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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A seminal work, April 29, 2006
This review is from: Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (Paperback)
William Cronon's book was a seminal effort in 1983 that established a new way of thinking about history. It has stood the test of time. The book describes the modes and manner of the ecological impacts that English settlers had on the New England landscape in the colonial era. Some impacts were intentional, others not so much. For example, by the time first permanent settlements were established beginning at Plymouth in 1620, many Indian villages had already been devastated by European diseases (Europeans, especially fishermen had been frequenting the New England fisheries for decades).
The English settlers brought the English methods of farming, new concepts of property, and a market economy that overwhelmed the tribes and transformed the landscape. Forests were cleared, beaver were over-hunted, fences erected, new and domesticated animals and plants were introduced.
An added bonus in this 20th anniversary edition is a delightful afterword by the author reflecting on the book and how it came to be only through repeated serendipity. An added bonus for Wisconsin readers are his reflections on growing up in Madison as the son of a UW history professor and how those experiences shaped his professional life.
Cronon sagely instructs us to asks 'how so Alien a Then could have become so familiar a Now'. Changes in the Land also wrought changes in the way we think.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Want to know how ecology can help us to understand history?, June 8, 2006
This review is from: Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (Paperback)
This is not so much a book about New England per se as on how ecology should mould our understanding of history. For too long historians have ignored the ecological/environmental dimension to history, especially colonial history; and Cronon's book is one among a number of path-breaking works that serves to redress the balance.
As Cronon convincingly argues, the strength of ecological analysis in writing history lies in its ability to uncover processes and long-term changes which might otherwise remain invisible. Indeed, ecological change is used throughout the book as a window through which to uncover the complex long-term changes wrought by the arrival of the puritans to New England since the seventeenth century. The full impact of European colonisation cannot be understood apart from the new relationship they established with the New England ecosystem though their commoditisation of resources and their involvement in the international capitalist economy, both of which greatly impacted the land and its previous inhabitants, the Indians. These changes were cultural as much as they were simply environmental or economic: the arrival of the pig, for one, was bound in a cultural relationship to, among other things, the fence, the dandelion, and a very special definition of property.
Of course, the book also offers up fascinating insights into the changing New England landscape from 1600 to 1800. It corrects misconceptions about an unchanging primeval forest before the arrival of the Europeans, or of Indians as passive agents in subsequent changes wrought. It also establishes the origins of the environmental problems in the region such as deforestation, soil erosion, and resultant climate changes - the legacy of which we still live with today.
If this book interests you, so should other landmark studies on ecological or environmental history, such as Alfred Crosby's `Ecological Imperialism' or Donald Worster's `Dust Bowl'.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Should be Interesting to Non-New Englanders, May 27, 2004
This review is from: Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (Paperback)
Even though I live in San Diego, I found this book to be well worth the read. Dense but short, "Changes in the Land" gives a close reading to the ecological impact of British colonization in New England. As Cronon states in his conclusion, this transformation has ramifications far outside New England, since the environmental degradation that accompanied early colonization forced settlers farther and farther afield. Twenty years after it was published, the scholarship is still, what I would consider "cutting edge". Cronon cuts across disciplines and primary sources to produce a nuanced model of the interrelationship of humans and the environment. Cronon's work is just as interesting for his (to me, anyway) novel technique of writing a history where the personalities of humans take a back seat to the consequnces of their decisions. The effect is at once radical and main stream. Radical, in that Cronon strips away traditional justifications for human decisions that reinforce the implicit assumptions that cause those same decisions. Main stream, in that he manages to stay away from the hyperbole and argument that plague revisions of history. I've also read Cronon's "Nature's Metropolis", which is his book about the development of the city of Chicago. I would recommend that book, as well as this one, to anyone interested in the subjects that Cronon covers. His scholarship is top notch.
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