During the Pequot and King Philip’s wars, English colonists in the northeast used a combination of martial violence and enslavement to remove Indigenous polities that stood in the way of English expansion. English warmaking took on a gendered cast as Indigenous men were killed in battle or murdered afterwards while Indigenous women were targeted for captivity and enslavement—a process I call dematriation. Gendered warmaking contributed to what the historian Wendy Warren calls “unplanting,” an evocative term that describes English removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands, a process the Native historian Jean O’Brien terms “divorc[ing] from the land.”
In the aftermath of war, as primarily female Indigenous labor was forcibly redirected to support the development of settler society, English colonists simultaneously engaged in widespread land theft by laying claim to large swathes of Indigenous land, engaging in land speculation, and using land deeds to secure English claims and guarantee long-term Indigenous dispossession. English profits from stealing Indigenous labor and dividing and selling Indigenous land can be viewed as forms of primitive accumulation, a key step in the accrual of capital that undergirded the development of capitalism. Colonialism, the racialization of Indigenous peoples, and English attempts to destroy Indigenous sovereign rights to land all contributed to how racial capitalism in the colonial northeast unfolded.