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V. A NEGLECTED POINT OF VIEW IN AMERICAN COLONIAL HISTORY: THE COLONIES AS DEPENDENCIES

OF GREAT BRITAIN.

BY WILLIAM MACDONALD,
Professor of History in Brown University.

A NEGLECTED POINT OF VIEW IN AMERICAN COLONIAL HISTORY: THE COLONIES AS DEPENDENCIES OF GREAT BRITAIN.

By WILLIAM MACDONALD.

I suppose that one of the most important things in historical study is the determination of the point of view. Unless one is content to be merely an annalist, setting down in chronological order such facts as he may choose to deal with, the standpoint, conscious or unconscious, of the student or writer is pretty certain to influence in considerable measure not only his interpretation of the meaning of events, but also his perception and selection of events themselves. If the ransacking of the records of the past for partisan or controversial purposes no longer passes muster as history; if impartiality and comprehensiveness are now generally insisted upon alike in teacher and taught, it still remains true that history, in the sense of an orderly presentation of the past as nearly as pos sible as that past actually was, is likely to be influenced very much by the way in which the inquirer looks at the field he is studying, the point from which he surveys it.

It is a not unfounded complaint against the treatment of American colonial history that it has been, too often, local and antiquarian rather than broadly or genuinely historical. The activity of scholars in this field has, to be sure, been something prodigious. The publication of historical material, particularly in regard to the history of the English colonies, has gone on at a portentous rate, while the stream of monographs, good, bad, and indifferent, is constantly widening. Merely to keep decently well informed of what others are doing is in itself a heavy drain on the time of the student who is so unfortunate as to have any other duties in life.

Further, and as a natural result of zealous devotion to an attractive subject, we are coming to have a considerable volume of specialized treatment of the colonial period. We have studies of colonial government, of colonial slavery, of colonial tariffs, of colonial currency, of taxation and suffrage in colonial times. There are even intimations that other colonies besides Massachusetts had religious interests possibly worth attending to. Not many subdivisions of the field but have been somewhat dug into by those who, from choice or necessity, have set to work to write something about American colonial history.

What is true of the student and writer is true also, if not in so marked a degree, of the teacher. If my observation of the teaching of early American history in the better class of colleges and universities is correct, the teaching of the subject has grown immensely in content in the last ten or fifteen. years. Voluminous as is the output of printed material, that material itself is increasingly used in the lecture room as well as the seminary. "Original research" is no longer merely a term to conjure with, but an instrument whose acquaintance is made by the student at a very early stage of his career. The feeling that American history is an "easy" subject is not, I think, quite so widespread as it once was. I doubt, indeed, if the subject is yet thought of by scholars in other departments as quite the equal in intellectual importance and dignity of most periods of European history, but this feeling, too, is, I think, noticeably giving place to a juster appreciation of what the study of American history really means.

What I want to do at this time, however, is not to pass any sweeping criticism on the study or teaching of American history in general or American colonial history in particular, but to call attention briefly to a point of view which, as it seems to me, has been quite too much and too long neglected. Notwithstanding the great activity in publication--perhaps, indeed, somewhat in consequence of it-American colonial history still has clinging to it a vast mass of localism and antiquarianism, burdening the subject with minute data of the slightest general interest, and obscuring if not obliterating the broader outlines of motive, influence, and development, the perception of whose significance can alone make the subject

historically interesting. The history of the colonies is too often treated, down to the time of the stamp act, substantially as Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge treats it in his "Short History"-two chapters to each colony, one on the course of events, one on social characteristics at the end of the period. That the colonies had anything in common before 1765; that they were anything but absolutely independent communities shot into the continent in 1606, 1620, 1663, and so on, and left to themselves until England discovered them about the time of the Seven Years' War, are matters which too often quite fail to appear. The suddenness with which the pre-Revolutionary agitation is made to flash upon the canvas, after a long and dreary period of colonial beginnings and petty happenings, and the lack of apparent preparation for the stirring events which follow each other in such rapid succession until the outbreak of war, are startling and disturbing to the student who has been taught to look for causes in history, or who has learned that in other periods or countries events do, on the whole, follow each other in somewhat of orderly succession. Very naturally, therefore, the colonial period, save where it is picturesque, is declared uninteresting, suitable for those investigators only whose equipment for historical research consists principally in a fair reading knowledge of English.

What we have, as it seems to me, been too much inclined to ignore is the fact that the American colonies were colonies. They were not independent States, but colonial dependencies of Great Britain. They were not neglected settlements in a remote New World, but valued and highly regarded parts of the British Empire. In isolating them from connection with the mother country, and centering attention primarily on the events which transpired on this side of the Atlantic, we lose sight of the all-important fact that the history of the colonies was largely determined by the attitude of England toward them, and that there was being worked out in this country, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one of the most interesting colonial policies of modern times. My plea, in other words, is for the study of American colonial history primarily as the history, in this part of the world, of English colonial policy.

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