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Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England Paperback – 1 September 2003

by William Cronon (Author, Afterword), John Demos (Foreword)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 453 ratings
Edition: Revised ed.
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The book that launched environmental history, William Cronon's Changes in the Land, now revised and updated.

Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize

In this landmark work of environmental history, William Cronon offers an original and profound explanation of the effects European colonists' sense of property and their pursuit of capitalism had upon the ecosystems of New England. Reissued here with an updated afterword by the author and a new preface by the distinguished colonialist John Demos, Changes in the Land, provides a brilliant inter-disciplinary interpretation of how land and people influence one another. With its chilling closing line, "The people of plenty were a people of waste," Cronon's enduring and thought-provoking book is ethno-ecological history at its best.

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  1. ISBN-10
    0809016346
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0809016341
  3. Edition
    Revised ed.
  4. Publication date
    1 September 2003
  5. Language
    English
  6. Dimensions
    13.84 x 1.91 x 20.83 cm
  7. Print length
    288 pages
  8. See all details
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Review

"Changes in the Land exemplifies, and realizes, the promise of ecological history with stunning effect. Setting his sights squarely on the well-worn terrain of colonial New England, [Cronon] fashions a story that is fresh, ingenious, compelling and altogether important. His approach is at once vividly descriptive and profoundly analytic." --John Demos, The New York Times Book Review

"A superb achievement: Cronon has changed the terms of historical discourse regarding colonial New England." --Wilcomb E. Washburn, director of the Office of American Studies, Smithsonian Institution

"A cogent, sophisticated, and balanced study of Indian-white contact. Gracefully written, subtly argued, and well informed, it is a work whose implications extend far beyond colonial New England." --Richard White, Michigan State University

"This is ethno-ecological history at its best . . . American colonial history will never be the same after this path-breaking, exciting book." --Wilbur R. Jacobs, University of California, Santa Barbara

"A brilliant performance, from which all students of early American history will profit." --Edmund S. Morgan, Yale University

About the Author

William Cronon is the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His book Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West won the Bancroft Prize in 1992.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hill & Wang; Revised ed. edition (1 September 2003)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0809016346
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0809016341
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.84 x 1.91 x 20.83 cm
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 453 ratings

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William Cronon

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M Clark
5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating and thought-provoking books
Reviewed in Germany on 1 July 2023
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This is one of the most fascinating and thought-provoking books I have read so far this year. Cronon's book is one of the pioneering works of ecological history. By looking at the causes of the ecological changes after European settlers arrive in New England, Cronon provides new insights into colonial history. By explaining how the landscape changed over time, the book opens your eyes to looking at the American landscape in a very different way.

This is a reissue of the book with an excellent introduction by Demos and a nice concluding essay by Cronon explaining how he came to write this book.
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Javier Lara Flores
5.0 out of 5 stars Muy bueno
Reviewed in Mexico on 26 July 2020
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Excelente libro
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NDB
5.0 out of 5 stars a classic book for those interrested in the history of the environnement
Reviewed in France on 9 April 2015
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This is truly a great book, a classic I must say, for those interested in the history of the environnement. It is well written. It tells the story of the Indians' way of life before the settlement of the Europeans in America. I found it very inspiring and well narrated. Then the book follow the path of the Europeans, their encounter with the Indians, and the changes that follow in the way Indians used to leave and for the land on a massive scale.
I highly recommand this book to those we wish to step back in time and to explore another way of life, the one of the Indians in comparaison to our own. The book clearly spell out the ways of our unforgiven civilization.
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Dienne
5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating and far-reaching
Reviewed in the United States on 29 September 2011
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I only picked this up in support of the author after I read a bit about his role in the recent Wisconsin protests and the repercussions he faced therefor. I didn't actually expect to like the book. It sounded like a dry, academic study of a topic I wasn't much interested in. I couldn't have been more wrong. This book is not only fascinating and illuminative of a much overlooked and misunderstood period in history, but it is also relevant to aspects of today's political and economic struggles.

Admittedly, the book gets off to a slow start. The first section explores what we are able to know about New England ecology before and during the colonial period, and the limitations on how we know it. The first chapter of the second section is an exploration of the diversity of New England ecology, both between the general northern and southern regions, as well as among the various "patchworks" of ecological areas within the two regions. These sections form a necessary base for the remainder of the book, but they are rather dry and academic.

But beginning with the chapter "Seasons of Want and Plenty", Cronon gets into the real meat of his argument: the differences between the ways Indians vs. colonists used the land and the fundamental incompatibility of the two.

I learned in school that the Indians had no system for surveying land, nor even a concept of land ownership. In fact, I learned, they didn't even believe land could be owned, and out of ignorance or for sport they would often sell the same parcel to different colonial groups, or to the same group multiple times. Cronon explodes the fallacy in that understanding. Indians did indeed have an understanding of land ownership, it's just that their understanding was fundamentally different from the colonists' understanding. Indians tended to own the land in common with their tribes, and various land use rights were recognized between and within the tribes. The right to hunt on certain land, for instance, could be sold - even sold to different parties - while still maintaining tribal ownership of the land itself.

But to the colonists, however, land ownership included all rights thereto and accrued to the individual owner thereof (although most colonial villages did have common areas of land). Therefore, one of the first acts of each successive group of colonists was to mark the boundaries of their property, generally by the use of a fence, thereby prohibiting any use by any other parties. From the start, the two ways of life were mutually exclusive.

Although the Indians, particularly in Southern New England, did practice agriculture, it was a semi-nomadic form of agriculture that depended on land use more than land ownership. The Indians tilled a particular field only for a few years before moving on and clearing another field, allowing the previous one to lie fallow and become overgrown. The Indians also made great use of controlled burning to clear fields. This prevented the decrease in soil fertility caused by overfarming, as well as creating great areas of borderlands between woodlands and fields, areas particularly hospitable to various berry plants and wildlife used for food and hides. These practices created the conditions for the great abundance of food, trees, and wildlife which so astounded the colonists.

Unlike the Indians who saw this "natural" abundance as simply a means of sustaining life according to the season, the colonists saw each particular resource as a commodity to be owned, used, exploited and sold for profit. Trees, for instance, were in great demand for building houses and ships, fuel for warmth during the long winters, and export especially because of England's tree shortage at the time. The means by which the colonists claimed, harvested and transported these resources, however, ultimately undermined the conditions necessary to supply such resources in such abundance. Trees were rapidly cleared to create fields, thereby leaving a dearth of trees for other purposes. Fields were planted at maximum levels with single crops year after year, thereby depleting soil fertility. Beaver and other animals were hunted to near extinction, at least within New England.

In fact, Cronon argues, this commoditization of the resources of the New World was the beginning of the rise of the capitalist economy in America, even though capitalism as it's understood today didn't truly develop until the Industrial Revolution.

Cronon's book is somewhat slim, but it is dense. It is packed with consideration of how little things impacted the ecology and economy in big and often unexpected ways. The colonists brought many unfamiliar organisms to the New World - seeds that grew to become invasive species, pigs that wreaked havoc with farming and gathering of berries, diseases for which the Indians had no defense. While many of the changes the colonists wrought were intentional, many were not, but the impact was just as great.

In addition to being a sweeping academic survey, Cronon's book is also a masterful narrative. He's not only listing the changes in different plant and animal species and the differences in land use, but he's telling a story of how those changes affected human lives, both the Indians and the colonists. It is a truly engaging account of the causes and effects which form the basis of the earliest history of our country and which still have echoes today.

Cronon was, it seems, a bit of a pioneer with this book. I've recently read several books which explore how advances in anthropology, archeology and ecology have led to enormous gains in knowledge of Indian cultures and have produced radical changes in our understanding thereof, but Cronon helped to set these advances in motion simply by considering and exploring the impact of seemingly small and minor things that most of us take for granted. Highly recommended.
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Chris
5.0 out of 5 stars The Key to Understanding Land Use in the 1600s
Reviewed in the United States on 20 April 2024
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This book is the key to understanding the differences in land ownership beliefs between the colonists and the New England Indian tribes. Reading this book will help the reader understand the true causes of King Phillip's War and how the colonists stole land from the New England Indian tribes.
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