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.
