A tour de force by Alan Taylor! The heavy tome might seem daunting at first, but Taylor puts us on a boat to the new world and successfully navigates us not only to Puritan New England, but Spanish South America, the Virginia Company, the middle Colonies, the West Indies, and the Pacific. In many ways, Taylor does not limit our scope. His work simultaneously reveals the colonization of the Americas, one of the first, if not the only work, I have come across to keep things in perspective. Taylor focuses on the micro and the macro; you will see not only Jamestown in 1607 but also Spanish Mexico around the same time. He does not allow us to forget that these colonies were not created in bubbles and each constantly intersects. At the conclusion, an understanding of the colonies chronologically, a broad understanding of their differences, stemming back from the very founding, as well as their similarities, culminates in the moments when these colonies begin to interact.
This book does not narrow its scope to one colony or one superpower colonizer; Taylor spends a full paragraph and a half of 477 pages on the American Revolution. This book is meant to show us the movement of peoples to, within, and among the new world and her colonies. Alan Taylor succeeds beautifully. His prose is light, easy to read, at times unexpectedly humorous, yet always aware of it's scope. A must have for any history buff!