Colonial Plantations and the Economy in Florida (review)

The anthology edited by Jane G. Landers and entitled Colonial Plantations and the Economy in Florida contains a total of nine essays written by five authors. ¹ The stated purpose of the work in the introduction (8) and throughout is to encourage further research on East Florida, a colonial area that each of the contributors rightly claims has received little attention from scholars of colonial America. The underlying thesis of all nine essays is that budding economic prosperity in East Florida during these three generations was repeatedly stifled by political instability. Collectively, the essays focus on the period from 1763 to 1821, which witnessed the cessation of Spanish Florida to England (1764), the English transfer back to Spain (1784), and the Spanish cessation to the United States (1819). Each of the authors, in one way or another, attempts to support this hypothesis by examining the economic experiences of different individuals, groups, and enterprises within the colony during one ² or, in some cases, through all or most of these three periods. ³

The authors argue that, until very recently, such scholars as Bernard Bailyn and Charles Loch Mowat relegated East Florida to failed economic colonial backwater status, thereby justifying the lack of scholarly attention it has received. ⁴ Landers and the other contributors dispute this assessment. They maintain that the region's physical environment offered real commercial agricultural opportunities and that the Old World immigrants and native Indians who worked the land were both enterprising and industrious. As proof of the area's economic potential, the contributors point out that during times of political stability the area prospered through the production of indigo, cattle, rice, staple crops, and timber. The authors reason that, had it not been for political instability and the accompanying loss of life and property, the settlers of East Florida would have played a much more important role in the economic development of the circum-Caribbean and Atlantic commercial systems of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Landers and her collaborators support this assertion by correlating periods of prosperity with political stability and times of economic decline with years of political instability. Just as individual plantations, groups, and industries would begin to prosper, they would suffer decline or abandonment as a result of a change in colonial rule or even outright destruction by Indian, bandit, or competing imperial and/or local factions.

And to what do the authors ultimately attribute the cause of East Florida's political instability? They rightly lay the blame on the colony's location, a contact point between Spanish, English, and Indian peoples—a frontier. James Cusick, author of the broadest of the nine essays in terms of contextual focus, concludes with this point (183–4). True, other factors were involved, including misplanning and importing too many Minorcan indentured servants on Andrew Turnbull's part during the first years of his attempts to establish the New Smyrna plantation. Shortages of start-up capital, labor, and supplies, along with differences in the designs of distant and local administrators, whether in Madrid, London, Washington, dc, or East Florida itself, all contributed to economic instability. Yet all of the five authors either implicitly infer or explicitly state that it was East Florida's frontier location that bred the political dislocation that, in turn, disrupted the area's economic development over and over again between 1763 and 1821. The fact that colonists, both white and black, slave and free, lived at the contact point between Spanish, English, U.S., and lower Creek/Seminole cultures made their political and, by extension, economic lives unstable. Cusick hits the mark in quoting David Weber on the value of frontier studies, "It is the power of frontiers to transform cultures which gives them special interest" (183). East Florida between 1763 and 1821 presents just such a setting that...