John Smolenski's recent treatment of Pennsylvania's first fifty years proposes a new method to understand the process by which utopian plans outlined in England became colonial realities. More broadly, he suggests the need to “rethink the ‘charter group’ approach to cultural development in colonial British America” (7). To do this, Smolenski eschews the well-known narrative in which a cohesive English group faces new social, economic, and environmental challenges in the New World. Instead, he uses a more subtle, but ultimately fruitful strategy that relies on a close examination of both discursive and legal sources. He first recounts the contentious process by which Quakers deliberately built a group identity and the structures of shared governance in Restoration England, then he chronicles the difficulties they faced in transferring that identity (which had been contingent on their position as persecuted Dissenters in England) and those structures (which, he argues, depended on social homogeneity and recognition of a shared civic culture) to the “Quaker” colony of Pennsylvania. The greatest difficulties faced by Pennsylvania's Quakers were those that struck at the heart of their carefully assembled identity: incorporating non-Quaker Europeans and Native Americans into their polity, on the one hand, and building a governing culture that could sustain dissent, on the other.

The core of the book's argument follows from the author's reading of founder William Penn's views on government. Penn, Smolenski suggests, believed that the colony's elite should serve the same function in government that Quaker leaders, known as “weighty friends,” played in Quaker culture. They were to lead and to govern through their moral example, guiding the popular will from within. This vision depended on the widespread acceptance of a particular legal culture, in which the governed submitted to the wise, moral guidance of their betters through a process of active assent. Thus, Penn and his settlers began with enormous and specific optimism. They “hoped that a carefully constructed, interactive culture of legality might create a virtuous civic homogeneity” (65). As they opened their colony to non-Quakers, they expected that the civic, legal culture they created would effectively “assimilate” non-Quaker immigrants into their “Holy Experiment,” and they believed that establishing positive relations with the province's Indian population would produce positive results. Like so many colonial adventurers, however, Pennsylvania's elite did not anticipate the difficulties they would face, or how much they would themselves change in the process. Smolenski charts the challenges and readjustments in Pennsylvania's civic culture as those who began by trying to assimilate others into their ideal of a British Quaker society ended by “creating a creole civic culture that stabilized and legitimated their rule in the colony” (10).

Smolenski traces Pennsylvania's civic culture, and especially the attempts of its elites to establish legitimacy for their new government, through an examination of its government, its legal practices, and its “speech economy.” He recasts what stands as perhaps the best-known religious controversy of Pennsylvania's early decades, the Keithian schism, within this framework. George Keith's attacks on Pennsylvania's religious and civil leaders reached beyond differences over the theological issues at hand. Keith simultaneously represented two kinds of challenges. First, by refusing to yield to the correction of Quaker leaders, he disrupted the civic culture and speech economy they were so carefully building. Second, Smolenski argues that Keith's concerns about the salvation of Indians drew attention to the very real fact that most of Pennsylvania's Quakers had little direct experience with British Quakerism. As Keith and his opponents argued over which Pennsylvania Quaker faction most accurately represented the essential Quakerism, they expressed their shared anxiety over the creation of a “creole” Pennsylvania. The colony's leaders succeeded in overcoming the challenge to their authority, but only by assuming the position of the persecutors they had resisted in Britain.

The Keithian schism serves as the pivot on which the book's argument turns. By the first decade of the eighteenth century, in Smolenski's account, Quaker Pennsylvania became something quite different from what its founders intended. The colony's legal culture lost its Quaker distinctiveness, and leaders fought repeated political battles about the place of Pennsylvania in the British empire. More important for Smolenski's argument, however, the Pennsylvania's Quakers refought the battle with Keith and his followers in print, using it as an occasion to define and then redefine their community. “The schism had been caused by a fear of Quaker declension,” writes Smolenski, “yet it spurred, more than any other event in early Pennsylvania, the process of creolization through which orthodox Friends mixed new cultural languages and practices with old ones to create a new ‘tradition’” (236). As they created a new political language and mythology of the colony's founding, Pennsylvania's Quakers also re-created their polity, so that, according to Smolenski, the colony was truly “founded” in 1710, with the stabilization of its political culture.

Smolenski's analysis of Pennsylvania's founding generations is insightful and compelling. The specific circumstances of Pennsylvania settlement make it differ from most other colonies, but Smolenski nudges other scholars to consider the conscious process by which colonial identities formed. More significant, however, is his deft, nuanced, and historically contingent narrative of Quaker Pennsylvania. Scholars of early modern religion and of early America more generally will find much of interest: the intertwining of religious and political cultures in Pennsylvania serves as an ideal and early window into transitions that occurred in myriad ways throughout the Protestant world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is a valuable and timely work that should find a wide readership.