2+ day, 15+ hour ago (811+ words) Bradford makes clear in Book I of Of Plymouth Plantation that the communal system was not chosen by the Pilgrims for ideological reasons. The London merchant investors'who financed the colony'insisted that all labor, production, and profits be merged into a common stock for seven years. Food, apparel, tools, and all necessities were to be distributed equally regardless of contribution. This was not a utopian experiment; it was a contractual instrument of early modern capitalist investment. Yet, from the colonists" perspective, it functionally resembled enforced communalism: equal distribution without regard for effort or skill, centralized control over labor assignment, and a social structure that minimized individual initiative. But the reality of life in Plymouth'starvation, exposure, disease, harsh winters, and the precariousness of frontier existence'exposed the fragility of this arrangement. With investors 3,000 miles away across the Atlantic, the contractual structure was increasingly…...