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“... Not until the 18th century did ordinary Europeans discover America. New World staples flooded into their homes, fibres, sugar, tobacco, affordable consumer items that made their lives a little more pleasant. Production of these goods, of course, required huge numbers of labourers, most of whom had travelled to America as bondsmen, as servants and slaves ...”

“... Revolutions,’ Barbara Tuchman writes, ‘produce other men, not new men. Half-way “between truth and endless error” the mould of the species is permanent. That is the earth’s burden.’ Edmund Morgan and Patrice Higonnet are less pessimistic. They see the great ideological transformations of the 18th century as a continuing challenge. To be sure, those who dreamed of creating a genuine liberal democracy may have failed to achieve their immediate goals, but they issued a powerful invitation to establish the sovereignty of the people ...”

“... historians have tested Bailyn’s thesis by extending and particularising it. This is what T.H. Breen has done in Tobacco Culture. The impact of Country ideas in the colonies, he argues, varied according to region and time and, above all, the ‘non-political experiences’ of the colonists, whose religion, work habits, family affairs, social values and the ...”

“... is what good historians write, then Jack Hexter at his best is a good historian indeed. Professor Breen, who is certainly a good historian, dedicates his book to Hexter. He has had a wholly original idea. Historians explain the differences which soon appeared between the social systems of New England and Virginia by differences in the environment. Professor ...”

“... to the end. An influential cohort of historians, including John Murrin, Jack Greene and T.H. Breen, has established that anglicisation, the dominant trend in 18th-century colonial life, was a vital precondition of the American Revolution. Only in the 1770s did the notion that a corrupt motherland was excluding her overseas offspring from a full enjoyment ...”