Mary Draper

doi:10.5007/2175-7976.2021.e83255

Authors

Mary Draper Midwestern State University of Texas

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7976.2021.e83255

Abstract

This article calls for centering the lives, labor, and expertise of Indigenous, African, and African-descended people in future commodity histories of the colonial Americas. The production of the Atlantic world’s most prized commodities depended upon the expertise and intellectual labor of Indigenous and African people. Their knowledge — which was often violently extracted by Europeans through enslavement — buttressed colonization and enabled the existence of many of the early modern Atlantic world’s commodities. If we recognize this botanical, agricultural, and environmental knowledge as intellectual history, then historians can show how Indigenous and African knowledge anchored the Atlantic world and, by extension, the global economy. At the same time, though, the creation of these commodities resulted in environmental devastation. Though imperial wealth depended upon their labor, Indigenous and African people bore the brunt of environmental collapse in the wake of commodity production. Their livelihoods and homelands were not protected.

Author Biography

Mary Draper, Midwestern State University of Texas

Mary Draper, Assistant Professor, is a scholar of colonial and revolutionary North America and the greater Atlantic world. Particularly interested in the history of the seventeenth-and eighteenth century British Caribbean, she is working on a book that recovers how the region's urban residents--from colonial officials and merchants to turtlers and enslaved pilots--amassed environmental knowledge to develop, defend, and sustain their volatile coastlines. An article based on the project was published in the Fall 2017 edition of Early American Studies. In both her research and teaching, Draper highlights the interconnections that crisscrossed the empires, culture, and ecologies of early North America and the Atlantic world. After receiving her Bachelor of Arts degree from Rice University, she earned both her Master of Arts degree and doctorate from the University of Virginia.

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