In 1625, the Shawmut Peninsula, home to modern day Boston, was known in the Algonquian language as “Mushauwomuk” (“the boat landing place”), and sat within the territory of the Massachuset nation, serving as a seasonal base for fishing and light farming. Within ten years, the Massachuset people lost the Shawmut to English settlers who claimed and occupied it as their land of promise.
Boston’s rapid development in the seventeenth century would not have been possible without the labor of enslaved Africans, which allowed the construction of an integrated political economy linked primarily to markets of the West Indies. Boston served as a center of the slave trade and port of entry for enslaved Africans. By the early 1700s, the New England Colonies were deeply involved in an economic alliance with the sugar-producing West Indies, driven by the abduction and enslavement of Africans and the trade of raw materials, molasses, and rum.
