Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy
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Focusing on the Connecticut River Valley—New England's longest river and largest watershed— Strother Roberts traces the local, regional, and transatlantic markets in colonial commodities that shaped an ecological transformation in one corner of the rapidly globalizing early modern world. Reaching deep into the interior, the Connecticut provided a watery commercial highway for the furs, grain, timber, livestock, and various other commodities that the region exported. Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy shows how the extraction of each commodity had an impact on the New England landscape, creating a new colonial ecology inextricably tied to the broader transatlantic economy beyond its shores. This history refutes two common misconceptions: first, that globalization is a relatively new phenomenon and its power to reshape economies and natural environments has only fully been realized in the modern era and, second, that the Puritan founders of New England were self-sufficient ascetics who sequestered themselves from the corrupting influence of the wider world. Roberts argues, instead, that colonial New England was an integral part of Britain's expanding imperialist commercial economy. Imperial planners envisioned New England as a region able to provide resources to other, more profitable parts of the empire, such as the sugar islands of the Caribbean. Settlers embraced trade as a means to afford the tools they needed to conquer the landscape and to acquire the same luxury commodities popular among the consumer class of Europe. New England's native nations, meanwhile, utilized their access to European trade goods and weapons to secure power and prestige in a region shaken by invading newcomers and the diseases that followed in their wake. These networks of extraction and exchange fundamentally transformed the natural environment of the region, creating a landscape that, by the turn of the nineteenth century, would have been unrecognizable to those living there two centuries earlier.
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Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy
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These hostilities came at an especially disastrous time for the Pequot nation. Their villages had been particularly hard hit by the smallpox epidemic of 1633–1634, in which three out of every four Pequots died. Then, in the summer of 1635, a hurricane made ground in southern New England, destroying crops as they stood in the fields. Hunger stalked New England from 1635 to 1636, striking European and Indian communities alike. Shortages in maize harvests may have placed further strain on subordinate villages who owed tribute to the Pequots, and the specter of famine likely contributed to the English rush to war. Raiding parties, especially those coming out of the hard-hit Connecticut Valley, made the seizure of Pequot corn supplies a wartime priority.52 Finally, the wealth and authority that came from the fur trade had not been evenly distributed among the villages and sachems of the Pequot nation. By the 1630s, a group of Pequot leaders who had been shut out of the inner circles of power, led by the sachem Uncas, had formed a splinter nation, the Mohegans, who sought their own commercial and military alliance with the English at the expense of the larger Pequot confederacy.53 Reeling from natural disasters and beset by enemies both without and within, the Pequots had, by 1636, reached the nadir of their military and political power.
Despite now being outnumbered by the English, the Pequots retaliated in 1637, leading to a full-scale war for political control of southern New England. Rival nations (most notably the Narragansetts), eager to see the Pequots defeated and their hold over the regional fur trade destroyed, allied with the English. Meanwhile, many of the Indian communities whom the Pequots had reduced to political subordination, and upon whom the Pequots depended for military assistance, abandoned their erstwhile political masters. The Mohegans became key allies of the English, while many Connecticut Valley villages chose to remain neutral in the conflict. English colonists waged a campaign of fire and wanton slaughter against the hopelessly outnumbered Pequots. The majority who survived the war were either taken captive by their Indian opponents or enslaved by the English. Many of the latter were sold to the West Indies, joining other victims of the transatlantic slave trade to toil on tobacco and cotton plantations, and perhaps contribute their labor to the development of the still nascent sugar economy. Only a small fraction of the nation escaped to reconstitute a community on the Thames River. Having violently expelled the Pequots from their position in the New England fur trade, English traders eagerly began a direct commerce with the Indian nations of the lower and middle Connecticut Valley.
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