Changes in the Land

by

William Cronon

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Changes in the Land: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
By 1800, the Native population of New England had dwindled while the number of colonizers soared. Indigenous people’s way of life had been destroyed by the transformations triggered by the colonizers and they constantly faced the issues of disease and malnutrition. Animals that had once been abundant had disappeared, as had many species of tree and the amount of forest in general. As a result of deforestation, the region was drier, with more extreme temperatures. There was mass soil exhaustion as well as a whole new group of pests and crop diseases.
In the final chapter of the book, Cronon summarizes what he has argued thus far. Taking a broad view, he shows how all the processes of change he has depicted are interconnected, which helps show how such enormous change could occur through a lot of very complex, local, gradual, and nuanced processes.
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Comparing the New England landscape of 1600 to that of 1800 implies that European colonization was the factor behind the enormous transformation that happened during this period. There are many ways in which this is indisputably true. Furthermore, because capitalism drastically intensified during this period, it might be tempting to attribute all the dramatic ecological change that occurred during that time to this socioeconomic shift. Yet there is an extent to which this correlation can be misleading. Some of the ways in which Europeans ended up transforming the land were not primarily economic—for example, the European diseases that colonizers brought over with them. While economic factors intensified the devastation that resulted from these diseases, the diseases themselves were arguably not an economic issue.
Although Cronon is speaking factually here, there is an extent to which this section of his argument is purely ideological. While it is true that something like the microorganisms causing European diseases were not caused by capitalism, it was capitalist forces that drove them (carried by European colonizers) to America. Indeed, the question of how much the changes described in the book are a result of capitalism are to some extent a matter of political perspective.
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Similarly, the changes caused by livestock were clearly related to capitalism, but Europeans had been keeping livestock for centuries before capitalism’s rise. Yet while many of the changes that colonization triggered could not solely be attributed to capitalism, it is also true that “economic and ecological imperialisms reinforced each other.” Native people were keenly aware of this reality. In 1642, the Narragansett sachem Miantonomo compared the land of plenty that had existed in the time of the ancestors with the depleted, apocalyptic reality that lay before his people in the present. Using a variety of different methods, Europeans had seized Native land as their own. As a result, those who had initially welcomed Europeans to New England began to resist their presence.
Here Cronon largely returns to a political interpretation of the land transformation that occurred during the colonial period by emphasizing how this transformation was largely triggered by political and economic factors. While the truth of why the land changed so much is not straightforward, it does have a single and rather obvious core cause, which is the colonization of the landscape by Europeans who were acting according to capitalist principles.
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Miantonomo argued that successful resistance would require “pan-Indian unity.” Yet alongside resistance, Native people also adapted to the new way of life brought about by the colonizers. They changed the way they hunted and farmed and also introduced new forms of social and political organization. Essentially, the way of life of their ancestors had been made impossible. At the same time, Native people generally kept themselves resolutely distinct from Europeans rather than assimilating into colonial society. Indeed, focusing on European colonizers as the primary forces in transforming the landscape risks underemphasizing the agency of Native people. The truth is that Native people were neither changeless nor “passive,” but active agents of history even as they faced intense suppression from the colonizers.
Although it is not the main focus of this book, many other works of historical scholarship examine how Native people both actively resisted European colonization and attempted to adjust their lives in order to survive in the new paradigm that the Europeans introduced. These two truths show that Native people were important historical actors who also had to deal with brutal restrictions on their agency imposed by the Europeans and an assault that ultimately amounted to genocide.
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Get the entire Changes in the Land LitChart as a printable PDF.
Changes in the Land PDF
The Native people who remained in New England found themselves forced into reservations on subpar land and deprived of access to animals for hunting and fishing. While ecology explains why Native people ended up being unable to survive on this depleted land, political history is necessary to show why colonizers first put them onto these lands. The assassination of Miantonomo by the colonizers shows what Native people who attempted to resist colonial power faced in return.
Here Cronon returns to the question of why combining ecological with human history is so important—the two are inherently interlinked and thus the history of humanity must always factor in the many complex ecological factors that determine human behavior.
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Overall, while the transformations to the land that occurred during the colonial period were indeed “multicausal,” there is no doubt that the escalation of capitalism during this period was the primary factor in triggering it. It could be argued that the biggest contrast between Native and European people lay in how they conceptualized the land and its “resources.” Whereas Native people did not tend to accumulate resources, accumulation of resources, commodities, and profit was the driving motivation behind the colonizers’ lives. Under this logic, there was no limit to how much a person “needed.”
Here, Cronon provides a crucial reminder that capitalism did not just arrive in America fully-formed—it intensified there in a way that significantly shaped the changes that occurred in the landscape. This increased the gulf between Native and European ways of life even further.
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Of course, the process by which this political ideology transformed the landscape was gradual and often indirect. Furthermore, colonial economies themselves went through massive transformations between 1600-1800. From the crystallization of property principles to an increase in the degree of profit farmers could expect to make, colonial economic life evolved dramatically during this period. As these tumultuous shifts took place, resources were frequently squandered and areas of land destroyed. Everything about the way the colonizers farmed was based on treating land both as “permanently abundant” and as capital. This was completely inconducive with Native ways of living on the land. 
At the very end of the book, Cronon hints at the long-term consequences of colonial changes to the land in more stark terms that he has done through most of the book. He acknowledges that the impact of colonizers on the landscape was very damaging and had effects that could not be undone.
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Beyond these clashes with the land’s indigenous inhabitants and their way of life, the colonial economy was also “ecologically self-destructive.” Colonizers treated the land’s resources as if they were infinite, only to be made starkly aware that this wasn’t the case. Again, while the most dramatic changes to the New England landscape are often thought to have taken place in the nineteenth century, it is important to remember how enormously the land changed during the colonial period, too. Colonization transformed both the social world of New England and the ecological one. The impact on the land was destructive, as “the people of plenty were a people of waste.”
The very end of the book subtly helps the reader make connections between the colonial period and the issues facing the U.S. (and indeed the world) in the present day. The process of ecological destruction that began occurring during the age of Empire is ongoing in the present and the question of how to approach the climate crisis can be usefully informed by looking at the history of colonial ecological change.
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