In my spare time I am rereading Albion’s Seed. I live in the Western extension of “Puritan America.” Going over the section that draws the connection between East Anglia and New England David Hacket Fischer, the author, emphasizes the peculiarity of East Anglian society in comparison to the rest of England (more literate, more egalitarian in asset distribution, etc.) and alludes to possible historical differences traceable as far back as the 6th century. The deep time roots of these differences reminded me of genetic studies which indicated that the peoples of the “Saxon shore” (of which East Anglia was the heart) bear the stamp of their Germanic forebears in their NRY lineages. The Elect who emigrated to the New World (immigrants were vetted for character and piety) might have numbered no more than ~50,000, who in the first half of the 17th century laid down the seeds for the development of Yankee America up to the Revolutionary War (Fischer makes reference to the fact that the sex ratio was relatively even in New England because of the social engineering of the elders of the colony and demographic doubling time worked its magic to increase the population base after the immigration decreased after 1650).
In this book Fischer emphasizes the cultural continuity that characterizes a region even when the preponderant ethnic group is numerically surpassed, and the genetic affinity of extensions of the root culture that transcend the bounds of geography. The peculiar cultural folkways of East Anglia, shaped by its Saxon and later Dane heritage, were recapitualed in a more extreme form in New England. These folkways were then transmitted to the Upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest. When the Irish settled in New England they brought their Catholicism and their drinking, but after a few generations Fischer argues that they began to behave very much be Yankees (J.F.K., an Irish Catholic was The United States’ last openly & proudly Yankee president). And so it is that the descendents of Gaels adopt a culture that owes much to the Saesons who displaced their kin in Britain, and hippies in the shadow of Mt. Hood in distant Imbler are stamped by the decision of Vortigern to invite German mercenaries to repulse Irish and Pictish mauraders.
Of course the current world is contingent upon the past, that is a trivial assertion, what surprises me is that we can still discern such stark strands of culture & thought over thousands of years and miles tracing themselves through disparate periods and nations.
Posted by razib at 12:08 AM