BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

Gaskill (Early Modern History/Univ. of East Anglia; Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction, 2010, etc.) studies the effects of 17th-century colonization on three generations of English in both England and America.

The first wave of sailors and planters failed abysmally. The settlements of Roanoke, Virginia, and Sagadahoc, Maine, proved that sailors are not planters and vice versa. Jamestown lasted longer and managed to export some tobacco, which King James I hated. The attempts at civilian plantations on the Irish model failed due to the great distance, cost, risk and political differences. The second wave he refers to as saints; those who sought freedom of religion by imposing their own. The Virginia territory did not succeed as well as the Puritans in New England, as they attempted to create individual estates and empires. The Massachusetts Bay Company concentrated on family units and communities, and their self-sufficiency and strict religious rules gave them the edge. As America struggled to survive by exporting fur (beaver quickly exhausted), cod and timber, England was looking to expand its empire and global influence. The Caribbean sugar islands of Jamaica and Barbados succeeded brilliantly but were entirely dependent on the African slave trade. In Virginia, class differences revealed that no one knew how best to do a job, and they couldn’t even decide how to properly assign certain tasks. Gaskill is nothing if not thorough, and the book contains an overload of individual tales of horrendous sea crossings, hard winters, sickness and failure. Finally, in the third wave, the warriors came to establish order, setting out to annihilate the Indian populations and take their land. In enforcing the Navigation Acts and collecting customs duties and taxes, they also sowed the seeds of revolution.

A comprehensive history of America’s colonists, who struggled to separate while remaining English, and the English, who just wanted a cash cow.