American Colonies: The Settling of North America

“In such exchanges and composites, we find the true measure of American distinctiveness, the true foundation for the diverse America of our time.” 

After debunking the myth of American exceptionalism, which Taylor argues is incomplete at best, he presents an alternate positive of the American experiment: a composite culture formed from the incredible diversity present in the colonies and, subsequently, the United States.

“In sum, white racial solidarity developed in close tandem with the expansion of liberty among male colonists. The greater opportunity and freedoms enjoyed by white men in the British colonies were a product of their encounter with a broader array of peoples—some of whom could be exploited in ways impossible back in Britain. Confronting that linkage has been the painful challenge faced by the American republic since 1776.” 

This quote is particularly important because Taylor draws slavery’s role in American history down through the present day. The painful legacy of slavery, he contends, must still be wrestled with now as one of the primary factors in America’s historical success.

“In recent years, the escalating integration of North America—by treaty, investment, trade, migration, travel, mass media, and environmental pollution—renders our national boundaries more porous. As a result, we may now be prepared to broaden our historical imagination beyond the national limits of the United States, to see more clearly a colonial past in which those boundaries did not yet exist.” 

Taylor makes this period of history especially relevant for the present day by linking it to globalism. The colonial period, he argues, presages our modern-day interconnectedness more than we might think.

“As McNeill so nicely put it, imperial visions were ‘imperfectly inflicted.’ Imperialists never achieved the full mastery they dreamed of; but the flawed pursuit of their illusions bore powerfully upon peoples in their way—just as those people inevitably deflected the blows of empire.” 

This idea is core to Taylor’s definition of colonization. He believes it to be a reciprocal, continuous process, one that altered the colonizers just as much as the colonized. As the Indians and slaves adapted, so too did the Europeans—and vice versa.

“In fact, it would be difficult (and pointless) to make the case that either the Indians or the Europeans of the early modern era were by nature or culture more violent and ‘cruel’ than the other. Warfare and the ritual torture and execution of enemies were commonplace in both native America and early modern Europe. Without pegging Europeans as innately more cruel and violent, we should recognize their superior power to inflict misery.”

Taylor is careful not to romanticize the Indians or the Europeans. While the Europeans undoubtedly committed more atrocities in Taylor’s narrative, he reliably reminds readers of the vast ecological, technological, and organizational advantages that enabled them to do so.

“But neither the priest nor the trader deserted European society to embrace life among the natives. Both men remained fundamentally committed to the superiority of the Christian faith and the European economy. For all their criticism of European materialism, these critics insisted that natives must eventually forsake their own culture and accept that of their invaders.” 

While a rare few in this early period already had concerns about the rise of capitalism in European culture, fewer still considered the Indian lifestyle to be a viable alternative. It never occurred to the Europeans that Indians may not need or want a different lifestyle.

“American colonization wrought an environmental revolution unprecedented in pace, scale, and impact in the history of humanity. The environmental revolution worked disproportionately in favor of the Europeans and to the detriment of the native peoples, who saw their numbers dwindle […] Colonization literally alienated the land from its native inhabitants.” 

By introducing European diseases, farming methods, cattle, pests, and even weeds to the American landscape, Europeans chipped away the Indians’ ability to utilize the land as they had before and eventually deprived many native groups of their autonomy.

“In sum, the natives suffered from a deadly combination of microparasitism by disease and macroparasitism by Spanish colonizers, preying upon native labor. Although not genocidal in intent—for the Spanish preferred to keep the Taíno alive and working as tributaries and slaves—the colonization of Hispaniola was genocidal in effect.”

The success of the colonial effort was due in no small part to the vast ecological advantages the Europeans possessed over the Indians. Disease was arguably their most important ally.

“When in the most isolated and least developed pockets of North America today, we like to think that we have rediscovered a timeless ‘wilderness’ and that we experience there the nature known by Native Americans before 1492. In fact, everywhere we see an altered nature profoundly affected by all the plants and animals that tagged along with the colonists to remake this continent.”

Taylor emphasizes the environmental revolution wrought by colonization, an incredible transformation of the American landscape effected by the merging of the Old and New Worlds.

“But their canny bargains meant no conversion to capitalist thinking. Indeed, European traders noted that the Indians sought higher prices for their furs so that they could reduce their work, preferring leisure once their basic desires had been met.”

Europeans tended to consider the Indians as perpetual children in matters of trade, unable to understood economic principles and easy to manipulate. While some concepts may have been lost in translation or simply rejected as irrelevant or unwanted, Indians adapted quickly and adroitly to many European trade conventions.

“The promoters could not conceive that the native peoples might prefer no colonial masters and no new system of labor. Satisfied with their own ways, the Indians wished little change, except to procure by trade the metals and cloths of the Europeans.”

Taylor describes a fundamental disconnect for the European immigrants. In their rush to settle, colonize, convert, and maximize profits, no European ruler or colonist stopped to consider if the Indians wanted to adapt to European ways.

“Newly obsessed with racial difference, Chesapeake whites felt more equal despite the growing inequality of their economic circumstances. The new sense of racial solidarity rendered white Virginians indifferent to the continuing concentration of most property and real power in the hands of the planter elite.”

Frightened by the prospect of class warfare, the Chesapeake great planters successfully displaced lower-class resentment by enlisting white men to police African slaves, creating the concept of white racial superiority in the process.

“Contrary to the declension model promoted by some historians, the increasing commercialism of New England life at the end of the 17th century derived from Puritan values rather than manifested their decay.” 

Taylor emphasizes that the colonial emphasis on maximizing profit and entrepreneurial business was in fact always encouraged by the Puritans, as they intimately connected the moral good of hard work with deserved earthly bounty.

“The mix of plants did not seem like proper agriculture to the English, who segregated their various crops in distinct fields. In fact, Indian cultivation was more efficient, producing substantial yields from relatively small amounts of land and labor.” 

This passage represents one of many ways cultural misunderstandings lead to ill-informed moral judgments of the Indians by the Europeans. Though the Indians had deep generational knowledge of how to work the land, Europeans rejected their methods because they looked different or reflected different cultural priorities.

“The colonists appointed themselves to judge how much land the Indians needed, which shrank with every passing year. The resolves of the town of Milford in Connecticut in 1640 were especially blunt: ‘Voted that the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof; voted, that the earth is given to the Saints; voted, we are the Saints.’”

This blunt quote from a Puritan assembly is an especially illuminating example of the Europeans’ cynical justification of land appropriation from the Indians, based in their Christian faith

“Although they traded with each other, the Indians and the Carolinians did not share the same economic ethos. The trader James Adair noted, ‘They say we are covetous, because we do not give our poor relations such a share of our possessions as would keep them from want.’ By contrast, ‘they are very kind and liberal to every one of their own tribe, even to the last morsel of food they enjoy.’ John Lawson concluded that Indians were ‘an odd sort of People for their way of Living is so contrary to ours, that neither we nor they can fathom one another’s Designs and Methods.’”

This passage neatly summarizes the deep cultural differences between the Indians’ generally egalitarian societies and the Europeans’ generally capitalistic societies.

“The Westo, however, soon learned that slave-raiding was a dangerous deal with the devil. In time, every client people became first debtors and then victims.”

A charged quote from Taylor on a typical modus operandi of European colonizers. By drawing native allies in with trade goods or practices that would improve their quality of life, colonizers then made them dependent on those same benefits for survival.

“An elite Carolinian conceded, ‘We eat, we drink, we play, and shall continue to until everlasting flames surprise us.’ Of course, this pleasure and ease depended upon the lands and hard labor forced from others. By conspicuous indolence and consumption, the planters abundantly demonstrated to onlookers that they were not slaves.”

Taylor illustrates the great planters’ strange reality: Their success depended entirely upon leveraging a system of labor exploitation that they created, which in turn inflicted new cultural anxieties on them regarding their social status.

“The Georgia dissidents rallied behind the revealing slogan ‘Liberty and Property without restrictions’—which explicitly linked the liberty of white men to their right to hold blacks as property. Until they could own slaves, the white Georgians considered themselves unfree. Such reasoning made sense in an 18th-century empire where liberty was a privileged status that almost always depended upon the power to subordinate someone else.” 

Taylor underlines the paradoxical conclusion of white racial superiority in the colonies: that to deny a white person slaves was to deny that person freedom.

“Many more slaves stayed on their plantation but resisted covertly, by dragging out their tasks, feigning illness, pretending ignorance, and breaking tools—or by stealing their master’s hogs and alcohol. With these tactics, the blacks cleverly exploited the prejudices of their masters, who considered blacks innately lazy, stupid, and dishonest.”

Trapped in a draconian slave system in which corporal punishment, torture, and rape were common and socially acceptable, African and American-born slaves had to be creative and discrete in resisting their oppressors. Like the Indians, they found ways to leverage their enemies’ prejudices against them, defending their identities and exerting as much of their own will within the system as they could. While their white owners may have had all the legal and political power, they never had full control.

“In sum, the Great Plains exacerbated the paradoxical impact of colonialism so manifest throughout North America. In general, the effects of colonial intrusion—germs, weeds, livestock, soldiers, missionaries, and trade—spread far and wide, extending beyond imperial control and affecting native peoples in wildly unanticipated ways. Reacting creatively to the colonial invasions, natives selectively adopted new animals, weapons, and techniques to strengthen their position. This, in turn, obliged the colonists to respond to the native adaptations.” 

This passage exemplifies a key example for Taylor’s definition of the process of colonization: some Indians actually reaped short-term benefits from the technologies and goods supplied by Europeans, which in turn demanded colonial adaptation.

“Push came to shove as both colonists and imperialists belatedly recognized the contradiction, long overlooked, between the growth in imperial ambition and the persistence of colonial autonomy.” 

While Taylor pointedly does not foreshadow the American Revolution too heavily, Chapter 18 outlines many of the crucial foundations of that conflict.

“They are really better to us than we are to them. They always give us food at their quarters, and take care we are armed against Hunger and Thirst. We do not do so by them, but let them walk by our Doors hungry, and do not often relieve them. We look upon them with scorn and disdain, and think them little better than Beasts in human shape, though, if well examined, we shall find that, for all our religion and education, we possess more moral deformities and evils than these savages do, or are acquainted with.”

This quote from Carolinian colonist John Lawson represents a rare moment of self-reflection on European culture’s priorities versus native priorities.