Thoughts on Jamestown and “the city-state of Boston”

I wrote this response to the following readings in my Boston College M.Ed. course Early American in the World, and I ended up liking the thoughts this generated. Here are the readings followed by my response:

• Kupperman, The Jamestown Project, Introduction, Chapter 6
• Peterson, The City-State of Boston, Introduction

These readings were each interesting depictions of the importance of thinking about Atlantic history, rather than American History or even North American history. In The Jamestown Project, we see this in the fundamental contingency and constraint of England’s position when it is turning to corner into the 17th century and its merchants/entrepreneurs are thinking about colonizing Virginia. The only reason England is focused on the Chesapeake (along with areas like Newfoundland and Guiana) is because the Spanish and French have picked over the rest of the continent. Late to exploration, etc, England is left with the scraps. So the projects in the Chesapeake are really seen as just a few among several possible landings that are spread throughout the left side of the Atlantic World. So there is a sense of arbitrariness with Jamestown — it’s just one of a few (relatively poor) English colonial options. Those options are all in competition with each other for investment, and in turn Atlantic World investments are competing with other more attractive destinations for capital around the world. The other role of an Atlantic orientation is to understand the experience of normal people in Jamestown. I thought that was a fascinating and surprising insight by Kupperman. The elites in the colony are panicked, but many normal people among the colonizers have insights from other encounters as seafaring people in the Atlantic world and it’s their experience and practiced improvisation that ends up saving the colony and, in the view of Kupperman, providing the model for English colonies all over the Americas. It is also illuminating to re-understand native peoples in the Chesapeake as experienced repeat players in the Atlantic World, having already interacted and developed strategies for understanding/dealing with several waves of colonizers by the time the Jamestown settlers arrive. I was fascinated that this Atlantic World experience of Chesapeake native peoples and their leader Wahunsenacawh actually may have led to mis-understandings on their part as to how long Jamestown and its settlers would persist and may have harmed their position even further. This is further evidence echoing last week’s reading from Barr on the Caddo experience: we must broaden the timescale for understanding indigenous people’s posture, strategies and interests dealing with colonial invaders.

The role of an Atlantic perspective is even clearer in Peterson’s The City-State of Boston. As a Boston resident since 2003, I was fascinated by this frame. I had always understood the Boston-centrism of this place — but more from the 19th century when, I had thought, the romantic neo-classical dandies of this town walked around calling it the Hub and throwing Greek pillars on everything. It’s exhilarating to understand that there is actually a material basis for Boston-supremacy (my tongue is in my cheek)! The Boston that arises in early trading and the city’s relationship with the sugar islands in the Caribbean is more like that of a Genoa or a Venice — a seafaring, trading, investment hub that is known globally by reputation. Here the relevant stage is not the 13 colonies, or even North America, but the ATLANTIC WORLD. Of course, the origins of this are not just in the religious independence and eccentricity of the Boston founders and their dogged determination to rule independently according to their charter. Another big factor was that Boston folk were allowed to accumulate and reinvest in slave-produced sugar, and then keep those reinvestments going to reinforce their power and independence. I was grateful for and would want to learn more about the transition that Peterson outlines whereby Boston starts out with a good hand in trade with Caribbean slave-holding sugar trading partners, and ends up being subsumed by Southern slave-holding sugar trading partners. Boston seemed to have the better part of the deal earlier on in their apex of the triangle, and then lost it — and this might be simply due to the scaling and shifting of terms of trade. But as Peterson suggests, much of this was because of the consolidation of USA federal power, which penetrated Boston much more than British power seems to have (and in the name of the slave power before the Civil War). But I wonder also how much of Boston’s fall as a “city-state” has to do with the rise of New York as the financial capital as the 19th century rolls on? Maybe New York was already becoming dominant in the 18th century, etc. Anyway, in my conjecture, Boston in the 19th century is still an economic engine and trading with the slave south; however, the economic incentives in the early US are completely trumping Boston’s independence and its local sovereignty. If the slave trade nationally is being driven more and more with New York capital and not with Boston capital, Boston is no longer the core of this trade and must accept what it must. So the story is not just one of the decline of an Atlantic world city-state, but the subsuming of a once-powerful political entity to the scaling and consolidation of capitalism (Wall Street). These are guesses from me.