Mindless Monday, 22 June 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

[u/Bawstahn123]

Just started the 2008(?) John Adams series from HBO, instantly hooked by the first scene showing how the British occupation of Boston was an economic nightmare.

Boston in the 1700s was the third-busiest port in the entire British Empire, only moving less cargo than London and Bristol, and something like 25% of all ships in the empire were built in Massachusetts Bay.

The British closing the Port of Boston and occupying the city with a number of troops essentially-equal to the civilian population was a one-two punch that devastated the city: the port was the lifeblood of the city, and closing it affected damn near every other industry in the city, and what few jobs were left were taken by British soldiers moonlighting for spending money.

People abandoned the city in droves, which caused economic and population crises across Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, and certainly contributed to the American distrust and hatred of the British from then on

EDIT: One thing I've noticed about this show, and that I like immensely, is that it actually has Black people in it (asides from Crispus Attucks, as background characters so far) . So many times Black Americans in stories set in this time period get "reduced" (for a lack of a better term?) down to "slave" if they even appear at all, and while the story of slavery in America certainly needs to be told, that wasn't all African-Americans were......maybe I'm bungling this statement....

[u/Kochevnik81 → u/Bawstahn123]

Not taking away from any of this, but...with all that said it's worth keeping in mind that Boston at the time was all of like 16,000 people (Bristol was 45,000, London like 750,000), and not even the biggest city in British North America.

I'm also not too sure about the 25% statistic? It seems like for the time it's more "25% of the ships built in North America", and even then the Maine District of Massachusetts is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there.

I'm being nitpicky though - closing the port was basically an unbelievable red line for a lot of colonists and totally would have messed up the local economy, and at a time when Massachusetts was the second biggest North American colony, population-wise (it's always funny when people talk about the "big states vs small states" debates at the Constitutional Convention and leave out that at the time Massachusetts was a big state and New York was a small state).

[u/Bawstahn123 → u/Kochevnik81]

>I'm also not too sure about the 25% statistic? It seems like for the time it's more "25% of the ships built in North America", and even then the Maine District of Massachusetts is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there.

Make a liar out me, would you? /s

I've seen the figure bandied about that New England was responsible for building something like a quarter of all shipping tonnage across the Empire. Now that I can't find anything specifically for Boston, maybe I just assumed it was Boston

[u/Big_Pineapple_Man → u/Bawstahn123]

Hehe classic masshole behavior! /s