Preface
In order to make his point about the primacy of economic pursuits in shaping American society, Greene sets up the straw man of New England declension model. As some reviewers pointed out, by the time of this book's publication few seriously held to that approach, as Greene's own conclusions in Chapter 8 reveal (see esp. Kettner in AHR). This work is valuable, it would seem, as a work of synthetic social history more than as a way to dispel the myth of New England.

Greene takes a regional approach to the social history of Colonial British America, dividing the world into four regions: New England, the Chesapeake, Britain and Ireland, The Middle Colonies and the Lower South, and The Atlantic and the Caribbean Islands. He treats the development of each region in a separate section covering the roughly 100 year period from 1660-1760. In his conclusion, he discusses the changes that drew the regions together to form the nation. The foundation of that nation was primarily an economic one for Greene. Though he doesn't rule out the importance of religion, he is anxious to exert the primacy of convergence in economic trends throughout the three regions as the 18th C progresses.

Prologue

Greene makes the interesting point that the American South is viewed as being "backward" in the 19th and 20th centuries, that it portrayed itself in the antebellum years as being above the money-grubbing of the north and that it lagged behind the north in economic development during most of the 20th century. We should not be distracted by this later period from the fact that the south was highly commercial in outlook from the founding. Maybe New England historians like George Bancroft tied all of American development back to Plymouth colony, but few today would doubt that the line of development runs equally back to Jamestown. Seeing America as a place where they could pursue their own material happiness, colonials in Jamestown was in the mainstream of American life of the time and the pursuit of economic happiness in Chesapeake is more the norm for the rest of colonial British America throughout the 18th C than theologically oriented New England. It was not until the 19th C that the South would try to distance itself from the crass commercialism of the North.

Chapter 1: Two Models of English Colonization, 1600-1660

Sets up the New England model in opposition to the Chesapeake model of economic and social development in the 17th C. Starting with the Spanish experience of conquest in America, Greene puts the Virginia Company in the context of the world of early 17th C empires. The objective of the Virginia Company was conquest and trade, not colonization and settlement. As the Spaniards in Mesoamerica, so too the British in Jamestown (1607). They were at first commercial conquerors and only later did they build societies. When they did set up agricultural endeavors, it was around tobacco culture with its intensive labor requirements. Early on the colony attracted indentured servants, single white males with few prospects in Europe. Though they may have set out with high ideals about spreading the Word of God, this was a profoundly commercial society. "Virginia was a highly exploitative society in which a few of the people who survived the high mortality had become rich and the vast majority worked in harsh conditions as servants, hoping to live long enough to work out their terms and become independent, landowning producers." (p. 12) After experiencing boom years in the 1630s and 40s, the economy stabilized and a more hierarchical society developed in the later part of the 40s and into the 50s. Moving out of the deadly estuarine zone, health improved and mortality declined as more stable families formed around a more equitable sex ratio. Greene refers to a gradual "thickening of social networks" (p. 17) By 1660, Virginia had become a more stable and stratified society, with concentrations of wealth in the hands of fewer planters.

Greene sets up New England as the foil to the Chesapeake. Plymouth (1620) was settled by families of the middling sort who were inspired by a desire to create a religious community in the New World as opposed to making a fortune. The New English came as families, not as single white male indentured servants. The sex ration was thus more equal, and population increased more as the result of native growth than immigration. New England focused initially on community building, hence the stability of the New England town in contrast to the unsettled life on the Chesapeake. Dissenters notwithstanding, New England society was remarkably homogenous in the 17th C, and the power of kinship networks was great. Throughout the first generation of settlement, patriarchal family authority preserved peace and order. New England society was intensely literate, founding colleges to educate ministers (Harvard and Yale) and producing a print culture which David Hall can mine for evidence of the World of Wonders common to elite and common society. Dedicated to a slow and organic pattern of growth, the New England world was far less differentiated in economic terms up to 1660. This was not the get rich quick society that prospered in Virginia.

Chapter 2: Reconsiderations

Based upon a consideration of scholarship in the 70s and 80s on Early Modern England, Greene contests the idea that New England was the most British of the colonies. The earlier picture of stable English villages isolated from the market has given way to the picture of Early Modern England as a far more stratified society, given over to market relations instead of sturdy yeomen farmers working to meet subsistence needs. The professions also provided avenues of mobility upward through the social classes, formerly thought to be far less permeable. British society was far less rooted than historians have often assumed. Paternalistic authority too was far less well established than once thought. Beset by low fertility rates and oriented toward the pursuit of materialistic gain in the agrarian marketplace. If all this is true, then the Chesapeake represents the mainstream of British social development instead of an aberration. In this context, New England seems reactionary and utopian, harkening back to a yeoman society that certainly didn't exist in the England they left if it ever did. What the New Englanders were trying to establish was not something that existed in the Old World. The society the puritans established was economically and socially very different from the one they left behind.

Greene then turns to Ireland, Bermuda and the West Indies. Here he finds much more to recommend similarities with Chesapeake developments in the 17th C than New England ones. The English landlords in Ireland sought to wring profits from the land, settling disbanded soldiers there to work the lands. Yet they never found the profitable staple crop to make their fortunes like the tobacco of Virginia or the Sugar of the Caribbean Islands. The lethal disease environment in Ireland killed settlers at a high rate as in Virginia and English dominated Ireland failed to develop a stable society in the 17th C. Though settled by Puritans initially, Bermuda rapidly developed a commercial orientation. Pursuing wealth through the growth of tobacco market, the Bermuda experience of high mortality rates and slow social formation was again similar to the Chesapeake. Barbados too exhibited this early commercial orientation. High mortality, sex imbalance, slow social formation and - above all - the pursuit of happiness through material acquisition in the agricultural marketplace marked the 17th C experience of Barbados. Treating white indentured callously and exploitatively, the importation of slaves to increase profits in sugar cultivation was a natural next step. As Richard Dunn has pointed out, the thriving sugar trade started in the 1650s made Barbados a prosperous commercial society by 1670.

Turning next to the social conditions of the Middle Colonies, Greene points out that despite the Quaker influence and the greater social stability brought by the settlement of PA by families, Penn himself had powerful economic goals. Unable to achieve the cohesion of New England, however, the society of Quaker yeomen farmers was far less ordered than New England. The settlement of substantial Dutch and Scandinavian populations in the colonies of New York, Delaware and the Jersies insured a diversity that was not conducive to New England-like development. This diversity only grew as immigrants from Whales, Scotland, Ireland and Germany entered the middle colonies. Socially oriented toward nuclear families, social organization proceeded more slowly in the Middle Colonies proceeded more slowly than in New England. The rise of large estates in the middle colonies worked by immigrant tenants, aided by the rise of port cities of New York and Philadelphia, secured the commercial orientation of the middle colonies.

Patterns in the Lower South in the 17th C were more like those of the Chesapeake as well. The southern part of this area, South Carolina in particular, was more of an extension of the Caribbean world than of the Chesapeake, with the materialistic and commercial motive even more prominent than in early Virginia society -- functioning as an adjunct to the West Indies for much of its early development. Searching for a profitable agricultural staple for export, South Carolinians experimented with tobacco and indigo before landing on rice cultivation in the 1690s, importing massive numbers of slaves (blacks outnumbered whites by 2 to 1 in 1720). South Carolina society was highly individualistic, competitive and socially fragmented.

Chapter 8: Convergence: Development of an American Society, 1720-1780

After recounting the different patterns of social development in the four major regions, Greene concludes by emphasizing the ways in which this social development was tending towards a more homogeneous environment for all the colonies. New England became less exceptional in the late 18th C, as health declined and along with it birth rates and the authority of the patriarchal system.

As the historians of gender in this period note, the puritan authorities were less likely to regulate male sexuality in this period and even Jonathan Edwards was caught short when he tried to discipline the sons of prominent families in the "bad books" episode of the 1740s in Northampton. The double standard was emerging over pre-marital sex. As Cornelia Dayton has explained in the Grosvenor-Sessions abortion case in Pomfret, CT, women were increasingly held of a higher standard of sexual purity as men worried more about respectability in secular society.

At the same time as New England was "declining" from its earlier position of exceptionalism, Chesapeake society was "rising", becoming more cohesive, settled, and racially united against blacks (see Edmund S. Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom). All of the other areas in this study were also moving toward greater "order, coherence, differentiation and complexity" in this period (p. 172). Greene posits a model of centripetal vs. centrifugal forces (p. 8.1) While the society of New England was becoming more centrifugal in nature, the rest of British colonial possessions were experiencing a centripetal pull.

Greene locates the source of this convergence in experience and inheritance. The experience of growth and differentiation combined with a growing Anglicization, as the influence of the metropolis on its colonies grew. Colonists participated in this growing pride at the thought of being British. In this light it is most probable that the revolutionary flame was fed by the slights of the metropolis felt by a highly sensitive colonial elite. The growth of the colonies was primarily through natural increase, rather than immigration between 1720 and 1760. After decimating the native populations and "widowing the land" in the 17th Century, the "Creole" populations of European colonies took off toward the "frontiers." There was a corresponding boom in gross economic productivity. As Menard and McCusker point out, "the gross national product (GNP) multiplied about twenty-five times between 1650 and 1770 ... sufficient to 'double income' over the period." (p. 182). The colonies were very prosperous at the time of the Revolution. Again Menard and McCusker point out that the colonies had developed a substantial degree of economic independence before the Revolution, largely freeing themselves from reliance upon foreign capital investment. While frontier expansion meant that fewer people lived in towns, urbanization also took off in this period as trading centers developed along the coast in the provincial capitols. In these trading centers, merchant elites increased in power in an increasingly socially differentiated and complex world. Yet the path to progress seems to have remained open, and there was no permanent underclass. Much more typical of this period was the middling sort of yeomen farmers, artisans, small traders and lesser professionals.

Briefly discussing the state of indentured servitude, one which he points out was not a happy estate in any section but which often proved to be temporary, he turns to the situation with slavery in the regions. Here he relies heavily on the work of Ira Berlin. Contrasting the Virginia tobacco culture with the rice culture of the lower south in the Carolinas, Berlin has shown the heavy hand of white paternalism as the guiding force in slavery's evolution in VA and the growth of black autonomy in S. Carolina as the major force in that area. Slaves in the Carolinas were able to take part in the agricultural market as they were in the Caribbean and they were able to maintain their African culture in the New World to the greatest extent of the three slave systems in North America. Slavery in the north was most commonly on small farms and in the urban environment, where slaves worked in shops, warehouses and on docks. No American colony opposed slavery at the time of the Revolution. It was in integral part of the exploitative economic system in all four regions.

The pursuit of personal economic prosperity was at the heart of the ideology of the "moral personality" in colonial America.

In this emerging secular and commercial culture, the central orientation of people in the littoral became the achievement of personal independence, a state which a man and his family and broader dependents could live 'at ease' rather than in anxiety, in contentment rather than in want, in respectability rather than meanness, and, perhaps most important, in freedom fro the will and control of other men. (p. 195)

For the colonial population this did not mean a solitary individual pursuit of gain, as prosperity was closely tied to the success of the family. This didn't mean that people didn't care about religion, or were caring less about it even. Pointing to Bonomi, Greene talks about the growing spread of churches and institutional church life in the 18th C. Commercial and religious were not separate spheres. Perhaps it was the commercial element that brought the new nation to think of itself as having a special mission. American exceptionalism has secular as well as religious roots.

Epilogue

Reemphasizes the centrality of the south to the colonial American world. Wonders how it was that southern development became peculiar in the 19th C...