Converging Worlds

Communities and Cultures in Colonial America

Louise A. Breen, Louise A. Breen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136596735
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Providing a survey of colonial American history both regionally broad and "Atlantic" in coverage, Converging Worlds presents the most recent research in an accessible manner for undergraduate students.

With chapters written by top-notch scholars, Converging Worlds is unique in providing not only a comprehensive chronological approach to colonial history with attention to thematic details, but a window into the relevant historiography. Each historian also selected several documents to accompany their chapter, found in the companion primary source reader.

Converging Worlds: Communities and Cultures in Colonial America includes:

• timelines tailored for every chapter
• chapter summaries
• discussion questions
• lists of further reading, introducing students to specialist literature
• fifty illustrations.

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Key topics discussed include:

• French, Spanish, and Native American experiences
• regional areas such as the Midwest and Southwest
• religion including missions, witchcraft, and Protestants
• the experience of women and families.

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With its synthesis of both broad time periods and specific themes, Converging Worlds is ideal for students of the colonial period, and provides a fascinating glimpse into the diverse foundations of America.

For additional information and classroom resources please visit the Converging Worlds companion website at www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415964999.

Part I

BEGINNINGS

Beginning in the late fifteenth century, the peoples of Europe and the Americas, having lived in isolation from one another for thousands of years, began to interact. Prior to contact, indigenous peoples had built vibrant civilizations, created highly diverse cultures, and established trade over long distances—just like their European counterparts. Europeans did not quickly, easily, or inevitably dominate this “new” world. The inroads that they made were accomplished over many generations of contact, and depended on native peoples' decisions. From a native perspective, Europeans represented both danger and opportunity. They carried deadly diseases, harbored alien notions concerning the ownership of property, and practiced forms of agriculture and livestock raising that actually changed the land, creating, as one scholar has insightfully argued, “new worlds for all.” But Europeans also brought opportunity in the form of exotic trade goods—particularly metal items and cloth—that native peoples could use to enhance their lives or gain advantage over neighboring groups. After considering all possibilities, Indians might reject would-be colonizers, manipulate them, attend to their spiritual teachings, cohabit with them, or co-opt them into their alliance and trade systems.¹

While it may be tempting from our chronological vantage point to make generalizations about Europeans coming to dominate their various new worlds, the reality was that during the colonial period they controlled only the environs of the population “centers” they actually inhabited.² Europeans needed native peoples to teach them where valuable resources were located, to trade with them, to convey information about local diplomatic styles and the strength of nearby Indians, and to be willing to entertain talk of Christianity. Rather than producing a concise report on who “won” and who “lost” at the very end, historians have labored in recent years to understand the ways in which Europeans and Indians shaped one another's cultures, and how they together created trade and diplomatic networks that featured meaningful, significant, and in some cases preeminent, roles for native peoples.³

The three chapters that make up this section examine some of the earliest contacts from numerous vantage points. In Chapter 1, Timothy Walker explores the motives and aims of the Europeans whose navigational technologies made travel across the Atlantic possible. Europeans “discovered” unknown continents as a byproduct of efforts to gain access to Asian markets, and bent themselves to the task of finding and exploiting the resources of these regions, whether they be precious metals or lands upon which to grow profitable agricultural commodities such as sugar, rice, or tobacco—endeavors that required coerced labor, both native and African. Spiritual imperatives raised the stakes of economic competition between European powers. The Reformation, which had divided European Christians into Catholics and Protestants, led to religious wars in Europe and had a profound influence over colonizing ventures, motivating policymakers to put a premium on spreading their own fervently held forms of Christianity, whether Protestant or Catholic, to the Americas.

Although by the middle of the eighteenth century, England emerged as the main European power in North America east of the Mississippi River, Walker makes clear that this was by no means a foregone conclusion, given the scope of activities engaged in by the Spanish, French, Dutch, and Swedish. He points out too that North America was not always of central concern even to those who had substantial holdings there, such as the French, whose imperial ambitions encompassed regions in South America, the Caribbean and Africa, and the Dutch, who placed disproportionate effort on their sugar producing colonies in the Caribbean and South America. North America frequently was the sidelight to imperial strategies that spanned the globe.

While Chapter 1 provides an overview of a vast array of colonial enterprises over a long chronological sweep, the subsequent two chapters provide microscopic analyses of specific interactions between native peoples and Europeans during conquest and colonization. Heather McCrea's “Tentative Testimonies” focuses on the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs in a manner that takes into account the available narratives of as many parties to the conquest as possible, paying careful attention to their respective efforts to create a historical memory of their roles in that cataclysmic drama. While leading Spanish participants wanted to be seen as noble carriers of civility and Catholicism to a benighted subject population, native informants who recounted their experiences to Spanish priests were most intent to speak about the ways in which the region's own internal politics had played a role during Cortes's conquest—a view that would highlight their own agency as politically astute actors rather than pitiable victims. Interpreting the various sources available is hard, “tentative” work, as McCrea puts it, because the voices of native peoples were filtered through the pens of Spaniards, mostly clergymen, who did not share the agenda of their informants and who may have influenced them in ways that prevented the full message from being transmitted, and silenced some issues.

To complicate matters even further, the Spanish themselves were not all of one mind. The priest Bartholomé de las Casas, for example, harshly criticized the abuses that native peoples suffered at the hands of military men, local authorities, and encomenderos who received grants of Indian labor. Known as the “black legend,” this unfavorable vision of the conquest played into the hands of foreign critics and competitors who, in an age of religious warfare, feared Spain's ability to fuel its military might with silver from a newfound empire. Narratives about the interaction with native peoples in all cases had broad implications for participants' sense of collective identity. The “black legend,” as a case in point, was useful to those who wished to supplant the Spanish in the New World, particularly the English, who claimed in their own narratives to be more virtuous in their dealings with native peoples.

As Michael L. Oberg shows in his chapter “Indians of North America: First Encounters,” however, no European power had a monopoly on virtue in its dealings with native peoples. All were interested in gathering profit from New World ventures, guaranteeing the security of their claims, strengthening their respective empires, and spreading their particular brand of Christianity. These goals required the cooperation of native peoples, not their destruction, but the cultivation of partnerships between natives and newcomers should not, Oberg emphasizes, be construed as evidence of selfless generosity on the part of Europeans toward native peoples. At its heart, Chapter 3 offers intricate vignettes of contact experiences, all showing Indians as active agents in their own history, capable of making or breaking European efforts to create colonies or extract resources. The most extensively treated contact experiences in this chapter include Coronado's interactions with the Pueblos and neighboring peoples in the American southwest in 1540–1541, and the failure of his expedition to locate legendary cities of gold; the ill-fated English attempt to settle Roanoke in 1584–1587; and the interaction between the Caddos and French explorers and Spanish missionaries from the early 1680s to 1693, when the Caddos rejected the Spanish God. Like McCrea in Chapter 2, Oberg demonstrates that scholars must work to understand the colonizing process as a “two-way street,” and to read documents, often produced by Europeans, with an eye toward reconstructing the native peoples' point of view.

The three chapters of this section exemplify the complexity of the contact period, fraught as it was with contradictory motives, unlikely allies, and an incredibly diverse cast of characters. Chapter 1 provides a broad, overarching look at the many colonizing projects that stretched over the colonial period, while Chapters 2 and 3 allow us to linger and observe as natives and newcomers sized each other up and in some cases constructed narratives of their first meetings. The close reading of the available sources engaged in by the authors of Chapters 2 and 3 helps to model the process of “doing” history, where historians must work hard to uncover the perspectives of all historical actors, even those who left the fewest traces, in order to reconstruct the story of our multivalent past.

NOTES

1 On the biological and environmental changes that colonization set in motion, see Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972); Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); James H. Merrell, The Indians' New World: Catawbas and their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); and William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985).

2 The Indians' potential to shape interactions with Europeans depended on geography and geopolitical circumstances, particularly imperial wars. Historian Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), has emphasized the creation of a “middle ground” in the Great Lakes area where neither the French nor their Algonquian-speaking partners had the wherewithal to dominate the other, and so had to reach mutual accommodations, whereas Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), has explored the Arkansas Valley, a region in which Indians primarily called the shots.

3 For these principles concerning interaction between European and native peoples, see Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Calloway, New Worlds for All.

EUROPEAN AMBITIONS AND EARLY CONTACTS:
DIVERSE STYLES OF COLONIZATION, 1492–1700

1419–60	Portuguese discovery and settlement of Madeira, Azores and Cape Verde island groups.
1492	Spain defeats Muslims in Granada, expels Jews; Columbus's expedition to America.
1494	Papal-sanctioned Treaty of Tordesillas.
1517	Protestant Reformation begins with German monk Martin Luther's 95 Theses.
1520	Aztec capital Tenochtitlán (Mexico) falls to Hernando Cortés and 600 Spanish warriors.
c.1530	First enslaved African peoples brought to Portuguese and Spanish New World colonies.
1532	Inca civilization (Peru) succumbs to a Spanish force under Francisco Pizarro.
1540–42	Francisco Coronado leads Spanish expedition through modern southwest US.
1534–41	Jacques Cartier charts Newfoundland coast and the St. Lawrence River for France.
1559–65	Spanish found Pensacola and Saint Augustine and French found Fort Caroline.
1585	Dutch (United Provinces of the Netherlands) proclaim independence from Spain.
1607	Founding of the first successful English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia.
1608	Santa Fé (modern New Mexico) settled by Spanish Roman Catholic missionaries.
1608	Quebec founded by French explorer Samuel de Champlain on the St. Lawrence River.
1609	Henry Hudson claims the Hudson River region for the United Provinces.
1615	Dutch found a colonial fur trade settlement at Fort Nassau (modern Albany, NY).
1618–48	Thirty Years' War in Europe has repercussions in Atlantic world.
1620	Plymouth Colony founded by Mayflower-borne English colonists.
1621	Dutch West India Company founded to colonize Hudson River valley and exploit fur trade.
1622–31	Scotland attempts to colonize Nova Scotia (“New Scotland”).
1626	Dutch found New Amsterdam (Manhattan Island; modern New York City).
1629	Massachusetts Bay Colony chartered by English king Charles I.
1638	S...