Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776

Two important arguments appear in this ambitious work. Butler satisfactorily shows that a distinctive New World society had already emerged before the Revolutionary War, rooted in English culture but incorporating other vital elements. His other main point, that the 13 colonies comprised the first modern society, is intriguing but ultimately unpersuasive. His 1770 cutoff point is on the far side of too many crucial modern developments: the Industrial and Democratic Revolutions, the demographic transition, and the full impact of the Enlightenment. A better choice for First Moderns is Victorian Britain. Along with the above criteria, that society relied on fossil fuels; managed public health; had mass media, communication and transit, companionate marriage and public opinion in the true sense (hence the media). Becoming America is thus not wholly convincing but thoughtful nonetheless. On each nation, classics still repay attention: cf. R. Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life." On modern Britain, see R. Williams, "The Long Revolution."

Jon Butler, well-known as a scholar of early American religion, broadens his area of concern in "Becoming America" to ask fundamental questions about the formation of American identity in the colonial era. In this book Butler traces a significant alteration in social, cultural, political, and economic perspectives in America between 1680 and 1770. He eschews discussion both of the early years of British America and the immediate origins of the American Revolution so common in historical texts in favor of this "middle period" which is usually passed over in traditional accounts. The result is a fascinating portrait of a people in flux, no longer dependent on the "mother country" but not yet independent. As he writes in the introduction: "The transformations occurring between 1680 and 1770 made the term `America' increasingly indelible. They made the direction of American history unmistakable, even if they did not make it inevitable" (p. 4). Butler suggests that three major interpretive approaches have dominated colonial history, and in every case "Becoming America" is an attempt to move beyond them. First, he noted that historians have tended to concentrate on the story of the earliest British settlements in North America before 1650, especially Puritan New England and Virginia. In so doing, they gave short shrift to the middle colonies and the period after the first generation of the colonies and before the strife with England that led to revolution. Second, a younger generation of historians in the 1970s began to explore the history of the Chesapeake and the Carolinas, employing quantitative methods, emphasizing society and ethnicity, and analyzing the development of both unique political and economic institutions. Finally, a school of historical thought has emerged in the last twenty-five years that emphasizes the "Europeanization" of eighteenth century America and the rise of a "deferential," material society seeking to replicate the perceived finest aspects of European culture. For Butler, who has admirably synthesized various studies representing these various interpretations, there are important truths in each approach but none offer a satisfying whole. He argues that what emerged in America by 1770 was a "modern society" in every sense of the word. It possessed, in his analysis, the five central traits of such a society: entrance into the international marketplace, a broad religious heritage with an overarching acceptance of other belief systems, a political system in which a wide range of groups participated, and overarching acceptance of ethnic and cultural diversity, and a "penchant for power, control, and authority of humanity and nature that brooked few limitations" (p. 2). Having established what he views as the core ingredients of a "modern society" Butler then lays out his argument for assigning the British colonies in America that status. His chapters deal with peoples, economy, politics, things material, and things spiritual a

In this gracefully written book, Jon Butler in Becoming America "traces the enormous social, economic, political, and cultural changes that created a distinctively modern and, ultimately, "American" society in Britain's mainland colonies between 1680 and 1770." (2) With straightforward prose refreshingly free of jargon, Butler shows that the American colonies developed into surprisingly modern entities by the eve of the Revolution. In separate chapters, he details five major characteristics of American modernity in support of this claim: ethnic and national diversity; complex economies; "large-scale participatory politics"; religious pluralism; and "the modern penchant for power, control, and authority" over both their environment and other human beings. This change from primitive 17th century outposts of Britain's colonial empire to "complex and variegated" (3) colonies by the mid 18th century is what Butler terms the "Revolution before 1776." By 1770, America was anything but a homogeneous society in terms of its population, particularly when compared to Europe. Butler notes that Indians and Europeans "lived side by side" (15) in most rural areas of the colonies. Religious, economic and cultural strife forced many in Europe to immigrate to the British mainland colonies, while after 1680 the American colonies "became a haven for non-English Europeans." (20) Butler points to a variety of newcomers-Jews, Scots-Irish, French Huguenots, Germans and Swiss-who settled all over America to make the New World a mix of ethnic groups, which "predicted the growing importance of ethnicity in America" which continues to the present. (25) Butler also details the "horrific suffering" of Africans, forced to America by the burgeoning slave trade at the end of the 17th century. Writing sensitively about the plight of these enslaved blacks, he also notes that their influx "recast the seventeenth-century colonies and [became] the American future." (36) Not only was America's population diverse, so was its religious composition. "Colonial American religion," Butler concludes, was "varied and rich between 1680s and the American Revolution." (185) This "religious pluralism and vitality," far more extensive than was characteristic of Europe, has been "identified as the very soul of modern American culture" he concludes. Butler also points to ministers like George Whitefield as being modern, in their celebrity status, individualism and "nondenominational, media-conscious[ness]." Butler points to the diverse and complex economies of the British colonies in America as evidence of their modernity, though he is careful not to ignore the growing poverty and inequality in New World.. Colonists "took command" of their commercial life and shaped it into a "notably autonomous economy," (51) especially in their agricultural pursuits, in which farming became more commercial after the 1680s. This new emphasis on the market was accompanied by diversification. Similarly