The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America--The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 (Vintage)
Surveying the founding British settlements of eastern North America, Bailyn, whose laurels include the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes, embeds the stories of Virginia, Maryland, New York, and Massachusetts in details of the transatlantic demographic movements in play. Uprooting oneself required powerful motivations that Bailyn extracts from the emigrants’ social origins in their home countries of England, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Bailyn shows news of the vanguards’ fortunes being sent back to Europe to their sponsors, whose particular responses of raising funds, recruiting reinforcements, and propagating the attractions of America as commercial opportunity, escape from social stratification, or religious refuge generate Bailyn’s narrative momentum through the first several generations of colonization. With such conceptual themes presiding over his presentation, Bailyn graphically emphasizes the settlement process as one of savage brutality, featuring common contempt for human life aggravated, to be sure, by primitive conditions and appalling death rates but epitomized in continual warfare with Indians, remorselessly tending toward their elimination. In Bailyn’s perceptive and erudite hands, the original British, Dutch, and Swedish ventures assume as wild and variegated guises as did the forceful individuals who embarked on them. --Gilbert Taylor--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.