Hybridity and Creolization in Early Pennsylvania

Too often, when we think of William Penn’s colonial project, we think of it in terms that disavow the very colonialism that underpinned it. Part of the problem lies in the persistent mythology surrounding Pennsylvania’s founding, a tradition inherited as much from scholars as it was from the founding generation. Writing more than a century ago, Isaac Sharpless, professor and dean at Haverford College, helped to naturalize the myth that colonial Pennsylvania was from its start a social and political democracy. For Sharpless, it just made good sense. After all, the colony had been born that way; a liberty-loving people like the Quakers, Sharpless concluded, could not help but produce a society that was democratic. Yet, despite the powerful images of tolerance and pluralism that thoughts of the Quaker colony evoke, the history of Pennsylvania—and Early America—needs to be interpreted in a fashion similar to other imperial endeavors: as a site of contestation and negotiation not only between indigenous and settler societies, but between the acrimonious admixture of colonists as well. To tell Pennsylvania’s history in this fashion is to discard a triumphant narrative of democratization and replace it with a story of creolization and hybridity. Each and together, John Smolenski’s Friends and Strangers and Judith Ridner’s A Town In-Between help to trouble the democratic narrative with more complex investigations of culture creation. Read together, Smolenski’s focus on the decades after Pennsylvania’s founding and Ridner’s close study of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, give important attention to the generative and adaptive processes of creolization and the resistant, sometimes subversive, responses of hybridity.

Smolenski’s Friends and Strangers might be said to start with Sharpless. Lest we think that time and research have undermined Sharpless’s Whiggish interpretation, Friends and Strangers reminds us that “modern scholars” have too often accepted and fostered Sharpless’s narrative of “Pennsylvania as the birthplace of modern tolerance, domesticity, and political liberalism” (2). Yet Smolenski does much more than destabilize a long-standing narrative. Drawing on a diverse body of scholarly literature and theory, Smolenski brings new insights and analysis to the history of the making of William Penn’s “Holy Experiment.” A refinement of the author’s 2001 dissertation, Friends and Strangers offers a story of contestation and negotiation among Quakers, the crush of new, non-Quaker settlers, and the region’s indigenous populations. In an effort to explore this process, the author frames the first half-century of Pennsylvania as a story of creolization, defined as a creative process in which settler societies, unable to “fit” Old World systems to a new landscape, built “new cultural habits and identities,” especially in the realm of “civic life” (4–5, 11, 290–91).

Friends and Strangers is divided into three parts, encompassing seven chapters and a conclusion, in which the author undertakes a chronological and thematic investigation of creolization along the colonial borderlands. Taken together, the chapters build a composite study of creolization and its discontents across fifty years of Pennsylvania history. Adopting what David Armitage has called a model of “cis-Atlantic history,” Smolenski’s first chapters weave Pennsylvania into “a wider Atlantic World” (306, n23) in an effort to see creolization as a natural process within the history of Quakerism and in response to the many problems that settlers faced in producing “a common civic identity” (121). As Smolenski quite accurately demonstrates, the Quakers’ Old World experience was at once indispensible in and little different from their efforts to craft a workable religious and political identity “in a rapidly transforming social landscape” (16).

By chapter 3 these two projects, identity formation and civil order, merge into Quaker efforts to build a “deferential political society in which ordinary citizens” accepted the rule of the Quaker “governing class” and, at the same time, to forge...