Introduction: Unsettling Greater Boston Boston, like any particular place, is many people from elsewhere have settled. Indeed, things. Among those who have celebrated it, its very name comes from a town in England or do so now, it is that “City on the Hill”—a from where a number of the original Puri- biblical phrase used by the Massachusetts tan settlers came in the early 1600s. When Bay Colony’s first governor to highlight the one speaks of colonial Boston, it is this first dangers of failure —but now (mis)under- face that is typically intended. It is one, par- stood to suggest the promise of great things ticularly in its earliest manifestations, that to come. In addition, as the physician and embodies a colony’s most unjust form: one poet Oliver Wendell Holmes once baptized involving a relationship of domination (by a the city, it is “the Hub” (of the universe), the “mother country”) and subjugation (of the center of the world. Moreover, it’s the “Ath- colonized land and people). Its second face ens of America” due to Boston’s preeminent reflects the fact that Boston has also long place in the intellectual and cultural life of been a place involved in the colonization of the United States, and its leading role in the places and peoples. One manifestation is the establishment of educational institutions— area’s dispossession of the non-European, from public schools to elite universities. And indigenous inhabitants and the absorption it is the “Cradle of Liberty” (a title claimed of the Native lands upon which the city and by others, not least Philadelphia) for helping its environs now sit. to birth and nurture the American Revolu- Prior to European contact, many Native tion and subsequent freedom struggles. groups—from the Massachusett and Nipmuc But Boston is also a colonial enterprise— to the Pennacook and the Wampanoag— and has been since its very founding—one populated the area. Moreover, there were with two faces. First, it is a colony in the points during the first several decades most literal sense of the word: a place where of European settlement when relations 1 60776txt.indd 1 2019-12-23 5:12 PM INTRODUCTION between settlers and Indians were construc- And for those who survived the new tive and respectful—even if often only diseases, as many did, other challenges superficially so—or when dissenting colo- abounded, which together greatly trans- nists challenged war-making against Indian formed the area’s landscape and the groups. The potential of these relations was socio-ecological relations of its indigenous significantly limited, however, by a larger peoples. These challenges included new context: the quest—at best, paternalistic—to goods and trade networks, as well as novel “civilize” the indigenous population. Such labor regimes—which involved the enslave- efforts were thus part of a project to “kill ment by English settlers of large numbers of the Indian, and save the man,” as Richard Indians as laborers in the emerging colonial Henry Pratt, a US Army officer credited economy and for sale in the Caribbean. with establishing the first Indian boarding Also central was the sheer number of arriv- school, phrased it in an 1892 speech. These ing colonists with their voracious hunger civilizing endeavors are inseparable from the for land and, with it, for trees to build and many episodes and various forms of overt fuel their homes, to construct ships, and violence against Native peoples. for export. Moreover, there was the matter These speak to another project, one that of European plants and animals. As they saw Indians and their claims to the land as encroached on Indians’ traditional lands, the obstacles to the colonial enterprise, and that settlers’ cows and pigs consumed their food thus focused not on “saving” Indians, but sources, while, like English plants in relation instead on “removing” them. It was a proj- to flora indigenous to the region, crowding ect facilitated not only by direct violence— out local fauna. And as colonial settlements violence intensified by rivalries involving and agricultural establishments grew, so too competing European projects in North did roads and fences, which greatly inhibited America and shifting alliances among Native the mobility of the Native population and groups—but also by a combination of thus their ability to access the land’s diver- economic, ecological, and epidemiological sity to provide for themselves as was their forces that led to drastic reductions in Native custom. numbers and far-reaching changes in how Such developments challenge a domi- they lived. Even before English colonists nant perception of nature, one which sug- settled what is today eastern Massachusetts, gests that the city is nature’s antithesis. In pathogens introduced by European traders fact, urban areas depend upon and embody had wreaked havoc on many Indian groups. nature. Hence, the urban and the rural, Between 1616 and 1618, for example, an cities and the countryside, are tightly tied. epidemic or a series of them killed upward Indeed, they make each other. Take, for of 75 percent of southern New England’s example, the largest inland body of water coastal Algonquian population, according to in present-day Massachusetts, the Quabbin one estimate. Reservoir. Sixty-five miles east of Boston, it 2 60776txt.indd 2 2019-12-23 5:12 PM INTRODUCTION is today the city’s primary source of water— to the making of a capitalist and highly as well as that for forty surrounding munici- unequal world economy. Merchants in palities. Encircled by forested land and roll- Salem, for instance, dominated the world’s ing hills, this “natural” body of water and black pepper trade in the beginning decades its bucolic environs were built in 1930s. It of the nineteenth century, and a Boston- involved the destruction of four small towns based company that focused on bananas and the relocation of about 3,000 people and came to be the world’s largest agricultural 7,613 graves. enterprise in the early 1900s. Area merchants The example demonstrates how the and industrialists helped to fuel the slave commandeering, transformation, and use trade through cotton textile production of environmental resources have been cen- and sale, while some of Greater Boston’s tral to the making of Greater Boston, as leading figures enriched themselves and they have been to any place on the globe, the local economy by buying and selling from the time of its founding. As an afflu- enslaved human beings of African origin, ent region of the modern global economy, as well as by hawking opium in Asia. Even Greater Boston consumes a grossly outsized while sermonizing in anticipation of his slice of the world’s resources and similarly New England voyage, Puritan leader John produces a disproportionate share of its Winthrop was contemplating the riches that pollutants. That the region’s residents (as a slavery in the West Indies would produce for whole) are able to do so is not unconnected his family. Later, in building the city and his to the fact that local actors have played key personal estate, Winthrop would rob both roles, politically, economically, and intel- land and labor from the region’s indigenous lectually, in giving rise and contributing to, people. and perpetrating, imperial violence against The hierarchy of humanity applied not distant lands and peoples. From the violent only to Native and African-origin peoples. annexation of much of what is today the Since the time of its founding, inequality US West as well as the Southwest (and its has been at Boston’s core. John Winthrop, “taking” from Mexico and the peoples liv- a member of England’s landed gentry, saw ing there) and the colonization of Hawaii in poverty and the need for the destitute to the 1800s to the brutal US wars against the submit to the powerful as part of God’s Philippines at the twentieth century’s dawn plan. He was similarly explicit about his dis- and Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s, and the dain for democracy, calling it “the meanest present-day and seemingly boundless post- and worst of all forms of Government.” 9/11 wars, Greater Bostonians have been Responding to a shortage of arable land pivotal figures. in England as common holdings were being Boston has also been, since its establish- enclosed and privatized, Winthrop had ment, a place predicated on global trade, encouraged settlers to head for the Massa- and Greater Bostonians have been central chusetts Bay Colony by boasting of the rich 3 60776txt.indd 3 2019-12-23 5:12 PM INTRODUCTION availability of low-priced land. The vision and much of it done by individuals who lack of religious freedom was in fact less of a basic rights and many of the key protec- lure than the vision of profit, and, among tions of citizenship—a significant number the twenty-one thousand individuals who of them “undocumented”—provide many arrived in the 1630s, the Puritans were a of the goods and services consumed and minority. According to historian Nancy Isen- enjoyed by those at the upper end of the berg, “For every religious dissenter in the income hierarchy. exodus of the 1630s, there was one commer- That the top 5 percent of households in cially driven emigrant from London or other the City of Boston have incomes of at least areas of England.” The majority of settlers $266,000 provides insight into who resides arrived as extended families, and many of in its tony areas. These areas include old- them with servants in tow. While many of money neighborhoods such as the Back Bay the new elite “owned” enslaved people of and the new and gentrified high-end resi- Indian or African origin, they far more com- dences of the South End, as well as Down- monly used heavily exploited child laborers town’s Millennium Tower (where the small- and indentured servants (those forced into est apartments sell for just under $1 million servitude due to debt or for having been and the “grand penthouse” sold for $35 mil- convicted of a crime).