Creating an Unfree Hinterland: Merchant Capital, Bound Labor, and Market Production in Eighteenth-century Massachusetts

In the 1720s and 1730s, a number of Boston merchants purchased rural property in the town’s hinterland. In these estates we see the transformative power of capital and slavery in colonial New England. Boston merchants reached into the countryside, purchased already improved land, equipped their farms with the latest agricultural technology, engaged in large-scale production, and employed slave labor to extract the fruits of the land, thus transforming Boston’s hinterland into one of drudgery and unfreedom. By positioning capital and slaves at the center of the New England economy, this study demonstrates there was a visible, albeit limited, slave economy in the middle decades of the eighteenth century that allowed a few wealthy Bostonians to deliberately reshape the countryside using their wealth and bound labor. Merchant capital, in short, had the potential to reconfigure how—and the way historians should think about how—the New England rural economy functioned and its relationship with the wider Atlantic world.