The Great Upheaval seeks to challenge the periodization employed by most Anglophone scholars of colonial North America and to better integrate scholarship of North America and the Atlantic world with broader early modern histories. Imperial crises were not mere disturbances in a long story of imperial consolidation that began in the early seventeenth century; for a half century these crises—not growth or stability—were the norm. The contributors treat these numerous outbreaks of violence not as interruptions in a “provincial” era but as marking a distinct period in time: the Great Upheaval.

The rigidly enforced social hierarchies in colonial North America during this era accelerated the exchange of people, goods, and ideas in unprecedented volumes, accompanied by rising Anglophone military and commercial power at sea, and a population increase of colonists that were all not only preceded by, but made possible by, the Great Upheaval.