Capitalism in the Core, Barbarism in the Periphery?

Bernard Bailyn’s The Barbarous Years—a new history of seventeenth-century European immigration to and settlement of the coastal North American British and Dutch colonies—complements a half-century of innovative work. This work, on the political, social, economic, and cultural history of the British colonies and the Revolutionary era, covers an extraordinary range of topics, from seventeenth-century New England merchants to Revolutionary-era ideology, from early education to the American Founders. Often controversial, Bailyn’s work has nonetheless shaped early American history more than any other twentieth-century historian.

The opening pages of The Barbarous Years clearly state his dual themes of diversity and barbarism. “A mixed multitude” emigrated “from England, the Netherlands, the German and Italian states, France, Africa, Sweden and Finland,” coming “for different reasons, from different social backgrounds, and cultures, and under different auspices and circumstances” (p. xiv). The English, who predominated, emigrated from every corner of the realm; even New England attracted a diverse population. Settlers and Indians alike behaved barbarously. The experiences of immigrants “were not mainly of triumph but of confusion, failure, violence, and the loss of civility as they sought to normalize abnormal situations . . . , in the process tearing apart the normalities of the people whose world they had invaded” (pp. xiv–xv). Almost never at peace, the European invaders fought bloody and reckless Indian wars and intense (and occasionally murderous) conflicts with one another. After presenting voluminous evidence of barbarity, Bailyn concludes that “conflicts with native Americans had been continuous, barbarous, and degrading for both peoples.” At the same time, “conflicts with authorities, public and private . . . had been continuous and destabilizing—sources of bitter personal disputes and communal disarray” (p. 503).

Bailyn has long written about English and European immigration to the British mainland colonies. In 1986, he published two books on pre-Revolutionary immigration: an interpretation and a detailed examination of a 1773–76 British immigration register. He gave both these volumes and the work under review the series title of “the peopling of British North America,” thereby emphasizing the Atlantic dimension of immigration, combining the history of sending areas, the process of emigration, and the environment that immigrants experienced and made once they arrived. His story thus takes place on a vast canvas, in England, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Finland, as well as in North America.

Based mostly on a voluminous secondary literature, The Barbarous Years sustains its twin theses through detailed narratives of emigration and colonization. It covers a multitude of colonies, from well-known settlements at Jamestown, St. Mary’s City, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay to the obscure Finnish colonies on the Delaware River. Proceeding chronologically and from south to north, it gives nearly equal coverage to each colonial endeavor, no matter how large geographically or how populous the settlement became by 1675. Colorful characters, many unknown to most early American historians, pop out in every chapter: Bailyn sketches the travails of Johan Printz, the beleaguered governor of New Sweden, and the exploits of Richard Ingle, “a mad captain” who tried to make Maryland a Protestant colony. Where secondary literature permits, Bailyn details the social experiences and cultural patterns of both Indians and settlers: the first chapter interprets the ethnohistory of American Indians; other chapters cover the demography and economy of the Chesapeake colonies, conflicts over land system in Massachusetts Bay, and religious struggles in New England. Except for a few asides, however, Bailyn fails to examine the place of women or sexuality in the new colonies, issues that the high sex-ratios (of men to women) everywhere, even in New England, should have brought to the fore.

Such a strategy has both advantages and disadvantages. The myriad details and accumulation of stories evoke complexity, challenge the patriotic pieties of courageous settlers and heroic Indians, and make clear that death, destruction, and violence accompanied the European invasion of America. But it obscures any comparison of the colonies together, save...