Description: Between 1640 and 1660, England, Scotland, and Ireland faced civil war, invasion, religious radicalism, parliamentary rule, and the restoration of the monarchy. Pestana offers a sweeping history that systematically connects these cataclysmic events and the development of the infant plantations from Newfoundland to Surinam.
Brief description: Carla Gardina Pestana is Professor of History and Joyce Appleby Endowed Chair of America in the World at the University of California, Los Angeles. A Guggenheim Fellow, she is author of The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell's Bid for Empire and The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640-1661.
Review Quotes: This book will be welcomed by research specialists and students alike. It contains an appendix discussing population estimates for colonies in 1640 and another listing pamphlets about New England published in England during the 1640s. The endnotes fill eighty-nine pages of close type...There is a detailed map of the English Atlantic World at the outset, and throughout the book Pestana does not assume that her reader has a command of the narrative details of either the English Revolution or the early phases of English colonialism. The book would therefore lend itself to courses dealing with early modern England, colonial America, or the Atlantic world...Pestana's book is therefore a most welcome addition to the field.--Joseph P. Ward "Seventeenth-Century News"