British America, 1500-1800: Creating Colonies, Imagining an Empire.

British America, 1500-1800: Creating Colonies, Imagining an Empire. By Steven Sarson. (London, Eng.: Hodder Arnold, 2005. Pp. xx, 332. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-340-76010-9.)

In British America, 1500-1800: Creating Colonies, Imagining an Empire, Steven Sarson analyzes two major, interrelated elements of British colonization in the Americas: how individual colonies took the shape they did and how the first British Empire took the shape it did. He succeeds quite nicely in developing these big pictures. His handling of the details, however, undermines the book's appeal to those in search of a general survey of British America.

Sarson begins with two introductory chapters. The first outlines Europeans' encounter with the Americas before 1600. The second describes both England and English notions of colonization before 1600 as well as the scale and nature of British migration to America between 1600 and 1800. The heart of the book, though, is the following seven chapters. First, in chapters 3 through 6, Sarson looks at each major region of British America--the Chesapeake, the West Indies, New England, and the lower South--in an effort to analyze the process by which it evolved from a plan to a society. In each case he finds that settlement began under the direction of a charter group, which he defines as "those to whom a charter was given and their employees and close associates" (p. xvi). Some of these groups, such as the Puritans, started with utopian ideals; others were more nakedly capitalistic in their ambitions. Whatever the intentions of the charter group, Sarson maintains that they were eventually derailed by the reality of America and by the need to attract European settlers. In colony after colony "local elites emerged, displaced the original charter holders, established their social and political pre-eminence over middling and poorer inhabitants and strove for political autonomy from the mother country" (p. 118).

In chapters 7 through 9 Sarson addresses his second major theme--the belated British effort to convert an array of quasi-independent colonies into an empire under parliamentary control. This effort failed, of course, and the empire shed thirteen colonies. In the process, British officials learned to be more careful how they tightened the noose on their remaining and future colonies and laid the groundwork for a second, far more centralized, British empire.

Though Sarson quotes liberally from original sources, his book is largely based on an extensive reading of recent secondary literature. In one regard he has cast his net widely. He covers two dozen American colonies--from Newfoundland to Grenada--and manages brief references to Ireland and India as well. His readings do seem a trifle skewed, however. Jack P. Greene, with whom both Sarson and this reviewer studied, dominates the notes. The empire that Greene drew so masterfully in Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607-1788 (Athens, Ga., 1986) and Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, 1988) informs almost every page of Sarson's work. Yet Bernard Bailyn's classic studies of late colonial politics and of the American Revolution are all but absent.

The greatest weakness of British America, however, is the number of factual errors it contains. These mistakes are not limited to any one region or era. They range from why Giles Cory was pressed to death (p. 141) to the content of the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (p. 264). None of these mistakes is critical to the author's thesis, but they are frequent enough to undermine readers' confidence in a book that might otherwise have been a useful text in a survey of colonial America.

DANIEL B. THORP

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University