Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy. Strother E. Roberts
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to cite another popular trope, to see Indians as inherently backward and doomed to be eventually replaced by a more industrious/technologically savvy population. For instance, Cronon’s Changes in the Land concludes by identifying “two central ecological contradictions” that explain environmental change over the course of the colonial period. The first insists that “the ecological relationships which European markets created in New England were inherently antithetical to earlier Indian economies.”43 This is—as Cronon would likely admit—an oversimplification of the economic transition that took place in seventeenth-century New England. The assertion that the economic choices introduced by Euro-American merchants and settlers in the seventeenth century were “antithetical” to Native American economies undervalues the dynamism of those economies and belittles the adaptability of Indian societies.
The environmental history of the New England fur trade is not the simple story of a “traditional” Indian economy displaced by a European/Euro-American capitalist system. Far from seeing the expanding European economy as incompatible with their own existing commercial networks, Native communities often enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to partner with European traders. The existence of the seventeenth-century fur trade (among other cross-cultural economic exchanges) proves as much. Rather, seventeenth-century New England witnessed the rise, operation, and ultimate decline of a new economy—one that encompassed European merchants and supplied European consumers, but that was, on its production side, just as much of an “Indian” economy as that which had preceded it. The history of early New England is not the story of an economic system imposed from outside, but rather a process by which Indians and Europeans cocreated new economic and ecological systems.44
The eventual decline of Native American economies in New England at the end of the seventeenth century can more appropriately be attributed to the historically contingent and culturally defined political and commercial choices that Indian communities made in the face of the fur trade and the ecological transformations it triggered. The abstract big-picture econohistorical models (to paraphrase Hämäläinen) of capitalist expansion embraced by Cronon, Merchant, and other scholars of early America downplay both human and nonhuman agency while obscuring regional historical processes.45 It was not, as Carolyn Merchant concludes, the simple introduction of “diseases and property rights” by Europeans that “destroyed [the] traditional patterns of subsistence” practiced by seventeenth-century New England natives. Certainly, Native American communities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suffered tragically high mortality rates following the introduction of foreign pathogens through commercial contact with Europeans.46 But it was Indian communities themselves who chose how best to adapt their subsistence strategies in response to ecological, economic, social, and political forces that included new diseases and Euro-American demands for land, as well as the “traditional” demands of Native networks of diplomacy and exchange.
The second of the “two central ecological contradictions” that Cronon identifies at the heart of the colonial economy was the tendency of Euro-American colonists to engage in “ecologically self-destructive” modes of production due to their assumption of “the limitless availability” of natural resources. For Cronon, colonial expansion was fueled by “the temporary gift of nature” and after “that gift was finally exhausted … expansion could not continue indefinitely.”47 While such an interpretation of early American environmental and economic history contains a germ of truth, it nevertheless misrepresents the historical attitudes that it claims to explain. To put it another way, Cronon’s final analysis of the early American economy—and the analyses of scholars that have followed him—better represents the viewpoint of a late twentieth-century environmentalist than it does the ecological perceptions of New England’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Euro-American inhabitants.48
To begin with, colonists did not assume “the limitless availability” of natural resources that they depended upon the New England landscape to provide. In fact, English settlers from the early decades of the seventeenth century forward remained ever mindful of the finite nature of locally available resources, continuously bemoaned the risk of shortages facing their settlements, and repeatedly drafted laws for conserving these resources. The historical irony at the heart of colonial resource exploitation is, in fact, the exact opposite of that presented by Cronon: even as colonists worried about impending resource shortages, these shortages rarely manifested themselves. (The one exception explored in this book is the regional exhaustion of fur stocks.)
The expansion of transatlantic markets into the North American mainland meant, in a very important sense, that the “gifts of nature” were not, in fact, “temporary” as Cronon claimed. The economic expansion of New England has continued, with some interruptions, from the seventeenth century through the twenty-first. Euro-American communities in New England never faced any prolonged or meaningful shortages of firewood, timber for construction, foodstuffs, or even agricultural lands. Commodity imports and population exports (outmigration) perpetually prevented (or at least took the sting out of) any impending shortages in these resources. Even after beaver disappeared from their own region, New Englanders could purchase hats and coats made from furs trapped around the Great Lakes or Hudson’s Bay. In the nineteenth century, New Englanders who had formerly cut lumber for sale to far-off markets (or whose forebears had) became consumers of lumber sawn in the Midwest. Historical efforts at resource conservation slowed exploitation and, in most cases, prevented the absolute exhaustion of natural resources, but it was the continuous expansion of markets that transformed relative local resource scarcities into a purchasable abundance.49 Cronon was, of course, correct that natural resources are globally limited and exhaustible, but this is a realization born of modern ecology. The lived experience of early modern New Englanders was one of feared local shortages repeatedly avoided through market participation. Just as colonial New England offered England and its West Indies colonies access to resources scarce in those regions, New Englanders gradually came to depend upon territories elsewhere in North America to supply them with their furs, lumber, meat, and so forth.50
This is not to say that many natural resources, readily available from the local environment in 1600, had not become scarce by 1800. Nor is it to deny that many ecological changes occurred which may justifiably be identified as examples of environmental degradation. The history that follows does not endorse the contention of Julian Simon and others like him that markets, in partnership with human ingenuity, can continue perpetually to overcome the limits placed upon humanity by a finite global environment.51 If market participation allowed New Englanders to avoid the hardships they might otherwise have faced from local resource exhaustion, this should be taken as a statement about the historical operation of commercial networks, not a prediction of the role that commodity markets might play in the future.
A focus on commerce and commodity production necessarily emphasizes the roles of some historical actors over others. This book’s five chapters revolve around five commodities which were especially important for networks of local, regional, and/or transatlantic trade in the colonial period: furs, agricultural crops, firewood, timber, and livestock. The choice of these particular commodities dictates which groups of historical human actors have received the most analytical attention. Native American economic actors, for example, occupy a central role in Chapter 1’s discussion of the Connecticut Valley fur trade and Chapter 2’s study of valley farming but make only intermittent appearances in later chapters. This is not because Indians or Indian communities disappeared from the Connecticut Valley after the decline of the fur trade in the late seventeenth century. Indeed, there continued to be—indeed has always been—an Indian presence in the valley. Rather, Native Americans play a smaller role in later chapters because the most widely traded commodities coming out of the valley in the decades after the 1670s were overwhelmingly produced by Euro-American labor. Native Americans continued to participate in the production of these commodities, raising livestock or becoming wage laborers in the larger Euro-American economy, but their role in resource exploitation decreased markedly compared to the role of incoming settlers. Likewise, the essential role that women played in colonial society is only occasionally mentioned, not because women’s labor was not crucial to maintaining