Summer talks series: Connected histories of capitalism

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• Department of History

For many early modern English imperial planners, New England was something of a disappointment; its economy merely ancillary to the more fiscally lucrative colonies to its south. In fact, New England was an integral part of the globalizing commercial system that enabled the profitability of tropical staple crop production, and of the large-scale enslavement of laborers on which this production depended. As planters in the Caribbean colonies specialised in tropical crops like sugar and tobacco, they dedicated more and more of their lands to staple production and turned to the more northerly mainland colonies to provide them with the supplies they needed to run their plantation enterprises. Colonial New Englanders, for their part, sought a way to afford the tools and luxury commodities they desired from Europe, and so welcomed the opportunity to provision the sugar islands with grain, meat, timber, draft animals, and ships. The result of this intra-imperial commerce was a system of ecological specialization within the British Empire in which trade with the Caribbean encouraged the creation of a diversified New England economy while also driving the region’s deforestation, loss of biodiversity, soil depletion, and erosion.

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