Early modern southeastern North America and the broader Atlantic and American Worlds.

HISTORIANS OF NEITHER THE INDIGENOUS INHABITANTS OF THE MAINLAND of southeastern North America nor the colonies Europeans established there after 1560 have ever been comfortable working with the framework of the history of the South. The very idea of the South as a distinctive entity characterized by slavery, large numbers of people of African descent, large plantations producing staple crops for export, low investment in education and other social amenities, and deep religiosity makes sense only in the American national context that took shape during the fifty years following the American Revolution and the subsequent creation of a new federal state that by the 1820s had, however tenuously, drawn all the inhabitants of southeastern North America into a national union. Only as a consequence of their experiences within that union did the people of these discrete political societies come to understand, first, that they had a common interest in relation to other segments of the union and, over time, that they had a common identity and composed a distinctive region within it.

To be sure, the political societies that evolved out of these early colonies all subsequently became parts of the South and, to one degree or another, shared in the defining of its attributes. Indeed, as the South became a self-conscious entity in the years after the Missouri Compromise, residents of those old societies, especially Virginians and South Carolinians, often acted as leaders in the construction of a southern regional consciousness. If historians of the South have been content to search the pasts of the colonies for the rudiments of the later South, and if some students of the southern colonies have been complicitous in such projects, most colonialists have found the anachronism and decontextualization inherent in such undertakings discomforting and have suspected that they would lead to distorted interpretations. For more than a century, the urge to avoid such disfigurement has driven historians of the early modern Southeast to seek frameworks that did not treat their areas of study as anterooms to the histories of the United States and its subset, the South.

The historians involved in this endeavor have been remarkably successful. They have represented the early modern southeastern colonies as outposts or extensions of the European empires to which they were attached and, further, as products of early modern European expansion, populated by European and African immigrants and culturally fused with indigenous peoples. Historians have used the perspectives of empire and of expansion to highlight the significance and changing character of European attachments, the concept of diaspora to focus attention on the extent and depth of the African connection, and the idea of encounter to investigate the impact of both upon the indigenous populations who inhabited the Southeast in considerable numbers before and after the arrival of Europeans and Africans. Two additional and complementary perspectives, the Atlantic and the panhemispheric, offer still other routes by which historians of the early modern Southeast may escape the pitfalls of anachronism and set their area of study in an even broader contemporary context. (1)

Historical investigation over the past century has revealed that the early modern Southeast was, by any measure, a place of extraordinary diversity. Its indigenous inhabitants were descendants of urband-welling and mound-building Mississippian peoples who had reached their zenith in the thirteenth century. At the time of their encounter with Europeans in the sixteenth century, they spoke a variety of languages and were divided into several large chiefdoms and confederacies and several hundred smaller nations. Many of these people were sedentary and agricultural, a few were sedentary and subsisted on marine resources, and others supplemented their part-time agriculture with hunting and gathering or were non-agricultural and seasonally nomadic. Despite severe demographic decline, a result of war, enslavement, and their susceptibility to European diseases, they continued for two centuries to be numerically predominant in the region as a whole. As late as 1760 they were twice as numerous as whites in the vast areas south and west of the nodes of European settlement on the Atlantic coast. With a long history of creating new collectivities, moreover, they showed themselves to be incredibly adaptive, repeatedly seceding and combining to form new groups, some of which constituted powerful nations and others of which lived on the margins of colonial societies and entered into webs of economic, social, and political exchange with European settlers. By 1776 the indigenous population had stabilized, and it held sway over much of the vast area between the Carolinas and the Mississippi River Valley. (2)

The Europeans who came to the area were similarly diverse, representing three different national states with divergent legal cultures and styles of colonization. The Spanish established the first permanent European colony in 1565 on the northern fringes of Spain's American dominion, naming it Florida and conceiving of it principally as a strategic outpost on the return route of silver fleets. Attracting few Spanish settlers, it consisted of a presidio in St. Augustine and a hinterland of more than twenty-six thousand evangelized Indians organized into self-governing mission provinces that in the middle of the seventeenth century extended from north Florida into Georgia and from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico. Florida's support system, providing royal subsidies to the Indians in return for their agricultural products and labor, was unique in early European colonial relations in southeastern North America. By the early eighteenth century, proxy wars and slave raiding generated by the English to the north had destroyed this extensive mission system and reduced Florida to a citadel at St. Augustine, two posts on the Gulf, at Pensacola and San Marcos, and a few hundred refugee Indians and fugitive slaves. The small export economy that had developed in the seventeenth century around deerskins, ranch products, naval stores, and provisions for the port of Havana had become a casualty of war and Indian flight. In an unrelated colonizing venture during the second decade of the eighteenth century, the Spanish, pushing the frontier of New Spain north, established a presidio and a mission and began to settle in San Antonio, Texas. (3)

When the English came to southern North America, they brought an entirely different pattern of colonization. With settlement as their principal objective, the English colonies--Virginia and Maryland in the Chesapeake in the early seventeenth century, the two Carolinas in the latter half of the seventeenth century, Georgia in the early eighteenth century, and, briefly, East and West Florida between 1763 and 1783--promoted large-scale British immigration, privatized landholding, created consensual polities, imposed legal and religious practices, and used unfree labor--European, Indian, and African--to produce staple crops--tobacco in the Chesapeake and northern Carolina; naval stores, rice, and indigo in the Carolinas, Georgia, and the Floridas--for export. Although the English developed a brisk trade with the Indians in deerskins and, until the late 1720s, in Indian slaves and used Indian allies as proxies in military contests with the Spanish, the English showed little interest in evangelizing Indians and, in contrast to the Spanish in Florida, segregated themselves from indigenous populations. Driven by land hunger, the aggressive settler population in the English colonies expanded rapidly. By the 1760s and 1770s, it had driven the Indians out of and occupied most of the area up to the Appalachian Mountains and was spilling across those mountains into the eastern reaches of the Mississippi River Valley. (4)

The last to make permanent settlements on the southern North American mainland, the French established the colony of Louisiana in 1699, beginning with posts along the gulf at Biloxi and Mobile and, in 1718, in New Orleans. Although the colony attracted far more metropolitan immigrants than Spanish Florida had and rather early developed the rudiments of a plantation economy using slave labor to produce indigo and other staples for export, the area occupied by white immigrants remained relatively small, with a core of fairly dense settlement radiating out from New Orleans and several scattered grain-producing settlements, often associated with trading posts, extending north up the Mississippi and its tributaries. Outside the areas of commercial agriculture, French relations with Indians fell somewhere between those of the Spanish and those of the English and involved a significant degree of mutual interaction. (5)

If the differences among these areas of national colonial occupation were striking, there were also significant variations within them, especially in the case of the more densely settled (with Europeans and Africans) sphere of British colonization. Notwithstanding the commonalities deriving from their English origins and continuing connections with the metropole, the Chesapeake colonies, including the northern portions of North Carolina, differed radically from those to the south. Students of these colonies have always shared an awareness of these variations, but the distinctions have been made ever more explicit over the last forty years as a result of a significant expansion and deepening of the historical literature.

Founded during the first half of the seventeenth century, the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland produced their principal staple, tobacco, in a mixed agricultural economy. They employed massive amounts of unfree labor, but before the closing decades of the seventeenth century, the workers were mostly indentured servants of British origin. Enslaved Africans only became the predominant form of labor during the early decades of the eighteenth century and never constituted more than 40 percent of the total of a rapidly expanding population through the middle decades of the eighteenth century. As a mode of economic organization, plantations with thirty or more slaves accounted for less than about a fifth of the land under tobacco culture, the typical establishments being much smaller family farms of a few hundred acres worked by family members and fewer than ten slaves. By the early decades of the eighteenth century very few indigenes remained within or lived adjacent to the principal areas of settler expansion. The Chesapeake colonies were thus essentially yeoman cultures, the vast majority of property-owning settlers being small freeholders, whose holdings were surrounded by a few plantations, often no more than two or three per county. In these cultures not only the large planters but also the yeomanry had prominent roles in a civic life that was fundamentally consensual, especially in the localities. By the time of the American Revolution, many prominent white Chesapeake residents were beginning to recognize the problems a slave economy had created for Virginia and, buying into the new antislavery rhetoric emanating from Europe, were sympathetic to proposals for eliminating slavery. Along with a growing emphasis on wheat and grain production, this ambivalence about slavery made some Marylanders and Virginians think of their states as central states that more closely resembled Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York than they did the eastern states of New England or the southern states of the two Carolinas and Georgia. (6)

The southern portions of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, all settled after 1670, presented a striking contrast. For their first century, they centered around a Lowcountry cultural core radiating from Charleston, the South Carolina capital, never penetrating more than fifty miles from the Atlantic, and stretching north into the Cape Fear region of North Carolina and, after the removal of a ban on slavery in the mid-eighteenth century, south into coastal Georgia and, after 1763, the new British colonies of East and West Florida. Significantly influenced by the successful example of Barbados, from which many early immigrants came, this culture early came to rely on the institutions of the large plantation and slave labor for its economic base. Although this area always engaged in enough mixed agriculture to feed itself, used the heavy forests to produce naval stores, and carried on a brisk trade in deerskins and Indian slaves with the numerous indigenes who inhabited the region, it rapidly shifted to the production of rice and, in the 1740s, indigo. Following a model worked out in the sugar culture of Barbados, Lowcountry planters produced rice on large plantations with high concentrations of imported African slaves. Already by the first decade of the eighteenth century, blacks constituted a majority of the population in the core parishes, and by the 1730s blacks outnumbered whites by more than two to one, a ratio that in some Lowcountry parishes reached as high as nine to one, as white planter families typically lived not on their plantations but in the growing urban port of Charleston, by far the largest colonial city on the southern North American mainland. In contrast to the Chesapeake and the West Indies, where slaves produced staples in gangs, the Lowcountry labor system of rice production typically used the task system, assigning slaves specific jobs and permitting considerable scope for their own economic projects once they had completed those tasks. (7)

Of course, these diverse societies--consisting of many scattered indigenous nations, colonies attached to three separate empires, and large distinctive settler cultures within the more heavily settled British territories that were further divided into five or, briefly after 1763, seven separate polities, each with its own discrete pattern of civic life and identity--had some contact with one another. Each of the colonies had extensive interactions with indigenous peoples, principally through trade, slave raiding, or war. Indigenous nations and Spanish Florida provided refuges for runaway slaves from the British colonies, and a small clandestine trade flowed between Spanish Florida and the lower southern British colonies. However, these many political societies were all also discrete entities. The indigenous nations were scattered, only loosely connected or completely disconnected from one another and sometimes at war among themselves; and the colonies all were much more closely tied to the European metropole to which they were politically, economically, and culturally attached than to the colonies of other national empires within the region. To the extent that individual colonies had intensive interactions with other colonies, it was with those within the empires to which they belonged, e.g., the British colonies with the British West Indian or other continental colonies, French Louisiana with the French settlements in the Illinois country, Canada, or the French Caribbean islands, and Spanish Florida with Cuba and New Spain, to both of which it had administrative attachments. Clearly, if these colonial spaces existed within the physical setting of the southern North American mainland, they also operated in and were constituent parts of the larger national imperial contexts to which they were connected by powerful ties of governance, law, trade, and cultural heritage.

Through a great number of monographs, many different historians contributed to the construction of this understanding of early modern southeastern North America largely without benefit of an explicitly Atlantic or pan-hemispheric perspective. To be sure, the imperial and expansion-of-Europe frameworks within which they set most of their work were always implicitly and often explicitly transatlantic, involving the comparison of colonial cultures with metropolitan cultures and the explication of the continuing ties between metropolises and colonies in all areas of colonial life. Stimulated by the civil rights movement and the new historical consciousness relating to black America that it produced, other historians used the concept of diaspora to study the slave trade, the African roots of American cultures, the widespread distribution of African slaves throughout the American world, and the diversity of the slave experience in America and thereby also focused attention on the transatlantic exchanges that characterized the new American worlds created after 1492. (8) Still others, using the concept of encounter, examined the effects of the intrusion of Europeans and Africans upon the old worlds of the Americas and the vast cultural changes provoked by this ongoing encounter. (9) Indeed, it can be said that this body of work laid the groundwork for the development of broader conceptions of the Atlantic basin and the Western Hemisphere as interconnected spaces in which similar social processes were at work. The result has been the identification of a useful area of study that can be called Atlantic or Western Hemispheric history.

How the rapid emergence of Atlantic history as an area of study may change the way historians think about early modern southeastern North America is as yet unclear. So far, Atlantic history has mostly been, in J. H. Elliott's words, a "history conceived in terms of connections," producing much new detail about many aspects of the complex and changing relationships that bridged and surrounded the Atlantic but little about the new worlds that developed within the four Atlantic continents. (10) For the study of those worlds, however, the greatest promise of an Atlantic framework is that it may encourage more historians to look across imperial and national boundaries and explore transnational continuities and similarities and thereby create broader contexts of comparison that will at once stimulate an appreciation of the general contours of the early modern New World experience, clarify understanding of the manifold specific variations within that experience, and enable historians to fit the particular areas they study into that general context.

With reference to the early modern Americas, scholars from a variety of disciplines have been moving in this direction for more than a quarter century. Although he totally neglected developments in the southern continent, D. W. Meinig, working in the field of historical geography, in the first volume of The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, published in 1986, employed the concept Atlantic America as a framework for his transnational discussion of European intrusions into North America before 1800. (11) In the same year, Peter Hulme, a literary analyst deeply influenced by postcolonial perspectives, used the concept of an extended Caribbean to call attention to commonalities in European understandings of the encounter with indigenous peoples and the subsequent colonial process in a broad area stretching from English Virginia south to Portuguese Salvador. (12) Perhaps more useful for students of early modern southeastern North America is the concept of a plantation complex that has emerged principally out of the work of the many historians who over the past four decades interested themselves in the African slave trade and the many inscriptions of African slavery upon American social landscapes.

Like the idea of an extended Caribbean, the concept of a plantation complex calls attention to the ubiquity of a form of settlement that stretched across national and imperial boundaries and encompassed a substantial area of the Americas. Distinguishing plantation colonies from settlement colonies in which the majority of the populations were of European origin, Philip D. Curtin defined the primary attributes of the former in a succinct volume published in 1990. These attributes included location in a tropical or semitropical and fertile space, the overwhelming predominance of unfree labor, a majority slave population that was non-self-sustaining and had to be replenished by continuing imports, organization of agricultural production around large-scale capitalist plantations, and a powerful focus on the production of staples for foreign export. Curtin finds the purest examples of this complex in the sugar colonies. Although Spaniards brought sugar culture from the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic islands to Hispaniola and to New Spain during the first half of the sixteenth century, Brazil was the American place in which, during the last half of the sixteenth century, Europeans first worked out all the characteristics of the plantation complex, which spread to Barbados and other eastern Caribbean islands during the last half of the seventeenth century and from thence to the Greater Antilles, where during the century after 1690 Jamaica and St. Domingue became its fullest expressions before the early nineteenth century. At the same time, this plantation culture spread in modified form onto both the South American and North American mainlands. If it centered in the Caribbean, Brazil and the North American Southeast functioned as parallel continental sites for its extension into the rest of the Americas. Indeed, it proved to be highly adaptable for the production of agricultural staples other than sugar, for forest industries, and even for ranching, and it subsequently spread into the mining areas of Peru and New Granada, where the supply of Indian labor was diminishing; and, following the discovery of gold in the 1690s and diamonds a few decades later, into Minas Gerais in Brazil. (13)

So extensive was the importation of Africans to meet the labor demands of this expanding plantation complex that Africans could be found in significant numbers well beyond the apparent boundaries of that complex, sometimes even functioning on large, plantation-type units of production in non-tropical areas, as in the case of iron production in the British middle colonies and agricultural production in New Jersey, New York, the Connecticut River Valley, and the Narragansett area of Rhode Island. (14) Insofar as the employment of African slaves on large units of production was the central feature of the plantation complex, there seem to have been few limits on its utility in the early modern Americas. Following Philip D. Morgan, however, it may be useful to make a distinction between slave colonies, where slaves provided a high proportion of the labor force and constituted a substantial segment of the population, and slave-owning colonies, where slaves supplied only a fraction of the labor and were a distinct minority of the population, albeit in both types of colonies slavery was protected and regulated by law. This distinction is similar to the one Curtin made between settlement colonies and plantation colonies. (15)

Yet these distinctions cannot be applied too strictly. Except possibly for those small island colonies the British established in the West Indies after the Seven Years' War, the slave societies of the plantation colonies were never without at least a few small, independent producers working with smaller numbers of slaves on the peripheries of the sugar plantations and were never strictly monocultural in the sense that they produced only the principal export staple. All the older island colonies in the Lesser Antilles, both British and French, produced much of their own foodstuffs, and if, as in the case of Barbados, they had a significant white population before the adoption of slavery, the population continued to be up to a fifth white. In the Greater Antilles of Jamaica and St. Domingue, the number of whites never rose much above 10 percent, but much slave labor went into the production of minor staples such as coffee, indigo, cotton, and ginger, into growing foodstuffs, and into cattle raising. On the mainlands of North and South America, even in the Lowcountry of southern North America and in Salvador in Brazil, where the populations were heavily African, substantial numbers of small producers raised foodstuffs and livestock and produced naval stores and logwood in a varied economy that concentrated on but was not limited to the production of the main export staple. The plantation economies of the Chesapeake and Louisiana--where the proportion of blacks was far lower and the number of independent yeoman farmers much larger--practiced even higher levels of mixed agriculture in a social landscape dominated by smaller economic units. In the study of these variations, a broad pan-hemispheric framework may be just as useful as an Atlantic perspective. (16)

By locating early modern southeastern North America within the larger framework of the pan-hemispheric plantation complex, historians can better understand where the area fits within the broad colonial process that transformed the Americas after 1492. They can see it not only as a promiscuous conglomeration of distinctive offshoots of European empires but also, at least in the British and French areas of settlement, as extensions of the plantation complex and as one or more of the many possible variations within that complex. From this wide perspective, these areas seem to be less peculiar--less in need of explanation--in the early modern colonizing process than do the settlement colonies to the north: the middle colonies and New England in colonial British America, and New France in colonial French America. But the inclusion of the Chesapeake colonies within this plantation complex also underlines the fact that planters can co-exist with a numerically dominant and empowered slave-owning settler population of smaller farmers within the plantation complex, an insight that will not surprise historians of colonial British America but that has often been overlooked by students of the various cores of the plantation complex.

This emphasis upon the combination of plantations and farms involving mixed agriculture, the production of staples, and slave labor may be particularly important for historians interested in pursuing the questions of how and when the diverse societies and populations in early modern southeastern North America eventually came together to form a coherent cultural region. Ultimately, of course, answers to these questions will require systematic and intensive analysis by historians of the emerging South in the national era.

In light of the vast amount we have learned over the past generation about all the entities of southeastern North America as they had developed by the closing decades of the eighteenth century, however, I suggest that this exercise begin by acknowledging that the most dynamic and expanding population on the southern mainland of North America was the British. Within the British sphere though, the Lowcountry model seems already by the 1770s to have been close to reaching its natural limits. If Barbados had served as a cultural hearth for the extension of the plantation complex to the Lowcountry, the cultural hearth that took shape in the Lowcountry and revolved around rice production on large plantation units with large numbers of slaves was unsuitable for lands far beyond the physical boundaries of the Lowcountry and was therefore incapable of replication throughout much of the area of future expansion.

By contrast, the cultural hearth that developed in the seventeenth-and early-eighteenth-century Chesapeake Tidewater turned out to be eminently transportable and adaptable. Beginning in the 1730s, Tidewater immigrants carried Chesapeake culture, with its focus on a mixture of tobacco, corn, and grain production using slave labor distributed among a few large plantations and a much larger number of small producers, west into the Piedmont and across the Blue Ridge mountains. There they joined an even larger stream of immigrants pushing south from Pennsylvania, at once absorbing those immigrants into the broad outlines of Chesapeake culture and adapting that culture to the interests and inclinations of the newcomers. Together, these two streams of immigrants negotiated a new cultural hearth, the attributes of which a subsequent generation carried west across the Appalachians into Kentucky and south into the backcountries of the Carolinas and Georgia. (17) With the emergence of cotton culture in the 1790s, this cultural hearth underwent a further transformation before it swept across the South as fast as the Indians could be removed and Spanish control over Florida, Louisiana, and Texas eliminated.

Wherever the aggressive bearers and modifiers of this culture went, they took with them its central ingredients--an insistence upon a consensual and participatory political system, a system of law rooted in British common law, and, most important of all, a pattern of land occupation devoted to the production of staples with slave labor on a few plantations and a much larger number of smaller units--and imposed them upon the physical and political landscapes. As Michael P. Johnson and David C. Rankin have shown in a study based on an intensive examination of the first four United States censuses throughout the Southeast, this pattern of land occupation predominated throughout those states that came to constitute the South. (18) Although the bearers of this culture ran roughshod over the indigenous and non-British cultures they encountered, even to a remarkable extent in French Louisiana, where they met the heaviest resistance, they never created a homogeneous regional southern culture. (19) The flexibility of this cultural system insured that it could be adapted to a wide variety of distinctive areas, distinctions that derived from variations in physical settings, cultural inheritances, and population mixtures; and the emerging South turned out to be at least as heterogeneous as any other area of the new United States within whose jurisdiction it slowly took shape in the decades after 1820, if, perhaps, not nearly so heterogeneous as it had been during the three previous centuries.

(1) See Jack P. Greene, "Beyond Power: Paradigm Subversion and Reformulation and the Re-Creation of the Early Modern Atlantic World," in Jack P. Greene, Interpreting Early America: Historiographical Essays (Charlottesville, 1996), 17-42; David Armitage, "Three Concepts of Atlantic History," in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (New York, 2002), 11-30; and Jack P. Greene, "Comparing Early Modern American Worlds: Some Reflections on the Promise of a Hemispheric Perspective," History Compass, 1 (2003), http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/full/10.1111/1478-0542.026.

(2) Amy Turner Bushnell, "The First Southerners: Indians of the Early South," in John B. Boles, ed., A Companion to the American South (Malden, Mass., 2002), 3-23, provides an excellent essay on the literature on this subject.

(3) See Amy Turner Bushnell, Situado and Sabana: Spain's Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida (Athens, Ga., 1994); Bushnell, "First Southerners," 11; and David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, 1992), 191-95.

(4) See Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, 1988), 81-100, 141-51, 170-206.

(5) See Daniel H. Usner Jr., "Borderlands," in Daniel Vickers, ed., A Companion to Colonial America (Malden, Mass., 2003), 408-24.

(6) See Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 7-18, 81-100; James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century, Chesapeake (Chapel Hill, 1994); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998); and Jack P. Greene, "The Constitution of 1787 and the Question of Southern Distinctiveness," in Robert J. Haws, ed., The South's Role in the Creation of the Bill of Rights (Jackson, Miss., 1991), 9-31, 147-49.

(7) See Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 141-51; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint; S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge, Mass., 2006); and Bradford J. Wood, This Remote Part of the World: Regional Formation in Lower Cape Fear, North Carolina, 1725-1775 (Columbia, S.C., 2004).

(8) See Philip D. Morgan, "African Americans," in Vickers, ed., Companion to Colonial America, 138-71, and David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York, 2000.

(9) See the excellent article by James H. Merrell. "Indian History during the English Colonial Era," in Vickers, ed., Companion to Colonial America, 118-37.

(10) J. H. Elliott, "Atlantic History: A Circumnavigation," in Armitage and Braddick, eds., British Atlantic World, 236-37 (quotation on p. 237).

(11) D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. Vol. 1: Atlantic America, 1492-1800 (New Haven, 1986).

(12) Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London, 1986), 3-4.

(13) Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (New York, 1990).

(14) See Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), chap. 2.

(15) Philip D. Morgan, "British Encounters with Africans and African-Americans, circa 1600-1780," in Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill, 1991), 157-219.

(16) Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 178-80.

(17) See Robert D. Mitchell, "American Origins and Regional Institutions: The Seventeenth Century Chesapeake," Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 73 (September 1983), 404-20.

(18) Michael P. Johnson and David C. Rankin, "Southern Slaveholders, 179-1820: A Census," paper presented at the Southern Historical Association annual meeting, New Orleans, 1990.

(19) See Jack P. Greene, "The Cultural Dimensions of Political Transfers: An Aspect of the European Occupation of the Americas," Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary' Journal, forthcoming, scheduled for vol. 6 (Spring 2008).

MR. GREENE is Andrew W. Mellon Professor, Emeritus, Johns Hopkins University.