Anglicizing America: Empire, Revolution, Republic ed. by Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Andrew Shankman, David J. Silverman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Anglicizing America: Empire, Revolution, Republic ed. by Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Andrew Shankman, David J. Silverman Alan Tully Anglicizing America: Empire, Revolution, Republic. Edited by Ignacio Gallup-diaz, Andrew Shankman, and David J. Silverman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 320pp. $55.00 (cloth). In April 2013 the McNeil Center of Early American Studies hosted a short conference in celebration of John M. Murrin, longtime faculty member, now emeritus, of Princeton University’s History Department and stalwart supporter of the McNeil Center since its inception as the Philadelphia Center in 1978. Former students of Murrin fittingly focused the program and the resulting Anglicizing America volume of essays around the theme that both informed and served as a spring-board [End Page 350] for much of his scholarship dating from his 1966 Yale doctoral dissertation, “Anglicizing an American Colony: The Transformation of Provincial Massachusetts”—sometimes referred to as the most cited and influential unpublished dissertation dealing with early American history. For Murrin, what he called “Anglicization” was that process by which diverse English colonies in North America, from the late seventeenth century through the immediate pre-Revolutionary years became “increasingly more alike, expressing a shared Britishness in their political and judicial systems, material culture, economies, religious systems and engagement with empire” (p.1). This sweeping Anglicization, he argued, gave coherence and direction to early American history, which with various mutations continued through the Revolution and on into the early decades of national history. John Murrin’s intellectual accomplishments are certainly worthy of celebration. For the last four decades of the twentieth century, his has been one of the truly worthwhile voices reflecting on the history of early America. When Murrin spoke out at conferences and colloquia, and in the sixty-odd articles and the textbook synthesis he wrote, he was always worth listening to. Over the years, he mastered a great deal of the raw archival material of early American history, confronted, interpreted, and built upon a superb knowledge of an increasingly rich historical literature, and generously shared wonderful turns of imagination and originality that could instigate debate and inspire, animate, and challenge others to stretch their reach. He took some delight in shaking both peers and students out of the comfort of familiar narratives. It is in this spirit that some of Murrin’s students have authored essays in this collection. The editors articulate their collective desire to take their mentor’s Anglicization insights beyond mainland colonial America, where Murrin had built his case, forward in time within the national American narrative, as well as more widely into both the multi-empired, diversely colonized, and ethnically and racially complex Atlantic World, and the intersecting American borderlands that evinced a multitude of Native American practices and perspectives. This, however, is not easily done. Once we extend the Anglicization conceptualization in time and space, the framework can easily become either so elastic as to lose its sharpness and salience or so rigid that it fails to acknowledge truly important developments or dimensions that are an inescapable part of the larger canvasses. The strongest parts of this collection are, with two exceptions, in the first part of the book. Murrin’s own introductory essay from 1974 is, as so many of his essays are, concise and clearly articulated, with a through-line emphasizing how Anglicization became a dominant shared [End Page 351] characteristic of the still diverse but maturing mainland North American colonies that lasted into the Revolution and beyond. Andrew Shankman builds on this piece with a valuable synthesis of more recent scholarship that thoroughly demonstrates the continuing relevance of Murrin’s insight. Thereafter, however, because the Anglicization framework is simply not the most fruitful way of framing the issues they choose to explore, even the best essays lose some of their punch. For example, Geoffrey Plank’s essay on early American warfare, which is both edifying and provocative, really juxtaposes North American military practices with those of Europe. The strut of eighteenth-century colonial militia officers may have been British, but the evolution of practices of warfare belong within a broader conceptual framework that at the very least substitutes “Europeanization” for “Anglicization.” As he has done elsewhere, Simon Newman adds...