Ned C. Landsman's new synthesis, Crossroads of Empire: The Middle Colonies in British North America, aims to achieve what has long eluded colonial historians: a history of the Middle Colonies as a distinct region within British North America, comparable in importance to New England, the Chesapeake, and the Carolinas and West Indies together. The themes underlying this quest have informed Landsman's work for the last twenty-five years: beginning with his superb study of the emergence of a Scottish-American ethnic identity from the intricacies of the Scottish settlement of East Jersey (Scotland and Its First American Colony, 1683–1765 [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985]) to his brief but rich survey of American provincial culture following the high-tide of Puritanism (From Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture, 1680–1760 [New York: Twayne, 1997]) and his introduction to Nation and Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and the Americas, 1600–1800 (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 2001); as well as in numerous essays on colonial religion, pluralism, and, ethnicity, two of which form chapters of the new book. Throughout his work, Landsman has crafted increasingly sophisticated arguments regarding how the first “hyphenated” Americans—especially emigrants from Scotland and Ulster, concentrated in the Middle Atlantic—emerged from often contentious religious and national conflicts to produce distinct styles of ethnic identity. In time, Landsman argues, these colonists, along with fellow New England and Southerners, produced a “provincial” society that proudly described itself as “British” while becoming increasingly protective of its liberties against imperial incursion.

Crossroads of Empire, the first in a series on Early American regional perspectives edited by Jack P. Greene and the late J. R. Pole, takes as its subject the Middle Atlantic region as a whole. Landsman's study is relatively brief and based mainly on secondary work, with scant notes but a useful “Essay on Sources” (223–232). Crossroads does not claim to be comprehensive in the manner of Alan Taylor's American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York: Penguin, 2002) or D. W. Meinig's magisterial The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (4 volumes, [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986–2006]). Instead, it serves as an accessible introduction to the rich literature on this region, especially its religious history, certainly among the most important and complex in early America. But Landsman's effort to persuade the reader that the Middle Atlantic forms a coherent unit within British America is less successful.

Landsman raises this issue almost immediately in the prologue, and concludes that the reason for the region's invisibility lies in the ways in which the dense and profitable interconnections among settlers in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania ultimately made the Middle Colonies virtually indistinguishable from its neighbors. “More than any other region of American settlement,” he writes, “the Middle Colonies would help draw together its diverse and far-flung parts” (7). In chapters 1–3, Landsman recounts the founding of the New York, West Jersey, East Jersey, and Pennsylvania proprietaries. In chapters 4–7 he provides discussions of the region's economic, cultural, intellectual, and political evolution, including religious aspects and impact. Not surprisingly, given Landsman's previous work, chapter 5, “The Crossroads of Cultures: Diversity, Toleration, and Pluralism,” and chapter 6, “The Crossroads of Philosophy and Faith,” are the strongest, setting out the multiple strands of Dutch Reformed, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Quaker, Jewish, and German sectarian organization and belief that comprised the Middle Atlantic religious fabric; the emergence of official toleration in West Jersey and Pennsylvania; the Reformed churches' strong reaction to the Episcopate Controversy that would have established the colonies' first Anglican diocese; the Enlightenment—with a particularly appealing profile of Scottish Anglican Elizabeth Graeme Ferguson, leader of a Philadelphia salon; and the equally divisive and unifying impact of the Great Awakening. Returning to the issue of imperial wars at the end of the book, Landsman concludes: “A society founded on diversity served to extend a broad-based and dominant European culture, as modified by the New World Environment, well beyond the bounds of the mid-Atlantic and into the American interior” (214).

Landsman's approach, however, serves to confirm that Middle Atlantic is about as easy to define as “the frontier,” without the advantage of an overriding thesis to subvert. While historians of the American West, for example, have made overthrowing the “Turner Thesis” something of a cottage industry, a comparable argument asserting the link between Middle Atlantic pluralism and American democracy has yet to be made, depriving Landsman of a strong “straw man” to topple. The adjective “Middle Colony” simply does not have the explanatory force that “New England” or “Chesapeake” does: even though none of these colonial regions was actually culturally monolithic. Landsman's approach—perhaps imposed by the series editors—is further hampered by the three-colony design. Tie-ins to the three lower counties of Delaware and to northern Maryland, with its own remarkable religious and national diversity, as well as history of religious toleration, would have been especially suitable here. Perhaps most surprising, Landsman's instructive work on “Britishness” and provincial Americans' increasing attachment to the empire—one of the best parts of his earlier work—is somewhat lost in the discussion.

This is not to say that readers of Church History will not find much to admire in Crossroads of Empire. Landsman's adept disentangling of the religious and national roots of identity in America remains instructive. His best work applies a wide-angle historical microscope to the vast movements of peoples and cultures that created colonial America—his fundamental subject, the Scots, were constantly on the go—revealing the webs of connection and struggles with difference that underlay colonial society. To doubly paraphrase William Penn: No Pluralism, No Provincialism. But does it then follow, No Pluralism, No Revolution? Or was the perfect provincial society also the perfect loyalist society? We need a Landsman thesis to provide the answer.