Political Ecologies and the Transformation of Landscape in the Early Modern Delaware Valley

Abstract

This dissertation uses the concept of political ecology to explore the nature of colonization and the subsequent landscape transformation in the early modern Delaware Valley. The question of how European colonization changed the landscape of the Americas has been central to the environmental history of the early modern Atlantic world for more than a generation. The ecological impact of colonization in the Delaware Valley, where multiple empires and groups, such as the Netherlands, Sweden, and England (Britain after 1707), as well as Indigenous peoples, attempted to colonize and transform the landscape, is an especially challenging scenario. In the multiple colonizations of the region, each European empire had its own political economy and negotiations with local Indigenous peoples, hence each group prioritized different uses of the land and different natural resources. Therefore, this dissertation uses the perspective of political ecology, which interpret shifts in human use of land and natural resources as part of a larger-scale political economy, to examine how colonization and landscape developed in the Delaware Valley. The political ecology approach allows us to examine the driving forces of environmental change at multiple scales, from local to imperial. Landscape transformation can only be explained by considering multiple factors at multiple scales, including settlers’ ideological and socio-cultural preferences, market demands, and relationships with local ecosystems and people. It is well known that colonists established a grainfield landscape in the eighteenth-century Delaware Valley, based on grain exports to the West Indies and southern Europe. This study examines why the region was ultimately transformed into the breadbasket of the British empire by chronicling the earlier projects that preceded and informed that shift. Just after the region’s Natives adopted maize-based agriculture through the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, the Dutch, Swedish, and English (later British) brought their visions of colonization based on their respective empires’ political economies into the region. The Dutch sought furs, whalebone, and whale oil, while the Swedes intended to establish tobacco plantations comparable to those in Chesapeake Bay. However, their attempts did not lead to large-scale environmental change. Although the colonizing schemes of William Penn, who became the proprietor of Pennsylvania after the English conquest, ultimately failed, Quaker colonists, with their agrarian ideology and ties to the Atlantic market, transformed the landscape and ecosystems of the region through mixed husbandry and the spread of scattered farmsteads. In the late eighteenth century, a search for new commodity crops and agricultural diversification arose in the region, based not only on enlightened natural knowledge of climate and soil, but also on the new political ecology of empire, which continued until the war for independence. At the same time, colonists faced the crisis of resource depletion, such as wood and fish resources, and sought to conserve those resources and solve the environmental problems in the region. Among many possibilities, several contingent and complex factors in the British Atlantic world, such as agrarian ideology, commercial networks, and a large amount of free labor, all led by Quaker colonization, shaped the grainfield landscape.