Actors Across Boundaries in Early Colonial Atlantic America

Cynthia J. Van Zandt

This paper focuses on the widespread mobility, cultural diversity, and boundary-crossing that created the exceptionally fluid character of Atlantic North America in the late sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries. Drawing on the work of Bernard Bailyn, Ira Berlin, Jack Greene, and John Thornton, the paper argues that territorial and cultural boundaries were constantly changing and remarkably porous. As a result, cultural mixing was extensive, though often contested, and people with many identities and cross-cultural contacts played an essential role. Everyone in the colonial world relied upon the boundary-crossing abilities of culturally heterogeneous people, and European colonies would not have survived the early period of colonization without them.

[WP #96031]