Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture

by Jack P. Greene

In this book, Jack Greene reinterprets the meaning of American social development. Synthesizing literature of the previous two decades on the process of social development and the formation of American culture, he challenges the central assumptions that have traditionally been used to analyze colonial British American history. Greene argues that the New England declension model traditionally employed by historians is inappropriate for describing social change in all the other early modern British colonies. The settler societies established in Ireland, the Atlantic island colonies of Bermuda and the Bahamas, the West Indies, the Middle Colonies, and the Lower South followed instead a pattern first exhibited in America in the Chesapeake. That pattern involved a process in which these new societies slowly developed into more elaborate cultural entities, each of which had its own distinctive features. Greene also stresses the social and cultural convergence between New England and the other regions of colonial British America after 1710 and argues that by the eve of the American Revolution Britain's North American colonies were both more alike and more like the parent society than ever before. He contends as well that the salient features of an emerging American culture during these years are to be found not primarily in New England puritanism but in widely manifest configurations of sociocultural behavior exhibited throughout British North America, including New England, and he emphasized the centrality of slavery to that culture.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, College

302 pages, Paperback

First published October 30, 1988

About the author

Jack P. Greene is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Preface
In order to make his point about the primacy of economic pursuits in shaping American society, Greene sets up the straw man of New England declension model. As some reviewers pointed out, by the time of this book's publication few seriously held to that approach, as Greene's own conclusions in Chapter 8 reveal (see esp. Kettner in AHR). This work is valuable, it would seem, as a work of synthetic social history more than as a way to dispel the myth of New England.

Greene takes a regional approach to the social history of Colonial British America, dividing the world into four regions: New England, the Chesapeake, Britain and Ireland, The Middle Colonies and the Lower South, and The Atlantic and the Caribbean Islands. He treats the development of each region in a separate section covering the roughly 100 year period from 1660-1760. In his conclusion, he discusses the changes that drew the regions together to form the nation. The foundation of that nation was primarily an economic one for Greene. Though he doesn't rule out the importance of religion, he is anxious to exert the primacy of convergence in economic trends throughout the three regions as the 18th C progresses.

Prologue

Greene makes the interesting point that the American South is viewed as being "backward" in the 19th and 20th centuries, that it portrayed itself in the antebellum years as being above the money-grubbing of the north and that it lagged behind the north in economic development during most of the 20th century. We should not be distracted by this later period from the fact that the south was highly commercial in outlook from the founding. Maybe New England historians like George Bancroft tied all of American development back to Plymouth colony, but few today would doubt that the line of development runs equally back to Jamestown. Seeing America as a place where they could pursue their own material happiness, colonials in Jamestown was in the mainstream of American life of the time and the pursuit of economic happiness in Chesapeake is more the norm for the rest of colonial British America throughout the 18th C than theologically oriented New England. It was not until the 19th C that the South would try to distance itself from the crass commercialism of the North.

Chapter 1: Two Models of English Colonization, 1600-1660

Sets up the New England model in opposition to the Chesapeake model of economic and social development in the 17th C. Starting with the Spanish experience of conquest in America, Greene puts the Virginia Company in the context of the world of early 17th C empires. The objective of the Virginia Company was conquest and trade, not colonization and settlement. As the Spaniards in Mesoamerica, so too the British in Jamestown (1607). They were at first commercial conquerors and only later did they build societies. When they did set up agricultural endeavors, it was around tobacco culture with its intensive labor requirements. Early on the colony attracted indentured servants, single white males with few prospects in Europe. Though they may have set out with high ideals about spreading the Word of God, this was a profoundly commercial society. "Virginia was a highly exploitative society in which a few of the people who survived the high mortality had become rich and the vast majority worked in harsh conditions as servants, hoping to live long enough to work out their terms and become independent, landowning producers." (p. 12) After experiencing boom years in the 1630s and 40s, the economy stabilized and a more hierarchical society developed in the later part of the 40s and into the 50s. Moving out of the deadly estuarine zone, health improved and mortality declined as more stable families formed around a more equitable sex ratio. Greene refers to a gradual "thickening of social networks" (p. 17) By 1660, Virginia had become a more stable and stratified society, with concentrations of wealth in the hands of fewer planters.

Greene sets up New England as the foil to the Chesapeake. Plymouth (1620) was settled by families of the middling sort who were inspired by a desire to create a religious community in the New World as opposed to making a fortune. The New English came as families, not as single white male indentured servants. The sex ration was thus more equal, and population increased more as the result of native growth than immigration. New England focused initially on community building, hence the stability of the New England town in contrast to the unsettled life on the Chesapeake. Dissenters notwithstanding, New England society was remarkably homogenous in the 17th C, and the power of kinship networks was great. Throughout the first generation of settlement, patriarchal family authority preserved peace and order. New England society was intensely literate, founding colleges to educate ministers (Harvard and Yale) and producing a print culture which David Hall can mine for evidence of the World of Wonders common to elite and common society. Dedicated to a slow and organic pattern of growth, the New England world was far less differentiated in economic terms up to 1660. This was not the get rich quick society that prospered in Virginia.

Chapter 2: Reconsiderations

Based upon a consideration of scholarship in the 70s and 80s on Early Modern England, Greene contests the idea that New England was the most British of the colonies. The earlier picture of stable English villages isolated from the market has given way to the picture of Early Modern England as a far more stratified society, given over to market relations instead of sturdy yeomen farmers working to meet subsistence needs. The professions also provided avenues of mobility upward through the social classes, formerly thought to be far less permeable. British society was far less rooted than historians have often assumed. Paternalistic authority too was far less well established than once thought. Beset by low fertility rates and oriented toward the pursuit of materialistic gain in the agrarian marketplace. If all this is true, then the Chesapeake represents the mainstream of British social development instead of an aberration. In this context, New England seems reactionary and utopian, harkening back to a yeoman society that certainly didn't exist in the England they left if it ever did. What the New Englanders were trying to establish was not something that existed in the Old World. The society the puritans established was economically and socially very different from the one they left behind.

Greene then turns to Ireland, Bermuda and the West Indies. Here he finds much more to recommend similarities with Chesapeake developments in the 17th C than New England ones. The English landlords in Ireland sought to wring profits from the land, settling disbanded soldiers there to work the lands. Yet they never found the profitable staple crop to make their fortunes like the tobacco of Virginia or the Sugar of the Caribbean Islands. The lethal disease environment in Ireland killed settlers at a high rate as in Virginia and English dominated Ireland failed to develop a stable society in the 17th C. Though settled by Puritans initially, Bermuda rapidly developed a commercial orientation. Pursuing wealth through the growth of tobacco market, the Bermuda experience of high mortality rates and slow social formation was again similar to the Chesapeake. Barbados too exhibited this early commercial orientation. High mortality, sex imbalance, slow social formation and - above all - the pursuit of happiness through material acquisition in the agricultural marketplace marked the 17th C experience of Barbados. Treating white indentured callously and exploitatively, the importation of slaves to increase profits in sugar cultivation was a natural next step. As Richard Dunn has pointed out, the thriving sugar trade started in the 1650s made Barbados a prosperous commercial society by 1670.

Turning next to the social conditions of the Middle Colonies, Greene points out that despite the Quaker influence and the greater social stability brought by the settlement of PA by families, Penn himself had powerful economic goals. Unable to achieve the cohesion of New England, however, the society of Quaker yeomen farmers was far less ordered than New England. The settlement of substantial Dutch and Scandinavian populations in the colonies of New York, Delaware and the Jersies insured a diversity that was not conducive to New England-like development. This diversity only grew as immigrants from Whales, Scotland, Ireland and Germany entered the middle colonies. Socially oriented toward nuclear families, social organization proceeded more slowly in the Middle Colonies proceeded more slowly than in New England. The rise of large estates in the middle colonies worked by immigrant tenants, aided by the rise of port cities of New York and Philadelphia, secured the commercial orientation of the middle colonies.

Patterns in the Lower South in the 17th C were more like those of the Chesapeake as well. The southern part of this area, South Carolina in particular, was more of an extension of the Caribbean world than of the Chesapeake, with the materialistic and commercial motive even more prominent than in early Virginia society -- functioning as an adjunct to the West Indies for much of its early development. Searching for a profitable agricultural staple for export, South Carolinians experimented with tobacco and indigo before landing on rice cultivation in the 1690s, importing massive numbers of slaves (blacks outnumbered whites by 2 to 1 in 1720). South Carolina society was highly individualistic, competitive and socially fragmented.

Chapter 8: Convergence: Development of an American Society, 1720-1780

After recounting the different patterns of social development in the four major regions, Greene concludes by emphasizing the ways in which this social development was tending towards a more homogeneous environment for all the colonies. New England became less exceptional in the late 18th C, as health declined and along with it birth rates and the authority of the patriarchal system.

As the historians of gender in this period note, the puritan authorities were less likely to regulate male sexuality in this period and even Jonathan Edwards was caught short when he tried to discipline the sons of prominent families in the "bad books" episode of the 1740s in Northampton. The double standard was emerging over pre-marital sex. As Cornelia Dayton has explained in the Grosvenor-Sessions abortion case in Pomfret, CT, women were increasingly held of a higher standard of sexual purity as men worried more about respectability in secular society.

At the same time as New England was "declining" from its earlier position of exceptionalism, Chesapeake society was "rising", becoming more cohesive, settled, and racially united against blacks (see Edmund S. Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom). All of the other areas in this study were also moving toward greater "order, coherence, differentiation and complexity" in this period (p. 172). Greene posits a model of centripetal vs. centrifugal forces (p. 8.1) While the society of New England was becoming more centrifugal in nature, the rest of British colonial possessions were experiencing a centripetal pull.

Greene locates the source of this convergence in experience and inheritance. The experience of growth and differentiation combined with a growing Anglicization, as the influence of the metropolis on its colonies grew. Colonists participated in this growing pride at the thought of being British. In this light it is most probable that the revolutionary flame was fed by the slights of the metropolis felt by a highly sensitive colonial elite. The growth of the colonies was primarily through natural increase, rather than immigration between 1720 and 1760. After decimating the native populations and "widowing the land" in the 17th Century, the "Creole" populations of European colonies took off toward the "frontiers." There was a corresponding boom in gross economic productivity. As Menard and McCusker point out, "the gross national product (GNP) multiplied about twenty-five times between 1650 and 1770 ... sufficient to 'double income' over the period." (p. 182). The colonies were very prosperous at the time of the Revolution. Again Menard and McCusker point out that the colonies had developed a substantial degree of economic independence before the Revolution, largely freeing themselves from reliance upon foreign capital investment. While frontier expansion meant that fewer people lived in towns, urbanization also took off in this period as trading centers developed along the coast in the provincial capitols. In these trading centers, merchant elites increased in power in an increasingly socially differentiated and complex world. Yet the path to progress seems to have remained open, and there was no permanent underclass. Much more typical of this period was the middling sort of yeomen farmers, artisans, small traders and lesser professionals.

Briefly discussing the state of indentured servitude, one which he points out was not a happy estate in any section but which often proved to be temporary, he turns to the situation with slavery in the regions. Here he relies heavily on the work of Ira Berlin. Contrasting the Virginia tobacco culture with the rice culture of the lower south in the Carolinas, Berlin has shown the heavy hand of white paternalism as the guiding force in slavery's evolution in VA and the growth of black autonomy in S. Carolina as the major force in that area. Slaves in the Carolinas were able to take part in the agricultural market as they were in the Caribbean and they were able to maintain their African culture in the New World to the greatest extent of the three slave systems in North America. Slavery in the north was most commonly on small farms and in the urban environment, where slaves worked in shops, warehouses and on docks. No American colony opposed slavery at the time of the Revolution. It was in integral part of the exploitative economic system in all four regions.

The pursuit of personal economic prosperity was at the heart of the ideology of the "moral personality" in colonial America.

In this emerging secular and commercial culture, the central orientation of people in the littoral became the achievement of personal independence, a state which a man and his family and broader dependents could live 'at ease' rather than in anxiety, in contentment rather than in want, in respectability rather than meanness, and, perhaps most important, in freedom fro the will and control of other men. (p. 195)

For the colonial population this did not mean a solitary individual pursuit of gain, as prosperity was closely tied to the success of the family. This didn't mean that people didn't care about religion, or were caring less about it even. Pointing to Bonomi, Greene talks about the growing spread of churches and institutional church life in the 18th C. Commercial and religious were not separate spheres. Perhaps it was the commercial element that brought the new nation to think of itself as having a special mission. American exceptionalism has secular as well as religious roots.

Epilogue

Reemphasizes the centrality of the south to the colonial American world. Wonders how it was that southern development became peculiar in the 19th C...

[Dan Gorman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lucidly written synthesis of revisionist research (circa 1970–88, when this book came out) about colonial America. Jack Greene shows how slave agriculture, not New England-style subsistence agriculture and commerce, was the major template for British colonial development. That is, more colonies in the British Empire resembled Maryland and Virginia — heavily reliant on cash crops grown with slaves — than New England. Greene's major claim is that colonies were developing or ascending in political power, as the Chesapeake colonies did, and not "descending" from a Puritan ideal. Greene's understanding of regional economics and resistance to a Puritan-centric definition of colonial history is widely accepted in 2018, but it was novel stuff in 1988. The strength of this book now, as with Edmund Morgan's classic "American Slavery, American Freedom," is how it summarizes and interprets a mountain of economic research in terms that undergraduates and grad students new to colonial history can understand. This is a strong teaching tool, and a useful example of how to reinterpret historiographic literature.

[Olivia Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Green highlights the impact that colonial America had on each region of the colonies (Southern, Chesapeake, New England, and even Island colonies such as Bermuda and Barbados) and proves his claim of the traditional belief that the New England model of the colonies, while it is influential in the development of American culture, was not the only region that contributed to the development of the early American culture. This belief is widely taught in schools today to sugarcoat colonial America, and I really enjoyed his detailed explanation that contradicts this statement.

[Sean McGowan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jack P. Greene’s book, surely meant as an introduction to the themes he is addressing, exhibits wonderful flair and elan in the process of fleshing out the idea the idea of a “developmental model, which looks at historical change in new societies as a movement from the simple to the complex” (xii-xiii). Greene simplifies greatly and views the British settlement of the 1600s to the 1800s as one of settlers coming to an empty land – a tabula rasa – and from that sociocultural background he builds his theories on the relative social merits and economic assumptions that drive the core of this book. To wit: Greene feels strongly that the “central options that have informed the analysis of colonial British American history over the past two generations… have emphasized the preeminence or normative character of the orthodox puritan colonies of New England in the process of early modern British social development and the formation of American culture” (xi). Since historians have, in the past, used these models to make assumptions about the same success or failure of the developmental schema in the MidAtlantic, Chesapeake and Deep South colonies, discovering whether the New England colonies were preeminent or normative in any socioeconomic way is essential.

Greene begins by looking at the traditional models of English colonization, introducing very generally the Chesapeake and New England colonies he will be analyzing throughout the book. He follows with a chapter of caveats and reconsiderations, then heads into the strong structure of the text. He calls his look at New England the “Declension” or decline model, and his look at the Chesapeake the “Developmental” model, comparing the two models through the same time periods and most of the same questions. He then takes the two into consideration as he looks at the Home Country – England – and her relationship to Ireland, which was one of the first center-periphery colonization efforts of Britain. Closely following this comparison come two Variations, or looks at the Middle Colonies and Lower South, and, The Atlantic and Caribbean Islands; these are much needed as they provide an additional framework and balance to Greene’s thesis. In the final chapter, Convergence, Greene demonstrates how the framework of the Chesapeake, in particular, (and in contrast to the New England “Declension” model) provides a much more ready explanation for the continued growth and type of societal structures that grew in that area. He does feel that the colonies are variations on a theme, but that the Chesapeake from Tidewater Virginia to Northern Maryland and perhaps somewhat beyond was far more representative of England – and of the archetypal “America” that was to come by 1776 – much more so than the New England of Bridenbaugh and Breen, than has ever been acknowledged.

This is a unique perspective, and Greene argues his points well. However, this is very much an introductory book rather than a definitive volume on the subject; too much is left unsaid and too many holes and questions exist to make this book stand completely on its own. But, it is a tremendously engaging book, even when run-on sentences could use some judicious paring, and it could be wished that Dr. Greene would write a larger, more in-depth sequel to this work to fill in the gaps and theoretical quandaries. Overall, a very good and absorbing book.

[David Nichols · Rating 2 out of 5]

John Murrin predicted in his 1990 review of this book that PURSUITS OF HAPPINESS would become the standard synthesis of colonial history for grad students. Today it's useful as a guide to the state-of-the-field before the maturation of Atlantic history and the rise of Continental history. Greene focuses on the Anglophone white settlers of British North America, arguing that they sought to create an individualistic, commercial, profit-oriented society. Plantation colonies like Virginia and Carolina were the norm; the communalist settlements of Puritan New England were exceptions, and over time they evolved into a form resembling the Middle and southern colonies. Greene conducted very deep research in the contemporary secondary literature, but his thesis probably owed most to T.H. Breen, who divided the early British colonies into individualistic and communal ones, and to Richard Bushman's work on the rise of a more atomized and profit-oriented society in New England, and before that to Louis Hartz's 1955 book on American liberalism.

Today we're much more interested in connections with Europe (Greene does mention Britain and Ireland) and Africa, and the impact of the colonies on Native Americans (and vice versa). In some respects Gary Nash's RED, WHITE, AND BLACK (1974), which focused on race relations in the British and French colonies, is more relevant text today, even though modern histories tend more to emphasize the independent agency of Indians and Africans.

[Colleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book on the place of the Chesapeake as the norm for British settlement in the Atlantic World, despite a historiography that places New England at the center. His main focus throughout the book is to refute that common argument, and he makes a strong case. I'd like to actually give it 3.5 stars...it's a bit dry and jargon-heavy towards the end, and I really prefer a stronger introduction. His section on Ireland was very interesting, but I found his section on the Caribbean to be disappointing. As a Caribbeanist, of course I'm going to be nitpicky with this section, and this book was written in 1988. But, it is a great book for content, fitting for both undergrad and grads and is a useful teaching tool on a variety of levels.

[Kris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Greene argues that New England and the "declension model" is not appropriate model for how entire U.S. developed, and that the Chesapeake colonies are. However, there's too much emphasis on individualism and markets in other colonies as opposed to New England's collectivism - seems like he embraces this mythical individualism that didn't really exist. Just because those in the Chesapeake weren't as collectivist as N.E. doesn't mean they were individualistic.

[Landon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Greene's analysis provokes the readers into re-evaluating their perception as to how the Revolution succeeded. It was the diversity of colonial regions with a common goal of pursuing happiness according to their individual beliefs and actions. Must read for those who believe it was only New England or Virginia that gave the basis for American success.

[Sean Chick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Greene's argument is mostly sound, but I think he stretches it and falls for the academic trap of ignoring evidence that does not fit into his thesis. This is very apparent when he analyzes England and the Middle Colonies. Regardless it is a well written book that I mostly agree with.

[Charlene · Rating 3 out of 5]

For grad course this fall.

[Mark Cheathem · Rating 4 out of 5]

A seminal book in changing perceptions of New England as the dominant model of colonial British development.

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent history book that is very nearly perfect in it's style and execution. Highly recommended for any academic historian doing research and in need of background data on the colonies.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Foundational to the historical field...with all of the trappings that that moniker usually entails.