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Reviewed by:
  • English Atlantics Revisited: Essays Honouring Professor Ian K. Steele
  • Carl Robert Keyes (bio)
Nancy L. Rhoden, editor. English Atlantics Revisited: Essays Honouring Professor Ian K. Steele. McGill-Queen’s University Press. xxviii, 528. $85.00

John M. Murrin opens the final essay of this collection by remarking that a ‘festschrift . . . seldom adds greatly to the reputations of the contributors.’ However, he continues, these essays ‘reflect serious research, much of it in archival sources, combined with careful thinking about difficult questions, most of which have been inspired by Ian K. Steele’s own writing.’ Reviewing English Atlantics Revisited almost feels superfluous, thanks to Murrin’s reflections on the notable contributions offered in the other sixteen essays, presented along with his own analysis of Steele’s role in creating current conceptions of the English Atlantic world.

Like most collections of essays honouring prominent scholars, this volume opens with an Introduction from the editor. Nancy L. Rhoden outlines the historiography of the Atlantic world, providing context for and drawing connections among the assorted contributions. The sixteen essays that constitute the core of the collection are then presented in five sections, grouped thematically to represent the stages of Steele’s career. The first section consists of two essays focusing on ‘Contexts,’ with Richard R. Johnson commenting on the political economy of English imperial ventures in the Atlantic and John Shy glowingly assessing Steele’s skill as a military historian.

Essays by Barbara C. Murison, Randy Dunn, and Stacy L. Lorenz comprise the second section, ‘Political Economy.’ Murison details the career of William Blathwayt, a steadfast functionary positioned at the centre of processes that ‘rationaliz[ed] the running of the empire’ in the 1670s and 1680s by implementing ‘armed force, legal coercion, and administrative expansion and pressure.’ While military options were sometimes useful, Blathwayt more often gathered power to the metro-pole, away from the peripheries, through an efficient management of information that allowed him to expand and bring coherence to imperial administration.

The third section, ‘The Maritime Atlantic,’ includes contributions by Neil Kennedy, Sara Morrison, Michael Dove, and Daniel A. Baugh. In an analysis of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Dove notes the theories explaining the company’s seemingly conservative operations in the northernmost reaches of the New World. He asserts that prior explanations glossed over ‘the degree of diplomatic uncertainty present in the Atlantic world for much of the eighteenth century and its resounding effect on the scope and pattern of the fur trade in North America.’ Dove [End Page 194] describes a business model that took into account not only changes in nautical technology but also geopolitical realities and uncertainties of the North Atlantic.

Jon W. Parmenter, Alexander V. Campbell, and Michelle A. Hamilton each analyzed ‘Amerindian and Military Frontiers’ for the fourth section. Campbell refers to the activities of the Royal American Regiment between 1755 and 1772 as a ‘dynamic Atlantic microcosm.’ He deftly weaves together the stories of officers and soldiers, from recruitment in the Old World through service and settlement in the New World, as he demonstrates how this regiment approached many of the social, economic, and cultural issues that preoccupy modern scholars. Association with the Royal Americans presented many soldiers with opportunities and advantages during their Atlantic world migrations.

In the final section, ‘Social History,’ David J. Norton, Kenneth A. Lockridge, Nancy L. Rhoden, and Margaret M.R. Kellow offer perspectives on society and culture in the early modern Atlantic world. In an intriguing essay examining the lives of the Swedish Hesselius brothers, Lockridge presents a complex analysis of identity and acculturation in multi-ethnic and multi-racial Philadelphia during the early and middle eighteenth century. The bulk of the essay focuses on Gustavus, the first professionally trained portrait painter in the American colonies. On the basis of his insightful portraits of two Delaware chiefs, Lockridge questions to what extent Gustavus moved beyond the original nausea that the seeming disorder of the heterogeneous middle colonies incited in him.

The volume concludes with Murrin’s essay. Space constraints do not permit consideration of each essay for this review, but Murrin’s contribution is a bonus that probes each for its significance while suggesting useful connections, questions, and...

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