New England's First Depression: Beyond an Export-Led Interpretation

Historians of New England’s economy traditionally explain the region’s recovery from its first depression, which lasted from the early to the mid-1640s, by Massachusetts’ export of surplus goods to transatlantic markets (primarily in the West Indies). This conventional interpretation, however, overlooks the timing of the sugar transition in the West Indies as well as the inability of the Bay Colony’s local infrastructure at that point to sustain an export trade of the requisite magnitude. The local economy, rather than an export market, was the likely engine of recovery.