| Author: | Alan Taylor |
| Language: | English |
| Pub Date: | November 12, 2001 |
| Publisher: | Viking Press |
| Pages: | 526 |
American Colonies: The Settling of North America is a book about early American history by Alan Taylor, first published on November 12, 2001, by Viking Press.[1] It is the first volume of the Penguin History of the United States.
The book is divided into three major parts: "Encounters", "Colonies", and "Empires".[2] These sections discuss, respectively, the colonial encounter between European settlers and the Indigenous peoples in North America, including through colonial projects such as New Spain; colonies such as the New England Colonies and the province of Carolina; and imperial domains including New France and British America. American Colonies rejects American exceptionalism, focusing on slavery and the displacement and depopulation of Indigenous peoples.[3] It employs the methods of social history and environmental history, among other approaches.[4]
Andrew Cayton describes the book as a "balanced synthesis" of a trend in historical scholarship emphasizing the pluralism and diversity of colonial-era North America, a place in which Indigenous people of the Americas and enslaved Africans, as well as Europeans, created novel social arrangements.[5] A starred review in Publishers Weekly likewise noted that American Colonies "challenges traditional Anglocentric interpretations of colonial history by focusing more evenly on the myriad influences on North America's development".[6] Osita Nwanevu, in a retrospective review of American Colonies along with Taylor's later works American Revolutions and American Republics, noted that American Colonies is organized in a more conventional, chronological manner than the other two, which focus on themes.[7]