Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America.

Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America. Edited by Robert Olwell and Alan Tully. Anglo-America in the Transatlantic World. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, c. 2006. Pp. xiii, 386. $50.00, ISBN 0-8018-8251-6.)

In Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America, editors Robert Olwell and Alan Tully present a series of articles analyzing how Anglo-American culture emerged and changed over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although the book is divided into three topical sections--"Environment and Identity," "Exchange and Identity," and "Politics and Identity"--each of the individual essays tends to focus on a specific place, time, and theme. All the essays work together to formulate a whole that is much larger than the sum of the individual parts. Furthermore, the introductory essay effectively establishes the framework for the book's central issue: interrogating the balance of colonists' preservation of familiar habits of thinking and acting against the necessity and desire to create new, or creole, ways of interacting with their new worlds. Each essay functions as an investigation into the change and continuity in each author's chosen field. Additionally, the introduction offers a historiographical summary of some of the latest work on the field of early British North American history.

As the editors effectively explain in their introductory essay, the common thread and theoretical underpinning of the volume are the multiple examples of the tension between tradition and innovation, between imported traditions from Africa and Europe balanced against new developments in Britain's American colonies or, in other words, between anglicization and creolization. Olwell and Tully embrace the concept of creolization as a device for explaining "an important process at work within the colonies" when locally born European Americans outnumbered the immigrants. In part because creoles possessed "a two-sided identity, ... [maintained] a colonial relationship to the metropole, [they were] quite unlike indigenous peoples ... [Their] culture [was] an intermixture of metropolitan traditions and colonial--that is, local--innovations and adaptations," and individuals "felt the tug of both local and imperial identities and influences, between inheritance and experience" (p. 9). Scholars of colonial North America will be familiar with this particular framework from the work of Jack P. Greene in Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, 1988), in which he describes the centripetal and centrifugal cultural forces that operated in the colonies, pulling them apart in some cultural attributes but largely bringing them together toward common outlooks in the decades preceding the War for Independence.

The twelve essays in this volume provide a rich array of examples of how the tension between local innovation and metropolitan influence functioned in practice from New England to the Caribbean. Space prevents discussing all of the articles, but three excellent examples demonstrate the range of outcomes in colonial North America. S. Max Edelson's "The Nature of Slavery: Environmental Disorder and Slave Agency in Colonial South Carolina" stresses the power of innovation, examining the link between Europeans' perception of their natural environment's suitability for agriculture and health and their understanding of enslaved Africans' adaptability to that same environment. Edelson also grapples with how white settlers' perceptions of racialized "Negro" physical, moral, and cultural attributes changed over the course of the colonial period. Early in the eighteenth century, South Carolina's slave code emphasized the notion of the savage African, an attitude Edelson demonstrates was imported with that colony's laws from Barbados with many of the early slaveholding immigrants. By 1740, however, South Carolina's master class believed that "slave character was molded by experience"--and could take several limited forms according to that experience (p. 37).

Natalie Zacek's article on the murder of Daniel Parke, former Virginian and governor and commander-in-chief of the Leeward Islands, explores white islanders' desire to retain their rights as Englishmen against the arbitrary Governor Parke and their defensiveness against metropolitan representations of the West Indian planters as profligate, decadent, cruel slave masters. White West Indian men asserted their Englishness in their cultural characteristics and the foundation of their legal rights despite the evidence that their tropical environment and slave-based economy made them quite different from Englishmen at "home." Thus, in the face of trajectories toward creolization in their colonial setting, white male Leeward Islanders emphasized their metropolitan nature.

Although Edelson and Zacek demonstrate how colonial societies innovated culturally even when they emphasized tradition, James H. Merrell instead stresses cultural continuity on the Pennsylvania frontier, focusing on gender roles among white and native frontier traders. Grounding his argument on impressive research in manuscript sources as mundane as backcountry merchants' account books as well as more readily available official documents, Merrell reconstructs webs of exchanges in which native women played a central role, acting for community well-being as well as individual gain. By contrast, women in European and métis families traded in goods but had less influence on their community's negotiations with native groups; furthermore, settlers frequently saw European women who engaged in frontier trade as "unruly" and "unhappy" (pp. 210, 212). Ultimately, Merrell determined that these women were often vulnerable to deceit in their exchanges and that European "gender concepts and constructs" remained strikingly different from those of native peoples in Susquehanna Country (p. 219). These three essays suggest the range of settlers' cultural adaptation to their new environments, and other essays grapple well with the nature and degree of creolization and tradition in the formation of colonial identities.

The focus on the tension between innovation and tradition in this collection is not surprising given that many of the authors of this volume completed their Ph.D.'s at Johns Hopkins University during Jack Greene's tenure. Two companion volumes of collected essays in the same series on Anglo-Americans in the Atlantic World cover economic and ideological issues. The books practically comprise a three-volume festschrift for Jack Greene and document his influence on a generation of students' and fellow-travelers' work on the history of the British Atlantic world. The cross-pollination of ideas and the common link to Greene's theories help to make this volume a coherent dialogue among scholars who examined various fragments of the empire in their specific permutations.

LINDA STURTZ

Beloit College