Just finished Giles Milton - Big Chief Elizabeth
The subtitle is 'How England's Adventurers Gambled and Won the New World'. It is a work of pop-history and like the blurb says, is full of astonishing stories and blood-curdling detail of how Sir Francis Ralegh tried to 'plant' colonies in the new frontier of Virginia, starting in Roanake Island and culminating in the bare survival of the Jamestown settlement. On the whole it is a well paced and engaging work, but I have some issues with it ...
The book is entirely from an Elizabethan English colonist point of view. Given the author's sources (and obvious lack of desire to engage with any Spanish language materials) this may seem understandable. But the fact that he is willing to stretch his imagination to convey the suffering of the early colonists in excrutiating detail shows that this is not an entirely dry source-based historical work. The absence of any similar attempt to understand the reaction of the native 'Indian' population to these events seriously unbalances the work.
I'm aware of the dangers of imposing contempory mores on historical treatments -but the author ought to know that dashing stories of imperial conquest and subjugation may need to be presented from more than one perspective.
The subtitle is 'How England's Adventurers Gambled and Won the New World'. It is a work of pop-history and like the blurb says, is full of astonishing stories and blood-curdling detail of how Sir Francis Ralegh tried to 'plant' colonies in the new frontier of Virginia, starting in Roanake Island and culminating in the bare survival of the Jamestown settlement. On the whole it is a well paced and engaging work, but I have some issues with it ...
The book is entirely from an Elizabethan English colonist point of view. Given the author's sources (and obvious lack of desire to engage with any Spanish language materials) this may seem understandable. But the fact that he is willing to stretch his imagination to convey the suffering of the early colonists in excrutiating detail shows that this is not an entirely dry source-based historical work. The absence of any similar attempt to understand the reaction of the native 'Indian' population to these events seriously unbalances the work.
I'm aware of the dangers of imposing contempory mores on historical treatments -but the author ought to know that dashing stories of imperial conquest and subjugation may need to be presented from more than one perspective.
Let the flogging begin....
