NEW LONDON COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER 1 Connecticut’s Colonial Coastal Trade

S cholars have devoted much attention to colonial Con-necticut’s trade with the West Indies. Climate differences and the sin-gle-minded pursuit of sugar planting at the expense of food production explain Connecticut’s trade with the West In-dies. However, Connecticut’s trade with Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York remains relatively unknown. Con-necticut shared the same climate as neighboring colonies. So, why would trade exist between Connecticut and neighboring colonies? Integration into the Atlantic economy affected structural changes on its partici-pants. Regions in the northern colonies that specialized in trade with the Atlantic economy soon underwent urbanization, as business operations induced linkages diversifying the region’s economy, and outstripped the ability of local farmers to supply the burgeoning domestic population. It has long been accepted that Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire could not achieve suffi-ciency in foodstuffs in the colonial pe-riod. From Rhode Island to Maine, rocky soils constrained the growth of surplus grain production, on the one hand, and urbanization in the growing port towns increased the demand for foodstuffs on the other. The specializa-tion in these colonies aggravated the food shortages. Producers in Maine and New Hampshire shifted their labor away from farming to concentrate on the more lucrative lumber trade. Spe-cialization in sectors connected with maritime activities such as whaling, shipbuilding, the West Indies trade, the slave trade, and fishing, in Rhode Is-land and Massachusetts, fostered the concentration of population in large urban ports, particularly Nantucket