Cultivating Colonies

A history of seventeenth-century colonies from Canada to South America that shows how tobacco powerfully shaped Atlantic empires

Cultivating Colonies addresses a fundamental question: how did the Dutch, English, and French establish successful colonies and trade routes in the Iberian-dominated Americas? Rather than assuming their success was predicated on precipitous Spanish decline, Melissa N. Morris shows a more complex story, in which these northern European empires relied on Iberian and Indigenous networks in a series of short-lived colonies in South America and the Caribbean before establishing themselves permanently in the Americas. These little-studied colonial experiments all had one thing in common: tobacco. Unlike most other major crops of this period, tobacco was native to the Americas. A crop in high demand that grows nearly anywhere and requires little special equipment, tobacco was an obvious choice for new colonies.

Drawing upon archival materials in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, and the United States, Cultivating Colonies makes three important contributions. First, by bringing together sources in four languages, it focuses on the interconnectedness of the seventeenth-century Atlantic world. Morris demonstrates that although colonies are usually considered to be imperial projects, they were often reliant on the help of others, whether rival Europeans, Indigenous groups, or Africans. Second, the book incorporates failed colonies, illicit trading, piracy, and similarly overlooked pursuits into the narrative of Atlantic empires and nations. In doing so, it draws connections between the successful North American colonies of the Dutch, English, and French with their forays farther south, and shows how colonization often relied upon lessons learned elsewhere. In their attempts to establish their own American empires, they sought not just to emulate Spanish successes at subjugating native peoples, but also to recreate the environments of Spanish America. Lastly, Cultivating Colonies highlights how central Indigenous and African knowledge and labor were to European colonization from the very beginning.