Politics & Power Quote by John Lawson

Lawson is praising corn, but he is really writing an origin story for colonial permanence: the “Plantations in America” weren’t secured by grit or providence, but by a crop’s sheer productivity. Calling maize “the most useful Grain in the World” is less botanical enthusiasm than a colonial ledger entry. “Useful” is the key word - it flattens food into infrastructure, calories into conquest.

The subtext is dependency disguised as mastery. Early English settlements liked to narrate themselves as exports of civilization; Lawson quietly admits they were, at least in the short term, imports of Indigenous agricultural success. Maize is not a European staple accidentally discovered; it’s a domesticated technology perfected by Native communities. By crediting “the Fruitfulness of this Species,” Lawson dodges naming the people and knowledge systems that made that fruitfulness legible and harvestable to newcomers. Nature gets the applause; Indigenous expertise fades into the background.

“Would have proved very difficult” carries a cool, almost bureaucratic understatement for what was often starvation, failure, and retreat. It also hints at the economic logic of settlement: a colony survives when it can feed labor and stabilize population long enough to become profitable. Corn becomes the quiet enabler of expansion - portable, storable, high-yield - the kind of crop that turns precarious beachheads into durable land claims.

Lawson, an explorer, writes like someone mapping resources as much as terrain. The sentence is a reminder that colonial history often runs not on grand speeches but on starch.