Crossroads of Empire: The Middle Colonies in British North America

Abstract

Scholars have long defined the middle colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania by what they are not. With their distinct settlement histories, multiple native populations, ethnically diverse settler populations, and contentious politics, the middle colonies never fit the tidy characterizations of Puritan New England or the descriptions of a racialized slave South. Instead, scholars such as Patricia U. Bonomi cited pluralism, especially in politics, as the defining quality of this region. But still scholars wondered, could the messiness of pluralism and the contention generated by diversity really define a region's identity? Do these colonies form a region at all? Ned C. Landsman answers these questions in the affirmative in this informative, nicely written synthesis. “Middle colonies” is more than just a term of convenience; rather, with a distinctive geography dominated by inland waterways offering access into the interior, a common history rooted in the Atlantic world and the competing imperial powers (the English, French, and Dutch) who shaped it, and with ethnically and racially diverse populations, the middle colonies “filled a distinct niche within a world of empires” (p. 5). In seven chapters, Landsman describes how that niche was constructed, the people, institutions, ideas, and experiences that shaped it, and the conflicts that reconfigured it in the eighteenth century.