Synopsis

With the arrival of European explorers and settlers during the seventeenth century, Native American ways of life and the environment itself underwent radical alterations as human relationships to the land and ways of thinking about nature all changed. This colonial ecological revolution held sway until the nineteenth century, when New England’s industrial production brought on a capitalist revolution that again remade the ecology, economy, and conceptions of nature in the region.

In Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England, academic Carolyn Merchant analyzes these two major transformations in the New England environment between 1600 and 1860.