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BOOK REVIEWS David B. Quinn. European Approaches to North analyse social and demographic trends and so America, 1450-1640. Variorum Collected Studies; have been unfashionable for more than a decade" Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Variorum Press, (221). It is, however, useful for historians and 1998. x + 342 pp., illustrations, maps, charts, others interested in the past to know what hap• index. US $101.95, cloth; ISBN 0-86078-769-9. pened, or at least what is likely to have happened. Quinn may be no exponent of the latest Paris fad This most recent collection of David Quinn's but he remains a scholar whose interpretation of essays on the early European exploration and events inevitably commands respect, precisely settlement of North America follows his Explor• because he is always more interested in making ers and Colonies: America, 1500-1625 (London, sense of the document than in validating a theo• 1990). Like its useful predecessor, European retical preconception. Approaches brings together Quinn's contributions What of the longer essays in this volume, in to several disparate publications. Although most which Quinn cautiously dons the unfamiliar of the essays in the present volume have appeared analytic robe? "Englishmen and Others" is a blunt in scholarly journals or conference proceedings and therefore interesting assessment of how since the late 1980s, that previous exposure does Quinn's compatriots viewed themselves and other not detract from the usefulness of this book. The Europeans on the eve of colonization. The final topics range from imagined Atlantic islands, to essay, "Settlement Patterns in Early Modern perceptions of American ecology, the French fur Colonization," is an analysis of the state of early trade, the settlement of Bermuda, editing Hakluyt, European colonization by 1700.
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