It is quite a testament to Jack P. Greene, as a dissertation advisor at Johns Hopkins University, to note that what is essentially a Festschrift for him runs to three volumes. One of these volumes, under discussion here, focuses on the nature of colonial British America, with all but three contributors having received their degrees at Hopkins. The span of articles in this collection alone—from Nevis to Newport, from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth—is wide. The editors here are to be applauded for coping so admirably with the challenge of creating a coherent volume out of such a broad range of topics. Robert Olwell and Alan Tully's introduction essentially presents a pared-down version of Greene's own convergence narratives about the development of British colonies in North America and the Caribbean. It contends that colonists navigated between two imperatives: “creolization” and “Anglicization,” a lucid means of casting the colonial experience for many (if by no means all) in this era. This kind of overview is useful, although it doubtless would require a rather more sustained defense, and a deeper sense of what is meant by “identities,” in other contexts.

The editors have also imposed order on this range of material by dividing it into the following sections: “Environment and Identity,” “Economics and Identity,” and “Politics and Identity.” This format generally works. The section on environment is especially thought provoking. It is excellent to see this inclusion here, although only the first and last essays in this section really tackle environmental history as such. The first is a fascinating piece by S. Max Edelson on the relationship of the environment to slavery in early South Carolina. Edelson argues for the ways in which Carolinians viewed with concern their dependence on both Africans and the natural environment, which were seen as unpredictable, capable of savagery and violence, and yet vital to settlement. The section closes with Robert M. Weir's investigation of shifting attitudes among colonists to environmental legislation and regulation. He usefully surveys the fishing and game laws in the colonies, although greater attention to the Native Americans who had already been shaping this environment might have enriched the analysis. The other two essays are more about social environments. In a detailed reconstruction of the colonial setting of the Lower Cape Fear region, Bradford J. Wood makes a case, rightly, for the importance of social networks and family ties among individuals living in the remote areas. He also posits that such networks became a means to develop regional identities by the time of the American Revolution. Daniel C. Littlefield gracefully traces the origins of Anglo-African “double consciousness” by examining the writings of those few prominent Anglo-Africans who were able to record their sentiments. He also points correctly to the imperatives under which such individuals wrote, which may have caused them to highlight certain themes and to treat Europeans mildly, despite the horrors of the slave trade and slavery.

The next section on “Exchange and Identity” leads with James E. McWilliams's detailed analysis of the commercial nexus in which the Massachusetts Bay Colony developed, putting it in line with much recent work on this topic. Next, James M. Baird reexamines Eugene Genovese's arguments about the emergence of paternalism and its relation to capitalism by focusing on the relationship between eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Virginia planters and their white overseers. He uses their relationships to highlight the competing capitalist exigencies of the market and the paternalist ethos of the household order in slavery. Jean B. Russo, also surveying the Chesapeake, attends patiently to the ways in which Talbot County, Maryland, developed artisanal cultures and markets that replicated metropolitan structures but in distinctive ways. She details the trades followed, the numbers of artisans, and the concentration of certain trade in certain areas (especially the development of urban artisanal output in Annapolis). James H. Merrell's essay on women traders on the Pennsylvania frontier contends that such women, both native and colonial, were central to economic exchange in the area. The essay has all the hallmarks of his work: close readings of the nature of exchange and an attention to its richness, for both women and men, as well as an inviting style.

“Politics and Identity” opens with Natalie Zacek's reassessment of the murder of the Nevis governor, Daniel Parke, in 1710. Zacek uses this case to argue, paradoxically, for the stability and relative good order of the British West Indian political scene (which was in many respects no more volatile than those in other locales of the British colonial world). Edward M. Cook Jr. offers a similarly thorough analysis of elections in prerevolutionary Newport, Rhode Island, in order to posit that Rhode Island developed a distinctive political culture by the time of the Hopkins-Ward dispute there in the years before the American Revolution. Daniel K. Richter imaginatively considers a plan for a 1764 reorganization of the North American colonies that never took place. The failure of this plan, and that it was for an empire in which settlers and natives would coexist, testifies to the tensions between British officials, settlers, and natives during and after Pontiac's War. Richter is here able to reconstruct vividly the events and reactions among various groups (from angry local settlers who refused to consider natives as fellow British subjects to flustered officials trying to get passage of the plan amid general concerns about America) on both sides of the Atlantic. The final essay, by Michal Jan Rozbicki, intriguingly recasts definitions of liberty for Americans (or at least some of them) around the time of the American Revolution. Rozbicki contends that definitions of liberty for many elites depended on independence based on property, in what he terms “the elitist paternity of revolutionary liberty” (315). It is not that liberty and inequality were incompatible but that definitions of liberty depended on inequality and freedom for certain elite propertied members only. Covering a range of areas, ideas, and debates, these essays taken together afford a sense of the wide range of approaches to colonial British America, as well as some means of thinking about its development and shape as a whole.