no part of continental America was bootstrapped more dramatically than New England, whose farmers and fishermen focused heavily on supplying Barbados and the greater, sugar-growing Caribbean. In fact, as much as any Enlightenment ideals, it was the West Indian roots of New England’s rising prosperity—freeing the merchants and farmers of places like Boston, Salem, and Providence from economic reliance on the English homeland—that fueled a nascent thinking about independence in this part of British America. As the historian Wendy Warren has noted, “[B]y the 1680s, more than half of the ships
...more
