★★★★★ 3
A decent primer -- no more.
Format: Hardcover
This is an odd book for one of America's premier historians. It isn't a bad book -- a person of Bailyn's erudition couldn't write a bad book -- but it doesn't hang together well. The author does not really have anything new to say and a historian of the Early Colonial Period will quickly recognize the usual sources. It is hard to see exactly what historiographical niche this book fills.
Even the title is misleading. Sure, Jamestown was barbarous enough by our standards and New Amsterdam was plenty harsh. But, the Bay Colony was, by the rough-and-ready standards of 17th century Europe, pretty civilized. (Compare it with the contemporaneous English Civil War or the Thirty Years War.) As for "Conflict of Civilizations," there was certainly enough of that but the most interesting part of the book, the last third or so on the Bay Colony, is largely an account of Puritan theological quarrels.
In fact, one senses that Bailyn felt like he was "home" when he wrote about the Bay Colony. He has, after all, written about New England since 1955 ("Merchants.") He gives the reader a clear account of the theological duels between Winthrop, Cotton, Hooker, Williams, Hutchinson and others. But, others have done this as well or better.
Bailyn all but ties himself in a knot to be politically correct toward the Native Americans. For every Indian atrocity he finds a matching atrocity in European civilization. Still, if captured in war one was likely to be a lot better off among the English, French or Dutch than the Pequods. A LOT better off!
This volume is part of a series that explores the settling of North America and hardly anyone is better equipped for this than the author. But, what begins as a good account of the horrors of Jamestown drifts into a twice-told tale of the niceties of Puritan disputation. It is almost as if Bailyn got bored half-way through and started channeling Perry Miller.
A good book in its way and quite useful for an upper division course or first-year graduate seminar. But, not well-written enough to snare the casual reader and not original enough to snare the professional historian. An odd number.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 19, 2013

