The Introduction of the European Colonial and Mercantile World into New England: Transformations of Human Ecosystems

Abstract

In the history of what was to become the northeast United States, there was a dramatic change in the non-human environment and the human sociocultural systems between the pre-colonial and colonial periods. Prior to human inhabitation of the area, change was driven by glaciers, water, natural fire, and non-human organisms. Once humans entered the picture their activities contributed to alterations of the non-human environment. But not all groups of humans impacted the non-human environment to the same degree. Different modes of production and ideologies shaped the kinds and levels of human impact on the non-human environment. In order to examine how interactions between die non-human environment, human production, and ideological systems created these changes, I constructed systems models, one portraying the pre-colonial human ecosystem and a second model representing the colonial transformative human ecosystem; i.e., England's movement into the mercantile world system. The first model represents at the end of the sixteenth century. The second model represents the same region at the beginning of die eighteenth century. In the pre-colonial model, interactions are locally based, while the second model portrays outside processes which include the expansion of the European mercantile market and general European influences. William Cronon's Changes in the Land and Carolyn Merchant's Ecological Revolutions serve well as the basis for examining this transformation. Pre-Colonial Conditions Figure 1 represents the Pre-Colonial New England Human Ecosystem. It portrays, energy, matter, and information flows. Non-Human Environment The non-human environment, within what later became known as England, represented in the box on the middle left of Figure 1, exhibited great diversity upon the arrival of the Europeans. This diverse environment was a result of ecological processes interacting with human activities. One human activity that gready influenced this diversity of the non-human environment was the practice of selective burning. Fire, represented as a tool gate in Figure 1. was an important tool utilized by Native Americans to manipulate and manage the non-human environment. Setting fires served to game, improv[e] visibility, facilitat[e] travel, driv[e] away reptiles and insects, increasfe] the supply of grass seeds and berries, and for offense and defense in war (Day 1953:334) along with dearing land for settlement and for horticultural plots in southern England. Notice in Figure 1 that burning impacted much of the non-human environment, having inadvertent impacts in addition to the intended results. Thus, Figure 1 shows the commonly held belief that Native Americans had no significant impacts on their non-human environment to be false. Social Structure and Economics As seen in Map 1, in pre-colonial after the revolution one thousand years ago (Merchant 1989:38), the Native Americans south of the Kennebec River in Maine practiced some horticulture along with hunting and gathering while those north of die river did not engage in any agriculture.1 The reason the northern Native Americans did not engage in cultivation may be due to a shorter growing season (Thomas 1976: 7) and soils less suitable to agriculture (Merchant 1989: 30). While both northern and southern Native Americans were nomadic, with mobility based on seasonality, the horticultural practices of the southern Native Americans led them to a more sedentary lifestyle than the northerners.2 The principal pre-colonial Native American social and economic unit, as seen in Figure 1, was the village. A village was usually composed of several hundred people who were organized into extended kin networks (Cronon 1983: 38). The wavy line in Figure 1 represents the cyclical information that was transmitted to the Native Americans via sunlight and rain patterns, temperature, and general weather conditions along with life cycles of plant and non-human animal life. …