Key points
The chapter's argument is that four very different upheavals — King Philip's War, Bacon's Rebellion, the Pueblo Revolt and Salem — belonged to one wider seventeenth-century pattern, not four unrelated local events.
Violence was normal. By one estimate there were only three years between 1600 and 1700 when peace prevailed, with civil wars from Russia and France to Ireland, Catalonia and the Ottoman Empire.
Two structural pressures drove it: new imperial rivals (England, France, then the Dutch challenging Spain and Portugal), and absolute monarchs colliding with regional nobles who would not surrender their power.
Environment mattered too. The Little Ice Age brought droughts, floods and cooling that wrecked harvests, squeezing governments, landed elites and peasants at once.
Charles I treated Parliament as merely advisory and refused to call it through the 1630s. A Scottish rebellion left him short of cash and forced his hand in November 1640 — the Long Parliament, which then sat two decades.
The English Civil War (1642–1651) devastated over 200 towns and villages and killed roughly 7% of the population, about 250,000 people — more than triple the proportion of Britons who died in World War I.
Challenging the king opened up who else should rule. The parliamentary side split: Independents wanted Parliament supreme, Levellers wanted the monarchy and House of Lords gone, and Diggers questioned private property itself.
Charles I was beheaded in 1649. Cromwell's Protectorate became military dictatorship; the monarchy was restored in 1660, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 deposed James II under a Declaration of Rights.
The Navigation Acts of 1650, 1651 and 1660 required colonial goods to travel in English ships to English ports — the clearest direct effect of England's upheaval on the colonies.
In New England, settlers passed 50,000 by 1670 while the Native population of the east fell below 20,000, mostly from disease. Settlers had little regard for Indigenous land claims or sovereignty.
King Philip's War began in June 1675 after John Sassamon was found dead and three Wampanoag advisers were executed for it. Metacom and the Wampanoag attacked, and most other Algonquian-speaking peoples joined.It was catastrophic for Native New England: about 2,000 killed or executed, 3,000 more dead of hunger and disease, 1,000 enslaved and shipped to the West Indies, some 2,000 made refugees — roughly half the population.
The colonists "won" at immense cost: about 1,000 dead (near 2% of them), a large war debt, a devastated frontier and an enduring hatred of Indigenous people.
Bacon's Rebellion (1676) came out of Virginia's land and labour squeeze. Berkeley gave land and office to wealthy allies, suspended elections and taxed smallholders. He knew the risk: six of seven Virginians were "Poore, Endebted, Discontented, and Armed."Nathaniel Bacon — a gentleman and nephew of Berkeley's wife — attacked Indigenous people against orders, was named a traitor, then burned Jamestown. He died of disease, the revolt collapsed, and Berkeley hanged twenty-three rebels.
The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 was the largest and most successful Native rebellion of the century. Drought, raiding and Treviño's 1675 crackdown on Pueblo holy men set it off; Po'pay organised across languages and distance using Native runners.
About 400 Spanish were killed and survivors fled 300 miles to El Paso for over a decade. When Spain retook Santa Fe in 1692, the new regime was lighter on Native labour and far less hostile to Pueblo religion.
The chapter's own theory of rebellion (opening 4.5): grievances help unite people, but grievances alone are not enough. Rebels also need to sense the powerful are divided among themselves, plus a triggering event — a drought, a violated norm, or an injustice to a popular leader.
Salem shows a convulsion need not be political. The same stresses — lost land, weakening authority, generational resentment, wartime strain — could turn "in more supernatural directions" in a still-premodern culture.