The Plundering Time: Maryland and the English Civil War, 1645-1646 (review)

Timothy Riordan, chief archaeologist at historic St. Mary's City, has written an unusual book, one that will appeal to both academic historians and to those whose interest in history is more casual. The Plundering Time carefully reconstructs in vivid detail the story of what is usually known as Ingle's Rebellion, the "year of plunder" that devastated and nearly destroyed the infant Maryland colony in the early 1640's. Casual readers will find this tale of revenge, violence, collapse into anarchy, and successful struggle to recover, fascinating, while professional historians will learn much from Riordan's fresh perspective on an important yet poorly understood period of early American history. Riordan argues that to understand Ingle's Rebellion, we should begin by abandoning the label. Too often the event, as the label implies, is viewed as a simple act of revenge by a hot-tempered ship captain striking back at Maryland for what he thought was an unjust arrest. In reality it was much more complex than that. The plundering time cannot be understood unless early Maryland is placed in its global context and attention is paid to several sources of political instability in early Maryland. One of the strength's of this book is Riordan's careful analysis of the roots of that instability, an analysis that reveals much about life in the early Chesapeake colonies. Those sources, which together account for Maryland's near collapse during the plundering time, include conflict with Virginia and with local Indians, the absence of institutions such as dense kinship networks and effective local government that would eventually help stabilize life in Maryland, religious tensions, not only between Catholics and Protestants, but among Catholics, especially between Lord Baltimore and the Jesuits, differences among the colonists over the future of the colony, and, most important, the tendency of political disputes in England to cross the Atlantic and create turmoil in the Americas. To Riordan's list, I would add the conflict between the Calvert family and great colonial merchants of England who were giving shape to the emerging empire. Those merchants disliked proprietary colonies. Their political power lay in England and they preferred colonies under the control of Whitehall, where their influence permitted them to protect their interests. Although focused on Maryland, Riordan has a lesson for historians of colonial America in general. There is a tendency to see early Maryland, and the colonies in general, as largely self-contained and isolated from other world events. As The Plundering Time makes clear, our understanding of colonial history can be enriched if we take a broader "Atlanticist" approach to early America. In sum, Timothy Riordan has written an important book, nicely written, impressively researched, and persuasively argued, one that greatly enriches our understanding of early Maryland, and that has an important message for students of British America in general.