A Revolution Before the Revolution?

Jon Butler. Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. x + 324 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $27.50.

In the introduction to Becoming America, Jon Butler notes that he began the book partly as a response to a friend who asked how to "synthesize colonial history after the Puritans" (p. 7). The question is familiar to every early Americanist. The beginning and ending points of the colonial period, the early years of colonization and the American Revolution, boast immense and immensely sophisticated literatures and long-standing traditions of interpretation. The middle years, defined by Butler as lasting between 1680 and 1770, have been comparatively neglected. Except for the Salem witchcraft trials and the Great Awakening, the period lacks the landmark events that attract on-going attention from scholars and readers. Of course, as Butler suggests, these years have hardly been ignored. But scholarly work considering the period, though often of extraordinary quality, tends to be focused tightly on a single question, colony, or region.

Synthesizing these substantial but often maddeningly separated literatures is a formidable task, but Butler performs it with aplomb. He has read widely and deeply in areas often known only to a few handfuls of specialists. The book includes learned discussions of furniture-making, Jewish immigration, and Native-American religion. But Butler does more than simply summarize these literatures. He also makes a strong case that this was a defining period. In 1680, Butler suggests, the colonies were small (a total population of perhaps 150,000) and relatively homogeneous. By 1770, they encompassed a population of some two million and were ethnically and racially diverse, largely market-driven, politically sophisticated, and religiously diverse. In the intervening years, Butler argues, America had become modern, become American.

Scholars who know Butler's earlier Awash in a Sea of Faith will not be surprised at the intelligence and clarity evident in his new work. ¹ But they will also note a marked alteration in tone. Awash, published in 1990, considered early American religion from the first colonial settlements to the antebellum years in strikingly original ways. Emphasizing such issues as magic and the "sacrilization of the landscape," the book relegated Puritanism and other topics beloved by generations of religious historians to the margins. Even the widely-studied Great Awakening was cut down to size. Butler considered the term "an interpretive fiction," and not a very helpful one. With its vigorous challenges to conventional wisdom, Awash at times evoked the strenuous atmosphere of the seminar room. Becoming America, by contrast, recalls the lecture hall, offering polished and carefully considered judgments gained from long and close engagement with the topic. While Awash attacked other historians' interpretations, Becoming America portrays the period itself. As the introduction notes, the book "concentrates on the past, not on historians" (p. 7). This rare combination of congenial openness, creative thinking, and extensive research makes Becoming America the best available introduction to the history of the mainland American colonies during the years between 1680 and 1770.

Becoming America proceeds topically in five primary chapters, with a concluding discussion relating these themes to the American Revolution. Butler divides each of the substantive chapters into separate sections considering major aspects of its topic. He begins with the expansion of population and of racial and ethnic diversity. During the century after 1680, he suggests, the colonial population, originally primarily English, became more heterogeneous. Huguenots, Scots, Jews, and Germans came to the colonies in significant numbers. Africans were forcibly transported to serve as slaves. Even the migration stream from England changed, with substantial numbers of Quakers and convicts adding to this growing diversity. Butler offers an excellent capsule history of each of these groups, adding a valuable survey of Native American experience as well. The post-1680 migrations, he concludes, created "an unprecedented jumble of peoples" that made mid-eighteenth-century America unique.

Butler's discussion of the economy also stresses change. The substantial economic expansion of the period, he...