ABSTRACT
The term “Anglo-America” in the title of this chapter identifies its major theme, the growth of a culture—of social and personal values, of habits of mind and writing—that is no longer simply English, nor even just English inflected by foreign experiences. The preceding two chapters showed explorers and conquerors traveling into situations that sometimes transformed them personally. However, their views of the world, their ways of thinking about it, remained essentially English, focussed on England, articulated in English terms with English references. In the mid-seventeenth century, though many and perhaps most colonists still crossed the Atlantic to make their fortune, rather than to settle permanently, their engagement with the colonies nonetheless began to change.
