Dreams and the Invisible World in Colonial New England: Indians, colonists, and the seventeenth century by Ann Marie Plane, and: Beyond Land and Sea: The Atlantic coast and the transformation of New England by Christopher L. Pastore

Thomas Underhill, a citizen of London during the Commonwealth, described that period of English history as “Hell Broke Loose.” Partly as a result of Anabaptist influence, and partly as a continuation of the indigenous Lollard movement, large numbers of persons in every part of England separated themselves from the Established Church and formed themselves into independent religious societies. Some of these groups were very eccentric in their beliefs and practices. Thomas Edwards, their bitter opponent, made a Catalogue of “the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies and Pernicious Practices … vented and acted in England” between the years 1642 and 1646, which he called, Gangraena. In it he distinguishes no less than two hundred and ten errors which were held by one or other of the sixteen groups into which he divides the sectaries. The sixteen were, “Independents, Brownists, Chiliasts or Millenaries, Antinomians, Anabaptists, Manifestarians or Arminians, Libertines, Familists, Enthusiasts, Seekers and Waiters, Perfectists, Socinians, Arians, Anti-Trinitarians, Anti-Scripturalists, Sceptics and Quietists.” The Parliamentary army especially abounded with men whose “great religion” was “liberty of conscience and liberty of preaching.” G. P. Gooch and others have shown how deeply the roots of modern democracy are embedded in the religious struggles of these seventeenth century sects. Most of them disappeared with the Commonwealth, or were absorbed in the rising Quaker movement, but certain fundamental principles for which they stood continued to exist and to mold public opinion.

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Environmental Aspects of the Atlantic Slave Trade and Caribbean Plantations

Environment and Empire ◽

10.1093/oso/9780199260317.003.0007 ◽

2007 ◽

Author(s):

William Beinart ◽

Lotte Hughes

Keyword(s):

Native American ◽

Seventeenth Century ◽

Slave Trade ◽

Atlantic Coast ◽

Family Farms ◽

European Consumer ◽

Agrarian Communities ◽

The Caribbean ◽

Cod Fisheries ◽

Colonial New England

The Atlantic world became Britain’s main early imperial arena in the seventeenth century. Subsequent to Ireland, North America and the Caribbean were the most important zones of British settler colonialism. At the northern limits of settlement, around the Atlantic coast, the St Lawrence River, the Great Lakes and on the shores of the Hudson Bay, cod fisheries and fur-trading networks were established in competition with the French. This intrusion, while it had profound effects on the indigenous population, was comparatively constrained. Secondly, British settlements were founded in colonial New England from 1620. Expanding agrarian communities, based largely on family farms, displaced Native Americans, while the ports thrived on trade and fisheries. In the hotter zones to the south, both in the Caribbean and on the mainland, slave plantations growing tropical products became central to British expansion. Following in Spanish footsteps, coastal Virginia was occupied in 1607 and various Caribbean islands were captured from the 1620s: Barbados in 1627, and Jamaica in 1655. The Atlantic plantation system was shaped in part by environment and disease. But these forces cannot be explored in isolation from European capital and consumption, or the balance of political power between societies in Europe, Africa, and America. An increase in European consumer demand for relatively few agricultural commodities—sugar, tobacco, cotton, and to a lesser extent ginger, coffee, indigo, arrowroot, nutmeg, and lime—drove plantation production and the slave trade. The possibility of providing these largely non-essential additions for British consumption arose from a ‘constellation’ of factors ‘welded in the seventeenth century’ and surviving until the mid-nineteenth century, aided by trade protectionism. This chapter analyses some of these factors and addresses the problem of how much weight can be given to environmental explanations. Plantations concentrated capital and large numbers of people in profoundly hierarchical institutions that occupied relatively little space in the newly emerging Atlantic order. In contrast to the extractive enterprise of the fur trade, this was a frontier of agricultural production, which required little involvement from indigenous people. On some islands, such as Barbados, Spanish intrusions had already decimated the Native American population before the British arrived; there was little resistance.

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