Colonial America: A Very Short Introduction
Written by Alan Taylor
Narrated by Noah Michael Levine
4/5
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About this audiobook
Over the last generation, historians have broadened our understanding of colonial America by adopting both a trans-Atlantic and a trans-continental perspective, examining the interplay of Europe, Africa, and the Americas through the flow of goods, people, plants, animals, capital, and ideas. In this Very Short Introduction, Alan Taylor presents an engaging overview of the best of this new scholarship. He shows that American colonization derived from a global expansion of European exploration and commerce that began in the fifteenth century. The English had to share the stage with the French, Spanish, Dutch, and Russians, each of whom created alternative Americas. By comparing the diverse colonies of rival empires, Taylor recovers what was truly distinctive about the English enterprise in North America. He focuses especially on slavery as central to the economy, culture, and political thought of the colonists and restores the importance of native peoples to the colonial story.
Alan Taylor
Alan Taylor has been a journalist for over 30 years. He was deputy editor and managing editor of The Scotsman, and for 15 years was Writer-at-Large for the Sunday Herald. He has contributed to numerous publications, including The Times Literary Supplement, TheNew Yorker and The Melbourne Age and was co-founder and editor of The Scottish Review of Books. He was editor of the centenary editions of the collected novels of Muriel Spark and has edited several acclaimed anthologies, including The Assassin’s Cloak (2000). He also wrote the bestselling Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark (2017). He also edited Madly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries (2022).
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Reviews for Colonial America
4 ratings1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is a good book but I really dislike the narrator: when he describes Native Americans in the opening sections, he does so in a deadpan voice, like a machine. Suddenly, when he gets to Columbus and Spanish conquest he develops some inflection and slows down to a normal narrative voice. Meeh. I’d rather read the book than feel compelled to infer the narrator’s politics.