This long essay began as an effort on the part of the great historian Bernard Bailyn to organize his own thoughts after three years of work on his epic multivolume series The Peopling of British North America, the first volume of which, Voyagers to the West, won a Pulitzer Prize. This published version is based on Bailyn's Curti Lectures at the University of Wisconsin. Bailyn's topic, if not evident from the title, is the:
...movement of people outward from their original
centers of habitation--the centrifugal
Volkerwanderungen that involved an untraceable multitude
of local, small-scale exoduses and
colonizations, the continuous creation of new frontiers
and ever-widening circumferences, the
complex intermingling of peoples in the expanding
border areas, and in the massive transfer to the
Western Hemisphere of people from Africa, from the
European mainland, and above all from the
Anglo-Celtic offshore islands of Europe, culminating
in what Bismarck called 'the decisive fact in
the modern world,' the peopling of the North American
continent.
According to Bailyn, and I know of no reason to doubt him, this massive process has not been studied to any great degree in the past. His effort is intended to correct this oversight and he here lays out a series of propositions which guide his thinking about the topic:
PROPOSITION ONE
The peopling of British North America was an extension
outward and an expansion in scale of
domestic mobility in the lands of the immigrants'
origins, and the transantlantic flow must be
understood within the context of these domestic
mobility patterns. Ultimately, however, its
development introduced a new and dynamic force in
European population history, which
permanently altered the traditional configuration.
PROPOSITION TWO
Examination of the settlement and development patterns
for the whole of British North America
reveals not uniformity, but highly differentiated
processes, which form the context of the
immigrants' arrival. The fortunes of the arriving
newcomers must be seen against this varied and
shifting background.
PROPOSITION THREE
After the initial phase of colonization, the major
stimuli to population recruitment and settlements
were, first, the continuing need for labor, and,
second, land speculation. There were, as a result,
two overlapping but yet distinctly different migration
processes in motion throughout those years.
Both linked America to Europe and Africa in
a highly dynamic relationship and together account
for much of the influx of people. But they
drew on different socio-economic groups and involved
different modes of integration into the society.
And land speculation shaped a relationship between
the owners and the workers of the land different
from that which prevailed in Europe.
PROPOSITION FOUR
American culture in this early period becomes most
fully comprehensible when seen as the exotic
far western periphery, a marchland, of the metropolitan
European culture system.
Most of this seems pretty unexceptionable--after all, in grade school, we learn that Virginia was settled by the wealthy, New England by Puritans, Maryland by Catholics, Pennsylvania by Quakers, New Jersey by Swedes and New York by the Dutch, why would be surprised that the immigrants do not fit a uniform pattern?--but as he develops the propositions a little further, some fresh thoughts emerge. For one thing, he makes a strong case for the idea that land speculation in America was widespread and cut across the entire economic strata, virtually from the day the first immigrants got here. This notion serves as a counter balance to the prevailing wisdom that such schemes were a late arrival and were a tool of absentee capitalists used to exploit innocent agrarians.
Another particularly useful idea is contained in Proposition Four; the idea that many of the peculiarities of American culture (religious fanaticisms and odd cults) and much of the brutality (the raw savagery displayed, by men and women, in war against the Indians) actually resulted from the internal contradictions and rough edges of our European cultural inheritance being freed from the restraints of the institutions which had kept them in check. Here on the periphery of Western Civilization:
All of these overt violations of ordinary civil order--Indian
wars, slavery, garrison government, the
transportation of criminals--though they permeated
the developing culture, overspecify and
overdramatize, make too lurid, an issue that had
much subtler and broader manifestations. The less
physical aspects of the colonies' peculiarities
were equally important. For ultimately the colonies'
strange ways were only distensions and combinations
of elements that existed in the parent cultures,
but that existed there within constraints that limited,
shaped, and in a sense civilized their growth.
These elements were here released, fulfilled--at
times with strange results that could not have been
anticipated.
This seems like a useful way of thinking about not merely matters like the genocidal policy towards Indians in America, but also the equally rough treatment of native populations elsewhere on the West's perimeter : South Africa, Australia, India, etc..
There is something odd though about Bailyn's utter deemphasis on the ideology and beliefs of immigrants. The external factors which he has identified must have been quite powerful, but were they really determinative of the whole process? It makes perfect sense that the movement of peoples to North America would be in part an outgrowth of general patterns of mobility in Europe, that later immigrant waves would be attracted by jobs and land and that North American culture would reflect it's European heritage. But if we consider the fundamental tension in society to lie between the desire for freedom and the desire for security, as I have frequently argued in these pages, then surely the thing that stands out most about these early American pioneers is the degree to which they were willing to completely forsake security in order to find freedom. After all, while immigrants of the 19th and 20th Century can be understood to have been taking advantage of preexisting opportunities in an industrialized America, the first few generations of settlers faced a much more perilous future trying to hack a living out of an unknown and often hostile land, already inhabited by natives with whom relations ran none too smoothly.
The imbalance in early America, in favor of freedom with no regard for
security, must have influenced precisely what types of people were willing
to come and take on the forbidding wilderness and it must have had a profound
effect on the type of culture that they developed here. At least
in this introduction, Bailyn does not seem much concerned with the influence
of ideas, which I find to be a major shortcoming of the work. Hopefully,
this glaring oversight is rectified in the actual volumes of the series.
(Reviewed:26-Aug-00)
Grade: (B-)
