Daemons in the pocket: Contract, commodities and witchcraft in Massachusetts Bay

Abstract

New England in 1692 was a community grappling with the cosmic meaning of capitalism in an age during which the market came to define life in the Atlantic world. Binding contracts, mobile capital and commodity exchange offered both philosophical proof and significant peril for a community rooted in a firm belief in the sacredness of contract covenants and in the reality of spectral forces intervening into the material world. As a result, the legal documents produced during the bloody witchcraft crisis that swept Massachusetts in those terrible years articulate a widespread anxiety about the potentially accursed nature of commodities that travel through and index social connections, the morally ambiguous incursions of invisible economic forces into everyday life, the compelling experience of contracts given divine or diabolical aegis and the cultural syncretism of a constellated culture bound together through market interrelations. As tales of witchcraft have taken root firmly as American narrative touchstones, those anxieties have remained central to representations of the witch trials in popular imagination. The novels, plays and films that return to the crisis’ collection of legal documents, economic contracts and oral performances, position contested issues of obliterative commodification, troubled economic social contact and cultural and racial insecurity at the heart of American folklore. This reading re-centres both primary sources and subsequent popular depictions of the witch crisis around the stories told through contracts and around the commodities and commodity exchanges that remained persistent features of Massachusetts Bay’s imbricated modes of storytelling. It reads these documents as evidence for the emergence of Atlantic market capitalism as a cosmic force, an obscure but interventionist God made powerful through market logic, and it argues that this force continues to define America’s central bloody myth of self.