January and February – Seeds of Rebellion Part 1
Until the 1960s, American colonial history focused narrowly on English-speaking men along the Atlantic seaboard, portraying a triumphalist narrative of “American exceptionalism.” This conventional story treated women as passive, Indians as primitive obstacles, and African slaves as unfortunate aberrations in an otherwise uplifting tale of expanding English freedom and prosperity. Spanish, French, Dutch, and Russian colonies were dismissed as hostile, irrelevant backdrops to the English settlements that supposedly spawned the United States.
This narrative placed “American” history as beginning in 1607 at Jamestown, spreading slowly westward to the Appalachians, and ignoring lands like Alaska and Hawaii until much later. While this simplification contains partial truths – many English colonists did achieve greater land ownership, prosperity, and social mobility than possible in hierarchical, impoverished England – it excludes the complex realities of women, enslaved Africans, Native peoples, and rival empires that shaped the colonial experience. This appealing but incomplete narrative persists in popular culture despite historians’ efforts to present a more comprehensive, diverse account of early America.
In an era when Americans fiercely debate whose stories belong in history textbooks, Alan Taylor’s American Colonies: The Settling of North America offers a sobering reminder: the fight over who controls the narrative is nothing new. For three centuries before the Revolution, indigenous nations, European empires, and African peoples struggled not just for land and resources, but for the power to define what “America” would become.
In his precise and detailed opening chapter, Taylor provides a great deal of highly speculative information concerning the existing Native populations of the Americas. Long thought of as unchanging, new discoveries through archeology and anthropology have shown that the Native American cultures had a long and complicated history in the centuries before 1492.
Taylor opens his account of Spanish colonization with the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in 1519, a city of perhaps 200,000 people – larger than any European city save Constantinople – about to be shattered by Spanish invasion. This image of a sophisticated civilization on the brink captures the book’s central insight: American history is a story of multiple advanced societies colliding, not civilization bringing light to wilderness.
The Historian Behind the Synthesis
Alan Taylor, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and specialist in early American history, published this volume in 2001 as part of the Penguin History of the United States series. His perspective matters because he belongs to a generation of historians who fundamentally reconceptualized colonial America. Where earlier scholars focused narrowly on the thirteen English colonies that became the United States, Taylor takes a continental approach, examining Spanish, French, Dutch, Russian, and Swedish colonies alongside English settlements. Trained in social history and influenced by Native American studies, environmental history, and Atlantic World scholarship, Taylor writes from a position that refuses to see American history as exceptional or inevitable. His work reflects decades of scholarly effort to decenter triumphalist narratives and take seriously the perspectives of colonialism’s victims and participants alike.
The Core Argument: Contingency Over Destiny
Taylor’s central interpretation dismantles the notion that North America was destined to become an English-speaking, Protestant nation devoted to liberty. Instead, he argues that colonial outcomes remained genuinely uncertain for centuries, shaped by disease, environmental factors, indigenous resistance, and the particular economic and religious motivations of different colonizers. “The varied peoples of early America had radically different goals, which they pursued with mixed results over three centuries of conflict and negotiation,” Taylor writes, emphasizing that what we call American history represents merely one possible outcome among many that seemed equally plausible at various moments.
The book challenges readers to recognize that indigenous peoples weren’t simply reacting to European arrival but were “making their own history” by forming strategic alliances, adapting to new technologies, and leveraging European rivalries to their advantage. Taylor insists that we cannot understand colonial America without recognizing Native Americans as central actors whose choices profoundly shaped events. Similarly, he argues that African slaves, despite their bondage, “became essential actors in the creation of colonial societies,” maintaining cultural practices and exercising whatever agency circumstances allowed.
The Author’s Voice: Complexity Without Judgment
Taylor’s prose combines scholarly precision with narrative power. Describing the Spanish conquest, he notes that while Cortés commanded only a few hundred men, “he benefited from invisible, unintended, and unanticipated allies: the microbes that carried epidemic diseases.” This formulation captures Taylor’s insistence on multi causal explanations that include biological and environmental factors alongside human agency.
His treatment of English colonization avoids both celebration and condemnation. Of Virginia, he writes: “The English came to Virginia as violent intruders intent on subordinating, displacing, or destroying the Indians who claimed the land.” Yet he also notes that “most colonists were themselves desperate people, escaping poverty and seeking opportunities denied them in England.” This even-handedness characterizes the entire book, as Taylor seeks to understand rather than judge, to complicate rather than simplify.
Perhaps most memorably, Taylor describes the Columbian Exchange as creating “a new world – indeed, new worlds – compounded from the unintended mixing of plants, animals, microbes, and peoples on an unprecedented scale.” This image of unintended consequences and biological transformation running ahead of human intentions recurs throughout the narrative.
Dialogue with the Field
Taylor’s work builds upon and synthesizes several historiographical traditions. He shares with Alfred Crosby’s “Ecological Imperialism” an emphasis on disease and environmental transformation as historical forces. His continental perspective echoes Herbert Bolton’s early twentieth-century call for a “borderlands” approach, though Taylor is far more critical of Spanish colonialism than Bolton.
Where traditional histories like Samuel Eliot Morison’s celebrated Puritan New England as the seedbed of American democracy, Taylor presents the Puritans as religious extremists whose “intolerance exceeded that of the English establishment they had fled.” His interpretation aligns with more recent scholars like Jill Lepore and James Brooks, who have emphasized colonial violence and indigenous perspectives.
Taylor also engages implicitly with the “Chesapeake School” of historians like Edmund Morgan and Kathleen Brown, who revealed how Virginia’s tobacco economy and racial slavery developed together. However, he places these regional stories within a broader hemispheric context, showing how Caribbean sugar colonies pioneered the brutal plantation system that mainland colonies would later adopt.
What We’ve Learned Since 2001
The two decades since publication have deepened rather than overturned Taylor’s interpretations. DNA evidence has confirmed the devastating scale of disease mortality among indigenous peoples, with some studies suggesting population declines of 90 percent or more – even worse than Taylor estimated. Archaeological work has continued revealing the sophistication of pre-Columbian societies, from Cahokia’s urban complexity to Amazonian landscape engineering.
Recent scholarship has further emphasized indigenous agency and survival. Books like Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire and Kathleen DuVal’s The Native Ground have shown powerful Native American polities dominating regions well into the nineteenth century, extending Taylor’s argument about indigenous power. Meanwhile, historians of slavery like Stephanie Smallwood and Vincent Brown have illuminated enslaved Africans’ cultural resilience and resistance in ways that complement Taylor’s brief treatment.
Climate history has also advanced, with research showing how the Little Ice Age affected colonial outcomes and how indigenous land management practices had shaped the “wilderness” Europeans thought they discovered. These developments enrich rather than challenge Taylor’s framework.
Why Read This in 2026?
In our current moment of contentious debates about how to teach American history, Taylor’s book offers invaluable perspective. It demonstrates that taking seriously the histories of indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans doesn’t diminish American history – it makes that history richer, more accurate, and more interesting. The book shows that the colonial past was genuinely multicultural, not through modern celebration but through conquest, coercion, and negotiation.
For readers seeking to understand how racial inequality became embedded in American society, Taylor traces slavery’s development with clarity and moral seriousness. For those curious about why the United States exists as an English-speaking nation when Spanish colonizers arrived first and French settlers often had better relations with Native Americans, Taylor explains the demographic, economic, and military factors that determined outcomes.
Most fundamentally, American Colonies teaches readers to think continentally and hemispherically, to see American history as connected to global processes rather than exceptional and isolated. In an increasingly interconnected world, this perspective seems more relevant than ever. Taylor’s work reminds us that the land we call America has always been contested ground where different peoples pursued competing visions of the future – and that understanding this contested past is essential for navigating our contested present.
A Note on This Series
This journey through Revolutionary history is as much about the evolution of historical understanding as the Revolution itself. History isn’t static – each generation reinterprets the past through its own concerns, asking different questions and prioritizing different sources. By reading these books in dialogue across 250 years, we’ll witness how scholarship evolves, how narratives get challenged, and how forgotten stories resurface.
This isn’t about declaring one interpretation “right” and another “wrong,” but appreciating the richness that emerges when multiple perspectives illuminate the same transformative moment. These books won’t provide definitive answers – history rarely does – but they equip us to think more clearly about how real people facing genuine uncertainty chose independence, how ideas had consequences, and how the work of creating a more perfect union continues. As we mark this anniversary, we honor the Revolutionary generation by reading deeply, thinking critically, and engaging seriously with both the brilliance and blind spots of what they created.
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