism? Effete plantations with brutal frontiers? Old world with New? How, for example, could William Byrd of Westover, Virginia, lead the refined plantation lifestyle for which he is famous, reading his Bible and his classics in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew every day, the paragon of culture and English sobriety, and then turn around to beat his slaves for the most trivial offenses, which he subsequently records for us in his "Secret Diary" with not so much as the smallest regret? What do these trends say about the American character? How did they shape our basic institutions and the fundamentals of our history?
In short, you will not find a better book on the population of the American colonies than Mr. Bailyn's. While I have not yet read the succeeding two volumes in his work, I eagerly look forward to doing so. I trust they, too, are more shining examples this brilliant historian's outstanding scholarship.
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Title: Voyagers to the West : A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution by Bernard Bailyn ISBN: 0394757785 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: 12 April, 1988 List Price(USD): $28.35 |
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Title: Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer ISBN: 0195069056 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: March, 1991 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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Title: Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement by David Hackett Fischer, James C. Kelly, Virginia Historical Society ISBN: 0813917743 Publisher: University of Virginia Press Pub. Date: March, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.50 |
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Title: American Colonies (The Penguin History of the United States) by Alan Taylor, Eric Foner ISBN: 0142002100 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 30 July, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Scotch-Irish: A Social History by James G. Leyburn ISBN: 0807842591 Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr Pub. Date: August, 1989 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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