Changes in the Land

William Cronon. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983, 2003.

Cronon's first book--published when he was 28 years old--has become a modern classic as well as a seminal text in what has become known as environmental history.

It is a brief book, one which still is impressive and eye-opening over three decades later, although the fact that environmental history is now far more prevalent means that the book isn't quite the shock now it must have been when first published. Still, it is easy to see why it won the 1984 Francis Parkman Prize. This is an elegantly written monograph which calmly and deliberately makes its point: "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 to historians--in the region's plant and animal communities." (From the Preface).

In other words, there was an ecological change as well as economic, political, social, and demographic changes, in the wake of contact between Indians and Europeans, and subsequent settlement by the latter.

The book is marked by the obvious contrast between Indian use of the land versus that pursued by the colonists, but Cronon takes great care to avoid falling in to a lazy dichotomy--as he notes at the beginning of Chapter 7, "A World of Fields and Fences":

"One must not exaggerate the differences between English and Indian agriculture. The two in many ways resembled each other in the annual cycles by which they tracked the seasons of the year."

He also cautions against the tendency to interpret the vast changes wrought by the introduction of European trade goods into Indian societies to the technologies themselves--rather, it was the new mode of economic logic and the new agents tied to larger markets, not the trade goods themselves, which were often used by Indians in ways very different than intended--often as markers of status rather than as utilitarian goods. Also, Indians tended to incorporate these goods into existing patterns of economic use, so assumptions that "improved" European goods necessarily altered economic practices don't add up.

Other contrasts--the distinction between "sovereignty" and "ownership" in regards to land ownership (and differing Indian and English concepts of both)--inform this richly detailed look at the environmental history of the region which was--to paraphrase his comments about history in his afterword to this 20th anniversary edition--going on all around the people in the past although the didn't realize it was happening.