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Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England Paperback – September 1, 2003
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The book that launched environmental history, William Cronon's Changes in the Land, now revised and updated.
Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize
In this landmark work of environmental history, William Cronon offers an original and profound explanation of the effects European colonists' sense of property and their pursuit of capitalism had upon the ecosystems of New England. Reissued here with an updated afterword by the author and a new preface by the distinguished colonialist John Demos, Changes in the Land, provides a brilliant inter-disciplinary interpretation of how land and people influence one another. With its chilling closing line, "The people of plenty were a people of waste," Cronon's enduring and thought-provoking book is ethno-ecological history at its best.
- Print length288 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateSeptember 1, 2003
- Dimensions5.45 x 0.75 x 8.2 inches
- ISBN-100809016346
- ISBN-13978-0809016341
- Lexile measure1390L
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“Changes in the Land exemplifies, and realizes, the promise of ecological history with stunning effect. Setting his sights squarely on the well-worn terrain of colonial New England, [Cronon] fashions a story that is fresh, ingenious, compelling and altogether important. His approach is at once vividly descriptive and profoundly analytic.” ―John Demos, The New York Times Book Review
“A superb achievement: Cronon has changed the terms of historical discourse regarding colonial New England.” ―Wilcomb E. Washburn, director of the Office of American Studies, Smithsonian Institution
“A cogent, sophisticated, and balanced study of Indian-white contact. Gracefully written, subtly argued, and well informed, it is a work whose implications extend far beyond colonial New England.” ―Richard White, Michigan State University
“This is ethno-ecological history at its best . . . American colonial history will never be the same after this path-breaking, exciting book.” ―Wilbur R. Jacobs, University of California, Santa Barbara
“A brilliant performance, from which all students of early American history will profit.” ―Edmund S. Morgan, Yale University
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Product details
- Publisher : Hill and Wang; Revised edition (September 1, 2003)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 288 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0809016346
- ISBN-13 : 978-0809016341
- Lexile measure : 1390L
- Item Weight : 8.7 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.45 x 0.75 x 8.2 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #84,504 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #74 in U.S. Colonial Period History
- #132 in Ecology (Books)
- #794 in U.S. State & Local History
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Admittedly, the book gets off to a slow start. The first section explores what we are able to know about New England ecology before and during the colonial period, and the limitations on how we know it. The first chapter of the second section is an exploration of the diversity of New England ecology, both between the general northern and southern regions, as well as among the various "patchworks" of ecological areas within the two regions. These sections form a necessary base for the remainder of the book, but they are rather dry and academic.
But beginning with the chapter "Seasons of Want and Plenty", Cronon gets into the real meat of his argument: the differences between the ways Indians vs. colonists used the land and the fundamental incompatibility of the two.
I learned in school that the Indians had no system for surveying land, nor even a concept of land ownership. In fact, I learned, they didn't even believe land could be owned, and out of ignorance or for sport they would often sell the same parcel to different colonial groups, or to the same group multiple times. Cronon explodes the fallacy in that understanding. Indians did indeed have an understanding of land ownership, it's just that their understanding was fundamentally different from the colonists' understanding. Indians tended to own the land in common with their tribes, and various land use rights were recognized between and within the tribes. The right to hunt on certain land, for instance, could be sold - even sold to different parties - while still maintaining tribal ownership of the land itself.
But to the colonists, however, land ownership included all rights thereto and accrued to the individual owner thereof (although most colonial villages did have common areas of land). Therefore, one of the first acts of each successive group of colonists was to mark the boundaries of their property, generally by the use of a fence, thereby prohibiting any use by any other parties. From the start, the two ways of life were mutually exclusive.
Although the Indians, particularly in Southern New England, did practice agriculture, it was a semi-nomadic form of agriculture that depended on land use more than land ownership. The Indians tilled a particular field only for a few years before moving on and clearing another field, allowing the previous one to lie fallow and become overgrown. The Indians also made great use of controlled burning to clear fields. This prevented the decrease in soil fertility caused by overfarming, as well as creating great areas of borderlands between woodlands and fields, areas particularly hospitable to various berry plants and wildlife used for food and hides. These practices created the conditions for the great abundance of food, trees, and wildlife which so astounded the colonists.
Unlike the Indians who saw this "natural" abundance as simply a means of sustaining life according to the season, the colonists saw each particular resource as a commodity to be owned, used, exploited and sold for profit. Trees, for instance, were in great demand for building houses and ships, fuel for warmth during the long winters, and export especially because of England's tree shortage at the time. The means by which the colonists claimed, harvested and transported these resources, however, ultimately undermined the conditions necessary to supply such resources in such abundance. Trees were rapidly cleared to create fields, thereby leaving a dearth of trees for other purposes. Fields were planted at maximum levels with single crops year after year, thereby depleting soil fertility. Beaver and other animals were hunted to near extinction, at least within New England.
In fact, Cronon argues, this commoditization of the resources of the New World was the beginning of the rise of the capitalist economy in America, even though capitalism as it's understood today didn't truly develop until the Industrial Revolution.
Cronon's book is somewhat slim, but it is dense. It is packed with consideration of how little things impacted the ecology and economy in big and often unexpected ways. The colonists brought many unfamiliar organisms to the New World - seeds that grew to become invasive species, pigs that wreaked havoc with farming and gathering of berries, diseases for which the Indians had no defense. While many of the changes the colonists wrought were intentional, many were not, but the impact was just as great.
In addition to being a sweeping academic survey, Cronon's book is also a masterful narrative. He's not only listing the changes in different plant and animal species and the differences in land use, but he's telling a story of how those changes affected human lives, both the Indians and the colonists. It is a truly engaging account of the causes and effects which form the basis of the earliest history of our country and which still have echoes today.
Cronon was, it seems, a bit of a pioneer with this book. I've recently read several books which explore how advances in anthropology, archeology and ecology have led to enormous gains in knowledge of Indian cultures and have produced radical changes in our understanding thereof, but Cronon helped to set these advances in motion simply by considering and exploring the impact of seemingly small and minor things that most of us take for granted. Highly recommended.
Twenty years after it was published, the scholarship is still, what I would consider "cutting edge". Cronon cuts across disciplines and primary sources to produce a nuanced model of the interrelationship of humans and the environment. Cronon's work is just as interesting for his (to me, anyway) novel technique of writing a history where the personalities of humans take a back seat to the consequnces of their decisions.
The effect is at once radical and main stream. Radical, in that Cronon strips away traditional justifications for human decisions that reinforce the implicit assumptions that cause those same decisions. Main stream, in that he manages to stay away from the hyperbole and argument that plague revisions of history.
I've also read Cronon's "Nature's Metropolis", which is his book about the development of the city of Chicago. I would recommend that book, as well as this one, to anyone interested in the subjects that Cronon covers. His scholarship is top notch.
While Cronon admits in his conclusion that “making the arrival of the Europeans the center of our analysis, we run the risk of attributing all change to their agency, and none to the Indians” who he insists “were anything but passive in their response to European encroachments,” he fails the convey this throughout the book. While Cronon makes reference to Indians who attempted to work within the English legal system when English livestock destroyed Indian crops, he never describes any significant attacks, instead portraying the Indians as a part of nature and almost romanticizing their modifications to the land. Even when Cronon writes of the Indians’ use of burning as a way to modify the land, he juxtaposes it against the Europeans’ later use of it, writing, “Instead of burning the forest to remove the undergrowth [as the Indians did], [the Europeans] burned it to remove the forest itself.”
Despite Cronon’s insistence that the Indians represent a separate form of ecological modification and maintenance, his every example is about processes happening to them, continuing the theme of the Indians as an aspect of nature. The second part of Changes in the Land, which Cronon titles “The Ecological Transformation of New England,” begins by detailing a pre-European New England, but devolves into the same lists of commodities that Cronon claims the first European explorers used. He describes how the Indians lived off of the land, but juxtaposes it against the drastic changes implemented by the Europeans, such as laying claim to the land. Through Cronon, the Indians appear naïve, often unaware of what participating in a European system entails. He writes, “The Indians, not realizing the full ramifications of what that market meant, and finally having little choice but to participate in it, fell victims too.” His explanation of deforestation begins with “England’s experiences with timber and fuel shortages.” Finally, his discussion of fencing in land for grazing only occasionally mentions the Indians, and then primarily to discuss some of the legal troubles from European livestock interfering with Indian grains.
Cronon writes from a Eurocentric viewpoint because his very premise is based on one: how did the European colonists change the environment of New England after their arrival. He states that he will show the changes from one system to the next and admits that the Indians changed the land a great deal themselves, but he only glosses over their changes, quickly changing topics to the European methods of colonization and taming the land. Changes in the Land describes first and foremost how the Europeans changed the land. Though the subtitle begins with Indians, Cronon spends very little time on their ecological modifications before describing in depth the actions of Europeans, much to the detriment of forming a well-balanced argument.
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This is a reissue of the book with an excellent introduction by Demos and a nice concluding essay by Cronon explaining how he came to write this book.
I highly recommand this book to those we wish to step back in time and to explore another way of life, the one of the Indians in comparaison to our own. The book clearly spell out the ways of our unforgiven civilization.