This is an intelligent, flawed book with a passionately argued thesis. The editor, Stephen Foster, has strong views about the historiography of British North America (an odd title, as this term is reserved for Canada in the substantive volume in this series), especially where it has gone wrong, and he has brought together a team of smart, generally younger, historians to exemplify his themes. Foster is better at telling us what he is against—Atlantic history, particularly, but also accounts that place slavery at the centre of the colonial experience—than what he is for. The principal themes of this book emerge slowly. There are two very interesting chapters on religion but none on the economy. The American Revolution, similarly, receives attention from two authors. Native Americans are treated from the perspective of the imperial gaze in London rather than as actors in the borderlands of the Americas, while slavery is given short shrift. It is acknowledged in the most tangential way, discussed in reference to the place where it was least present—New England. In addition, Sarah Yeh's excellent chapter on planters and the politics of identity in the West Indies hardly mentions enslaved people. At least slaves and Indians get some mention. As in the substantive volume, women are ignored. The cover illustration, of male sea captains getting uproariously drunk in Surinam, shows graphically the masculinist perspective of this volume.

Choosing such a cover illustration is a combative choice, especially given a long diatribe by Foster in his introduction explaining why the West Indies should not be treated historically alongside the rest of British America. Foster insists that Atlantic historians are determined to connect the West Indies with British North America because they hate nationalistic readings of the American Revolution as overdetermined and because they want to make slavery (rather than, say, religion) “the central boss of European colonization” (11). But the principal reason why the West Indies and British North America should run together before the American Revolution is that they formed a single polity. British imperial officials did not see thirteen colonies, but sets of colonies, all in the Americas. They were all part of Britain overseas. And, despite Foster's injunctions, this volume hardly ignores the West Indies. West Indians are not only on the cover of the book; they are everywhere. The West Indies warrants a chapter to itself, alone from any other British American region. It is strange not to want to deal with a topic and then to incessantly write about it.

It is easy to see why Foster's authors keep coming back to the West Indies. It is because the book is organized not around region, as is customary, nor around chronology, which would make sense but which is seldom done in British American historiography. It is arranged, instead, around the idea of centrality of Britain as the organizer and disrupter of colonial life, in the West Indies as in the mainland. Indeed, the book's principal theme is commendably postmodern: the importance of colonialism in British American life before 1776 and the fact of postcolonialism after 1783. Jay Sexton, in an especially bracing and impressive essay on the role of the British Empire in the United States in the early nineteenth century, shows that just because some British Americans achieved independence in 1783 did not mean that the United States gained autonomy from British influence. Indeed, Britain managed to win the sort of power over the United States in the nineteenth century that it wanted to get in the mid-eighteenth century but which, in an epic example of failed policy making, as Daniel Hulsebosch shows, it bungled it in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War.

The argument of this book is that J. R. Seeley was wrong. Empire was not gained in a fit of forgetfulness and the American Revolution should not be seen as a failed attempt by Britain to bring order to polities that had enjoyed autonomy from the start of settlement and which had enjoyed “salutary neglect” before 1748. On the contrary, British North America was settled as part of an ideologically driven impulse by the crown, Kenneth Macmillan asserts, who insisted on its authority being upheld in the New World. Its development, especially in the crucial area of religious expression, was driven by what was happening in England. Evan Haefili, for example, insists that religious pluralism was more of an extension of English patterns than something distinctively American. Americanization, Nancy Rhoden explains, developed in the eighteenth century as an outgrowth of increasing integration into British manners. This integration happened, Foster and Haefili, argue, in a period in which imperial control tightened as Britain worked out the details of the fiscal-military state. By the start of the Seven Years' War, Britain had worked out a system of imperial governance that allowed for religious diversity and an established Anglican church, provided ways of dealing with Indians, and allowed practical means whereby the imperial state could address colonial grievances.

To understand British North America, therefore, one must start with understanding Britain. What is really needed to make this theme of strong imperial influence on British North America and the West Indies convincing would be a chapter on British North America as seen from London. Troy Bickham and Sarah Yeh do that to an extent with Native Americans and West Indians. But what would add to this work is a chapter on how the hubris of victory in the Seven Years' War unhinged British statesmen so that they took theoretical assumptions that parliament was supreme as practical reality of how empire worked. Those assumptions came badly unstuck in North America. In short, it was the “British” in the phrase “British North America” that was the “boss” in British colonization in the Americas, even more than slavery. It is the center, not the periphery, that we should study in more detail.