The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790
by Rhys L. Isaac
Summary
Rhys Isaac traces Virginia's society across fifty pivotal years, from the settled hierarchy of the tobacco gentry around 1740 to the transformed political and religious order left by 1790, using what he called the observational techniques of the cultural anthropologist to recreate everyday life at the moments it changed most visibly. The book divides into three parts: Traditional Ways of Life, which establishes the patriarchal, Anglican dominated order tobacco wealth had built; Movements and Events, which follows that order's disruption; and Afterview, which surveys what replaced it.
The disruption Isaac traces begins with the Great Awakening, the evangelical revival that swept through Virginia in the mid eighteenth century. Established Anglican church attendance declined as new evangelical sects, some of which questioned slavery outright, drew in enslaved people and poorer white Virginians who had stood outside the gentry's hierarchy of social rank. Isaac reads that religious upheaval as directly connected to the political revolution the same gentry would go on to lead against Britain, a colony's internal social order shifting even as its leaders fought an external war for independence.
Isaac writes with an anthropologist's eye for gesture, ritual, and everyday practice rather than the assemblies and elections of conventional political narrative, and reading the book means following that method closely, scene by scene, rather than a straightforward chronological account. Reviewers praised its innovation in cultural history while some found its treatment of causality, of why one change actually produced the next, a genuine weakness of the argument. It suits a reader interested in how a colony's manners and faith changed on the way to revolution, not only its laws.
Historical Context & Significance
The Transformation of Virginia won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for History, making Isaac the first Australian historian to receive the prize; that year's finalists were Robert Middlekauff's The Glorious Cause and Bertram Wyatt-Brown's Southern Honor.
Isaac earned his early degrees at the University of Cape Town before a Rhodes Scholarship took him to Balliol College, Oxford, and a doctorate in 1962; he emigrated to Australia the following year, teaching at the University of Melbourne and then La Trobe University from 1971 to 1991. A 1975 visiting professorship at the College of William and Mary put him in Virginia itself while he was developing the book, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1982 at 451 pages, a work that helped establish cultural and anthropological method as a serious approach within American colonial history.