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Creating an Unfree Hinterland: Merchant Capital, Bound Labor, and Market Production in Eighteenth-century Massachusetts

Creating an Unfree Hinterland: Merchant Capital, Bound Labor, and Market Production in... <p>In the 1720s and 1730s, a number of Boston merchants purchased rural property in the town’s hinterland. In these estates we see the transformative power of capital and slavery in colonial New England. Boston merchants reached into the countryside, purchased already improved land, equipped their farms with the latest agricultural technology, engaged in large-scale production, and employed slave labor to extract the fruits of the land, thus transforming Boston’s hinterland into one of drudgery and unfreedom. By positioning capital and slaves at the center of the New England economy, this study demonstrates there was a visible, albeit limited, slave economy in the middle decades of the eighteenth century that allowed a few wealthy Bostonians to deliberately reshape the countryside using their wealth and bound labor. Merchant capital, in short, had the potential to reconfigure how—and the way historians should think about how—the New England rural economy functioned and its relationship with the wider Atlantic world.</p> http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal University of Pennsylvania Press

Creating an Unfree Hinterland: Merchant Capital, Bound Labor, and Market Production in Eighteenth-century Massachusetts

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Publisher
University of Pennsylvania Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 The McNeil Center for Early American Studies.
ISSN
1559-0895

Abstract

<p>In the 1720s and 1730s, a number of Boston merchants purchased rural property in the town’s hinterland. In these estates we see the transformative power of capital and slavery in colonial New England. Boston merchants reached into the countryside, purchased already improved land, equipped their farms with the latest agricultural technology, engaged in large-scale production, and employed slave labor to extract the fruits of the land, thus transforming Boston’s hinterland into one of drudgery and unfreedom. By positioning capital and slaves at the center of the New England economy, this study demonstrates there was a visible, albeit limited, slave economy in the middle decades of the eighteenth century that allowed a few wealthy Bostonians to deliberately reshape the countryside using their wealth and bound labor. Merchant capital, in short, had the potential to reconfigure how—and the way historians should think about how—the New England rural economy functioned and its relationship with the wider Atlantic world.</p>

Journal

Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal – University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: Feb 10, 2017

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