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Colonial Plantations and the Economy in Florida (review)

The anthology edited by Jane G. Landers and entitled Colonial Plantations and the Economy in Florida contains a total of nine essays written by five authors.1 The stated purpose of the work in the introduction () and throughout is to encourage further research on East Florida, a colonial area that each of the contributors rightly claims has received little attention from scholars of colonial America. The underlying thesis of all nine essays is that budding economic prosperity in East Florida during these three generations was repeatedly stifled by political instability. Collectively, the essays focus on the period from  to , which witnessed the cessation of Spanish Florida to England (), the English transfer back to Spain (), and the Spanish cessation to the United States (). Each of the authors, in one way or another, attempts to support this hypothesis by examining the economic experiences of different individuals, groups, and enterprises within the colony during one2 or, in some cases, through all or most of these three periods.3 The authors argue that, until very recently, such scholars as Bernard Bailyn and Charles Loch Mowat relegated East Florida to failed economic colonial backwater status, thereby justifying the lack of scholarly attention it has received.4 Landers and the other contributors dispute this assessment. They maintain that the region’s physical environment offered real commercial agricultural opportunities and that the Old World immigrants and native Indians who worked the land were both enterprising and industrious. As proof of the area’s economic potential, the contributors point out that during times of political stability the area prospered through the production of indigo, cattle, rice, staple crops, and timber. The authors reason that, had it not been for political instability and the accompanying loss of life and property, the settlers of East Florida would have played a much more important role in the economic development of the circum-Caribbean and Atlantic commercial systems of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Landers and her collaborators support this assertion by correlating periods of prosperity with political stability and times of economic decline with years of political instability. Just as individual plantations, groups, and industries would begin to prosper, they would suffer decline or abandonment as a result of a change in colonial rule or even outright destruction by Indian, bandit, or competing imperial and/or local factions.