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9780815603610

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Reviews

A wonderfully shrewd and satisfying account. . . . A provocative book.--Kirkus Reviews Brilliantly controversial, will invite a rethinking of the whole stretch of our American past.--New York Times Book Review The product of inspired thinking.--Booklist

A wonderfully shrewd and satisfying account. . . . A provocative book.-- Kirkus Reviews Brilliantly controversial, will invite a rethinking of the whole stretch of our American past.-- New York Times Book Review The product of inspired thinking.-- Booklist

A wonderfully shrewd and satisfying account. . . . A provocative book.-- ""Kirkus Reviews"" Brilliantly controversial, will invite a rethinking of the whole stretch of our American past.-- ""New York Times Book Review"" The product of inspired thinking.-- ""Booklist""

A wonderfully shrewd and satisfying account of how, a full century before the American Revolution, England's mainland colonies were herded into a new, centralized, no-nonsense imperial system. Webb (History, Syracuse) handles the Byzantine ins and outs of the story by splitting it into three parts. The first, and most likely to turn heads, is about Bacon's Revolution : the 1676 Virginia uprising that pitted Nathaniel Bacon and a ragtag army of poor whites and slaves against the cloddish and corrupt oligarchy headed by Sir William Berkeley. Unwilling to leave Berkeley and his cronies in charge of the province, but equally appalled at the prospect of widening class warfare (convincingly documented here, despite what many historians have said), the British government clamped down with troops and bureaucrats. Webb's second section, The World Viewed From Whitehall, reveals that the Privy Council, which assumed responsibility for masterminding the clamping-down, was at the same time confronted with a similar problem in New England - the inability of its smug and bigoted oligarchs to defend their provinces against the massive and destructive Algonquin uprising of 1676, commonly known as King Philip's War. Once again, the response was to impose new, stricter, genuinely imperial control. The Anglo-Iroquoian Empire, Webb's final section, recounts the diplomatic revolution of 1676 that created the Covenant Chain between the English and the most powerful Indians of the interior. Partly the work of Garacontie, the Onondaga leader, and Edmund Andros, the Governor of New York - both of whose lives Webb describes in somewhat excessive detail, and without the benefit of Francis Jennings' more subtle study of The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire (1983, p. 1196) - the Covenant Chain spared New York the ravages of King Philip's War, turned the tide in New England, and laid the foundation for a century of imperial dominion. The Revolution of 1776, Webb suggests, can thus be seen as a reaction against the policies embraced in 1676 and a bid to retrieve the autonomy that was lost in that eventful year. A nifty idea, and a provocative conclusion to a provocative book. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Stephen Saunders Webb is Professor of History at Syracuse University and the author of The Governors-General and Lord Churchill's Coup.

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