Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy. Strother E. Roberts
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and most may not have participated directly in the slave trade, but they nonetheless profited from the sugar revolution and the labor of the enslaved millions who toiled on the plantations of the West Indies.11
Historians have long suggested that the wealth generated by the trade in sugar and other slave-produced plantation commodities played an important role in laying the foundation for Britain’s industrial revolution and the British-led transition to a modern capitalist economy in western Europe and the United States. Sugar and related commodity trades certainly contributed capital for later industrial investments, but, perhaps more importantly, sugar production undergirded an entire imperial system that fed consumer demand in the British Isles while also creating demand for British produced goods in far-flung regions of the world. Successful colonists—whether they participated directly in sugar production or were otherwise employed in ancillary sectors of production—indulged their tastes for imported British goods and, over time, consumed an expanding array of textiles, household furnishings, and luxury goods produced in or reexported through Britain. British goods, likewise, found their way outside of the empire, filling the demands of African traders engaged in the transatlantic slave trade (a crucial underpinning of the sugar trade) and of Europeans both on the continent and in the often poorly supplied colonies of French and Spanish America. Meanwhile merchants and the owners of capital in Britain invested in new ventures to meet these demands, employing workers who were themselves constituents of the “consumer revolution” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These workers channeled their earnings into a domestic demand for commodities that had already been increasing in England since the beginning of the early modern era.12
If not its centerpiece, commodity production in New England was, nonetheless, integral to this imperial economic expansion, a fact easily overlooked by scholars, such as Sir Josiah Child and his intellectual heirs, who place too much focus solely on the connection between colonies and the metropole. Furs for the European market were New England’s first major transatlantic export commodity, tying the region into commercial networks that stretched north into New France and across the Northern Hemisphere to Siberia. However, by the second half of the seventeenth century, the fur trade had been supplanted in importance by New England’s trade with the sugar islands. New Englanders played a critical role in creating and maintaining the slave labor–based plantation system of the West Indies.13 Boston merchants drew on their agricultural hinterland—which included the Connecticut Valley as well as the rest of New England—to establish a steady trade with the West Indies by the 1650s.14 The food, timber, ships and other commodities produced in New England, and elsewhere on the mainland, allowed Caribbean planters to specialize in cultivating staple crops. Nor did New Englanders limit their commerce to the British sugar islands, but also fed and supported European settlers in the French and Spanish Caribbean as well. In 1679, royal agent and customs official Edward Randolph observed critically that New England merchants were willing to “trye all ports” in search of customers and that Boston had consequently become “the mart town of the West Indies.”15 In the late eighteenth century, the value of New England’s commodity exports to the West Indies was over three and a half times that of its exports to the British Isles.16
No single leg of Britain’s intraimperial Atlantic trade was balanced. The West Indies exported more (in terms of value) sugar and other tropical commodities to the British Isles than they imported back in manufactured and luxury goods. By contrast, a small variety of New England–produced commodities flowed directly to Europe—most notably fish, agricultural goods, timber and wood products, and, early on, furs—but the northern mainland colonies purchased far more from Britain then they exported in return. On the other hand, New England and the Middle Colonies ran a trade surplus with the West Indies. New England, in particular, imported a good deal of sugar, molasses, salt, and some rum from the Caribbean, but these imports fell far short of balancing the interregional ledger. Instead, New Englanders effectively relied on their trade surplus with the West Indies to cover their shortfall with Europe. Trade within the empire roughly balanced, and regional specialization helped optimize productivity in the imperial system as a whole.17 Over the course of the eighteenth century, goods and services traded to the West Indies facilitated New England’s rapid increase in per capita wealth and allowed New Englanders to raise their standards of living by indulging in imported European goods. In the words of economic historian Carole Shammas: “It is difficult to imagine a thriving New England post-1640 … without the sugar islands.”18
Like other works within the developing genre of “commodity histories,” Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy connects commodity production and, to a lesser extent, consumption to the development of new commercial networks that united the emerging transatlantic world of the early modern period. William Cronon justified centering his Nature’s Metropolis on a study of commodity markets by asserting that “few economic institutions more powerfully affect human communities and natural ecosystems in the modern capitalist world.”19 This project shares Cronon’s appreciation for the importance of commodity markets in shaping humanity’s relationship to the natural world, but recognizes that the ability of such markets to profoundly alter natural ecosystems predated capitalist modernity. This book goes a step beyond other commodity histories by tying its analysis of commercial networks to a study of ecological change—effectively integrating not only human communities but also nonhuman fauna, flora, and even the nonorganic elements and physical systems of the Connecticut basin into its definition of the early modern British Atlantic economy.20 The result is a history that explores how markets connected consumers in far-flung communities not only to human producers but also to the natural resources that these producers exploited and the broader ecosystems from which these resources were drawn.
This ecological focus means that Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy differs from other commodity histories in a second important way as well: Instead of following a single commodity across the globe from its site of production to its site of consumption, this study seeks to understand how the historical production of a number of commodities impacted the societies and ecologies of a single region. The goal of this book is to produce a particular type of “Atlantic World history,” what David Armitage has termed a “cis-Atlantic” history. This history will explore the “local particularity” of New England, and more specifically of the Connecticut Valley, while also asking what historical developments in this one corner of the early modern world can tell us about the larger processes at work within the “wider web of connections” that tied together the economies and ecologies of the far-flung lands bordering the Atlantic.21 Whereas, the two monographs which currently dominate the historiography of early New England’s regional environment—William Cronon’s Changes in the Land (Cronon’s other seminal work of environmental history) and Carolyn Merchant’s Ecological Revolutions—give only passing attention to the historical markets that drove environmental change in colonial New England, the new research presented here emphasizes the centrality of Atlantic markets.22
Just as Pekka Hämäläinen has worried that “big-picture ecohistorical models” are to blame for “suffus[ing] history with biological determinism,” it can likewise be claimed that many existing environmental histories of early America overindulge in a particular brand of economic determinism.23 Cronon and Merchant, for example, relied heavily on the abstract concept of “capitalism” as the driving force behind environmental change in early New England. This book, by contrast, pushes deeper into historical economic life to explore the way that the growth of specific markets—social networks connecting producers to consumers, often through several layers of economic intermediaries—contributed to a new, increasingly capitalistic, early modern Atlantic World.24 Capitalism was not an autonomous actor that pulled New England into modernity. Rather, the Indian and Euro-American inhabitants of early modern New England worked with economic actors elsewhere to build the expanding system of social and commercial networks that constituted modern capitalism.
Among other benefits, this new interpretive model highlights the importance of nonagricultural export commodities to New England’s economic development and ecological transformation. The previous historiographical fixation on agriculture as the driving force behind economic growth in early modern New England has caused many scholars to overlook or downplay the