October 2005
The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. Volume 1: Atlantic America, 1492-1800, D.W. Meinig (1986).

This is the last book I finished last year. I wrote most of the review last year, too. I was hoping to finish it before my trip to California in December, but I didn't quite make it. I think I had one or another of the Meinig books out for most of 2005, what with multiple check-outs and renewals. I read both volumes one and two intermittently throughout the year. I've read probably about two-thirds of volume two. Volume one I finally finished.

There'll be no unifying narrative this time, as there was with volume 3, just a laundry list of interesting little tidbits I learned.

Most broadly interesting to me was a perspective of British America of the 1760s, rather than our usual retrospective view through the birth of our own nation. One consequence of Britain's decisive victory in the Seven Years War was that, for the first time in their history, the British colonies in America faced no military threat from foreign powers. Combined with the enormous growth of the colonies, that left British America in 1763 organized under an outdated imperial political structure that was no longer rational.

The need for reform was recognized, and there were plenty of ideas on what to do about it. Meinig tells us:

I would have liked to read more about these moderate proposals that never came about. For me, the interesting revelation here is that neither of the familiar positions we know from traditional American history — that America should be an occupied possession of Britain, taxed without representation; or that America should be completely independent of the British crown — were mainstream views.

Elsewhere, Meinig provides a more general model of flows of political power in an imperial system, which sheds further light on how imperialism tends to generate extremists on both sides. It's funny to think of our Founding Fathers as radical extremists, but that is how they were viewed at the time (as were also their opponents in London). Before the events which forced polarization of views, nearly everyone favored some sort of middle ground. The hotbed of radical extremism was Massachusetts. Although there were scattered clashes in other colonies, the revolution originated as the rebellion of one colony only, and it wasn't until the revolt in Massachusetts triggered an extremist response that the other colonies gradually came around.

Another thing that was new to me (but not to Ericka, who spent much of her life in the South) was the general pattern by which South Carolina was settled. It began as an offshoot of Barbados, which hitherto was by far the most lucrative of the British colonies in America. South Carolina's slave economy comes directly from that of Barbados, which was a colony of sugar plantations. Even before slaves were economically useful on the mainland, ownership of them was part of the social structure that the Barbadians brought with them.

Owing to the culture-disrupting way in which Africans were brought to America, examples of African culture shaping North America is scarcer than for other immigrant groups. One prominent exception is the growing of rice in the South. The Europeans, apparently, knew nothing of this crop, but when left to their own devices slaves began to grow their own rice following recognizable West African patterns. The white masters developed the industry only after learning the agricultural techniques from their slaves.

Another thing I never knew was that Georgia was founded as a free state, with slavery illegal. Unfortunately, it didn't stick.

This is one of many discussions in which geographic reality shapes history more than do the ideas of men. (It is, after all, the main theme of the series.) Another involves food:

Although the author is not the sort to proclaim it boldly, one can read between the lines here a Frederick Jackson Turnerish thesis.

There's your four-word answer to the question of American identity: land cheap, labor dear. From this come the

As always, I am entertained to learn of little quirks of political geography. I remember from seeing maps of the early colonies in other books that so many of them claimed a band of land between two lines of latitude extending westward indefinitely. I hadn't realized that for many years it was thought that South Carolina had a band as well. Its western borders were defined as all the area between the Savannah River and the 35th parallel. It wasn't until years later when explorers followed the river upstream that they discovered it turned north and crossed the parallel, so that Georgia extended northward to meet North Carolina, closing off South Carolina from the West.

I had never noticed before that if the parallel which forms most of Pennsylvania's northern border were to extend westward, it would meet Lake Erie at exactly the same point that the state's western border does. Of course this is no coincidence. At one time, the northern border did extend all the way to the lake, but Connecticut had a competing claim to the same land. As part of the settlement, Pennsylvania was limited to only that territory which is no further west than the point where its northern border met Lake Erie. Since this would leave Pennsylvania only a single point of coastline on the Great Lake, a condition of the settlement was that Pennsylvania could purchase from the federal government the little triangle of land whose hypotenuse is now the state's Erie coast. The federal government had obtained this from New York, which gave up claim to any land west of the westernmost point of Lake Ontario, which thus became the definition of the eastern side of that triangle.

By the time of the Revolution, New York was one of the largest colonies, but in the early colonial period, it was more confined than most, without much westward extension. That's because New York's hinterland was occupied by the strongest and most stable of the indigenous North American nations, the Iroquois. It wasn't until the Iroquois's eventual decline in the 18th century that New York finally enjoyed the expansion due to its natural geographic advantages. By contrast, Virginia's hinterland was a power vacuum which European-American colonists were able to fill relatively quickly, leading to the early creation of Kentucky as the first trans-Appalachian state.

Kentucky was never a territory. Virginia, of which hitherto it was an integral part, granted Kentucky independence only as part of an arrangement in which it was simultaneously granted admission as a state. Vermont was never a territory either. Like Texas, California, and Hawaii, it was briefly an independent republic, but unlike those three it became a state simultaneously with annexation. The the first state to make the transition from territory to state was Ohio, the 15th state.

As usual, Meinig provides some curious geographic terms which may be academic jargon or may be the author's liberal creativity with words, I'm not sure which. At one point he manages to get two in consecutive sentences:

Obviously jungly means resembling a jungle, and arcuate means resembling an arc, but both are unfamiliar looking. (Both are legal in Scrabble, too.) Somewhat less obviously, insular here is intended in its literal sense of pertaining to islands. (Latin insula means island; a peninsula is one side short of an island, just as the penultimate is one short of last.)

I didn't note a page to quote from, but pirogues were unfamiliar to me before I first encountered them here. I've seen or heard the word a few more times since then, in connection with Louisiana, I think. A pirogue is a sort of dugout canoe-like boat. The word is Caribbean in origin.

A word which surely must be field jargon is umland, which Meinig uses together with hinterland as if the two are synonymous or nearly so. Maybe it's a term familiar from earlier works of history and geography (though he didn't italicize it) which gives a more precise shade of meaning than hinterland for those familiar with the German sources.

Even more jargonish is conspectus. Thomas Jefferson (or was it Mencken?) wrote about using a two-dollar word where a 25-cent equivalent would suffice. How many dollars in this sentence? "Such a conspectus also illuminates some major differences between the western and eastern sectors that were significant to the disintegration of this imperial complex." I'm not even sure what he's saying there.

The paragraph about Georgia quoted above might be the first place I've seen propinquity written anywhere besides that one Edna St Vincent Millay sonnet.

Contumacious is one of those words I've seen before and half understood but never took the time to really get to know. Some words of that description turn out to be not very interesting, but this one is wonderful. Merriam Webster defines it as "stubbornly disobedient", and the associated noun, contumacy is "stubborn resistance to authority: specif: willful contempt of court". These are not to be confused with contumelious ("insolently abusive and humiliating") and contumely ("harsh language or treatment arising from haughtiness or contempt").

Meinig quotes Richard Hofstadter, describing the colonial New World:

My last two notes are type-related. At one point Meinig mentions the "fiordlands of the Northwest Coast", which is unremarkable except as an interesting contrast to the fjord spelling, which I saw quite a bit in Collapse, which I was reading simultaneously with this book, in the chapters about Vikings.

Elsewhere on the very same page I see the monstrosity Mação, a double dose of diacritical excess. In opera contexts I often see "Habañera", in which the erroneous tilde is evidently added just because it looks like it might be right so the writer can't resist drawing it in. The tilde here is similarly tempting, but whereas most Portuguese words ending in -ão have obvious Latin/Spanish cognates ending in -ano, Macao is simply a Portuguese spelling of a native Chinese name. In contemporary writing, the "preferred" transliteration is now "Macau". I don't know what tempted the writer to add a cedilla as well — confusion with Curaçao, perhaps?

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