06-26-2021, 05:19 PM
Let's take a look at the first area of Yankee settlement. It was completely unattractive to other settlers than peoples of southeastern England. The soils were stony, so agriculture was not going to offer easy growing of high-value crops. The climate was too cold for plantation agriculture. Efforts to establish plantation agriculture failed because the African slaves died in the cold. There were no minerals to be exploited, and no large population of sedentary First People s offered any opportunity for easy exploitation. New England had good water transportation which was good for commerce. Fishing proved important as a supplement to what would otherwise have been subsistence agriculture.
David Hackett-Fisher makes note of the unusually-long life expectancies in New England among political and religious leaders. Life expectancies are uncharacteristic for a pre-industrial community. Some of the economic activities infamous for low life expectancies, like mining, were rare. Commerce at best is a healthy mix of mental and physical activity. The sybaritic excess that one associates with slave-owning planters leads to obesity and diabetes from idleness, over-eating and over-rich eating, and copious drink didn't contribute to early deaths among elites, hardly existed. Alcohol consumption was slight and rare, so cirrhotic livers were rare... as were bar-room brawls that tended to cause frequent deaths.
Democratic institutions, including the oldest continuously-elected legislature in the world (the Massachusetts General Court, formed early. So did the legal profession. Educational standards were high, with Harvard College being established in 1636 -- a mere sixteen years after the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. There was no easy money to be made but one could earn a solid income the hard way. Economic inequality was slight for the time. Political upheavals were unlikely. Not having much portable wealth in the forms of precious metals, spices, sugar, or tobacco it was not a target for pirates and it wasn't the sort of area that some other Great Power really wanted.
The one way in which to reliably die quickly was to be a criminal. It was far safer to be a fisherman than a pirate.
David Hackett-Fisher makes note of the unusually-long life expectancies in New England among political and religious leaders. Life expectancies are uncharacteristic for a pre-industrial community. Some of the economic activities infamous for low life expectancies, like mining, were rare. Commerce at best is a healthy mix of mental and physical activity. The sybaritic excess that one associates with slave-owning planters leads to obesity and diabetes from idleness, over-eating and over-rich eating, and copious drink didn't contribute to early deaths among elites, hardly existed. Alcohol consumption was slight and rare, so cirrhotic livers were rare... as were bar-room brawls that tended to cause frequent deaths.
Democratic institutions, including the oldest continuously-elected legislature in the world (the Massachusetts General Court, formed early. So did the legal profession. Educational standards were high, with Harvard College being established in 1636 -- a mere sixteen years after the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. There was no easy money to be made but one could earn a solid income the hard way. Economic inequality was slight for the time. Political upheavals were unlikely. Not having much portable wealth in the forms of precious metals, spices, sugar, or tobacco it was not a target for pirates and it wasn't the sort of area that some other Great Power really wanted.
The one way in which to reliably die quickly was to be a criminal. It was far safer to be a fisherman than a pirate.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.