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This paper addresses the long and structuring impact of the Puritan paradigm on early New England history and historiography. It highlights the tendency of the religious model to obscure or marginalize the entrepreneurial and commercial impulse inherent in the colonizing project of the Massachusetts Bay Company. It argues that settlement, or the action of appropriating and transforming indigenous land for the benefit of the corporation, provides a salutary, contextual perspective on the role of commerce and expansion in shaping New England societies at their founding. The original documents and the promotion of the corporation show that John Winthrop and his colonial government embraced the economic implications of land appropriation and commercial development, managing labor and trade with a view toward colonial and financial success on an Atlantic scale. Their expansionist policies and their concern for the protection and preservation of the property and the privileges of the entire corporate body transformed the Company into a proto-state defined by and attached to its sovereignty.

This paper analyses the commercial and institutional context in which Jeremy Belknap founded the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1791-1792. It reads his “Four Dissertations” of 1792 as a series of methodological and theoretical arguments in favor of the unique chronology and thematic content of American history. It argues that Belknap’s overall historical project is the origin of American exceptionalism as a historical practice, based on an exclusive focus on settlement and expansion as the engines of history, and on the experiences of American settlers since their arrival on the continent, as the only sources on which to build a relevant paradigm of the American character. His legacy is problematic, but it represents a crucial avenue of postcolonial inquiry, in which the structuring effects of exceptionalist historiography can be studied.