In this book, Butler shows that the American
colonies developed into surprisingly modern entities by the eve of the Revolution.
In separate chapters, he details five major characteristics of American modernity in support of this claim: ethnic and national diversity; complex economies; large-scale participatory politics;
religious pluralism; and the modern penchant for power, control, and authority over both their environment and other human beings. By 1770, America was anything but a homogeneous society in terms of its population, particularly when compared to Europe. Religious, economic and cultural strife forced many in Europe to immigrate to the British mainland
colonies, while after 1680 the American colonies became a haven for non-English Europeans. Butler points to a variety of newcomers-Jews, Scots-Irish, French Huguenots, Germans and Swiss-who settled all over America to make the New World a mix of ethnic groups, which predicted the growing importance of ethnicity in America which continues to the present. Butler also details the horrific suffering of Africans, forced to America by the burgeoning slave trade at the end of the 17th century. Not only was America's population diverse, so was its religious composition. Colonial American religion, Butler concludes, was varied and rich between 1680s and the American Revolution.
Butler points to the diverse and complex economies of the British colonies in America as evidence of their modernity, though he is careful not to ignore the growing poverty and inequality in New World. Butler shows that native Americans too became enmeshed in complex and powerful economic relationships with Europeans in the colonies. Merchants won wealth and status through expansion, extension and specialization, all of which demonstrate for Butler that colonial economics were modern and complex. Colonial politics, Butler concludes, were so complex that they often baffled observers.
In Becoming America, Jon Butler has convincingly depicted British America from 1680 to 1770 as a place in which the colonies were becoming more modern, diverse and complex. Yet some of his evidence does not point to modernity at all. Although he vividly depicts the cultural and religious holocaust suffered by Africans upon their forced immigration to America, perhaps Butler should have made more out of the meaning of this labor system. Overall, this was a great read.