Land, Labor, and Colonial Economics in Thomas Morton's New English Canaan

As long as critics have written about it, Thomas Morton's New English Canaan has been positioned as a counter history to William Bradford's canonical Of Plymouth Plantation. One vein of critical reception has dismissed Morton's text as a flawed literary anomaly, effectively repeating Bradford's own befuddled and anxious response to Morton's aesthetics.¹ A smaller but impassioned vein of literary criticism has, in turn, elevated Morton over Bradford on the basis of his egalitarianism, proto-environmentalism, or multiculturalism avant la lettre—essentially celebrating Morton as a more laudable expression of individualism and freedom than that represented by the pilgrims.² Despite their differences, both of these critical responses keep intact the central terms of a liberal-nationalist American literary history that has obscured the global economic implications of New England colonialism.

Historians such as Karen Ordahl Kupperman and Edith Murphy who have emphasized Morton's commitment to colonial trade have complicated these bifurcated representations of Morton. I wish to combine here these scholars' emphasis on trade with the efforts of more recent critics, notably Phillip Round, and Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, to situate Morton and Ma-re Mount within a transatlantic literary and cultural arena. Morton's volume is read and taught in small and selective excerpts even more often than Bradford's, but I argue here that its stylistic and structural difficulties might be made more legible by reading all three of the books that make up New English Canaan in the context of Morton's already intersecting regional and transcontinental economic relationships. New English Canaan's satirical critique of the Separatist Puritans' incapacity for enjoyment—a relatively brief portion of the book that has been the nearly exclusive focus of literary criticism—is in fact interwoven with the book's sustained theory of English colonial economics. The book condemns the New England Puritans as financial and cultural illiterates whose ungoverned access to colonial trade destroys at once the order of a traditional social hierarchy and the natural productivity and wealth of New England. Drawing on the literary forms of the masque and pastoral, Morton presents the Separatists as inept performers of an illegitimate class/status identity and urges an aristocratic reordering of the colonial society and economy that, he insists, is already modeled in the landscape itself.³ Yet Morton's pastoral depiction of the landscape also elides the labor of those Native Americans and indentured servants that transforms natural bounty into economic profits. To this extent, Morton's vision relied on the exploitative economic relations that characterized the early modern Atlantic world rather more than it challenged or offered an alternative to them, as Linebaugh and Rediker argue that it does.

As Bradford tells it, Morton and his eclectic group of Ma-re Mount traders are guilty of creating and then profiting from numerous forms of economic and social inflation; their actions have led to the inflation of prices, the inflation of consumption and spending practices, the inflation of the social position of servants and Native Americans, and the self-inflation of Morton himself, whom Bradford calls a mere "pettifogger" (226) who now thinks himself "high" (231). Morton's prompt spending of his fur trade profits figures forth the bountiful self of the aristocratic country landlord out of England's recent feudal past. Morton—probably a recently risen member of the "middling gentry"—performatively claims this identity even as he accuses the Puritans of illegitimately performing their class/status.

At the time of the Plymouth-Ma-re Mount conflict, there was literally no working model of a profitable plantation in New England. The economic drama of New English Canaan is therefore staged against a backdrop of land ownership disputes, trading rights and pricing conflicts, and colonial financial failure on the plantation level. A good many critics have located in fur trade competition the repressed center of Bradford's heightened animosity toward Morton.⁴ But although Ma-re Mount and Plymouth found themselves competing in the same fur trade, Morton suggests that each plantation was engaged in that trade as a means to advance...