In this installment of the Highlight Series, The Life of a Historian presents a quick summary and review of…
Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. 1st rev. ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003.
Affiliate Disclosure
Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
There has been no timeless wilderness in a state of perfect changelessness, no climax forest in permanent stasis.” 1
A work by historian William Cronon.
An Abridged History of Changes in the Land
Originally published in 1983, Changes in the Land
developed from a seminar paper Cronon wrote during his first year of graduate school at Yale University. Although his professor, Edmund Morgan, hoped he would publish his work, Cronon seemed reluctant at first. As he puts it, “I had come to Yale not to write about colonial New England, to study Chicago and its hinterland in the nineteenth-century Middle West.” 2
Thus, the writing and research that would become a foundational pillar to the field of environmental history resided in the purgatory of Cronon’s filing cabinet for two years.
Luckily, as life happens so often, a series of serendipitous events and introductions over a few week period led to Cronon expanding on his original seminar paper and publishing it as the book Changes in the Land.
Purpose & Argument
In the preface, Cronon explicitly and clearly states both his thesis and purpose for writing Changes in the Land. Additionally, and although he attributes much of the ecological changes to European views on property and capitalism, Cronon is adamant that his work is “not a human history.” 3
Purpose
According to Cronon, his “purpose throughout is to explain why New England habitats changed as they did during the colonial period. It is not my intention to rewrite the human history of the region: this is not a history of New England Indians, or of Indian-colonial relations, of the transformation of English colonists from Puritans to Yankees.” 3
Thesis
Cronon writes, “my thesis is simple: the shift from Indian to European dominance in New England entailed important changes–well known to historians–in the ways these peoples organized their lives, but it also involved fundamental reorganizations–less well-known historians–in the region’s plants and animal communities.” 4
Arguments
The primacy of Cronon’s argument is the different and conflicting views of land and property held by Indians and colonists, and their effects on the ecology of New England. Whereas Indians perceived the land as something to be used, colonists understood land as property to be owned and to produce commodities.
Before European settlement, New England was the home of a mobile human population that relocated villages from habitat to habitat and viewed property rights according to ecological use and need. Afterward, New England was the home to a human population that believed in fixity and property rights as owners of the land itself. Land and natural resources were now a commodity to be sold, bought, and profited off of in pursuit of more property and material wealth.
This transition in way of perceiving and using the land led to large populations of livestock and other non-native animals, large-scale deforestation and grazing, wide-spread hunting, fishing, and fur trapping, removal of native flora and fauna that proved invaluable as market goods, and the bounding of land with fences and other markers of ownership.
As Cronon illustrates throughout, the effects of such a transition were vast and immense. The fusion of European views of property and land, the global market, and the abundant natural resources of New England forever transformed the ecological landscape of the region.
Methodology
Cronon constructed his narrative and argument, both, thematically and chronologically. He begins by contrasting the precolonial ecosystems of New England with those at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He follows with a comparison of the ecological relationships of pre-colonial Indians and the Europeans arriving in New England. His work then continues on to describe the process of ecological change following European arrival.
Sources
Cronon relied on a variety of sources that range from ones common to the practice of history (e.g. contemporary accounts and records) and ones a bit more unorthodox but no less, and arguably more, important to his particular historical narrative.
The writings and descriptions of travelers and early naturalists, both during the nascent years of English settlement and later towards the end of the eighteenth-century, do much of the heavy lifting. But as Cronon argues, although they provide contemporary observations of New England landscapes and the changes that occurred over the course of colonial settlement, they also require proper evaluation of the individual’s skills as a naturalist. Additionally, what purpose did the individual have to write their account? How much of the land did they explore and detail? These questions shaped much of Cronon’s decision to use and how to interpret these sources.
Although less personal, colonial town, court, and legislative records offered more detailed data and specifics on deforestation, livestock and predators, property boundaries, conflicts between Indians and colonists, and the composition of forests. Furthermore, this information helped assess and corroborate individual accounts.
Cronon also used less traditional sources in the form of relict old-growth timber, fossil pollen in pond and bog sediments, and microscopic changes in soil flora and fauna. Admittedly, he discusses his intellectual limitations in using such sources but argues such sources are needed to illustrate the ecological changes of colonial New England.
Other Works by William Cronon
• Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
• Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature
• Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past