And like an abstractly maternal being, I lean at night over both the good and the bad children, equal when they sleep and are mine. Poor hapless men, poor hapless humanity! What are they all doing here? I see all the actions and goals of life, from the simple life of the lungs to the building of cities and the marking off of empires, as a drowsiness, as involuntary dreams or respites in the gap between one reality and another, between one and another day of the Absolute. I see everyone with the compassion of the world’s only conscious being.

I feel a tenderness as if I were seeing with the eyes of a god. It’s an immediate humanitarianism, without aims of conclusions, that overwhelms me now. Reading Taylor’s descriptions of the genocidal microbes explorers unwittingly carried, the livestock breeding feral packs that devoured unfenced Indian crops, the hardy Old World weeds that spread in the over-grazed landscape, I begin to think of the Europeans as simply the most sentient and motivated organisms of a rapacious ecosystem, their mastery of navigation just a transit of creatures.

This book can no more take a side than a time-lapsed film of mold spreading on a sandwich can sway one to the mold or to bread. Sure, Taylor has his moments of passionate phrasing, but a work of this scope and synthesis (all colonial experiments in North America, and most in the Caribbean, from Columbus to the California missions) is a poor vehicle for agitation the reading, and perhaps the writing, of any lofty historical survey insinuates an abstraction, a detachment, invites a vast indifference. Some reviews on this site mention Taylor’s “leftist bias,” allege a soft-pedaling of Native American violence and environmental impact.

American colonies by alan taylor