In this imaginative and remarkably well-written study of the coastal history of Narragansett Bay, Christopher Pastore offers a cautionary tale three centuries in the making. By examining how the Native Americans, English colonists and American citizens who called the estuaries and inlets of the Bay home between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries co-existed within and across the environment they inhabited, Pastore emphasises the dangers inherent in attempting to master the sea in the name of human progress. In six chapters bookended by a prologue and an epilogue, the author explores how Rhode Islanders attempted to navigate and improve the littoral space between land and sea, that “confluence of sweetwater and seawater” (5), to use one of his many lovely turns of phrase, where early modern ideas about the improvable, knowable land and the eternal, unknowable sea mingled and clashed in the surf.

Pastore argues that the estuaries of Narragansett Bay evolved from being spaces of conflict and trade between colonists and Natives Americans that “set the stage for colonial expansion” (4) into fundamental economic nodes in the eighteenth century Atlantic World that were “points of interconnection where societies became firmly ‘entangled’”, as Eliga Gould has characterized them.Footnote ¹ In the late eighteenth century, Pastore contends that British colonists and American citizens remade the estuaries of the Bay to serve wartime ends, hardening its edges in the process, while in the nineteenth century, corporate interests—represented here by Blackwater Canal Company—sought to subordinate littoral space for industrial ends, with disastrous consequences for the ecology and economy around Narragansett Bay.

At the heart of Pastore’s project is the contention that in seeking to master the coastal Narragansett Bay space between continental North America and the Atlantic Ocean, for ostensibly rational reasons inspired by the Enlightenment and spurred by the Industrial Revolution, Rhode Islanders foisted a potential ecological and environmental catastrophe on themselves that persists to this day. As their actions, conscious or not, reshaped the coastline in an effort to reduce the ambiguity of the space between land and sea, they instigated changes in the region’s water tables, fauna, flora, and in the physical composition of its important harbours, that were to the detriment of those living there.

Pastore adeptly integrates archaeological, biological, economic, environmental and religio-political evidence to craft a genuinely interdisciplinary argument, one in which comparative water table statistics and Roger Williams’ manuscript diaries can be juxtaposed as sources to make similar points in a manner that is not jarring. He convincingly establishes that Rhode Islanders took seriously the ecological conditions of their fisheries in the early eighteenth century and that town officials were prepared to petition colonial and state governments for funds to de-silt and re-route rivers and inlets on which their commerce depended. But in making such changes, he strongly implies—if never outright states—that they at best mitigated the impact of their progressive agenda to improve the land, without ever seriously considering an alternative. He laments the failure of Rhode Islanders, past and present, to consider that, “[P]erhaps leaving room for improvement along our shores is more sustainable than actually achieving it” (10).

Yet, as he himself concedes in the book’s epilogue, the only viable solution to the relentless improvement of Rhode Island’s coast, which has left it vulnerable to modern concerns about rising sea levels and worsening weather, may be further improvement. He suggests that, “Perhaps it is time to forge a new definition of progress, one that accepts the necessity of hybridity and impermanence by embracing the sea” (238). In making this claim about another kind of progress the ultimate conclusion of this work, Pastore perhaps overstates its originality as a modern solution to the challenges presented by estuaries and littoral spaces, especially given the historical experiences of the Dutch with the sea. They make an appearance in this work as New Netherland colonists whose use of rivers and estuaries to establish boundaries rankled with Native and English Americans alike, so it is curious that their reputation as expert coastal engineers is not considered further by Pastore.

That aside, the author’s other major contribution in this work is to draw the attention of historians of the Atlantic World to the littoral space between continents and oceans as spaces worthy of study in their own right. He is able to succeed in this task because he demonstrates conclusively that the attention of early modern people themselves were on littoral spaces, where they understood the fertility, navigability and improvability of inlets and rivers to be important aspects of their lives in North America. He stresses that, for Native Americans, English colonists and American citizens, their objective to improve estuaries stemmed from a desire to harvest their bounties and to traverse their lengths in an era before railroads made the continental interior more accessible. But he also demonstrates that the environmental consequences of their designs regularly forced them to adapt their strategies in a way that required early modern people to constantly reshape their relationship with the estuaries on which they lived. Recognizing this fact, he “adds a narrative of renewal” to the environmental history of the early modern world that has “often been told as a tale of tragedy or inevitable decline” (4).

In his two earliest chapters, for example, Pastore effectively traces how coastal and the inland interior of New England was shaped by the burgeoning wampum trade in the Northeast and Rhode Island’s livestock-oriented economy. Pastore links the wampum trade in worked whelk and quahog shells that were found in New England’s beaches and riverbeds to the collapse of the north-eastern beaver population, whose valuable waterproof furs English colonists desired. The beaver die-off led to the wholesale destruction of their dams, reducing the amount of standing water in interior New England and leading to faster river currents that deposited more silt in Narragansett Bay. This, coupled with the widespread use of livestock fertilizer in Rhode Island, the runoff of which dramatically increased the nitrogen content of the Bay’s estuaries and stimulated algae blooms, meant that the Bay’s harbours became less valuable to mariners and fishermen alike.

While otherwise interesting chapters on the 1741 boundary dispute between Massachusetts and Rhode Island over Narragansett Bay’s extent and Enlightenment efforts to establish whether clams should be categorized as vegetables (because they were planted and harvested), animals (because they were brined) or minerals (because their shells were burned to make lime) fit less comfortably within the book’s broader argument, Pastore ends with another excellent chapter on the Blackstone Canal Company. He traces how its bankruptcy and subsequent inability to maintain the standing water pools necessary to keep the Blackstone River flowing, turned the canal into a neglected sewer whose industrial runoff poisoned the Bay and damaged fishing stocks irrecoverably. Pastore persuades us that this highlights the inherent danger in privatizing how we manage our coastal spaces and underlines that, although we often inflict damage on our environment that far outweighs whatever economic or political benefits we seek to accrue, we should learn from the struggles of Rhode Islanders, past and present, and aim to strike a better balance between the need to improve and to co-exist with, and within, coastal, littoral spaces around the Atlantic World.