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The transformation of a continent
Feb. 25th, 2025 02:14 pmA friend of mine has been running an online weekly history class since early in the pandemic, when I absolutely did not have the time to do any such thing. But I have much more time now, so I joined the most recent iteration of it when they wrapped up their last “unit” on 19th century Asian empires (which I regret missing) and turned instead to working their way through the Penguin History of the United States, beginning with Alan Taylor’s American Colonies: The Settling of North America.
We did one chapter a week for 20 weeks, which means that I’ve already discussed a lot of my thoughts on this book, at least on a chapter by chapter basis. I’m trying to come up with more holistic thoughts for the last class. Here are a few as such:
The book does a very good job of not centering the British as the, like, main characters of what would later become the United States. The book also doesn’t limit itself to only discussing what would later become the United States, as the whole of both American continents were subjected to various overlapping imperial colonization projects that would only much, much later firm up to today’s national and state borders. So we got to learn a lot more about the Spanish in North America, the French, the English outside of the “thirteen colonies” that would later rebel, the Dutch, and even an interesting segment near the end on Russian Alaska, which I had not previously known anything about. The book also doesn’t shy away from talking about just how brutal colonization was and how delusional and self-serving these imperial “civilizing” missions were, nor does it reduce the native population to one-dimensional, helpless innocents.
The book’s discussion of native nations and their political, cultural, and military developments–both before and after European contact–is a real strength here, at least compared to most US history textbooks, and really makes me want to read more Native American history. Among non-native Americans, even among ones who intend to be pro-native rights and stuff, there is a tendency to see “Native Americans” as one group, which was uniformly one way from time immemorial until 1492 and then a second way (sad and poor) from 1492 onward. The main contribution towards Awareness that not all native nations are the same in even minimally mainstream discourse in the past 15 years or so has been telling people not to use the term “spirit animal,” partly due to concerns about cultural appropriation but also partly because Twitter discourse warriors are apparently unfamiliar with the concept of an umbrella term. American Colonies instead talks a lot about the various political maneuverings of different native nations and the alliances and enmities thereof, the differences in the ways they resisted, traded with, and sometimes allied with the Spanish, French, and British empires, and the ways they exploited intra-European enmities just as the European empires exploited various intra-Native American tensions. I’m not saying this book is predominantly or even largely about Native American history or viewpoints, but it makes an effort to not reduce them to picturesque little backdrops to the drama of grand European conquest, and as such it made me think about how little I really know about Native American civilizations and how unconscionable that is given that I have lived here my entire life.
This book also doesn’t pussyfoot around the almost total centrality of profit to the European colonial projects. While many of the people involved in these projects were motivated, in whole or in part, by genuine beliefs in other things–mainly religion, science, and nationalism–these colonies were often largely and sometimes wholly commercial projects. Many of the initial colonies were settled by corporations before coming under control of the associated European crown, and the most common motivation for settlers to rebel against the orders of their home countries was when the governments back in Europe tried to mess with their ability to make money. Murder, theft, enslavement, abduction, lying, cheating, smuggling, and every vice or crime you could possibly think of was transformed into an inalienable right on the part of colonizers to set themselves up with land and money. Despite a lot of high-minded rhetoric otherwise (which was also there from the beginning), we are all living with this legacy of hypercommercial violence to this day, as anyone who’s looked at the news lately can see.
We did one chapter a week for 20 weeks, which means that I’ve already discussed a lot of my thoughts on this book, at least on a chapter by chapter basis. I’m trying to come up with more holistic thoughts for the last class. Here are a few as such:
The book does a very good job of not centering the British as the, like, main characters of what would later become the United States. The book also doesn’t limit itself to only discussing what would later become the United States, as the whole of both American continents were subjected to various overlapping imperial colonization projects that would only much, much later firm up to today’s national and state borders. So we got to learn a lot more about the Spanish in North America, the French, the English outside of the “thirteen colonies” that would later rebel, the Dutch, and even an interesting segment near the end on Russian Alaska, which I had not previously known anything about. The book also doesn’t shy away from talking about just how brutal colonization was and how delusional and self-serving these imperial “civilizing” missions were, nor does it reduce the native population to one-dimensional, helpless innocents.
The book’s discussion of native nations and their political, cultural, and military developments–both before and after European contact–is a real strength here, at least compared to most US history textbooks, and really makes me want to read more Native American history. Among non-native Americans, even among ones who intend to be pro-native rights and stuff, there is a tendency to see “Native Americans” as one group, which was uniformly one way from time immemorial until 1492 and then a second way (sad and poor) from 1492 onward. The main contribution towards Awareness that not all native nations are the same in even minimally mainstream discourse in the past 15 years or so has been telling people not to use the term “spirit animal,” partly due to concerns about cultural appropriation but also partly because Twitter discourse warriors are apparently unfamiliar with the concept of an umbrella term. American Colonies instead talks a lot about the various political maneuverings of different native nations and the alliances and enmities thereof, the differences in the ways they resisted, traded with, and sometimes allied with the Spanish, French, and British empires, and the ways they exploited intra-European enmities just as the European empires exploited various intra-Native American tensions. I’m not saying this book is predominantly or even largely about Native American history or viewpoints, but it makes an effort to not reduce them to picturesque little backdrops to the drama of grand European conquest, and as such it made me think about how little I really know about Native American civilizations and how unconscionable that is given that I have lived here my entire life.
This book also doesn’t pussyfoot around the almost total centrality of profit to the European colonial projects. While many of the people involved in these projects were motivated, in whole or in part, by genuine beliefs in other things–mainly religion, science, and nationalism–these colonies were often largely and sometimes wholly commercial projects. Many of the initial colonies were settled by corporations before coming under control of the associated European crown, and the most common motivation for settlers to rebel against the orders of their home countries was when the governments back in Europe tried to mess with their ability to make money. Murder, theft, enslavement, abduction, lying, cheating, smuggling, and every vice or crime you could possibly think of was transformed into an inalienable right on the part of colonizers to set themselves up with land and money. Despite a lot of high-minded rhetoric otherwise (which was also there from the beginning), we are all living with this legacy of hypercommercial violence to this day, as anyone who’s looked at the news lately can see.
