A safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my car doesn't get stolen. It means building new jails to keep criminals behind bars. And it means there's no need to worry when I play at the park. We're making every corner of Ontario safer to make all of Ontario safer.
That's how we protect Ontario. For all of us. Learn how at ontario.ca. Pay for by the Government of Ontario.
It's springtime, which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale. From May 4th through June 9th, you can get 50% off nearly every single print, e-book and audiobook from Princeton University Press. Just go to press.prinston.edu to get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation. And beyond belief, how evidence shows what really works.
There's so many fantastic books, you can get an incredible deal on. Go to press.prinston.edu and use the code spring50. That's S-P-R-I-N-G-50 at press.prinston.edu. This sale only lasts for a month, so go and get some books.
Welcome to the new books network. Hello and welcome to new books in history podcast, part of the new books network. I'm your host, Christoph Odenius, and our guest today is Anies de laier. She's a historian of colonial American history, specializing in 17th century New England, settler colonialism and the history of enterprise.
Her book is Settling the Good Land, Governance and Promotion in John Winthrop's New England. She is also published, I think I counted 14 academic articles on New England history, and of course her doctoral dissertation on the individual and the community in John Winthrop's New England. Dr. de laier teaches at Lyon at the Universite du Mieff Lien du, and is a member of the Interdisciplinary Twiung-Boon Research Group, which combines action, discourses and economic and political thought to better understand the meaning of political ideas and consequences.
Last year, she received the rank of abilitation to direct doctoral feces, the highest rank in the French system. Anies de laier, welcome to the new books in history podcast. Thank you, Christoph, it's great to be here. Thank you.
Settling the Good Land is an exciting story of the newness of the New World and how the 17th century Englishmen first got interested in the project. And then up and moved across the ocean to put their money and their lives where their mouth is. Will you tell us who these people were, these settlers of the good land, this new and emerging settler type, as you call them, and what is the scope and argument of your book? Yes.
So the settlers I studied were part of what is called the Great Migration of English colonists from England to America in the spring of 1630. About 700 people traveled with John Wentworth throughout that particular spring, but eventually it is estimated that about 20,000 people traveled to the coast of New England in that decade. So these settlers were the beginners of English mass settlement on the American coasts. They were families, householders and their dependents, who came from various points across England, but in particular East Anglia, where John Wentworth himself was from.
And they had gathered under the Massachusetts Bay Company, a colonial company, a very small colonial company, that had chosen settlement as a business plan to compensate for what had been colonial failures until then on the New England coast. I focused on John Wentworth because he is the major, the central source really, on the founding of New England. He is known mostly as the author of the model of Christian charity, ex-sold by many generations of antiquarians, genealogists and historians, as the first expression of a civil and providential vision of America, the world-famous city of Onahil. Now the model is in every anthology of early American literature, which makes Wentworth a historical figure of major importance in American memory.
His latest biographer, Francis Ramer called him America's Forgotten Founding Father in 2003. Now in settling the good land, I took a deliberately different approach. I was not so much concerned with the significance of his writing and policies in subsequent American history. Rather, I tried to understand what he knew or could have known about America and colonization in 1630.
Why he had decided to join a colonial company at the very ripe old age of 41, which was ench it by the standards of those days. And also what understanding he had of his function as colonial governor, what governance in a colonial context actually entailed. In other words, I was interested in the context of his colonial career, not so much in his legacy, even though I addressed this issue in the last chapter of the book. How is it going?
Is it good? Yes, perfect. So who was this enterprising Englishman, the father of New England? This, the father of New England is a big word, but this enterprise in Englishman was a lawyer and a lord of the manner of East India.
He was born in Groton, which is about 40 miles from Cambridge and 80 miles from London. And he was the first born of a second born land owner in the region. And he struggled in his childhood to reach full ownership of his family's land. Just like his father before him, he combined management of that holding spread out across East Anglia through marriages and purchases with a legal career in London, where he was a clerk practicing land law, recording and arguing conflicts of land ownership, warchips, and tendencies between aristocrats, between gentlemen and aristocrats, or between the middling sort of Englishman and the crown.
He was an expert in land law, who at the age of 41, had a sort of moral crisis and decided to put his tremendous clerical energy to the job of colonial governor. Now, if I can explain a little bit what I mean by this crisis, yes please. John Winthrop always, he's a wonderful historical actor to study because he was a prolific writer. They are five volumes of the Winthrop papers edited by the Massachusetts Historical Society in the early 20th century.
He's written a journal and through reading all these sources, it comes a very powerful voice. What struck me about him was his tremendous sense of self, which partly comes from his religion, but also from his political ambition. As I said before, he was a landowner and a lawyer in 17th century England, moving regularly from his land 80 miles from London to London, where he spent extensive periods in the ins of court, trying to rise up the social ladder available to the gentry at the time. And at many times in his youth, and he recorded this in his writings, his own sense of self and conviction was pitted against the authority and the glory of men above him.
Men who had religion, just like he did, but had glory, had lineage, more land than he hid, but then he had, sorry. And this confrontation increased as time went by. He was a wonderful family man with many children, many boys, especially, and limited land. His career in land law was meant to increase opportunities for social and financial advancement, which in 1629 were proving rather limited.
His sons, his older sons didn't have a calling, didn't really have a profession, and his second son, Henry, who tried his hand at settling Planting Tobacco in Barbados, had come back to London and seduced his cousin under his uncle's nose, jeopardizing the reputation that went for head spent his entire life building. By being an exemplary clerk, a loyal representative, a messenger for the different political circles in East Anglia and around London, someone people could trust, and when he was hired by the Copping the Massachusetts Bay Company, all the sources pointed to that reputation as an exemplary land lawyer, someone who was expert in managing land disputes, who understood property, and who understood the privileges that came with that. It just happened that at the age of 41, he had reached the limits of what English society could afford him, and he decided to leave for that reason, for opportunity. And the word sounds very contemporary and very modern, but it's actually all over English promotion at the time.
The opportunity for something that went from valued above all else, and that was competency, the opportunity to be independent, not to be dependent on anyone for income, income to live on, but also to pass on to one's children. I really appreciate the psychological picture that you give us and how his crap and he can't get out and achieve what he wants. And as you said, he had seven boys and could not provide for them in the old world, and that this word competency comes up many times in this text, and also liberty. But let me ask you something that was confusing to me, because this is for every American child.
This is not a new subject. We have this in elementary school, but we don't have a complete picture. And so when I remember learning about the pilgrims around things, giving as a very young child, it was always about seeking freedom of religion as these Puritans. And indeed, Winthrop was a without Puritan, but I was so surprised to see how he could thrive or at least make his way in England at the time.
And there's a quotation you'll give us from John Smith of Virginia on page 167, praising the chief undertakers of the Massachusetts Bay Company as gentlemen of Buddhist states, some of 500, some of the thousand pound of land a year, men of good credit, well-de-loved in their country, and good Catholic Protestants, which means the Reformed Church of England, even though there were among them a few discontented and about just Papists, Puritans, separatists, and such factuous humorists. So why then does his storyography cling to the image of the oppressed pilgrims in the wilderness finding a new safe haven to start in your society? Well, it's a very appealing image. It's a very powerful idea of history moving in a certain direction towards more religion, towards more progress.
It was repeated time and again over the 19th century by romantic historians who who described American history as a continuation of European history westward, and the focus on local agents of motivated by religious purity makes sense in that romantic perspective at a time when the nation was trying to find commonality experiences that individual Americans could look back on and find meaning in. In the 1950s, when Perimilar established the Puritan paradigm of the errand of the Puritans into the wilderness, he established a tradition, a historiographic tradition, that required of historians to conceive of these experiences through the prism of Puritanism, because it was shared by people in old and new England, so it connected both spaces and it created a continuum of ideas, the progress of the reformation from the old world to the new world. But they focused essentially on religion as culture. Puritanism in New England studies is all pervasive, it explains everything from people's child rearing habits to whether age to how they considered nature and the environment.
I mean, there are hundreds of books about Puritanism in New England and I read them as a student of American history, if interested in colonial history. I read all these books and all secondary sources seem to point to John Wentworth. He was quoted everywhere and he represented power in that colony. So I decided to go and look for myself and I was sitting one day in the British Library, in the Rare Books, Reading Room at the British Library with the 1996 Harvard edition of the journal and I started reading it from page one.
And suddenly it was a revelation I have to say, suddenly a world, I was, I encountered a world that for a reason I couldn't explain then religion had not described a world of contest and struggle for land, for survival, for resources. That was a world's way from the expectations I had of what a Puritan society would be, inward looking pre-modern and not interested in either trade or social change. And when I started reading the journal, I saw the opposite of that. I discovered a voice, someone who was witness to a series of events that were unprecedented in the history of English colonization.
And I wanted to understand where he had built these expectations about colonization. So I started reading promotion, going back reading English promotional texts, looking for representations of America, its landscape, its peoples, about what colonization meant and how to best organize and run it. And I found that actually promotional writers were anything but original. When England entered the race for American possession a century after the Spanish, there were many, many precedents of conquests and war and some colonies had disappeared, a lot of business failure, a lot of business failure.
And then I had done, I traced the idea of settlement or the idea of a permanent appropriation of American land by English families to the campaign by Sir Walter Riley in the mid 80s. He had agents and promoters, Richard Hacklood the elder and his nephew Richard Hacklood the younger, who proposed that the key to England's imperial success would be to establish enough ports and trading posts in America to support the English fleet all year round as it competed at sea with other nations for Spanish treasure. The next step in this process was the founding the creation of commercial companies in the 1610s, under James I and the pivotal role of John Smith in articulating the role of settlers in making England succeed in spite of its considerable delay and the apparent neglect of its sovereign. And so he's done the truth, he's correct that this is a large group of people, some quite mainstream.
But yeah, he's correct and John Smith has speaks from experience. I think most historians agree on how significant his writings on Virginia and later New England were. He basically said describe a hierarchy of agents of colonization. Investors in London stayed at home, they enjoyed the comfort of their chimney corners quote unquote, which is a phrase that you see coming up again and again in promotion, while settlers risked life in limb to expand English sovereignty in America.
They deserved proper reward for their efforts. Smith told again and again how he had been abandoned by the investors of the Virginia company betrayed by them when they realized that returns weren't coming quick enough, they just abandoned the settlers to their fate. Now John Smith argued that those who chose colonization should reap the fruit of their labor, that is have access to some form of full ownership of land in America and enough autonomy and self-government to fulfill their plan. So I believe this is a central moment in the history of settlement when John Smith actually argues that settlers are real and they are the only serious agents of colonization.
I think that's a very important point and I'll just add I was also surprised to learn from your book that the pilgrims of the Mayflower were not sailing from Britain but from the Netherlands where they had been for some time but they found it's too decadent there which I suppose one can find in the but they included ordinary adventurers as you call them some of them lied in there and so even so they weren't just this religious group it was all kinds of people but this brings me to a second question which was also a surprise perhaps a third surprise already is how much back and forth there is I sort of imagined that these colonists came to this new world left alone but in fact they go there's a reason they're doing all this promotional writing is for continual support from from even so how does this genre of promotional writing and the continuous reporting back to the investors it really links I mean the Atlantic is a small small body of water but it links both both coasts and so New England keeps one foot in in Old England and that was a that was an astonishing discovery from reading your text would you talk about that the genre of writing and what it achieved and how much back and forth there was yes colonization I believe it was a public act you know before land claims became real they were first signified through maps that were transformed added to and circulated across Europe claiming possession of land in America only became real if other people could be informed of of that phenomenon so colonization was a public act there was there were maps but they were also narratives now explorers and colonizers needed publicity to generate support they needed support because even if they had to pack their ships full they would only travel over with enough supplies to let them through one winter they knew that over there they would be completely destitute so they needed people at home who could maintain their reputation to creditors and fill up the ships that came back with additional supplies or more laborers to help them build their settlements in America so this was a relationship that was that was in the central part of the business men in England who wanted to invest in colonial ventures for whatever reason expected some form of return they knew that returns weren't immediate they the the average time of financial returns was about seven years so for during these years connections had to be maintained with merchants in England captains who carried those goods back and forth across the ocean and settlers themselves in new England who labored to fill the ships with timber and fish and anything that infer naturally that they could sell back in England to pay their creditors and buy more supplies for those the chief items that traveled back to England timber fishermen be repelled yes timber fish in beaver but we shouldn't think of new England trade as solely circulating between the old world and the new more immediately new England ships traveled the American coast and all the way to the Caribbean and so very quickly from the mid-1630s that is five years after the beginnings of settlement went through up records and is in his journal that he received an alligator from a governor in Barbados he mentions sugar and cotton and also goods that English and European colonists in general not just English colonists exchanged along the coast so it's not just that settlers depend on people in England they also depend on other colonizers and colonists along the coast and they naturally depend also on the Indian trade so instead of a closed-up world you know the Puritans walking in the snow towards their church you know isolated in the wilderness in a hostile nature that is not at all the picture that the journal gives on the contrary it describes a world that is open to absolutely all areas of the Atlantic world including Africa and went from in particular cherish these relationships with his favorite captains who could be counted on to bring grain when there wasn't enough corn to eat or to bring enough sugar for New England landowners to start making rum from the 1640s and brag about how popular their rum was in Virginia in the Caribbean so we really have to think of it as an open world not not a closed-up world on religion and the church that's that's very important you mentioned maps i love how many maps there are in your book many of them in color and i was looking at the map of Massachusetts Bay i think it's on 189 and i live there for three years and it's interesting to see newton as new town or water town as water town or the charles river i remember going jogging there what was it like 400 years ago in 1631 when one throw got off of his ship and what did he find what did it look like how did it what kind of a world should we imagine when we look at these look at these maps certainly not an empty world it was a world uh Massachusetts was chosen by the Massachusetts Bay Company whose investors came from other colonial companies at work in England at the time and they had experienced the fish the fisheries on the northern banks so they knew that the new england coast was full of wood but also full of rivers and on the rivers were marshland and grassland on which they immediately began raising cattle for survival and also for trade salt meat and cattle hides that you know a lot of ships were happy to find when they stopped over so imagine a world that to the english looked very much like england because it combined uh plain land with mountains woodland and a climate that was definitely colder than england but had nothing of the seasoning uh that had made uh uh that had given Virginia such a bad reputation um the colder weather meant fewer diseases so imagine a world where there are woods uh cleared land indian or indigenous farmland that the english weren't always apt at seeing or discovering but they were very good at finding cornstalk to steal from in the early days um but it is a world world that is between land and sea the colonists rely on water for trade for communication for food so they settle in various points across the bay at the mouth of the many rivers of the bay to capture the beaver trade that will be traveling down these rivers but also to have a point of access to the interior where settlements can continue to progress along the banks of the river so it's a very utilitarian view of the landscape which is you know spread out settlement in crucial access points that are going to make trade and agriculture possible in the quickest possible way so what kind of population can we imagine you said 20 000 came over the course of the decade but i'm guessing that's for the entire new world possessions of england how many people might have lived in in the massachusetts bay colony um about at what point of 1635 or something 1635 you would have expected between 8 000 and 10 000 people um that's a lot and and that's a lot of people gathered again across a vast territory um they come in on various ships and then when they get to the land they undergo what historians have called the great reshuffling is they organize themselves into groups by family groups or regional affiliation or Puritan beliefs um the marshall are you know to follow the teaching of one minister over another and that will be the reason why they'll go to that town instead of that town and very quickly they are given land uh surveyors are a very important part of land management in massachusetts um plots of land on which they are obliged to work immediately or within three years if within three years they haven't farmed the land that the corporation has given them they lose it so they come over and they cut down trees and they plant corn or they raise cattle if they are very closer to the grassland of the riverbanks uh they plant orchards they have a lot of hogs as well so they combine subsistence agriculture with cattle raising in order to generate a little bit of surplus that circulates across the bay which fascinated me in particular with how sophisticated they're the magistrates were in thinking about infrastructure they were very quickly market towns and market days registered in the in the minutes of the corporation that the corporation paid for um boats uh to connect various points around the bay there was a real awareness on their part that people should be connected in some way and circulate between settlements in order to exchange their goods but also maybe a communique don't visit families so imagine a landscape dotted with villages that do not look like the new england village that we imagine we imagine the white steeple and a few houses in the middle surrounded by woodland it's not really what new england towns look like they certainly have a core and the core is the meeting house which is it's is the church but it's also the place of social and political interaction um a market possibly on certain days and a first circle of habitations around that meeting house uh which will combine uh ownership by the richer colonists the leaders of each town but also poor farmers who live near the center to have access to communal fields in wood but then each mile each town was about six miles six square miles which is quite a vast territories so there are other circles out of circles where younger farmers maybe poorer farmers live and raise cattle or grain as tenants to other landowners and little by little land is cleared between those outer farms and the inner farms and that's how these settlements over time will connect into one territory but it will never be just one settler territory there are native villages and native communities that continue to reside in that land and to interact with settlers as well it is what historians are called a hybrid land hybrid land yes would you tell us about the the native villages and the um inclusion of indigenous american uh indians and also their dispossession and exploitation and just how how that changed over the course of the decade and you you write there was never any peace in new england but a continuous process of rumors intimidation conflicts and negotiation which windthrob navigated with unwavering confidence in his own racial superiority um would you tell us how how this played out well this is a great question it's a very very difficult one now for many reasons uh first of all um caveats or disclaimer i am i am french um and i have no um i've always understood that um doing indigenous history itself was was beyond my capabilities because i don't speak any indigenous languages and i have no connection or not even proximity with indigenous communities or historians who are at present doing amazing work resurrecting a past that has been negated by the dominance of eurocentric views of what happened on the ground uh violence i think in new england it was part of was an integral part of the secular's lives for for many reasons uh first colonization is violence appropriating land that doesn't belong to you is a form of violence the secular is also incorporated um indigenous children and women in particular into their households and giving them new names and new identities and also forbidding that they should maintain kinship ties uh with with their kin and their tribes in the west as settlement progressed the population increased and more land was needed uh because the business model of the massachusetts bay company included cattle the settlers had their very quickly had their eyes on rivers along the long island sound and in particular the canada get river which marked sort of the western limit of what the founding charter of 1629 gave them as territory so from the mid-sixteenth thirties they are already busy trying to build trading falls and and smaller settlements on the canada get river so they travel mostly by sea but uh winds are very clear that the point in the end is to have contiguous settlement from massachusetts bay all the way to canada get and that means running across uh narrow against the territory nyantic territory nipnuk territory and the massachusetts as well so the plan is always for expansion and the manners uh the manner with which this expansion happened uh becomes even always more violent throughout the decade until the 16th uh the year 1637 38 and what is known as the pikwot war which was basically a series of military expeditions on behalf of the massachusetts bay company to uh inflict and the term is there's inflict terror upon indigenous peoples residing in those areas to make them run away so there are instances of of you know there are armed conflicts isolated armed conflicts between individual pounds or planters and their indigenous neighbors and there is in the mid-sixteenth thirties this mass massive campaign of terror against indigenous peoples in the region and that is the beginning also of the use of slavery indigenous slavery and uh which i believe increased the degree of violence greatly in the settlement you know um marking indian bodies separating families telling people off to regions that were very distant and uh from which they did not expect it expect them to return so the brutality of slavery that we uh think of mostly in the southern colonies was also at work in new england from very very early on so this is what i mean by no peace in new england expansion was always going to continue and violence uh was the daily lot of settlers because their very act of appropriation colonisation was itself a violent act and this is the me ask this is the very beginning of of of atlantic slavery and when um henry when drop was in varderos he it sounds to me when he was planting those fields the back of fields he didn't have slaves yet right but here you tell us indian women and children were sold to bermuda which shocked me again because you would think women and children wouldn't be able to do that tropical um that the forced labor could you describe what this slavery looked like um if you if you can well um i i can these these um captives were war loot they were from from what the settle the letters of the settlers and when from narrative the policy was to if possible kill indian warriors and they are very gruesome passages where pieces of men's bodies scalps and ears um are circulated across the settlement as proof of their death so the idea of killing warriors is of course to dismantle and to to to jeopardise indigenous alliances um at work in the region um that's what happens with men mostly women and children uh become captive in this just war this war of conquest that the settlers called just war and they are uh for many incorporated into setter households where there's always a great need for additional labor or sold um abroad as a way to empty villages simply empty villages for more land for europeans to settle on it sounds very brutal but it isn't a text and it is very much what windfip describes i think if the my second chapter on the pilgrims also demonstrates that this was the way colonisation was envisaged by the english when they decided to settle there was always that fear rumor you know a sort of doubt as to their legitimacy of their land occupation because they're scared and they are rumors circulating all the time about how the indians want to kill them all um and how they're always in danger so they they proceed by inversion uh then negate the violence of their own actions which is to come in uh steel corn occupy indian farmland because it's already partly cleared letting their hogs roam the countryside and destroy indian crops uh which leads to famine and weakness among these these people these indigenous indigenous people and um there is this strategy of slow encroachment onto indigenous land that they justify as self-defense so the rumors are here to explain why they used weapons that's in the narratives now in the letters that they exchanged the policy is is very simple it's a quisitiveness so capture bodies use them as laborers or sell them for profit and destroy villages because they're simply in the way and that's in the sources and it's uh sometimes difficult to read but i think it's important to understand that um it happened now the biggest well i'm not the biggest of course because you know nothing is worse than war or terror or locking people into a fort and setting it on fire um but the violence that went from exterat he's no warlord and he's no soldier he's a he's a lawyer and he believes in constitutionality in the law and his way of justifying this colonizing policy is simply to silence indigenous agency he does not uh he describes stations who come to boston to negotiate treaties and ownership with him in a very stereotypical monolithic matter manner uh there are indians therefore they're always the same they are lazy uh they're mischievous sometimes they're reliable if it's useful but you know he resorts to a lot of racial stereotypes he has he abides by a very strong racialized view of how the land should be his and therefore these people should go and he makes it i think it also shows there is humanity in his eyes doesn't it that he needs them to submit and to surrender there's passages of you know some i forgot which which leader it was but he places wind drops hand on his heart and says this heart is your heart and my men are your men and um there's always the question there's always the question of veracity you see the whole point of focusing on promotion was say if if colonization is a public act this record of events is it a truthful record or does it serve a particular purpose which is to to defend a form of land occupation that was unprecedented uh remarkably violent and uh and that needed to be accounted for um abroad in England but also in other areas of Atlantic colonization so i think that that public dimension of promotion uh forces us to doubt pretty much every statement that went through it makes but to read a statement with his in mind the corporate structure he was working within and the commission that he valued so much uh once he was elected to the company and that commission required that he pursued the interests of the corporation and the interests of the corporation were sustainability solvency and always more land and that necessarily came into conflict with you know um be interested of of the French in the north the Dutch in the south also the pilgrims to a certain extent and most importantly indigenous peoples i think that's why richard donne who's worked so much on john wenthrop has this wonderful phrase he said well for some of us john wenthrop is one of the great figures of american history but for others quote he is the man you love to hate unquote and i think it's true the vindictiveness and the and the brutality of his speech and his writing sometimes is it's very astounding and to me it testifies of his sense of scientificity his awareness that what was happening in new england was simply a new form of collective political existence that was english and origin but belong to a space that was completely new and that justified that they invented so many rules of demeanour and behavior etc so i think that's why i find him fascinating the fact that he knew that colonization was only at its beginning and that settlement within the wider methods of colonizing that europeans were practicing was particular and was unique well i yes and i agree that everything he has written especially on the subject of the native peoples was for the consumption of his investors back home or i should say back across the ocean not at home but um right for example the seal of the massachusetts wake up and he which has a which has an indian man pointing his bow toward the ground in peace and standing between two trees you write as if it were gates to a land of resources and a little speech bubble coming out of his mouth and come and help us or something like that it um but it's not that they thought the indigenous people were animals they had to tell a story where they were saving the poor-beknited savages from from themselves even as they knew that they were killing and terrorizing you say you know your quotation of terror and selling them off that that for me is very interesting especially how much how how steeped this writing is is in the gospel and in the city on a hill that he could hold both of those at the same time in his in his rhetoric and in his imagination but that's why the the expression the good land comes from the bible of course numbers in deuteronomy and it is the land promise it's canan the land that god promises to his people and the puritans weren't the first and the only ones to use this formulation religious exceptionalism was at work in spanish colonization as well every european european nation claimed to own true religion and to be able to save the indigenous or the native peoples from obscurity and and damnation by converting them so this was to me this was really a trope of promotional literature that was shared across many nations european nations colonizing in the america at the time um i suppose we should add that this is exactly at the time of the 30 years war where europeans were equally happy to murder other europeans in extraordinary numbers i think that something like a third of central europe was was wiped out between Protestants and catholics and often um Protestants and catholics united against other Protestants and catholics so it's not reserved for indigenous populations yes and there isn't one way of looking at appropriation there isn't one uniform view of indigenous peoples they are actually competing visions wind truck himself could in one letter or pamphlet talk about america as a vacuum domicili as an empty land where there were no people when obviously that was completely untrue and and he knew it so in other times native americans are used as spoils pushing forward the narrative in the action towards towards the success of the business um if we remember that colonization is a public act and a commercial enterprise then we can accommodate his different versions because colonizers did not encounter the same populations every time um in political alliances also shifted um in america as time went on so instead of having one monolithic view of a Puritan errand as one goal and it's it's interesting it's more interesting to me to think of this as what it is a bit manky calls the spaces of power so think of it as spaces that are shared contested by many actors with various interests it's not as grand as the sweeping march forward of american liberty but it's also it's much more interesting in terms of experience diversity uh hybridity and also the imagination because i got to um discover and imagine we have to realize we have no visual representation of colonial america or very few the first engravings describing the cities date from the 1714 1750s before that we have no actual images of what the landscape look like what the towns look like or what the daily existence of the colonists uh felt like to them and i think by looking at space rather than ideas uh conflict and contestation rather than the inevitable conquest of or march of american liberty over the land we discover a variety of experiences those of indigenous people of course but also women um we hear very little about them i think in the future there'll be much more research about how women understood their role in the colonizing process because i'm sure you've you've noticed by reading my book how much masculinity figures very strongly in windthrups self-reception because competency was a masculine goal for the gentry you know independence from a father or a father-in-law or an aristocrat was a form of manhood in order to reach manhood you had to become independent and that is very much in windthrups writing throughout his entire career and i noticed that the role of women at least in the religious or the new chapter on liberty is just for um procreation right it's another form of expansion just like more land it's more and more people and that the sexual crimes that resulted in conception were often not punished and the sexual crimes that did not uh especially homosexual crimes and things like that were punished severely absolutely so what is land if it's empty the point of traveling over and conquering it is to fill it fill it with people and villages and fields and cows and you know occupy it really a form of occupation and for that you need children and uh and large families went for himself had many many children even though he lost many and uh he was a i think a very devoted family man i mean we shouldn't just imagine a um you know that the um the horrible puret and tyrant who is so repressed and you know had no ability for fun or centrality i think that that doesn't apply to him he um he loves marriage he loves the company of his wife he he enjoys the physicality of marriage as well um but he really believes that women at that marriage serves one purpose which is to grow uh to have children and uh and acquire more land to keep in the family so the size of land of the holding and the size of the family kind of go together and um i think that that's something that uh central colonial scholars will recognize uh central societies uh uh a court of sort of dedicate a lot of their attention to the health of the family i think that is a great place to stop and i want to um thank thank you again and just to tell our listeners that settlement of land um is published by bril and it's very easy for the non-specialist to read extremely accessible very quick 300 pages with lots of colorful maps and um just a magisterial and a supremely engaging work so um dr dill dr dillio thank you so much for speaking with us this morning thank you it's been wonderful