Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776

Synopsis

Multinational, profit-driven, materialistic, politically self-conscious, power-hungry, religiously plural: America three hundred years ago - and today. Here are Britain's mainland American colonies after 1680, in the process of becoming the first modern society - a society the earliest colonists never imagined, a new order of the ages that anticipated the American revolution, Jon Butler's panoramic view of the colonies in this epoch transforms our customary picture of pre-Revolutionary America. It reveals a strikingly modern character that belies the 18th century quaintness fixed in history. Stressing the middle and late decades (the hitherto dark ages ) of the American colonial experience, and emphasizing the importance of the middle and southern colonies as well as New England, this book shows us vast revolutionary changes before 1776 among a fantastically diverse assortment of peoples. Here are polyglot populations of English, Indians, Africans, Scots, Germans, Swiss, and French; a society of small colonial cities with enormous urban complexities; an economy of prosperous farmers thrust into international market economies; peoples of immense wealth, a burgeoning middle class, and incredible poverty. Butler depicts settlers pursuing sophisticated provincial politics that ultimately sparked revolution and a new nation; developing new patterns in production, consumption, crafts, and trades that remade commerce at home and abroad; and fashioning a society remarkably pluralistic in religion, whose tolerance nonetheless did not extend to African or Indians. Here was a society that turned protest into revolution and made itself many times during the next centuries - a society that, for 90 years before 1776, was already becoming America.