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The British Atlantic World: Working Towards a Definition*

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Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690–1750. By HeyrmanChristine Leigh. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1984. Pp. 431. £22.25.
The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community. By SteeleIan K.. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Pp. xii + 400. £29.50.
The Economy of British America, 1607–1789: Needs and Opportunities for Study. By McCuskerJohn J. and MenardRussell R.Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Pp. xxiv + 485. Paperback edition £14.20.

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Nicholas Canny
Nicholas Canny
Affiliation:
University College, Galway
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The Historical Journal , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , June 1990, pp. 479 - 497
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

1 Miller, Perry, The Mew England mind: the seventeenth century (New York, 1939)Google Scholar; Idem, The New England mind: from colony to province (Cambridge, Mass., 1953); Andrews, Charles MacLean, The colonial background of the American revolution (New Haven, 1924)Google Scholar; Curtin, Philip D., The Atlantic slave trade: a census (Madison, Wisc., 1969)Google Scholar; Jordan, Winthrop D., White over black: American attitudes toward the negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968)Google Scholar. The term colonial British America was first given official status in Greene, Jack P. and Pole, J. R. (eds.) Colonial British America: essays in the new history of the early modern era (Baltimore, Md., 1984)Google Scholar.

2 The books on English social history considered most apt for the purposes of imaginative reconstruction were Hoskins, W. G., The midland peasant: the economic and social history of a Leicestershire village (London, 1957)Google Scholar; Laslett, Peter, The world we have lost (London, 1965)Google Scholar; Everitt, Alan, The community of Kent and the great rebellion (Leicester, 1966)Google Scholar; Stone, Lawrence, Social change and revolution in England, 1540–1640 (London, 1965)Google Scholar; Thirsk, Joan (ed.). The agrarian history of England and Wales, vol. 4; 1500–1640 (Cambridge, 1967)Google Scholar; Plumb, J. H., The growth of political stability in England, 1675–1725 (London, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; MacFarlane, Alan, The family life of Ralph Josselin, a seventeenth-century clergyman (Cambridge 1970)Google Scholar. Special importance was also attached to Quinn, David B., The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966)Google Scholar. This brief list derives from my own experience as a student of Richard Dunn at the University of Pennsylvania 1967–71, but a brief glance at works on the social history of colonial America published during the early1970s will reveal the more general influence of these authors.

3 Davies, K. G., The north Atlantic world in the seventeenth century(Minneapolis, 1974)Google Scholar; Davis, Ralph, The rise of the Atlantic economies (London, 1973)Google Scholar.

4 The features of family life identified as of particular importance were longer lives, earlier marriage, and larger numbers of children who continued to reside in the parental home until the age of marriage. It was also believed that most people lived out their lives in the communities, where they were born and raised, thus contributing to low levels of geographic mobility. See Powell, Sumner Chilton, Puritan village: the formation of a New England town (Middletown, Ct., 1963)Google Scholar; Demos, John, A little commonwealth: family life in Plymouth colony (Oxford, 1971)Google Scholar; Greven, Philip J. Jr, Four generations: population, land and family in colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, N.Y., 1970)Google ScholarLockridge, Kenneth A., A New England town: the first hundred years: Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636–1736 (New York, 1970)Google Scholar.

5 Dunn, Richard S., Sugar and slaves: the rise of the planter class on the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (London, 1973)Google Scholar. Morgan, Edmund S., American slavery, American freedom: the ordeal of colonial Virginia (New York, 1975)Google Scholar.

6 Wood, Peter, Black majority: negroes in colonial south Carolina throughthe stono rebellion (New York, 1974)Google Scholar; Lemon, James T., The best poor man's country: a geographical study of early south easternPennsylvania (New York, 1972)Google Scholar; Dunn, Richard S. and Dunn, Mary M., (eds.), The world of William Perm (Philadelphia, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levy, Barry, Quakers and the American family: British settlement in the Delaware valley (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar; Landsman, Ned C., Scotland and its first American colony, 1683–1765 (Princeton, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kim, Sung Bok, Landlord and tenant in colonial New York manorial society 1664–1775 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1978)Google Scholar; Taté, T. W. and Ammerman, D. L., (eds.), The Chesapeake in the seventeenth century: essays on Anglo-American society (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979)Google Scholar; Land, A. C., Carr, L. G. and Papenfuse, E. C. (eds.), Law, society and politics in early Maryland (Baltimore, Md., 1977)Google Scholar.

7 See the discussion of books on the Chesapeake in Canny, Nicholas, ‘The Anglo-American colonial experience’, The HistoricalJournal XXIV, 2 (1981), 485–503CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Rutman, Darrett B. and Rutman, Anita H., A place in time, Middlesex county, Virginia, 1650–1750 (New York, 1984)Google Scholar.

8 Craton, Michael, Searching for the invisible man: slaves and plantation life in Jamaica (Cambridge, Mass., 1978)Google Scholar; Dunn, Richard S., ‘A tale of two plantations: slave life at Mesopotamia in Jamaica and Mount Airy in Virginia, 1799–1828’, William and Mary Quarterly, XXIV, 1 (1977), 32–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jennings, Francis, The invasion of America: Indians, colonialism and the cant of conquest(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975)Google Scholar; Axtell, James, The European and the Indian: essays in the ethnohistory of colonial North America (New York, 1981)Google Scholar; Breen, T. H., ‘Creative adaptations: peoples and cultures’, in Greene, Jack P. and Pole, J. R. (eds.), Colonial British America, pp. 195–232Google Scholar.

9 For an especially good example see Bailyn, Bernard, Voyagers to the West: emigration from Britain to America on the eve of the revolution (London, 1986)Google Scholar.

10 Konig, David Thomas, Law and society in Puritan Massachusetts: Essex county 1629–1692 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979)Google Scholar; Demos, John, Entertaining Satan; witchcraft and the culture of early New England (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar; Innes, Stephen, Labor in a new land: economy and society in seventeenth century Springfield (Princeton, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 For the extension of the concept of decline to include commercial life see Nash, Gary B., The urban crucible: social change, political consciousness, and the origins of the American revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Price, Jacob M., Capital and credit in British overseas trade: the view from the Chesapeake, 1700–1776 (Cambridge Mass., 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Idem, ‘Colonial trade and British economic development’, in Claude Fohlen and Jacques Godechot (eds.), La révolution Américaine et l'Europe (Paris, 1979), pp. 221–42; Jones, Alice Hanson, American colonial wealth: documents and methods (3 vols., New York, 1978)Google Scholar; Idem, Wealth of a nation to be: the American colonies on the eve of the revolution (New York, 1980).

13 Price, ‘Colonial trade and British economic development’. In fairness to McCusker and Menard, they do point to a developing trade between Ireland and the American colonies, especially New York, but this subject has been subjected to a more recent comprehensive analysis in Truxes, Thomas M., Irish American trade, 1660–1783 (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar.

14 Greene, Jack P., The quest for power: the lower houses of assembly in the southern royal colonies, 1689–1776 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1963)Google Scholar.

15 McLaughlin, Andrew C., The foundations of American constitutionalism (New York, 1932)Google Scholar; McIlwain, Charles H., The American revolution: a constitutional interpretation (New York, 1923)Google Scholar.

16 The work of these legal historians is analysed in depth in Greene, Jack P., ‘From the perspective of law: context and legitimacy in the origins of the American revolution: a review essay’, South Atlantic Quarterly, LXXXV (1986), 56–77Google Scholar, but see also Reid, John Philip, In a defiant stance: the conditions of law in Massachusetts Bay, the Irish comparison, and the coming of the American revolution (University Park, Pa., 1977)Google Scholar.

17 Greene states his concerns most specifically in Hoffman, , Tate, and Albert, (eds.), An uncivil war, pp. 5–6Google Scholar.

18 Bercovitch, Sacvan, The Puritan origins of the American self (New Haven, 1975)Google Scholar.

19 Meinig here instances the Irish and English populations in Newfoundland and the French and English settlers in the St Lawrence basin.

20 See, for example, Liss, Peggy, Atlantic empires: the network of trade and revolution, 1713–1826 (Baltimore, Md., 1983)Google Scholar.