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guese Colonization in Brazil and chapters on Portugal in his already mentioned Colonization are widely known by virtue of their being the most comprehensive and readily accessible accounts in English. The retelling of the more familiar story of British expansion from the imperial rather than the narrow American point of view has had results no less notable than those arising from a réévaluation of Spanish effort, has brought about sympathetic understanding and ha? led to fundamentally different interpretations. Proper perspective has made it very evident that, under mercantilistic philosophy, the Caribbean sugar islands and India formed the jewels of Great Britain's far-flung empire, of the eighteenth century, and that the southern mainland colonies of North America were of immeasurably more consequence to the homeland than were those of the upper Atlantic coast. Various measures such as the hat and molasses acts, viewed as peculiarly oppressive by the New Englanders, have consequently resolved themselves into logical manifestations of a rational colonial policy and the old motherland emerges tolerant, indulgent and acknow-ledged as the most generous of métropoles. Similarly, lot of the British colonists is seen to have been a really enviable one by comparison with other colonial groups and their alleged grievances are now regarded as largely imaginary, arising out of an overdose of liberty. Four men, George L. Beer, Charles M. Andrews, Herbert L. Osgood and Claude H. Van Tyne, have been most instrumental in reshaping conventional views here and their striking findings have been published in a series of volumes which rank among the chief products of American historiography. The first of these, New York business man by profession and historian by hobby, revolutionized scholarly thought by his Origins of the British Colonial System, 1678-1660, Old Colonial System, 1660-1764 and British Colonial Policy, 17541765.
The numerous writings by Professor Andrews of Yale clarified the atmosphere and first revealed the boundless oppor13