The Colonial Period of American History

Charles McLean Andrews built The Colonial Period of American History as a four volume history of the English colonies from their founding through the years just before the Revolution, and the Pulitzer Prize recognized specifically the first volume, published in 1934 after Andrews had spent more than four decades as a working colonial historian. Andrews had led what other historians came to call the imperial school of colonial history, an approach that read the colonies primarily through their ongoing relationship with Britain rather than treating them as an independent story building steadily toward revolt.

The opening volume lays out that approach from the start, tracing how English colonization actually worked as an imperial project, governed by trade regulation, administrative institutions, and a genuine, functioning relationship between colony and crown rather than by simmering resentment waiting to boil over. Andrews's larger argument, developed across the full four volumes, holds that the Revolution grew less from colonial tyranny than from British statesmen failing to recognize how much American society had changed since the colonies were first settled, a failure of understanding on London's side as much as a rebellion on the colonies' side.

Reading the volume means encountering the capstone of a working lifetime spent almost entirely inside colonial archives, written by a historian colleagues had already come to call the dean of the field before this book even appeared. It suits a reader who wants the colonial period read on its own institutional terms, as a functioning empire with its own logic, rather than as merely the backstory to the Revolution that followed it.