Paul M. Pressly

The particular value of this monograph is that the author takes you step by step through the process by which a failed exercise in recreating the social structures of English rural society became a rip-roaring participant in an imperial trade based on rice, timber and deer skins, that was more part of the Caribbean than associated with the rest of British North America. This thus becomes something of a bleak alternate history in that the question of whether a Neo-European society not based on slavery and/or the conquest of Indian land could have been a success, and the answer would seem to be no. As for what this meant politically, the merchants of Savannah, and the men who dealt with the Creek Nation for deer skins (an input into leather production), were among the last to join the "Patriot" movement; it was the Congregationalist population of the colony, and the onrush of settlers out of Virginia and North Carolina, who swept away loyalist leadership of the colony. Pressly leaves one with a nod to the Georgia's role in the rise of the Cotton South; but just a nod. While Pressly sometimes feels as though he's weighing you down with detail, he actually does this in a fairly entertaining matter for an academic monograph.… (meer)