IN his 2019 memoir Illuminating History, Bernard Bailyn shared a story about entering the PhD program at Harvard. Fresh from service in the army, where he and countless others of his generation witnessed the unparalleled attack on the Enlightenment ideals that had ushered a liberal Europe into existence, he decided to study history. As it turned out, the army had assigned him to learn German in anticipation of the post-war reorganization and occupation of Europe. Bailyn's linguistic training and immersion in German led him, not surprisingly, into European history, especially the history of Germany. But after the war, when he arrived at Harvard, his interests had shifted. He had become fascinated with understanding the relationship between ideas and lived experience and to “exploring the connections between America and Europe, in whatever sphere.” Bailyn had settled on the early modern era where, he wrote, “one could see the connections between a distant past and an emerging modernity.” The question that drove him first into early American history became a lifelong quest. As he put it, during his career he examined individuals and documents that revealed “vital encapsulations of what would become major developments in the emergence of modernity.”1Fair enough, as Bailyn might have put it. This was the kind of large problem historians should pursue, a point he made early in his career in his provocative essay on the limitations of Fernand Braudel's study of the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century.2 But what, exactly, did Bailyn mean by modernity? Re-reading his works on the seventeenth century suggests a dramatic change in his conceptions of the modern from the 1955 publication of New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century to the appearance in 2012 of The Barbarous Years. Early on, modernity seems to have meant capitalism to Bailyn, though he did not write about this as explicitly as others.3 In his last major work, a period of positive change that Bailyn once associated with the expansion of “the civilization of the Old World” apparently disappeared, replaced by a vicious era defined by the violent collision of Europeans and Native Americans.4 The historian Daniel K. Richter, in his epic story of early America, traced the impact of what he called “ancient pasts” in colonial North America.5 Bailyn only occasionally referred to earlier periods in his work on the seventeenth century. Unlike his studies on the Revolution, and particularly his argument that the history of ancient Rome shaped the political thought of English and Anglo-American pamphleteers, Bailyn's seventeenth century stood apart. The result was a tension between his often-elegiac assessment of the Revolutionary era and his somber analysis of the seventeenth century. This tension captured the Janus-faced nature of modernity: an era that witnessed expressions of the grandest human aspirations, evident in Jefferson's statute for religious freedom (a text Bailyn revered6), but also the grim reality of mass violence, which Bailyn saw only too well in the years before he entered graduate school.A posthumous reading of a scholar's work can often feel incomplete, especially if the author of the retrospective piece knew the subject well. As I sat with The Barbarous Years after Bailyn's passing, I wanted to ask him questions. I thought about the closing section of Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) by Bailyn's then-colleague Simon Schama, who reminded readers that “historians are left forever chasing shadows” and try as we might “[w]e are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.”7 If Bailyn could have heard me, I would ask: What accounts for the difference in tone between your studies of the Revolution and The Barbarous Years?Bailyn would not be the first historian whose views of the past changed over the course of their careers. In a brilliant essay the Annaliste historian Jacques Le Goff revisited the work of Jules Michelet (d. 1874), the nineteenth-century historian of France who had become something of a muse for him. Le Goff had the advantage of examining Michelet's reworking of his own texts, enabling him to trace changes in the long-gone medievalist's interpretation of the past. Unlike Michelet, Bailyn eschewed the notion of updating or rewriting, preferring instead to reposition his work through elaboration—notably in the twenty-fifth and fiftieth anniversary editions of Ideological Origins. Absent any testimony on his part about why he had a bleaker view of the first century of English colonization in North America than his assessments of the eighteenth century, I suspect the difference in tone derived from his assessment of the evidence. What I see in Bailyn's grim view of the seventeenth century “is the reality, as it stands accused by its own testimony,” as Le Goff wrote of Michelet in a passage that rings true.8In The Barbarous Years, Bailyn relied on his literary skill to reveal memorable moments of historical action. To explicate his understanding of the meaning of modernity, I offer a brief Bailynesque view from a satellite high above of crucial events that took place in Europe and the early modern Atlantic basin in the generations leading to 1607 and the opening of The Barbarous Years. With that mise en scène, I turn to this book, which holds a possible key to understanding Bailyn's thoughts on how the modern emerged and its meaning.Across his career, though Bailyn spoke frequently about medieval Europe and used the Domesday Book as a model for an imaginative survey of colonial North America, he primarily wrote about the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not what came earlier.9 To my knowledge, he never explained the shift from a medieval to an (early) modern mindset, although there are hints in his writings that modernity originated in Europe. If I am right, then his view of the emergence of the modern aligns with other scholars.10 Other historians, including those whom Bailyn read (and assigned to students), described both medieval and early modern Europe, establishing the context for Bailyn's interpretations of the movement of Europeans and European ideas across the Atlantic.11Bailyn's early analysis of Braudel suggests he paid close attention to those who studied medieval history. Among scholars whose work he knew were historians, affiliated with Annales HSS, who developed the concept of la longue durée to describe the medieval past. They argued the need to incorporate techniques of other disciplines to understand historical arenas where human behavior seems to have changed little over long periods.12 As Braudel contended in 1958, to understand the past historians needed to embrace social scientists’ study of enduring structures, a notion he developed under the influence of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. The two spent three years together during the 1930s, at the behest of the French government, establishing the study of the social sciences and history at the University of São Paulo.13Historians drawing inspiration from the idea of la longue durée identified underlying structures that existed for generations in medieval Europe, such as the seemingly timeless rhythms of rural life before industrialization, ideas relating to nighttime, and feudalism.14 Certain institutions endured for centuries, such as monarchies and the Church, each of which developed rules to maintain order, especially in distressed times when social rules collapsed. The Inquisition proved an effective tool for suppressing masques of death as well as fornicating in church yards, helping the religious back to the Eucharist.15But the persistence of some aspects of daily life did not halt changes we associate with the emergence of the modern era: double-entry bookkeeping and marine insurance, the rise of cities, and especially the Black Death, which led to the almost immediate founding of colleges—institutions facilitating yet further changes over time.16 Long before Columbus, some Europeans traveled far beyond the continent's boundaries—Iberians to mid-Atlantic islands, Norse as far as Newfoundland, and the agents of Italian merchants to China. A consumer revolution created demand for sugar, silks, salted cod, and spices produced far from Europe.17The erosion of long-held attitudes and practices that had persisted through la longue durée accelerated across Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Infante of Portugal, also known as Prince Henry the Navigator, supported long-distance explorations from his base in the port city of Sagres. In 1441, Portuguese raiders captured two Africans, a small start to what became the world-transforming institution of the slave trade.18 Martin Luther's protest at Wittenberg in 1517 began to erode the Church from within by questioning policies such as purchasing indulgences, priestly infallibility, and clerical celibacy. The slave trade launched a revolution in labor and racial relations, on the one hand, and the Reformation began the dismantling of Roman supremacy, on the other. While other parts of the world turned inward, notably much of China in the fifteenth century,19 many Europeans embraced new possibilities. Johann Gutenberg's development of movable type and the rapid proliferation of printing presses accelerated the transition by making new ideas more widely available than ever before.During the sixteenth century, tumult swept across Europe as historians have written. Religious disputes often pitted one neighbor against another, especially in urban areas like Paris. On August 23 and 24, 1572, about a decade after Catholic-Protestant violence had initiated the so-called French war of religion, Catholic mobs in Paris assaulted Huguenots. The attackers, perhaps motivated by a rumor of a Protestant plot to kill the king, began in Paris and spread into the countryside. The attacks killed perhaps 2,000 individuals in Paris in a single week following St. Bartholomew's Day and between 10,000 and 70,000 Huguenots across the country. Women and men rioted together, and priests and civic officials blended into and energized crowds. Protestants shunned by Catholic neighbors faced their fate at the hands of ravenous mobs. A Catholic gang killed Catherine Médici's Protestant jeweler and then his son. The jeweler's wife leapt from her window to escape, only to break both legs in the fall. The crowd severed her hands to steal her gold bracelets. One observer claimed that her “hands remained in the street for several days,” where they were gnawed on by dogs. The violence was hideous, with atrocity stories circulating across Paris and the countryside. Historians identify no single cause for this bloodletting. Instead, it likely resulted, as the historian Natalie Zemon Davis has written, from “a repertory of actions, derived from the Bible, from the liturgy, from the action of political authority, [and] from the traditions of popular folk justice, intended to purify the religious community and humiliate the enemy and thus make him less harmful.” Protestants disinterred Catholic skeletons and burned them. Catholics desecrated the unburied corpses of their victims, slicing them up and parading them through the streets. “Seldom before had religion led to such carnage and so much deliberate cruelty, especially within one nation,” the historian Carlos Eire has asserted: “France became hell on earth.”20By the time Parisians were hacking each other to pieces, newborn violent passions exploded in other arenas. Queen Elizabeth's soldiers, who crossed the Irish Sea to expand her realm, massacred families on Raithlin Island in 1575 and in other places displayed the decapitated heads of deceased Catholics to undermine the morale of local communities.21 Portuguese and Spanish enslavers unleashed their own reign of terror, expanding the commerce in captured Africans from relatively small numbers to a bourgeoning trade to supply West Indian and Brazilian sugar plantations with unfree laborers. These European empire-builders initially believed they could force Indigenous Americans to perform back-breaking work in cane fields and boiling houses. But the first large-scale experiment in Western Hemisphere enslavement, attempted by the Spanish on Hispaniola, almost immediately self-destructed. Spanish enslavers captured individuals and transplanted thousands into unfamiliar lands. Arduous physical labor, separation from kin, and economic and dietary deprivation combined to destroy the Taino population. By 1514 perhaps only 26,000 Tainos survived. Smallpox arrived in December 1518 and by the early 1520s, a demographic historian concluded, “the native population, reduced to a few thousand, was heading to extinction.”22 Unable to organize sufficient labor from Indigenous communities, Europeans expanded their use of enslaved laborers, from the mid-Atlantic islands to the Western Hemisphere.23The first century after Europeans’ arrival in the Western Hemisphere—not counting the earlier, small-scale migration of Norse to Newfoundland—produced more than slavery, of course. An ever-increasing number of books and pamphlets, as well as word-of-mouth information spread by returning mariners, cultivated an infectious curiosity among Europeans.24 Many saw the Americas as a grand market where they could shop for valuable commodities in exchange for what Europeans regarded as trinkets. Enterprising map makers created tempting landscapes of vistas they had never seen, supplementing travelers’ allegedly honest accounts of distant climes with pictures of fur-bearing animals, brazilwood, pearls, and willing trading partners.25Slow off the mark, northern Europeans began to investigate and lay claim to some of the western shores of the Atlantic. The Venetian explorer Giovanni Caboto (or John Cabot), who worked under the aegis of Henry VII, explored the Northwest Atlantic basin, though neither his actions nor his son Sebastian's did much to advance English interests. Indeed, the younger Cabot soon migrated to Spain to facilitate Iberian goals in the Atlantic.26 Within a generation, the Breton explorer Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence River. He encountered two large, prosperous Iroquoian cities, Stadacona and Hochelaga. Despite the fact that the inhabitants of these communities could have killed him and his crew, Cartier, like Columbus, erected crosses and claimed vast territory for the King of France. He returned twice, as did other French, though by the early 1540s French desire for the St. Lawrence waned.27The English became more interested in the Americas in the 1570s when the brash and arrogant Martin Frobisher went in search of the fabled Northwest Passage, the quickest water route to the South Sea (the modern Pacific Ocean). During his voyage of 1576, he and his men believed they had discovered gold in Nunavut, prompting his backers to support a flotilla of seventeen ships to establish a mining colony there in 1578. They brought back 200 tons of rock. An assayer termed it worthless. The English used it to build walls and pave roads. For the moment they gave up searching for the passage—though not before Frobisher named the imagined passageway for himself.28Within a decade, Sir Walter Raleigh, one of Elizabeth's favorites, organized an exploratory venture to the outer banks of modern Carolina. In 1585, on the second English mission to the region, the young mathematician Thomas Harriot and the talented artist John White created a detailed report about the region and its resources. Though the last group of English colonists to Roanoke disappeared by 1590, White's and Harriot's reports from 1585, one in words and the other in pictures, tantalized Europeans with American resources to be harvested: fish, lumber, furs, silkgrass, and Natives’ souls. By century's end, these enticements, alongside the efforts of intrepid promoters of English colonial schemes, began to reap rewards. More than a century after Bartholomew Columbus failed to convince Henry VII that Britons should create colonies in North America, Elizabethan promoters concluded that America would solve England's most pressing social problem—its “many thousands of idle persons” and “masterless men” who threatened the social order. Once in North America, these migrants would provide new markets for English manufactured goods. At the same time, merchants would import natural resources and make themselves rich. These economic gains mattered, but so did religious and cultural benefits: the English, by establishing a permanent presence in North America, would halt the spread of Roman religion.29The stream of Europeans bound for the Americas remained far smaller in the sixteenth century than the torrent it would later become, but those organizing overseas ventures managed to make the conquest and colonization of North America seem possible. This movement of people, itself part of the transition toward modernity Bailyn observed, began before any English colonists landed at Jamestown. Earlier cultural practices traveled too. As Richter wrote just a year before publication of The Barbarous Years, ideas “[h]oned in late medieval campaigns in places such as Moorish Granada and Celtic Ireland” and then exported to the West Indies, New Spain, and the Chesapeake produced “patterns of ruthless violence, enslavement, and oppressive rule of indigenous peoples,” and thereby laid “an ugly base for all that would follow.”30 The opening of the Western Hemisphere for exploitation by opportunists who had often witnessed violence in Europe set the stage for the dark, violent story Bailyn brought to vivid life.The most conventional aspect of Bailyn's 2012 masterpiece was its chronological and geographical framing: North America from 1607 to 1676. But rather than see this era as one of inevitable triumph, he instead cast it as tragedy, an often-desperate story of evermore intricate and brutal relationships between Europeans, Africans, and Indigenous Americans in the territory that would become the thirteen British mainland colonies. Unlike earlier historians, who had seen in this era the planting of self-government and the creation of a refuge for those persecuted for their faith, Bailyn instead saw the epoch before 1607 as more stable and civilized than what came after. “All the people involved—native Americans, Europeans, and Africans—struggled for survival with outlandish aliens, rude people, uncultured in what mattered,” he wrote. “All—native Americans, Europeans, and Africans—felt themselves dragged down or threatened with descent into squalor and savagery. All sought to restore the civility they had once known.” Though he did not make a direct connection, Bailyn set the tone for his book by equating the modern not with enlightenment but with savagery. The meeting of disparate peoples in the Atlantic basin and in Eastern North America magnified, rather than diminished, the desire to harm others.31In some ways, The Barbarous Years brought to fulfillment ideas that Bailyn expressed in different contexts earlier. In his study of the Boston merchant Robert Keayne, for example, he dwelled on what he later called “a double bind between capitalist avarice and constrictive piety.”32 This, in many ways, has long been one way historians marked the shift from the medieval to the modern: a decline in traditional social relations, with the limits and comforts they provided, towards more explicit market values in economic relations. Certainly, the transition was not immediate. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, English colonial adventurers Sir Humphrey Gilbert in the 1580s and the wily military commander Ferdinando Gorges in the 1630s each dreamed of creating American outposts where they would preside over feudal fiefs with the authority to establish courts.33 The puritans who jousted with Keayne had their own perspective, stripping the selectman of his honors because they regarded his routine mercantile actions as self-serving and hence contrary to the collective good they sought. Yet as Philip Greven Jr.—a Bailyn graduate student—revealed in his pioneering study of Andover, Massachusetts, wealthy puritans maintained their economic advantages when they moved across the ocean and divided up their town's patent, precisely maintaining social ranks without guilt or any sense of hypocrisy even though it led to a local economy that preserved privilege.34 Any hesitation puritans felt about seeking profit also had little bearing on their exploitation of Providence Island, where grandees moved with alacrity from a labor system based on indentured servants to slavery.35 Possessing and gaining wealth were divinely sanctioned. Keayne challenged local authorities who deemed his actions self-serving. His 50,000-word last testament became a device for Bailyn, in his first published article, to expose a clash of cultures emblematic of the violent birth of the modern.36When Bailyn returned to Keayne in Illuminating History, he explained that he had approached the merchant's will in the 1950s when studies of puritanism had become a big academic business. Bailyn plunged into the sources behind Max Weber's seductive formulation about the relationship of capitalism to puritanism. That pursuit led him to R.H. Tawney's classic Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, which influenced his decision to write his dissertation (and first book) on New England's merchants. In these works, Bailyn hoped to use the emergence of English colonial society to examine tensions between capitalist motivation and Christian restraint without needing to take account of many other European cultural forces. Massachusetts, Connecticut, Plymouth, New Haven, and Rhode Island would in essence become historical laboratories enabling Bailyn to isolate the conflict between avarice and piety, and hence to witness a key moment in the emergence of modernity.37But by the time he wrote The Barbarous Years, Bailyn's view of the seventeenth century had become both more expansive and much bleaker. In some ways, he seemingly, and uncharacteristically, buried his argument in a blizzard of historical details, what he called “studies within stories,” a technique he derived from his reading of the historian Herbert Butterfield.38 In his opening chapter “The Americans,” he provided an overview of Indigenous peoples of Eastern North America, with particular attention to the Powhatans and the Haudenosaunee, two confederations that played crucial roles in the establishment of English colonies after 1607. He did not depict their world before 1607 as some prelapsarian paradise, a conceptualization proposed by some English travelers in the sixteenth century.39 Instead, he recognized dangers that predated the arrival of Europeans. “None were free from the threat of violence,” he wrote, “the unpredictable and uncontrollable violence of the natural world, the unfathomable violence of inner lives that exploded so strangely in dreams, the violence of border wars that erupted repeatedly, year after year, and the psychological violence endemic in cultures that demanded heroic invincibility and endurance and that familiarized children with excruciating cruelty.”40 Though he acknowledged changes in this Native world before the English arrived at Jamestown, the thrust of his argument pivoted on the notion that Indigenous communities were not in 1607 in an especially weak position despite prior epidemics produced by Old World diseases. But one “virus” had precipitated change: the fur trade. Before 1607, he argued, it had produced a “cultural malignancy” that had begun to destabilize Native communities.41Here Bailyn leapt into a century-long academic debate. In 1930, the Canadian economic historian Harold Innes argued that Native hunters pursued the trade for rational reasons because, like the Europeans they met, their commercial relations were driven forward by the desire for material gain.42 Later scholars, notably the anthropologist Adrian Tanner and the historian Calvin Martin, argued that sub-Arctic peoples linked the trade to a specific aspect of Native culture. As Tanner and Martin saw the situation, the eagerness with which Crees and others abandoned traditional restraints on killing animals eroded because the keepers of these animals, the supernatural deities that controlled their movements and allowed hunters to succeed, had violated their sacred contract with people. Tanner, working in the field, and Martin, in the archive, concluded that sub-Arctic peoples believed that humans would be healthy if they took only the game they needed to survive. If they did so, then the deities would keep the world healthy. But when European diseases arrived, illness spread among Indigenous peoples. Unable to identify Europeans as the source of scourges, Natives focused their rage on fur-bearing animals to punish them in what Martin memorably called a “holy war.” From this reading, the historic fur trade was less a result of what an economist might deem rational choice behavior and instead a by-product aimed at disposing of the carcasses of enemies taken in religious conflict.43 After the publication of Martin's book, historians and anthropologists attacked his argument as resting on faulty interpretations of Native behavior.44One could argue that the real effects of the fur trade had not yet become visible by 1607. Indeed, the historian William Cronon wrote that the overkilling of animals was a result of the arrival of English colonists in New England in the seventeenth century, an ecological catastrophe driven by the inexorable logic of unrestrained capitalism—another example, one might argue, of puritans assailing a merchant like Keayne while encouraging destructive, self-enriching exploitation of limited natural resources.45But even though the influence of the fur trade was far greater after 1607, Bailyn was certainly correct that earlier developments had already altered Native communities. Some of the change reflected politics independent of Europeans. The rise of Wahunsonacock's Powhatan confederacy depended on his political acumen, which resulted in the expansion of his authority across perhaps thirty Native communities in the Chesapeake. He understood that the way to power was to gain resources and then redistribute them, a classic example of patron-client politics. As his power grew, so too did his family. One colonist claimed that he had one hundred wives. While that number might be exaggerated, his polygamous relationships allowed him to place children across the Powhatan landscape. Living in communities along the tributaries of modern Chesapeake Bay, the werowance's children became his political agents, solidifying his control over the movement of resources. His pre-1607 experience shaped his approach to the English. He saw the newcomers not as conquerors but as the representatives of a new client state. He would prevail over them as he had dominated others. He apparently saw the marriage of Pocahontas as part of his larger strategy. When Sir Thomas Dale, who had arrived as high marshall in 1611 and eventually became governor, wanted to marry another of Wahunsonacock's daughters in 1614, the werowance refused. But, as the colonial secretary Ralph Hamor reported their discussion, he told the Englishman that when Pocahontas “dies he will have another child of mine.”46Wahunsonacock's death in 1618, the year after his daughter Pocahontas died, brought the ascension of his brother Opechancanough—and another sign of the importance of developments before 1607. As a child known as Paquiquineo, the future Powhatan leader had been captured and taken to Spain in 1561 where, following a model that Columbus had designed soon after arriving in the Caribbean, his captors hoped he would convert to Christianity and learn the language of a nation bent on expanding from the Caribbean north to the Chesapeake. Christened as Don Luís, the young man returned to his homeland in 1570. The following February he left his colonial hosts, who were establishing a Jesuit mission in the area, and returned with other Indigenous, likely people who would later be among the Powhatans. These Natives murdered the missionaries, putting a temporary end to European colonial expansion in their territory.This experience presumably remained in Opechancanough's mind when he reshaped Powhatan practices after 1618. Unlike Wahunsonacock, Opechancanough's political instincts convinced him the English had overstayed their welcome and must leave. He tried to provoke their departure on March 22, 1622 when he organized a Powhatan rebellion against the newcomers. The English responded to the “massacre” with a vengeance. The warfare of 1622 to 1624 eclipsed the violence of the English settlement's first troubled decade. Though the English prevailed, the now bankrupt Virginia Company lost its charter in 1624. In 1628, Matthias Merian, working in the engraving shop launched by de Bry in 1590, produced a searing image of the uprising (Bailyn used a 1634 version in Barbarous Years). This image, which did not appear in an English-language work at the time, provided visual testimony of the collapse of civility after 1607.47The tone of The Barbarous Years is decidedly darker than much of Bailyn's earlier work, especially the 1992 version of Ideological Origins with its long concluding chapter on the writing and ratification of the United States Constitution. Bailyn labeled that piece “Fulfillment,” the final stage of a revolution he had traced in an effort to see, as he reminded readers in Illuminating History, the relationship between formal ideas and lived experience. There was an optimism to his work on political ideas, though not a celebration. Instead, as he had written in 1973, he had come to understand how ideologies worked from the analyses of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz.48 For w