Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy. Strother E. Roberts

history of the Connecticut Valley that follows, like the tale of Hobomok and Ktsi Amiskw, is a narrative of conflict, choices, and change. Like many environmental histories, it considers how particular local environments changed over time, the role of human beings in creating those (often unexpected or unforeseen) changes, and the way that market pressures and incentives helped shape those human decisions. It employs instances of historical conflict as signposts to map scarcity along the Connecticut’s course and to determine which natural resources were most in demand where and when. Most importantly, the following pages explore the growth of an overlapping network of local, regional, and transatlantic markets in natural resources and studies the impact that local inhabitants’ choices within these markets had upon both the land- and waterscapes of the colonial Connecticut Valley. As soon as the river was freed from Ktsi Amiskw’s dam, its waters ran down to the sea and mingled with the ocean beyond. No longer held back, the great pond became the Long River, which in time became a commercial highway tying the Pocumtucks, neighboring Native American communities, and eventually Euro-American settlers in the valley to the wider world beyond.

      At first, the European colonists who joined the Pocumtucks in the Connecticut Valley recorded and repeated the story of Hobomok and the Great Beaver. But, in time, their descendants developed their own creation narrative for the region. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, Euro-Americans had crafted a creation tale for the Connecticut Valley that was set in the last ice age and began with a glacier moving down from the north.³ The advancing ice sheet carved out a great channel along the course of the Ammonoosuc Fault that separates the White Mountains in the east from the Green Mountains of the west. Steadily advancing, the glacier took the path of least resistance, plunging through the soft soils that lay between the mountains and finally reaching Long Island Sound around twenty-one thousand years ago. As the earth began to warm, the glacier melted, depositing sand and boulders picked up along its travels. Near present-day Middletown, Connecticut, a large moraine of such debris formed, arresting the seaward journey of melting glacial waters. The result was a great lake stretching over two hundred miles long from what is today Middletown to Littleton, New Hampshire. The pent up waters gradually wore away the moraine dam and the lake drained to create, about twelve thousand years ago, the modern Connecticut Valley. As the waters receded, plants, animals, and the ancestors of the valley’s historical Indian communities colonized the newly revealed lands.⁴ As rational as this description of natural forces may seem, it remained firmly wedded to a Eurocentric belief in progress and a circumscribed view of what constituted civilization. In this new myth, geology and biology (or what earlier generations referred to as Providence) prepared a “wilderness” to receive the civilizing efforts of America’s Puritan forefathers.⁵

       Atlantic Economy

      In contrast to such narratives—which often identified progress with the triumph of Euro-American technologies over nature—recent environmental history recognizes that human economic activity exists within nature and both shapes and is shaped by the dynamics of natural ecosystems. At its heart, economics is the study of how humanity chooses to manage the scarce resources that nature provides. Consequently, economic activities stand at the forefront of this environmental history of the Connecticut Valley. The book that follows is not the first to consider how the natural environment has shaped New England’s history. Nor is it the first to point out the important role that commodity production and exchange played in the development of an increasingly globalized “Atlantic World” in the early modern period. What this history proposes is to tie these two historical approaches together, to embrace the new methodological questions raised by recent transnational histories of commerce and empire in order to breathe new life into the older and increasingly dated environmental history of colonial New England.

      Unlike other regions of colonial America, New England famously lacked a single foundational staple commodity—for example, sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo—around which its early economy could be built. In 1679, only fifty years after the founding of the first English town in the Connecticut Valley, Parliament asked the government of Connecticut for a list of the commodities that the colony produced. In response the colony’s general court provided an inventory of “the Comodities of the country” that boasted an array of grains, salted meats, livestock, cider, and timber products. Each of these commodities was important to the economy of the Connecticut Valley, but no single one could be said to underpin the region’s economy in the way, for example, tobacco did for Virginia. A portion of these commodities, the general court continued, went directly into Connecticut’s small, but growing, trade with the West Indies and the Spanish and Portuguese Wine Islands. The largest part was sold to merchants operating out of the mainland’s greatest entrepôt, Boston, where Connecticut Valley products mingled with commodities from all over New England before being resold into the wider Atlantic World beyond.⁶ This official exchange highlights Connecticut’s role as a colony within a larger imperial system—as a site of resource extraction for the good of the English Empire—and it emphasizes the commercial forces that linked colonial Connecticut Valley residents and their local environments to far-off markets.

      For Americans raised on tales of Pilgrim forefathers and New England exceptionalism, it is worth remembering that colonial New England’s lack of an economic staple actually made it—as one economic historian recently wrote—“something of a disappointment to those with an imperial vision.”⁷ It was the Caribbean, not New England or any other mainland region, which provided the economic engine that drove the early modern British Empire in the Americas. As early as 1668, wealthy merchant and political economist Sir Josiah Child asserted that every English subject who immigrated to the West Indies provided for “the employment of Four Men in England, whereas peradventure of ten men that issue from us to New England … what we send to or receive from them doth not employ one.”⁸ On the surface of things, Sir Josiah seems to have had a point. By the second half of the eighteenth century, the West Indies accounted for about 60 percent of the annual value of the exports coming out of Britain’s American colonies. The combined value of New England’s exports made up only about 7 percent of this total. New England’s share of imperial wealth did increase slightly over the course of the colonial period, but the northern colonies never came close to generating the levels of profits or revenue generated by the Caribbean sugar islands.⁹

      The “sugar revolution” that began on Barbados in the 1640s transformed the English imperial economy. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, white planters throughout the Caribbean embraced sugarcane as a crop that seemed to promise instant wealth. European consumers clamored for sugar, turning what had once been a luxury “spice” into a household staple. Sugar replaced other common sweeteners in cuisine, encouraged the invention of new sweet concoctions, and served as a preservative for an array of foodstuffs. It also helped cut the bitterness of other exotic comestibles finding their way onto global markets around the same time, making commodities like tea, coffee, and cocoa acceptable for finicky European palates. English merchants, most in the metropole but also many in the colonies, amassed fortunes. The number and tonnage of English ships plying Atlantic waters underwent an astronomical expansion. Revenues poured into state coffers. By the late eighteenth century, taxes on sugar contributed more to the exchequer than duties on any other imported commodity, and the revenue from sugar and its products trailed only the land tax and taxes on domestic alcohol production in their importance to the imperial budget. Subsidiary trades—most notably the transatlantic slave trade that delivered African laborers into bondage on sugar plantations—flourished as a result.¹⁰

      For those shut out from the rarified business opportunities that offered obscene wealth to a lucky few planters and merchants (which is to say, the vast majority of Britons), the sugar revolution could still offer a chance at increased prosperity. The high profits offered by sugar (and tobacco, indigo, and other tropical crops) meant that planters were often loathe to devote valuable plantation lands to uses other than cultivating their staple. Colonists elsewhere in the Americas, including the Connecticut Valley, seized upon the opportunity to supply the West Indies with what the islands failed to provide for themselves: grain and flour, draft animals and meat, fish, and timber, as well as the barrels and ships needed to carry out the trade of an empire. The British Isles supplied some of these same commodities, as well as tools and the manufactured luxuries craved by