During the early eighteenth century, New England no longer grew enough wheat to sustain its own people, much less for export. New England’s growing population exceeded its own agricultural capacity, as a parasite compounded the effects of the marginal climate to blight the local wheat harvest. The New English began to import wheat from the more fertile and temperate middle colonies, which escaped the blight and replaced New England as the granary of the West Indies and southern Europe. Formerly the great colonial entrepôt, Boston slipped to third, behind Philadelphia and New York, by 1760.
