The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, Volume 1

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In the past several decades there has been a significant increase in our
knowledge of the economic history of the United States. This has come
about in part because of the development of economic history, most particu-
larly with the emergence of the statistical and analytical contributions of the
"new economic history," and in part because of related developments in
social, labor, and political history that have important implications for the
understanding of economic change. The Cambridge Economic History of the
United States has been designed to take full account of new knowledge in the
subject, while at the same time offering a comprehensive survey of the
history of economic activity and economic change in the United States, and
in those regions whose economies have at certain times been closely allied to
that of the United States, Canada and the Caribbean.
Volume I surveys the economic history of British North America, in-
cluding Canada and the Caribbean, and of the early United States, from
early settlement by Europeans to the end of the eighteenth century. The
volume includes chapters on the economic history of Native Americans (to
i860), and also on the European and African backgrounds to colonization.
Subsequent chapters cover the settlement and growth of the colonies,
including special surveys of the northern colonies, the southern colonies,
and the West Indies (to 1850). Other chapters discuss British mercantilist
policies and the American colonies, and the American Revolution, the
constitution, and economic developments through 1800.
Volumes II and III will cover, respectively, the economic history of the
nineteenth century and the twentieth century.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE CAMBRIDGE ECONOMIC HISTORY
OF THE UNITED STATES
VOLUME I
The Colonial Era
i
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE CAMBRIDGE
ECONOMIC HISTORY
OF THE UNITED STATES
VOLUME I
The Colonial Era
Edited by
STANLEY L. ENGERMAN
University of Rochester
ROBERT E. GALLMAN
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
I CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
CAMBRI DGE UNI VERSI TY PRESS
Cambri dge, Ne w York, Mel bourne, Madri d, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paul o
Cambri dge Uni versi ty Press
32 Avenue of the Ameri cas, Ne w York, N Y 10013- 2473, USA
www. cambri dge. org
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© Cambri dge Uni versi ty Press 1996
Thi s publ i cati on is in copyri ght. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place wi t hout
the wri tten permission of Cambri dge Uni versi ty Press.
First publ i shed 1996
Repri nted 2002, 2007
Pri nted in the Uni t ed States of Ameri ca
A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
The Cambri dge economi c history of the Uni t ed States / edited by
Stanley L. Engerman, Robert E. Gal l man.
p. cm.
Includes index.
Contents: v. I. The Col oni al era
I S BN- 0- 521- 39442- 2 (he)
1. Uni t ed States - Economi c conditions. I. Engerman, Stanley L.
II. Gal l man, Robert E.
HC103. C26 1996
3 3 0 . 9 7 3 - d c 2 0 95- 860
CI P
I S BN 978- 0- 521- 39442- 0 hardback
Cambri dge Uni versi ty Press has no responsibility for
the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or
third-party Internet We b sites referred to in this publ i cati on
and does not guarantee that any content on such
We b sites is, or wi l l remain, accurate or appropriate.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
CONTENTS
List of Maps page vii
Preface ix
The History of Native Americans from Before the Arrival of
the Europeans and Africans Until the American Civil War i
NEAL SALISBURY, Smith College
The African Background to American Colonization 53
JOHN K. THORNTON, Millersville University of Pennsylvania
The European Background 95
E. L. JONES, Melbourne Business School, University of
Melbourne
The Settlement and Growth of the Colonies: Population,
Labor, and Economic Development 135
DAVID w. GALENSON, University of Chicago
The Northern Colonies: Economy and Society, 1600-177 5 209
DANIEL VICKERS, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Economic and Social Development of the South 249
RUSSELL R. MENARD, University of Minnesota
Economic and Social Development of the British West
Indies, from Settlement to ca. 1850 297
B. w. HIGMAN, University of the West Indies, Mona
British Mercantilist Policies and the American Colonies 337
JOHN j . McCUSKER, Trinity University
The Revolution, the Constitution, and the New Nation 363
CATHY MATSON, University of Delaware
Bibliographical Essays 403
Index 447
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
MAPS
North America in 1763 page xi
Areas of Non-Indian Settlement and Locations of Selected In-
dian Groups, ca. 1763 2
Slave origins 54
African slavery, 1750 55
The West Indies 298
vn
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
PREFACE TO VOLUME I OF
THE CAMBRIDGE ECONOMIC HISTORY
OF THE UNITED STATES
Prefaces to sets of essays, such as this one, are often devoted to explaining
why publication was delayed or why certain planned essays are missing
from the completed book. This Preface is an exception. All of the authors
met their deadlines — or near to — and they produced a very close approxi-
mation to the volume that the editors had imagined when they laid out
their original plans. These plans did not imply, however, that all authors
would agree on the interpretation of specific events and patterns of
change. Rather, aware of the present state of historical knowledge and the
disagreements among scholars, we expected that some differences across
chapters would appear, and, in that expectation, we were not disap-
pointed.
Two moderately unusual ideas informed our original plans for the series.
While the volumes were to be concerned chiefly with the United States,
we decided that the American story could not be properly told unless some
attention were given to other parts of British North America. Specifically,
we thought that the volumes must contain essays on Canada and the
British West Indies, the latter at least down to the time of emancipation.
Second, we thought that the first volume should begin by treating the
prior economic histories of the societies that came together during the
colonial period - the societies of Native Americans present in North Amer-
ica before Columbus, of Africans who were involved in trade with Europe-
ans, including the slave trade, and of Europeans.
These ideas were carried out. Three of the nine chapters are concerned
with the origins of the populations that mingled in America during the
colonial period; a fourth treats the West Indies. The remaining chapters
are organized around the subject of economic change. One treats the
I X
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x Preface
overall population change and economic development of the mainland
colonies; a second is concerned with the southern regions; a third is on the
North, including parts of what was to become Canada; a fourth takes up
British economic policy toward the colonies; and the last is devoted to the
Revolutionary war, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution.
Volume II covers the long nineteenth century, from 1790 to 1914, and
Volume III, World War I and the years following it, down to the present.
These volumes, like all Cambridge histories, consist of essays that are
intended to be syntheses of the existing state of knowledge, analysis, and
debate. By their nature, they cannot be fully comprehensive. Their pur-
pose is to introduce the reader to the subject and to provide her or him
with a bibliographical essay that identifies directions for additional study.
The audience sought is not an audience of deeply experienced specialists,
but of undergraduates, graduate students, and the general reader with an
interest in pursuing the subjects of the essays.
The title of Peter Mathias's inaugural lecture (November 24, 1970)
when he took the chair in economic history at Oxford was "Living with
the Neighbors." The neighbors alluded to are economists and historians.
In the United States, economic history is not a separate discipline as it is in
England; economic historians find places in departments of economics and
history — most often, economics, these days. The problem of living with
the neighbors nonetheless exists since economic historians, whatever their
academic affiliations, must live the intellectual life together, and since
historians and economists come at things from somewhat different direc-
tions. Another way to look at the matter is to regard living with the
neighbors not as a problem but as a grand opportunity, since economists
and historians have much to teach one another. Nonetheless, there is a
persisting intellectual tension in the field between the interests of history
and economics. The authors of the essays in these volumes are well aware
of this tension and take it into account. The editors, in selecting authors,
have tried to make room for the work of both disciplines.
We thank the authors for their good and timely work, Rosalie Herion
Freese for her fine work as copy editor, Glorieux Dougherty for her useful
index, Eric Newman for his excellent editorial assistance, and Frank Smith
of Cambridge University Press for his continued support and friendship.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
North America in 1763
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
1
THE HISTORY OF NATIVE
AMERICANS FROM BEFORE THE
ARRIVAL OF THE EUROPEANS
AND AFRICANS UNTIL THE
AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
NEAL SALISBURY
The economic history of North America began thousands of years before
the arrival of Europeans, as the ancestors of modern Indians dispersed over
the continent to nearly every kind of environmental setting and then, over
time, elaborated and modified their various ways of life. Although general-
izations about this diversity of peoples and their long history are hazar-
dous, certain basic themes run throughout it and into the period of
European encounters that followed. One theme is that because Indian
communities represented collections of kin groups, both biological and
fictional, rather than of individual subjects or citizens, the norms, roles,
and obligations attending kinship underscored economic, social, and po-
litical life. A second theme is that economic life consisted largely of
activities relating to subsistence and to the exchange of gifts. A third
theme is that religious beliefs and rituals generally underscored these
economic activities.
The arrival of Europeans after A.D. 1500 brought a people whose norms
and customs presented a sharp contrast to those of Native Americans.
While most Europeans likewise owed allegiance to families and communi-
ties, these were frequently superseded by loyalties to more abstract nation-
states and institutionalized religions. Moreover, Europeans were elaborat-
ing practices of capital accumulation and market production that were
utterly foreign to Native Americans. Finally, there was a biological discrep-
ancy between the two peoples. By their exposure to a wide range of
This chapter was written while the author was a fellow at the National Humanities Center in 1991- 2.
He wishes to thank Sheila R. Johansson, the members of the Triangle Economic History Workshop for
their comments and suggestions, and Colleen Hershberger for her assistance in preparing the map.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
^=^>'X?
500 KUomcten
Areas of Non-Indian Settlement and Locations of Selected Indian Groups, ca.
1763
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
History of Native Americans Until Civil War 3
Eastern Hemisphere pathogens, Europeans had transformed smallpox and
numerous other epidemic disorders into childhood diseases. Native Ameri-
cans, on the other hand, utterly lacked previous exposure to such diseases
and were thus far less effective in resisting them.
Despite the vast differences between them, Indians and non-Indians
interacted in a variety of ways and settings in the centuries after Colum-
bus's first landfall in 1492. After outlining pre-Columbian history, this
chapter will explore those interactions through the first two-thirds of the
nineteenth century.
INDIGENOUS NORTH AMERICA
PEOPLING OF NORTH AMERICA
The human history of North America originated when bands of Upper
Paleolithic hunters began crossing the Bering land bridge to Alaska some-
time during the period of Wisconsin glaciation (ca. 75,000-12,000
B.C.), as an extension of a larger dispersal from central Asia into the
northern tundras of Siberia. These continuous movements were probably
stimulated by population increases resulting from the hunters' success in
pursuing mammoths, bison, reindeer, and other herd mammals. Al-
though some peoples may have moved south of the North American Arctic
at an earlier date, most remained in the far north until ca. 10,000 B.C.,
when the melting of the massive Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets
facilitated movement onto the northern Plains and, from there, to points
throughout the Western Hemisphere.
PALEO-INDIANS, IO,OOO-8oOO B.C.
While still in the Arctic, the Paleo-lndians, as the earliest North Ameri-
cans are called, developed a distinctive fluted projectile point, so termed
for the way it was shaped to attach to a spear. Armed with these weapons,
they spread rapidly throughout the continent, preying on mastodons,
mammoths, and other large game animals that lacked experience as prey.
The massive environmental consequences of deglaciation and climatic
warming, of which the advent of human beings was but one, led to the
extinction of several species of large game by ca. 9000 B.C.
Paleo-lndians lived in bands of fifteen to fifty people that moved annu-
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4 NeaI Salisbury
ally through informally defined, roughly circular territories averaging 200
miles in diameter. Band members resided together during spring and
summer and in smaller groups for the fall and winter. Many bands trav-
eled beyond their territories to favored quarries, where they interacted
socially and ritually with other groups.
ARCHAIC NORTH AMERICANS, 8OOO- I 5OO B. C.
The atmospheric warming associated with deglaciation continued until
about 4000 B.C. Below the glacial shields, northward-moving boreal and
coniferous forests were replaced by deciduous forests in the east, grassland
prairies in the center, and desert scrub and shrub steppes in much of the
west. The inhabitants turned to exploiting the widening range of smaller
mammals, marine life, and wild plants in their new environments. As
they grew more knowledgeable about local sources of food and materials,
these Archaic peoples, as archaeologists term them, fine-tuned their annual
rounds, opting for more sedentary settlement patterns and increasing their
band sizes, often doubling their populations. Still, settlement patterns
varied widely, from permanent villages covering one or two acres in areas
of the Eastern Woodlands to hunting-gathering bands in the Great Basin
and Southwest, whose size and mobility were unchanged from those of the
Paleo-Indians.
In parts of the continent, particularly the Eastern Woodlands, the
stabilization of the environment, by ca. 4000 B.C., was followed by social,
political, and ideological change of great magnitude. As bands became
more sedentary and their technology more sophisticated, labor became
more specialized. The most basic division of labor determined subsistence
activities on the basis of gender: men hunted and fished while women
gathered wild plant products and shellfish, besides preparing all the food.
Technological sophistication also led bands to increase their production
and consumption of materials and objects, both utilitarian and nonutilitar-
ian, for exchange. The most highly valued materials, especially obsidian,
copper, and marine shells, appear at sites hundreds and even thousands of
miles from their points of origin. The presence of grave goods fashioned
from these materials suggests that these networks and their attendant
rituals underlay the spread of shared assumptions about the relationship
between life and death. Certain Archaic centers, such as Indian Knoll in
Kentucky, amassed unusually large concentrations of exotic materials,
implying that they enjoyed preeminence within a large network. In the
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 5
burials at these centers, goods from such materials were reserved for a
small minority of, presumably, elite individuals.
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL DIVERGENCE,
15OO B. C. - A. D. 15OO
After ca. 1500 B.C., the divergences from Archaic patterns of subsistence,
settlement, and political organization became even more pronounced.
While hunting remained central for Arctic, Subarctic, and most Plains
peoples, others turned to gathering, fishing, and farming as primary
means of obtaining food. But regardless of the magnitude, all peoples
were changing. And in spite of the radical divergences among native
North Americans, they continued to share in certain common develop-
ments, such as the spread of ceramic pottery and the advent of the bow and
arrow, until the beginning of contact with Europeans.
In the Arctic, the ancestors of modern Eskimo peoples had spread across
northern Alaska and Canada to eastern Greenland between 2000 and 1500
B.C., replacing Indian groups moving southward toward warmer climates.
Though environmental constraints militated against the more radical inno-
vations undertaken by natives to the south, it is noteworthy that - long
before Columbus - some Eskimos were using iron, obtained via Siberia
from Russia at the onset of the Christian era and in Greenland via the
Norse after A.D. 986. But the quantities of the metal were insufficient for
inducing major cultural changes.
In much of the west, bands focused on gathering and fishing to supple-
ment, in some cases nearly to supplant, hunting. In the Great Basin,
women refined seed-milling through a series of technological innovations
after A.D. IOOO, enabling the ancestors of the modern Utes, Shoshones,
and other groups to lessen their mobility and their dependence on hunt-
ing. Indians in most of California turned increasingly to acorns, along
with fish, in around A.D. 1, while those on the Northwest Coast concen-
trated on salmon and other spawning fish. Food processing became more
labor-intensive but, because the food was both readily available and
storable, the people could reside in permanent locations. Populations
grew, so that villages generally numbered in the hundreds by the time
Europeans arrived. The resulting pressure on resources led to exclusive
definitions of territoriality, increased warfare, and elaborate social rank-
ing. In California, groups divided into several small communities presided
over by chiefs in central villages. In the Northwest Coast, leaders of more
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6 Neal Salisbury
prominent clans regularly confirmed their power at pot latches, during
which they gave away or destroyed much of the material wealth they had
accumulated.
Elsewhere in North America, Mesoamerican influences, combined with
local practices, opened the way to plant domestication. By about 5000
B.C., the peoples of Tehuacan Valley in southern Mexico were cultivating
small quantities of maize, beans, squash, and other plants. From this
beginning, agriculture and related influences moved north via two dis-
tinct streams, one overland to the southwest, the other across the Gulf of
Mexico to the southeast. The earliest evidence of domesticated plants
north of Mexico is maize and squash at Bat Cave, New Mexico, from ca.
3500 B.C. But for another 3,000 years, the new plants remained marginal
to the subsistence of southwestern peoples.
Around 400 B.C., a new, drought-resistant strain of maize enabled
southwestern cultivators to spread from highland sites to drier lowlands.
Increased yields and the development of storage pits led to larger, perma-
nent villages that in turn became centers for the production of finished
goods and of long-distance exchange. The earliest irrigation systems were
developed in the villages of the Hohokam culture, in the Gila River valley,
after 300 B.C. The coordination of labor required by these systems led to
social ranking and hierarchical political structures. In the larger villages,
platform mounds and ball courts, modeled on those in Mesoamerica,
served as social and religious centers. In the Mogollon and Anasazi cul-
tures, which emerged over a wide area after the third century A.D. , surface
structures supplemented the pit-houses, and specialized storage rooms and
kivas (religious centers) appeared. Turkeys and cotton were domesticated,
with the latter being woven on looms.
The period from the tenth to mid-twelfth centuries, a period of unusu-
ally abundant rainfall in the southwest, marked the height of Anasazi
expansion and centralization. At Chaco Canyon in northwestern New
Mexico, 15,000 people inhabited twelve villages, or pueblos. Each pueblo
consisted of dozens or hundreds of contiguous rooms for dwelling, storage,
and religious services, built around a central plaza with a large kiva.
Despite such intricate organization of such dense populations, there is no
evidence of social ranking or political hierarchy at Chaco. At least seven
other pueblos, at distances of up to 100 miles in all directions, were linked
to the canyon by a system of roads. Chaco Canyon's power appears to have
been based on its role as a major source of turquoise production and as a
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 7
principal center for exchange of turquoise, marine shells from California,
and macaw feathers and copper bells from Mexico.
In the mid-twelfth century, Chaco Canyon abruptly declined, and its
population dispersed. Whether the rise at that time of Casas Grandes,
about 400 miles south, as a new center for trade in turquoise, marine
shells, and macaw feathers, was a cause or an effect of Chaco's decline is
not clear. Some argue that Chaco collapsed because the smaller towns in
the canyon, resenting the control over water distribution exercised by the
largest pueblo, revolted. Others maintain that decreasing rainfall was
responsible. Drought was definitely responsible for far larger migrations
from Mesa Verde and other population centers in the Southwest in the late
thirteenth century.
Dispersing Anasazi peoples settled in the various pueblos, stretching
from the Rio Grande Valley west to Hopi country, where the Spanish
found them in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While spurning
the elements of confederation that characterized Chaco Canyon, the post-
Anasazi pueblos retained the basic structure of the old religion, centered
in the kivas. Most of them now supplemented it with special attention to
the kachinas, spirits considered capable of encouraging rainfall. The pueb-
los also continued their roles as centers of exchange, both local and long-
distance, importing and redistributing such items as buffalo hides and
meat from the Plains, marine shells from California, and bird feathers
from Mexico, while exporting turquoise, cotton cloth, maize, and a range
of other materials and products. Among those with whom they exchanged
most actively were the Athapaskan-speaking Apaches and Navajos who
arrived in the region in about A.D. 1400 after a series of migrations from
the Mackenzie Basin in Canada.
As in the Southwest, plant cultivation in the Eastern Woodlands began
modestly. The earliest evidence consists of some Mexican squash and
gourds grown, along with several local species, at two separate sites in the
Mississippi Valley in ca. 2500 B.C. Even after maize appeared in the
fourth century B.C., agriculture continued for several more centuries as a
minor component of a subsistence system oriented primarily toward hunt-
ing, fishing, and gathering. Unlike in the Southwest, where complex,
centralized redistribution systems appeared only after farming became the
primary means of subsistence, such systems in the east long predated
agriculture.
At Poverty Point, Louisiana, work on two large mounds and a set of
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
8 Neal Salisbury
concentric embankments was probably begun before 1200 B.C. The labor
entailed in the construction of these earthworks (an estimated 3 million
person-hours for the embankments alone) indicates a level of political
coordination found nowhere else in North America at the time. Poverty
Point is also distinguished by the variety and quantity of exotic materials
deposited there - galena, quartz, copper, grizzly bear claws, obsidian,
crystal, and other materials — originating in a range of locales from the
Appalachians to the Rockies and north to the Great Lakes. Poverty Point
was the center of a network of communities, distributing goods to sur-
rounding tributary communities while drawing labor from them.
In the central Ohio Valley, a system of mound-centered communities of
the Adena culture emerged in the fifth century B.C. Most of its 300 sites
feature mounds built atop burials and within circular or square enclosures.
Grave goods included objects manufactured from North Carolina mica,
Lake Superior copper, and Gulf Coast marine shells. The labor involved in
building the mounds and manufacturing the grave goods and other arti-
facts suggests a highly centralized system of authority, presumably
wielded by those adult males who received the most lavish burials. The
distribution of Adena grave goods over much of the Northeast indicates an
organized movement based on shared beliefs and rituals connected with
death.
By the first century B.C., Adena culture was developing into the more
complex Hopewell, distinguished from the former by even more elaborate
mounds and burials and by the greater geographic extent of its influence.
Hopewell villages of 100 to 500 people usually stood on river banks below
bluffs at intervals of about 12 miles. Mounds averaged 100 feet in diame-
ter, 30 feet in height, 500,000 cubic feet in volume, and 200,000 person-
hours of labor. The most elaborate burials included as grave goods thou-
sands of freshwater pearls plus ornaments, figurines, and tools of copper,
mica, tortoise shell, silver, obsidian, galena, and other materials that were
brought to Hopewell centers and manufactured by specialized artisans. A
grouping of Hopewell centers emerged in the Illinois Valley, and Hope-
well mounds and copper burial effigies were spread widely in the Missis-
sippi Valley.
The Hopewell centers in the Ohio and Illinois valleys were abandoned
in the fifth century A.D. Some archaeologists note that this decline coin-
cided with the advent of the bow and arrow and with evidence of increased
warfare in and around Hopewell communities, suggesting that the system
was destroyed by violence from within or without. Others point to chang-
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 9
ing subsistence factors that might have undermined Hopewell hegemony,
particularly to climatic cooling or to evidence of increased maize cultiva-
tion by Ohio and Illinois peoples, although agricultural products were
clearly not yet dietary mainstays. In the Southeast, on the other hand,
Hopewell communities continued to develop, influencing the rise of agri-
culturally based Mississippian culture, beginning in the eighth century.
Flourishing throughout the Mississippi Valley and the southeast, Missis-
sippian culture represented a qualitative transformation among native
North Americans. Mississippian peoples cultivated a new strain of maize,
adapted to the short growing season of the northern Mississippi Valley,
along with beans and squash; practiced a religion based on the sun as a
source of fertility; and fortified their villages while developing more lethal
arrow points. Political power was centralized in the hands of a hereditary
chief who coordinated the collection and distribution of food surpluses and
of materials and goods obtained through exchange. These chiefdoms, as
anthropologists term them, typically centered on large villages built
around open plazas featuring platform burial mounds topped by temples
and elaborate residences for leading families. From the eleventh century
onward, most of these chiefdoms were grouped with anywhere from three
or four to several dozen others into complex or paramount chiefdoms.
The largest, most complex Mississippian center was Cahokia, located at
the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, near modern East St.
Louis. Cahokia was first settled in the seventh century by farming peoples
attracted to its rich floodplains. Three centuries later, its population was
20,000, and it featured over 120 mounds within a 5-square-mile area.
Social stratification and ritual sacrifice lay at the center of Cahokia's reli-
gious beliefs as well as its distribution of power. Laborers worked in
Cahokia's ongoing construction projects; artisans fashioned products from
shell, copper, clay, and a variety of other materials both local and exotic; a
managerial class coordinated the productive and commercial life of the
city; and hereditary rulers were accorded religious veneration, expressed in
tributary payments of agricultural produce and manufactured goods. This
stratification is reflected in the range of human burials found at Cahokia,
from mass graves outside the city walls to the graves of rulers, who were
encased in extraordinary amounts of exotic materials and accompanied by
dozens of individuals who were sacrificed so they could accompany their
master in the afterlife.
By the thirteenth century, Cahokia had developed beyond other para-
mount chiefdoms into an incipient city-state. It was surrounded by nine
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i o Neal Salisbury
smaller mound centers and several dozen villages that produced its food
and managed its waterborne commerce with other urban centers in the
Midwest and Southeast. But the thirteenth century represented Cahokia's
peak. The city's demand for food and wood outstripped local supply while
allied centers in the Midwest and Southeast broke away as they surpassed
Cahokia in size and military power. By the end of the fourteenth century,
Cahokia was abandoned, and by the time Europeans arrived in the upper
Mississippi Valley, the region was characterized by small, dispersed agri-
cultural villages linked only by ties of reciprocal exchange.
Although Mississippian culture came to an end in and around Cahokia, it
continued to flourish in the Southeast until the arrival of Europeans. The
southeastern centers were inhabited by forerunners of the Cherokees,
Creeks, Natchez, and other peoples known to the later colonists of the
region. To be sure, fluctuations and inequities in agricultural production,
the accumulation of tribute, and military conflict resulted in frequent
power shifts whereby the location of a paramount chiefdom shifted from one
community to another within a regional alliance. But this very instability
prevented a concentration of regional power like Cahokia's, ensuring the
survival of Mississippian culture and the system of paramount chiefdoms.
Natives elsewhere in the East did not directly encounter Mississippian
culture but were nevertheless affected by its proximity, above all in their
adoption of agriculture as a primary mode of subsistence. Wherever a
growing season of ioo frost-free days could be counted on, Indians incorpo-
rated farming into their hunting-fishing-gathering economies.
The configuration of Indian peoples and cultures that Europeans encoun-
tered after 1500 was the product of a complex array of historical forces.
Some groups were descended from peoples who had inhabited the same
locale for thousands of years; others had arrived only within the preceding
century or two. Similarly, some institutions and practices such as autono-
mous communities and hunting-gathering-fishing economies were deeply
rooted, while others, such as agriculture and political confederations, had
arisen only recently. The combination of ancient traditions and continuous
adaptations and innovations, along with the ecological diversity of the
continent, helps to account for the social and cultural diversity of North
American Indians at the outset of the sixteenth century. A paucity of firm
evidence renders demographic descriptions of Native Americans imprecise
and general at best. Physical anthropologists estimate life expectancy at
birth to have averaged in the low to mid-twenties, comparable to world-
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 11
wide rates for groups with similar subsistence economies and technologies.
Probably numbering somewhere between five and ten million in 1500,
Native Americans were developing in directions about which we can only
speculate.
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
Many of the challenges posed to Indian communities by European expan-
sion during the sixteenth century were analogous to those that some had
faced earlier, especially in relation to Anasazi and Mississippian centraliza-
tion. Others were unprecedented in the North American experience be-
cause of Europeans' technology, modes of organization, beliefs, and, above
all, disease pathogens.
BEGINNINGS OF EUROPEAN ACTIVITY, 1 4 8 0 - 1 5 5 0
Sustained European contact with North America was initiated when Bristol
fishermen began frequenting the Grand Banks off Newfoundland during
the 1490s or, possibly, the 1480s - before Columbus' first voyage. After
the English-sponsored expeditions of John Cabot (1497-8), fishermen,
whalers, and explorers from Iberia and France were a regular presence from
Newfoundland to the Gulf of Maine. By the mid-i52os, Beothuks,
Micmacs, and other Indians in the region regularly encountered Europeans,
some of whom traded metal goods for furs and others of whom captured
natives for sale into slavery. In the meantime, Spanish slave-raiding expedi-
tions, followed by two efforts to establish colonies (1521, 1526-8), were
alienating groups of Indians on the South Atlantic coast. And Giovanni da
Verrazzano's voyage for France (1524) made contact with Indians at several
points along the coast from Carolina to New England.
Indian-European encounters spread beyond the Atlantic coast with the
remarkable travels of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca and three companions,
including an African slave, Estevanico (1528-36). They were part of a
colonizing expedition to the Gulf Coast of Florida that fought with the
Apalachees and other Indians. After the expedition was scattered and they
were shipwrecked on the coast of Texas, the four walked through the
southwest to Mexico, where their reports of interactions with natives
provided a direct impetus for more substantial Spanish efforts, led by
Hernando de Soto in the Southeast (1539—43) and Francisco Vasquez de
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12 Neal Salisbury
Coronado (1540—2) in the Southwest. Both these expeditions were heavily
manned and financed, wandered over vast expanses of territory in search of
gold, alienated Indians by their demands for tribute and their militaristic
bearing, and spread deadly epidemic diseases among the natives before
finally withdrawing.
Meanwhile, three French expeditions to the St. Lawrence River led by
Jacques Carrier and Jean-Francois de la Rocque de Roberval (1534—43)
likewise alienated numerous Indian groups and ended in futility. During
the same period, fishermen and whalers from Spain, Portugal, France, and
England frequented the Northeast in growing numbers. Although the
evidence of their contacts with the natives is sketchy, it is clear that coastal
Indians had become accustomed to trading furs to European visitors.
Recent scholarship on Indians' motives in this earliest stage of trade indi-
cates that they sought glass beads and other "trinkets" for religious reasons,
regarding them as the equivalents of the quartz, mica, shell, and other
sacred substances that they had exchanged among themselves for millennia.
And many of the metal utilitarian goods initially traded to Indians, such as
copper pots and iron axes, were transformed into objects that were worn as
means of displaying one's access to such supernatural power.
Although relatively few Indians had directly encountered Europeans by
the middle of the sixteenth century, many more had felt the latter's
presence. One source of such indirect contact was European material
goods. As early as 1524, Verrazzano found Indians with European objects
in New England, and de Soto found items of Spanish manufacture deep in
the southeastern interior in 1540. Natives also obtained European goods
via indigenous exchange networks and from European shipwrecks. And
they learned from other Indians about the strange people who came over
the water in large boats. Depending on the experiences of their infor-
mants, they might have regarded the Europeans as mythological figures
(an impression that was typically short-lived), as friendly allies, or as
dangerous enemies. The most potent form of indirect contact was through
disease pathogens, which traveled via indigenous exchange routes beyond
the range of the Europeans themselves. De Soto, for example, found native
communities already ravaged by smallpox spread by earlier expeditions.
NEW APPROACHES, 1550- 1600
European approaches to North America and its natives changed somewhat
after the middle of the sixteenth century as would-be colonizers came to
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 13
realize the impracticality of massive conquest expeditions. Moreover, grow-
ing challenges by France and England to Spain's position in the Americas
meant that each country's efforts were undertaken with its rivals, as well as
the natives and the resources of the land, in mind.
After suppressing a French Huguenot settlement on the Carolina coast
in 1365, Spain established a permanent base at St. Augustine that soon
anchored a chain of forts and religious missions along the Atlantic coast as
far north as Chesapeake Bay. Although some Indians were initially recep-
tive, the Spanish ultimately failed to establish their legitimacy as political
and religious authorities. Forced tributes of food, a devastating smallpox
epidemic, the alien religious teachings and discipline imposed by Jesuit
and Franciscan missionaries, and atrocities committed by Spanish soldiers
led the depopulated Guales to move their villages inland. Armed upris-
ings by the Powhatans in the Chesapeake (1571) and the Guales (1576-
81, 15 97-1601) temporarily ended the Spanish presence everywhere
north of St. Augustine.
In the meantime, an English group attempted to colonize Roanoke
Island, on the North Carolina coast, in 1585. Although native-settler
relations were initially amicable, the colony's insistence that the local
Algonquian-speaking Indians provide it with corn led to hostilities.
When its English backers failed to supply provisions, Roanoke was
doomed. By the end of the century, a succession of epidemics and violent
encounters with Spanish and English colonizers, plus a desire for European
trade, had led Indians on the lower Chesapeake to coalesce around a
werowance (chief) known as Powhatan.
As with St. Augustine, Spanish expeditions into the southeastern inte-
rior led by Tristan de Luna (1559—61) and Juan Pardo (1566—8) hoped to
strengthen Spain vis-a-vis its European rivals. Instead of attempting all-
out conquest of the natives, these expeditions allied with Mississippian
centers, which had been reduced in size and power in the aftermath of de
Soto's expedition, and helped them collect tribute from recalcitrant neigh-
bors and wage war against rival centers. In so doing, they further spread
European diseases and material goods.
In contrast to the Southeast, no European power established a territorial
base in the Northeast in the latter half of the sixteenth century. While
fishermen, whalers, explorers, colonizers, and traders from Spain, Portu-
gal, and England frequented the region from the Hudson River to New-
foundland, it was the French who predominated. By the 1580s, Indian-
French contacts were focused on the beaver trade and had expanded inland.
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14 Neal Salisbury
French traders made annual voyages to Tadoussac on the St. Lawrence and,
on a few occasions, as far upriver as modern Montreal. Indian hunters and
traders brought them furs from as far west as the Ottawa Valley in return for
iron axes, copper pots, glass beads, and other manufactured objects. The
trade helped France to solidify its position in North America while the pelts
fed a growing demand for beaver hats among the middle and upper classes in
Europe.
The effects of these contacts on northeastern Indians were numerous. As
they turned from hunting solely for subsistence in order to meet the
demands of European traders, Indians altered their customary subsistence
cycles. Where women farmed, the transition posed no great difficulty. But
nonfarming groups now spent less time fishing, shellfishing, gathering
wild plants, and preserving food. They compensated for the resulting
deficits by intensifying their exchanges of meat for maize with nearby
farming Indians, by raiding farming Indians, or by receiving food from
the French as part of their payment for pelts. A second effect was depopula-
tion from disease. Although not easily documented in this period, diseases
had clearly reduced the population of the Micmacs and, possibly, other
Indians of the Maritimes region. A third effect was the warfare that
erupted as Indians fought to control access to French trade goods. The
Iroquoian-speaking communities contacted earlier in the century by Car-
tier were apparently attacked and dispersed by Mohawks and other Iro-
quois who resented being denied direct access to French goods. The
refugees from these communities joined the Hurons and other Ontario
Iroquoian-speakers.
European trade also had important political effects for some Indians.
The Iroquois' efforts to break into the St. Lawrence trade appear to have
strengthened their recently formed confederacy. The latter half of the
sixteenth century also witnessed the coalescence of the Huron Confederacy
into its seventeenth-century form. By geographically consolidating, the
Hurons were better positioned to obtain French goods as well as to pro-
duce surplus maize for their northern neighbors.
The late sixteenth century also saw the resumption of Spanish activity
in the Southwest, forty years after Coronado's failure. Although the Royal
Ordinances of 1573 outlawed conquest and mandated benevolence in
Spanish dealings with the natives, the actual outcome for Indians was
unchanged. After two expeditions (1581, 1591) met violent receptions
among the Rio Grande Pueblos, Juan de Onate in 1598 led 400 settlers in
founding a missionary colony in the same area. Before the year was out,
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 15
the forcible seizure of corn provoked rebellions at three pueblos, which the
Spanish managed to crush.
The period also saw less sustained contacts with natives by the English
in the Canadian Arctic, where Martin Frobisher aroused the antagonism of
Inuits in 1576, and in California, where Francis Drake established brief
but amicable ties with the Miwoks in 1579.
Despite their failure to establish permanent colonies during the sixteenth
century, Europeans substantially affected portions of North America. Never-
theless, Indian life continued along familiar lines at the end of the sixteenth
century. Most of the continent remained unaffected by the newcomers,
while the absence of colonial activity in the southeastern interior enabled
populations there to recover from the epidemics. Only along the Atlantic
coast and in portions of the northeastern interior and Southwest did Europe-
ans follow up immediately on their sixteenth-century beginnings, and even
in these areas, Indian cultures and communities showed a remarkable
adaptability and persistence in the face of enormous challenges.
NATIVE AMERICANS AND THE ADVENT OF
EUROPEAN COLONIZATION, 1600-60
The beginning of the seventeenth century marked the turn toward large-
scale, permanent colonization of North America by western Europeans.
The weakness of Spain and the rise of England, France, and a newly
independent Dutch Republic led to influxes of settlers, traders, missionar-
ies, and imperial officials in certain areas of the continent. During the first
sixty years of the new century, these newcomers extended and consolidated
their presence through their interactions with Indian groups.
COLONIAL BEGINNINGS IN THE NORTHEAST
The most far-reaching effects of colonization on Indian societies occurred
in the Northeast, where the French, Dutch, and English converged in the
early years of the seventeenth century. The French built on their trade ties
with the Montagnais and Micmacs to establish posts at Quebec (1608) and
Port Royal (1613), respectively. On the St. Lawrence, they used guns to
help the Montagnais, Algonquins, and Hurons prevail in counter-raids
against the Mohawk Iroquois. After 1615 they shifted their trade interests
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16 Neal Salisbury
primarily to the Hurons, who annually supplied them with 12,000 to
22,000 pelts from the Great Lakes and Ottawa Valley during the 1620s.
For a generation, the French-Huron alliance was the centerpiece of the two
peoples' economies and societies. French ties with the Micmacs also flour-
ished after 1600. Overcoming food shortages and depopulation, possibly
by as much as 75 percent during the preceding century, the Micmacs
acquired food and prestige by using French guns and shallops to raid
Indians from Cape Cod to Newfoundland.
Beginning in 1610, Dutch traders flocked to the Hudson Valley and
began a flourishing trade with Algonquian- and Iroquoian-speaking Indi-
ans there, including the Mohawks, who were frustrated by their chronic
exclusion from the St. Lawrence. By 1620, the Dutch had extended their
trade to coastal Indians between Narragansett Bay and the lower Delaware
Valley.
On the New England coast north of Cape Cod, successive English
colonizing expeditions from 1602 to 1614 repeatedly coerced, assaulted,
or kidnapped Abenakis, Massachusetts, and Wampanoags, while French
traders were establishing successful ties. But from 1616 to 1618, an
epidemic, probably of French origin, swept through the very groups allied
to the French, causing a population decline from ca. 70,000 to ca. 7,000.
Soon afterward, the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth in November 1620 and
established a new English colony among the devastated Wampanoags.
Thereafter, each of the three colonized regions was affected by develop-
ments in the others. In 1622, a Dutch trader discovered the many values
to Indians of wampum — marine shell beads that were gathered, drilled,
and strung by Algonquian-speaking Indians from Long Island Sound to
Narragansett Bay, where the shells were found in greatest abundance.
Indians throughout the Northeast valued wampum as sacred material and
used it in rituals and exchanges to convey messages of peace and condo-
lence as well as in belts to record their histories. The Dutch began trading
cloth and metal goods to coastal Indians for wampum and then using the
wampum, in addition to their own wares, to obtain furs from inland
natives. During the mid-i62os, the Dutch temporarily lured some
Montagnais and Algonquins away from the French with wampum. In
1627, they began selling wampum to Plymouth's traders after the latter
agreed to confine their trading to the coast north of Cape Cod. By then the
wampum trade was transforming Indian life in lower New England and
Long Island. The Dutch introduced metal drills to increase production,
and Indian men and women spent winters crafting the beads. Two groups,
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 17
the Narragansetts and Pequots, emerged to dominate exchanges between
native producers and Dutch traders.
The advent of wampum also transformed relations among Indians
around the Dutch trade center at Fort Orange, on the site of modern
Albany. Although located on land occupied by the Algonquian-speaking
Mahicans, Fort Orange was initially open to all Indians. But when
Montagnais and Algonquins began trading there in 1624, the Mohawks
feared that these Indians would cut them off from direct European trade
on the Hudson as they formerly had on the St. Lawrence. To ensure their
access, they launched a war against the Mahicans in 1624 and, despite
Dutch support of the Mahicans, defeated them and secured control of the
land around the fort by 1630. Thereafter the Mohawks were the major
trade partners of the Dutch, controlling the exchange of beaver pelts for
vast quantities of wampum and European goods between New Netherland
and the Five Nations Iroquois Confederacy.
The wampum trade in southern New England was altered, but not
disrupted, by the "Great Migration" of some 20,000 English settlers
between 1629 and 1642. Initially, the newcomers overran the lands of the
coastal Massachusetts Indians, who had been reduced to about 200 people
in a few tiny communities. But a smallpox epidemic that spread to Indians
throughout the Northeast in 1633—4 drew the attention of many colonists
to the rich floodplains of the Connecticut River Valley. The epidemic
coincided with growing resentment among both Connecticut River Indi-
ans and coastal wampum producers against the Pequots for monopolizing
trade with the Dutch. In 1637 the Narragansetts and Mohegans aided
Massachusetts and Connecticut troops in a war of near-extermination
against the Pequots. As a result, Connecticut was opened to English
settlement, and English traders acquired direct access to producers of
wampum.
During the mid-seventeenth century, Indians in southern New England
retained varying degrees of economic and political autonomy. With the
defeat of the Pequots, the Narragansetts dominated wampum production
in eastern Long Island and on the mainland coast. They maintained their
independence from the mainstream Puritan colonies by allying with dis-
senting Rhode Island, by retaining their ties with Dutch traders, and by
conveying wampum directly to the Mohawk Iroquois. Indians in the
Connecticut and Merrimack valleys not only produced furs and consumed
trade goods themselves but oversaw the movement of these materials
between the English and interior Indians. Groups directly allied to colo-
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18 Neal Salisbury
nies, particularly the Pokanoket Wampanoags with Plymouth and the
Mohegans with Connecticut, sought to satisfy English desires for land and
allies without endangering their subsistence autonomy and cultural iden-
tity. The Indians with the least maneuverability in southern New England
were those with the largest losses from disease, who were now engulfed by
settlers and isolated from exchange ties with other Indians. These were the
Massachusetts, plus Wampanoag communities on Cape Cod and Martha's
Vineyard, who turned to Christianity in large numbers in the 1640s and
1650s.
Munsee and related Indians on Long Island and the lower Hudson
experienced similar effects from Dutch settlement but lacked missionaries
to mediate between them and the colonists. These Indians had initially
supplied New Netherland with pelts and maize, but Dutch expansion not
only threatened their land holdings and other resources but also threat-
ened to subject them to the colony's authority. At the same time,
overhunting had depleted the supply of beaver skins, isolating the natives
from the elaborate network of Indian—European trade in New Netherland.
In three brief but decisive wars (1643-5,
X
655, 1663-4), Dutch troops,
with Mahican and Mohawk support, killed or drove out most of the
Munsee and other Indians below Fort Orange. The refugees moved north
to live among the Mahicans or west to the Delawares.
THE RISE OF THE IROQUOIS
By the 1630s, two major fur-trading alliances had arisen in the Northeast
that dwarfed all others in scale and political significance — the French-
Huron and the Dutch—Iroquois. Each was the major prop for a colonial
economy, and each reinforced the position of a powerful native confeder-
acy. Moreover, commercial beaver hunting had exhausted each group's
supply of beaver pelts, and epidemics were striking both their popula-
tions. Their responses to these crises put the two alliances on a collision
course and revealed important differences between them.
As they sought new sources of furs during the 1630s, the Hurons built
on established ties in which they exchanged corn for meat, copper, and
other materials with the Nipissings, Ottawas, and other peoples to the
north and west. The Five Nations Iroquois, with their more southerly
location, lacked the Hurons' access to the thicker, more valued northern
pelts as well as the latter's extensive trade links. The Iroquois Confederacy
had been formed by deflecting internal hostilities outward against com-
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 19
mon enemies, and this militant tendency had been reinforced by half a
century of battling to overcome exclusion from direct trade ties with
Europeans. Beginning in the 1630s, Iroquois raiders attacked parties of
Hurons and other French allies carrying pelts to Quebec and returning
with French goods.
The discrepancies between the two alliances were heightened by the
degree of control each European power exercised over its Indian partner. In
1633, the French insisted that the Hurons accept Jesuit missionaries as a
price for maintaining the alliance. The arrival of the Jesuits coincided with
the smallpox outbreak of 1663-4 and a subsequent series of other epidem-
ics that resulted in a population decline of 50 percent, to about 10,000 by
1640. While the epidemics raged, most Hurons blamed Jesuit witchcraft
for the mortality. But as the Hurons grew more dependent on the French
for trade and for protection against the Iroquois, the French offered incen-
tives to converts in the form of higher prices and guns. Although only a
minority of Hurons responded, their avoidance of communal rituals and
most other contacts with "pagans" undermined the consensus on which
Huron society depended for its coherence.
While French efforts to control their native allies increased, the Dutch
West India Company in 1639 relinquished its monopoly on the Indian
trade in New Netherland. The volume of trade in New Netherland rose
markedly thereafter, and with it the flow of previously outlawed guns
and ammunition to the Iroquois. From the early 1630s, the Iroquois
were responding to a depopulation rate almost identical to that of the
Hurons by raiding their rivals for captives, in addition to furs and
European goods. Although some captives were tortured, most were
adopted into families as replacements for Iroquois who had died. With
more guns at their disposal, the Iroquois turned in the 1640s to all-out
warfare in an attempt to eliminate rival political entities and absorb their
populations and trade connections. In 1648—9, they dispersed the Hu-
rons and then moved west to inflict similar treatment on the Petuns,
Neutrals, and Eries. As the Iroquois took over their hunting lands, the
refugees were absorbed into Iroquois ranks or fled to more remote Indian
communities. Some Christian Hurons were given refuge in Quebec. The
Iroquois then advanced against the Algonquian-speakers of the Great
Lakes and Ohio Valley, where French trade links now extended, scatter-
ing Shawnees, Ottawas, Potawatomis, and others. Only a determined
stand by a large body of refugees at Green Bay in 1653 finally stalled the
Iroquois advance.
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20 Neal Salisbury
NATIVES AND COLONISTS IN CHESAPEAKE AND
DELAWARE BAYS
English colonists also settled in Chesapeake Bay, beginning in 1607 at
Jamestown, Virginia. After initially exchanging metal goods for corn, the
Virginians alienated the Powhatan Indians by insisting on tributary pay-
ments of grain. The English were nearly starved out until reinforcements
in 1611 gave them an upper hand, enabling them to subject the
Powhatans to a humiliating peace in 1614.
After the beginnings of commercial tobacco production in 1618, a mas-
sive influx of planters and laborers brought new tensions as the English
pressured the Powhatans to cede additional land. The Indians mounted a
surprise attack in 1622, killing 350 (nearly one-third) of the settlers. The
colony recovered and launched a war of near-extermination. By 1634, it had
driven the Powhatans from the lower James and York valleys, gaining
300,000 additional acres of tobacco-growing land. With Virginia's popula-
tion having risen to 8,000, the Powhatans launched a second surprise attack
in 1644. Again the colony recovered and retaliated. In 1646, the Powhatan
Confederacy was dissolved and its people confined to tiny, scattered reserva-
tions, where they continued to be harassed by hostile colonists.
In the upper Chesapeake, the Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannocks strug-
gled to maintain a dominance achieved during the late sixteenth century
through the control of exchanges between Indians and visiting Europeans.
With permanent colonies established on the Hudson and the James, the
Susquehannocks were no longer a major conduit for such trade. A Virginia
trader, William Claiborne, gave them a European connection in 1631, but
the new colony of Maryland expelled Claiborne three years later, with the
aid of Piscataway Indians eager to bypass the Susquehannocks' monopoly.
After the founding of New Sweden (1638) provided them with a source of
arms, the Susquehannocks soundly defeated Maryland troops in 1643 and
then inflicted a similarly decisive defeat on the hitherto invincible Mo-
hawks in 1651. But New Sweden's demise at the hands of the Dutch in
1655 forced the Susquehannocks to turn to less friendly Maryland and
New Netherland in order to maintain European trade ties.
FLORIDA
Although the Guales had nearly destroyed Spanish Florida by the end of the
sixteenth century, the colony soon recovered. In 1601, Spanish soldiers,
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 21
aided by interior Indians, suppressed the Guale revolt. Four years later,
Franciscan missionaries resumed their order's work among the Guales and
eastern Timucuans and built several new missions among the western
Timucuans. Mission Indians grew corn for the Spanish in return for Euro-
pean cloth and glass, some of which they circulated to interior Indians.
While claiming far-reaching successes, the missionaries despaired over the
persistence of polygamous marriages and other "pagan" customs among
their converts. During the 1610s, a new round of epidemics cost the lives of
about half of the 16,000 mission Indians. The Guales were urged to settle at
new locations on offshore islands, but many fled to the interior.
In 1633 the Franciscans extended their missionary efforts westward to
the Apalachees. Although the Spanish were careful to separate the "repub-
lic of Spaniards" from the "republic of Indians," with Indian caciques and
other leaders holding official positions in the latter, abuses by soldiers and
missionaries continued to alienate many Indians. This alienation was re-
flected in major rebellions by Apalachees (1647) and by Apalachees and
Timucuas (1655). Continued depopulation from epidemics added to In-
dian demoralization. Nevertheless, the Franciscans claimed 26,000 con-
verts in 1655.
THE SOUTHWEST
As the seventeenth century opened in New Mexico, the proprietary gover-
nor, Juan de Otiate, maintained oppressive levies of corn on the Pueblos.
Besides leaving the Indians without adequate food, the levies deprived the
Pueblos of their principal item of trade with the nonfarming Apaches and
Navajos of the region. Apaches and Navajos began raiding Pueblos for
corn, European livestock, and metal goods. After Ofiate resigned in 1607,
the Spanish ended the levies and offered substantive military support to
the Pueblos, with the result that conversions to Catholicism rose from 400
to 7,000 in a single year and to 34,000 by 1625. Spanish traders sold
Apache and Navajo captives seized in the counteroffensive as slaves in
Mexico. After 1617, periodic intervals of peace were marked by Spanish-
Apache trade at Pecos, long the center of exchange between peoples of the
upper Rio Grande and southern Plains, respectively.
Despite intervals of peace and stability, the patterns of the first years
continued to characterize relations between Spanish, Pueblos, and non-
Pueblo Indians. Episodes of drought and epidemic disease, along with
Spanish exactions of tribute (encomienda) and labor (repartimiento), lessened
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22 Neal Salisbury
the Pueblos' agricultural productivity, leaving them with inadequate food
and vulnerable to raids by Apaches, Navajos, Utes, and Jumanos. These
factors also led to population decline and the consolidation of seventy
pueblos into thirty-five by 1650. These troubles and the conduct of Fran-
ciscan missionaries, who exacted labor as well as inflicting corporal punish-
ment and outlawing traditional rituals, contributed to demoralization and
resentment among the Pueblos. By mid-century, the Indians in at least
five pueblos had unsuccessfully attempted to get rid of their missionaries
through violence or by petitioning the authorities.
Over a period of sixty years, the presence of Europeans had markedly
affected native life in several areas of North America. Along portions of
the eastern seaboard — between the Merrimack and the Hudson and on the
lower Chesapeake — the relatively few remaining Indians were minorities
in their own homelands, surrounded as they were by Europeans who had
replaced them as the principal cultivators. Natives of the lower Great
Lakes and the Ohio Valley had fled their homelands in the face of aggres-
sion not by Europeans but by Iroquois who were responding to the Euro-
pean presence. The Iroquois themselves used their relationship with New
Netherland to become a major power in the Northeast, threatening the
very future of New France. At the edges of European settlement in the
Northeast, Indians were being drawn into ever closer links with their still-
expanding European neighbors. Although Indians in New France, Flor-
ida, and New Mexico remained a majority and were not threatened with
the loss of land, they were nevertheless subjected to frequent outbreaks of
disease, to pressures (coercive in the Spanish colonies) to produce for a
market economy or for tributary levies, and to missionaries who sought to
invalidate crucial aspects of their cultural identities. Beyond the areas of
direct European contact — in the interior of the Eastern Woodlands, in the
eastern Subarctic, and in the northern and southern Plains - Indians were
encountering increased quantities of European goods and (in the Eastern
Woodlands) native refugees from areas torn by upheaval.
I MPERI AL- COLONI AL EXPANSI ON AND
NATI VE AMERI CAN STRATEGIES, 1 6 6 0 - 1715
In the half century after 1660, the competition among European nations
for control of North America and its resources sharpened. Native Ameri-
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 23
cans responded to these developments in a number of ways. Some, facing
encroachments by settlers, political authorities, or missionaries, sought to
restore autonomy and cultural integrity by mounting armed uprisings,
threatening the existences of several colonies in the process. Elsewhere,
Indians allied with one or another European power as the best means of
ensuring communal survival and, in some cases, enhancing their power, in
a period of rapid flux.
NORTHEAST: TRANSFORMATION OF THE IROQUOIS
The 1660s marked a halt in the remarkable rise of the Iroquois. Their
Dutch ally was expelled from North America while their Indian neigh-
bors along with the French took steps to counter Iroquois attacks. To the
south, the Maryland-armed Susquehannocks beat back 800 Iroquois who
assaulted their main village in 1663. In New England, Jesuit and Puri-
tan missionaries encouraged Indians to close ranks with their fellow
Algonquian-speakers in Canada against the Mohawks. The Mahicans,
humiliated by the Mohawks forty years earlier, joined the new movement
and decisively repulsed a Mohawk attack on one of their villages in
1664. In the upper Great Lakes and Illinois Valley, the victory of refugee
Indians over the Iroquois at Green Bay in 1653 and the emergence of
interethnic villages contributed to the subordination of tribal loyalties to
a larger Algonquian and, implicitly, anti-Iroquois identity. At the same
time, French trade posts and missions drew this new force closer to New
France.
To the north, New France took direct action to halt the destructive
attacks that the Iroquois had extended during the 1650s to French commu-
nities themselves. In 1665, France dispatched 1,000 troops to Canada.
Their mere presence, along with the coalition of Indians now arrayed
against them, led the four westerly Iroquois nations (Senecas, Cayugas,
Onondagas, Oneidas) to make peace with New France. The troops launched
two attacks against the recalcitrant Mohawks in 1666. While inflicting few
casualties, they burned villages and food supplies with such impunity that
the Mohawks joined the new accord in 1667. The French quickly estab-
lished two trade posts near Iroquois country and dispatched Jesuit missionar-
ies to work in Iroquois villages. Although the minority of Iroquois converts
moved in 1673 to the village of Caughnawaga (now Kahnawake), near
Montreal, they maintained close ties to their homeland, enabling all Iro-
quois to trade and communicate with both New France and New York.
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24 Neal Salisbury
While making peace with New France, the Iroquois also consolidated
their relationship with the English in New York. As a result, the Indians
of the New England colonies who had retained some measure of autonomy
found themselves diplomatically isolated after the mid-i66os, just as their
fur sources were being depleted and expanding settler societies were pres-
suring them for land. Such pressures led to "King Philip's War" (1675-
6), between several Indian groups and the southern New England colo-
nies. Although the Indians enjoyed considerable success at the outset,
hunger and disease in their ranks, along with the participation of the
Mohawks and some local Indians on the English side, enabled the colo-
nists to prevail. Thousands of Indians fled the region, were killed, or were
sold into slavery. Those remaining in the colonies, whether friendly or
hostile during the war, were subjected to laws restricting their move-
ments, occupations, and autonomy. Tensions between settlers and Eastern
Abenakis in coastal Maine led to the war's spreading there, but the
Abenakis held their own, and the treaty ending the war in 1677 repre-
sented no significant gain for either side.
Similar tensions gripped the Chesapeake. Maryland allied with the Five
Nations in 1674, isolating the Susquehannocks and pressuring them to
abandon their land for a site on the Potomac. After relocating, the
Susquehannocks were attacked by Virginia and Maryland militia in 1675
as the beginning of a broader campaign to remove by force Indians who
occupied potential tobacco-growing lands. In Virginia this campaign led
to the civil war known as Bacon's Rebellion (1675-7), when the royal
governor, William Berkeley, attempted to restrain settlers from attacking
Indians friendly to the colony. As in southern New England, the Indians
in both colonies were defeated and the remaining survivors confined to
tiny reservations.
In 1677 New York's Governor Edmund Andros convened two treaty
conferences in which the Iroquois met with government representatives
from the southern New England and Chesapeake colonies, respectively.
The conferees agreed on the disposition of New England Indian refugees to
villages near Albany and of Susquehannock refugees to lands near Iroquois
country. They also declared that Indians remaining in the colonies would
be tributaries of the Iroquois as well as colonial subjects. These were the
first two of the Covenant Chain treaties by which the Iroquois took an
active role in British Indian policy and colonial expansion. The protocol of
Covenant Chain conferences was an elaborate synthesis of Indian and
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 25
European diplomatic forms, some of which had precedents in earlier
Iroquois—Dutch conferences.
Although the Iroquois now enjoyed stability on their eastern and south-
ern frontiers, the last quarter of the seventeenth century was marked by
tumultuous upheavals to the north and west. English efforts to break the
French trade monopoly in Canada and the Ohio Valley led to fierce compe-
tition in which guns became a prominent commodity on both sides.
During the 1670s the newly chartered Hudson's Bay Company established
several posts on the Hudson and James bays from which they dealt with
Crees and other Indians as far west as Lake of the Woods. At the same
time, the English at Albany were urging the Iroquois to divert some of the
Great Lakes trade their way. With well-armed Indians impinging on one
another's hunting territories in quest of additional furs, tensions ran high.
Then in 1679 a smallpox epidemic killed 10 percent of the Iroquois
population, leading the Five Nations to launch a new round of devastating
assaults on the Illinois, Miamis, and other western allies of the French in
order to obtain captives. To deter French support, they also renewed their
attacks on French settlements in Canada. In response, the French deliber-
ately increased their volume of trade with Indian allies from Maine to Lake
Superior, as a matter of policy rather than in response to market demands,
and dispatched a new body of troops to Canada.
The French-Iroquois conflict eventually merged with King William's
War (1689-97), between England and France. Political upheavals associ-
ated with Leisler's Rebellion (1689) and its aftermath produced a series of
New York governments that were ineffective in mounting a military effort
against the French and in supporting the Iroquois. In the face of this
vulnerability, French troops invaded Iroquois country and destroyed sev-
eral villages while their Indian allies likewise attacked with great effective-
ness. By 1698 the Iroquois had lost about 25 percent (500) of their
fighting force, about 1,600 of their total population of 8,600, and the
Canadian hunting territories seized from the Hurons and other Indians
half a century earlier.
In the meantime, Iroquois influence to the south waned with the estab-
lishment of Pennsylvania (1681). William Penn carefully purchased land
from the Delawares and established trade agreements with them, ignoring
Iroquois claims, based on the Covenant Chain, to oversee Delaware affairs.
The new colony also welcomed refugee Susquehannocks and other Indians
seeking to escape Iroquois control.
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26 Neal Salisbury
By the end of the century, the Iroquois were deeply divided into pro-
English, pro-French, and neutralist factions. But defeat at the hands of the
French and the inability of the English to offer substantive military sup-
port had strengthened the arguments of those Iroquois who sought new
means to achieve peace and trade. The result was the Grand Settlement of
1701, in which the Five Nations reached new agreements with each of the
major powers. The Iroquois agreed with France to make peace with that
nation's western allies and to remain neutral in future Anglo—French wars.
In return the Iroquois would be allowed to hunt and trade as far west as
Detroit. A new Covenant Chain treaty with the English pointedly ex-
cluded military support from the Iroquois' obligations but opened the way
for Protestant missionaries to work among the Five Nations.
In making peace with the Iroquois, both England and France expected
to garner the bulk of the Great Lakes fur trade. To consolidate its grip on
the trade, the French built a fortified post at Detroit. However, the
Iroquois persuaded many of the Indians there to take their pelts to Albany
for the better prices offered by the English. French efforts to halt this trade
led some Iroquois to join renewed English military efforts against the
French during Queen Anne s War (1700-13). As during King William's
War, English military ineptitude reminded the Iroquois of the dangers of
allying too closely with Britain and prompted the confederacy to resume
its neutrality.
SOUTHEAST: INDIANS AND THE SLAVE TRADE
The last third of the seventeenth century marked the end of Spain's
monopoly on trade with Indians in the Southeast. The suppression of the
Powhatan Confederacy in 1646 enabled Virginia traders to make direct
contact with Cherokees, Westos, Tuscaroras, and Catawbas to the west
and south. By the mid-1660s the Virginians were arming the Westos -
refugees from Iroquois attacks on Lake Erie - who returned with deerskins
and with captives, mostly Guales seized from Spanish missions, whom the
Virginians sold as slaves. English-inspired raids on Spanish-Guale mis-
sions increased rapidly after the new colony of Carolina allied with the
Westos in the early 1670s. The Carolinians sold most of their slaves in the
West Indies, although some went to New England. In 1683, a group of
independent traders defied the proprietary monopoly and allied with the
Savannah Shawnees, refugees from Iroquois attacks on the Ohio River, to
attack and enslave the Westos themselves. These traders assumed control
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 27
of Indian trading and policy in South Carolina. After 1685 they attracted
many Guale refugees to the colony, where they became known as
Yamasees, and extended their activities to interior Muskogean-speakers,
then coalescing as the Creek Confederacy, and to the Chickasaws on the
east side of the Mississippi River. These allies brought them deerskins and
Timucuan, Apalachee, Cherokee, and Choctaw captives.
Responding to English expansion in both the North and South, and to
Spanish weakness on the Gulf Coast, France in 1699 established a colony
at Louisiana and rooted it in an alliance with the Choctaws, who were
eager for means of defending themselves against slave raiders. The advan-
tages held by the English and their Indian allies were magnified with the
outbreak of Queen Anne's War in the Southeast in 1702. English and
Creek forces destroyed the remaining Florida missions and reduced the
Spanish presence to St. Augustine and Pensacola, while English and
Chickasaws devastated the French at Mobile and the Choctaws in their
villages.
Even as it won these victories, Carolina's hold on its allies was being
undermined by its own colonists. Trader abuses and squatting by settlers
led the Savannah Shawnees to raid some English settlements in 1707.
Carolina enlisted the aid of the Catawbas while the Shawnees turned to the
Iroquois, now at peace with all their neighbors in the North. The Shaw-
nees returned to their Ohio Valley homes under Iroquois protection, while
the Iroquois and Catawbas began a rivalry that would persist in the form of
raids and counter-raids for most of the century. Massive settler immigra-
tion in North Carolina similarly undermined English relations with their
Tuscarora allies. The attempt of some Tuscaroras to drive the settlers from
their land was defeated in 1712 when the English summoned the aid of
Yamasees and Cherokees. In the same year the Creeks, the most powerful
Indian force in the Southeast, negotiated their own peace with France and
Spain because of repeated abuses by English traders. Then in 1715, the
loyal Yamasees mounted the most serious challenge yet. Resenting the
abusive actions of both traders and settlers, they staged coordinated at-
tacks on several trading houses and settlements, while Creeks and
Catawbas assassinated English traders in their villages. Only the support
of the Cherokees, who considered joining the uprising but declined be-
cause of deep-seated resentments against the Creeks, enabled the English
to prevail. Defeated Yamasees fled inland to Creek villages or back to now-
revived Guale missions, while the Creeks pursued a policy of neutrality
vis-a-vis Europeans. In the meantime, the Indian slave trade came to an
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28 Neal Salisbury
end, as it became clear that Native Americans were utterly unable to
survive the disease environment of the West Indies.
SOUTHWEST AND SOUTHERN PLAINS:
NATIVE REVOLTS AND NEW LIFEWAYS
Although far removed from the Atlantic and the forces sweeping across it
between Europe and the Americas, the Southwest and its native peoples
were likewise transformed in substantive ways in the late seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries. Pueblo resentment against Spanish rule hard-
ened after 1660 as conditions worsened. A long cycle of drought (1666-
71) brought starvation not only to Pueblos but to Apaches and Navajos,
who renewed their raids. An epidemic in 1672 only added to Pueblo
miseries. Along with continued resentment against both secular and reli-
gious officials, these factors prompted a resurgence of Pueblo traditional-
ism. Missionary charges of idolatry and witchcraft led the governor, Juan
Francisco Trevino, in 1675 to order the destruction of religious kivas and
objects and the arrest of forty-seven prominent natives. When a large
contingent of normally peaceful Pueblos appeared at his palace and de-
manded the prisoners' release, Trevino assented, hoping to retain Pueblo
support against the Apaches and Navajos.
Trevino's concession accomplished little because Pueblo resentment had
passed the breaking point. One of the imprisoned leaders, a San Juan
shaman named Pop6, became the focal point of a movement to expel the
Spanish altogether and restore the traditions that prevailed before 1598.
After five years of preaching and organizing, and even gaining some
support from non-Pueblo raiders, the Pueblos united to drive the Spanish
from the province and defeated an attempted reconquest in 1681-2. A
new governor, Diego de Vargas, returned in 1692 with a formidable force,
but did not complete the restoration of Spanish control until 1700. Even
then, the Hopis remained independent.
During the twenty years of conflict, the Pueblo population in New
Mexico declined from 17,000 to 14,000, due to warfare, starvation,
enslavement for labor in Mexican mines, and voluntary emigration to the
Hopis, Navajos, and Apaches. Many villages were abandoned, and most
others were relocated. Many communities were divided both by these
moves and by differences in attitudes toward the Spanish. But the Spanish
reconquest was a partial one. The authorities did not reintroduce enco-
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 29
mienda (although they retained repartimiento) and they enjoined the Francis-
cans to moderation and toleration in their evangelizing.
In their hasty departure from New Mexico in 1680, the Spanish left
behind thousands of animals. This windfall accelerated the adoption of
domestic animals by Indians in the Southwest. For the Navajos, horses
and sheep became the basis for a more sedentary way of life than either the
hunting and gathering of the pre-Spanish past or the raiding of the seven-
teenth century. The Apaches combined horses with guns, some stolen
from the Spanish, others introduced to the southern Plains by Carolina-
armed Chickasaws or by French traders based in Illinois and Louisiana. In
coming years, this combination of horses and guns would transform native
life on the Plains.
By 1715, the escalating scale and intensity of warfare was leading many
Indians to search for new strategies for maximizing the benefits of European
trade while minimizing their subordination to imperial interests. In much
of the East, this meant "playing off" the European powers in a policy of
active neutrality. Elsewhere in the East, and also in the Southeast, it meant a
cautious approach in dealing with the sole European power in the region.
On the Plains, where Europeans had yet to establish a direct presence,
Indians embraced European material culture as part of their adaptations to
new circumstances triggered by European presences elsewhere.
NATIVE AMERICANS AND THE EUROPEAN
CONFLICT FOR EMPIRE, 1715-63
Although the conclusion of Queen Anne's War in 1713 marked the begin-
ning of three decades of peace among Europeans, that peace did not
diminish imperial competition for supremacy in North America. In the
absence of overt war, each of the European powers sought to extend and
strengthen its ties to various native groups, not only for profits but —
where two or more of them competed — as means of securing diplomatic
(and potential military) allies. Indians with access to two or more sources
of European goods could use their positions to play these sources off one
another and avoid becoming dependent on any one. Other native groups
fought among themselves to control access to such goods or to advance the
interests of their European ally. Even many Plains Indians were drawn into
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30 Neal Salisbury
such rivalries. The outbreak of a new Anglo—French war in 1744, along
with the expansion of British settlement, began the unraveling of the
system of alliances and play-offs in the Eastern Woodlands, a process that
ended with the defeat of France and its withdrawal from North America in
1763.
NEUTRALITY AND DEPENDENCE IN
THE EAST, 1 7 1 5 - 4 4
In the Northeast, the Iroquois remained formally at peace with both
European powers, but their success at diverting western Indians' furs to
Albany led the French to establish a post at Niagara (1721), which the
English countered by building Fort Oswego (1727). Together, the two
posts enabled Great Lakes Indians to bypass the Iroquois and trade directly
with the British and French. As a result, the Iroquois increasingly looked
southward for allies, tribute, and additions to their ranks. In 1722 they
incorporated the Tuscaroras as the sixth member of their confederacy. In
the same year, they met with New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia
officials to revive the Covenant Chain and agree upon the disposition of
Indians within the later two colonies. In return for being granted trade
privileges in Pennsylvania, the Iroquois agreed that Shawnee refugees
from South Carolina, along with some indigenous Delawares, would be
moved from Pennsylvania to the Ohio Valley. The new treaty also enabled
Iroquois parties to travel freely in their raids for captives, now centered on
the Cherokees and Catawbas. In 1737 the Iroquois cooperated with Penn-
sylvania in imposing the fraudulent Walking Purchase on most of the
Delawares remaining in the colony, obliging them to move to the south-
ern periphery of Iroquois country and west of lands sought by Pennsylva-
nia for settlers.
The arrival of refugees in the Ohio Valley in the second quarter of the
eighteenth century marked the reoccupation of a region emptied by Iro-
quois raids a century earlier. Besides the Delawares and Shawnees from
Pennsylvania, the region was settled by "Mingos" - Iroquois who moved
west in search of less congested hunting areas - and some Algonquian-
speaking allies of the French. As French and English traders vied for their
business, these Indians sought to avoid dependence on, and deference to,
the French, English, and Iroquois, a tendency that led the French to label
them "republican."
North of the Great Lakes, Anglo-French competition extended com-
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 31
mercial fur trading west to the Rocky Mountains. Although Indians
sought wherever possible to trade with both powers, the French arming of
the Sioux in the 1720s led Crees, Ojibwas, and Assiniboins to rely more
heavily on the Hudson's Bay Company. After 1730, the French estab-
lished new posts among the latter three groups, leading the Sioux to turn
against the French. The Ojibwas used French arms to mount an all-out
war on the Sioux, inaugurating the westward movement that would lead
many Sioux to the Plains and a radically new way of life. Meanwhile, in
1736, the French quashed a twenty-five-year effort by several Indian
groups, led by the Foxes, to drive French traders from the area west of
Lake Michigan.
In upper New England and the Maritimes, on the other hand,
Abenakis, Malecites, and Micmacs displayed their decided preference for
the French to the encroaching presence of the British. The awarding of
Nova Scotia to Britain in the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) and English recov-
ery from King Philip's War (1675-6) led to tensions between English
traders and settlers, on one hand, and Indians supported by French mis-
sionaries on the other. After full-scale war erupted in 1722, the English
introduced troops whose ranks included subject Indians from the southern
New England colonies. Although enjoying limited success against the
Micmacs in Nova Scotia, the English destroyed the Abenaki village that
was the center of hostility in Maine and killed its resident missionary. In
treaties signed in 1725 and 1727, the Indians and English agreed to live
in peace and recognize each other's legitimacy, but tensions continued and
occasionally erupted in violence.
In the Southeast, the Creek Confederacy developed the diplomatic
"play-off" system to perfection in the generation after 1715. In the man-
ner of the Iroquois, they drew on internal factions to establish ties with the
British in Carolina, French in Louisiana, and Spanish in Florida. Under
the mico, or "emperor," Brims, the Creeks granted limited trade conces-
sions to each of the three powers while declining to favor any one over the
others. Above all, they sought to maximize their profits from the deerskin
trade and minimize European control of that trade. To that end they
fought both the French-allied Choctaws and the Carolina-allied Chero-
kees, but joined with the powerful, Carolina-allied Chickasaws who so
successfully harassed the French on the Mississippi River. They supported
the refugee Yamasees in attacks against Carolina traders and settlers, and
the'Iroquois in their raids on Cherokees and Catawbas.
The Creeks' success depended in part on their geographic position, as
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32 Neal Salisbury
the Cherokee experience during the same period illustrates. Although the
Cherokees had intervened on the side of Carolina at a critical moment in
the Yamasee War, that colony continued to favor the Creeks over the
Cherokees by paying the Creeks higher prices for deerskins and by provid-
ing them with guns and ammunition. For the Carolinians, such a policy
was needed to prevent the Creeks from shifting their trade entirely to the
French and Spanish. Because the Cherokees lacked ready access to French
and Spanish traders, the Carolinians could charge them higher prices and
deny them guns with impunity. The lack of adequate weapons left the
Cherokees vulnerable to attacks by Chickasaws, Choctaws, Iroquois, and
the Creeks.
Over time, the growing strength of the British in the Southeast, rela-
tive to that of the Spanish and even the French, altered these patterns. The
inability of the latter two nations to produce adequate supplies of guns and
other goods on a consistent basis, the inability of the Spanish to prevent
the English from destroying Yamasee villages in Florida in 1728, and the
death of Brims in the early 1730s combined to weaken the Creeks' play-off
system. In this context, Creeks welcomed James Oglethorpe's proposal in
1733 to establish an English settlement on Creek land as a means of
balancing South Carolina's growing dominance. Desperate for solid ties
with other Europeans, the Cherokees turned briefly in the 1730s to two
successive European eccentrics - Sir Alexander Cuming, who promised
salvation through a direct treaty with the English crown, and Christian
Priber, a German mystic who urged the Cherokees toward a policy of
neutrality. Although the two men's presences were only fleeting, they did
heighten the demoralized Cherokees' sense of national identity. Even more
vulnerable were the Piedmont Catawbas, beset by a declining deer popula-
tion, Iroquois raids, and encroaching settlers. As a result, they became
more dependent on close ties with the South Carolina government, allying
with it against common Indian enemies and seizing runaway slaves.
Britain's strength in the Southeast was evident as far west as the Missis-
sippi River. Although the French, with Choctaw aid, cursed the Natchez
in 1729 and seized their lands, the English-armed Chickasaws regularly
raided the French-allied Illinois for captives and frequently disrupted
French traffic on the Mississippi. After 1730 the uncertainties of French
supplies and the aggressive trade tactics of the Carolinians split the previ-
ously loyal Choctaws, setting off a civil war that lasted two decades.
Meanwhile, small enclaves of Indians, surrounded by settlers, struggled
to survive and maintain their cultural identities in the heavily populated
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 33
areas of the British seaboard colonies. In the face of poverty, discrimina-
tion, and restrictions imposed by legislation and white overseers, many
served as soldiers, seamen, indentured servants, or casual laborers. Besides
poverty, the effects of alcohol and disease reduced their already small
numbers still further. With military and maritime occupations taking a
higher toll of males, many native women married outsiders, particularly
free blacks who were similarly marginalized in colonial society. For the
most part, Indians in the colonies were ignored by whites except when
their military services were desired or when significant numbers were
attracted to evangelical Christianity as preached in the Great Awakening
revivals of the 1740s.
EASTERN INDIANS AND THE FALL OF
FRANCE, 1744 — 63
The outbreak of war between England and France in 1744 further exposed
French weakness and the vulnerability of the Indians' play-off system.
British naval supremacy prevented the French from importing many of the
trade goods needed to shore up their alliances with Indians. Neutral and
even many pro-French Indians in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys per-
ceived the shortages and the resultant high prices as insulting. On the
Mississippi, dissident Choctaws openly allied with the hated Chickasaws
and South Carolina in 1745, widening the bloody civil war between pro-
and anti-French factions. Two years later, Mingos, Shawnees, Miamis, and
others launched attacks on French posts in Ohio and began dealing with
Pennsylvania traders.
Recognizing that their empire itself was at stake, the French resorted to
decisive military action. French troops helped sympathetic Choctaws to sup-
press the pro-English faction once and for all and moved to reassert French
power in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley. At Pickawillany on the Ohio,
they led an attack that resulted in the death of the Miami leader, Memeskia,
a key figure in the anti-French movement. In so reasserting themselves, the
French were aided by the conduct of the English in each region. The abuses
that South Carolina's traders were regularly accused of by other Indians be-
came a point of resentment among the Choctaws. At a treaty conference at
Logstown, Pennsylvania, in 1752, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Iro-
quois pressured Ohio Indians into confirming Virginia's claim to land south
of the Ohio and accepting construction of an English post at the junction of
the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers. With the English now perceived as
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34 Neal Salisbury
a more direct threat to their lands, most Ohio Indians returned to pro-
French or neutral positions. French troops then drove all English traders
from the region and began the construction of a series of forts, including
Fort Dusquesne, where the Virginians had begun theirs.
When Anglo—French war broke out in 1754, Indian support enabled
the French to defeat efforts by George Washington at Fort Necessity (1754)
and James Braddock's British regulars (1755) to capture Fort Duquesne.
Shawnees and Delawares then launched attacks on frontier settlements in
Pennsylvania in a concerted effort to drive back settlers impinging on their
lands. The Iroquois—English Covenant Chain was essentially a dead letter
as even many Iroquois joined the French in a stunning series of victories in
1756-7.
Although the rise to power in England of William Pitt was a principal
factor in the reversal of military fortunes in the Seven Years' War, the
effort of Indians to maintain balance between the two powers was equally
decisive in North America. By 1758, most Iroquois and even Shawnees
and Delawares had come to fear that the French would prevail. At a treaty
conference at Easton, Pennsylvania, in October 1758, the Ohio Indians
agreed to abandon their support for the French, who thereupon withdrew
from Fort Dusquesne. With Indians now aiding them, the English seized
Fort Dusquesne and Fort Niagara in the summer of 1759. In September
1760, New France surrendered to the English.
Even before the war's end, some Indians were uneasy about their inabil-
ity to contain the ascendant British. Afterward, these suspicions were
borne out when Britain's commander, General Jeffrey Amherst, ordered
large garrisons to remain in the occupied French posts, halted the giving
of all presents, including food, to allied Indians, and demanded the return
of all British captives held by the allies, even those who had been adopted
and wished to remain with their captors. He also seized some Seneca land
for his officers at the same time that some Connecticut settlers massacred
Delawares in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania and took over their
land. In the South, the Cherokees had entered the war on the English side.
But their ill treatment by soldiers and traders while Virginians and South
Carolinians squatted on their land led them in 1759 to join the weakened
French cause. Although the Cherokees initially drove back the frontier of
settlement, a contingent of British troops in 1761 moved through their
lands, burning homes and crops. Shortly thereafter, the Cherokees submit-
ted to South Carolina. With the British having defeated the French, the
resentment of Native Americans against the British was greater than ever.
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 35
HORSES AND GUNS: THE PLAINS AND
SOUTHWEST TRANSFORMED
Well before Europeans set foot on the Plains in significant numbers,
Native Americans were transforming their lives and the region with ob-
jects of European origin, principally horses and guns. Although there was
more than one source of each, most Plains horses originated among those
left behind or seized during the Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico (1680-
1700). From there they were diffused northward by the Utes to their
fellow Numic-speakers, the Shoshones, some of whom subsequently ac-
quired distinct identities as Bannocks and Comanches. First used for meat
or transporting goods, horses were being ridden to hunt and raid in the
1730s and, soon after, became an object of prestige in many societies, to
be accumulated and given away.
Guns, on the other hand, originated in the deliberate actions of French
traders seeking to extend that nation's influence west of the Mississippi. In
1718-9, Charles Claude du Tisn6 established alliances with the Osages,
Wichitas, and Pawnees, designating these groups as middlemen in the
French trade and giving them guns to reinforce their roles. French-armed
Pawnees and Kansas defeated a Spanish-Pueblo expedition seeking to
establish trade on the southern Plains in 1720. By the mid-1720s, all the
Indian nations on the lower Missouri River had been brought into the
French fold. After 1738, French contacts extended to the upper Missouri
as well.
By the mid-eighteenth century, horse-mounted Indians from the periph-
ery of the Plains had evolved new lifestyles as equestrian nomads and
moved onto the grasslands to follow bison herds. Among the most notable
of these were the Lakota Sioux, Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Comanches. In
addition, village-dwelling natives of the region, such as the Pawnees,
Arikaras, Mandans, and Hidatsas, incorporated horses into their village-
based agricultural societies for hunting and transportation. Such peoples
were highly vulnerable to surprise raids by the equestrians, as were the
eastern Apaches, who, despite having horses and a few captured guns,
were no match for the French-armed Comanches. As a result, the Apaches
made peace with the Spanish during the late 1710s.
Similarly in the Southwest, the Spanish and Pueblos grew ever more
interdependent as raids by mounted Comanches and Utes threatened both.
The Pueblos were increasingly integrated into the colonial economy and
polity, though never at the expense of their autonomy. The Navajos like-
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36 Neal Salisbury
wise modified their ways in response to Ute raids and other new condi-
tions. They shifted to a pastoral economy based on the sheep herds created
after the Spanish departure in 1680 and, under the influence of Pueblo
refugees accepted during the Spanish reconquest, adopted some Pueblo
religious ideas and European materials.
Albeit in very different ways, native lives over much of the continent were
significantly transformed during the first two-thirds of the eighteenth
century. (During the last years of this period, a third theater of Native
American-European interaction was opened by the arrival of Russian fur
traders in southwestern Alaska, a topic discussed in the next section.)
Except for subject Indians in the British and Spanish colonies, the French
presence had affected directly or indirectly the material lives of virtually
all Indians east of the Rockies. The elimination of France as a territorial
power in 1763, then, marked the end of an era and the opening of a large
power vacuum.
NATIVE AMERICANS AND THE RISE OF THE
UNITED STATES, 1763-1815
The half century after France's defeat in the Seven Years' War marked a
profound shift in the balance of power among Europeans. After emerging
as an independent nation in 1776, the United States asserted itself as a
major power and quickly came to dominate most of the old British Empire
in North America, as well as France's Louisiana territory, while Britain
consolidated its hold over the previously French stronghold of Canada.
The opening of European colonial activity in the Pacific was initiated by
Spain in California and by Russia in Alaska, but Britain and the United
States soon took over the lucrative trade in the Northwest Coast. In very
different ways, each of these developments had profound consequences for
Native Americans.
INDIANS AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, 1763- 83
The signing of the Treaty of Paris in January 1763, confirming France's
expulsion from North America, only heightened the concerns of Great
Lakes and Ohio Indians over British policies and settler incursions. Many
natives placed hope in rumors that, despite the treaty, the French would
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 37
return while others were drawn to the preachings of Neolin, the "Delaware
Prophet," who called on Native Americans to reject all European goods
and alliances in order to restore their former abundance, autonomy, and
cultural integrity. Pontiac, an Ottawa Indian, and other leaders drew on
these widespread resentments and hopes to mount coordinated assaults on
the British-occupied posts formerly owned by the French. Although sev-
eral forts were seized or besieged, shortages of food, divisions among the
natives, and a smallpox epidemic - deliberately instigated by the English
when they distributed infected blankets at Fort Pitt - combined to end
the offensives by 1765.
In the meantime, the British government moved to allay Indian fears
through a royal proclamation of October 1763, asserting direct imperial
control, as opposed to that of colonial governments, over Indian-white
relations west of the Appalachian crest. Although Britain would exercise
ultimate sovereignty beyond this "Proclamation Line," Indians would
retain title to all lands not previously ceded by treaty. Indian superinten-
dents, appointed for northern and southern districts, would approve all
future sales of such land as well as regulate trade and enforce imperial law.
The crown's utter inability to enforce this new policy was soon appar-
ent. Squatters, speculators, traders, hunters, and outlaws crossed the Proc-
lamation Line at will, while revenue shortages prevented the crown from
adequately staffing its garrisons and the superintendencies, and from fur-
nishing gifts to the Indians. In 1768, Britain returned control of Indian
trade to the colonial governments. In the same year, the northern superin-
tendent and the Iroquois agreed in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix to cede
thousands of acres of Shawnee, Delaware, and Cherokee land on the Ohio
River, opening it to speculation and settlement. Other coerced cessions
during the same period created tensions all along the colonial frontier as
whites encroached on Indian land while Indians resisted. All-out war
erupted in Virginia in 1774 after some colonists massacred eight friendly
Mingos, and Mingos and Shawnees retaliated. After its troops defeated the
Indians, Virginia forced the Shawnees to cede all their lands south of the
Ohio River.
With the outbreak of war between Britain and its colonies, most Indi-
ans were pressured by each side to support its cause or at least remain
neutral. The Cherokees used the opportunity to mount a series of highly
effective attacks on encroaching settlers. But the southern colonies retali-
ated with expeditions that burned most Cherokee towns and forced the
nation to cede more than 50,000 square miles of territory to Virginia and
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38 Neal Salisbury
the Carolinas in 1777. Although the Oneidas and Tuscaroras, under the
influence of Congregationalist missionary Samuel Kirkland, joined the
colonists, most other Iroquois supported the British. Shawnees mounted
raids on settlements throughout the recently ceded lands of Kentucky.
Kickapoos, Miamis, and other Ohio and Great Lakes Algonquian-speakers
assisted in the British capture of Vincennes in 1778. Meanwhile, the
British invasion of the South in the same year was supported by all the
major Indian groups there. Besides the Oneidas and Tuscaroras, the colo-
nists were supported by Indian minorities in the seaboard colonies and by
steadfastly pro-French groups in upper New England, eastern Canada, and
the upper Mississippi Valley.
Pro-British Indians paid dearly for their allegiance when the Americans
launched a series of retaliatory expeditions in 1779. Iroquois, Shawnees,
Delawares, Cherokees (many of whom had reentered the war in 1778),
Foxes, and others had homes and villages burned. More than 5,000 Iro-
quois fled to Canada as a result of raids that destroyed over forty of their
villages, and many Ohio Indians moved farther west. After the devastation
of the war, all Indians discovered to their consternation that the Treaty of
Paris (1783) between Britain and the United States left them to deal with
the latter on their own.
FEDERAL POLICY AND ANGLO-INDIAN
RESISTANCE, 1 7 8 3 - 1 8 1 5
The new Confederation government attempted to assert its authority on
the frontier by dictating, between 1784 and 1786, a series of treaties of
cession with Indian groups in both North and South. The rationale for the
treaties was that Indians should compensate the new republic for expenses
incurred in prosecuting the war. But the government lacked the means for
raising a military force capable of enforcing the treaties in the face of
resentful natives on one hand and expansion-minded settlers on the other,
so that some of the treaties were ineffectual.
Under the leadership of Henry Knox, Secretary of War for both the
Confederation and the early Washington administration, United States
policy was directed toward facilitating white expansion and "civilizing"
Native Americans, which meant assimilating them into European-
American society and culture. The United States henceforth would acquire
western lands only through treaties of purchase, in which Indians fully and
freely consented. A series of Trade and Intercourse acts, passed during the
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 39
1790s, sought to regulate and control relations between Indians and non-
Indians along lines similar to those of Britain's Proclamation of 1763. In
1796, Congress went further by establishing a system of trading factories
at which Indians could expect fair prices and treatment. Both the treaties
and factories served the "civilization" policy by dispensing agricultural
tools, domestic animals, and other goods expected to hasten the Indians'
acculturation.
Despite the altruism of these intentions, many Indians recognized that
the underlying goals of expansion and assimilation were fundamentally
threatening to their ways of life. Most natives north of the Ohio River, as
well as large numbers of Cherokees and Creeks in the South, resented
pressures to cede their lands and move away. These resentments were
actively encouraged by the Spanish in the South and the British in the
North. From 1789 to 1794, warfare between the Indians and the United
States raged over much of the frontier. After much bloodshed, the United
States succeeded in obtaining treaties that ceded most of southern and
western Ohio and additional portions of Cherokee country, and confirmed
earlier cessions of Creek lands.
Although Jefferson continued the twin goals of expansion and assimila-
tion after 1800, the realities of European-American demography, econ-
omy, and politics almost inevitably pushed expansion to the forefront. To
be sure, significant numbers of Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and
Chickasaws in the South responded to efforts by the federal government to
foster farming among native men and domesticity among women. But
such responses were limited to a small minority, mostly mixed-blood
children of British traders or Loyalists and Indian women. Most Indians
were far more directly affected by United States efforts to open up addi-
tional land for settlers. By applying relentless pressure on Indian leaders,
federal agents during Jefferson's administration obtained cessions to addi-
tional portions of Ohio, Tennessee, and Georgia as well as parts of Indi-
ana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Organized resistance to these pressures soon emerged in the Northwest,
led by the "Shawnee Prophet," Tenskwatawa, who urged a complete repu-
diation of European-American ways, and among a group of Creeks known
as "Red Sticks." Influential in both areas was Tenskwatawa's brother,
Tecumseh, who argued that Indians should unite to counter United States
expansionism and that the generally coerced treaties signed by individual
tribes were invalid. These tensions escalated to violence in the Northwest
in t8io and thereafter merged into the War of 1812, during which
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40 Neal Salisbury
virtually all the northwestern Indians, along with the Red Sticks, allied
with the British against the United States. The decisive crushing of Indian
resistance came in attacks led by William Henry Harrison in the North
and Andrew Jackson in the South. Virtually all of the Northwest was
thereafter open for white settlement while, in the South, the Creeks lost
over half their remaining lands.
EXPANDED TRADE IN THE NORTH
AMERICAN HEARTLAND
The defeat of France in the Seven Years' War, and subsequent expansion by
Britain and the United States, served to increase the presence of Europeans
and Euro-Americans from the Mississippi River and Lake Superior to the
Rocky Mountains and Columbia Plateau. Although Spain assumed formal
sovereignty in Louisiana under the Treaty of Paris (1763), its characteristic
inability to dispatch human, financial, and material resources to North
America limited its control of this burgeoning activity. To be sure, the
new town of St. Louis, founded in 1764, emerged as the single most
important center in the Missouri—upper Mississippi region. Here and in
New Orleans, elite Spanish families intermarried with their French coun-
terparts and with leading families among Indian middlemen to strengthen
the positions of Creoles and mixed-bloods as brokers in the trade. But in
most of Louisiana, trade continued to be carried out by French and M6tis
(French-Indian) coureurs de bois (fur traders).
Britons and Americans proved to be far more influential newcomers
than the Spanish in central North America. Following the British takeover
of Canada, the North West Company was chartered to assume control of
the former French trading network. Until 1821, the new company en-
gaged in furious competition with the Hudson's Bay Company for control
of Indian trade in the upper Plains and central Subarctic. Instead of
relying on Indians to bring them pelts, the two companies built networks
of posts in the Canadian interior and dispatched specialized crews of
Europeans, mixed-bloods, and eastern Indians to man them. By the end of
the eighteenth century, these networks extended west to the Peace River
valley, north to the Mackenzie River, and south to the Missouri. Between
Lake Superior and the Peace River, where competition was most intense,
traders went directly to Indian camps to secure furs, and engaged natives
in supplying meat and other provisions to the posts. As a result of this
increased demand, the populations of beaver, deer, and moose were se-
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 41
verely depleted in much of the region, and Indians were often forced to
turn to the traders for imported food, thereby compounding their depen-
dence. British and French traders frequently took Indian wives.
The influx of Europeans brought a new round of devastating "virgin
soil" epidemics to western North America. As much as one-third of the
previously unexposed populations in the Plains, the Southwest, and other
regions during the 1780s were struck down by smallpox, supplemented
by localized outbreaks of influenza and other diseases.
The epidemics, along with the advent of the Americans after the Louisi-
ana Purchase, marked a major turning point in Indian relations with Euro-
Americans in the Plains (from the Missouri Valley southward) and Colum-
bia regions. Several expeditions, beginning with that of Lewis and Clark
(1804-6), reported in great detail on the land, resources, and peoples of
the Missouri and Columbia drainages, encouraging entrepreneurs to take
advantage of American sovereignty in this fur-rich region. Thereafter,
trading parties took pack trains of goods directly to Indian villages, in-
stead of waiting for middlemen to bring pelts to company posts. In some
areas, American-employed trappers of many backgrounds including
whites, Metis, eastern Indians (principally Iroquois, Delawares, and Shaw-
nees), and even native Hawaiians procured their own pelts rather than
trading with the local natives. Traders also dispensed guns for their clients
to use in the growing competition for hunting territories. The spread of
trade and warfare heightened Indian demand for horses for the mobility
they provided in raids. On the Missouri, these developments favored the
nomadic Sioux over the village-dwelling Mandans, Arikaras, and
Hidatsas. The latter's large, settled populations were more vulnerable to
epidemic mortality and raids by equestrian nomads, and their middleman
positions were undermined by the nomads' mobility. The Americans estab-
lished amicable relations with Indians as far up the Missouri as the Yel-
lowstone River during this period; the Blackfeet and other groups farther
upriver remained hostile.
The epidemics of the 1780s were equally devastating in the southern
Plains and in the Southwest, leading the Comanches, Utes, Navajos, and
Jicarilla Apaches to make peace with Spain during that decade. Thereafter,
western Apaches were the principal raiders of Spanish and Pueblo commu-
nities. Although ravaged by drought as well as smallpox, the Hopis
continued to resist Spanish authority. Spain's deteriorating position in the
Americas generally, the growing influx of American and British interlop-
ers in the southern Plains, the devastating epidemics, and the advent of
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42 Neal Salisbury
the Americans on the Plains and of the British, Russians, and Americans
in the North Pacific all contributed to the weakening grip of Spain in
western North America.
NATIVES, SEA OTTERS, AND THE CHINA TRADE: THE
NORTH PACIFIC COAST
European expansion from a different direction began when Russian traders
and hunters seeking sea otter pelts moved from Siberia to the Aleutian
Islands of Alaska during the 1740s. Over the ensuing decades, private
companies expanded their activities eastward, often brutally subjugating
the Aleuts and Eskimos on whose labor they depended and extracting
heavy yasak (tribute) from them. Epidemic diseases undermined native
resistance efforts, as did the activities of Russian Orthodox missionaries.
By the end of the century, the highly profitable Russian trade had largely
depleted sea otters from the Aleutians to Sitka Sound.
Meanwhile, other nations were being drawn to the region. Spanish
expeditions patrolled the Northwest Coast after 1774, engaging in some
trade, but primarily guarding against incursions by other Europeans.
Despite Spanish vigilance, British and American traders were soon active
along the coast between Alaska and California. The market for sea otter
skins was China, but whereas Russian access to this market was limited to
an inland border crossing in Mongolia, the British and Americans traded
pelts in Canton for silks, tea, and other Chinese goods sought by growing
numbers of west Europeans and North Americans. British activity re-
mained limited by the monopolies of the British East India and South Sea
companies, but Boston-based Americans made at least 127 voyages from
the Northwest Coast to China between 1788 and 1826.
Concerns over foreign competition, destruction of fur sources, and
exploitation of the natives led the imperial government to grant a mo-
nopoly to the Russian—American Company in 1799. Under the com-
pany's charter, all able-bodied native males were to serve as wage-earning
hunters, although no more than half would do so in a single season. The
company also pledged to respect native property rights. In keeping with
Russian practice at home, the Orthodox Church was subordinated to
secular authority, effectively stifling missionary criticisms of company
employees' exploitation of native workers and sexual abuse of native
women.
The Russian—American Company's efforts to expand south of Sitka after
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 43
1800 were significantly limited by the Tlingits, whose resistance was
aided by American arms, and by its inability to match the quality and
prices of British and American goods. Although some Tlingits and other
Northwest Coast natives later traded with, and occasionally worked for,
the Russians, they were never enticed into the dependency of the Aleuts.
Using Aleut labor, the Russians established a post as far south as Fort
Ross, California, in 1812.
HISPANOS AND NATIVES IN ALTA CALIFORNIA
Spanish expansion into California began in 1769, prompted by fears that
Russia and Britain would establish themselves on the Pacific and encroach
on Mexico. Spain quickly asserted its territorial sovereignty and its author-
ity over coastal natives with the construction of twenty-one Franciscan
missions, extending from San Diego to Sonoma, and four military
presidios. Although their intentions were ostensibly religious, the mis-
sions served as instruments for Spanish economic development and for
social control of the native population. Devastated by diseases from the
outset, Indians were drawn into missions where, as neophytes, they were
required to work in vineyards, herd cattle, and perform other laboring and
servile tasks. Missionaries administered corporal punishment frequently
and harshly in order to replace native authority and cultural values with
their own. Natives were similarly treated at the presidios. At the presidios
and even in the missions, Indian women were sexually exploited.
Indian resistance to Spanish authority took many forms, including
armed uprisings, individual acts of violence, escape, suicide, abortion and
infanticide by native women, and the persistence of traditional religious
practices. Escaping Indians often took horses and guns, introducing them
to inland Indians and urging their use against the Spanish. After 1800,
when most coastal natives had converted, escaped, or died, the missionar-
ies turned inland. Although many inland Indians also converted and died
from diseases, they were more successful than coastal Indians in minimiz-
ing the effects of Spanish colonization.
Mortality among Indians in Alta California was among the highest
anywhere in North America. The devastating epidemics were followed
by life in the missions and presidios with their poor diets, unsanitary
crowding, corporal punishment, sexual abuse, native demoralization,
and various efforts at resistance. As a result, the native population in the
missionized area of California was reduced from approximately 72,000
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44 Neal Salisbury
Indians in 1770 to about 18,000 in 1830. As many as 10,000 more
from inland areas also died.
The rise of the United States and the expansion of Euro-American trade
and colonization meant that by 1815 most Indians in North America were
engaged in economic relations with Europeans, with varying demographic
and cultural consequences. The War of 1812 ended military resistance,
and British support of such resistance, as viable options for Indians con-
fronting the spread of Anglo—American settlement in the Eastern Wood-
lands. The Louisiana Purchase opened the way for the spread of American
traders over much of the trans-Mississippi west. On the Pacific coast,
Russian, Spanish, British, and American activity was transforming the
lives of Native Americans. In each of these areas, Indians were developing
new strategies for interacting with Euro-Americans that they would con-
tinue to pursue in the coming decades.
NATIVE AMERICANS AND U.S.
EXPANSION, 1815- 65
The half century from the end of the War of 1812 to the end of the Civil
War was marked by upheavals that reverberated throughout the North
American continent. Above all, these resulted from a cluster of develop-
ments in the United States— the beginnings of the market, industrial,
and transportation revolutions, and a demographic growth in which the
non-Indian population increased by more than 30 percent every ten years
from 1800 to i860. By the end of this period, the United States had
expanded to the Pacific coast while waging a civil war that vanquished
slavery and the pretensions to sovereignty of individual states. The conse-
quences of these developments for Native Americans were enormous.
Through death and dispossession, Indians east of the Mississippi River and
in much of California were reduced to tiny, scattered remnants, while
those elsewhere faced a republic determined to finish the process of acquir-
ing Indian lands and extinguishing Indian sovereignty.
U. S. POLICY IN THE EAST: FROM "CIVILIZATION"
TO REMOVAL
As in previous North American wars involving nation-states, the Treaty of
Ghent (1814), ending the war of 1812, made ho reference to Indian
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 45
nations, leaving the natives to deal with the victors on their own. During
the ensuing decade, native groups ceded most remaining land north of the
Ohio and east of the Mississippi and agreed to emigrate westward. The
only overt protests came from the Winnebagos in Wisconsin in 1827 and
from a group of Sauks and Foxes who, led by Black Hawk, attempted to
reoccupy land in Illinois in 1831. Federal troops defeated this effort in a
brief war the following year.
Violence in the Southeast centered in Florida, where Georgia and Ten-
nessee militia units had pursued runaway slaves during the war and come
into conflict with the Seminoles, former Creeks who harbored the run-
aways. In the First Seminole War (1817-8), Andrew Jackson led federal
and Creek troops in a concerted campaign that led not only to the
Seminoles' defeat but to Spain's decision to sell Florida to the United
States.
Except for the Red Stick Creeks, other natives in the Southeast had not
joined the ami—United States movement instigated by Tecumseh, and
they retained far more land after the War of 1812 than did the defeated
nations to the north. Moreover, the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and
Chickasaws had, to one degree or another, come under the influence of
Anglo-Indian mixed-bloods and other elites who were educated in both
Indian and white societies. Small but significant numbers of these bicul-
tural elites were adopting Euro-American modes of farming and domestic-
ity, literacy in English, and Christianity. A few of them even owned black
slaves or operated businesses. According to the proponents of "civiliza-
tion," such developments should have led Indians to abandon their tradi-
tional identities and claims to sovereignty, and to cede most remaining
lands to whites. But such was not the case. The adoption of "civilization"
by an elite minority actually reinforced the traditionalist orientation of
most members, and even the elites sought to retain tribal land bases and
strengthen claims to Indian sovereignty out of a combination of self-
interest and patriotism.
In the face of such obstacles, expansionist interests in the United States
pressed the government to replace the goal of "civilization" with that of
removing all eastern Indians, providing them with lands west of the
Mississippi in exchange for those left behind. Jefferson had raised the
possibility of such exchanges after the Louisiana Purchase, and some south-
eastern groups had moved west voluntarily. Monroe proposed a removal
bill to Congress in 1825, and in 1830, after Andrew Jackson's election to
the presidency, the Indian Removal Act was passed. During the 1830s,
treaties were imposed on the "Five Civilized Tribes" of the Southeast.
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46 Neal Salisbury
Although protests by the Chickasaws and Choctaws were relatively
muted, a brief Creek War (1836), a far more bloody Second Seminole War
(1835—42), and an extraordinary Cherokee campaign consisting of congres-
sional lobbying, judicial appeals, and a public relations effort among
white Northerners revealed the depths of Indian attachments to their
homelands and opposition to forced removal. The forced removal of the
southeastern Indians left only a small minority who remained as individual
citizens of states or who had hidden out to evade removal.
AMERICAN CONQUEST OF THE TRANS-MISSISSIPPI WEST
The first half of the nineteenth century marked two political revolutions in
the Southwest — the Mexican overthrow of Spanish rule, completed in
1821, and the American conquest, completed in 1848. In New Mexico,
the first revolution brought a wave of new settlers northward from Mex-
ico, many of whom violated Pueblo land and water rights and others of
whom revived the practice of raiding the Navajos for slaves. At the same
time, the Mexican government failed to maintain the peace achieved by
Spain with the Navajos, Comanches, Utes, and Apaches in the late eigh-
teenth century. As a result, some of these Indians resumed their raids on
Hispano and Pueblo communities. Hispanos and Pueblos cooperated in an
unsuccessful popular revolt in 1837-8 against political corruption and
federal policies, and a second one ten years later against the imposition of
American military rule.
Despite the latter revolt, the new American authorities in New Mexico
identified the Pueblos as village-dwelling, landholding Indians whom,
unlike the eastern Indians, they could not remove. With settler encroach-
ments increasing dramatically, the territorial government in 1854 con-
firmed Spain's land grants to the Pueblos. However, Congress, in organiz-
ing a territorial government for New Mexico, refused to maintain the
Pueblo voting rights granted by Mexico.
The United States also assumed responsibility for defending the Hispa-
nos and Pueblos, as well as its own citizens, against non-Pueblo Indians.
Tensions arose after 1848 because of Anglo and Mexican incursions on
Indian land and because of several incidents involving soldiers and Indi-
ans. In 1862 the United States dispatched a new commander, General
James Carleton, and additional troops to New Mexico to suppress the
Apaches and Navajos. Carleton determined to move the Indians to Fort
Sumner in eastern New Mexico as a means of neutralizing and "civilizing"
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 47
them. Employing deception and terror, Carleton's troops rounded up and
forcibly moved more than 9,000 Navajos and 500 Mescalero Apaches to
the new location. Shortages of food, water, and wood, along with disease,
raids by other Indians, and general demoralization, plagued the impris-
oned natives. By 1865, most of the Mescaleros had escaped. In 1868, the
United States concluded a new treaty with the Navajos, allowing them to
return to their homeland. However, their new reservation of 3.5 million
acres was just one-tenth of their former territory.
As in New Mexico, Mexican rule in California brought increased settle-
ment and, despite a theoretical recognition of Indian citizenship, little
change in the actual status of Native Americans. Military campaigns
continued to coerce Indians into the missions until 1834, when the federal
government instituted a policy of secularization. Although mission prop-
erty was to be divided between the Indians and the clergy, the land and
most of its improvements actually went to colonial officials and their
relatives. The 15,000 neophyte laborers scattered, some to the new hacien-
das as peons, others to Mexican pueblos as domestics and other menial
laborers, and still others to the interior regions. As the ranching economy
expanded, conflicts between Mexicans and interior Indians became more
or less ongoing until the outbreak of the Mexican War.
The American takeover was followed immediately by the gold rush
that brought an onslaught of unmarried white males to California, most
in search of quick fortune and entertaining no regard for nonwhites.
Outright extermination became deliberate policy as private military expe-
ditions, funded by the state and federal governments, hunted down
Indians in northern and mountainous areas. By i860, more than 4,000
natives, representing 12 percent of the population, had died in these
wars. The invasion had ecological consequences as well. Gold and silver
mining disrupted salmon runs, while farming and fencing restricted
hunting and gathering. The breakup of the Mexican ranchos meant that
even more Indians flocked to the pueblos in search of work, just as the
end of the gold boom was putting many Anglos on the same road. An
act of 1850 provided that any Indian could be charged with vagrancy on
the word of any white. The convicted vagrant would be auctioned off to
the highest bidder, who would employ him for up to four months.
Indian children and young girls were kidnapped for service as laborers
and prostitutes. Not surprisingly, disease, alcoholism, and poverty were
the lot of many Indians, and diseases — primarily tuberculosis, small-
pox, pneumonia, measles, and venereal diseases — were the major cause
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48 Neal Salisbury
of mortality, accounting for two-thirds of Indian deaths between 1848
and i860.
After the overthrow of Spanish rule in Texas, the new Mexican govern-
ment encouraged immigration by Americans as a way of strengthening the
thinly populated province. But the immigrants quickly overwhelmed the
Mexicans and seceded to form an independent republic in 1836. Despite
the pacific policies of the first president, Sam Houston, settler aggressions
against Indians drove out all but the equestrian Kiowas and Comanches
before Texas was annexed by the United States in 1845.
The decades from the 1820s through the 1850s marked the zenith of
the fur trade west of the Mississippi. During this period, virtually every
Indian group in the Plains, Rocky Mountains, and Columbia Plateau was
immersed in an American-dominated trade in buffalo robes, beaver skins,
and the pelts of smaller mammals, as well as meat and other animal
byproducts. Whereas European trade was formerly a means of acquiring
relatively small quantities of guns, glass beads, and cloth for incorporation
into societies that remained subsistence-oriented, market priorities now
affected Indian life in more fundamental ways. Instead of accompanying
their husbands on the hunt, women remained in the camps to process
hides. Because hunters procured animals faster than their wives processed
them, the demand for female labor increased. This demand was satisfied
by increased raiding for female captives who became additional wives of
the productive hunters. Some Indian women married white and M6tis
traders and trappers who resided with the natives for at least part of each
year. The children of these marriages grew up in the native villages, often
becoming traders themselves and later serving as cultural brokers with the
white world. Goods of cloth, metal, and glass were incorporated into
native material, social, and aesthetic life, along with — in the case of some
tribes — alcohol. These goods were obtained at American trading posts,
which were now within reach of most Indians. European diseases were
more destructive than ever during the 1830s, particularly a smallpox
outbreak in 1837 that killed half the population of the Plains and virtually
destroyed the village societies of the upper Missouri.
The annexation of Mexican territory by the United States in 1848
heightened American traffic west of the Mississippi, initiating a change in
relations between the federal government and Indians in the region. Con-
flicts between emigrants and natives led the federal government to seek
new treaties with the western nations and to extend the American military
presence, along with that of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, among the
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 49
western tribes. In treaties signed during the 1850s and early 1860s,
various Indian groups accepted the formal bounding of their land and the
right of the United States to build forts and roads in the vicinity. Some
were obliged to give up their homelands altogether and move to lands
designated Indian Territory. To one degree or another, Indians were re-
stricted to reservations where, unable to pursue their full subsistence
rounds, many became dependent on annuities — annual allocations pro-
vided for in the treaties and administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Indians often did not understand or accept the terms of these treaties,
leading on a few occasions to armed conflicts with settlers or federal
troops. The most serious such incident was the Santee Sioux uprising in
Minnesota (1862). Indian violence was the pretext for the slaughter by
Colorado volunteers of peaceful Cheyennes at Sand Creek (1864). These
outbreaks helped set the stage for the intensified military conflict that
followed the Civil War.
The removal across the Mississippi of the "Five Civilized Tribes" from
the Southeast also occasioned the extension of United States power west-
ward. The Osages and other natives who hunted in Indian Territory
resented the newcomers' presence while squatters attempted to settle on
Indian lands. The government built several forts and dispatched troops to
protect the removed Indians from both these threats. Other manifestations
of an American presence were the traders who attempted to profit from the
cash annuities received by the Indians under terms of the removal treaties,
and missionary schools that attempted to extend the benefits of Euro-
American material and spiritual life. To one degree or another, each of the
tribes was split between a small faction, including elites, favoring assimila-
tion to the dominant culture, and a larger, tradition-oriented group.
While the former, whose ranks included most Indian slaveholders, favored
the Confederacy, many of the latter favored the Union, and some volun-
teered their military services. Nevertheless, the United States used the
tribes' pro-rebel positions to justify reducing their landholdings so as to
make room for other Indians being forcibly removed from elsewhere in the
West.
BEYOND THE AMERICAN SPHERE: CANADA AND THE
FAR NORTH
The period after the War of 1812 saw British Canada develop a policy of
"civilization" similar to that adopted earlier in the United States. Begin-
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50 Neal Salisbury
ning with American and British missionaries, the goal of urging Indians
in Upper Canada to settle in permanent villages and adopt Euro-American
modes of farming became official colonial policy in 1830. Reserves,
sought by Indians in earlier treaty negotiations so they could pursue
traditional subsistence practices, were now to foster acculturation. The
new reserves were resented by many natives while attracting squatters and
traders who sold alcohol or put Indians in their debt. But while enacting
legislation in 1850 to protect Indians from such outside influences, the
government simultaneously sought to relocate some reserves in white-
settled areas and to encourage whites to settle near others, on the grounds
that such contacts would encourage "civilization." An act of 1857 pro-
vided for the "enfranchisement" of individual Indians — that is, the grant-
ing of full rights of citizenship to adult Indian males who met criteria of
literacy, financial solvency, and "good moral character." Despite minimal
results, these policies were continued after Canada achieved dominion
status in 1867.
Beyond Upper Canada, the Hudson's Bay Company reigned supreme.
Its absorption of the North West Company in 1821 put many Metis and
British mixed-bloods out of work as the new monopoly sought to stream-
line and professionalize its work force. Many of these men settled in Red
River Colony, where they hunted for bison on their own or set up as free
traders with the Indians. In lower Hudson Bay and James Bay, mean-
while, the decline of beaver led the company to increase its employment of
Crees in jobs other than hunting and trapping — principally warehousing
and the building and repairing of ships. In this way, the already close
social and economic connections between Indian communities and the
Company's factories were made still closer. In the far North, from the
Churchill to Mackenzie drainages, the Company extended its network of
trading posts so that most Indians were drawn into at least casual trade ties
by the beginning of the Dominion period.
The Hudson's Bay Company also took over the sea otter trade with
natives on the Northwest Coast. During the 1830s, it outbid and sup-
planted American traders there, and extended its range by leasing the
Alaska panhandle from the Russian-American Company. Because the
traders were seasonal visitors rather than permanent residents, the Indians
controlled its most direct effects on themselves and their culture. The
principal commodities they sought during the nineteenth century were
cloth and guns, which enhanced the power of chiefs in potlatches and
wars, respectively. These and other goods supplemented rather than sup-
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History of Native Americans Until Civil War 51
planted their functional equivalents in the native material culture. The
upsurge in trading actually enhanced ceremonialism and the production of
totem poles and other objects associated with trade and expressions of
power. At the same time, the longer-range effects of contact were more
destructive. By the mid-nineteenth century, the sea otter population was
significantly depleted throughout the region; European epidemics had
drastically reduced the native population everywhere; alcohol had become
a staple of the trade; and warfare and slavery among natives was more
widespread.
The Russian—American Company's abandonment of the Northwest
Coast, which also included the sale in 1741 of its post at Fort Ross,
California, was part of a shift in the focus of its trading activities to
western Alaska. A series of explorations from 1819 to 1844 brought the
Inuits and Athapaskans of the Nushagak, Kuskowim, and Yukon drain-
ages into the company's trading orbit.,Because these contacts were limited
to the exchange of selected material objects for beaver skins, the impact of
Russian culture on the natives remained minimal during the nineteenth
century.
European exploration of the Arctic coast was initiated after 1819 by a
series of Russian expeditions in northwestern Alaska and British expedi-
tions in the Canadian Arctic. The expeditions established contacts, both
friendly and hostile, with various Eskimo bands. A few of these contacts
were regularized after 1840, when British whaling ships began frequent-
ing sites at Baffin Island and in northern Hudson Bay. Much of the Arctic
interior remained entirely unknown to Europeans until the end of the
nineteenth century.
As of 1865, the Indian population north of Mexico probably numbered no
more than 350,000 - a steep decline from the estimated five to ten mil-
lion of four centuries earlier. The self-sufficient communities, linked by
extensive exchange networks, found throughout the continent in 1500
were to be found only in some Arctic and Subarctic areas. Elsewhere,
surviving Indians were being forced into positions of economic depen-
dency, the most glaring form of which was the barren reservation with its
annuities, government agents, and missionaries holding out the promise
of "civilization." In the face of such conditions, the most remarkable
feature of native life in 1865 was the extent to which even the most
deprived and demoralized communities survived and continued to reflect,
if only in attenuated form, identities and traditions that predated the
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52 Neal Salisbury
upheavals of recent centuries. At the same time, a survey of the continent
and the immense wealth it had generated by 1865 would have to acknowl-
edge the process by which Indians were separated from the land and other
resources as fundamental to American economic history.
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THE AFRICAN BACKGROUND
TO AMERICAN COLONIZATION
JOHN K. THORNTON
GEOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND
The vast majority of the Africans who came to populate the English
colonies of North America and the Caribbean came from a region we can
designate as Atlantic Africa. It stretched from the Senegal River in north-
ern Africa to the Angolan port city of Benguela in the south. A few
African Americans did come from outside this region — inventories and
shipping records reveal some people from Madagascar, the areas around
the Zambezi basin and perhaps from the east coast of modern-day South
Africa - but they were not numerous and came relatively late in the trade.
This region was denned first and foremost by the Atlantic Ocean,
because the ease of access to the African coast was dictated not only by the •
presence of water transport routes but also by the fact that once mastered,
the wind and current regime of the south Atlantic made fairly easy linkage
for sailing ships between African and American destinations. It was also
defined on the north and south by desert regions. North of the Senegal,
the Sahara desert and its barren coast made for little trade or navigation; to
the south, the Namib desert formed a similar barrier. Even though the
Portuguese had a colony in Angola since the late sixteenth century, they
had barely explored the region south of Benguela by the 1780s.
Visitors to Atlantic Africa from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centu-
ries divided this vast stretch of land into "coasts," each characterized by its
own demographic composition, climatic conditions, transportation net-
work, and economy. The names varied from language to language and
time period to time period, but the general geography was sufficiently
consistent for a clear pattern to develop. In all, there were five coasts -
53
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Slave origins
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STATE
Town
Etirnicgnup
African slavery, 1750
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56 John K. Thornton
Upper Guinea Coast, Ivory Coast, Lower Guinea Coast, Gabon Coast,
Angola Coast — with some subdivisions.
Starting in the north was the Upper Guinea Coast, defined by the system
of communication delineated by the Senegal and Gambia rivers; it is
probably appropriate to add to this region the area that the Portuguese
called "Guine do Capo Verde," which the French called the "Rivieres du
Sud," in modern Guinea and Guinea-Bissau, down to Sierra Leone and
even northern Liberia. Next was a territory called the Ivory Coast, or the
Kwa Kwa Coast, sometimes called the Windward Coast. The wooded
coastal region was anchored in central Liberia on the north and west, and
the eastern C6te d'lvoire on the south and east.
The Lower Guinea Coast extended from eastern Cote d'lvoire to the
western part of Cameroons and was typically divided into two parts: the
Gold Coast on the west, mostly eastern Cote d'lvoire and Ghana, and a
section composed of the Slave Coast (Togo, Benin, and western Nigeria)
and the Bight of Benin (Nigeria and Cameroons). It was followed by the
Gabon Coast, another highly wooded section that reached from Cameroons
down to the northern part of modern Congo Brazzaville. Finally, there was
the Angola Coast, which included most of Congo Brazzaville, Zaire, and
Angola down to the Angolan port of Benguela.
The interior boundaries of Atlantic Africa were defined in large measure
by transport access. In Upper Guinea, where rivers coming from deep in
the interior provided access to the coast, the Atlantic zone extended inland
to the great "interior delta" of the Niger river, from 1,000 to 1,500
kilometers from the sea — a reach which by a European scale equals that of
the Danube but which still fell short of the greatest American rivers such
as the Mississippi and Amazon. Other rivers also gave interior people
access to the coast, although few rivers united such disparate regions.
Navigation based on the lower Niger and coming to the Gulf of Guinea in
modern Nigeria allowed regular and inexpensive communication between
people living 400 to 600 kilometers inland and the coastal people (on the
scale of a Rhine or Rhone in Europe or the Hudson and Susquehanna in
America), but none of the other river systems in west Africa were as
helpful. In central Africa, the Zaire river connected people as far as 600
kilometers from the coast with the Atlantic, and the Kwanza gave similar
deep access.
Where river routes did not allow deep access, Atlantic Africa was really
a coastal region. The Ivory and Kwa Kwa coasts were virtually unknown
to Europeans even in the early nineteenth centuries, largely because their
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African Background to American Colonization 57
business there was restricted to the people along the immediate coastline.
Another such stretch lay along the Gabon Coast, where contact with the
Atlantic was restricted to coastal people.
Where rivers connected the coastal regions with the interior, the coastal
rivers, lakes, and lagoons often allowed considerable lengthwise naviga-
tion and communication along the coast, in many ways equivalent to the
great inland waterway of North America's East Coast. One such system
stretched along the west African coast from the Gambia south to Liberia.
Although there were interruptions (mostly falls and rapids), it made for
nearly 600 kilometers of navigable waterways' that gave the Upper Guinea
Coast its unity, at least on the coast. A second system made possible
coastal navigation between the eastern Gold Coast and the mouth of the
Niger, although here, too, there were interruptions over this 1,000-
kilometer section of coast that unified the Lower Guinea Coast. Finally, a
less useful system of coastal navigation connected the Kwanza with the
Ogowe rivers, again with some interruptions but covering some 1,000
kilometers of the Angola Coast.
Climatic and vegetation zones had little role in defining Atlantic Af-
rica, although they shaped the economies and societies of the people who
lived in the various zones. Broadly speaking, Atlantic Africa was divided
into three climatic and vegetation zones: a northern zone lying south of
the Sahara where the scrubland of the Sahel gradually turned to open
savanna, then wooded savanna, and the lush tropical rain forest on the
south. The different vegetation results from rainfall patterns: annual rain-
fall increased steadily from north to south. A line passing about 100 to
200 kilometers inland from the south coast of west Africa demarcated the
northern border of the great equatorial tropical rain forest, with its very
high rainfall. With one exception, the so-called "Benin Gap" in modern
Benin, the entire south coast of west Africa was originally thickly forested,
as was the central African region extending south toward the mouth of the
Zaire river. Below the Zaire, and stretching south to the Namib desert, is
another zone of wooded savanna, savanna, and-scrubland that mirrors the
pattern in the north of west Africa. It is delineated by a similar rainfall
gradient, anchored in the forest on the north and the desert to the south.
The division of climatic and vegetation zones did not exercise a decisive
effect either on settlement patterns or on the pattern of interaction with
the Atlantic. Thus the open country of west Africa north of modern
Guinea Bissau was moderately well populated and deeply involved with
the Atlantic, as was the similar country to the south of the rain forest. On
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58 John K. Thornton
.the other hand, the two regions least involved with the Atlantic, the Ivory
and Gabon coasts, lay in the forest. But this was not a decisive climatic
determinant — the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) and the coast of modern
Nigeria also lay in the rain forest but were among the most deeply in-
volved regions in Africa.
Neither did the climatic and vegetation zones shape the demography of
Africa decisively. While population was quite sparse in the central African
rain forest, the highest population densities of Atlantic Africa — over
thirty people per square kilometer in 1700 — were found in the forested
regions of southern Nigeria and Ghana along the lower Guinea Coast. The
open plains and wooded savannas of Upper Guinea had lower population
densities, averaging perhaps ten people per square kilometer in 1700,
with higher concentrations along the rivers and lower levels in the spaces
between them. The southern savannas of Angola, however, south of the
equatorial rain forest, were very sparsely populated. Overall densities
rarely exceeded five people per square kilometer in the eighteenth century,
and in many areas, densities below five people per square kilometer were
common.
The uneven distribution of the population, as was the case with differ-
ing climatic zones, was not particularly important in determining the
propensity of Atlantic Africans to participate in trade with other Atlantic
countries in Europe and America. The sparsely populated Angolan Coast,
for example, was one of the most vigorously participating regions and
supplied nearly half of all the slaves that Africa sent to the Americas. On
the other hand, the Ivory and Kwa Kwa coasts, which had population
densities at least double those of Angola, scarcely participated in the
Atlantic economy at all and sent only a handful of slaves. Still, the great
demographic heartland of Atlantic Africa, the Lower Guinea Coast, was
also a major participant in the slave trade, matching Angola in raw
numbers of slaves exported, even if its per capita participation was much
lower.
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL DIVISIONS
Clearly, the decisions to participate in Atlantic trade and the slave trade
were the outcome of human choices, and these choices defined the histori-
cal, cultural, and political contours of Atlantic Africa. The divisions and
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African Background to American Colonization 59
variations of the Atlantic Africans were critical to understanding the
nature of African participation in the Atlantic economy; they also provide
an essential background to understanding the role of African people in the
Americas.
Atlantic Africans were divided in two ways - by states (political units)
and nations (cultural units). These two divisions almost never completely
overlapped, and the belief in African tribes - combining a common lan-
guage and custom with a political structure - that had dominated anthro-
pological study of Africa early in this century is now seen to be mistaken.
Rather, states and nations made very different claims on their members,
were variously denned, and shaped daily life in different ways.
Nations in Africa, as in preindustrial Europe and elsewhere, were
ethnolinguistic units, where common language, customs, and religious
practices prevailed. Nations commanded no loyalty on their own, and the
membership in a nation was either ill defined or changed according to
circumstances. Nations were not strictly linguistic divisions. Sometimes
common customs, commercial interactions, and exchanges helped to reduce
the cultural distance that a strictly linguistic analysis might emphasize.
Recent studies of African religions, art, and archaeology suggest that
the distribution of cultural items is not necessarily perfectly correlated
with language. Language boundaries, drawn according to mutual intelligi-
bility, can be quite flexible when neighboring languages are closely re-
lated, and language ceases to be a useful defining characteristic when there
is widespread multilingualism. Similarly, customs, aesthetic norms, reli-
gious practices, and other cultural indicators were often exchanged be-
tween groups. Inventories of African slaves in French and Iberian colonies
recognized about forty different language-based nations among Africans,
probably based as much on African perceptions as European or American
ones, but modern linguists would recognize as many as 150 languages in
the area from which these slaves were drawn.
Religion also helped to define nationality, although like many other
customs, it was not as clearly differentiated between nations as language
could be. Most African religions were based on continuous revelation
rather than scriptural or traditional revelations — that is, religious practice
focused on direct and immediate contact between people in This World
and the Other World, typically through augury, divination, prophecy, or
spirit mediumship. The human priests who facilitated spiritual contact
often did not create a religious orthodoxy, since this year's revelations
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60 John K. Thornton
might not be acceptable next year. In only a few cases, such as the Ife
divination of the Yoruba-speaking people and their neighbors, did a
widely recognized body of texts create something of a standard system.
Virtually all African religions focused some attention on the recently
dead ancestors of living people. These ancestors typically devoted their
attention to the affairs of their immediate descendants and were thus
family focused. As such, they did little to define nations, and most
families accepted that the ancestors of other families were real and valid
but of little help to anyone save family members.
On the other hand, most African religions recognized other supernatu-
ral beings as well. These might be the ancestors of the ruling group, of the
first people to settle an area, deities responsible for particular sections of
territory, or eternal deities with power over natural phenomena. Such
deities were far more likely to be specific to a nation - or, more com-
monly, a state - and might regulate the affairs of a large community.
Thus national religions might be defined by such a group of royal
ancestors or deities but would not deny the existence or legitimacy of the
religious traditions of other nations. Often gods from one tradition
might be revealed in another one as contacts between two nations intensi-
fied, and the borrowing of deities from one tradition to another was
quite common — specifically noted for Allada, Dahomey, and Oyo, who
had come to share many of their originally specific deities with each
other by the end of the eighteenth century.
This feature was also applied to Christianity and Islam, in that accep-
tance of these two religious traditions often helped to define an African
nation (specifically noted in the Christian Kongo or Muslim states of west
Africa). They rarely suppressed the cult of ancestors and often did not
replace territorial deities. Africans often had revelations that identified
national deities with saints, jinn, or angels in Christianity and Islam.
While language, culture, religion, or nationality might make for senti-
mental attachments between peoples, it was the state that demanded
loyalty and service. For most Africans who looked beyond the purely
parochial concerns of family or village, it was the state that claimed their
loyalty and from which they derived their identity. Ethnonyms of
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Africa were usually state rather than
nation names. This was true even in such large states as Asante (which was
multinational), or in areas such as the Yoruba-speaking region, where the
nation was larger than each state. It was only among African slaves in the
Americas that cultural and linguistic identities, rather than state citizen-
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African Background to American Colonization 61
ship, determined membership in the "nations" or "countries" into which
they divided, and many of the American national names had no corre-
sponding unit in Africa.
African states varied widely in size, composition, and structure. Some
were quite large, such as the empire of Mali, or its latter-day successors in
the western Sudan: the empire of the Great Fulo, Kaarta, or Segu; or the
great central African empire of Lunda. Others were of more modest propor-
tions, such as the Oyo Empire, Benin, Asante, Dahomey, Kongo,
Ndongo, or the larger Ovimbundu kingdoms such as Viye or Mbailundu
in Angola.
But what is perhaps most striking is the very large number of small,
even tiny, states that could be found in Africa. Although it is not possible
to map the boundaries of every state in Atlantic Africa before the mid-
nineteenth century (or sometimes after), there were surely several hundred
states found in that region alone. Most were small, perhaps the size of a
county in the United States, a comfortable day's walk across. Such small
states — one might call them ministates or even microstates — were com-
pletely independent, possessed a capital town of perhaps a few thousand
people, and had a dozen or so villages under their immediate control.
These would describe the small states along the seventeenth-century Gold
Coast and in the region along the Gambia river and Sierra Leone. Olaudah
Equiano described his eighteenth-century childhood in one such state in
the Igbo-speaking area of modern southeastern Nigeria as "little more
than a single large and somewhat dispersed village." In the seventeenth
century, as many as 70 percent of the people in Atlantic Africa lived in
states whose total population was under 10,000; in the eighteenth cen-
tury, fewer probably did, for several large states, such as Asante and
Dahomey, absorbed many of the smaller states of their region.
The economic impact of such parceled sovereignty varied. On the one
hand, as the Upper Guinea region clearly reveals, these small states might
form a constant nuisance to trade, charging transit taxes every few miles to
travelers engaged in long-distance business. Some were predatory on com-
merce and their neighbors; others were too small and weak to be able to
impose order or enforce law. Because they lacked control over alternate
routes, they were also unable to restrict trade very much, and the great
merchant groups were able to come to understandings concerning transit
taxes, enforcement of laws, and other essentials by threatening to change
trade routes to areas that were more amenable. Trade and specialization do
not seem to have been adversely affected by the parceled sovereignty: the
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62 John K. Thornton
internal and international commerce of areas like Sierra Leone and the
Gambia, where there were many small states, was just as vigorous and
efficient as that of the larger states, such as Asante.
ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION
One of the most important roles that African states played was in the
redistribution of wealth. All African states, even the smallest ones, levied
taxes on their inhabitants, sometimes by demanding monetary payments,
often by making demands of a share of production to be delivered in kind,
frequently by demanding labor service. The African wealthy classes, in
turn, derived at least a portion of their own wealth by taking a share of
this revenue, distributed according to office. In this way, officeholding,
whether it was hereditary or appointed, was an important means of achiev-
ing income, and the concentrations of wealth generated by kings, territo-
rial rulers, bureaucrats, council members, and other state officials created
a single and primary means of inequality.
This inequality, in turn, helped to shape the economy. Some rulers
demanded that each of the territorial nobles receive labor services to
cultivate fields on behalf of the state, with the revenues from those fields
being a salary for the officeholders. This was done, among other places, in
the seventeenth-century kingdom of Loango. The officeholder might con-
sume the product of the field himself, or with his clients and family
members, or he might sell the product on the market. The market econ-
omy would clearly be shaped by decisions that the state official made with
regard to what was planted in the fields, where it was sold, and even how
it was sold.
There were also private channels for state officials to obtain wealth.
Unlike the rich and powerful of Europe and Asia, those of Africa were not
landowners; rather, the people who are called nobles and landowners in
European accounts of Africa were typically state officials who derived their
income from taxes rather than rents. The politically powerful landowner,
whose income was derived from rent and was thus wholly or partially
independent of the state, was not possible in Africa.
African law did not recognize the right to own land as property, al-
though cultivators could have rights to usufruct to any land they had
cleared or used recently, and villages or other units of local life might
distribute land for farming. But such rights did not include the right to
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African Background to American Colonization 63
sell land or, more importantly, to let land out to tenants in exchange for
rent. Thus, one owned land only as long as one cultivated it or used it as
part of a fallowing system.
Private wealth derived instead from rights over dependents. Such depen-
dents might be clients, pawns (people who were contractually dependent
for a period of time, often to pay debts), wives, or slaves. Such people
might be given land to cultivate by their masters and be required to share
their harvest with them, but such land donations did not amount to
tenancy. The relationship that drew income from the dependent was a
personal one rather than one mediated through ownership of a factor of
production.
Clients and pawns were people who had voluntarily attached themselves
to the service of a wealthy or powerful person. In exchange for his protec-
tion, payment of debts, or perhaps opportunities, the client or pawn
would perform labor and other services on behalf of his patron, either for a
fixed period or for the duration of the perception of mutual benefits.
In polygamous households, wives might also perform substantial labor
on behalf of their husbands. As men became wealthier, they could pay
bride price for many wives, whose labor might in turn generate further
income. The most visible examples of female labor being used in this way
come from the palace economies of Lower Guinea, where households that
sometimes had wives numbering in the thousands produced specialty
goods (typically textiles) for palace, local, and international consumption.
By far the most important form of dependent labor was slavery. It was
common for travelers to find whole villages of slaves producing for a
master along major trade routes. Most merchants employed their slaves
not only in production but also as porters of goods, as local agents in long-
distance business, and even as assistants; slaves also performed personal
service of one sort or another.
The great advantage of slaves was they and their production were the
personal property of the master. One did not have to hold state office to
obtain slaves, although in some societies, such as the seventeenth-century
Gold Coast, a person had to pay a fee and perform an expensive ceremony
before obtaining the right to own slaves. In this respect, slaves and other'
dependents performed the function that private landholding did in Europe
or Asia. In some cases, private wealth in slaves was more important than
state-generated wealth: in seventeenth-century Kongo, for example, the
real wealth of the nobility was said to be in their slaves rather than in the
incomes of the provinces to which they were assigned.
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64 John K. Thornton
Private wealth could also have political implications. Detailed records
for the coastal region of the Gold Coast, for example, show that men who
acquired private wealth and invested it in slaves might ultimately use the
wealth, the people they controlled, and weapons to make themselves
independent or even masters of the rulers of the state. John Cabes, a
merchant who eventually became ruler of a quasi-independent state com-
posed of his slaves and subjects in the late seventeenth century, provides a
model of what private wealth could do when invested in politics.
AFRICAN POLITICS:
THE DYNAMICS OF STATES
Much of the domestic politics of African states was shaped by this dynamic
of wealth as well as by constitutional principles that were buried more
deeply in their history. The actual form of African states varied almost as
widely as they did in size. One late-seventeenth-century observer, the
Dutch merchant Willem Bosman, classed the states of the Gold Coast into
two sorts: republics and monarchies. The republics were governed by
councils, one called the caboceiros (chiefs) and the other the mancebos (young
men), while the monarchies were under the absolute rule of a single
executive authority. Much of the history of Atlantic Africa in the sixteenth
to eighteenth centuries involved the dynamic between these two extremes
of state form.
With modifications, Bosman's analysis could work for many parts of
Africa. In the Senegal valley, the early explorers found the Jolof Empire
dominating the regions. While Jolof controlled a large area, power within
it was diffuse — the king had no powers to tax, and his government was
checked by territorial nobles who controlled local areas. This loose organi-
zation was challenged in an extended civil war in the early sixteenth
century, from which smaller but more autocratic states, such as Kajoor
and Waalo, emerged. In these states, royal slaves (later called, disparag-
ingly, ceddd) acted as dependent agents of the rulers, thus allowing more
centralized control. In the eighteenth century, the ceddo, acting as a corpo-
rate group, often organized informal but effective collective government.
Efforts at centralization in this region were often resisted by collectively
organized bodies (often called republics in European sources) of religious
leaders (marabouts), who occasionally led revolts (as did Nasir al-Din in
1673—7) or even seized power (as did Malik Sy in Bondu in 1690, and
Abd al-Kadir in Futa Tooro in 1776).
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African Background to American Colonization 65
In the south of Upper Guinea and in the interior of the Senegambian
region, the states of the period descended from the powerful medieval
empire of Mali. In the valley of the Senegal, the empire of Great Fulo
succeeded Mali in the seventeenth century, although it disappeared as a
regional power by the early eighteenth century. Along the south coast,
Mali rule had never interfered with local polities, beyond taking tribute,
and even this stopped in the early seventeenth century. Reports from the
period after 1580 mention many local systems of government. Some
involved councils (often composed of members from specific families) who
ruled in place of a king, or through a figurehead king. Others involved
much more autocratic forms. In Sierra Leone, in particular, kings appear
to have been strong; they selected the members of their councils as well as
the territorial rulers, who served at royal pleasure.
Lower Guinea was often characterized by the rise of new, large, and
powerful centralized states, especially after 1650. In the sixteenth century,
the Gold Coast was composed of dozens of small, independent states
whose wars sometimes disrupted the trade of the area. In the late seven-
teenth century, however, much more powerful and unitary states emerged
in the interior and began to exercise an incomplete authority over the
coast. The first of these, Denkyira and Akwamu, arose in the 1680s. They
yielded to the Asante kingdom, which by the middle of the eighteenth
century had come to dominate the interior, although never quite swallow-
ing up the coast, where a Kingdom of Fante prevailed. Asante rulers were
not absolute; its original constitution had been a federation bound to-
gether by oaths of loyalty, and leaders of the original state exercised a
substantial check on the ruler. As a bureaucracy under royal control
emerged in the mid-eighteenth century, checks were still placed on royal
power. Even the rulers of conquered territories still had some leeway for
operation. In the eighteenth century, Asante was disrupted by major
revolts, such as those in the 1720s and again in the 1750s, in which
conquered rulers disrupted either Asante's rights over them or the mem-
bers of the federation challenged royal authority.
The rise of Dahomey in the interior of the so-called "Slave Coast" in the
late seventeenth century was similar to the rise of Asante. Dahomey's
predecessors, Allada and Whydah, both had quite autocratic systems of
government, founded in part on slaves and royal wives as dependent rulers
and administrators, a system which was perfected as Dahomey took over
the coast in 1724-7. By the mid-eighteenth century, Dahomey had be-
come the epitome, for foreigners at least, of African despotism. Older
states of Lower Guinea, such as the Oyo Empire and Benin, were governed
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66 John K. Thornton
by hereditary rulers whose power was checked by councils of various
compositions. The rulers often sought to create dependent positions, but
the political dynamic included considerable resistance by council members
to royal absolutism. A civil war that pitted councils against the king, and
each other, tore Benin apart in the late seventeenth century, and it was a
much more decentralized balance between king and council that replaced
it after about 1720. Oyo, like Benin, was governed by a combination of
king and councils and suffered through a long and devastating civil war
when the two components of government fought each other after the
1780s, a war that lasted intermittently into the nineteenth century.
As the western end of Lower Guinea saw the emergence of more central-
ized states, the eastern end, especially the Niger Delta and surrounding
areas, became a realm of tiny states governed by republican types of
government. Olaudah Equiano's home state of Essaka, in the Igbo-
speaking part of the Niger delta, was in an area of very small states. Essaka
was ruled entirely by members of an association of titleholders, most of
whom had obtained their titles by purchase or co-optation, whom Equiano
called (by a Classical analogy) "judges and Senators." They acquired their
titles by wealth, could not necessarily pass the titles on to their children,
and governed the state collectively.
Central Africa, called the Angola Coast by European visitors, was
dominated by three states in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centu-
ries. In the north, the kingdom of Loango held sway, while south of the
Zaire River lay the kingdoms of Kongo and Ndongo. There were also
smaller states, in the highlands between Kongo and Ndongo, and in the
great central Angolan plateau south of Ndongo. In the seventeenth
century, Kongo was a highly autocratic society, mostly because Kongo
kings succeeded in concentrating large dependent populations around
their capital of Mbanza Kongo (Sao Salvador after 1596). However, a
succession dispute and civil war after 1665 resulted in the destruction
and abandonment of the capital and the partitioning of the kingdom
among several factions of the royal family. This situation both decentral-
ized the country and promoted frequent civil wars. Although less well
documented, Loango seems to have undergone a similar, though much
less violent, transformation. The central state of seventeenth-century
descriptions was not nearly as authoritarian in the mid- to late eigh-
teenth century, when regional-based powers challenged the monarch by
disrupting succession of kings.
Ndongo, on the other hand, was in the process of becoming much more
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African Background to American Colonization 6j
centralized in the sixteenth century, as royal slaves under the king's con-
trol provided military strength and staffed a bureaucracy. But a civil war
that involved the claims of territorial rulers, a succession dispute, and
Portuguese interference from their coastal colony of Angola, disrupted
Ndongo throughout most of the seventeenth century. Queen Njinga
(1582-1663) eventually reconstituted a highly centralized kingdom in
eastern Ndongo and Matamba toward the end of her life. Njinga's com-
bined kingdom and Kasanje, another state founded out of the same tur-
moil, dominated the middle reaches of the Kwango. Both these states,
however, were torn apart by tensions between central power and wealthy
private slaveholders in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Beyond the Kwango in the interior, the rise of a powerful and central-
ized Lunda empire in the late seventeenth century was the most impor-
tant state process; while south of Ndongo in the central highlands, in
the seventeenth century, a little-known state called Bembe was replaced
by two important larger states, Viye and Mbailundu. Viye was less
centralized — some of the local nobility had substantial powers - while
Mbailundu was much more autocratic and also more capable of expand-
ing rapidly.
The dynamics of state interactions had important impacts on the econ-
omy. In the more centralized states, for example, royal interests played an
important role in economic decisions, private wealth tended to be limited,
and trade was centralized. In the less centralized polities, on the other
hand, commercial decisions were made by a diffuse group of merchants,
and private wealth was more extensive. Furthermore, the connections
between wealth and political power, especially in promoting the interests
of private wealthy citizens, played an important role in creating stability
or instability.
THE PRODUCTIVE ECONOMY
Atlantic Africa, this diverse area of many states and nations, was also a
region of considerable economic diversity. It is difficult to generalize
about the economy of Atlantic Africa, just as it is difficult to delineate its
geographical, political, and ethnic boundaries.
As in all preindustrial economies, African economies were essentially
agricultural in the sense that the majority of the time that people spent in
productive activities was to tend crops or raise livestock. Contemporary
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68 John K. Thornton
descriptions allow the delineation of several distinct agricultural regimes.
In coastal west Africa, from modern Liberia north to Senegambia, rice was
the main staple, grown in a complex agronomic system that produced
high yields but required considerable labor. Rice growing along the coast
and in marshy areas, as well as along river basins farther inland, was
supplemented by other crops in less well watered areas. Millet and sor-
ghum were particularly important. They were later supplemented by
exotic crops such as American maize and cassava.
Where ecological conditions permitted it, stock was raised, and cattle
were plentiful in the drier inland areas. Other parts of the region were less
favorable to cattle raising, and small stock, such as chickens and pigs,
provided much of the dietary protein. Fish were consumed fresh along the
entire African coast and near fish-bearing rivers and were preserved by
salting or drying for areas without substantial fishing areas.
Africans produced beer and, in most areas, made wine from a variety of
palm oils. Tree crops and peanuts were especially important for edible oils,
and arboriculture was an important activity in all regions.
Lower Guinea had a different regime of crops from Upper Guinea,
making much more extensive use of yams and, later, exotic root crops,
such as cassava. Rice was. fairly rare in this region, though millet and
sorghum and, later, American maize provided the basic grain crops. Most
of the region was not favorable for cattle; small stock provided protein,
along with fish. Palm wine was especially important as a beverage, while
palm oil figured prominently in cooking.
The Angola region also had less rice cultivation, though some was grown
along the lower course of the Zaire River in Kongo. Millet and sorghum
were gradually replaced by American maize and then often by cassava in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Stock raising was variable; some
highlands regions, such as Ndongo, were major cattle-raising areas, while
other regions, such as the majority of the kingdom of Kongo, produced few
cattle. As in other parts of Africa, fish — caught fresh along rivers and the
coast, or dried and salted elsewhere — were critical in the diet. Angolans,
like Africans in other regions, drank palm wine and various brewed grain
drinks and used palm oils extensively in cooking.
Although the exact mode of food preparation varied widely, some gener-
alizations are appropriate for Atlantic Africa. Grain crops were mostly
eaten in the form of stiff gruels or porridge. Typically, in the case of
American maize, millet, and sorghum, the grain was pounded into fine
powder and then boiled to the desired consistency. Rice was boiled with-
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African Background to American Colonization 69
out much preparation, while cassava was made into flour and then boiled.
The gruel was then eaten with stews made of an oil (usually palm or
peanut) base, using whatever meat or fish was available, beans, spices, and
vegetables. Often the gruel was rolled in balls and dipped in stews,
though sometimes the stew was put on the gruel. Fresh fruit, leaves, and
green vegetables were sometimes cooked separately as side dishes.
By modern standards, African agriculture of the period was not very
productive, but by the standards of the seventeenth or eighteenth century,
Africa was a fairly advanced region. Although Africans used quite simple
tools (no group in Atlantic Africa used the plow, for example) and prac-
ticed various forms of what is called shifting cultivation, crop yields were
high. European visitors, who presumably had the performance of their
home economies as a base, typically described African agriculture as very
productive. They usually believed that Africans did not work very hard,
but they thought that the yields they obtained were very high by the
standards of the time. Levels of productivity achieved by modern formers
using similar tools and techniques in Africa point to high yields relative to
those achieved by sixteenth- or eighteenth-century European farmers. In
the more recent past, crop yields were much higher than those of
seventeenth-century Europe, though low by the standards of modern scien-
tific agriculture.
One measure of the efficiency of agriculture is vital rates, since they
reflect at least indirectly on the capacity of the society to provide itself
with adequate food and shelter. It is possible to discuss vital rates in this
period only for the region of Angola, where Christian baptismal records
from Kongo and the Portuguese colony of Angola provide data. Birth rates
were quite high during this period, as high as forty-five to fifty per
thousand - somewhat higher therefore than the birth rates for western
Europe, though equaled and even exceeded in many parts of America,
such as French Canada. These high birth rates were probably accomplished
by a fairly low age of first conception, since data on the spacing of children
suggest intervals equal to or even longer than those experienced in Europe
at the same time. Perhaps the spacing reflected low rates of fertility of the
polygamous households.
Infant and child mortality kept the high birth rates from causing explo-
sive population growth. Infant mortality in seventeenth-century Kongo
was probably around 250 to 300 per thousand in normal (nonfamine)
years, which compares favorably with infant mortality rates in western
Europe and America. Somewhat higher rates of child mortality in Africa,
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-jo John K. Thornton
however, gave societies in Europe and Africa general parity in survival
rates to age 18: roughly half of all children born survived to this age.
As in other parts of the world, population growth was checked by
periodic catastrophic episodes of mortality occasioned by drought and
famine, which affected rates of infant and child mortality and tended to
kill off the elderly. Warfare and enslavement, which affected otherwise
healthy people in the adult age brackets, also killed or removed many.
These phenomena produced an overall low growth rate, in central Africa
tending toward two per thousand, but this figure is not well supported by
data and must be considered a rough guess.
The level of productivity in basic food production necessarily required
that the majority of the population work in agriculture and hence live near
the lands that they farmed. As elsewhere in the world, Africa was a land of
rural villages with relatively small towns. African villages varied widely in
size and form, often according to ecological conditions. In some areas,
such as the Senegal valley, where the river was essential for irrigation,
settlements spread out along the river valley without clear nucleation,
although, based on social conditions, one can speak of villages. In central
Africa, on the other hand, villages were fairly compact and frequently
stockaded, as the low population density encouraged wild animals. These
villages were quite small, however, according to travelers and Portuguese
administrative reports, averaging about 200 people each. But in Lower
Guinea, much larger settlements were the norm, often exceeding 1,000
people, though many were not highly nucleated. Such concentrated num-
bers were made possible by reliance on high-yielding root crops, although
the fields were often located some distance from the village. In the
Yoruba-speaking regions, settlement was more often in small towns than
in villages, with populations in excess of 1,000, but this distribution
frequently meant that people had to walk fairly long distances to reach
their fields.
African residential construction, especially in areas with small villages,
adopted a strategy of building fairly small and uncomplicated structures
that required little investment in skill and labor and that were abandoned
and rebuilt often. In a tropical climate, where severe cold was rarely a
problem, this strategy met the shelter requirements of the population and
allowed more sanitary conditions than building more complex and perma-
nent structures might. Thus, the tendency for buildings in tropical climates
to become rotten and infested with insects, rodents, and reptiles was offset
by frequent destruction and rebuilding. This construction strategy made
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African Background to American Colonization 71
African villages very mobile, moving every few years. It fit in, on the one
hand, with the absence of private landed property, which gave villagers
little stake in particular locations, and on the other hand, with shirting,
long-fellow cultivation, which favored movement of the population.
This construction strategy was not universal, however. Larger and more
permanent constructions were built to meet the needs of religious and
political elites for prestige construction, or for strategic and defense consid-
erations. Large cities, such as Oyo and Benin on the Guinea Coast, and
Jenne and Timbuktu on the Niger River, and Sao Salvador in Kongo, can be
documented in the same location for centuries, and their buildings were
more permanent. Such cities typically emerged as capitals or political
centers, and the most elaborate buildings were temples, mosques,
churches, and palaces. In some cases, such as the Yoruba cities and Benin,
the move toward more permanent and elaborate residential structures
accompanied the growth of such cities. In other cases, such as central Africa,
the residential population continued to be quite mobile, and cities were
more population concentrations than nucleated settlements. The capitals of
the Lunda Empire moved frequently within a fairly small densely settled
zone, for example, while Sao Salvador's population was spread out over more
than 100 square kilometers. Sometimes construction of elite buildings
conformed to the rural pattern, as in the case of the Njinga's palace, which
was large but constructed impermanently. Njinga's display of wealth came
not so much from the architecture as from the elaborate and expensive mats
that made up the walls of her palace.
In addition to its agriculture and construction industry, Africa possessed
a manufacturing sector that supplied the population's needs for tools and
clothing as well as luxury goods. As with agriculture, African manufactur-
ing was done with fairly simple tools and techniques, yet the quality of
output was as high as that from any other part of the world. Recent
archaeological and anthropological research has revealed, for example, that
Africans had discovered a process to make high-quality steel using a furnace
design that was fairly simple and required little concentration of labor. This
created a mobile smelting industry that was characterized by fairly small
enterprises, since furnaces were often only used a few times before being
abandoned. The mobile smelters, in turn, could better exploit fuel sources
with their small, technically simple production processes.
African textiles have also been reevaluated in recent years, and their
quality is now generally regarded as good, even if the looms on which they
were produced were simple. In general, Africans relied in textile produc-
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72 John K. Thornton
tion on a large and highly skilled work force rather than on machines.
Africans were particularly interested in textiles; in addition to textile use
in clothing, textiles were used as wall coverings - a use that may have
accounted for as much textile production as clothing. Woven mats, used as
floor covering or for sleeping, were also employed widely.
In many parts of Africa, production was integrated into village life
rather than being undertaken by specialists in urban centers, as was true in
much of seventeenth-century Europe. In central Africa, the major textile-
producing centers were located in rural areas, and industrial towns were
unknown, though some of the villages, especially those located close to
sources of supply of raw materials, did focus special attention on textile
production. Most textile workers were not specialists, since they were also
engaged in agricultural production, but the level of skill was high, as was
the quality and quantity of their output. Trade statistics gathered in
Luanda in the early seventeenth century, where many of the textiles pro-
duced in eastern Kongo were sold, suggest that hundreds of thousands of
meters of textiles were produced and sold annually. Such a level of produc-
tion places Kongo among the major textile-producing centers of the
world, though the production was done in rural areas using very simple
tools.
But decentralized industrial production with thousands of part time but
highly skilled rural workers was not necessarily the only way in which
manufacturing was organized. In Lower Guinea, there was concentrated
textile production, often of high-quality products for sale on regional
markets, which coexisted with rural village industry geared to local needs.
Seventeenth-century reports, for example, mention a palace industry in
the coastal city of Whydah employing king's wives (who sometimes num-
bered in the thousands) to produce textiles for local consumption and sale
on local, regional, and even world markets. A similar palace industry was
found in Warri, in southern Nigeria, at about the same time, and was no
doubt found in other towns and palaces of the area. Later travelers' ac-
counts of the Oyo Empire, which, like Kongo, was a major textile-
producing area, speak of an urban-based industry which might include as
many as 1,000 weaving establishments in a single city. But this weaving
always coexisted with the local production of cloth. The Igbo ex-slave,
Olaudah Equiano, recalling life in his home village in eastern Nigeria in
the mid-eighteenth century, noted both the home production of cloth by
local people as well as the importation of cloth made elsewhere in the same
region, and perhaps abroad.
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African Background to American Colonization 73
In many parts of Upper Guinea, there were specialists in textile produc-
tion, forming what some have called artisan castes. Although the industry
was not concentrated in towns, and the making of thread was done in
every village, weaving was done by migrant specialists. This finished
cloth, like that from other parts of Africa, often entered regional markets,
frequently being transported along the rivers by both African and Euro-
pean merchants.
The production of metals tended to be more concentrated than that of
textiles, simply because the geography of metals required some concentra-
tion. Typically, industrial centers or districts were concentrated in areas
where abundant local deposits of iron could be found, near wooded areas
that could supply fuel, especially (in Upper and Lower Guinea) along the
margin between the rain forest and the wooded savanna. However, within
such industrial regions, the actual production sites were quite mobile and
small and, as in textile production, often employed many part-time work-
ers assisting a core of skilled masters.
A recent archaeological study of the industry in Bassar (modern Togo in
Lower Guinea) shows that as the industry grew, there was a concentration
of people, though never in industrial towns. Since African metal produc-
tion relied on wood to fire the furnaces, smelters and smiths had to move
frequently as forests were cut for fuel. This discouraged concentration of
the industry, as can be seen by the long-range ecological degradation of
the Sankarani river in the heartland of the old empire of Mali, when the
presence of the city forced the concentration of smelteries. This led to the
eventual abandonment of the area and of the industry in the seventeenth
century.
The result of these environmental and organizational factors was that
steel was produced in great industrial regions where furnaces were scat-
tered throughout the area. Bassar in Lower Guinea was one such district,
while in central Africa, one can still see considerable slag heaps formed by
the steel industry of Kongo, which was concentrated along the Inkisi
valley in the eastern part of the country and along the banks of the Zaire
River. In the Portuguese colony of Angola, eighteenth-century officials
complained that the relative decentralization of steel production made
taxation difficult. They sought to concentrate it at Nova Oeiras and to
endow it with some European technology, though without long-term
success.
The mining and smelting of metal coexisted with a blacksmithing
industry that had branches in a great many villages. Raw metal was
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74 J°hn K. Thornton
shaped or reshaped to meet the specific needs of villagers or to sell on
local markets. Occasionally, such final production was centralized. The
city of Benin in Lower Guinea was the center of a concentration of
smiths, mostly working on copper or other precious metals. A whole
quarter of the city was given over to metalworkers, and they had dozens,
if not hundreds, of shops in the quarter, according to visitors of the
seventeenth century.
THE COMMERCIAL ECONOMY
The African productive economy gave rise to extensive trade and com-
merce. Regional specialization and fairly long-range trade were supported
wherever transportation axes made them possible. Rivers and inland water-
ways were especially important in the development of substantial trade
networks. For example, the coastal system of rivers, creeks, and lagoons in
Upper Guinea allowed for waterborne transport and, as a result, made it
possible for agricultural specialization to develop. Thus, there were re-
gions that specialized in the production of rice, others that produced
yams, and yet others that produced grain crops such as millet. Surpluses
were shipped to large regional markets by small, shallow draft watercraft.
The maze of waterways that made up the delta of the Niger River and its
surrounding waterways was a similarly integrated region of highly special-
ized production, as was the great inland waterway that stretched west-
ward, with interruptions, as far as the Gold Coast. Seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century reports note a vigorous trade in grain, fish, salt, and
other goods along these waterways, as well as villages and even whole
districts that specialized in the production of bulk agricultural goods for
the market.
Even in areas that were not as blessed with transportation networks,
local markets were still quite active, even if the villages tended more
toward self-sufficiency in foodstuffs and bulk goods. But salt, iron, other
metals, some types of foodstuffs (for example, dried fish), and some types
of textiles could still be profitably transported considerable distances to
allow markets.
With this level of market activity, African economies needed curren-
cies, and there was a variety in use. In Africa, as elsewhere, it was common
for frequently demanded or precious commodities to perform a monetary
role, as seen by the iron bar or copper wire currencies of west and central
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African Background to American Colonization 75
Africa. Peasants might often make transactions using cloth, chickens, or
other domestic animals as a standard of value.
In west Africa, gold and cowrie shells formed the major monetary
substances. Sources dating from the twelfth century onward provide infor-
mation on the conversion rates between gold and cowries. Accounting
(even if done without writing) and credit or long-distance monetary ex-
changes were often done using cowries as monies of account. In central
Africa, the shells known as nzimbu were clearly such a monetary unit, used
to calculate debt and taxes and to settle debts even when actual specie did
not change hands or when the real exchange was made in goods rather than
money. By early in the seventeenth century, the shells had been joined by
cloth of a special length and quality, typically the high-quality cloth of
eastern Kongo or Loango, called libongo.
Most goods that came to local markets were carried there by their
makers, as far as the limited documentation permits us to know. Africa
also had professional merchants, specialists in trade, although they tended
to concentrate their energies on the kinds of goods that could travel long
distances profitably. Such products were typically goods with high value
to weight (precious metals, finished quality manufactures, salt, or dried
meat and fish), and were often consumed by the upper classes and wealth-
ier people.
Professional merchants could be found in every part of Atlantic Africa.
They often formed communities that settled in towns under their own
government and linked in networks that Philip Curtin has dubbed a
"trading diaspora." A good example of such a trading diaspora is the
Mandinka-speaking Juula and Jakhanke of the Upper Guinea. According to
Jakhanke histories, these traders began in the city of Jakha (on the Bafing
River, a tributary of the Senegal) and, following their business, fanned out
to other locations. Jakhanke towns were founded, under the auspices of local
rulers in the areas where they settled, and were permitted the right to
govern themselves. Sixteenth-century Europeans met Jakhanke at coastal
points as far afield as Gambia and the Gold Coast; hence, they imagined that
the city called "Jaga" (Jakha) was some great metropolis that controlled the
trade of all west Africa. The Jakhanke and other trading groups like the
Juula did indeed dominate the commerce of Upper Guinea, becoming
involved not just in moving goods but also in the production of goods on
plantations worked by their slaves or in ships where artisans employed or
enslaved by them made cloth or tanned leather or produced metal goods.
Although they were not quite as concentrated a group as the sixteenth-
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76 John K. Thornton
century Europeans imagined, they did manage to operate in concert and
shared commercial information to permit switching the direction of trade
from one port or one town to another as market conditions warranted.
This was not through political control but simply through information
sharing and informal meeting among the most important leaders, whose
combined business gave them the capacity to influence the market.
Both the Jakhanke and the Juula were also professional Islamic religious
scholars {'ulama or marabouts), and their business as traders and their
profession as scholars and judges were intertwined. Indeed, this connec-
tion between trade and religion was so intimate that both contemporary
witnesses and modern scholars have debated whether they were principally
religious scholars who took up commerce as a sideline, or traders first
who, upon conversion to Islam, became devoted to scholarship. Whatever
the historical relationship or the self-perception of the merchants, how-
ever, they were the dominant professional trading group in Upper Guinea.
A similar network, made up of people from the Hausa states in what is
now northern Nigeria and Niger, bordered on the Mandinka-speaking
trading networks along the Niger River. Hausa-speaking merchants, like
their Mandinka-speaking counterparts farther west, developed a complex
trade diaspora connecting the Hausa cities of the interior with coastal
locations, especially in what is today Nigeria, and communities of them
were to be found in the courts of Oyo and Benin in the eighteenth century,
as well as farther afield in the northern districts and courts of Asante and
Dahomey (where one could also find Mandinka-speakers).
In addition to these large networks based in the interior cities of west
Africa, there were smaller ones in other parts of the coast. For example,
traders from the Balanta region in Upper Guinea operated a complex
trading network along the coastal waterways of modern Guinea—Bissau,
while Akani traders in the seventeenth-century Gold Coast posted "trade
captains" in most of the major trading ports to look after the interests of
the major inland towns of the Akan federation (later to become the king-
dom of Asante).
When European merchants set up operations on the various coasts of
Africa, their local employees, both European and African, took to private
trading in the immediate area of the coastal forts, posts, or offshore islands
where European commerce was based. These local employees often broke
the official bonds of loyalty to their country and shipping concerns (such as
the great slave-trading houses or government-sponsored companies) and
joined local elite families or merchants, creating a group of culturally and
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African Background to American Colonization 77
racially mixed people. They in turn developed a trading diaspora that
stretched into the interior, especially along the Senegal and Gambia rivers
but also along the coast in Upper Guinea.
One group, who spoke a form of Creole Portuguese as their trade
language, was originally based on the Portuguese offshore island colony of
Cape Verde, with branches on the mainland and offshoots in the interior.
This section was joined in the seventeenth century by French Creole-
speaking groups based on the French post on the island of Goree in
Senegal that focused on the trade of that river, and by English Creole-
speaking groups on the Gambia and along the coast of Sierra Leone. A
second group was based originally at the Portuguese posts of Mina (on the
Gold Coast) and on the offshore island of Sao Tome. Their trade was
focused on the Gold Coast and Lower Guinea in general. In the seven-
teenth century, this group was joined by merchants with Dutch, Danish,
German, French, and English connections focused on various Gold Coast
forts or the trading port of Whydah.
All these commercial groups were proud of being Christian (though
unlike their Muslim counterparts, and sometime rivals, they were not
priests), spoke Creole versions of English, French, or Portuguese, and
dressed in modified European fashion. Although their origin was rooted in
European commerce, by the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century,
they had become essentially an African commercial group whose relations
with the European-based trading concerns were not always cordial.
The Angola region possessed its own trading diaspora. By the seven-
teenth century, one of the most important of these diasporas was the Vili
network, based on the ports of the kingdom of Loango in modern-day
Congo-Brazzaville and Gabon and on the ports Malemba in Kakongo and
Kabinda in Ngoyo. Vili traders controlled a network of towns and settle-
ments across the Kingdom of Kongo into the interior as far as the Maleba
Pool and Kwango River and south to the Portuguese colony of Angola and
its eastern neighbors along the Kwango River. Although these settlements
did not answer to the government of their home countries, each one did
have a "captain" who was strictly obeyed by others in the settlement. A
second network, based on the Kongo province of Zombo in the Inkisi
valley, was interlocked with the Vili merchants but reached into the
interior beyond the Kwango to the Lunda Empire, which came to promi-
nence in the late seventeenth century.
The Angolan region had an even more extensive and developed Afro-
European trading network than did west Africa, surely because the Portu-
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78 John K. Thornton
guese colony of Angola (founded 1576) was both larger and more extensive
than any holding by any other European power in west Africa. The
pombeiors, originally slaves employed by Portuguese merchants based in
Luanda to travel to markets in Kongo and Maleba Pool (known in the
sixteenth century as Mpombo), had become much more independent of
the European interests during the seventeenth century. There were two
great interior diasporas. One was based in eastern Angola at Mbaka
(Ambaca) and stretched into the interior as far as Lunda by the late
eighteenth century. The second one was based on the port of Benguela and
the interior Portuguese presidio of Caconda (founded 1769) and mingled
with the first diaspora in the Ovimbundu kingdoms of the central high-
lands of Angola.
European trade, and with it the slave trade, fit into this larger dynamic
of African politics and economy. Europeans were unable to accomplish
much in the way of conquest in Africa. Early attempts at raiding the
African coast, by the earliest Portuguese sailors to reach west African
waters (after 1444), were largely unsuccessful and ultimately resulted in
several Portuguese defeats. By 1462, Portuguese emissaries to various
African rulers had established diplomatic and commercial relations with
them, a situation that was to prevail over the remaining period of the slave
trade, being taken up in turn by Dutch, French, and English traders who
followed Portuguese merchants to African waters. Outside of Angola,
European posts in Africa from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries
were essentially trading posts that remained there under the sufferance of
African rulers, often being required to pay rent or tribute.
EUROPEAN TRADE WITH AFRICA
European trade with Africa was of two sorts: shipboard trade or factory
trade. Shipboard trade took place in areas where Europeans were either
unwilling or unable to establish posts on shore. Such trade prevailed, for
example, along the Ivory and Kwa Kwa coasts and on the Gabon Coast,
where there was relatively little trade and where African authorities were
sometimes hostile to any shore-based participation. Trade in these areas
was always problematic, with considerable bad faith and trickery on both
sides.
Factory trade of one sort or another was far more common. Factories
were established by formal arrangements between African political authori-
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African Background to American Colonization 79
ties and European merchants or governments. They often originated in
gold-exporting regions like the Gold Coast or the Senegambian area be-
cause of the security needs created by high-value trading items. The
formality of the arrangements allowed for (1) debts to be collected, (2)
those who violated market rules to be punished, and (3) general security
for goods and slaves to be provided. Portuguese communities dotted the
entire coast of Upper Guinea by the end of the sixteenth century, although
the Portuguese government sometimes discouraged actual settlement.
When Dutch, French, and English merchants began to take over the
seaborne trade, some of these communities were occupied by the new
powers, and other posts were established under their own control, such as
Goree Island (French) and James Island (English).
Factories were more elaborate on the coast of Lower Guinea, especially
in the Gold Coast area. Formal Portuguese presence began with the estab-
lishment of the post of Sao Jorge da Mina (later known as Elmina) in
1482, with outstations established at other points along the coast in the
following century. When merchants from northern Europe entered this
trade in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they established
more posts. Many of these were fortified and came to be almost indepen-
dent of the African rulers on whose hospitality they relied, but for the
most part, they kept making tribute payments to Africans for the right to
maintain their forts.
The Slave Coast, which included the area between the Volta and Niger
rivers, was less well established, a variety of posts being established for
greater or lesser amounts of time. The Portuguese, French, English, and
Dutch posts at Whydah were unfortified and coexisted within the same
town under the sovereignty of the ruler of Whydah, and subsequently the
king of Dahomey when Whydah came under Dahomey's control in 1727.
The Niger Delta and Benin region (sometimes called the Bight of
Benin) were areas where commerce was less well established in posts. An
early Portuguese post at Ughoton, Benin's port, was abandoned in favor of
shipboard trade early in the sixteenth century, and no post was reestab-
lished until the Dutch reopened the factory from 1716 to the 1740s, only
to abandon it later. The French attempted a similar post in the 1780s,
although the Niger River area nearby never had any formal factory.
Trade in central Africa was somewhat different from west Africa. The
Portuguese founded a factory at the Kongo port of Mpinda in the early
sixteenth century and had another at the Kongo capital far in the interior,
both of which were so firmly under Kongo sovereignty that they might
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80 John K. Thornton
not be considered as really being European posts. When the Portuguese
established the colony of Angola after 1575, the city of Luanda, which was
fully under Portuguese sovereignty, became the center for their commerce,
and indeed, even interior posts, such as Massangano, Cambambe, and
Ambaca, were commercial centers under Portuguese sovereignty. To de-
scribe a colony with hundreds of thousands of subjects and a substantial
surface area as simply a factory, by analogy to west Africa, is obviously
false.
Other European powers established a similar presence. The Dutch estab-
lished a post at Mpinda in Kongo in the 1620s; like the earlier Portuguese
post, it was under Portuguese sovereignty. Kongo's King Garcia II closed
it down in 1642, because Calvinist Dutch preachers were not allowed in
Catholic Kongo. At the same time that they were experiencing trouble in
Kongo, the Dutch sought to seize control of the Portuguese colony of
Angola. They succeeded in taking Luanda in 1641 but were never able to
extend their control over the interior posts and were finally driven out of
the area in 1648. Subsequently, the Dutch, and the English and French
who followed, based their operations in central Africa on the Kingdom of
Loango or its neighbors north of Kongo, especially at the town of
Kabinda. There merchants fanned out along the coast of Kongo, and
sometimes even along the Angola Coast south of the Kwanza, to deal with
Africans through shipboard trade.
These essentially peaceful commercial relations were, however, occasion-
ally disrupted in a variety of ways. Sometimes private traders sought to
improve their position by raiding, kidnapping African merchants who
came aboard their vessels, or landing armed bodies to raid coastal people.
Generally, these operations were limited and often were immediately pun-
ished by African authorities, who closed ports, seized European goods,
and set embargoes. These actions were sufficiently successful that on more
than one occasion, European or colonial American governments sought to
locate the offenders and restore the lost people or property, as Massachu-
setts did when a Boston-based captain seized some people off Sierra Leone
in 1645.
A slightly different type of relationship involved European armed forces
fighting in African wars at the behest of African rulers. Portuguese sol-
diers became mercenaries in African armies in Kongo, Benin, and Sierra
Leone in the sixteenth century, while English marines served in a similar
capacity in Sierra Leone toward the end of that century. When the Portu-
guese established their fort at Sao Jorge da Mina on the Gold Coast in the
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African Background to American Colonization 81
late fifteenth century, the post became a center for Portuguese involve-
ment in African politics in the sixteenth century. Portuguese soldiers, or
rather Portuguese and African soldiers under Portuguese command, at-
tempted to extend Portuguese influence, mostly to block trade connec-
tions by other European powers.
When the Dutch, Danish, Prussian, and English commercial compa-
nies took up fortified trading posts along the Gold Coast during the
seventeenth century, they also brought small bodies of soldiers to defend
their forts and occasionally to raid the forts of their commercial rivals.
Sometimes these bodies also served as mercenaries in African wars. Compli-
cated conflicts, such as the Komenda war of the late seventeenth century,
involved several African armies, bodies of mercenaries under command of
Dutch and English merchants, and other mercenaries under African com-
mand developed.
European-led mercenaries also played a role on the coast of Allada and
Whydah in the early eighteenth century, but both in this area and on the
Gold Coast, Europeans lost much of their room to maneuver as the large
inland polities, Asante and Dahomey, came to dominate coastal politics
after the 1720s. As long as coastal politics were dominated by the rival
concerns of tiny independent states, commanders of small mercenary armies
or even private African and European traders could operate freely and with
effect. Once larger military forces loyal to the interior states came into play,
however, the possibility of a European military presence evaporated.
The largest military operation by a European power in Africa was
culminated by the Portuguese invasion of Angola in 1575. As with the
situation on the Gold Coast and at Allada and Whydah, it began through
European involvement as mercenaries, first with Kongo (after 1491) and
then with Ndongo (in the 1520s). The Portuguese invasion of 1575 began
in cooperation with Kongo and was aimed at the coastal provinces of
Ndongo. Once some success had been achieved, however, Kongo changed
sides, and Portuguese advance was halted after their defeat at the battle of
the Lukala in 1590.
Further Portuguese advance was achieved largely by their organization
of an African army (called guerra preta) under Portuguese command and
then by employing Imbangala mercenaries. This combination allowed the
Portuguese to raise sizable armies in Angola and to fight in the war of the
Ndongo succession (1624-56) and to make successful attacks against
Kongo (1665) and Pungo Andongo, one of their former allies (1671-2).
Portugal also suffered defeats in these wars. The crushing defeat at the
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82 John K. Thornton
battle of Kitombo (against Kongo in 1670) was probably crucial in the
much lower level of Portuguese ambition for conquest in the last years of
the seventeenth, the eighteenth, and the early nineteenth centuries.
Europeans bought and sold a variety of goods in Africa through these
trading arrangements. The most important early export from Africa was
gold; Africa also exported a wide variety of other items, including exotic
goods of the tropical environment, such as wild animals and their skins,
ivory, perfumes, and wild products, such as gum. Africa also exported
copper in varying quantities and textiles of all qualities for both the
European and the American markets.
THE SLAVE TRADE
From the American and European perspective, however, Africa's most
important export was slaves. Slaves were among the first exports in the
mid-fifteenth century and had come to dominate the value of exports in
the seventeenth century, reaching their peak numbers in the last decades
of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Although some of the earliest slaves were captured directly by European
ships, this pattern quickly ceased. Direct capture was quite rare after that,
with the notable exception of Portuguese operations in Angola. Most
slaves were delivered to European buyers by African merchants or state
officials and exchanged peacefully in markets controlled by African state
officials. This type and scale of exchange could only have developed be-
cause the institutions of slavery and slave marketing were widespread in
Africa at the time of earliest contact. Thus, African law recognized the
status of slavery and the right of the owners of slaves to alienate them
freely. We have already noted the significance of slaves in the development
of private wealth in African society, and one could add that rulers in-
creased their power by using slave soldiers, officials, and servants. How-
ever, the great majority of the slaves who were sold to Europeans during
the period of the slave trade were not drawn from an existing stock of
slaves in Africa but were usually recent captives in wars or the victims of
recent banditry and judicial proceedings.
This legal and commercial background explains how it came to be that
Africa generated such substantial exports of slaves in a short period after
cor'.act with Europe generally through peaceful commercial transactions.
In west Africa, of course, a preexisting trans-Saharan slave trade, oriented
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African Background to American Colonization 83
Table 2. 1. Average annual exports of slaves from Africa, 1500-1700
Coast
Western
Gulf Guinea
West Central
1500
2,000
1,000
2,000
1501-50
2,000
2,000
4,000
1551-1600
2,500
2,500
4,500
1601-50
2,500
3,300
8,000
1651-1700
5,500
19,500
11,000
Source: Thornton, Africa and Africans, Table 4.1.
Table 2. 2. Slave exports in the eighteenth century, by decade (thousands)
Decade
1700-9
1710-19
1720-9
1730-9
1740-9
1750-9
1760-9
1770-9
1780-9
1790-9
1800-9
Senegambia
22
36
53
57
35
30
28
24
15
18
18
Sierra
Leone
35
6
9
29
43
84
178
132
74
71
64
Gold
Coast
32
38
65
74
84
53
70
54
58
74
44
Bight of
Benin
139
139
150
135
98
87
98
112
121
75
76
Bight of
Biafra
23
. 51
60
62
77
106
143
160
225
182
123
Angola
110
133
180
241
214
222
267
235
300
340
281
Source: Richardson, "Slave Exports," Table 7, p. 17, rounded to nearest thousand.
to north African and Mediterranean markets, had existed since perhaps the
sixth or seventh century, and many of the early exports came from the
diversion of this trade to Atlantic ports by African merchants such as the
Jakhanke and Juula. But even central Africa, where there had been no
contact with slave-using societies outside the region, was already export-
ing half of Africa's total slaves in 1520.
The accompanying tables show the regional distribution of the slave
trade by coasts by annual average export for each 50-year period prior to
1700 (Table 2.1), and then by decades for the eighteenth century (Table
2.2), the best-documented period and the one when the overwhelming
bulk of slaves was imported into North America and the Caribbean. The
. maps on pages 54 and 55 indicate the locations of these areas. The number
of people exported had grown steadily from 1500 to 1620 or so, then
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84 John K. Thornton
expanded rapidly in the mid to late seventeenth century, reaching its peak
in the last decades of the eighteenth century. It fell off rapidly as the
various abolition campaigns began to take effect in the early nineteenth
century, rapidly declining after 1820. Much of the growth of the trade in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries took place due to the involve-
ment of Lower Guinea in the trade, particularly with the rapid growth of
the area as a slaving center in the eighteenth century. By contrast, Upper
Guinea exports remained fairly stable, although growth did take place in
the eighteenth century, especially in Sierra Leone in the 1750s and 1760s.
Angola showed a higher rate of growth than did Upper Guinea, although
never the explosive expansion shown by Lower Guinea in the eighteenth
century. Still, Angola accounted for roughly one-half of Africa's export of
slaves throughout the entire period of the trade, even though it was the
least densely populated area.
The majority of people who eventually were transported to the Ameri-
cas were enslaved by Africans in Africa. The devices by which enslavement
took place included: judicial enslavement, kidnapping, private raiding,
and military enslavement.
Judicial enslavement, the first of these mechanisms, was a result of the
sentence of transportation ("passing salt water" as it was called in Angola)
as punishment for a crime. Such crimes might include unpaid debt,
violation of religious sanctions, certain types of adultery, as well as theft,
destruction of property, or assaults. The punishment often extended be-
yond the guilty party to include kinspeople and even allies. The courts
that handed out such sentences and the law that they applied varied
widely, as would be expected from a region with over 100 legally sover-
eign entities. Witnesses in Africa and interviews with slaves in America
point out that in some areas at least (Angola and Upper Guinea are well
known in this regard), there was a tendency to extend enslavement as a
punishment for more and more crimes, and a greater willingness to in-
clude relatives who were not immediately guilty among the enslaved.
Walter Rodney suggested that this legal corruption was a product of the
demands of the slave trade, as it may well have been. There are, indeed,
many accounts of fairly trivial pretexts for enslavement in the literature of
the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth century.
It is difficult to make statistical measure of the percentage of people
enslaved through different means. The only quantitative source that has
been extensively studied is a series of life histories, collected by linguist
S. W. Koelle, of a large number of people rescued from slave ships by the
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African Background to American Colonization 85
British Navy in nineteenth-century Sierra Leone. These life histories do
not constitute a statistically random sample, and they were collected very
late in the history of the slave trade. They show that less than one person
in 6ve was enslaved through judicial means. Other sources, typically
based on interviews with slaves in America or with slave sellers in Africa,
generally confirm the relatively low numbers.
Those who fell afoul of the law were not always the most desirable
slaves, because some were real criminals, while others, such as those
convicted of witchcraft or religious crimes, made troublesome slaves for
other reasons. The judicial process was also not well attuned (even in areas
where it was quite corrupt, such as Upper Guinea) to produce slaves who
were salable or desirable for prospective buyers from Europe or America.
Sentences of enslavement were passed against family groups and often
resulted in the enslavement of the old and infirm as well as the healthy
people capable of the work that American slavery demanded.
By far the most common form of enslavement was one or another form
of forcible capture - through either kidnapping or private raiding — or
war. Koelle's life histories support this conclusion: 34 percent of the
people whose histories he recorded had been captured in war, and 30
percent had been kidnapped or seized in other violent ways. These figures
are again broadly supported by other sources, mostly based on testimony
of slaves in America or slave dealers on the African coast, although these
sources place more weight on war as a source than kidnapping or private
raiding.
Kidnapping typically took place through the operations of small bodies
of armed men, sometimes with government approval, often without it.
Throughout Upper Guinea, especially in the Senegal valley and the
Mandinka-speaking world of the interior, there was a long tradition of
informal operations conducted by off-duty soldiers of the various royal
cavalries against civilian populations. Such raids, typically involving a few
dozen horsemen using their mounts to achieve surprise, were illegal in the
context of their own country's laws - but the ceddo of the Senegambia and
the sofas of the Mandinka kingdoms of Kaarta and Segu were able to
conduct such raids anyway and with virtual impunity. Juula and Jakhanke
merchants played a crucial role in these small-scale operations by arrang-
ing to buy the captives (sometimes in advance) and using their wide-
ranging commercial contacts to smuggle the slaves out of the area.
In coastal Upper Guinea, there was considerable piracy conducted by
people who used the rivers and creeks of the area to move about small
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86 John K. Thornton
bodies of armed men quickly and silently. Such pirates were not necessar-
ily a part of the military or naval establishments of the states of the area, as
were the horsemen of Senegambia or Segu; rather, they were private
bandits or outlaws. They preyed on people who necessarily had to leave
their homes and strongly defended villages to fish, wash clothes, travel to
market, or tend to their complex rice cultivation.
Such private kidnapping, especially along rivers and creeks, is also
documented in Lower Guinea, especially in the Niger Delta area, where it
was widespread. Olaudah Equiano's description of his own enslavement
and that of many of his countrymen describes the manner in which such
pirates operated. These pirates were not only slave raiders; they also
engaged in peaceful trade or struck at other economic targets.
Banditry which resulted in the enslavement of people was quite com-
mon in the seventeenth-century Gold Coast, where it was known locally as
panyarring. People and goods were often seized in the course of commercial
disputes, and not all such captives were sold abroad, although many times
they were. With the rise of the larger states of Asante and Dahomey,
however, this sort of disorder was greatly curbed.
Informal kidnapping and raids also occurred throughout Angola. Sol-
diers of the Portuguese garrisons in Angola often seized people in their off-
duty time, in operations analogous to those of off-duty soldiers in Upper
Guinea. No doubt, other armies did the same, although the records are
less complete for other areas. Mid-seventeenth century travelers in Kongo
occasionally noted the arbitrary seizure of people and goods by the elite of
the country, which sometimes resulted in considerable destruction and, of
course, the sale of many of the victims. In the confusion of Kongo's
lengthy civil wars of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this
situation was exacerbated. During the civil wars, groups of raiders at-
tacked travelers on the road and occasionally in villages. There was a
strong tradition of selling such people to slave traders, particularly to the
Vili traders, who had many settlements throughout Kongo that served as
collecting points and in-transit holding areas.
Kidnapping and informal raiding had their limitations, however, even
though abolitionist writers tended to focus attention on them - to the
point that it is often seen in popular treatments as the usual means of
enslavement. Small groups of soldiers or private raiders were necessarily
limited in the amount of damage they could inflict; by fortifying their
homes or villages and posting scouts and lookouts, villagers could make
such raiding less effective.
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African Background to American Colonization 87
Most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers believed that the
most important source of enslavement was war. In this case, enslavement
resulted from the feet that the armies of African states conducted military
operations against their neighbors. It may be that African states waged
war to acquire slaves, and there is some evidence that at least some wars
were conducted for that purpose alone. Some of the warfare in the
Senegambian region involved raids that appear to have been more con-
cerned with obtaining loot (including slaves) than with other objectives.
The cycle of wars between Kaarta and Segu in the interior of the Upper
Guinea region in the late eighteenth century might thus be seen as a series
of extended slave raids rather than as wars for aggrandizement, strategic
position, or commercial advantage.
Warfare was more or less endemic in the world of this period, and to
reduce all African wars to simple slave raids would be incorrect. Many wars
were waged concomitant to the rise of larger states. The history of the early
slave trade from central Africa, for example, shows that many slaves were
taken from wars linked to expansion of the kingdom of Kongo and its
southern neighbor, Ndongo. The kingdom of Benin was also in the process
of expansion in the first half of the sixteenth century when it exported
slaves. The emergence of Oyo, Dahomey, and Asante, and their territorial
expansion in the late seventeenth and early to mid-eighteenth century, also
resulted in wars in which people were captured and exported. The emer-
gence of the central African kingdoms of Viye, Mbailundu, and Lunda in
the mid- to late eighteenth century similarly resulted in lengthy wars.
In all of these cases, however, the process of expansion was part of a
larger, complex, and multifaceted political environment, and in no case
were the wars simply the triumphant march of an overwhelming army.
The emergence of Kongo, for example, involved the knitting together of
several allied provinces, war against their neighbors, occasional defense
against neighboring state incursions, and suppression of rebellion in other
regions. Even much of the warfare in the development of the Portuguese
colony in Angola was conducted to take strategic areas, suppress rebel-
lions, or engage in the politics of succession, as much as to take slaves.
Both Asante and Dahomey emerged in complex multistate politics
through warfare that was both offensive and defensive as they contended
with their neighbors and rivals. In Asante, these rivals were Akwamu,
Denkyira, and the Fante Confederation; for Dahomey, they included
Allada, Whydah, Popo, then Oyo, and the Nago and Mahi states. The
politics of state building involved setbacks and defeats as well as victories.
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88 JohnK. Thornton
This pattern of war and its resulting enslavement is best demonstrated
by the situation of Dahomey, which many contemporary observers argued
was a state dedicated to slave raiding. A detailed survey of Dahomey's late
eighteenth-century wars - conducted by Lionel Absom, an English factor
(merchant representing a company) resident at Whydah and married to a
local woman — augmented by recent research shows that Dahomey's mili-
tary record was a checkered one. Only about one-third of its military op-
erations were unqualified successes, which resulted in the capture of thou-
sands of slaves. Another third were bloody draws in which Dahomey took
few of its objectives and captured few, if any, slaves. In the other third,
Dahomey suffered defeat and sometimes heavy loss, in which the erstwhile
victim of a Dahomian slave raid/war was able to sell Dahomian captives to
European factors. Clearly, Dahomey was not a pariah state that lived by
continuously successful slave raiding against weaker neighbors. Rather,
one must understand Dahomey's wars in terms of its larger state aims,
especially a long-standing attempt to extend its control to the northern
areas, and the successful resistance of those whom it tried to take over.
In other cases, civil wars within states were the cause of military action
that involved the enslavement of people. The Kongo civil wars, which
went on sporadically from the end of the seventeenth century to the early
nineteenth century, had their causes rooted in deep-seated political rival-
ries between factions of the royal family, and they resulted in considerable
enslavement. The Benin civil wars of the late seventeenth and early eigh-
teenth century were also rooted in the domestic politics of the state but
resulted in a rash of enslavement.
Civil wars not only caused substantial enslavement through the opera-
tions of armies connected with rivals for state power; they also resulted
in a decrease in internal order, which loosed bands of raiders and in-
creased the ability of criminal elements to undertake raids against small
villages and travelers. This was clearly the result of the civil war in
eighteenth-century Kongo, where political rivalry, raiding, and crime
were inextricably intertwined.
Whatever the causes, however, the slave trade had a considerable demo-
graphic impact on Africa. Various scholars have attempted to match the
increasingly detailed and accurate information on the number, age, and
sex of slaves shipped to the Americas on European craft against estimated
African populations. While methodological assumptions vary, and we are
still some distance from having all the relevant demographic data for
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African Background to American Colonization 89
Africa analyzed, the first results show that African population size and
structure was affected by the loss of people through the slave trade.
IMPACT OF THE SLAVE TRADE
The most successful attempts to estimate African population loss examine,
as closely as possible, the number of slaves shipped out from a number of
carefully defined regions. It is obvious from the preliminary results that
the demographic impact varied considerably, both in time and space.
Upper Guinea probably suffered the least, since it had a fairly dense
population and a relatively small export of slaves. Lower Guinea shipped
many more slaves, but its very dense population kept the overall demo-
graphic impact from being too great. Angola and central Africa, on the
other hand, exported very large numbers of people from the least densely
populated region of Atlantic Africa and suffered, as a result, the greatest
demographic damage.
The nature of the demographic change involved, first, an absolute loss
of population, although most often the regional impact was a lowering of
the rate of population increase rather than an absolute decline. Neverthe-
less, short-term declines were noted in some regions for periods as long as
40 or 50 years, especially in the late eighteenth century when slave exports
reached their peak.
A second impact was the change in the age and sex structure of the
population. Export slaves were drawn from quite specific age and sex
groups: adults of the age group 18-35 were overwhelmingly favored, and,
in general, male slaves outnumbered females by roughly two to one in the
trade as a whole. While the age structure of the export slaves was stable
over most of the period, the sex ratios varied widely (but rarely did females
actually outnumber males).
The results of such long-term losses are well illustrated by late-
eighteenth-century Angola, probably the worst effected by the slave trade
(as well as being the best-documented area). Other regions of Africa
probably suffered similar changes, although it is unlikely that they were as
pronounced as in central Africa. In Angola, Portuguese censuses reported
that the adult population was substantially smaller in proportion to the
population of children than one would expect from underlying birth and
mortality schedules. This resulted in an adverse dependency ratio, which
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90 John K. Thornton
meant that the needs of attending to a dependent (generally juvenile)
population lowered the amount of production available for investment.
In addition to the adverse dependency ratio, there was an imbalance in
the sex ratio among adults. Angolan data suggest that women outnum-
bered men in the adult age group by more than two to one. One probable
result of these imbalances was the development of widespread polygamy,
but it may have had other, as yet undetected, impacts on family structure
as well as the sexual division of labor.
Moreover, the effects of the population change took place over a long
period of time, so it is quite likely that slaves who departed Africa in
the eighteenth century came from societies that were quite different
demographically from those in existence a century earlier. Insofar as
other elements of the culture were affected by demographic structure,
these changes may even have had an impact on the way in which the
American community of Africans developed and altered their own cul-
tural institutions.
The demographic changes described above were generated by a model
using rather simple assumptions about the nature of the slave trade and
initial African population — buttressed, for later periods, by actual demo-
graphic data. But the peculiar demography of precolonial Africa probably
cannot be explained solely in terms of the Atlantic slave trade. Along with
the movement of slaves to the Atlantic coast, there was considerable
movement of people as slaves within Africa and military losses resulting
from warfare that had only a partial (if any) connection with the slave trade
overseas, as well as other population movements. The fact that the Ango-
lan census reports almost equal imbalances among the free population as
among the slaves suggests that this region (specifically the deep hinterland
of Luanda) was losing male population relative to females due to military
losses and other causes, not only because of slave selling. The sex ratio may
also have been affected by the import of females from further inland.
Thus, in central Africa, population in some areas grew rapidly, as it did
in the central highlands in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centu-
ries, while other areas were largely depopulated, as were the regions east of
the Kwango in the nineteenth century. The transfer of women in childbear-
ing ages from one area and one society to another within Africa could have
had dramatic impacts on population sizes and structures.
Such transfers of population in conjunction with the demands of local
African slave markets, and following the development of the African
domestic economy, can be seen in Upper Guinea (especially Senegambia)
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African Background to American Colonization 91
as well as in Angola. Thus, if imbalanced sex ratios were caused by gains
of women (imported as slaves in the Angolan central highlands in this
period) rather than losses of men (shipped overseas), the overall impact
might be rapid population growth even with unbalanced sex ratios and
adverse dependency ratios. The central highlands experienced considerable
economic growth in this period. Thus, it is difficult to generalize about
the overall effects of the slave trade, even at a regional level, and even
more so at the more local level.
The impact of the export of slaves may also have affected African
development in ways other than the strictly demographic. Some histori-
ans, following the lead of Walter Rodney, speak of the transformation of
slavery, and indeed of African society, as a result of supplying such a large
number of slaves to external buyers. For example, the tendency to alter
law and custom in order to create more crimes punishable by enslavement,
and then to use corrupt methods to entrap people in the legal process, may
well have altered relations between social groups and especially between
people and the legal system. Likewise, the number of people enslaved in
Africa may have grown as a result of the larger number of people captured
and transported through the demands of the export market. Finally, the
level of exploitation of lower classes in general and slaves in particular may
have increased.
These suggestions are difficult to evaluate. In many cases, we do not
know enough about African society before the export slave trade to be able
to speak authoritatively about such matters. For example, it is difficult to
determine what proportion of the African population was enslaved at any
point prior to the nineteenth century and, thus, to judge the impact of
exporting slaves on the number of slaves held in Africa. Finally, the
discipline of African history is just beginning to unravel the complexities
of African social, diplomatic, and constitutional history, but it is unlikely
that all the changes in these fields can be traced back to the impact of the
slave trade.
It is important to keep in mind, however, that African political leaders
and merchants played the most important role in determining the level of
the slave trade. Europeans rarely could exert direct influence on them,
although their willingness to buy thousands of people was a powerful
indirect influence. Virtually all European positions in Africa were held at
the discretion of African rulers; African political authorities determined
where and when exchanges would take place and even played a major part
in determining prices.
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92 John K. Thorntdn
FROM AFRICA TO AMERICA
The thousands of slaves who left African shores for American destinations
followed complex shipping routes to various American ports. Each Ameri-
can region received a different mixture of people from the various export-
ing regions of Africa; thus, the cultural and social experience of Africans
varied in different parts of the American world at different times. Portu-
guese shipping, which supplied Brazil, for example, drew an overwhelm-
ing number of slaves from central Africa and a relatively restricted region
of Lower Guinea in the eighteenth century, while in the seventeenth
century, Angolan sources were even more pronounced and complemented
by limited numbers of slaves from Upper Guinea. French captains drew
relatively little on the Gold Coast but focused much more attention on the
Slave Coast (around Whydah especially) and Angola, with Senegambia as a
relatively small component.
English shippers, on the other hand, drew their slaves from all parts of
Africa, although after 1750, they focused their attention on the Bight of
Biafra especially (including Whydah). Angola, however, always attracted
English attention. Generally, around one-quarter and sometimes more of
the people that the English purchased as slaves came from this region.
Table 2.3 shows the major African sources of slaves imported into the
British West Indies and North America during the eighteenth century. It
is a good indicator of the regional origins of the African component of the
population of English-speaking America.
These different patterns were the product of commercial organizations
in Europe, the specifics of relations with various African suppliers, and the
competition among Europeans for access to various ports. The regional
origins of the American slave population were not just a product of the
trading patterns of the metropolitan suppliers — some colonies changed
hands often and were thus variously supplied by official shipments. More-
over, both legal and clandestine slave traders of various nations introduced
slaves into the colonies of other American colonizers. Thus, New York was
originally supplied by Dutch slavers, then English. Louisiana had Span-
ish, French, and American suppliers. The English companies sent thou-
sands of slaves to Spanish America but smuggled many slaves into the
French Caribbean colonies as well. Dutch captains, though never com-
manding the bulk of the slave trade, often supplied countries other than
their own colony of Surinam.
As can be seen from Table 2.3, sometimes these conditions resulted in
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African Background to American Colonization
93
Table 2.3. Regional origins of slaves in English-speaking America, 1700-1800
Senegambia
Sierra Leone
Gold Coast
Bight of Benin
Bight of Biafra
Angola
Senegambia
Sierra Leone
Gold Coast
Bight of Benin
Bight of Biafra
Angola
Senegambia
Sierra Leone
Gold Coast
Bight of Benin
Bight of Biafra
Angola
Whole
12.1
22.6
18.4
11.7
12.9
22.4
6.6
18.8
11.1
7.3
41.4
14.4
0.8
15.3
10.7
0.8
43.8
28.6
As Percentage of Imports
Jamaica
ca.
10.5
16.1
34.8
30.5
1.6
7.5
ca.
6.7
16.5
39.0
13.8
25.1
5.1
ca.
2.7
6.0
8.1
0.0
48.6
34.6
South Carolina
1700
8.1
0.0
9.5
0.0
4.8
77.4
1750
32.0
8.4
37.9
13.8
0.7
18.0
1800
1.9
5.1
31.2
0.0
3.4
56.7
Virginia
4.0
1.0
20.0
0.0
60.0
5.0
15.4
0.0
28.6
0.0
39.4
16.7
Sources and notes: British trade as a whole based on Richardson, "Slave Exports," Table 5, p.
13; Jamaica based on Curtin, Atlantic Slave Trade, Table 46, p. 160; South Carolina based on
William Pollitzer, "A Reconsideration of the Sources of the Slave Trade to Charleston, S.C.,"
as Table 4 in Holloway, Africanisms, p.7; and Virginia based on Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves,
Table 34, p. 322. There is considerable fluidity in coastal designation in all these categories,
especially the Windward Coast, which is probably the Gold Coast in most accounts (and has
been so merged in compiling these tables) - see Jones and Johnson, "Slaves from the
Windward Coast" - but is also sometimes in Sierra Leone. Likewise, many lists and
documents do not distinguish clearly between Bight of Benin and Bight of Biafra.
widely varying mixes of slaves reaching different colonies at the same
time. While the data on the North American slaves leave much to be
desired, even if they are only generally accurate, they show wide dispari-
ties. Note, for example, the extreme predominance of Angola slaves in
early South Carolina, and their relative absence in Virginia; while Bight of
Biafra slaves were noticeable in Virginia, they were scarcely imported into
South Carolina.
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94 John K. Thornton
This vast migration of people — the largest intercontinental migration
in history up to its time - helped to shape the demography and culture of
the Americas. It also linked the two hemispheres through the constant
economic interaction necessary to continue the commerce and, with it,
cultural contacts as well. Europe influenced Africa as its merchants came
to African ports and its diplomats established relations with African rul-
ers, and Africa influenced America through the steady stream of popula-
tion to American shores. African history has been important in the devel-
opment of the history of the Atlantic basin for this reason. Since Africans
controlled their end of this trade, it was influenced by events in Africa's
development. Insofar as history shaped the culture of African people, it
also shaped the culture of Americans, both those from Africa and those
from other continents.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE EUROPEAN BACKGROUND
E. L. JONES
I N WHAT SENSE DI D EUROPEAN
ORI GI NS MATTER?
Originally the colonial American economy was constructed from European
materials. It cannot be questioned that the predominant influence among
the European traits was British, or more accurately English, and that until
the War of Independence this became ever more firmly established. The
admixture of other Europeans does not gainsay this fact, even though their
role has been played down in a literature of early Americana that is
inordinately concerned with the Pilgrim Fathers. The other major influ-
ences on what became a Euro-American way of life were the distant
location of the colonies, together with their lavish resource endowment,
and the slowly fading aboriginal culture.
The Native Americans had been present since prehistory, and the uses
they had made of the land created capital improvements subsequently
taken over by the immigrants from across the ocean. These "capital works"
included cleared openings in the forest cover; burning to produce browse
for their prey, the deer, thus encouraging sprout hardwoods, reducing fire-
sensitive species (especially the understory); introducing from farther
south crop plants like maize; and pioneering tracks and pathways. There
were hundreds of semipermanent Indian villages in the northeast of the
future United States, some with up to 150 acres cleared for crops and
larger areas ecologically modified for hunting.
This was no longer a land of dense, unbroken forest. The benefit to
small, struggling settlements was undoubtedly great. It has been sug-
gested that it would have taken a generation to produce the clearings that
95
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96 E. L.Jones
the Puritans found ready-made. Competition for existing openings was
often what brought whites and Indians into conflict, despite both being
such low-density populations. The voluntary immigrants of recent centu-
ries, their equipment and capital, tools, techniques, institutions, and
"invisible baggage," the back-home market for their exports, were each
and every one of them European. Only their slaves were not. Yet appear-
ances may blind us to the deeper processes which decided the nature of the
American economic system. Although observation tells us that colonial
settlement was Anglo-American, or at any rate Euro-American, and that a
cousinhood has persisted to the present, the American colonies held up a
distorted mirror to the old country - or old countries.
Observation does not tell us why certain features rather than others
crossed the Atlantic, why some began to fade almost as soon as they got
there, why others survived, or why they combined in novel ways. If we
confine ourselves to tracing origins - that is, to a genetic approach - we
miss the underlying dynamic or structural forces that help to explain why
at any given time things were as they were. No one will overlook the
extent to which a new geography and different factor proportions (relative
quantities of land, labor, and capital) changed economic relationships, but
it is possible to neglect the fact that more subtle forces altered the mix.
These forces are vital to an understanding of why some elements in the
economic system were path-dependent when others, and the mix as a
whole, were original to America.
While the case for examining the English, British, and European back-
ground is undoubted, we also need to recognize that colonial Americans
were faced with opportunities to select from more than one social tool-kit
and to create new approaches of their own. It can scarcely be over-
emphasized how easily that fact is obscured by the continued presence of
so many European features, mostly English ones, some of them truly
ancient in their essence. The translocation of these elements remains, of
course, the place to start.
The initial settlement of New England may even be conceived as a
renewal of far earlier efforts by Europeans to expand the area under their
control. For instance, it is sometimes said that the trans-Atlantic migra-
tion was a continuation or fresh episode of a land-hungry movement that
included the Crusades. This depends on playing down the religious mo-
tives of the Crusaders. Economic historians are liable to give the impres-
sion of treating any and every activity as motivated by material concerns.
Unwary ones do indeed write as if other motives were disguises for the
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The European Background 97
profit motive. In reality, most are merely paying the attention their
profession demands to the large material component and enormous mate-
rial consequences of territorial gains, without intending to deny that other
motivations exist.
An economic element was certainly present in the rather direct carry-
over of Spanish arms to Mexico after the "Reconquista." Islamic power had
been ousted from the Iberian peninsula, but both Spain and Portugal
realized that they could not hope to conquer Moorish North Africa. Their
shift in focus to Central America was a deflection of reconquest energies.
Economic motives were present even in the settlement of Massachusetts:
preference falsification cannot be ruled out among the inhabitants of a
theocracy and may indeed be implied by moral backsliding; many settlers
were Anglicans rather than Puritans; besides which the London merchant
backers were certainly interested in the repayment of their loans. In any
case, whatever the inspiration, the material consequences were enormous.
It is not too fanciful to accept that what we are seeing with respect to
North America was, in long perspective, a resumption of the westward
Germanic movement that had dissolved the Roman empire and brought
the Saxons to England. That migration had created the kingdoms within
England, where the Saxons paused for one thousand years and more until
they leapt across the Atlantic in the early seventeenth century. The techni-
cal level of production of seventeenth-century Europeans was probably not
very much more developed than in Saxon times, although, compared with
the Native Americans, the successful adoption of arable farming as the
universal basis of life greatly raised the productivity of the land and the
population it could support. Ironically enough, this was achieved partly
through incorporating a local crop, maize. The practical result was a rapid
growth of the white settler population, proof against Indian assault de-
spite a serious threat during King Philip's war. The trans-Atlantic mi-
grants were often farmers; those who were not had to turn to farming -
they did so gladly enough where land was plentiful. For a long time, the
sectoral division of labor was much less marked than in the metropolitan
country.
Admittedly, there were differences from earlier movements within Eu-
rope. Whereas in Viking times ships and navigation were already adequate
for skirting along the shores of the north Atlantic, weapons technology
was scarcely up to maintaining a foothold. The Iron-Age Vikings in
Vinland had been unable to hold out against the native "Skraelings" with
their Stone-Age weapons. By the time of the Pilgrim Fathers, guns had
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98 E. L.Jones
been adopted. Whether or not the native Indians were mainly defeated by
European diseases which, somehow, the Vikings had not brought, powder
and shot gave the Puritans an enormous additional advantage.
The Puritans and other immigrant groups were impelled by a religious
ideology scarcely conceivable to the modern agnostic mind and absent
during either the Viking excursion or the original Saxon invasion of Brit-
ain. A strong ideological sense of purpose was a great support. But the
Puritans dominate the literature more than they dominated historical
reality; other English migrants, especially the second or younger sons of
the landed gentry who because of primogeniture would not inherit their
fathers' estates, had more prosaic motives for their move. Thus the
Salopian Col. Richard Lee, ancestor of Robert E. Lee, who emigrated in
1640, proudly claimed descent from a Saxon family rather than from some
upstart supporter of the Conqueror. Political discontent at home and the
magnet of land were push and pull.
During the centuries since the Saxon invasion, the rustic English had
considerably increased their involvement in the market and refined their
institutions for regulating it. In England they had become accustomed to
a less wooded environment than in continental Europe. They had cleared
the oak forest for farms, as they would do again and again in America. In
general they had avoided the Romano—British settlements in England,
making clearings of their own, although adopting some of the originally
prehistoric routeways. This reluctance to usurp existing "capital-in-land"
was rare among invaders and may have been because Celtic populations
were much denser than those later met in America (smallpox dealt the
Indians a savage blow).
Despite some differences, the discovery, exploration, and settlement of
North America can thus be interpreted as a giant step in the old land-
hungry game of probing at the edges of the Saxon world. The populations
of Europe had long been checked in the north by ice, in the south and east
by other peoples. Even on the western fringes the compressed remnants of
the Celtic cultures still held sway at the end of the Middle Ages. Repeated
attempts to expand finally exploded in the least likely direction, across the
broad, open ocean. Once the great divide of the Atlantic had been robbed
of its worst terrors, the impetus to acquire more land took on new life.
Puritan ideology merely reduced some of the psychic costs, while powder
and shot cut some of the real ones. More rhetorically, Chamberlain's
formulation of imperial federation in 1897 referred to "the all-Saxon
home." Although by then the United States had long since defected, there
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The European Background 99
had been a genuine as well as a spurious Saxon cast to England's overseas
expansion.
Some of the original West Country Puritan migrants of 1630 soon
moved on from Massachusetts to Connecticut, then dispersed again within
a very few years. In later times, their descendants took part in the west-
ward movement across the United States. Among them was the Maverick
family, which came from the line of the rector of Beaworthy in Devon; it
was a descendant who reached Texas in the nineteenth century and gave
the family name the modern connotation. The Southern frontier of the
Scotch-Irish may be seen as continuing the violent expansion that had
taken place in Britain, renewed in the Western Isles and Ulster under
Elizabeth I, as well as under James VI of Scotland and the same king when
he became James I of England. The carry-over to New England and
Virginia was very direct, even to the involvement of some of the main
personalities on both sides of the Atlantic.
We could speculate about other pasts — non-European options - for
North America. Had that continent been settled by others, say the Islamic
Moors of the western Mediterranean, the resultant economy would have
looked different. They would have brought other living entourages and
modes of economic organization. They would have brought different
forms of political organization, with their own implications for levels of
productivity and the distribution of income. In any event, it is "to En-
gland that we owe this elevated rank we possess," said de Crevecoeur,
"these noble appellations of freeman, freeholders, citizens; yes, it is to that
wise people we owe our freedom. Had we been planted by some great
monarchy, we should have been mean slaves of some distant monarch."
Many world cultures were expansionary: although we shall not pursue it
more explicitly, a thought-experiment on the likely behavior of other
colonists is what is needed as a control against which to assess the actual
behavior of the English and Europeans in the New World. We certainly
need to take a broad approach where what we are discussing is the estab-
lishment in uncharted territory of an entire economic system, wrapped
round with its own sociopolitical system, where nothing so elaborate had
ever existed before. The immigrants did not merely bring their tools and
methods, their institutions and laws — that is, everything on the supply
side — they brought their own tastes, too, and thus a demand side which
introduced and was likely to perpetuate Europeanness.
Even had the French or Spaniards prevailed over the British in North
America, the structure of the economy would surely have been different. It
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ioo E. L.Jones
would have been encased in a more rigid polity, with weaker supply bases
and less eager markets across the ocean to back it up. The factor propor-
tions of the American continent would have distorted the European nature
of the settler economy, as they did British settlement, but they would not
have obliterated all the Absolutist tendencies of mainland European gov-
ernments. They did not in Canada.
The foregoing statement represents a limited measure of agreement that
history matters, that what happened in America was path-dependent. The
view expresses disbelief that the environment of the New World could
transform any settlement into something unheard of among human soci-
eties or disguise its particular origins. New attributes emerged, to be sure,
perhaps different ratios of the old personality types - "who is this new
man, the American?" — but the factual importance of starting English is
demonstrable. As in biological evolution, there was a Founder Effect.
History ran controlled experiments to show what difference this made,
most pointedly the Iberian colonization of Central and South America.
Such experiments do not replicate the exact environment of North Amer-
ica, but they come close enough to be persuasive.
However, beginning English was not quite a sufficient determinant of
what America would become. The classification fails in at least three ways.
First, Englishness is too general. Regions within England (let alone Brit-
ain or Europe) differed from one another ecologically and in economic
organization. A large literature attempts to trace transplanted regional
complexes of social life and farming system.
Second, the English economy was not the same seed-bed at successive
periods. Over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it changed to an
unprecedented extent. Although it has sometimes been suggested that
what America offered was space to persist in the old ways, unthreatened by
later changes in the metropolitan world - in other words, to reproduce an
idealized version of the life where one came from - anything that later
waves of immigrants brought, the fashions they spoke of, could still be
adopted. Contact with the host culture never completely stopped. The
backwoods was not a time capsule. The incipient Balkanization projected
by "Franklinia" and one or two other jurisdictions conceived after the
Revolution across the Appalachians in the "Caintuck" was defeated by the
transportation improvements of the canal age, imported from industrializ-
ing Britain. The Erie Canal soon tied the interior to the East and hence to
Europe. America, even western America, could never cut itself off com-
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The European Background 101
pletely from the permanent normality of change in the whole Atlantic
economic system.
Third, the colonies as they progressed from wilderness to civilization
themselves changed even faster in some respects than the originating
society. After all, they started from an undeveloped base.
Nothing so far said grapples closely enough with the ultimate question
about the English, British, and European background: in what sense did it
really matter? The surface record - the factual history - is unequivocal.
England, Britain, and Europe were the "onlie (direct) begetters" of the
economic apparatus transplanted; they were the sine qua non of the devel-
oping economy in America. Their legacy, continually supplemented with
borrowings, persisted into the life of the independent United States and to
some extent continues, although the signal is weaker and there is more
noise today.
Early in the nineteenth century, Chancellor James Kent of New York
observed wryly that the Acts of Congress which regulated shipping trades
and fisheries in 1792 and 1793 corresponded with the British statutes as
they had been applied under George III. Despite constant grumbling
about the English admiralty and prize courts in the years leading up to the
War of 1812, the law as practiced in those courts was rapidly and com-
pletely adopted by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The direct heritage of regulation, productive method, and European
taste has been demonstrated in detail by several authors. Despite a general
forgetfulness in America about the English past and reverence for the fresh
start apparently implied when a written constitution was adopted in
1789, such scholars proclaim that antiquity need not mean irrelevance. It
has even been proposed that the successful ethnic groups among the
colonists were ones whose farming systems were "preadapted" by the
similarity of the ecology of their homelands to the districts they settled.
The supporting evidence seems rather to be of some settlements that did
fail in a seemingly incongruent landscape; whether the reasons were eco-
logical is a matter of opinion.
The preadaptation argument is an extreme statement of the significance
of the European background: move to an ecologically strange locality and
fail. It implies no melting pot and no cultural malleability, points that are
at once contradicted by the fact that, having failed, migrants could and
did switch to the methods of groups from other homelands. Ethnic com-
munities seldom died out in the wilderness, although surprisingly many
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102 E. L.Jones
settlements were physically abandoned. However, success and continuity
are much more evident, most strikingly in the persisting folkways and
splendidly tidy horse husbandry of the Amish people in Lancaster County,
Pennsylvania. Theirs is the polar case, an antiquated society scarcely
matched in modern Europe itself.
The case for a path-dependent economic history of colonial America
seems unassailable. The importance of the European background seems
certain. In particular, English, or at any rate British, people had re-
created what was to almost all intents and purposes a new set of British-
like localities overseas, trading with the home regions; corresponding with
home about business, religion, science, and government, slower at receiv-
ing the mails but often eager to hear about metropolitan fashions; some-
what insulated by higher transport costs but never cut off.
The dominating Englishness, or more broadly Europeanness, of colonial
America can surely have no explanation other than the power of its ori-
gins. However, on reflection, this is reminiscent of the "blind watch-
maker" fallacy, in which the intricacy of nature, from spiders through
penguins to giraffes, was assumed to require the explanation of a grand
design, until the advent of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. A
Darwinian-style explanation can be introduced in the present case. What
it says is not that America remained English because England is where it
began, but that Englishness survived only as long as adverse selective
pressures were not strong enough to alter it. The fact that the colonists did
not seek to incur the costs of change if no benefits were apparent does not
mean that they could and would not change their ways when this was
necessary or profitable. Meanwhile, the known ways were comfortable,
and there was cultural reinforcement through links with the homeland.
Rules were set up that seemed to Anglicize the economic organization
of America from the start. The market connection and continued stream of
immigrants protected the links. But what was done may best be seen as
the choice of a least-cost solution, not an adamantine necessity. Part of the
choice meant differences rather than similarity. Within one generation,
the English village had become the New England village, with new
materials and new layout, despite some remaining similarities.
The process was adaptation, not mimicry, but then the immigrants
were never a representative sample of the English, and they no longer lived
in an English setting. Voluntary immigrants were a self-selected group,
and involuntary ones were hardly a cross-section of the population either.
The former were often extruded by economic distress, political distur-
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The European Background 103
bance, and lack of religious freedom. Migrants were never those who had
been wholly satisfied with England, nor those who had succeeded best
there or knuckled under soonest. The cavaliers were remounted in Vir-
ginia after they had been dismounted in England. The North Carolina
Highlanders, who had left after the 'Forty-five Rebellion, were most
decidedly those whose faces did not fit. Men like that were so atypical of
society in Britain that it is almost surprising how British America was to
remain amidst all its novel variety.
In New England, especially, there was no truck with manorialism or the
establishment of an hereditary landed aristocracy. Although a number of
common fields survived for a long time in Massachusetts, they were
sometimes cleared and tilled for the first year only. By and large, individ-
ual landownership was the rule from the outset. Even with communalism,
each holding's home paddock was usually sizable, much bigger than in
England, big enough for subsistence. Where common fields appear in the
landscape of eighteenth-century Massachusetts they were sometimes re-
creations, emphasizing the aspect of choice from a menu of institutions
rather than an automatic transfer. In the South, great wealth immediately
established itself on plantations — but not personal titles. By the time of
Independence, a greater equality of wealth and income than in the old
country demonstrated the benefits of a few generations spent accumulat-
ing capital in the colonies more than it reflected titular advantage.
England could not maintain full control over distant colonies occupied
by men who sometimes thought themselves truer Englishmen, reverting
to older ways or deliberately concerned with planting the New Jerusalem,
the City on a Hill. Even in Virginia, the laws were versions of English law
adapted to new circumstances, which included a scarcity of men with legal
training. Law and order were seen as necessary to the conduct of business
and essential if further immigrants with skill and capital were to be
attracted, but this did not mean and could not mean unchanged law or an
exact replica of the English legal apparatus.
Learned, then, from handbooks and faced with unexpected difficulties
like Indian attack, the law began to alter. Its English origin is obvious, but
the change of form is obvious, too: Latin and French vanished from the
courtroom. Elements of substance changed as well. Americans were not
"born free," but they did manage to discard some ancient English exactions.
Massachusetts soon abolished heriots, reliefs, and escheats. Whereas the
poor in England had been disarmed and no one worth less than £100 per
annum could possess a gun, the Indian threat in Virginia meant that adult
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104 E. L.Jones
males were soon required by law to own gun, powder, and ammunition.
There, what in England would have been quite minor courts took on wide
powers. Increasingly, legislative initiatives flowed up from the burgesses.
The West Country Pilgrims ran their colonies through what were in
effect Dorset and Somersetshire J.P.s sitting in Quarter Sessions. Enforce-
ment lay in the hands of officers who were, like the town officers of
Dorchester, Beaminister, or Crewkerne, clerks of weights and measures,
leather sealers, way wardens. The stuff of economic regulation was cer-
tainly English but collapsed into simpler forms with more authority at
local levels.
The borrowings continued through time, and not merely via new immi-
gration. Personal connections and pen friends remained. As an instance,
members of the Wolcott family, clothiers from Wellington in Somerset,
revisited England for decades. The colonies and the home country, what-
ever the frictions, operated with substantially the same information pool.
Understandably, more ideas flowed westward than eastward across the
Atlantic, from the more populous home country to the little colonies. Yet
the American resource endowment - meaning, above all, more abundant
land — besides the distance from government in London, fear of the Indi-
ans, and the presence of other European nationals, meant new problems
and possibilities. Americans borrowed, but they also substituted and
invented.
From England came everything up to and including the jointed wooden
dolls clad in the Season's Parisian dress fashion, which in the eighteenth
century reached as far away as Boston. The flow eventually included even
virtual industrial spies, such as the renegade Samuel Slater, bursting with
desire to tell the Browns of Providence, R.I., how to make a water-
powered Arkwright's cotton-spinning machine like his employer's in
Derbyshire.
Much that America borrowed or retained from its English past was
trivial. There were other ways of living than English ones, but in the
absence of compulsion or enticing alternatives, they would be the ones to
prevail and persist. Why should other Europeans not adopt the English
language and ways unless they happened to settle in distinct localities of
their own? Even then they would at last find overwhelming advantages in
speaking English. Despite this, some of the seemingly English solutions
mutated beneath their reassuringly familiar names and labels. As with the
law, colonial ways were sometimes fresh responses to new problems, in-
cluding those induced by different factor proportions. Still others were old
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The European Background 105
solutions to old problems, invented anew. Colonial life, including eco-
nomic life, emerged from a swirl of possibilities in which the large English
component only seems assured because there was usually no special reason
for it not to be.
Nothing seems culturally more tenacious than dietary preference, yet
the Puritans swiftly adopted maize and started to experiment with squash
and pumpkins. Later, the theocratic authority of the preachers themselves
was eroded when their real incomes fell in a great inflation and they turned
to supplement their pay and dilute their energies with other occupations.
Social relationships in New England were not so fixed as to index the
earnings of clerics.
The idea that the culture of the Scotch-Irish was transferred unchanged
to the colonies is part of the case that the folkways of Britain were
replicated. Preadaptationism seems improbably fortunate if the same prac-
tices that gave the Scotch-Irish only a marginal living in Britain were
secretly readying them to thrive in resource-abundant America. Moreover,
the case for continuity is weakened because, while celebrating what was
retained, it neglects what was discarded and contains no intrinsic means of
telling which was which. The Scotch-Irish clung to the cramped dimen-
sions of the houses they used to build at home where good building timber
had been scarce. That they persisted with the same dimensions when they
had no need to stint themselves among the tall timber of the backwoods is
taken as evidence of path-dependence: in reality, they modified their ways
enough to copy corner timbering from the Germans in Pennsylvania and
to invent the dog-trot house, which was two houses of the old size under a
single roof. In terms of function, if not of form, this suggests adaptability
rather than continuity. That grin of the Cheshire cat, the retention of old
forms, has too readily been taken to imply the meaningful persistence of
European localisms.
The Scotch-Irish also eventually caused soil erosion by continuing their
old habit of plowing up and down hill instead of along the contours. Yet
they abandoned run-rig (in which the arable strips plowed by individuals
were scattered about separately). The American wilderness may not have
functioned in the diametrically opposite way envisaged by the Frontier
Thesis — as an "environmental grindstone, pulverizing the cultural attri-
butes that Europeans brought over" — but it did winnow them. When the
matter became urgent or when it self-evidently paid, settlers were willing
to change elements that might otherwise be taken as the very core of their
economic and social being. Much later, Americans could still be found
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106 E. L.Jones
borrowing from England, but they were actually selecting what suited
their book — for instance, the liberal ideas of the opposition rather than
the conservative notions of government in the lead-up to the War of
Independence.
In this way, conscious choices were made from the available, still
largely European, menu. The choices were more often unconscious. Ameri-
cans continued to behave like Europeans because that is what they had
been and conceived themselves still to be, especially as defined in opposi-
tion to the red man. Laws and institutions creaked within a mainly
English frame, which was obliged to adapt to new circumstances, al-
though it often seemed to do no more than create across the Atlantic an
array of regions mirroring those of the mother country. These variants
were like the syntheses of a playwright, catching the flavor but not the
substance of the originals.
The new American regions shared a frontier location. In British terms,
they were most like the Border Country. By the standards of lowland
England, the Scotch-Irish were indeed to assume a quite disproportionate
role in America. Nevertheless, older, economically more complex soci-
eties, East Anglian and West Country Puritan communities, Londoners,
and southern English gentry were now juxtaposed with the life of the
frontier. Contemplate transferring parts of the community from Suffolk,
London, or Dorset to Ulster, and one has, perhaps, a little of the flavor of
the experiment. The fact that no analogy completely fits acknowledges the
element of strangeness in the settlement of America, like dreaming of the
old country rather than remembering it.
Many processes contended to perpetuate or modify European forms.
Cultural regions have supposedly been identified as representing British or
European regions, ethnic enclaves with fossilized old-country systems of
farming and ways of life. Here the Amish stand out, although in general
the Middle Colonies exemplify another process, the simplification of Eu-
rope overseas, and the Amish would be exceptional anywhere. To English
eyes, trans-Atlantic cultural regions are sometimes faintly reminiscent of
districts at home, but the landscape as a whole is relatively undifferenti-
ated. American regions are typically large; the Pennsylvania Dutch coun-
try in Lancaster County is atypically small.
Regions of the United States, especially in the East, can thus appear like
parts of Britain or occasionally Europe, synthesized from ancestral tales. In
English, British, or European terms, a faint air of unreality must exist,
because before the seventeenth century the United States was not trans-
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The European Background 107
Atlantic Europe at all. Landscapes created at that date may have started
with a summary, implicit in their forms, of processes that had taken place
in the history of somewhere else. Not even an exile was going to re-create
the redundant detail of all past occupancies through which, as R.A.
Dodgshon described it in a memorable phrase, the seventeenth-century
English landscape had ghosted. American settlements were the Potemkin
villages of seventeenth-century England.
The propensity of the first effective settlement to make a durable im-
print even when new ethnic stock replaced the first-comers may have
produced a patchwork landscape comparable in some respects to that of
Europe, though never with Europe's variety. Yet the fact that streams of
immigrants came from known districts did not mean that the full richness
of Europe was represented. It was not. Many cultural influences collapsed
into a handful in the American setting. A classic example was where
English, German, and Scotch-Irish influences fused into a Pennsylvanian
economic style: the common law and the English language; the long rifle
from the Rhineland; the Conestoga wagon and Dutch barn, also both from
Germany; and whiskey, the Ulster cabin plan, potatoes, and the infield-
outfield method of hill farming from the Scotch-Irish. No single European
region could supply all these traits and tools; although this does not
guarantee that the mix was optimal, mixing there was.
The extent of mixing reinforces the point that, potentially and actually,
malleability underlay the observable British and European features.
Choice was possible. The European background mattered because the costs
of obtaining information about non-European possibilities would have
been enormous. Had they been as cheap, even these alternatives might
have been introduced piecemeal, as was the growing of Indian corn.
Admittedly, there would have been psychological resistance (which trans-
lates as high costs) to introducing complexes of such oddities en bloc.
There were always radicals and black sheep, innovators and entrepre-
neurs, but community norms and established old-country institutions
reinforced conventional behavior. For immigrants to what was largely a
cultural void, origins mattered more than they do now; migrants today are
entering an established American society whose commercialized mores are
hard to resist. In the past, Englishness might wear out for the American-
born but was constantly refashioned not simply by the authority of the
British crown and the pull of British markets but by the arrival of mi-
grants fresh from "home." Americans thought of themselves as Britons
living and working at a distance. Although after the 1760s this self-
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108 E. L.Jones
identification began to disappear from their rhetoric, they remained
Anglomorphs - people of whatever descent whose manner is English, or
at least English enough to distinguish them from their own ancestors.
Modes of running the economy were as much part of this assemblage as
any other traits.
The speed and extent of Americanization is a matter of judgment. Vari-
ous explanations of the nature of the economy exist. One is a nativist view,
which claims that the American environment, especially the frontier, cre-
ated "this new man, the American." Another is that frontier resources
created Atlantic capitalism as a whole, tying America to Europe. The next is
that Europe was for all practical purposes reestablished and re-created across
the ocean. Yet another is that new social forms, latent but suppressed in
Europe, flowered from European stock in the new environment.
The nativist school proclaims that the new setting created a novel Euro-
American culture. From the nativist position, the frontier reshaped all
relationships along lines made famous by Frederick Jackson Turner. In a
variant, Ellen Semple urged that, whereas cultural regions directly de-
scended from Europe did emerge up and down the East coast, things
changed with the westward movement. Once the pioneers had been si-
phoned through the bottlenecks of Appalachian passes like the Cumber-
land Gap, subsequent isolation hindered their access to coastal and of
course European markets, halted the establishment of landed estates, and
induced a western classlessness. But as Louis Hartz observed, the common
thread of the Frontier Thesis is that the land and the same novel society is
assumed to have been created by abundant land wherever it was occupied.
On the contrary, in his opinion, when we compare all the neo-Europes, or
even all the Thirteen Colonies, their common European origin becomes
clear. This exposes the inadequacy of the Frontier Thesis to explain the
ultimately European nature of America. Land and resources vary but not
enough to obscure the common origin, while the Frontier may explain the
scale but never the character of American life. Factor proportions models
do not account for the social structures that came to dominate in particular
frontier regions.
The main alternative to the nativist conception is not so much Hartzian
as a market-driven model of the core-periphery type favored long ago by
Walter Prescott Webb. In this formulation, interior America was indis-
solubly linked to Europe by trade. The link was not the creation of an
exploitative metropolis, whatever the Western resentment of east-coast
merchants. Rather, the primary cause of the rise of capitalism throughout
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The European Background 109
the western world was found in a resources boom created by the immensity
of cheap land. The Frontier Thesis is here turned on its head. Abundant
land ties America economically to Europe and makes the European back-
ground matter; it does not free Americans to be more than variants of
European, capitalistic man.
The nativist arguments apply best to the period of the frontier move-
ment after 1790. The greater divergence of American life after that date is
explicable as a result of a larger, more self-contained market, more immi-
grants of non-British stock, and greater average distances from any origi-
nal influence. It is easier to envisage the seaboard economies during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as European fragments, although
blurring, simplifying, and becoming more exempt from the complexities
and archaisms of England and Europe.
Whether one should be more surprised at the persistence of an English
essence than at the innovations is a little like asking whether a glass is
half-full or half-empty. In any event, the possibility exists that Britain and
America to a degree changed in tandem because they responded similarly
to similar circumstances. This is explicitly urged by Marxists who see the
law, for example, transformed in both countries in the nineteenth century
to meet the desires of industrial employers. Empirical work suggests that
this was not so, that the legal system as handed down was too tenacious to
allow a takeover by class-interest law. Perhaps there was little need.
Premodern legal attitudes were scarcely pro-labor. More broadly than just
the law, some of the persistent similarity between institutions and tech-
niques on either side of the Atlantic may well have been due to a similar
root-stock growing in substantially the same market soil.
"It is too clear to require the support of argument," proclaimed Chief
Justice Marshall, "that all contracts and rights, respecting property, re-
mained unchanged by the Revolution." How much more, then, had those
contracts and rights been English before Independence, down to the final
comma. Matters may have been a fraction different thereafter: "when the
people of the United Colonies separated from Great Britain, they changed
the form, but not the substance, of their government," said Chief Justice
Morrison Waite.
The debate between continuity and discontinuity may be summed up
by triaging the phenomena involved. At the first level, cultural phenom-
ena including house types, dialects, and the like often survived evoca-
tively. This need be no more than a "survival of the mediocre," not a
tribute to the optimality of British or European attributes.
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At a second level, economically important phenomena often give the
appearance of surviving, but may do so mainly as labels, without their full
original content and meaning. New World forces hollowed them out. Old
forms may have acquired a fresh but different content in Britain, since
Britain too continued to change. Thus we see that within an undeniably
descendant agrarian organization in America, content may have changed
with new crops adopted, such as maize (resisted in Britain). But in Brit-
ain, in came turnips (resisted in America).
At a third and more fundamental level, deep behaviors were undoubt-
edly transmitted and did persist: the work ethic, decentralized govern-
ment, a willingness to take public office, and a preference for independent
family forms rather than collectives. In addition to the similarity of com-
monplace cultural and institutional forms, it was this level that kept the
British and Americans as kissing cousins. Many of these attitudes had
profound economic significance.
ECONOMIC SYSTEMS
This section is a sketch of major components of the economic system of the
host culture of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. To appreciate
its significance in terms of what was and was not carried to North Amer-
ica, it should be read with colonial American economic history in mind.
By no means every feature from Britain was transported. Nevertheless, the
pieces from which a new jigsaw puzzle was put together in America,
recognizably a version of the old one, were the elements of British eco-
nomic life.
The literature of economic systems is highly stylized. It has been con-
cerned for a generation with contrasting the structures and performances
of the United States and the U.S.S.R. To a degree which must disturb any
economic historian, exercises of this kind have been made to depend on
freezing the frame — on selecting supposed equilibrium states (and dates)
from which individual items may be abstracted and compared. The ap-
proach relies crucially on the concept of closure - that is to say, on the
identification of fully matured economic systems, despite the fact that any
system continues to change over time.
When we turn to early modern Britain and Europe, we find that the
past generation of economic historians has shifted in the opposite direc-
tion, toward depicting the economy as in a nonequilibrium state. Because
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The European Background 111
the literature has sought, consciously or unconsciously, to assimilate the
late preindustrial period to the "relevant" period of the Industrial Revolu-
tion, it has perhaps gone to extremes in emphasizing change rather than
continuity. Compared with the descriptive, institutionalist focus of earlier
work, it has played down the substantial elements of custom and what (by
the standards of later periods in the same economies) were relatively
limited markets.
Much, perhaps everything, depends on the base period from which we
choose to view the past. Compared with medieval times, or with the great
empires that still dominated organized economic life over much of the rest
of populous Eurasia during the "early modern" centuries, the economies of
Europe, especially western Europe, and above all those of the United
Provinces and Britain, were abnormally mobile. Nevertheless, switching
to the vantage point of the end of the twentieth century, the changes were
slow enough for the frame to seem frozen.
Due allowance has also to be made for the complexity of regional
differences within Britain, as shown for instance by the multiplicity of
fine-grained vernacular architectural traditions. The British scene is
shot through like patterned silk with variety in everything from geol-
ogy to linguistics: strata and dialects change almost every ten miles.
Past economic life varied in detail from place to place, too. While it is
a matter of judgment what breaks we try to impose on its continua,
the categories are certain to be more numerous than in most countries.
It also has to be remembered that Americans drew items from the stock
of other traditions, from the Palatine barn to the Greek revival. The
establishment of colonial economies represented a shaking of the Euro-
pean kaleidoscope.
The account of the British background which follows is in four parts,
compiled from methods of analyzing economic systems: (i) modes of
coordination; (2) factors of production; (3) sectors of the economy; and (4)
evaluations of performance.
MODES OF COORDINATION
The mechanisms by which economies are coordinated are typically dis-
cussed under the headings of custom, command, and market. The last
comes first to the modern mind, but economic systems are not free-
floating and neither are markets self-enforcing. They are parts of the larger
social and political system, of society as a whole. This was more evident in
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the past when markets were less free of the influence of customary norms
or the dictates of rulers.
In Britain, the systems of control were already more mixed than almost
anywhere else in the world. The market was more accentuated than any-
where except in a few trading cities, of which the most prominent was
London's competitor, Amsterdam. The United Provinces were ahead of
England in developing a prosperous world trade. The difference was that
London had as its hinterland a nation-state with a larger population. It
manufactured a stronger economy than the Netherlands by integrating the
hinterland with its metropolitan market. England, later Britain, thus did
not remain a city-state with a rural tail but became the first widely
developed country.
Tasks were to some extent allocated, and investment and output were
determined, by individual responses to the signals of prices. Nonmarket
regulation by custom or the dictate of a government or ruler was not as
dominant in England as it had been in most places and periods of history.
Moreover, change was in the direction of extending the market, despite
the political turmoil of the mid-seventeenth century, which was connected
with the unsuccessful attempt of the Crown to turn back the clock.
Elements of routine, "vegetative" custom remained. They represented
the self-organization of small communities with limited trade, little con-
tact with anything like a central policy-making government, and a mainly
oral tradition. Such communities survive in the villages that still predomi-
nate in the Third World. Nonmarket allocations were made above all
within the household, allied to which many tasks continued to be deter-
mined on a basis of gender. Age was less of a criterion because children in
a poorer economy were usually put to work early, and in the absence of
regular nonfamily support in old age, the elderly were obliged to stay at
work.
The formative period of American colonialism corresponded with a time
in English history when the monasteries had already been dissolved and the
charitable role of the church had shrunk without a compensating rise in
secular welfare. The guilds were already beginning to lose their sway,
reducing the charitable protection of urban artisans. Inarticulately, growth
was starting to edge out welfare as the main consideration. It could be
argued that this was sensible given that risk was declining. Nevertheless, a
welfare gap opened.
Agriculture was much the largest industry by any measure. Here major
customary elements persisted in the shape of common-field farming,
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The European Background 113
whereby individual families farmed strips of land scattered about large
open fields. The most widely acknowledged explanation of this arrange-
ment is that it was a form of insurance. Formal insurance markets had
scarcely arisen in any sector; fire insurance, for example, only barely came
into bud after the Great Fire of London in 1666 and awaited the early years
of the next century to flower.
Whether or not the purpose of farming in common fields really was
insurance, it meant that in a wide central belt of the country from York-
shire to the south coast, community norms of husbandry restricted many
farmers from following price trends for profit. These rules reduced the
scope for innovativeness by setting village times for many operations.
They militated against the sowing of unfamiliar crops, since these could
be "fed off" by everybody's livestock in a common herd. The innovative
farmer could not hope to keep all the gains of his enterprise. While there
were more and more agreements or side-payments to permit the sowing of
small private plots in the common fields (and many enclosures had been
made from at least the fifteenth century), communal elements were still
predominant in this chief of all industries.
Viewed over two centuries or so, the British economy saw a distinct
waning of central command elements, disguised though this was by at-
tempted resumptions of power on the part of the Stuart kings and by the
long retention of the symbols of royal authority. Although as late as the
Civil War a few great lords still rode out at the head of their tenants on
private quarrels as well as the king's cause, strict feudalism had effectively
died long since. The cash nexus had supplemented and was replacing the
social bond. As trade increased and the merchant class grew in influence,
the central government showed greater concern with commercial policy.
In the shires, landlordism, concerned with rent rolls, was in the saddle,
though this does not mean that the energies of landowners or their stew-
ards were single-mindedly devoted to maximizing rents. Land remained
vitally important for a number of reasons: it offered the main route to
political power, social prestige, and preferred activities like hunting.
Although any starting date will bisect change, a simple way of looking
at the reduced role of nonmarket, political decision making is to start in
the fifteenth century with the Wars of the Roses. These went some way
toward eliminating part of the old Norman aristocracy and establishing
the Tudor dynasty in the person of Henry VII. This may seem no more
than the sort of succession coup that typified the premodern world. How-
ever, coupled with the new men who were his supporters, the particular
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goals and personality of Henry VII made a difference. He was inclined to
punish by fines rather than executions. He pacified the country, being one
of those rare monarchs who perceived the value of law and order as well as
seeing the role of financial management in attaining them and being
prepared to do plenty of the necessary office work himself. His pacification
favored merchants and artisans. Violence was externalized — thereafter
exported to the Celtic fringes and, eventually, to colonial frontiers.
Although Henry VIII did not sustain the attention to detail needed to
keep up the momentum of a commercializing society, he did free resources
by abolishing the monasteries. Monastic lands and other assets were sold
to bidders who, to recoup, put them to productive use. The economy
tended to expand under its own steam with relatively little further encour-
agement. Merchants rose from subservience to some political power in the
course of the sixteenth century. After the convulsions associated with the
Eleven Years' Tyranny and the Civil War, which may be looked on as
arising out of the attempts of a hard-up crown to raid other people's
property, the merchant position became secure.
The Stuarts would have loved to regain absolute power and exert central
control over the economy. This was symbolized by Charles II's abortive
effort to have Sir Christopher Wren build him a castle like Versailles at
Winchester, the historic capital. Lord Torrington in 1782 called this "a
miserable deserted intention of Royalty." The Stuarts lost. The Puritans
had long since gone to Massachusetts, and although in the 1640s some
had sailed back to support the Parliament, waves of other disaffected or
persecuted sects, like the Quakers, as well as migrants with openly eco-
nomic aims, continued to leave. In broad terms, nevertheless, and despite
Jacobite invasions and uprisings such as those in 1715 and 1745, the issue
had been resolved in favor of limitations on the crown by the Restoration
Settlement in 1660 and more particularly by the Glorious Revolution of
1688. Parliaments composed of large, relatively businesslike landowners
and big London merchants were able to protect the market economy. By
the early eighteenth century, most landed families owned some commer-
cial investments. Political stability and internal pacification were matched
by a fall in rates of interest.
Agriculture's large share in the economy declined only slowly, and
landed society remained important. A law as late as 1711 required mer-
chants who wished to enter the House of Commons to buy themselves
estates. Many sinecures remained in the nineteenth century. But even
Charles I's monopolies had never gone as far as the handouts and patronage
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The European Background 115
typical of absolute monarchs in mainland Europe. The British colonists
who left for America were leaving an economy that was changing fester
than any other, though with many remaining frictions. Ironically, it was
often the intrusion of market forces, rather than Absolutist decisions, that
dislodged the emigrants.
Externally, the policies of the state remained for a long time broadly
mercantilist. Internally, there remained an admixture of nonmarket regula-
tion. Local measures to restrain competition among groups of neighbors in
villages and very small towns, as well as to abate nuisances of all kinds,
gave the economy an interventionist cast. At no time was the market
untrammeled, though many of the interventions were made by local rather
than central government.
The decline of royal absolutism was thus not matched by a comparable
reduction in nonmarket controls. Early emigrants would not have ex-
pected anything else. They were accustomed to a great deal of regulation.
In many respects concerning sales and settlements, property rights and
policing, nonmarket elements remained. Important customary features of
economic life did, however, lose force over the early modern period:
examples are the erosion of common-field farming by enclosure, starting
with enclosure by agreement; the abandonment of sumptuary laws, which
had dictated what might be consumed according to social rank; and the
gradual removal of legal protection for guild monopolies.
Individual price-responsive firms had long been evident, although well
into the period many businesses did remain subject to guild control over
entry, size of firm (regulated in terms of numbers of employees), quality of
product, and prices charged. Yet the guilds were already being under-
mined, not only by legal changes but by the spread of industry into rural
cottages, whose occupants escaped guild control and accepted lower pay
than artisans in the incorporated towns. Rural domestic industry and
workshop trades continued to increase into the period of the classic indus-
trial revolution.
In commerce, much activity remained in the hands of "resident strang-
ers" who lived in particular parts of town and worshiped in their own
churches. Insofar as this was a restriction on entry, it was an ascriptive
feature that sat oddly with the "capitalist" nature of trade. Commercial
expansion nevertheless brought more British subjects into the relevant
occupations alongside aliens. These occupations included the transhipping
of goods and moving them about by hand, virtual coolie labor on a
forgotten scale.
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Sluggish, uneven, and resisted though it was, the main theme of the
early modern period was the extension of market considerations into areas
that had hitherto been ruled by command or more often by custom. This
development was not a linear one, and its success in all sectors should not
be taken for granted. For all that, it was the dominant trend.
FACTORS OF PRODUCTION
The standard classification of factors of production is land, labor, and
capital, though classical economists referred to "capital-in-land," capital,
and labor. They thereby acknowledged the large element of investment in
usable land which is made up of farmhouses and farm buildings, accommo-
dation roads, hedges, drains, and even the improved tilth of cultivated
soil. Although colonization was not an obligatory response to resource
scarcity - hence Adam Smith's allusion to American settlement arising
through "no necessity" - emigration was partly shaped by relative re-
source scarcities, especially demand for the cheaper land that was to be
found in America.
By modern standards, the density of population in Britain was not
high, being in 1600 about nine times less than today, between eleven and
twelve times less in England and Wales. This was offset by the much
weaker agricultural technology, which meant that more land was needed
to produce a given output. Livestock production and some of the feeding
of horses was from grass, much of it poor-quality permanent pasture on
commons and moors. "Artificial" sources of fodder were still scarce; a high
proportion of all land cultivable with existing methods had to be devoted
to growing cereal crops for human consumption. Essentially, there was a
fertilizer shortage. Greater intensities of cropping began to be possible
with the introduction of rotations involving "new" crops like clover. A
surge of these changes seems to have begun in the 1650s. The rental price
of meadowland began to fall rather quickly.
Common land could be used for the hunting of various species of
mammals and birds, an activity that overlapped with pest control. There
was ample precedent for the great ring shoots of later Pennsylvania in the
communal village hunts for foxes, which preceded the ritualized form of
fox-hunting adopted in modern England. Riparian rights were more re-
stricted, some of those which had belonged to the monasteries having
passed directly into private hands. The physical existence of resources did
not always mean they were accessible.
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The European Background 117
Most English settlements did possess commons that were used for
grazing and sources of fuel in the form of timber or bushes such as gorse,
the last being extensively used (to all intents and purposes, cropped) as
charcoal in forges and ovens. Although fuel wood was in short supply in
London in hard winters, and dramas occurred like the burning of church
pews, shortages may have originated as much in poor transport as in
inadequate production. The price data do not support the idea of a "timber
famine." Clearly there was a trade-off among various uses for land, includ-
ing supplying timber, but timber is a crop and does not run out once and
for all. Coppices produced sticks suitable for firing on rotation every few
years. In any case, the price of fuel as a whole fell with the coastal shipping
of "sea-coal" from the middle of the seventeenth century, and after that
time the canalization of rivers made inland distribution much easier. On
the other hand, although the English situation was by no means dire,
settlers in America would have found both timber and fuel agreeably
cheap by English standards.
While Ireland, the Hebrides, and fringes of the Scottish Highlands were
exploited as a kind of internal frontier in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and there were major projects of fen drainage in England, it is not
possible to piece these examples together to demonstrate a general pressure
of population on land. The introduction of German miners to the Lake
District, which is commonly cited to indicate that Britain was a backward
area catching up with south-central Europe, ignores the fact that they were
not very successful, not involved with many types of minerals, and not
responsible for the main developments of English mining.
As to labor as a factor of production, there were signs of underemploy-
ment and unemployment. Poverty was a problem, and various attempts to
solve it were ineffective. There was not enough economic growth generat-
ing new capital to invest in ways that would have created work while, as
we will see, some existing sources of capital were slow to be invested in the
most productive ways.
Despite prohibitions, people kept moving into the suburbs of London,
which were more like Third World barrios than the bland residential areas
which the term now implies. Labor was moving out of agriculture without
finding a wholly adequate alternative. Undoubtedly, adjustment to struc-
tural change lagged. Extruded labor could not readily find work in secon-
dary industry, shifted around looking for it - "hark, hark, the dogs do
bark, the beggars are coming to town" — and was absorbed only slowly.
Part of the problem may have arisen from rhythms in some types of
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n 8 E. L.Jones
farming that left labor with little to do at certain seasons. Other trades
were also dependent on seasonally available resources and had similar
spells when work was not to be had.
This problem of outflow from the land was to some extent cushioned by
the rise of rural domestic industry. Cottage work took up labor at slack
times and in districts where arable farming was starting to contract,
besides employing female and child labor in general. In addition to sea-
sonal fluctuations and short-term ones caused by bad weather, industry
was not immune from slack periods arising from downturns in trade.
Much has been made of a depression in the cloth trade as the cause of
emigration from the West Country in the 1620s. Daniel Boone's father
was a weaver who left Bradninch in Devon, a county that experienced a
long deindustrialization. Other powerful motives, such as religious disaf-
fection, are not so easy to identify. It would not be possible to predict
migrant origins solely from what we know of industrial depression; some
depressed regions seem not to have sent out many migrants. After all,
emigration was only one available "exit" response to hardship, and there
seem to have been other reasons that explain much of it.
As noted, a deeper problem of capital formation may have lain beneath
the problems of unemployment and underemployment. Speaking very
broadly indeed, the difficulty lay less in the availability of savings than in
the weak will to invest. Initially, the bulk of savings was in the hands of
landowners. As M. M. Postan pointed out in a celebrated passage, many a
baron of the fifteenth century possessed enough resources to have financed
the start of a cotton industry on the scale of the eighteenth century. None
did. Such holders of capital were wedded to the land, to militarism, to
consumption. They were also accustomed to a face-to-face society and were
unwilling to lend money to people they did not know, for purposes with
which they were not familiar and could not evaluate. When anything
other than farming was involved, they seemed to want to keep their
money at call.
The enormous returns sometimes achieved by treasure hunting on the
Spanish Main began to erode this resistance. Trade, and indeed coloniza-
tion, played a bigger part. In any case, as the merchant class expanded,
especially in the Commercial Revolution after 1660, it showed the way
and created the instruments for passive investment. By the early eigh-
teenth century, more and more mercantile families were descended from
younger sons who had made their own fortunes in trade before reentering
the landed class. There was thus an intermingling of types of enterprise.
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The European Background 119
The supply of factors of production should not be thought of as fixed.
Resources, after all, are a function of the technology available to exploit
them, while in the medium or long run, enterprise is engendered by the
creation of opportunities to invest. In this respect, as in others, one's
impression of the British economy depends very much on which period,
and how long a period, one surveys. Viewed over the early modern centu-
ries as a whole, the impression is of an unprecedented freeing of factor
supplies. Labor increasingly became detached from the land. To a degree
this was because, given the modes of inheritance (which tended to eschew
the continental solution of subdivision), the growth of population tended
to outstrip the supply of farms.
Land became more of a commodity as a result of political events such as
the Dissolution of the Monasteries, already mentioned, and the forced sale
of indebted Royalist estates under the Commonwealth. The purchasers
wanted to get a return for their money and, despite the Restoration of
Charles II, were able to retain the estates they had acquired, to the
disappointment of royalists.
Commodity markets had existed throughout history. Free markets for
factors of production, enabling them to move to where they could make
the highest marginal return or come into the hands of those who sought to
do so, are a better touchstone of economic change. The early modern
period saw real advances in this respect. None of this means that the
transition was smooth. The economy was an increasingly enterprising one,
but its state of disequilibrium meant plenty of upsets. In a polity which
offered the weak, the unfortunate, and the dissenter few and unreliable
occasions to express their political "voice," emigration as an "exit" solution
was almost to be expected.
Deviance showed up in other ways. As religious ferment gave way to an
uneasy pluralism and a greater secularism disguised by the required rituals
of an established church, opportunities for the independently minded
remained limited. Energies were deflected into more productive channels.
An artisan society emerged in which a good deal of effort went into
technological creativity. This was not accompanied by commensurate at-
tention to high science. What it produced was a "tinkering" society with
an outlet for talents that might have gone elsewhere - maybe back into
disputation and religious wars like those of sixteenth-century Europe.
Emigration across the Atlantic may be thought of as one option among
many for people caught up in the complexities of slow, irregular economic
development and every other kind of societal change.
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120 E. L.Jones
SECTORS OF THE ECONOMY
The usual sectoral division of the economy is threefold: primary produc-
tion (agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, and quarrying), secondary
production (manufacturing), and the tertiary sector (services). Economic
growth is usually accompanied by a movement of some fraction of the
labor supply from primary production into the secondary or even tertiary
sectors, where its productivity is higher.
Agriculture was certainly much the largest employer during the early
modern period. It was undergoing fundamental change and relatively
speaking was slowly shedding labor into the other sectors. As much as any
indirect sign can, this suggests that the economy was growing. Among
the underlying forces bringing about agricultural change were improve-
ments in communications and the growth of income from other activities,
notably trade. Markets for food grew, particularly in London. More re-
gional specialization became possible. There is an apparent circularity here
in that part of the rise in London's population was due to agriculture's
ability to shed labor. That this labor could eventually earn an income
providing services in the financial, commercial, and administrative capital
made London a large market for the output of those who remained on the
land.
Change thus revealed itself in a regionalization of agriculture, or rather
an intensification of the pattern of regions which already existed. As it
became unnecessary for each and every parish or form to grow its own
grain, specialization developed. Whole districts did remain as cereal pro-
ducers, finally integrating this with the production of livestock. These
districts tended to be ones with easily tilled soil and reasonable market
access. Others, however, found that they could not grow their own bread
competitively. They turned to buying it and specializing in the rearing or
feeding of store and fatstock — that is to say, growing and fattening
cattle — on grass.
Because specialist livestock production does not require as much labor
as cereal growing, these districts had workers - or, more precisely, part of
the time, some of the workforce - to spare. The villages where this hap-
pened were the ones in which rural domestic industry tended to take hold
most strongly. An economic geography emerged which differed from the
archetypal medieval pattern, which was rather uniformly agricultural with
a closer approach to universal self-sufficiency in cereals. But the new
geography did not yet approach the industrial pattern in which manufac-
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The European Background
1 2 1
turing withdrew from the countryside and concentrated in towns on
coalfields.
Accompanying the changes was a more marked shift from communal,
open-field forming to "several" or independent farms. This had been going
on for some time, first voluntarily in the form of enclosures by agreement
but in the eighteenth century by Acts of Parliament that gave objectors
little or no choice and affected the final one-third of the land of England.
While the distribution of open fields and enclosed districts was also highly
patterned, the pattern did not closely fit the emergent cropping regions.
In other words, technical and organizational change were not fully congru-
ent. English regions were small enough for most emigrants to have been
familiar with the concepts of both enclosed and common fields, and after
the mid-seventeenth century at the latest, most would also have known
about improvements in cropping. In a direct sense, this was not vital to
them, since abundant American land reduced the need to concentrate on
productivity per acre. What was important was a background of adaptabil-
ity and change — by historical standards.
Attempts to interpret early American agricultural systems in terms of
direct transfers of open fields or enclosed farms do not allow for the fact
that both were common knowledge and either could be chosen. Indeed,
for a surprisingly long time given the greater availability of land, common
fields were reconstituted in Massachusetts.
Later British developments involved more and more complex rotations,
closely integrating crop and livestock production. As the eastern seaboard
became more densely settled in the eighteenth century, American visitors
went to Thomas Coke's famous estate at Holkham in Norfolk to observe
the latest systems. There was plenty of other contact whereby intensive
British agricultural methods could be transferred or adopted. Archives of
correspondence between landowners and natural scientists on either side of
the Atlantic have been published. Washington's correspondence with the
agriculturist, Sir James Sinclair, is well known. In 1785, when Washing-
ton was enlarging the garden at Mount Vernon, the Fairfaxes of Wirithling-
ton near Radstock, Somerset, sent him plants, seeds, and even a farmer.
In the absence of countervailing pressures, the methods of laying out
settlements and managing farms were certainly likely to remain the ones
with which settlers were already familiar. But these things were negotia-
ble. There were choices of crops, as witness the early switch to maize from
the small grains of Europe. Where Americans did not find that adopting a
new crop was worth the effort, they refrained from using it. There were
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122 E. L.Jones
better sources of fodder than the turnip, for instance, which does not mean
that the colonists either did not know about this emblem of eighteenth-
century English farming or could not obtain the seed. Middle-colonies
estates did experiment with it. Most of the inventory of crops remained
European, but this feet does not tell us much about the calculus of choice
that really determined the Americanizing of agriculture.
Northwestern Europe was not fundamentally unlike the northeastern
seaboard. Climatically it was less rugged. The winters were scarcely
harsher than those of the Carolinas; the summers were seldom hotter than
those of New England. The trees, plants, birds, and animals of Europe
were related to those of America. The colonists did not find it hard to
attach familiar names to approximately similar species, nor to discover
resources comparable with those to which they were accustomed, such as
types of timber. The differences were significant but not overwhelming,
nor perhaps numerous. Wheat, barley, and the other grains would grow,
even if maize was adopted, a cereal sufficiently unknown to the English for
John Locke in the 1670s to note it carefully in southern France as "bled
d'Espagne" (Spanish wheat).
In comparing productivities it would be hard to subtract the effects of
all the "made land" of Europe, the capital-in-land. This resulted from
millennia spent clearing forest and hauling rocks from the fields, as well as
from millennia spent adapting what were originally often southwest Asian
plant species to the moist environment north of the Alps or west of the
Channel. By contrast, North American pasture proved to be of less nutri-
tive value for stock, few of the grasses being able to withstand grazing.
The winters were severe enough to put great strain on stocks of hay. But
Europeans were used to a shortage of hay: the pressure points in their
farming were similar in kind, if different in intensity, and they possessed
pasture species which they could introduce. The introduction of clover
from England to the United States brought down the value of wet mead-
ows by 1800, as it had at home a century earlier.
The English were less familiar with some of the problems of predatory
animals. The last wolves had been killed centuries earlier, leaving only
traces in Saxon place-names like Wolf Pits or Wolfhall. Fortunately, farm-
ers now had powder and shot, while other techniques like seven-foot deer
fences were well enough known. Against this, the adjustment of agricul-
ture to the environment had not been perfected even in England.
Settlers brought the rats and mice, cereal rusts and smuts, and the field
weeds incident to farming in Britain and Europe. Crop disease among the
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The European Background 123
small grains made shifting to maize a fortunate opportunity for the New
Englanders. In 1672, John Josslyn listed twenty-two weeds as having
"sprung up since the English planted and kept Cattle in New England."
One was plantain, which the Indians were already calling "white man's
foot." In the new environment, shorn of the checks and balances in the
ecosystems of the old country, some of the interlopers became runaway
pests.
In the wilderness, men had to farm. Yet a proportion of early English
(and Dutch) settlers were townsfolk. Admittedly, the towns were tiny,
except for London, Bristol, Norwich, and Amsterdam. On the other
hand, the cities were still small and meadowed enough for rural life not to
be strange in principle. Similarly, most country-dwellers had lived close
enough to trade and industry for their ways to be familiar. Industrial plant
was small, much of it was located in small towns or even villages, and it
worked up agriculturally produced raw materials. In any case, those who
crossed the Atlantic usually left from one of the bigger port cities; over
time, 10,000 indentured servants emigrated from the port of Bristol
alone. They had at least cast their eyes on vastly larger settlements than
any they would find in the colonies, besides workshops, docks, and big
warehouses. By virtue of the journey itself, they could no longer be
completely rustic.
The people who became Americans came from the more developed parts
of northwestern Europe, approximately from a broad belt stretching from
Bristol or Exeter to Amsterdam or later the Rhineland. Thus, when we
turn to industry, we find a heritage of experience of an economy in which
many commodities were made for sale, usually in small workshops or the
home, and were often traded at a distance. Firm size was perhaps not quite
as small on average as the domestic system would suggest, since part of the
operation involved control by large "putting out" merchants who disposed
of raw materials and sold the finished product. Occasional attempts to
achieve economies of scale had already been made by men like Thomas
Stumpe of Malmesbury, with his workshop in the abbey after the Dissolu-
tion, and John Winchcombe, better known as Jack o' Newbury, with his
long weaving shop stretching back a block from Northbrook Street in that
borough. But before mechanization, the gains were apparently insufficient
to establish this trend.
Most of the goods produced were small consumer items, though the
trades making edge tools and other producer goods were to flourish on the
basis of the colonial need to import such things. Part of the original trade
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124 E. L.Jones
contact between New England and old England was highly personal. To
cite just one case, members of the Wolcott family, originating in 1630
from Wellington, Somerset, were back there as late as 1675 buying goods
to carry to the colonies. In the hands of merchants, exporting grew,
though it had to be protected by the Enumerated Lists attached to the
Navigation Act. The Lists restricted the range of commodities that colo-
nials were permitted to produce for sale. An Act of 1731 (5 Geo.II)
captures the flavor: it was "to prevent the Exportation of Hats out of any of
His Majesty's Colonies or Plantations in America, and to restrain the
Number of Apprentices taken by the Hat-makers in the said Colonies or
Plantations, and for the better encouraging the making Hats in Great
Britain."
Before the Civil War, woolens had been dominant among manufactured
goods, especially those for export. Their proportion shrank in the Commer-
cial Revolution, which after 1660 extended the range of British exports,
shifted their direction substantially from trade with continental Europe,
and greatly increased the receipts. The expansion of secondary industry after
the Restoration was part and parcel of the regionalization of the economy.
Certain regions became more thickly dotted with works and industrial
cottages. Metal goods towns such as Birmingham and Sheffield — but not
yet the cotton capital of Manchester - expanded. For the time being, much
expansion in most industries was "traditional," accomplished by the replica-
tion of existing units and methods of production.
The outstanding development in the tertiary sector was the growth of
commerce. The establishment of several companies to engage in foreign
trade had followed the founding of the Muscovy Company in 1553, lead-
ing to those of the Plymouth Adventurers to New England in 1620 and
the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1628. Behind this lay an upsurge in
commercial activity along the coasts of northwestern Europe as a whole. It
was partly consequent on the loss of centrality by the Italian city-states.
Their trade was displaced by the westward extension of the Ottoman
empire. Compensating maritime trade between the Mediterranean and
Baltic Seas expanded. The shores of the southern North Sea were pivotal in
this, hence the long, uneasy competition and conflict between the Low
Countries, England, and to some extent France.
Of these, England came out on top. While her methods were often
external to the market — sweeping the Dutch from the seas - she suc-
ceeded better than her competitors in exploiting the growth area of extra-
European trade, the triangular trade between Europe, West Africa, and
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The European Background 125
the West Indies. To this trade, New England was linked as an additional
supply base for the West Indies sugar plantations, although England made
sure to retain direct links with the northern colonies as well as with the
tobacco plantations in Virginia.
After 1660, as a result, Britain began to import as well as re-export new
crops among which sugar and tobacco figured most prominently. Her port
cities and domestic trade expanded greatly. With this came an increase in
the mobilization of capital, the emergence of financial institutions, better
communications, and the development of retailing (where shops took
market share from fairs, and specialist shops took it from general stores).
The successful integration of trade and industry stimulated economic
development, including some technical change. In the 1690s, patent
activity reached two to three times the level of the previous thirty years,
yet thereafter it slumped until the second half of the eighteenth century.
Rapid industrialization was deferred, and the economy remained heavily
agricultural-cum-commercial for some generations.
ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE
The criteria by which the performance of an economy is judged relate in
the main to the efficiency with which resources are allocated and used.
Others relate to equity and the ability to meet exogenous shocks. As is
well known, the difficulty is to sum up: there is no agreed, unambiguous
way to weigh the different criteria in a single balance. When economies do
better than one another in some respects but worse in others, the econo-
mist qua economist has little to add. Since our present purpose is the more
straightforward one of categorizing the British economy as a storehouse of
resources available to early Americans, we do not have to concern ourselves
much with a consolidated balance sheet. Insofar as a judgment is neces-
sary, or possible, Britain should be compared with other countries from
which emigrants might have come.
The first touchstone is how closely resources came to being fully mobi-
lized. They did not come very close. An uneven wealth and income distribu-
tion meant that the rich could afford to hold assets out of the marketplace.
Private property rights over land retained large areas for hunting and ex-
cluded them from cultivation. Far less capital was expended on religious
structures than in medieval times, but much of it was still withheld from
investment for conspicuous consumption or militarism.
It is with respect to labor that the idea of full resource mobilization
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126 E. L.Jones
becomes most unhistorical. The endemic problems of poverty, the system-
atic undereducation of women and the poor of both genders, and sluggish-
ness in redeploying labor that left the land, all show the limitations of
both cultural values and available investment funds. At the higher levels
of society, talent (male talent) was drawn heavily into professions like the
law and the church, where material productivity was not high. Society was
highly structured, and many groups, like the younger sons of the defeated
Royalists, felt that the chances of improving their lot were limited. Had
that not been so, only ideologues and adventurers might have left.
From this it is all too evident that a second requirement, static a/locative
efficiency, was not met, meaning that all factors were not allocated so as to
earn their highest marginal return. Many institutions, customs, and
ascriptive features (such as the guilds and the control of particular trades
by resident strangers) interfered with such an outcome. Reallocative
changes did take place but were hampered by the limited integration of
the communications network and poor means of disseminating informa-
tion. A provincial press did not appear until the start of the eighteenth
century.
A further criterion, dynamic allocative efficiency, could be met by defini-
tion only if capital accumulation took place at an optimal rate, determined
by some combination of individual preferences and national priorities.
This is a somewhat anachronistic demand of an age that lacked clearly
defined policy goals. In any case, capital from higher-earning activities
notoriously returned to the land for reasons of prestige and power. This
undoubtedly reduced the rate of economic growth below what would have
been desirable in a world of such poverty, After 1663, landowner-
dominated parliaments protected the farm sector by offering bounties on
the export of grain. The emergence of an influential nonlanded bourgeoi-
sie, other than individuals primarily involved in trade, was slow. For
instance, it was the end of the eighteenth century before a cluster of resort-
town residents supportive of colonization, and including Sir William
Grant, attorney-general of Canada after 1776, appeared in Devon as the
"Dawleish circle." By then, the opportunity to promote further official
British colonization in the land south of Canada had passed.
Nor was there static technical efficiency, which requires the economy to
operate on the production frontier. Static technical efficiency may be de-
fined as the full use of best-practice technique. That would have been the
ideal; the question is, how closely did early modern Britain approach the
goal? As always, the position from which this is judged could be historical,
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The European Background 127
with a "base-weight" in the preceding period, or modern, looking back
from the present. Another possibility is to compare early-modern Britain
with one of its contemporaries, say France or the Netherlands.
Making a bold stab at a conclusion, we should certainly keep in mind
the level of technical practice in medieval times and in the neighboring
countries. By those standards, Britain performed quite well, despite a
great mix of industrial and agricultural methods and plant size. Better
methods were spreading in a number of industries and certainly in agricul-
ture. But the great variety of practice means that the best techniques
known were very far from universally adopted.
As to dynamic technical efficiency, England was one of the more creative
societies known by that period. Much of the scientific theory underpin-
ning late eighteenth-century industrialization was actually developed in
France, but it was of signal importance that an artisan class had emerged
in England capable of giving practical embodiment to the ideas. The
continent, France especially, did not do as well in that respect.
Authorities differ with respect to the desirability of an equal distribution
of income. Some feel that the taxes and regulations needed to approach
equality must fatally reduce incentives to produce. But the degree of
inequality was very marked, and it is noteworthy that, by the time of
Independence, Americans had not only become far less unequal but had
achieved higher average incomes, too. While that presumably owed much
to abundant resources, the implication may be that British extremes of
poverty failed to provide an equivalent spur to effort.
Finally, what may be said about the speed of adaptation to "exogenous"
shocks? By reasonable historical standards, it was good. As Adam Smith
noted, neither wars, nor plagues, nor fires had prevented the accumulation
of national wealth. An excellent example of resilience is provided by the
speed of rebuilding after fires, and not merely after the Great Fire of 1666
in London, where restrictions on work by nonresident craftsmen were
readily lifted. Many other towns experienced severe fires that destroyed
much of their housing and capital stock, hundreds of houses at a time
(13,200 were razed in the Great Fire). Local resources and informal mu-
tual assistance among towns, together with the issuing of "Briefs" (licens-
ing the collecting of alms for individuals), almost always facilitated rapid
rebuilding.
England, even more the whole of Britain, was not an equitable society,
not one that mobilized its resources to the full, and not one that allocated
its factors of production optimally. However, compared with most and
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128 E. L.Jones
perhaps all economies of the day, it was relatively flexible. Its factor
markets were becoming freer, technical change was being generated, and
society as a whole was rich and energetic. The colonists of America had the
best start then possible.
OTHER EUROPEAN ECONOMIES
The European migrations to North America and Australasia were not the
biggest in history, but they were among the biggest that failed to blend
significantly with existing cultures. The Native American presence, like
that of the Australian aborigines, tended to fade away. There was conflict,
contact, and a little borrowing, but on the whole, the Europeans usurped
the territory and set about populating it with whites engaging in
European-style economic life.
Among the Europeans, the role of the British and especially the English
clearly predominated. The question arises, why did other countries even in
the western half of Europe play a so much lesser role? As it happens, their
role was probably greater than the number of their settlers suggests, at
least regarding the introduction of techniques which were then borrowed
by migrants from Britain. Nevertheless, their participation was rather
small. The colonies that some of them established were taken over by
migrants from the British Isles.
Certain European countries were larger in population than Britain, and
some of them tapped a richer vein of technical change - for instance, the
metallurgy of southern Germany. The fact that most had more rigid social
systems and more arthritic factor markets than England (the United Prov-
inces was the main exception) did not necessarily dissuade them from
major acts of imperialism: Spain, after all, secured a vast empire in Central
and South America. That the Spanish and other colonies did less well in
the long run than the British colonies in North America is not quite the
point. In any case, British colonies in the Caribbean did not always do
very well. The present question is, why was colonizing by other northern
Europeans in North America so much feebler than that by the British?
The first and obvious answer is that Britain blocked them. There is
something to it. Britain did restrict or usurp the settlements of smaller
peoples like the Swedes, Dutch, and Danes. Yet Britain's ability to defeat
even a small nation like the Dutch was not certain, and her tussle with the
French was neither brief nor one-sided.
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The European Background 129
For central Europeans, there were alternatives, not merely the eastward
movement of earlier centuries but internal colonization like draining
marshes and Frederick the Great's settling of 300,000 people in 1,200
new agricultural villages. However, that option might be interpreted by
some as a response to the British monopolization of North America.
Other nationals did manage to settle in the British colonies. After
1685, with the Huguenot dispersion, the diversity of origins increased,
especially in the Middle Colonies; there were also Sephardic Jews and
many Dutchmen, while by the middle of the eighteenth century, one-
third of the inhabitants of Pennsylvania were German. The Dutch and
German languages long survived, and Benjamin Franklin was not the only
one who objected to this and saw in it a threat of Balkanization. On the
whole, non-British public institutions were not introduced. The Germans
and Swedes tended to settle in distinct communities, often inland in the
Middle Colonies. Continental Europeans distrusted the law, since in their
own countries it had tended to defend privilege. They kept away from
state churches and politics. Bunching together was linguistically easiest.
The German language was vital for the intellectual and emotional survival
of Lutheranism, and many of the Germans saw themselves as members of
"redeeming communities," among which the Amish survives. Their self-
sufficient, reclusive behavior was typical of the Palatines, who swarmed in
1709—10 from their Rhenish land, which the French had devastated in
1697. Religious, linguistic, and cultural isolation from British settlers
promoted little chain migrations of people from certain regions in conti-
nental Europe, reinforcing their particularism in the New World, protect-
ing the retention of their own folkways, and slowing the rate at which
their ideas mingled with those of British origin.
Governments in the interior of Europe had few resources and little
access to the sea. Among the several hundred principalities, some "not the
breadth of a shoe," that made up Germany at the end of the Thirty Years'
War, only the Hanseatic cities of Hamburg and Bremen had coastal access
west of the Baltic. The others had no fleets and would have been obliged
to hire shipping from the Dutch or the English, raising the costs of already
expensive ventures. There were some negotiations along these lines, but
most of the protagonists were inept. They were more interested in a quick
killing in the sugar islands of the West Indies. The seaboard countries
offered more competition to Britain, notably France, which had 123 ports
along a mere 600 kilometers of its northwest coast.
The rulers of mainland Europe had more personal preoccupations,
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130 E. L.Jones
which came to center on the building of extravagant palaces: Versailles and
its many replicas. France had the task of refilling the state coffers after
Louis XIV's disastrous wars. Her attempts to establish a profitable export
staple in Louisiana or Canada did not succeed. Once a few of them had
found colonial adventures did not pay, European rulers turned back to
domestic measures designed to increase and attract population to their
own states. They often restricted the private emigration of their subjects.
All in all, there was little free capital and less willingness to invest it in
colonial ventures. Economies were semideveloped, with a patchy distribu-
tion of workshop and rural domestic industry, but with so many political
jurisdictions that markets were poorly integrated. Seen in the round,
continental agricultures lagged behind the institutional and husbandry
developments of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. In France,
the proportion of land under forage crops was only four percent ca. 1700
and no more than six percent as late as 1789. Matters were a little better in
northwest Germany, but everywhere else they were worse. An absence of
net investment in the land may have been characteristic of wide areas; the
rents extracted from French estates went to enable the nobility "to live
noblement on the banks of the Seine."
Trade was hampered by frequent tolls. Furthermore, during the mid-
seventeenth century, most of Europe was affected by a decrease of popula-
tion and an economic downturn related to the political disruptions of the
so-called "General Crisis." The worst manifestation was the Thirty Years'
War (1618-48), which supposedly cost the German states one-third of
their population. Thereafter, until the nineteenth century, Germany be-
came the "backyard of Europe" and missed out on the Atlantic expansion.
Conspicuous consumption, a high-liquidity preference, and preoccupa-
tion with war typified the rulers and nobility of the mainland European
states. The landowners tended to consume their rents and, for fear of social
obloquy, most invested covertly, where at all, in trade and industry.
Merchants hurried to buy land for its status value.
European elites remained captive to a syndrome of underdevelopment
longer than their peers did in England, while their merchant class seldom
shared in the early gains of overseas expansion. Historically, there is
nothing surprising in this; the rigidities and lack of a growth ethic were
greater still among Asian potentates. England and the United Provinces,
at base London and Amsterdam, were world exceptions. Their growth,
resting on European coastwise trade, plus the outcome of Anglo—Dutch
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The European Background 131
rivalry, is what has first to be accounted for in any explanation of the role
played by the English in North American settlement.
BACKWASH EFFECTS
By historical standards, England and Europe were changing fast before
and during the period of North American settlement. Most of that change
was internal, but some of it was a feedback effect from the act of coloniza-
tion itself. What forms did this backwash take?
Some of them were small beer. America, Baltimore, Georgia, New
England, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and
South Carolina are all frequent as the names of fields in England. The
point is that the names are in the category known as "nicknames of
remoteness," and the fields were distant from the farmhouses or away on
some parish boundary. England was long settled and had a large, compli-
cated society. American influences were remote in most respects.
The big biological effects that the discovery of America had on Europe
do not belong here. Maize, the white potato, and perhaps syphilis were
transmitted from farther south. New commodities like tobacco, indigo,
and later cotton, together with still others already known to Europe, such
as furs, fish, and timber, did flow across the north Atlantic. Taken to-
gether, they added to the resource stream that created the Commercial
Revolution. The economic and political effects of that were not negligible.
Crops that could be physically produced in Europe, like tobacco, were
discouraged in line with the international division of labor dreamt up by
the British crown. Ecologically, the settlement of North America was not
like the discovery of a new planet, in the way that the opening of the
tropics or Australasia has been described. The problems that North Amer-
ica raised for European settlement were unusual only in their scale. The
products supplied went to swell and redirect existing branches of the
economy rather than to create new industries.
As Sir John Seeley concluded in the nineteenth century, England's
success in competing with Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and France
to control the New World was because she was the least hampered by
involvement in struggles on the European mainland. Disraeli urged that
England had outgrown Europe.
The Commercial Revolution had helped to change the balance of power.
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132 E. L.Jones
It made Britain more maritime and extended the theater of European
conflict. It made Britain richer and increased the commercialism of its
economy, although few from the Thirteen Colonies brought back wealth
and stayed in Britain. It increased the size of the market served, although
scarcely to an extent commensurate with the geographical reach. The
consequences include some responsibility for Britain's rise to foremost
power and foremost economy in Europe. Market growth, then, and a
reshaping of geopolitics were the outcomes.
Incorporated in this was an increase in the geographical and scientific
inventory at the disposal of Europeans, a new faith in a Providence
which seemed to offer a new frontier whenever an old one was passed.
Ample contact at the official, commercial, and personal levels guaranteed
that Europeans could begin to grasp the layout of the globe and what it
offered. This sense of a Manifest Destiny for Europe was partly responsi-
ble for the later, relatively casual, penetration and colonization of the
southern hemisphere.
Some North American settlers returned home permanently. The best-
known reverse flow was that which promptly returned from the "errand"
to build the City on a Hill in New England, back to fight the good fight
for Parliament during the Civil wars or to settle again in a purified
Commonwealth.
Finally, beyond the effects on foreign trade and foreign affairs, the
outflow to colonial America has been seen as a source of British liberties.
Many among the colonists were in their day bigots and ideologues like
Puritans, Quakers, cavaliers who left when they lost the war, violent
Scotch-Irish from the borders, and convicts and whores transported at
state expense. Others, not especially poor, were motivated by restless
earthly ambition. The going of all these sorts and conditions left England
potentially a less troubled and more tolerant country.
CONCLUSION
What difference did it all make? Origins - or parallels? - for most fea-
tures of early America can be found in northwestern Europe, Britain, or
England. Even the quintessential "American System" of mass-producing
interchangeable parts had precursors in the French government arsenals,
the Taylors' block-making plant at Wood Mills on the Itchen in Hamp-
shire, and Brunei's machinery in the Royal Naval dockyard at Ports-
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The European Background 133
mouth. The details could be spelled out, one by one. We can see in the
rapid rise of import-substituting industries during the 1640s and the War
of Independence that in the latent structure of their economic life, the
colonies were even more like Europe than they were actually permitted to
remain.
The colonies and the early Republic were tightly bound to the British
trading system. They were a vast, distant, experimental annex of Britain,
but not a colony on the moon. Their ability to outdo their origins and
escape the Third-World status of other colonies, like those in nineteenth-
century Latin America, was outstanding. The precise paths by which they
brought British or European ways to the wilderness are matters of record.
This potential arose from the unbalanced, decentralized, and energized
nature of northwestern European and especially British society, from
which vigorous and motley emigration took place.
The North American colonies, then, descended from the fastest-
developing economy of the most developed part of the world. They had
their birth at the right juncture. Although the British government had
strong views on the mix of economic activities proper to its empire, and
did not hesitate to impose its views in the Navigation Acts, the colonies
were less trammeled than any other home country might have made them.
Britain herself was struggling free of Absolutism and dirigisme (etatisme),
with its confiscations, monopoly grants, and forced loans.
Moreover, many immigrant groups were radical, originating from the
disgruntled sections of society. Although they carried all the obvious
equipment and most of any Englishman's "invisible baggage" with them,
what they were disinclined to carry was as important: they were impatient
with archaic restraints on the individual. The element of choice in what
they kept and what they left behind is too easily discounted in the pres-
ence of so patently a British and European heritage. European (chiefly
English) tastes, technologies, and institutions — the discarding of some
restraints, all in a context of resource abundance — brewed a novel, vaster,
more prosperous, and more equal trans-Atlantic Europe.
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Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE SETTLEMENT AND GROWTH
OF THE COLONIES: POPULATION,
LABOR, AND ECONOMIC
DEVELOPMENT
DAVID W. GALENSON
INSTITUTIONS OF SETTLEMENT
In the years following its establishment of a settlement at Jamestown in
1607, the Virginia Company set out to build an agricultural colony that
would earn profits for investors. Toward this end, beginning in 1609 it
raised both capital and labor through the device of a commercial company
organized as a joint-stock venture. Shares in the company could be ac-
quired either through a subscription of capital or through the pledge of
one's labor in America for a period of seven years. The excitement created
in England by earlier explorations in North America, fueled by optimistic
reports sent back by early settlers in Jamestown, enabled the Virginia
Company to raise one of the largest sums ever invested in an English
maritime venture.
An early failure of the settlement at Jamestown, marked by extremely
high rates of mortality and shortages of food and fresh water that resulted
in debilitating illness among many of those who survived, was met by a
response from the company that would not have surprised English employ-
ers of the day. The colony's governor attributed the infamous starving
time to the idleness of Virginia's labor force, and during the following
years the company moved to eliminate this problem with sterner mea-
sures. From 1611 to 1618 the colony was ruled with iron discipline, with
a detailed plan for all economic operations. All land was to be owned by
the company and farmed collectively. The workers, all men, were to be
treated as bound servants of the company for their specified terms. They
were to be housed in barracks and provided with strict rations. For build-
ing fortifications and growing crops they were to be divided into work
135
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136 David W. Galenson
gangs, in military fashion, each of which was to be supervised by an
overseer. The company's officers governed the colony under martial law,
and punishments for misdeeds, including execution for serious crimes,
were harsh and summary.
Within less than a decade after this plan was devised, however, sweep-
ing changes — so fundamental as to constitute a social revolution — had
transformed the economic and social organization of Virginia. By 1620
the company had freed the earlier settlers from their contracts and given
them their own land and houses. The company had also brought women
to Virginia, so the settlers could marry and have families. Martial law had
been abolished. And a General Assembly was convened in 1619, with two
representatives from each of Virginia's eleven settlements; the extraordi-
narily liberal suffrage privilege extended the vote for these representatives
to all the adult males in the .colony.
All these changes were the result of the company's recognition that
greater positive inducements were necessary to permit the recruitment and
motivation of a labor force sufficient to reverse the economic decline that
had begun during the company's earlier regimen. The company had be-
gun with the intention of contracting to pay the workers little more than
the low wage rate that prevailed in the English labor market, and trans-
porting them to America, where the abundant land would greatly increase
the value of their labor. The substantial difference between the workers'
high productivity in Virginia and their low English wages would reim-
burse the company for the cost of transportation and leave a handsome
surplus that would accrue to the company as profits. Although the work-
ers could have been expected to realize that their own work effort would
have little impact on the return they would receive when the company's
profits were distributed, the company believed the workers would have no
choice but to cooperate because of their total reliance on the company in
the hostile American wilderness. What the company failed to anticipate,
however, was that its protection was not essential to the workers, who
could consequently rebel against their harsh treatment by finding alterna-
tive employments, whether by running away to live with the Indians or
simply by starting their own small settlements. Faced with this effective
competition for the workers' labor, the company had to recognize that it
did not enjoy the monopsony position it had anticipated as the only
employer in the region's labor market and was forced to respond by
offering workers higher wages and better living and working conditions.
So it was that at the very outset of English settlement in North Amer-
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Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 137
ica, employers were introduced to the colonial labor problem. The direc-
tors of the Virginia Company were only the first of many who had to adapt
to a world completely unlike the one they knew and had assumed to be
universal. Seventeenth-century Englishmen lived in an economy in which
land had long been scarce and labor abundant, and employers simply took
for granted the availability of workers at very low wages. In the course of
the settlement of English America, a succession of employers and workers
would be surprised at the full social and economic implications of a new
world in which factor proportions were radically different. Employers
throughout the colonies complained of the scarcity and high cost of labor,
and bemoaned the new independence of what had been a docile and
subservient laboring class in England. In a typical example of what be-
came a litany of appeals for labor from seventeenth-century colonists, in
1645 a Barbados planter wrote to a relative in Scotland: "Want of servants
is my greatest bane and will hinder my designe . . . . So pray if you come
neare to any port where shipping comes hither indenture procure and
send me [servants] . . . lett them be of any sort . . . what I shall not
make use of and are not serviceable for me I can exchange with others." In
the same year, Massachusetts' former governor John Winthrop complained
that the supply of new servants from England was inadequate, and that in
consequence those already in the colony "could not be hired, when their
times were out, but upon unreasonable terms." The manager of a Maine
estate complained to his English employer in 1639 that "workmen in this
Country ar very deare." Reporting the "great wages" required by farm
workers, he declared "I cannot Conceave which way their masters can pay
yt, but yf yt Continue this rates the servants wilbe masters & the masters
servants." From the other side of the employment relation, colonial work-
ers reveled in the increased prosperity and autonomy that the scarcity of
their labor conferred on them. A settler in early Virginia remarked with
astonishment that "our cowekeeper here of James citty on Sundays goes
accowtered all in freshe flaming silke; and a wife of one that in England
had professed the black arte, not of a scholler, but of a collier of Croydon,
weares her rough bever hatt with a faire perle hatband, and a silken suite
thereto correspondent." Later in the colonial period, shortly after his
arrival in Pennsylvania a hired farm laborer wrote to his family in Lanca-
shire that "if any of my relations have a mind to come to this country, I
think it is a very good country and that they may do well." Three years
later the same man, now the proprietor of a weaving shop and owner of
450 acres of land, reiterated his advice more confidently, telling his family
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138 David W. Galenson
that "it is a great deal better living here than in England for working
people, poor working people doth live as well here, as landed men doth
live with you."
1
The labor problem in early Virginia was greatly intensified by the
beginnings of the commercial cultivation of tobacco in the colony. Europe-
ans had found tobacco in cultivation and use by Indians in the Americas
during the sixteenth century, but little tobacco had been brought back to
Europe, and in the early seventeenth century it remained an exotic and
expensive product in England. In 1612 John Rolfe, who would later
marry the Indian princess Pocahontas, began to experiment with tobacco
in Virginia. The success of his experiments was so great that Virginians
soon began growing tobacco on every cleared patch of ground, even in the
streets; in 1616 the colony's governor, fearing that the obsession with
tobacco would result in famine, declared that no colonist would be al-
lowed to grow tobacco unless he planted at least two acres of corn for
himself and every servant. Yet the profitability of tobacco was so great that
this and later attempts at restraining its production had no more effect
than King James' vehement denunciation of the crop's evils, and tobacco
quickly came to dominate Virginia's economy. In 1619 the colony's secre-
tary reported that one man growing tobacco had cleared £200 sterling by
his own labor, while another with six servants had made £1,000 from a
single crop; he admitted that these were "indeed rare examples, yet possi-
ble to be done by others." Another resident of early Virginia declared in
1622 that "any laborious honest man may in a shorte time become ritche
in this Country."
2
During the 1620s Virginia became English America's
first boom country, as tobacco production reached levels greater than
500,000 pounds per year.
During the first decade after the initial settlement at Jamestown, the
Virginia Company had been severely weakened by the colony's lack of
economic success, and the poor returns paid to those who had invested in
the enterprise. Although tobacco became a source of great prosperity in
the colony's second decade, it did not prove a source of salvation to the
1
William Hay to Archibald Hay, Barbados, September 10, 1645; Scottish Record Office, Hay of
Haystoun Papers, GD 34/ 94; ; James Kendall Hosmer, ed., Wintbrop's Journal: "History of New
England," 1630- 1649, Vol. 2 (New York: 1908), 228; James Phinney Baxter, ed., Documentary
History of the State of Maine, Vol. 3 (Portland, ME: 1884), 163- 4; Lyon Gardiner Tyler, ed.,
Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606-1625 (New York: 1907), 284- 5; "Early Letters from Pennsylva-
nia, 1699- 1722, " Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 37 (1913), 332, 334.
1
Tyler, ed. , Narratives of Early Virginia, 284- 5; Susan Myra Kingsbury, ed., Records of the Virginia
Company of London, Vol. 3 (Washington, D. C. : 1933), 589.
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Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 139
company and in fact served to weaken the company even further: while
tobacco made fortunes for many individual settlers, including a number of
the company's officers, the wealth it conferred on many planters gave
them the power to become increasingly independent of the company.
Ironically, the extraordinary profitability of tobacco was no more compati-
ble with successful control of the colony by the Virginia Company than
economic failure had been. The company had wished for a stable society,
where men could earn reasonable profits and live normal lives, but neither
the starving time of the first decade nor the boom that followed created
conditions that could achieve this end.
For nearly two decades the Virginia Company fought what ultimately
proved to be a losing battle. In 1624 its charter was annulled, and Vir-
ginia was taken under the direct supervision of the king as the first royal
colony in England's history. Although debate continues even today over
the relative importance of the causes of the Virginia Company's failure,
whatever the precise contribution of the company's own shortcomings, it
is clear that many of its greatest problems, including persistent epidemic
sickness and occasional Indian massacres, were largely beyond its control.
And although its career was brief, the company was responsible for a
number of important institutional innovations that were to spread widely
and become central to the colonial settlement of English America. One of
these was the use of the joint-stock device. Familiar to seventeenth-
century Englishmen from mercantile shipping ventures, the Virginia Com-
pany adapted this device to colonization and introduced investors to the
idea of placing their funds for relatively long periods, fixed at the time of
subscription. The company launched a publicity campaign in 1609 that
captured not only the imagination of the English public, but of enough
wealthy members of London's mercantile community to enable the Vir-
ginia Company to raise a sum of capital larger than any other colonizing
company of the early seventeenth century, and second among joint-stock
companies of its time only to the staid and powerful East India Company.
Another innovation of the Virginia Company was indentured servitude, an
early solution to the labor problem, which will be discussed later in this
chapter. Yet another innovation was the headright system. In one of a
series of initiatives aimed at increasing immigration to Virginia, in 1618
the company began a policy of granting fifty acres of land for every person
settled in the colony. A man could receive this amount - one headright -
not only for himself and each member of his family who came to Virginia
but also for each bound laborer he imported. With these grants the
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140 David W. Galenson
Virginia Company established the principle of using American land to
help finance immigration. In the later years of the seventeenth century,
long after the demise of the Virginia Company, the headright system
remained perhaps the single most powerful device attracting immigrants
to Virginia. And with some variations in the amount of land and the form
of the transaction, the headright system was later adopted by nearly all the
colonies of English America.
Beyond initiating the headright system, the Virginia Company intro-
duced another device intended to speed up settlement within its territory.
Groups of shareholders were allowed to combine their landholdings into
jointly owned associations, called private plantations or hundreds, and the
investors in each of these small communities were given local governmental
powers over other settlers. Many of these small settlements were established
as investors rushed to expand tobacco production on fertile lands with access
to the region's many waterways, which could serve to transport their crops
to market. The system of private plantations promoted several tendencies
that became characteristic of Virginia later in the colonial period. One was
the relatively great degree of local power, political as well as economic, of
the country gentlemen who dominated the colony in much the same way
that the English gentry dominated many rural counties in the mother
country. Another was the widespread dispersion of the region's population
along the Chesapeake's waterways, with the consequent absence of towns,
which was often noted with disapproval by English visitors.
The Virginia Company made another contribution to the settlement of
English America that was less concrete but perhaps even more important
than any of these specific innovations. Although the company ultimately
failed, it did establish a settlement that persisted, and in tobacco it
successfully began to produce a staple crop that could profitably be ex-
ported to Europe. These accomplishments may have been the final encour-
agement necessary for many Englishmen, rich as well as poor, to stop
merely considering migration to the New World and to take action. By
1620 a new burst of migration was under way that in the course of the
next two decades not only would bring much larger numbers of new
settlers to Virginia, but would include concerted and successful attempts
to settle in the West Indies, New England, and Maryland. Although this
later migration did nothing to save the Virginia Company from economic
failure, to the extent that the company's experiences helped to increase the
size of the later migration and influenced the behavior of its settlers, the
impact of the Virginia Company on the settlement of English America
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Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 141
extended far beyond its geographic domain, and continued long after its
own demise.
In the years following the dissolution of the Virginia Company, the
colony's leading planters struggled to retain the political rights they had
gained earlier. After more than a decade of uncertainty, the King recog-
nized the authority of Virginia's representative assembly to make the
colony's laws, subject to the governor's veto. Once this privilege was
granted, it set a precedent of a significant degree of self-government that
would extend to all later royal colonies.
During the middle of the seventeenth century, Virginia came to be
dominated politically and economically by a small group of wealthy plant-
ers. Many of these were recruited to Virginia by its powerful governor, Sir
William Berkeley, who arrived in the colony in 1642 and held office for
nearly 30 years. Berkeley attracted many younger sons of eminent English
families to Virginia through liberal use of his patronage powers. His
appointments to high public offices, which in turn brought great land
grants and valuable trading licenses, succeeded in establishing his follow-
ers as such a powerful ruling elite that they and their descendants retained
substantial political control over Virginia for much of the balance of the
colonial period.
As the colonization of English America proceeded, other forms of settle-
ment appeared, as new institutions were devised to fit particular circum-
stances. As larger numbers of Englishmen became willing to migrate to
America, a new form of commercial organization grew increasingly attrac-
tive to wealthy and politically powerful English investors. One or more
gentlemen might become owners of a new colony and induce migrants to
settle on their lands under an essentially manorial plan of government.
The wealth and political connections of the promoter would place him in a
good position to obtain title to a grant of land from an English govern-
ment anxious to encourage English settlement of the New World at other
than public expense, and the prominence and fortune of the promoter
would help to inspire the confidence of settlers in choosing their American
destination.
A series of attempts to establish proprietary settlements occurred in the
early history of the English West Indies. In 1627, with the authority of a
royal patent, Sir William Courteen organized a venture that sponsored the
first English settlement in Barbados. Two years later, however, the Earl of
Carlisle obtained a royal patent that made him proprietor of both Barbados
and the Leeward Islands. After a struggle for power Carlisle prevailed.
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142 David W. Galenson
Under the plans of these early ventures, Barbados was to be an estate
cultivated for the benefit of the proprietors. Land grants of moderate size
were to be made to cultivators, who were to pay proprietary dues to the
absentee owners of the colony.
During the first two decades of settlement, Barbados and the Leeward
Islands - St. Christopher, Nevis, Montserrat, and Antigua - were the
sites of small settlements where farmers cultivated a variety of crops for
export, including tobacco, cotton, and ginger, without great commercial
success. In the early 1640s, however, Dutch settlers from Brazil helped
English planters introduce sugar cultivation into Barbados, and the sugar
revolution quickly changed every aspect of the economy and society of the
English West Indies. The new crop was immediately enormously profit-
able. Sugar was most efficiently grown on large plantations, and a number
of young, ambitious English merchants and gentlemen rushed to the West
Indies to buy up small farms and consolidate them into great plantations.
When the supply of English workers proved inadequate to grow the labor-
intensive export crop, the planters rapidly began to import large numbers
of African slaves.
The growing wealth of Barbados' planters emboldened them. In 1643
they ceased paying rents to their absentee proprietor and declared them-
selves freeholders. A period of political maneuvering followed, and after
the English Restoration, at the planters' request Charles II officially an-
nulled Carlisle's proprietary patent and confirmed the validity of all land
purchases made in earlier decades. With the formal demise of the propri-
etorship, Barbados became a royal colony under the direct control of the
king, who levied a duty on all exports from the island while leaving the
planters largely in control of their own local government. Similar develop-
ments occurred in the Leeward Islands, where the great sugar planters
grew increasingly powerful both politically and economically. When the
Spanish were driven out of Jamaica in 1660, it also became an English
royal colony. Although the settlement of Jamaica was for many years
disrupted by struggles between planters and English buccaneers who used
the island as a base of operations, over time great sugar plantations
emerged there too, and wealthy planters imported armies of African slaves
to grow their crops. Throughout the English West Indies, economic
prosperity gave rise to considerable economic independence, and the enor-
mous wealth created by sugar cultivation led to the great planters being
allowed to govern their colonies as oligarchies subject only to the relatively
permissive control of the king.
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Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 143
The first major example of the proprietary form of settlement on the
North American mainland was the grant of Maryland to Cecilius Calvert,
the second Lord Baltimore, in 1632. A royal charter granted Baltimore
sole title to more than 10 million acres on upper Chesapeake Bay. The
remarkable charter also gave Baltimore virtually complete legal authority
over his territory, with the power to establish a government in whatever
form he pleased. Baltimore established the colony's first settlement at St.
Mary's in 1634 and installed his brother as governor, with detailed instruc-
tions on how the colony was to be organized. Religious tolerance was to be
one of the colony's fundamental tenets. The first Lord Baltimore, a convert
to Catholicism, had envisioned Maryland as an asylum for Catholics,
where they would be free to worship without fear of reprisals or discrimina-
tion, and his son wished to realize this goal without in any way alienating
the more numerous Protestant settlers who would be essential to the
successful establishment of a colony. The organization of Maryland's econ-
omy was to be familiar to Englishmen, as Baltimore laid out plans for the
most complete transplanting of a manorial system that was to be at-
tempted anywhere in English America. The proprietor would grant estates
of thousands of acres to manorial lords, who would hold the legal power to
operate courts on their lands. The lords would recruit tenants to settle on
their estates and pay rent on their lands. The lords would pledge to
support the proprietor in return for their grants, and would pay him
quitrents in recognition of their economic obligations.
The manorial organization of Baltimore's colony failed to materialize, as
Maryland's history during the seventeenth century witnessed the gradual
breaking down of rigid proprietary control in spite of the proprietors'
concerted efforts to maintain their position in the face of growing popular
opposition. As in Virginia, tobacco quickly became the primary cash crop
and provided a basis for the colony's economic success. The grants of large
estates were initially of little practical political or economic significance
because of the shortage of workers to cultivate them as tenants or laborers.
The extreme labor shortage early in the colony's history allowed many
early settlers to gain their economic independence from the manorial
lords, and to establish separate farms where they could work for their own
profit, often accumulating sizable estates. Thus just as in Virginia, in
Maryland the colonial labor problem undermined the initial plans for a
rigid social hierarchy, as Lord Baltimore's blueprints for a manorial society
were largely swept away and early Maryland became an open and fluid
society, which offered considerable economic and social opportunity for
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144 David W. Galenson
poor settlers from England. In time, the colony's growing population
would serve to push up land prices and confer great wealth on Lord
Baltimore's original grantees and their heirs, and these men would play a
central role in the colony's government as in its economy. But like the
economy, the government that emerged was much more broadly based
than Baltimore had planned. The colony's bitter political strife came to
center around the growing efforts of the elected assembly to gain power
and greater autonomy at the expense of the governor and the lords of his
appointed council. A long and bitter struggle concluded with the success-
ful attempt of the assembly in 1691 to have Maryland declared a royal
province. Although the proprietor retained his rights to the colony's
lands, the political power of the proprietor had been removed. This was
the culmination of a process that had begun almost at Maryland's first
settlement, for the economic realities of the New World meant that the
primary importance of the proprietor and his grantees stemmed from their
position as wealthy landowners and tobacco planters rather than from the
legal privileges granted to them as manorial lords.
A number of similar proprietary settlements followed in later years;
these included the founding of Carolina in 1663 by eight proprietors,
among them the Duke of Albemarle and Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, the
grant of New York to the Duke of York upon its conquest in 1664, the
subsequent grant of Jersey by York to Lord John Berkeley and Sir George
Carteret, and the grant of the proprietorship of Pennsylvania to William
Penn in 1681. While the specific governmental forms and economic
practices varied from one colony to another, all of these ventures shared
the characteristic that their proprietors treated their grants as private
estates from which they expected to derive personal incomes. They were
willing to take advantage of any kind of economic opportunity that ap-
peared promising, but in all cases their most valuable asset was ownership
of a vast amount of land. Their profits consequently depended on attract-
ing settlers whose efforts would produce output from the land, which
would serve as the basis for tax revenue to the proprietors as well as raising
the price at which the remaining lands could be sold to later settlers.
Although the establishment of large estates to be worked by tenants and
landless laborers was the initial model on which these proprietary colonies
were usually based, the greater economic power conferred on settlers by
the New World's labor scarcity prevented these English tenures and prac-
tices from effectively taking hold, and proprietors were often forced to
adapt by simply selling their land outright to settlers.
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Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 145
A dramatic example of this process occurred on the southern mainland
coast in the last decades of the seventeenth century. A successful Barbados
plantation owner, Sir John Colleton, recognized that the rapid growth of
the Barbados economy had created a large group of land-hungry farmers,
experienced in colonial settlement, who might easily be enticed to the
territory south of Virginia with the promise of abundant land. Colleton
assembled a group of wealthy and influential backers and with their
support in 1663 obtained a royal charter granting his partnership title to
all the land between Virginia and Florida. None of the proprietors in-
tended to settle in Carolina, for Colleton had convinced them that they
could simply design and appoint a government, distribute land in the
colony, and collect rent from settlers. Few settlers responded to their plan,
however, and many of those who did reacted unfavorably to conditions on
the swampy Carolina coast. In 1669, with the Carolina settlement close to
extinction, one of the proprietors, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, set out to
provide the basis for a new initiative. With the help of his secretary, the
political philosopher John Locke, Ashley designed a new approach to the
colony's settlement, including a more active role for the proprietors in
directing and funding its development. The two men also wrote the
Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which outlined an elaborate legal
framework for a society that was to be based on land ownership. The
constitution provided for a class of wealthy aristocrats, who were to make
large investments in the colony and receive great estates, a large class of
lesser property-holders who would pay quitrents to the colony's propri-
etors, and another class of tenants, who would have no political role. The
constitution also recognized that blacks would be held as chattel slaves.
Political stability was to be gained in the colony by giving the primary
political and judiciary positions to the nobility, while creating a limited
degree of democracy by allowing all landowners to vote for representatives
to a parliament that could accept or reject legislation initiated by a council
of the noblemen.
The settlement initiated by Ashley's efforts, centered around the town
that would later be named Charleston, grew into the prosperous colony of
South Carolina. Yet it developed in a way very different from that envi-
sioned by Ashley and Locke, as a group of experienced and ambitious
settlers from the West Indies dominated the early settlement and gave its
society a number of features borrowed from the sugar islands. Initially, the
displaced Barbadians made South Carolina's economy a complement to
that of the West Indies, as they sent beef and pork to feed the islands'
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146 David W. Galenson
populations, and lumber to make the barrels for shipping their sugar. As
time went on, their continuing search for a staple crop led to the discovery
that the Carolina lowlands were ideally suited for rice cultivation, and
during the eighteenth century many colonists established great planta-
tions to grow rice for export. The early recognition that the swampy
lowlands posed a great danger to settlers in the form of malaria discour-
aged English immigrants, so the Carolina planters readily imported large
numbers of slaves to do the onerous work of growing rice in the hot
Carolina summers. Over time the planters challenged the authority of the
proprietors in a variety of ways, and after a number of lesser acts of
defiance, in 1719 they formed their own government and announced that
they would no longer recognize the proprietary authority. The English
government accepted the new government's invitation to take over, and in
1720 South Carolina became a royal colony. The end of proprietary rule
did not end the proprietors' ownership of the colony's lands, which was
not accomplished until 1729, when the proprietors gave up their land
rights in exchange for payments from the English exchequer.
The experience of New York affords another example of the failure of a
proprietorship. New Netherland had been founded by the Dutch West
Indies Company in 1626 as a base for its North American fur trade.
Fearing that agricultural development would be a costly distraction from
the colony's main purpose, the company discouraged the establishment of
commercial farming. As a consequence the colony grew very slowly, and
its small population offered no resistance when a fleet sent by the English
government seized New Amsterdam in 1664. The king's subsequent
grant of the colony to his younger brother made New York the only
proprietary possession in colonial history to be held by a member of the
royal family. Fittingly, the charter was unique for its brevity and minimal
restrictions. The Duke of York was allowed to rule without popular repre-
sentation, make all appointments and laws, and determine all judicial
matters, with a right of appeal only to the king. He was to have complete
power over the colony's trade, and he could fix its customs rates, regulate
the assigning of its lands, and provide for the colony's defense.
Although New York's charter was the most extreme expression of propri-
etary authority to be found anywhere in English America, the Duke of
York did not rule despotically, and in practice his rule was more benevo-
lent than those of some other proprietary colonies. He did wish to profit
financially from his investment in the colony, and to this end he set
customs rates for exports and imports, as well as land rents and manorial
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Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 147
payments. These profits failed to materialize, however, as the colony's
inhabitants resented their lack of political privileges compared to their
neighbors in New England, and objected to the imposition of taxes with-
out popular consent. After resisting the establishment of an assembly for a
number of years, the duke relented, and a general assembly was convened
in 1683. The assembly passed a series of new laws that provided the basis
for a constitution for the colony, but these had not yet taken effect in 1685
when the duke became King of England. James' accession to the throne
changed the legal status of New York from a ducal seignory to a royal
colony, subordinate not only to the king but also the other branches of the
executive government in England. The colony's assembly was dissolved,
and New York was again ruled by a governor, under the control of the
English government. Conflict between the government and the general
population continued, until in 1689 the king called on a new governor to
establish a general assembly of the colony's freeholders, as in other colo-
nies. New York then became a normal royal colony, with popular represen-
tation in government, but with a history of political contentiousness that
had never made it profitable for its proprietor.
A very different example of the defeat of a proprietorship, as a result of a
colony's economic success, is afforded by the most famous of proprietary
settlements. In 1681 Charles II granted to William Penn title to the last
unassigned segment of the North American coast, stretching from New
York to Maryland, with boundaries encompassing a territory nearly as
large as that of England. Penn received personal title to all the land of the
territory, as well as the authority to form a government, to appoint most
of its officers, and to enact laws subject only to the agreement of an
assembly of settlers and the king. In 1682, Penn issued a Frame of
Government, which he considered a constitution for the new colony. Since
Penn intended his colony to be a refuge for persecuted Quakers, the Frame
provided for complete freedom of religion. Politically, Penn's constitution
created an oligarchic structure in which laws were to be initiated by a
governor and council, with an assembly, elected only by landowners, able
to veto but not to amend legislation. In Penn's scheme, political power
was reserved primarily for the wealthy, as he planned to use appointive
offices in the colony as an inducement for wealthy Englishmen to purchase
large tracts of land.
Penn was an extremely successful recruiter of settlers. Beginning in
1681, he circulated pamphlets throughout Great Britain, the Nether-
lands, and Germany, and soon made Pennsylvania the most widely adver-
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148 David W. Galenson
tised American colony. Penn's advertising efforts, together with his liberal
policy of land distribution, quickly gained Pennsylvania a reputation as a
place where settlers of modest means could prosper. Not only English.
Quakers but also Europeans from a wide variety of countries responded to
the call. Philadelphia soon became a major commercial center, and many
more settlers spread out to the west on Pennsylvania's fertile farm lands.
Yet Penn was much less successful in his role as a proprietor than as a
recruiter. Almost from the beginning of settlement, the representative
assembly challenged the dominant political power held by the governor and
his council, and a continuing series of struggles over the form and practice of
government left Penn discouraged and disillusioned. The culmination of
these struggles came in 1701, when Penn was forced to replace the original
Frame of Government with a new charter of liberties. Under the new charter
the upper council was eliminated from the legislative process, and the
power to initiate legislation was to be held by the assembly, subject to veto
by the king, but not by Penn. Except for the appointment of the governor,
proprietary rule of Pennsylvania came to an end, as the colony's residents
were to have no special allegiance to Penn or his descendants. Although
Penn retained rights to all undistributed land in the colony, this did not
prove to be of sufficient value to compensate for his past expenses and the
damage done by a steward who embezzled from his estate, and Penn was a
poor man when he died in 1718. Yet Pennsylvania prospered. Although it
never became the peaceful religious Utopia Penn had wished for, the colony
was a great economic success, with a rapidly growing population of more
heterogeneous origins than any other major colony of English America.
Pennsylvania's many small farms stood in sharp contrast to the great planta-
tions of South Carolina, but both colonies shared an experience in which the
economic prosperity of their settlers empowered them to eliminate the
control of proprietary government.
A very different method of settlement appeared in the colonization of
New England. In 1628 a group of English Puritans obtained a land patent
encompassing most of present-day Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
They received a royal charter in 1629 for the Massachusetts Bay Company,
a joint-stock organization similar to the Virginia Company. As a result of
deteriorating economic conditions in England as well as growing fears of
religious repression for critics of the Church of England, in 1630 the
Puritan leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Company took the novel step of
migrating to America, taking the company and its charter with them.
Unlike the other colonizing companies, the New England settlers there-
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Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 149
fore would not be accountable to an English organization holding title to
their land and the profits from its settlement. All the major investors in
the Puritan colonies migrated to New England, carrying with them their
capital and their title to the company, and leaving further promotional
work in England to a network of associations based on religious interest.
The system proved an effective one, as the relocation of whole congrega-
tions to America in groups resulted in a substantial movement of English-
men to Massachusetts between 1630 and 1643, when improving prospects
for Puritans in England brought an end to the initial migration.
The spread of settlement throughout New England proceeded very differ-
ently from the patterns of colonization to the south. Many of the initial
plans made by companies for English settlements in America had called for
their colonists to create towns and villages like those of England in the new
lands, in order to transplant familiar ways of life to the New World. Yet to
the dismay of those who planned the settlements, in most of the early
colonies the desired compact communities did not develop, as the advan-
tages of large landholdings for commercial agriculture and the need for
access to waterways for transporting bulky cash crops to market generally
tended to disperse settlers over the countryside in a pattern of isolated
plantations and farms very different from that of England. Such was not the
case in New England, however. The leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Com-
pany had originally intended to distribute land to householders using a
headright system, with the amount of land granted to each settler to be
determined by the number of family members and servants arriving in the
colony. Yet when they reached America, the leaders realized that use of this
policy might produce the kind of scattering of the settlers that had occurred
in Virginia, and would not guarantee the attainment of their communal
goals. The Puritans consequently designed a system for the settlement of
their lands based on the strict and centralized control of regimented commu-
nities, and unlike in other regions this plan was not undermined by the
existence of lucrative agricultural opportunities.
A group that wished to establish a new town in Massachusetts needed
the permission of the colony's legislature. When the legislature approved a
request, its franchise not only conferred the right to create a government
for a new town, and the right to send representatives to the legislature,
but also carried title to an allotment of land. This land was legally deeded
to a group of leaders, or proprietors, of the planned settlement. These
leaders distributed the land, to themselves as well as others, according to a
number of criteria, including social status, family size, and extent of
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150 David W. Galenson
investment in the colony. In each town much of the land was initially not
distributed but was held out for common use and grants to later settlers,
as well as for later division among the original proprietors when the
growth of their families made larger landholdings advantageous. The same
leaders who owned the town's land were among the initial voting member-
ship of the town's political meeting, and made up an important part of the
members of the town's covenanted church.
Although opposition to the tight control of these small groups of
leaders would develop later, in the early colonial period the villages orga-
nized in this way remained cohesive, and the settlement of New England
proceeded with the orderly establishment of new towns founded and man-
aged by these procedures. The Massachusetts Bay Company evolved from a
commercial company into the government of a commonwealth, and the
colony's government consequently ceased to have the profit motivation of
the other companies of colonial settlement. As a result, initial land settle-
ment was often done through grants rather than purchases, with the speed
of the expansion of landholding determined by political and social as well
as economic considerations. The ability of the colony's leaders successfully
to impose and maintain their control over economic resources may have
been in large part a consequence of the absence of the extraordinary profit
opportunities that existed in other regions of English America, for poten-
tial entrepreneurs in New England lacked the powerful incentive of their
counterparts to the south to establish the large plantations that would
have conflicted with the social goals of the Massachusetts Bay Company's
elite. Conflict was also reduced by the fact that when a number of
nonproprietary residents of an existing town became dissatisfied with their
restricted economic opportunities, they were often able to obtain permis-
sion from the legislature to establish a new town and thus become propri-
etors in their own right. The region in which English ways of life were
most successfully replicated in America was also the region which would
achieve the least economic prosperity.
Another group that shared the Puritans' objection to the Church of
England had also settled in New England. A small group of religious
radicals arrived in Plymouth in 1620. The Pilgrims rejected the pursuit
of wealth and worldly comforts in their attempts to establish a primitive
religious Utopia. When they failed to achieve the religious commitment
they had sought, their lack of material success left them with no cohesive
political or social structure, and their small settlement was formally
absorbed into Massachusetts in 1691. Although intellectual historians
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Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 151
have long been fascinated by the Pilgrims' self-abnegating quest for
religious purity, their impact on the colonial economy and society was
negligible.
A survey of the institutions of settlement of English America quickly
reveals not only a variety of ways in which existing English methods of
organization were adapted to particular problems involved in settling the
wilderness, but also the frustration in most cases of the original goals of
those who initiated the ventures. The model of settlement common to
most of these ventures - indeed the term normally used by seventeenth-
century Englishmen to refer to colonies — was that of the plantation, in
which English settlers would transplant their traditional communities and
established ways of life to new lands. Yet in most places this foiled to
happen, and from very early in the colonial period it became commonplace
for English visitors to America to remark on the unfamiliarity of the
societies they found there. The failure of the original plans of many of the
earliest colonizers was in part a consequence of the common economic
basis of their efforts in profit-seeking joint-stock companies or proprietor-
ships. The need to produce dividends for shareholders or proprietors
placed great pressure on settlers to produce quick profits for their compa-
nies, but to their disappointment they found no sources of immediate
profits in America. The result was often the financial weakening of the
companies, even their bankruptcy, and a growing need for the settlers to
assume greater responsibility for the survival of their own communities.
The remainder of this chapter will survey some of the main adaptations
they made and the consequences that followed from them, but a central
element in the history of all the colonies of English America is the early
use of new economic and social institutions, as the result of a painful
transition to the very different economic realities of a new world. The early
colonizers' great plans for enormous profits and Utopian social and reli-
gious communities were based on the assumption that employers and
workmen would stand in much the same relation in America as they had
in England. These plans were quickly thwarted, however, by the eco-
nomic realities of the New World: the radically greater ratio of land to
labor in America, and the much greater labor productivity this produced
in most of the new regions of settlement, meant that the employment
relationship would be very different from that of England. Out of the
adjustment by both employers and workers to the new economic realities
of America came genuinely new forms of society.
Although the focus of the following section of this chapter will be on
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152 David W. Galenson
labor market institutions, these were obviously not the only important
features of the colonial economy and society that were transformed in the
process of transfer from the Old World to the New. A few other features
of fundamental importance deserve mention. One of these involved land
tenure. The ownership and control of land came to be much more closely
linked in America than in England. Although the trend in England at
the time of colonization had long been toward the increasing importance
of land tenure in fee simple, and although tenancy was far from nonexis-
tent in the colonies, the ownership of land by those who worked it was
much more common in the colonies than in the mother country. This
was not simply the result of the greater abundance of land in America,
for the effect of the higher colonial ratio of land to labor was reinforced
by the attitudes of many settlers, who had come to America precisely to
avoid the tenancy that faced them in England. The combination of this
widespread desire for independent ownership and control of land with
the ample supply of American land to be cleared and cultivated meant
that freehold land ownership became a dominant characteristic of the
colonial economy.
Another characteristic of the colonial economy often remarked by con-
temporaries was that the extent of control exercised by formal community
structures — not only government, but also private associations such as
guilds — was much less than in England. From a very early date, many
governments at the level of both the colony and the local community
recognized that the colonial economy was simply not subject to their
oversight and control. Guilds and many other private economic associa-
tions either never began in the colonies or never developed effective con-
trol of markets. Although the actual degree of control over the economy
that was exercised by governments and guilds in seventeenth-century
England has long been debated by historians, in colonial America many
governments and other formal organizations failed to maintain even a
pretense of being able to regulate economic activity. While in some re-
gions the dispersion of settlement clearly made government control of
most economic activity impractical almost from the beginning of coloniza-
tion, even in areas where settlement proceeded in more traditionally En-
glish fashion, based on central towns, it soon became apparent that deci-
sions concerning production and trade would be largely independent of
government intervention, and would be determined almost entirely by the
abilities and desires of the individuals and families who populated English
America.
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Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 153
LABOR MARKET I NSTI TUTI ONS
The key to economic success in colonial America, for individual planters as
well as entire colonies, was to obtain an adequate supply of agricultural
labor to grow crops that would satisfy the demands of the large European
market or of the expanding markets of the colonies. Stark contrasts ap-
peared among the solutions to this problem that were developed in colo-
nial America. Three major institutions emerged as solutions — indentured
servitude, slavery, and hired labor — and the differences among them
affected nearly all aspects of life in the societies that produced and sus-
tained them.
The first of the three institutions to emerge on a large scale was inden-
tured servitude. This was a credit system under which labor was leased. In
England servants signed contracts, called indentures, promising to work
for a recruiting agent or his assigns in a particular colony for a specified
period of years. The servant was then transported to the agreed destina-
tion, where his contract was sold to a colonial planter who provided the
servant with food, lodging, and clothing during the time the servant
worked for him. The design and practice of indentured servitude overcame
considerable obstacles, in the form of capital market imperfections and
principal—agent problems, to make the indenture system a key institution
in early English America. A brief account of its development and opera-
tion shows how the efficiency of the system was achieved.
Ten years after the initial settlement of Jamestown, Virginia's planters
began to export tobacco to England. The introduction of the crop raised the
value of labor sharply. In the fall of 1619 the secretary of the colony wrote
excitedly of its new prosperity, proclaiming that "all our riches for the
present doe consiste in Tobacco," but then corrected himself, explaining
that "our principall wealth (I should have said) consisteth in servants. "3 To
meet the resulting high demand for labor, late in 1619 the Virginia Com-
pany sent one hundred new workers to the colony, each bound to the
company for a period of years. Upon their arrival, the company rented out
the majority of these servants to private planters on annual contracts. This
arrangement proved costly to the company, however, because of the new
principal-agent relationship that it created between the company and the
private planters. The company quickly recognized that the planters lacked
sufficient incentives to protect the company's substantial investment in the
> Kingsbury, ed., The Records of the Virginia Company of London, Vol. 3, 221.
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154 David W. Galenson
labor of their hired workers, both in providing adequate maintenance and
health care in the colony's unhealthy disease environment and in preventing
runaways. The following year, the Virginia Company made a new shipment
of one hundred servants. Their distribution among the planters became the
first large-scale example of the characteristic form of the indenture system,
as colonists paid a lump sum of money to the company and in return
received title to the services of the worker for a fixed term of years. This
transaction solved the agency problem the company had encountered ear-
lier, for now the servant's supervisor was the owner of his labor contract,
with appropriate incentives to care for the servant and prevent him from
running away.
This transaction provided a systematic means by which a substantial
supply of English labor could be connected with colonial demand. A
majority of all hired labor in preindustrial England was performed by
workers called servants in husbandry - youths of both sexes, usually aged
in their teens or early twenties, who lived and worked in the households of
their masters on annual contracts. Passage fares to America in the seven-
teenth century were high relative to the earnings of these servants in
husbandry, and few prospective migrants were able to pay the cost of the
voyage out of their own savings. The Virginia Company's solution was to
provide passage to America to prospective settlers as a loan to the mi-
grants, who contracted to repay their debts with their labor services after
their arrival in America.
The large size of the debt for passage meant that repayment would take
substantially longer than the single year that normally characterized the
employment of farm servants in England, and this potentially raised new
problems of work incentives. The migrant typically faced a term of four or
more years as a bound laborer after he or she had received the major benefit
of the bargain, in the form of passage to America. One historian has
recently argued that under these circumstances, with the servant lacking
the motivation of either future wages or the desire to be rehired, masters
had to rely heavily on physical violence to extract work from indentured
servants.* Corporal punishment of servants may have been more common
in the colonies than in England; although colonial laws protected servants
from excessive punishment, masters were permitted considerable latitude
in beating their servants. Yet it would be surprising if such physical abuse
had been very widespread, for harming their servants would obviously
* Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York:
1975), 126.
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Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 155
reduce the profits that masters could gain from their work. There is
evidence that positive work incentives for servants were created within the
operation of the indenture system. Masters appear typically to have ex-
ceeded the legally required minimum levels for food and clothing pro-
vided to their servants, and freedom dues - the master's payment to the
servant at the end of the contract - could also be raised above the legally
specified levels. Wages could be paid to servants during their terms, and
some masters made bargains with their workers that allowed the servants
to be released early from their terms of servitude. The opportunities
created by these positive work incentives clearly contributed to the flexibil-
ity of the indenture system in practice.
The legal basis of indentured servitude originated in the English stat-
utes and practices that regulated service in husbandry, but over time
throughout the colonies the indenture system developed into a distinctive
institution in law. In addition to laws that permitted masters to whip
their servants for misbehavior, most colonies enacted a system of laws to
enforce the servants' contracts. Servants caught in attempts to run away
were to be put in jail until they could be returned to their masters; in most
colonies the servant was then bound to compensate his master by having
his term extended, in some cases by as much as ten days for every day of
his absence. Masters were entitled to transfer their rights to their servants'
labor, and servants could be — and regularly were — legally sold. Servants
were not allowed to marry without their masters' permission; servants who
married secretly would have their marriage declared invalid and their
terms of servitude extended. In spite of the considerable control their
masters enjoyed over them, indentured servants nonetheless retained many
basic legal rights and enjoyed important legal protections. Servants' inden-
tures were legal contracts, and their terms were upheld and enforced by
colonial courts. A number of servants whose masters tried to hold them
beyond their agreed terms were freed by colonial courts upon presentation
of their indentures. Servants had the right to sue their masters for mistreat-
ment, and in extreme cases of abuse servants would be released from their
contracts. Although instances in which servants were freed by courts were
rare, county courts frequently ordered that masters improve the treatment
of their servants, often by increasing the food or clothing they provided.
Masters who caused the death of a servant were to be tried for murder, in
the words of a Maryland act of 1642, "as near as may be to the law of
England."
Like servants in husbandry in England, indentured servants bound for
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156 David W. Galenson
the colonies were generally young. Five sets of English registrations of
departing servants made between the 1680s and the 1770s show that at
least two-thirds of the migrants throughout this period were between the
ages of 15 and 25. It was extremely rare for servants to be below the teen
ages or above the twenties; the share of servants between 10 and 30 was
consistently above 90 percent. Throughout the colonial period, English
indentured servants were predominantly males. Surviving registrations
from the seventeenth century show that males accounted for 75 percent of
the migrants, while their share increased to 90 percent in the eighteenth
century. This shift may have been the result of changing demands for
skilled and unskilled servants, as discussed later in this essay.
Although the Virginia Company first developed the method by which
the indenture system operated, once the practice of outright sale of the
contracts had been established a large company no longer had any signifi-
cant advantage in servant transportation, and the indenture transaction
was quickly borrowed by smaller merchants and planters. The trade in
servants was a natural one for European merchants who imported sugar,
tobacco, rice, or other crops from the colonies, for servants could be
exchanged directly for colonial produce. There were no legal barriers to
entry into the trade, and economic barriers to entry were small for mer-
chants or captains already involved in trans-Atlantic shipping. As a result,
throughout the colonial period in the principal European ports large num-
bers of recruiters engaged in the trade, and servant transportation was
typically carried on in highly competitive markets.
Fare quotations indicate that charges for passage from England to Amer-
ica were constant for all servants at any date: they did not vary with
individual characteristics or among colonial destinations. All servants who
migrated to America consequently incurred implicit debts of similar
value. With recruitment under competitive conditions, the value of all
servants' contracts should have been the same at the time they were
negotiated. However, since the productivity of the servants differed, the
conditions of their indentures had to vary: the higher a servant's expected
productivity in America, the faster he could repay the implicit loan made
to him, and the shorter the contract he should have received.
Several sizable collections of indentures, which have survived among
English legal records, provide detailed evidence about the characteristics
of several thousand servants and the conditions on which they migrated to
America. Econometric analysis of the length of the servants' contracts
confirms the prediction of an inverse relationship between the term of
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Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 157
servitude and individual productivity. The length of indenture was in-
versely related to age, skill, and education, as older servants, those who
had skilled occupations, and those able to sign their contracts received
shorter terms. Servants bound for the West Indies furthermore received
considerably shorter terms than those bound for the colonies of the North
American mainland. This reduction in term was clearly a compensating
wage differential paid to servants willing to travel to less desirable destina-
tions, because both working conditions for servants and economic opportu-
nities after servitude were known to be much worse in the Caribbean
islands than on the mainland. West Indian planters were well aware of
their disadvantage in recruiting English servants. In 1675, for example,
the Council of Barbados complained in a petition to the King of England
that "In former tymes Wee were plentifully furnished with Christian
servants from England . . . but now Wee can gett few English, haveing
noe Lands to give them at the end of their tyme, which formerly was theire
main allurement."
5
The length of indenture furthermore responded to
changes in the colonial demand for labor. The terms of servants bound for
the West Indies varied inversely with the price of sugar. With the region's
virtual monoculture in sugar, high prices for the staple signaled times of
prosperity in the islands, and the high demand for labor during these
periods improved the conditions on which servants could travel to the
region.
The highly competitive European markets in which servants entered
indentures produced economically efficient outcomes. The lengths of the
contracts were no greater than was necessary to reimburse merchants for
the full cost of transporting the servants to the colonies. Thus the prices
for which servants were sold to colonial planters were only slightly higher
than the fares charged free passengers for the trans-Atlantic voyage; the
difference was a premium received by merchants for bearing the risk of
servant mortality on the crossing. The high degree of competition in the
European markets in which servants signed contracts therefore protected
the servants from economic exploitation by merchants, who might have
wished to bind servants to contracts much longer than necessary to pay for
their passage. The adjustment of contract lengths furthermore was suffi-
cient to equalize the expected sale prices of all contracts at the time the
servants were bound. Thus a number of variables that represented informa-
tion known by recruiting merchants at the time the servants' bargains
' "Petition of the Council and Assembly of Barbados to the King," 167;; Public Record Office,
London, CO. 1/35, f.237v.
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158 David W. Galenson
were made in Europe, including characteristics both of the servants and of
the contracts they entered, were found to have no systematic effect on the
sale prices of the servants' contracts in America. This implies that more
productive servants were able to capture the rewards from their greater
value in the form of shorter terms, instead of having these benefits accrue
to merchants as higher sale prices for their contracts. Additional evidence
of the efficiency of the market for servants comes from the analysis of
fluctuations in the volume of the servant trade over time. The number of
servants arriving annually in Maryland and Virginia varied positively with
tobacco prices. As for sugar in the West Indies, the central position of
tobacco in the early Chesapeake made the crop's price a good indicator of
the state of the region's economy. That high tobacco prices resulted in
high levels of immigration again attests to the efficiency with which the
trans-Atlantic market for servants transmitted information about the state
of colonial labor demand to Europe.
Indentured servitude was an important early solution to the labor prob-
lem in many parts of English America, and it was widely adopted: the
leading historian of the institution estimated that between one-half and
two-thirds of all white immigrants to the colonies between the 1630s and
the Revolution came under indenture.
6
Whereas initially all the servants
came from England, in time migrants from other countries joined the flow
of servants to English America; especially in the eighteenth century, sub-
stantial numbers of Scottish, Irish, and German immigrants came to the
colonies under indenture. In particular, the large migration of Germans to
Pennsylvania produced an innovation in the form of a variation on inden-
tured servitude called the redemptioner system. Before sailing from Eu-
rope, a passenger signed an agreement to pay his fere on arrival in Amer-
ica. After arrival, a period of two weeks was allowed for the servant to raise
the fare. If he failed to raise the money, he was sold into servitude by the
ship's captain for a length of time just sufficient to repay his debt. The
value of this system to immigrants appears to have stemmed from the fact
that the concentration of the German migration to Philadelphia meant
that many migrants could hope to find family or friends already in Pennsyl-
vania who might give or lend them the funds necessary to cancel their
debts. English criminals also joined the flow of indentured servants; those
convicted of felonies could be sentenced to transportation to the colonies,
where they would be bound to serve terms of from seven to fourteen years.
6
Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 7607-1776
(Chapel Hill, NC: 1947), 336.
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Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 159
During the eighteenth century a large fraction of England's felons were
sent to the Chesapeake Bay colonies under indenture.
Although indentured servitude played a major role in the colonial labor
market, in most places its importance declined significantly before the
time of the Revolution. Indeed, in precisely those regions that initially
depended most heavily on white servants for their labor needs, planters
eventually turned to black slaves as their principal source of bound labor.
Although these substitutions of slaves for servants occurred at different
times in different regions, in each case the functions of indentured labor
evolved in similar ways over time.
Indentured servants were quantitatively most important in the early
development of those regions that produced staple crops for export. The
major need was for workers to clear the land and grow the staple, and
initially planters relied on indentured labor to do this work. As time went
on there was also a rising demand for skilled craftsmen to do the work of
building finer houses, processing and packing the products for export, and
catering to the demands of the growing domestic markets, and servants
were purchased for these jobs.
A second stage in the evolution of the function of indentured servitude
occurred in the West Indies after the introduction of sugar, in the Chesa-
peake Bay colonies during the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and in
South Carolina and Georgia in the eighteenth century, after planters had
replaced their European field workers with Africans. In each of these cases,
this substitution of slaves for servants caused the majority of the bound labor
force to change from white to black. The initial transition from servants to
slaves was not complete, however, because the newly arrived Africans
lacked many of the craft skills required by colonial planters. Planters gener-
ally did not train their adult Africans to do skilled jobs, instead waiting to
train either those imported as children or slaves born in America. For a time
a racial division of labor by skill therefore existed, as unskilled labor forces
were made up of slaves, while indentured servants continued to function as
craftsmen and often to act as plantation managers.
As colonial output continued to increase, the demand for both skilled
and unskilled labor grew further. The eventual outcome in the plantation
economies was widespread investment in the training of slaves to take over
the skilled work. By the time of the Revolution the substitution of slaves
for servants had been largely completed in all the staple-producing colo-
nies of English America. In the West Indies and the southern mainland
colonies there were many plantations based almost exclusively on slave
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160 David W. Galenson
labor, with many slaves employed as skilled artisans in addition to those
who did unskilled field work. The adoption and growth of slavery in those
regions of English America that were characterized by plantation agricul-
ture did not bring a complete end to the immigration of white servants,
but it did produce systematic shifts over time in their occupational compo-
sition, and eventually in their principal regions of destination. By the end
of the mainland's colonial period, the West Indies had ceased to import
white servants in significant numbers, and among the plantation econo-
mies only the Chesapeake Bay colonies continued to receive sizable flows
of indentured labor. Among the economies not characterized by plantation
production of staple crops, only Pennsylvania received large numbers of
servants for an extended period, beginning in the late seventeenth century
and continuing through the end of the colonial period.
The decline of indentured servitude was thus linked in many colonial
regions to the growth of slavery. Unlike the trade in indentured servants,
the trans-Atlantic trade in African slaves began long before the English
colonization of America. Portuguese merchants began to trade for slaves
on the coast of West Africa as early as the middle of the fifteenth century,
and a substantial trans-Atlantic trade in slaves arose in the course of the
sixteenth century, with Portuguese ships carrying African workers to Span-
ish America and Brazil. By the end of the sixteenth century the Portu-
guese were joined in the trade by Spanish and Dutch merchants. More
than 100,000 African slaves were brought to the Americas by the end of
the sixteenth century, and another half million by the middle of the
seventeenth — still before English involvement in the trade began.
When English merchants entered the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the
second half of the seventeenth century, they therefore found a highly
competitive international industry in the process of rapid expansion. The
spread of sugar production from Brazil to the West Indies after 1640
produced a booming demand for labor in English America, which coin-
cided with a general expansion of sugar production in the Americas, so
that more African slaves were sold to Europeans in the five decades after
1650 than during the preceding 200 years combined. The desire of En-
glish merchants to capture a share of the lucrative trans-Atlantic trade in
slaves eventually led to the grant in 1663 by Charles II of a charter to the
Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa. The company was
badly organized, however, and its operations were interrupted by the
outbreak of war between the English and Dutch in 1665. When peace was
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Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 161
restored in 1667 the company was beyond saving, and its liquidation
began in 1670.
The Company of Royal Adventurers was succeeded by the Royal African
Company, which received a charter from Charles II in 1672. The new
company was granted a legal monopoly of the slave trade to English
America in return for agreeing to establish and maintain fortified settle-
ments on the West African coast. The forts, where company factors would
purchase and hold slaves prior to shipment, were desired by the King to
prevent the military domination of the region and possible exclusion of the
English by another European power.
The expected monopoly of the slave trade to the English colonies
failed to materialize. From the beginning of its career the Royal African
Company suffered infringements of its monopoly in the form of illegal
deliveries of slave cargoes to the English colonies by smaller traders,
referred to by the company as interlopers. Surrounded by wealthy plant-
ers who favored an open trade in slaves, the company's resident agents in
the West Indies fought a losing battle to stop these illegal shipments.
The agents could rarely persuade colonial governors to apprehend the
interlopers, and when they did, colonial juries made up of planters
would rarely give judgments against the smaller traders. As a result, at
most times the Royal African Company does not appear to have carried
even a majority of the slaves delivered to the English sugar islands.
Having failed to produce adequate profits for its investors, and suffering
from outstanding debts from West Indian planters that grew steadily
over time, the Royal African Company's activity in the slave trade
dwindled after the 1680s, it became inactive in that trade after 1730,
and the company went out of business in 1752.
The economic history of the Royal African Company's legal monopoly
has long been misunderstood. A notable early misinterpretation, which
has subsequently been repeated by many historians, was offered by Adam
Smith. Part of Smith's famous attack on mercantilism in The Wealth of
Nations was devoted to a discussion of the unfortunate economic conse-
quences that resulted when legal monopolies were granted to merchants to
set up joint-stock companies to carry on England's foreign trade. In sum-
marizing the Royal African Company's career, Smith stated that it had
enjoyed a monopoly of the slave trade until 1688, when the flight of James
II from England nullified royal monopolies. Exposed to competition, the
company was unable to survive, in spite of a parliamentary act of 1698
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162 David W. Galenson
granting the company the proceeds of a tax levied on its English competi-
tors in the slave trade. In Smith's view the reason for the company's
economic failure upon being exposed to competition was not hard to find,
for he believed the company to have been twice cursed by inefficiency,
with the "negligence and profusion" of both a joint-stock company and a
legally protected monopoly.
7
Smith's explanation of the Royal African Company's failure appears
incorrect, because his analysis was based on false premises. The company's
failure was not caused by inefficiency spawned by a sheltered monopoly
position, but on the contrary by the very competitiveness of the trans-
Atlantic slave trade. The company's African forts proved an expensive
liability that raised the company's costs relative to those of its competi-
tors, while the compensatory benefits the royal charter was supposed to
confer on the company were never realized, as neither Charles II nor his
successor James II proved willing to override the resistance of colonial
planters and enforce the company's exclusive right to deliver slaves to the
English colonies. As a consequence, company employees overseas convinc-
ingly reported to the central office in London that the interlopers were able
both to outbid the company for slaves in Africa and to undersell it in the
West Indies.
A longstanding belief that the Royal African Company held an effective
economic monopoly of the slave trade to English America has often served
to obscure the fact that the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the colonies was a
highly competitive industry. This has resulted in significant misunder-
standings of both the conduct of the trade and the economic basis of one of
colonial America's major sources of labor supply. Recent investigations
have produced evidence of the conduct of the trade that contrasts with
many earlier views, by identifying a number of outcomes that suggest
careful and efficient approaches to the business of slave trading.
The mortality of slaves on the trans-Atlantic crossing has long been one
of the most intensively studied aspects of the slave trade. The debate over
mortality dates back to the British parliamentary hearings on the abolition
of the slave trade that began in the late eighteenth century. The slaves'
passage mortality rates were higher than those suffered by other travelers
crossing the Atlantic: although Royal African Company records show a
decline in average slave mortality per voyage from 24 percent during the
1680s to 13 percent in the 1720s, and records from later traders indicate a
7
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causa of the Wealth of Nations (New York: 1937 [orig.
publ., 1776]), 700-1, 712-13.
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Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 163
further decline to average mortality rates of 8 to 10 percent in the second
half of the eighteenth century, even the latter remained far above the
mortality rates of under 4 percent estimated for Europeans traveling to
America in the eighteenth century.
The earliest explanation for these high mortality rates, first offered by
the abolitionists, attributed them to overcrowding of the slaves on the
voyages, which resulted in poor sanitation and rampant spread of disease.
Yet recent quantitative investigations of the experience of the Royal Afri-
can Company and other traders have failed to reveal any systematic rela-
tionship between the mortality rate of slaves on a voyage and the degree of
crowding of the slaves. Another traditional explanation for the slaves' high
mortality attributed it to inadequate provisioning of the ships. Yet again
quantitative studies have found no evidence of higher average daily or
weekly mortality rates on longer voyages, which would have been most
severely affected by the inadequate supplies of food and water. In sum, the
results obtained to this point suggest that slave traders were not negligent
or careless in the ways often charged in the past. Recent studies of the high
passage mortality of slaves have suggested epidemiological explanations of
the high mortality. The slaving voyages brought together at close quarters
large numbers of people from very different geographic disease environ-
ments, and inevitably exposed them to many unfamiliar diseases that
could be lethal to those who had no immunity developed through previous
contact. Outbreaks of small pox, dysentery, and other diseases would
spread rapidly throughout the human cargoes of the small slaving ships,
often killing many slaves already weakened from conditions on their jour-
neys to the West African coast and during their imprisonment there prior
to shipment. Evidence consistent with explanations that stress the role of
contagious diseases has been found in the fact that the European captains
and other crew members of the slaving ships suffered from mortality rates
much higher than those common among sailors on other types of trans-
Atlantic voyages, and often as high as those of the slaves. Indirect support
for epidemiological explanations of the high mortality rates on the trans-
Atlantic crossing is afforded by a different kind of evidence that demon-
strates the extraordinary danger of entering unfamiliar disease environ-
ments in the colonial period. A study of English employees of the Royal
African Company sent to live on the west coast of Africa found that among
460 new arrivals between 1695 and 1721, one in three died within four
months of landing, and three in five failed to survive one full year.
Slavery grew very unevenly in English America. Large-scale slavery
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164 ' David W. Galenson
appeared earliest and most prominently in the West Indies. All the En-
glish colonies in the West Indies had black majorities in their total popula-
tions by the end of the seventeenth century, and all reached black shares of
more than 80 percent of the total population during the eighteenth cen-
tury. On the North American mainland only South Carolina developed a
black majority in its population during the colonial period, although
slaves did come to make up more than one-third of the total population in
Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia. The Middle Colonies
had much lower black shares in total population, ranging from 5 to 10
percent, and New England never had more than 3 percent of its popula-
tion made up of blacks.
Beyond these differences in the overall numbers of blacks, there were
considerable differences among regions in the typical sizes of slave hold-
ings. The great sugar plantations of the West Indies produced by far the
greatest concentration of slave ownership. As early as 1680, more than
one-third of all slave owners in Barbados owned more than twenty slaves;
plantation sizes grew over time, and in Jamaica during the early 1770s a
sugar plantation of median value held more than 200 slaves. Among the
mainland colonies, the typical size of slave-holdings was greater among
the rice planters of South Carolina and Georgia than among the tobacco
planters of the Chesapeake. Thus in 1774, nearly half of all slave owners in
Maryland and Virginia owned five slaves or less, compared to less than a
quarter of the slave owners of South Carolina, while less than 5 percent of
Chesapeake slave owners held more than 25 slaves, compared to fully 30
percent of those of South Carolina.
In all the colonies of English America, slavery came to be well defined
as a legal status, involving the perpetual servitude of blacks and their
progeny. Yet the legal status of slavery was not created simultaneously or
uniformly throughout the colonies; it evolved separately within each col-
ony, and its adoption often occurred piecemeal, as legislators responded to
specific questions that arose concerning the status of Africans. The speed
with which the status developed varied considerably across colonies. One
instance of the rapid legal definition of slavery occurred in the West
Indies. In 1636, the council of Barbados declared that "Negros and Indi-
ans, that came here to be sold, should serve for life, unless a Contract was
before made to the contrary," and no doubts concerning the lifetime
servitude of blacks appeared there in later years. Similarly, in South Caro-
lina the rights of masters were very early clearly defined; the colony's
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Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 165
Fundamental Constitutions, drafted by Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper and
John Locke in 1669, declared that every freeman of the colony would have
"absolute power and authority over his Negro Slaves, of what opinion or
Religion soever."
In contrast, property,rights in blacks remained much more uncertain
for an extended period in the Chesapeake Bay region. Although blacks
were present in the region by 1619, no legislation concerning slavery
appeared until after mid-century; not until 1661 did Virginia's assembly
recognize that some blacks were held for lifetime service. In 1664, Mary-
land's legislature enacted a law that all blacks held in the colony, and all
those imported as slaves in future, would serve for life, as would their
children. Yet questions nonetheless remained about the absoluteness of
Chesapeake planters' property rights in slaves. Thus in 1667 Virginia's
legislature noted that concern had arisen that slaves who were baptized
might thereby be freed from their servitude, and passed a law declaring
that they would not. While the ostensible purpose of this law was to
encourage the spread of religion, its more likely cause was revealed in the
title of the parallel law enacted in Maryland in 1671, "An Act for Encour-
ageing the Importation of Negroes and Slaves into this Province." The
extension of the property rights of Chesapeake masters in their slaves did
not end with these laws. In 1669 Virginia's assembly bluntly extended
these property rights to their stark limits in "An act about the casuall
killing of slaves": a master who killed his slave would not be guilty of a
felony, "since it cannot be assumed that prepensed malice . . . should
induce any man to destroy his own estate." Thus fully fifty years passed
between the first arrival of blacks in the Chesapeake and the full definition
of the legal status of slavery.
Both the practice and legal definition of slavery became established in
all the colonies of English America in the course of the colonial period,
and although the patterns of development varied considerably among the
colonies, the form of the institution that eventually emerged was very
similar throughout English America. The English government was aware
of the development of black slavery in the colonies, and made no concerted
effort to regulate or prevent the status, because it recognized the economic
value of the institution. Once established, slavery remained in existence in
all the colonies of America through the time of the Revolution. An
abolitionist movement did begin in Pennsylvania after 1750, and the
growing support of the Quaker church for antislavery led increasing num-
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166 David W. Galenson
bers of slaveowners voluntarily to manumit their slaves in the following
decades. But mandatory abolition by legislation did not occur until after
American independence; Pennsylvania passed a first abolition law in
1780, and a number of other northern states followed this lead thereafter.
Free labor existed throughout colonial history. Yet much less is known
about free labor in the colonies than about either servitude or slavery, in
part because free labor is a less dramatic subject than bound labor, and in
part because of a shortage of primary evidence. The smaller amounts of
money at stake in the hire of free labor for short periods attracted less
interest from the government and the courts than the larger sums involved
in the long-term hire or purchase of bound labor, and records of transac-
tions in free labor are consequently scarcer than those in indentured and
slave labor.
Hired workers in colonial America faced a very different legal definition
of their obligations than do workers today. Colonial laws and the decisions
of courts appear initially to have followed English practices concerning
labor contracts in most respects. Thus for example an early Virginia law
reenacted an English principle by providing that any worker who agreed
to perform a piece of work must not depart before completing it, upon
penalty of a month in jail and a fine of £5 sterling. In general, colonial
courts initially appear to have accepted the premise, which prevailed in
English law, that hired artisans and laborers were legally bound to com-
plete the services they had agreed to perform; at least in the seventeenth
century the courts did not hesitate to order the specific performance of all
labor agreements, and to impose fines on workers who did not fulfill their
contracts. Over time, however, practice in the colonies may have changed.
During the eighteenth century the legal requirement that hired workers
remain at their jobs until they had fulfilled their agreements seems increas-
ingly to have been replaced by simple civil liability for any damages
caused by their premature departure.
Hired labor was present in all the colonies, but its importance varied
considerably across regions. In one region, however, hired labor existed
almost in isolation from the other two labor types. A study of probate
inventories from the mainland colonies in 1774 found that only 5 percent
of a sample of New England decedents had owned slaves, and that none
had owned indentured servants. The absence of bound labor in New
England was well known to contemporaries, as for example a seventeenth-
century visitor to the colonies remarked that although "Virginia thrives by
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Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 167
keeping many Servants . . . New England conceit they and their children
can doe enough, and soe have rarely above one Servant."
8
Because of the virtual absence of bound labor, an interesting point of
comparison for New England's labor market is that of England. Preindus-
trial England had two distinct types of hired labor. One, service in hus-
bandry, was made up of unmarried youths in their teens and early twenties
who lived and worked in the households of their employers, typically on
annual contracts. The second type was made up of adult men who worked
for wages by the day or week. Both these types of labor existed in New
England, but underlying economic differences between Old and New'
England appear to have changed considerably their quantitative impor-
tance and functions in America.
In England, service in husbandry was an efficient method of labor
allocation, for it allowed workers to move among farms at minimal cost
to increase their productivity. Children could move from the smaller
farms of their parents to the larger farms of neighbors or wealthier
farmers in nearby villages, thus raising the productivity of their labor.
The institution's exclusive use of the unmarried eliminated the problem
-of tied movers: the cost of migration was lower for these individuals than
for whole families, and employers could hire the number of workers they
wanted, without having to support or house other family members.
Historians have found that in preindustrial England wealthier farmers
were less likely than poorer farmers or landless laborers to send their
children into service. The larger farms of the wealthier parents meant
that they could put their children's labor to better use than the poor,
thereby not sacrificing income by keeping their children longer at home.
The considerably higher value of labor relative to land in New England
meant that rather than sending their children into service on larger
farms, more colonial parents could potentially behave like wealthier
parents in England and expand their landholdings to take advantage of
the labor of their children. Service in husbandry should therefore have
been less common in New England than in England. Although data have
been analyzed from only a small number of communities, the evidence of
the studies done to date does support this analysis, for it indicates that
servants in husbandry made up smaller shares of the total population in
New England's towns than in those of England during the late seven-
6
"Certaine Notes and Informations concerning New England," ca. 1660-4, British Library, Egerton
Mss. 239;, f-4i;v.
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168 David W. Galenson
teenth and early eighteenth centuries. New England parents clearly kept
their children at home longer than English parents, developing the
family estate, rather than sending them to work for others. Colonial
America's labor scarcity therefore appears to have reduced considerably
the importance of this institution that was central to the preindustrial
English labor market.
A similar change appears to have occurred with hired day labor. New
England had active markets for hired labor from a very early date, but the
region's employers frequently complained that hired labor was both expen-
sive and hard to find. As early as 1641 John Winthrop expressed his
frustration at the inability of Massachusetts' legislature to prevent "the
excessive rates of laborers' and workmens' wages," noting that "being
restrained [by statutory limits on wages}, they would either remove to
other places where they might have more, or else being able to live by
planting and other employments of their own, they would not be hired at
all."
9
It appears to have been common in New England for smaller farmers
to hire out for wages for short periods; a recent study found that almost
every man in one seventeenth-century Massachusetts county performed
occasional hired labor at some time in his career, most often for his older
and wealthier neighbors. Yet the same study found that the typical periods
of hire were short, so that few farmers were able to rely on the hired labor
of neighbors or strangers. The study concluded that hired workers ac-
counted for a much smaller share of all labor needs in Massachusetts than
in England.
The higher level of wages relative to the price of land in New England
meant, as Winthrop recognized, that more men could buy farms and work
for themselves in New England, and in consequence fewer adults worked
as full-time hired laborers there than in England. Recent estimates indi-
cate that whereas in England in the late seventeenth century more than
two-fifths of adult males relied primarily on agricultural wage labor for
their livelihood, in New England this share was consistently below one-
third. In seventeenth-century Essex County, Massachusetts, the employ-
ment of hired labor was in fact so irregular that the identifying occupa-
tional designation of laborer almost disappeared from county records.
The settlement of the abundant lands of the New World substantially
improved the lot of free workers, not only by raising the wages of those
who worked for hire, but also by allowing many others to purchase land
' Hosmer, ed., Winthrop'sJournal, Vol. 2, 24.
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Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 169
and become independent farmers. Although in some areas increasing popu-
lation densities over time resulted in rising shares of landless laborers in
the adult male population, throughout the colonial period hired labor
appears to have remained quantitatively less important in America than in
England.
POPULATION GROWTH AND
THE LABOR FORCE
Colonial America has been known for its rapid population growth since
the time of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Malthus. Examination of the
behavior of total population immediately shows why this has been the
case. Between 1650 and 1770 the total population of the English colonies
of the West Indies and North America increased from just under 100,000
to more than 2.6 million, an average annual rate of growth of 2.8 percent.
During the same period the population of England rose from 5.2 million
to 6.5 million, or at a much more modest average annual growth rate of
less than 0.2 percent. With an average rate of population growth in
America more than fifteen times that of England, it is little wonder that
the enormous difference impressed observers in both the colonies and the
mother country: in the course of 120 years, the colonial population had
increased from less than 2 percent to more than 40 percent as large as that
of England. This striking American expansion, which Malthus called "a
rapidity of increase probably without parallel in history," became the
primary piece of empirical evidence cited by Malthus in support of his
belief that population would increase geometrically in the presence of
benevolent political institutions and abundant fertile land that together
held at bay the great checks of misery and vice.
10
Yet this growth of the overall colonial population was the result of a
number of very disparate component patterns. One facet of this diversity
appears when total population is disaggregated by region, as shown in Table
4. 1. Average annual regional growth rates on the mainland during 1650—
1770 ranged from a low of 2.7 percent for New England, through 3.3
percent for the Upper South and 4.2 percent for the Middle Colonies, to a
high of 5.5 percent for the Lower South (for 1660-1770). The lowest
regional rate, an annual average of 1.8 percent, was found in the West
10
Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London: 1970 [orig. publ., 1798]),
105—6.
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17°
David W. Galenson
Table 4.1. Total population of English America, by region (thousands)
Year
1610
1620
1630
1640
1650
1660
1670
1680
1690
1700
1710
1720
1730
1740
1750
1760
1770
New
England
2
14
23
33
52
69
87
92
115
171
217
290
360
450
581
Middle
Colonies
2
4
6
7
15
35
54
70
103
147
221
297
428
556
Upper
South
1
3
8
13
25
41
60
76
98
124
159
225
297
378
502
650
Lower
South
1
4
7
12
16
25
40
60
108
142
214
345
West
Indies
2
14
59
81
96
118
135
148
178
212
258
285
330
406
479
Total
1
7
38
99
146
200
269
345
408
512
685
907
1201
1507
2000
2611
Note: New England includes Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont,
Plymouth, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Middle
Colonies include New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.
Upper South includes Maryland and Virginia. Lower South includes
Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. West Indies includes
Barbados, Jamaica, Antigua, Montserrat, Nevis, and St. Kitts.
Source: John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British
America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill, NC: 1985), 103,136, 153, 154, 172,
203.
Indies. Thus the total population of the West Indies increased by only a
factor of eight during 1650—1770, compared with factors of 25 for New
England, 50 for the Upper South, and more than 135 for the Middle Colo-
nies in the same period. As these very different long-run growth rates im-
ply, major shifts occurred over time in the composition of colonial popula-
tion by region. In 1650, 60 percent of all colonial residents lived in the
West Indies, with just over 20 percent in New England, less than 15 per-
cent in the southern mainland colonies, and less than 5 percent in the Mid-
dle Colonies. By the close of the colonial period, less than one-fifth of the
total colonial population was in the West Indies; New England's share had
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Settlement and Growth of the Colonies
Table 4.2. White population of English America, by region (thousands)
Year
1610
1620
1630
1640
1650
1660
1670
1680
1690
1700
1710
1720
1730
1740
1750
1760
1770
New
England
2
14
23
33
52
68
86
91
113
167
211
281
349
437
566
Middle
Colonies
2
4
5
7
13
32
50
63
92
135
204
276
399
521
Upper
South
1
2
8
12
24
39
56
68
85
101
128
171
213
227
312
398
Lower
South
1
4
6
10
14
19
25
34
58
82
120
189
West
Indies
2
14
44
47
44
42
37
33
30
35
37
34
35
41
45
Total
1
6
38
83
110
146
185
233
273
326
447
588
658
969
1309
1719
Source: See Table 4.1.
remained almost constant at just over one-fifth, while the southern main-
land had risen to nearly two-fifths and the Middle Colonies to one-fifth.
Still greater contrasts appear when total population is disaggregated by
race. Table 4.2 presents evidence on the growth of the white population
by region. Perhaps most striking is the divergence between the experi-
ences of the West Indies and the mainland regions. In 1650, more than
half of all the whites in the English colonies lived in the West Indies. But
the second half of the seventeenth century witnessed a sharp absolute
decline in the islands' white population, with only a gradual recovery in
the eighteenth century. By the end of the colonial period, consequently,
the white population of the West Indies was no greater absolutely than it
had been a century earlier, and in 1770 West Indian residents accounted
for less than 3 percent of all whites in English America. In sharp contrast,
the white populations of the mainland regions all grew rapidly throughout
the colonial period, with average annual growth rates during 1650-1770
ranging from 2.7 percent in New England to 3.0 percent in the Upper
South, 4.1 percent in the Middle Colonies, and 4.9 percent in the Lower
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
172
David W. Galenson
Table 4. 3. Black population of English America, by region (thousands)
Year
1610
1620
1630
1640
1650
1660
1670
1680
1690
1700
1710
1720
1730
1740
1750
1760
1770
New
England
1
1
1
2
3
4
6
9
11
13
15
Middle
Colonies
1
1
1
2
3
4
6
11
12
17
21
29
35
Upper
South
1
3
4
7
13
22
31
53
84
151
190
251
Lower
South
2
3
7
15
26
50
60
95
155
West
Indies
15
34
52
76
98
115
148
176
221
250
295
365
434
Total
16
37
56
83
111
137
186
237
318
410
538
692
890
Source: See Table 4.1.
South (during 1660—1770). From very unequal beginnings in the seven-
teenth century, the mainland's white population in 1770 was divided
almost equally among New England, the Middle Colonies, and the South.
The growth of the black population by region was radically different, as
shown in Table 4. 3. For most of the seventeenth century, more than 90
percent of all blacks in English America were located in the West Indies.
That region's black population increased throughout the colonial period,
with an average annual growth rate of 2.8 percent during 1650-1770.
From small numbers in the seventeenth century, however, the black popu-
lation in the southern mainland colonies grew very rapidly in the eigh-
teenth century, with average annual growth of 4.3 percent in the Upper
South during 1700—70, and 5.8 percent in the Lower South. As a result,
by 1770 just over half of all blacks in English America were on the
mainland. These were heavily concentrated in the South, as few blacks
lived in the Middle Colonies, and fewer still in New England.
Table 4.4 shows that the share of blacks in the total population of
English America rose sharply in the late seventeenth century, from less
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 173
Table 4.4. Blacks as a percentage of total population, by region
Year
1610
1620
1630
1640
1650
1660
1670
1680
1690
1700
1710
1720
1730
1740
1750
1760
1770
New
England
1
2
2
1
1
1
2
2
2
3
3
3
3
3
Middle
Colonies
11
12
11
11
10
7
7
9
10
8
7
7
7
6
Upper
South
4
1
2
4
6
7
10
13
18
19
24
28
40
38
39
Lower
South
5
6
16
18
26
37
43
46
42
44
45
West
Indies
25
42
54
64
73
78
83
83
86
88
89
90
91
Total
2
1
16
25
28
31
32
34
36
35
35
34
36
35
34
Source: See Table 4.1.
than one-sixth in 1650 to more than one-third by 1700; it then remained
virtually constant at that level during the eighteenth century. But the
quantitative importance of blacks varied enormously among regions.
Blacks never made up more than 3 percent of the total population of New
England, while their share in the Middle Colonies peaked at just over one-
tenth in the mid-seventeenth century and declined thereafter. In contrast,
a steady growth of the share of blacks occurred in the southern mainland
colonies, as blacks accounted for about two-fifths of the total population in
both the Upper and Lower South by the end of the colonial period. The
West Indies had by far the largest share of blacks: the region had an overall
black majority by 1670, more than 80 percent of its population was made
up of blacks throughout the eighteenth century, and 90 percent of the
total population was made up of blacks by the time of the American
Revolution.
These regional differences in population growth rates, and in the racial
composition of population, reflect enormous differences in disease environ-
ments, demographic behavior, and labor market outcomes among the
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
174 David W. Galenson
regions. The case of the West Indies lies at one extreme in a number of
respects. As witnessed by the changing racial composition of the popula-
tion, the growth of the island colonies depended entirely on the growth of
slavery. This was a direct consequence of the sugar revolution that began
in Barbados in the 1640s and later spread to the other islands. Sugar
production for export to Europe was immensely profitable, and the intro-
duction of sugar in the West Indies produced an explosive increase in the
demand for labor to plant and harvest the cane. Yet sugar cultivation also
required very heavy and arduous labor, most efficiently done by groups of
workers organized into gangs. West Indian sugar plantations more than
any other preindustrial agricultural enterprise became factories set in the
fields, and English indentured servants soon learned to avoid the punish-
ing work of sugar cultivation in the tropics. At the same time, the sugar
revolution reduced the attractiveness of the islands to English immigrants
of modest means for another reason. The technology of sugar cultivation,
with very high fixed capital requirements for the machinery and structures
needed to grind the cane, boil the juice, and cure and pack the sugar for
shipment, resulted in great economies of scale, and in consequence small
farms could not compete with the vast plantations that swallowed up the
islands' fertile land. The West Indies quickly became known as a region
that offered no real economic opportunity for former indentured servants
or poor free settlers. In addition, the mixture of Europeans and Africans
from a number of very different disease environments soon created a deadly
epidemiological environment that rapidly made the West Indies notorious
as a place of widespread disease and extraordinarily high mortality, and
most Englishmen were reluctant to risk premature death in the islands'
harsh demographic regime. With a rising demand for labor and a declin-
ing supply of both indentured and free English immigrants able to choose
their colonial destinations, West Indian planters readily turned to the use
of workers who did not share this ability, and African slaves quickly came
to dominate the labor forces of the sugar islands. Throughout the colonial
period the black population of the West Indies suffered a substantial excess
of deaths over births, and the islands' slave populations grew over time
only as a result of massive continuing importations of Africans in every
decade.
Among the mainland colonies, the Lower South, particularly South
Carolina, most resembled the West Indies in its heavy reliance on slave
labor. Also as in the islands, the increase in the black share of the labor
force in South Carolina, and later Georgia, coincided with the rise of a
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 175
single export crop — rice — to a dominant place in the economy. The
commercial cultivation of rice in South Carolina began in the 1690s, and
within two decades blacks outnumbered whites in the colony. As in the
West Indies, the nature of the work involved in production of the staple
crop was a key element in the transition from white to black labor in South
Carolina, for the oppressive work of growing rice in labor gangs in the
heat of the colony's summers deterred English workers from migrating to
the colony after rice became its main product. And like the West Indies,
South Carolina quickly gained a reputation for unhealthiness that further
reduced the colony's potential white labor supply. The black population in
South Carolina, as well as in North Carolina and Georgia, expanded in
large part because of an importation of Africans that continued throughout
the colonial period.
Although the rise of staple export crops was responsible for the growth
of slavery in the West Indies and South Carolina, the same was not true of
the Chesapeake Bay colonies. Tobacco was introduced into Virginia by
1620 and quickly became the basis of the Chesapeake region's economy,
but it was cultivated primarily by white farmers and their English inden-
tured servants for at least the next five decades. Tobacco was a more
delicate plant than either sugar or rice, and was not well suited to the
routinized labor of work gangs. Furthermore, tobacco production required
much less fixed capital than did sugar, and as a result apparently offered
no important economies of scale. Throughout the colonial period, tobacco
was grown profitably on small farms as well as on large plantations.
Although economic opportunities for immigrants diminished somewhat
over time, the region never became as inhospitable to those of modest
means as did the West Indies, and the Upper South attracted substantial
numbers of English migrants during most of the colonial period.
The most dramatic change in the Chesapeake's labor force occurred in
the closing decades of the seventeenth century. The region's planters'
holdings of bound labor shifted from a ratio of four indentured servants to
one slave during the late 1670s to nearly four slaves to one servant in the
early 1690s. Major changes in the conditions of supply of both servants
and slaves appear to have caused this rapid transformation in the composi-
tion of the region's bound labor force. The supply of servants to the region
appears to have declined as a result of both improving labor market
conditions in England and deteriorating prospects for migrants to the
Chesapeake in the late seventeenth century; the former reduced the total
numbers of migrants leaving England for America, while at the same time
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
176 David W. Galenson
the latter harmed the Chesapeake in competing for migrants with newly
settled Pennsylvania, which offered the abundant inexpensive land that
the tobacco colonies no longer had. The result of this decline in servant
supply was a sharp increase in the price of servants, together with falling
numbers of new arrivals in the 1680s and "90s. At the same time the cost
of slaves to Chesapeake planters fell. The 1680s marked the lowest point
of a secular decline in slave prices in the West Indies, due to falling sugar
prices in European markets, and slave traders dissatisfied with the low
prices that they were receiving for their cargoes in the West Indies began
to bring the mainland tobacco planters a steady supply of Africans at low
prices. The Chesapeake's rapid transition in the 1680s from primary
reliance on the bound labor of white servants to the large-scale use of black
slaves was therefore the result of a substantial decline in the price of slaves
relative to that of servants. Once planters had begun to use African slaves
in large numbers, they were clearly satisfied with their new bound labor-
ers, as the Chesapeake's black population rose steadily during the eigh-
teenth century.
The labor force of the Middle Colonies was very different from those of
the other regions. No colony in the region relied heavily on slave labor,
and sizable flows of both free and indentured immigrants came to the
region in almost every decade after the initial settlement of Pennsylvania
in the 1680s. A much larger proportion of these immigrants came from
places other than England, including most notably Germany and Ireland,
than was the case for any other region of English America.
Diversified agriculture based on the family farm characterized most of
the rural economy of the Middle Colonies. The region produced a variety
of grains, vegetables, and livestock. Its mercantile centers, Philadelphia
and New York, exported these products to a number of markets, led by
the West Indies and southern Europe. The resulting commercial prosper-
ity and continuing availability of fertile land for immigrants gave the
region a widespread and lasting reputation as the best poor man's country
in the world, and this reputation was clearly a key factor in attracting the
large numbers of immigrants that helped to produce the rapid growth of
the Middle Colonies' white population throughout the eighteenth cen-
tury. At the same time, it appears that the substantial continuing immi-
gration of indentured servants as well as free workers generally held the
cost of labor below levels that prevailed in the regions to the south of
Pennsylvania, and consequently below a level at which the large-scale
importation of slaves would have been profitable.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Settlement and Growth of the Colonies
Colonial New England's demographic history was distinctive among
the regions of English America in several important ways. Most notably,
New England was the only region that had practically no significant
immigration after its initial burst of settlement, which ended by the early
1640s; indeed during most of the remainder of the colonial period New
England had net outmigration. Slaves never made up more than 3 percent
of the region's population, and New England imported few European
indentured servants. Unlike the West Indies and the southern mainland
colonies, which increased their populations in spite of high mortality
rates, through persistently high rates of immigration, New England en-
joyed very low mortality rates throughout the colonial period, and its
population grew as a result of high rates of natural increase.
As a consequence, New England was unique among the regions of
English America during the eighteenth century in having nearly all its
work performed by free native-born whites. In most areas small family
farms produced a variety of crops for their own consumption and sale in
local markets, as well as some exports to the West Indies. Their labor was
overwhelmingly that of the family members, supplemented by only occa-
sional hired labor. The region's relatively low effective demand for labor
together with the steady expansion of its population through natural
increase appear to have held the cost of labor below levels that would have
made it profitable to import either servants or slaves.
As these overviews of the population histories of the major regions
suggest, the great differences in the experiences of the regions appear to
have stemmed from considerable differences in rates of immigration to
each of the regions and in the mortality rates of their populations. The
differences among regions in the pattern of white immigration over time
are highlighted in Table 4.5, which presents estimates of net migration of
whites by decade from 1630. New England's only period of sustained
white immigration occurred early in the colonial period, with the Puritan
migration to Massachusetts, which.had ended by 1670. In a majority of
the decades thereafter the region was a net exporter of population. The
opening of Pennsylvania first made the Middle Colonies a major destina-
tion for immigrants during the 1680s. The region remained among the
major receiving regions for white immigrants throughout the rest of the
colonial period. Pennsylvania received the bulk of the region's immi-
grants, but New York also received sizable numbers in the decades follow-
ing the middle of the eighteenth century.
The prosperity of Virginia's tobacco economy made the Upper South an
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
178 David W. Galenson
Table 4.5. Decennial net migration of whites to English America, by region
(thousands)
Decade
beginning
1630
1640
1650
1660
1670
1680
1690
1700
1710
1720
1730
1740
1750
1760
1770
New
England
11
5*
3
8
1
- 1
- 17
-A
20
- 2
9
- 10
- 9
6
- 23
Middle
Colonies
4
13
7
0
10
15
27
13
40
9
12
Upper
South
11
14
18
17
15
9
0
18
21
38
30
- 17
20
- 2
- 25
Lower
South
3
3
4
3
7
1
10
16
16
13
34
51
West
Indies
41
40
33
12
15
11
19
10
18
16
6
9
11
5
11
Total
63
59
54
40
38
36
12
31
70
77
88
11
75
52
26
Sources: Henry Gemery, "Emigration from the British Isles to the New
World, 1630-1700," Research in Economic History, 5 (1980), 215; David
Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America (Cambridge: 1981), 216-18.
important destination for immigrants from early in the colonial period.
The region suffered a sharp drop in white immigration in the final two
decades of the seventeenth century, but immigration quickly revived, and
the Upper South was the leading colonial destination for white immi-
grants in each of the first four decades of the eighteenth century. Declining
rates of immigration followed, and the Upper South became a net exporter
of white population late in the colonial period. The Lower South began to
receive moderate levels of white immigration in the second half of the
seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century. These gave way to
higher and steadily rising levels after 1720, as the growth not only of
South Carolina but also of North Carolina and Georgia made the Lower
South the largest destination for white immigrants in the last two decades
of the colonial period.
The West Indies were the major destination for white immigrants in
the early colonial period, as the islands received more than half of all
whites bound for English America during each of the three decades after
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 179
1630. A sharp drop in white immigration to the region occurred after
1660, and the West Indies were never again as important a destination for
whites, with generally declining levels of immigration over time for the
remainder of the colonial period.
The general patterns of white immigration by region thus include a
decline by the mid-seventeenth century of two regions — New England
and the West Indies — that were important destinations early in the colo-
nial period; a consistent importance of one region - the Upper South —
from the early seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth; and a
rise of two regions — the Middle Colonies and Lower South - to impor-
tance during the eighteenth century.
The demographic composition of this immigration differed consider-
ably across regions. The early migrations to the West Indies and the
Chesapeake were overwhelmingly made up of young, single men; for
example, 94 percent of a group of 985 passengers who left London for
Barbados in 1635 were males, and more than 90 percent were between the
ages of 10 and 29, while 86 percent of 2,010 passengers from London to
Virginia in the same year were males. In contrast, 35 percent of a group of
1,960 migrants from England to Massachusetts prior to 1650 were fe-
males. The ages of the immigrants to New England were also more widely
distributed than those to the southern regions; more than one-fifth of this
early group were below the age of 10, and more than one-quarter were
above the age of 30. The great majority of these early immigrants to New
England, more than 70 percent, traveled in family groups. These sex
ratios clearly indicate why rapid natural increase could begin so early in
New England, as well as suggesting that natural increase in the early West
Indies and the Chesapeake would not have been possible even if the disease
environment had not been so virulent. Over time, the sex ratio of immi-
grants to the Chesapeake became more balanced, but male migrants con-
tinued to outnumber females by a ratio of two or three to one throughout
the seventeenth century.
Differences in the demographic composition of immigration by region
clearly also existed later in the colonial period. Half of all English and
Scottish immigrants to New York during 1773-6 traveled in families, as
did more than two-fifths of those bound for New England, whereas less than
one-tenth of those bound for Maryland and Virginia traveled with family
members. While females accounted for 40 percent of the immigrants to
New York, and 30 percent of those to New England, they made up only 12
percent of those bound for Maryland and 8 percent of those bound for Vir-
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
180 David W. Galenson
Table 4.6. Decennial net migration of blacks to English America, by region
(thousands)
Decade
beginning
1650
1660
1670
1680
1690
1700
1710
1720
1730
1740
1750
1760
1770
New
England
0
0
0
0
0
0
1
1
1
0
- 1
- 1
-5
Middle
Colonies
0
0
0
1
3
1
1
0
2
- 2
- 2
Upper
South
1
2
2
7
8
11
7
6
29
47
4
8
-19
Lower
South
0
0
1
1
2
10
11
11
12
17
32
9
West
Indies
39
38
53
59
95
88
93
126
88
115
127
86
81
Total
40
40
55
67
104
102
114
145
130
174
149
123
64
Source: David Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America (Cambridge:
1981), 216-18.
ginia. In general, these patterns from the beginning and end of the colonial
period appear to have held true throughout. New England and part of the
Middle Colonies tended to attract settlers traveling in families, with rela-
tively balanced sex ratios and broader age distributions, while the staple-
producing regions of the West Indies and the southern mainland attracted
more indentured immigrants, primarily males concentrated in their teens
and twenties. Several colonies, including Pennsylvania and North Carolina,
appear to have been intermediate between these patterns, with continuing
flows of both single indentured servants and family groups.
A comparable overview of the net migration of blacks to the colonies is
given in Table 4.6. The dominant role of the West Indies is clear. The
sugar islands received more than two-thirds of all blacks imported to
English America in every decade, and more than four-fifths in ten of the
thirteen decades for which estimates are available. Within the region,
Barbados imported the largest numbers of slaves in the three decades after
1650 but was surpassed by Jamaica thereafter. Jamaica remained the lead-
ing English American importer of blacks for the next ten decades. By
1710, the majority of all blacks bound for the West Indies were destined
for Jamaica, and this generally remained true thereafter.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 181
On the mainland, New England and the Middle Colonies never im-
ported large numbers of blacks. The Upper South increased its imports of
blacks steadily from the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth,
and at its peak, in the 1740s, received more than one-quarter of the blacks
bound for the English colonies. The Lower South began to import slaves in
significant numbers after 1710, and its demand grew during the mid-
eighteenth century, as North Carolina joined South Carolina as a signifi-
cant slave importer. During the 1760s the region received more than one-
quarter of all blacks bound for English America.
Slaves were imported strictly for their value as laborers, and the age
distribution of those transported from Africa to the colonies was conse-
quently much narrower than that of European immigrants, who often
traveled in family groups. Although precise age distributions are not
available for slave migrants, it is clear that they were concentrated almost
exclusively in the prime working ages. For example of 74,000 slaves
carried to the West Indies by the Royal African Company, 52 percent were
categorized as men - 16 to 40 years old — 34 percent as women, from
ages 15 to 35, 10 percent as boys aged 10 to 15, and only 4 percent as
girls aged 10 to 14. More than four-fifths of the slaves were therefore in
their late teens, twenties, or thirties, and negligible numbers were either
below the age of 10 or above that of 40. The sex ratio of these slaves might
appear surprisingly even, as females accounted for nearly 40 percent of
those transported. Although some contemporaries argued that the large
share of females arose from a desire of planters to allow their slaves to have
families, in general it seems more likely that it was a result of the high
relative productivity of females in field work. Among these slaves, on
average girls sold in the West Indies for prices 90 percent as high as those
of boys, and women for 80 percent as much as men.
Mortality rates in the colonies were also marked by great regional
variation. The two areas for which colonial mortality rates have been best
documented are New England and the Chesapeake Bay region. Table 4.7
collects results from a number of studies of particular communities or
populations from these regions. Colonial New England was a very healthy
place. In particular, the region's smaller agricultural communities, like
Andover and Plymouth, enjoyed life expectancies in the seventeenth cen-
tury that were higher not only than other colonial regions but probably
also than those of England at the time. Mortality rates were considerably
higher in New England's port cities, such as Salem. This was presumably
a result of the greater exposure of the urban population to diseases borne
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Table 4.7. Estimate of lift expectancy for
white men at age }()
Place and birth cohort
Andover, MA
1640-99
1670-99
1700-29
1730-59
Plymouth, MA.
17th century
Salem, MA
17th century
18th century
Ipswich, MA
18th century
Charles County, MD
1652-99
Charles Parish, VA
1665-99
Maryland legislators
1618-49
1650-99
1700-49
1750-67
South Carolina legislators
1650-99
1700-49
1750-1800
Northeast
1760-99
1800-19
South Atlantic
1760-99
1800-19
Years
40.8
38.7
33.4
36.3
40.0
29.2
30:3
32.3
20.4
16.4
12.6
20.9
26.0
28.2
24.9
21.1
27.5
36.1
36.4
33.2
330
Sources: Maris A. Vinovskis, Fertility in
Massachusetts from tie Revolution to the
Civil War (New York: 1981), 29;
Lorcna S. Walsh and Russell R.
Menard, "Death in the Chesapeake:
' Two Life Tables for Men in Early
Colonial Maryland," Maryland
Historical Magazine (1969), 213; Daniel
Blake Smith, "Mortality and Family in
the Colonial Chesapeake," Journal of
Interdisciplinary History (1978), 415;
Daniel S. Levy, "The Life Expectancies
of Colonial Maryland Legislators,"
Historical Methods (1987), 19; Daniel S.
Levy, "The Economic Demography of
the Colonial South" (Ph.D.
dissertation. University of Chicago,
1991), 123; Clayne Pope, "Adult
Mortality in America before 1900: A
View from Family Histories," in C
Goldin and H. Rockoff, eds., Strategic
Factors in Nineteenth Century American
Economic History (Chicago: 1992), 286.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 183
by sailors and immigrants from other disease environments, as well as
generally poorer conditions of sanitation in more crowded communities. It
is difficult to determine whether New England's mortality rates changed
over the course of the colonial period, but the available evidence suggests
that there was no significant trend over time.
The early Chesapeake was a much less healthy place. Men born in Charles
County, Maryland, in the second half of the seventeenth century had a life
expectation at age 30 of only 21 years, barely half the expectation of 41 years
enjoyed by their counterparts in Andover, Massachusetts. And wealth appar-
ently offered no means of protection against the Chesapeake's harsh disease
environment, as the generally prosperous members of Maryland's legisla-
ture in the late seventeenth century could expect to live on average a mere
half year longer than the general population of Charles County. Further-
more, these grim figures fail to take into account the numerous immigrants
who failed to survive seasoning, the dangerous period during the first
summer of exposure to the new American disease environment when many
newcomers died. Many immigrants died before they had been in America
long enough to leave any trace in the legal or religious records used for
demographic studies, so seasoning mortality rates cannot be estimated with
precision, but the testimony of contemporaries indicates that the risk to
new arrivals in the southern colonies could be substantial.
Over time, mortality rates fell substantially in the Chesapeake. The life
expectancy of Maryland's legislators at age 30 rose more than seven years
in the hundred years after 1650. Although this still left them at a disadvan-
tage relative to men in rural New England, it may have closed most of the
gap between them and their contemporaries in the urban North. By the
end of the colonial period the differential between North and South may
have been very small; a broadly based study has estimated that life expec-
tancy at age 30 for men born during 1760-99 was 36.1 years in the
Northeast, compared to 33.2 in the Southeast, as shown in Table 4.7.
Less detailed evidence is available for other colonial regions. The West
Indies early established a reputation as a dangerous place for immigrants'
health and remained an undesirable destination for most Englishmen there-
after. One visitor to Barbados in 1647 reported that "the Inhabitants of
the Hands . . . were so grieviously visited with the plague (or as killing a
disease), that before a month was expired after our Arivall, the living were
hardly able to bury the dead."
11
Malaria, yellow fever, dysentery, and
11
Richard Ligoo, A True & Exact History of tie Island of Barbados (London: 16)7), 21.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
184 David W. Galenson
other diseases appear to have made the West Indies the most unhealthy
region of English America, although early South Carolina shared many of
the same diseases and consequently also suffered from a poor reputation
among prospective immigrants. In 1684 the colony's proprietors com-
plained that "Charles Town is no healthy situation . . . people that come
to the province and landing there and the most falling sick it brings a
Disreputation upon the whole Country."" Yet conditions may have varied
substantially in different parts of the colony, as the western part of South
Carolina appears to have been a substantially healthier place than the
eastern lowland regions. Over time the shift of population toward the west
tended to increase average life expectancies in South Carolina, and as
shown in Table 4.7, a study of South Carolina's legislators indicates that
they may not have had life expectancies much shorter than their counter-
parts in Maryland during most of the colonial period.
Fertility rates were generally high in colonial America. Benjamin Frank-
lin attributed this to the abundance of land in the colonies. He wrote in
1751: "Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap, as that a
laboring man, that understands husbandry, can, in a short time, save
money enough to purchase a piece of new land, sufficient for a plantation,
whereon he may subsist a family." Franklin argued that "such are not
afraid to marry," and consequently "marriages in America are more gen-
eral, and more generally early, than in Europe. "'3 Recent studies have
tended to confirm Franklin's observations on colonial nuptiality. In colo-
nial New England, marriage appears to have been nearly universal among
adults; local studies have found that the proportions never married were
well below 10 percent. In contrast, at times during the seventeenth cen-
tury more than one-quarter of adults in England never married. The
unbalanced sex ratio of the early Chesapeake has been found to have
resulted in a high rate of bachelorhood, as an estimated quarter of the
region's men in the seventeenth century never married, but this rate
apparently fell as the sex ratio neared equality in the eighteenth century.
As Franklin argued, colonial Americans also appear to have married
earlier than their English contemporaries. Local studies for both New
England and the Chesapeake indicate mean ages at first marriage for men
that ranged between 24 and 27, without evidence of secular trend during
" Quoted in Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the
Stono Rebellion (New York: 1975), 66.
•' Benjamin Franklin, "Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, peopling of Countries,
etc.," in The Works of Benjamin Franklin 4 (Philadelphia: 1809), 18;.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 185
the colonial period. This suggests that colonial men typically married
somewhat earlier than their English counterparts, for whom the mean age
during the American colonial period was generally between 26 and 28.
Even more important for fertility, however, is the fact that colonial women
married significantly younger than English women. Women in colonial
New England first married at mean ages that ranged from 20 to 23,
considerably lower than the mean ages for English women of the time that
ranged from 25 to 27. In the Chesapeake, women who had been inden-
tured servants married at ages similar to those of women in New England,
but native-born white women married considerably younger, at mean ages
from 17 to 20. Limited evidence on marriage ages in the Middle Colonies
suggests behavior there similar to that of New England for both men and
women.
These lower ages at marriage do appear to have resulted in higher
fertility in the colonies than in England. Completed family size averaged
from five to six children in England throughout the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. In comparison, studies of a number of communities
throughout the mainland colonies have found that total children born to
completed families generally averaged at least six, and often reached eight
or more. To the extent that the colonial communities studied to date were
typical, births per completed family were therefore higher in the colonies
than in England.
Regional differences in fertility within the colonies cannot be described
with confidence. The tendency for higher southern fertility due to the
earlier ages at marriage might have been offset by higher southern mortal-
ity rates, which meant that fewer marriages completed their normal fertil-
ity in the South than the North. Yet this latter effect declined in impor-
tance as southern life expectancies increased in the eighteenth century. As
a result, as shown in Table 4.8, national census data for 1800 indicate a
clear tendency for fertility rates in the major states to rise from North to
South.
Recent studies of black demography in the Chesapeake suggest that
early immigrant slaves in the region did not reproduce themselves, as a
result of both the unbalanced sex ratios of the slaves imported and the
region's high mortality rates. In the course of the early eighteenth century,
however, the region's black population began to grow naturally, as native-
born black women, like their white counterparts, married younger and
bore more children than their immigrant mothers. Natural increase was
never achieved among the black population in the colonial West Indies,
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
186 David W. Galenson
Table 4.8. Number of children under
age 10 per thousand white women aged
16-44, by state, 1800
State
Maine
New Hampshire
Vermont
Massachusetts
Rhode Island
Connecticut
New York
New Jersey
Pennsylvania
Delaware
Maryland
Virginia
North Carolina
South Carolina
Georgia
Number of
children
1974
1704
2068
1477
1455
1512
1871
1822
1881
1509
1585
1954
1920
2030
2116
Source: Yasukichi Yasuba, Birth
Rates of the White Population in the
United States, 1800-1860 (Baltimore:
1962), 61.
however, because the region's extraordinary mortality rates prevented the
growth of a substantial native-born population.
The evidence on immigration, mortality, and fertility taken together
clearly reveals enormous contrasts in the ways in which the different
colonial regions achieved rapid population growth. Although many evi-
dentiary gaps remain to be filled, it appears likely that the regions formed
a spectrum ordered from North to South, with the role of natural increase
descending in importance along this spectrum, and that of sustained
immigration increasing in importance. Within the southern regions, the
areas with the lowest rates of natural increase faced the greatest barriers in
attracting voluntary immigrants, and achieved overall population growth
through the purchase of involuntary immigrants. The colonial regions
with the lowest rates of natural population growth tended to be those
which enjoyed the greatest success in the production of staple products for
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Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 187
export to the great European markets. In part, the poor demographic
performance of these regions was caused by the geography of disease, as
malaria and other dangerous illnesses spread more readily in warmer cli-
mates. But the demographic problems of these regions were in part a
consequence of their economic opportunities, as the availability of lucra-
tive export crops resulted in harsh labor regimes in which profits could be
increased by forcing laborers to work at levels of effort and under adverse
conditions that damaged their health and reduced their longevity.
Malthus contended "that there is not a truer criterion of the happiness
and innocence of a people than the rapidity of their increase. "*« And he
had no doubt that the extraordinarily rapid growth of the population of
the English North American colonies was due to extraordinarily favorable
economic circumstances, as the availability of vast amounts of fertile land
was combined with political institutions favorable to the improvement
and cultivation of that land.
15
Although quantitative studies of the eco-
nomic and social progress of the colonial population cannot provide direct
measures of their happiness, these studies can tell us how migrants to the
colonies fared materially, and therefore provide indirect evidence on how
the settlement of English America was perceived by contemporaries.
The best systematic evidence on the economic and social progress of the
immigrants comes from several studies that have traced the careers of
sizable groups of indentured servants who migrated to Maryland during
the seventeenth century. How migrants fare at their destination is of
course an important question in the study of any migration. In the case of
indentured servants in early America the question seems particularly inter-
esting in view of the great sacrifices they made in order to migrate, giving
up much of their freedom of choice over living and working conditions for
substantial periods, as well as considerably increasing their risk of prema-
ture death both on the ocean voyage and upon arrival in the New World.
The question of whether the servants' gains from migrating could have
justified these high costs was hotly debated by contemporaries, as well as
by many historians in more recent times.
Servants who arrived in Maryland early in the seventeenth century and
who escaped the substantial risk of premature death in the early Chesa-
peake generally prospered: 90 percent of those who arrived in Maryland
during the colony's first decade of settlement and who remained in the
'« Malthus, Essay on Population, 106.
•' Malthus, Essay on Population, 105. This analysis appean to have been drawn from Smith, Wealth of
Nations, 338—9.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
188 David W. Galenson
colony for at least ten years after completing their terms of servitude
became landowners, typically on a scale that afforded them a comfortable
living. Some accumulated considerable wealth, and a few gained estates
that placed them among the wealthiest planters in the colony. Nearly all of
these early former servants who remained in Maryland for a decade or more
after gaining their freedom held political office or sat on a jury - not
major positions in most cases, but nonetheless substantially above what
these men could have expected had they remained in England. Several of
these early servants became members of the elite group that ruled early
Maryland, even joining the colony's governing Council. The accomplish-
ments of many of these freedmen were very impressive from an English
perspective; most could not have expected to do nearly as well had they
not emigrated, for England was a place that offered little chance of signifi-
cant economic or social mobility for those born below the gentry.
Opportunities for immigrants to Maryland deteriorated over time, how-
ever. Parallel analysis of the careers of a group of servants who arrived in
the colony during the 1660s shows less impressive accomplishments.
More than half of those who remained in Maryland for at least a decade as
freedmen failed to become landowners, and none of these former servants
acquired great wealth. A smaller proportion than of the earlier group
participated in government, and of these none rose above minor public
office. The opportunity for former servants to become prosperous planters
in Maryland was therefore much less late in the seventeenth century than
it had been earlier. Freedmen increasingly faced a choice between remain-
ing in the colony as hired workers or moving elsewhere, most often to
Pennsylvania, in search of their own land.
Several general conclusions might be drawn from these studies of the
success of migrants. One is the simple recognition that the time and
destination chosen by an immigrant were crucial determinants of his
experience. This point, which emerges strongly from the history of
seventeenth-century Maryland, becomes even clearer when differences
among colonial regions are considered: whereas the availability of good
farmland gave Pennsylvania a favorable reputation among immigrants for
a century, the high cost of land and undesirable conditions for hired
workers caused indentured servants and free immigrants of modest means
very early to avoid traveling to the West Indies, and later the Lower
South. But as these decisions by immigrants indicate, information about
the desirability of the different colonial regions spread widely among
Englishmen who were considering moving to America. It was indeed the
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 189
choices made by white immigrants to avoid the harsh living and working
conditions of the sugar islands and the rice colonies that made slavery the
economic solution of planters in these regions, for Africans could be forced
to work in places where Europeans chose not to.
A second generalization from the studies of Maryland is that although the
degree of economic opportunity available to immigrants declined over time
in the Chesapeake, even in the final decades of the seventeenth century there
was no shortage of employment. Although the rapid expansion of the
tobacco economy, which earlier had made the sparsely settled Chesapeake an
excellent place for poor settlers, had given way to slower growth in a more
densely settled region where the choicest land had become occupied, freed-
men could still find abundant work at good wages. This point again seems
subject to wider application: although the extent of opportunity for immi-
grants varied over time and across places, colonial English America appears
throughout its history to have remained a genuine land of opportunity
where European migrants might considerably improve their condition if
they were willing to risk premature death in the trans-Atlantic crossing and
the unfamiliar disease environment of the New World. That the colonies
continued to attract large numbers of Europeans, skilled as well as un-
skilled, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is testimony
to the fact that many Europeans knew this to be true.
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Our knowledge of the growth of the aggregate colonial economy is poor.
Existing data sources have not been adequate to provide the basis for
reliable estimates of the total product or income of the colonies, so it is not
possible to summarize the colonies' economic growth by presenting time-
series evidence on aggregate colonial output or per capita income. The
best summary evidence on overall colonial economic performance has been
drawn from probate records, as considerable effort has recently been de-
voted to developing estimates of the per capita wealth of the living from
the inventories of the estates of decedents made by colonial probate courts.
Although these wealth estimates cannot be converted convincingly into
estimates of per capita income because of a lack of evidence on savings
rates, the evidence on wealth is of value in its own right for the insights it
yields into colonial economic performance both over time and in cross-
sectional comparisons among regions.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
190 David W. Galenson
The most extensive use of the probate inventories for the estimation of
wealth was made by a study that estimated the wealth of all the English
mainland regions in the single year of 1774. Estimates for earlier years are
scarce, and no comparable study of a large number of colonies has been
done for any other time. Some indications of change over time can be
gained from narrower studies, however. One study recently found that
total wealth per wealthholder in six Maryland tidewater counties in 1700
was £203, and estimated that per capita wealth in these counties at the
same date at £34.7.?* In 1774, total wealth per wealthholder in the
southern mainland colonies was £395, while per capita southern wealth
was £54. 7. After adjusting for price-level changes, the estimate of south-
ern real total wealth per wealthholder for 1774 is 49.8 percent higher than
that for Maryland in 1700, while estimated real total wealth per capita in
1774 is 22.6 percent above the estimate for 1700.
17
Comparison of these
figures over time can be no more than suggestive, because the geographic
coverage of the estimates is very different, and the direction of any result-
ing bias in comparing the estimates is unknown. The changes in level are
substantial, however, as the implied annual average of growth of wealth
per wealthholder is 0.55 percent between 1700 and 1774, while the
annual average increase of per capita wealth is 0.28 percent. Moreover, it
is likely that these growth rates continued a process that had begun earlier
in the colonial period, for wealth levels were probably considerably higher
in 1700 than in the mid-seventeenth century. The more rapid increase of
wealth per wealthholder than of per capita wealth between 1700 and 1774
is consistent with the increase during the eighteenth century of the impor-
tance of slaves in the southern colonies, because slaves increased the total
population without adding to the numbers of wealthholders. Although
obviously imprecise, the indication of growth given by these comparisons
is clearly consistent with the consensus among most economic and social
historians who have studied the colonies, that significant increases oc-
curred during the colonial era in both productivity and the standard of
living.
Although comparable estimates of per capita wealth for the seventeenth
century are lacking, some studies of the value of probated estates provide
suggestive evidence. One of these found that the mean value of estates in
16
All values in this section are given in £ sterling.
" Price-level changes are taken from Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, A Perspective of
Wages and Prices (London: 1981), 30. Because the wealth estimates are quoted in English currency,
the appropriate price-level adjustments are those of England. .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 191
Jamaica rose steadily during the last quarter of the seventeenth century,
with the average value in 1700 more than twice that of 1675. A study of
four counties on Maryland's lower western shore found that the mean value
of estates rose by 40 percent between the 1660s and the beginning of the
eighteenth century. Although these increases are impressive, they are not
necessarily the result of economic growth, for to some unknown extent —
most likely a large extent in Jamaica - they may represent the effects of a
growing concentration of wealth as the number of bound laborers in-
creased. Yet it is likely that in some degree they were caused by genuine
gains in productivity. Early in the colonial period, English settlers in
those regions that differed most from their homeland with respect to
climate and other agricultural endowments began to grow staple crops
that were generally new to them, on a scale that was also unfamiliar. The
potential profits to be made by growing sugar, tobacco, and other crops
more efficiently were great, and might be expected to have led colonists to
work at improving their methods of production. This does seem to have
occurred, as for example in the early Chesapeake planters both learned how
to handle more tobacco plants per worker and developed better strains of
the plant. The results were impressive, as one study found that tobacco
output per worker in Maryland and Virginia more than doubled between
1620 and 1630, and doubled again between 1650 and the end of the
seventeenth century, with the net effect that the amount of the crop
harvested per worker rose from 400 pounds in the early decades of tobacco
cultivation to 1,900 pounds per worker by 1700. This achievement of
early productivity gains was by no means inevitable, however, and it is not
likely to have occurred equally throughout all the colonial regions. In
some regions, particularly those where agricultural conditions differed less
from those of England, there may have been less scope for productivity
increases due to improvements in agricultural methods. A study of two
rural Massachusetts counties, for example, found no increase in mean
wealth per estate between 1680 and 1720. Earlier in this essay, it was seen
that the greatest departures from the originally intended forms of govern-
ment and the greatest modifications in transplanted institutions tended to
occur in those regions where economic conditions differed most from those
of England. Although detailed investigations remain to establish the eco-
nomic effects of these adaptations, it may be that the more radical changes
coincided with, and perhaps served as the basis for, the greatest gains in
productive economic efficiency.
The major study of colonial wealth done to date has estimated that
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
192 David W. Galenson
nonhuman per capita wealth in the mainland colonies in 1774 was £37.4.
Although comparisons with other countries are again difficult, it is possi-
ble to give some indication of where this placed the colonies relative to
England. Per capita wealth in England rose from approximately £110 in
1760 to £192 in 1800.
l 8
Per capita wealth therefore appears to have been
substantially lower in America than in England, with the colonial level in
1774 probably significantly less than one-third that of England. Although
little research has been done to evaluate this sizable difference, the author
who produced the colonial estimates cited here suggested that the large
size of this gap in wealth might have been due in part to differences in
social structure and institutions between the mother country and the
colonies, and that the difference in the level of income might consequently
have been smaller than that in wealth:
We are left with the possibility that British wealth per capita, which includes the
wealth of the barons, lords . . . and of other great landed estates, was consider-
ably higher than that of the colonists, including the slave population. Income
may have been higher in relation to wealth in the colonies because of the much
lower value of land here, the importance of "free" income (gathered from the
countryside), the lesser elegance of the finer private buildings, the as yet relatively
fewer "carriages and coaches," the relatively small amounts of fixed industrial
capital. •»
Support for the proposition that colonial income levels might have
compared more favorably with that of England than was the case for
wealth is provided by several intriguing pieces of indirect evidence about
one important component of the material standard of living, nutrition. A
recent study of muster rolls for soldiers who fought in the American
Revolution produced the striking result that American-born colonial sol-
diers of the late 1770s were on average more than three inches taller than
their English counterparts who served in the Royal Marines at the same
time. Since the genetic potential for height in these populations would not
have differed, the most likely cause of this remarkable American advan-
tage in height is superior nutrition. This conclusion becomes somewhat
less surprising in view of another recent study that examined the diet of
colonists in the Chesapeake region, and found that after the very earliest
years of settlement it is likely that nearly all migrants from England to the
18
These figures for national wealth per head are from Charles Feinstein, "Capital Formation in Great
Britain," in Peter Mathias and M. M. Postan, eds., Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Vol. VII
(Cambridge: 1978), Table 24, 83; the figures were converted from constant 1851- 60 prices to
current prices using the price index given in ibid., Table 5, col. 1, 38.
•'» Alice Hanson Jones, Wealth of a Nation to Be (New York: 1980), 69.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 193
Chesapeake improved their diets in the process. Although settlers in the
Chesapeake had to adapt to a diet different from the one they knew in
England, with an American diet based primarily on Indian corn instead of
wheat and other grains, most colonists in the Chesapeake received a more
nourishing diet than all but the most affluent Englishmen. These studies
of nutrition together suggest that the real standard of living of typical
colonists might have been higher relative to those of English workers than
has generally been believed in the past, and higher than might be inferred
from the comparison of American and English wealth levels.
Another indication of high colonial standards of living is afforded by
evidence on levels of education. Literacy rates among free adult males in
the colonies were high by contemporary English standards. In the mid-
seventeenth century, about two-thirds of New England's adult males were
literate, compared to only one-third of adult males in England. Although
literacy rates were higher in New England than elsewhere in the colonies,
literacy rates for free males in seventeenth-century Virginia were near one-
half, still above English levels, and literacy rates in Pennsylvania were
probably higher than in Virginia. Literacy rates in a number of colonial
areas appear to have fallen in the late seventeenth century, perhaps as a
result of the increasing geographic dispersion of the population; as new
lands on the frontier were settled, more families had no access to existing
schools, and many new towns initially lacked the wealth to build and
operate schools. Strong evidence of improving education appears in the
eighteenth century, however, as literacy rates rose throughout the main-
land colonies. By the close of the colonial period regional differences still
existed, but they were considerably smaller; adult male literacy in New
England was near 90 percent, and free adult males in Pennsylvania and
Virginia had literacy rates near 70 percent. As in the seventeenth century,
overall literacy rates for free adult males in the colonies in the late eigh-
teenth century were therefore higher than those of England, where adult
male literacy was about 65 percent. Evidence on the extent of literacy
therefore suggests that by contemporary standards English America was
not only initially settled by a well-educated population, but that after an
early decline due to the costs of geographic expansion, the colonial popula-
tion saw considerable improvements in education during the eighteenth
century which kept its levels of literacy above those of England.
While comparisons of colonial living standards with those of England
are plagued by severe problems of measurement, comparisons of wealth
among the colonial regions in 1774 can be made with greater precision.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
194 David W. Galenson
These reveal a number of interesting contrasts in the levels as well as the
nature of the economic development that had occurred in different places
over the course of the colonial period. The first column of Table 4.9
compares total wealth per capita for the mainland regions and Jamaica.
The level rises from north to south, with New England's wealth at two-
thirds that of the South, the Middle Colonies' at three-fourths the south-
ern level, and Jamaica's 50 percent greater than that of the South. This
ranking was familiar to contemporaries, whose understanding of the princi-
pal economic basis of these geographic differences was succinctly expressed
by Adam Smith: "The profits of a sugar-plantation in any of our West
Indian colonies are generally much greater than those of any other cultiva-
tion that is known either in Europe or America: And the profits of a
tobacco plantation, though inferior to those of sugar, are superior to those
of corn."
20
Although at first glance it might appear natural to consider the wealth
measure used in the first column of Table 4. 9, obtained by dividing a
region's total wealth by its total population, in the case of colonial Amer-
ica it is extremely difficult to interpret this measure. For the legal exis-
tence of transferable property rights in humans in colonial America, in the
form of slavery and servitude, means that bound laborers are here included
both in the numerator of this expression, as part of physical wealth, and in
its denominator, as part of the total population.
The second column of Table 4.9 eliminates this problem by removing
the value of human capital from total wealth. This treatment is compara-
ble to that typically used for measuring per capita wealth in today's
economies, in which property rights in humans cannot be sold. This
measure can be interpreted as giving one indication of the productive
capacity of an economy relative to its population, by estimating the ratio
of nonhuman physical capital to total population. The ordering of the
regions changes in this measurement, as the Middle Colonies lead the
other mainland regions, and New England and the South are both at the
same level below it. Jamaica remains above all the mainland regions. Yet
what is most striking about the results obtained with this measure is
perhaps not the change in ranking, but the very small differences among
the regions: the Middle Colonies' nonhuman wealth per capita is only 10
percent greater than that of the other mainland regions, and Jamaica's is
less than 10 percent above that of the Middle Colonies.
™ Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 366.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Table 4.9. The wealth of the colonies in 1774
Region
New England
Middle Colonies
Southern Mainland
Jamaica
(1) Total wealth per
capita (£)
36.6
41.9
54.7
84.1
(2) Nonhuman
wealth per capita (£)
36.4
40.2
36.4
43.0
(3) Total wealth per
free capita (£)
38.2
45.8
92.7
1200.0
(4) Nonhuman
wealth per free
capita (£)
38.0
44.1
61.6
754.3
Note: Nonhuman wealth includes land (real estate) and nonhuman portable physical wealth (livestock; producers'
durables, crops, consumers' durables, etc.). Total wealth is the sum of nonhuman wealth and the value of
indentured servants and slaves.
Sources: Mainland Colonies: Jones, Wealth of a Nation to Be, 58, 96. Jamaica: McCusker and Menard, The Economy of
British America, 61; McCusker, "The Rum Trade and the Balance of Payments of the Thirteen Continental
Colonies, 1650-1775" (unpublished dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1970), 692; Stanley L. Engerman,
"Notes on the Patterns of Economic Growth in the British North American Colonies in the Seventeenth,
Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries," in Paul Bairoch and Maurice Levy-Leboyer, eds., Disparities in Economic
Development Since the Industrial Revolution (London: 1981), 50.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
196 David W. Galenson
Comparing columns 1 and 2 of Table 4.9 serves to emphasize both the
central importance of bound labor in the southern mainland colonies and
the West Indies and the marginality of bound labor in New England and
the Middle Colonies. The difference between the entries for a given region
in the two columns is the value of transferable human wealth in a region
divided by total population, and this ranges from a mere £0.2 in New
England and £1.7 in the Middle Colonies to the much larger amount of
£18.3 in the southern mainland and the still greater value of £41.1 in
Jamaica.
Although informative, the measure presented in the second column of
Table 4.9 fails to capture important aspects of the striking differences in
wealthholding that existed among colonial regions. Since human capital
could be bought and sold under colonial law, servants and slaves repre-
sented valuable physical assets to their owners; at the same time, most
bound laborers were not potential wealthholders. The measure given in
the third column of Table 4.9 recognizes these facts by including the value
of bound laborers in physical wealth while excluding bound laborers from
the population measured in the denominator. The resulting measure gives
an indication of the ratio of the value of total transferable physical wealth
to the size of the free population. The effect of the change in the measure is
dramatic. The initial ranking obtained for total wealth per capita, rising
from north to south, reappears, but what is most striking is again the
relative magnitudes. New England and the Middle Colonies both had less
than half the total wealth per free capita of the South. Even more remark-
ably, Jamaica had more than twelve times the average wealth per free
resident of the southern mainland colonies, or equivalently more than
twenty-five times the mean level of the Middle Colonies or New England.
This third measure corresponds most closely to the perceptions of con-
temporaries who compared the wealth of the colonial regions, for what
impressed them was the enormous wealth represented by the great planta-
tions of the southern mainland colonies and the West Indies, in contrast to
the more modest agricultural economies of New England and the Middle
Colonies, which were based on the family farm. Contemporaries were also
aware of the great wealth gap between the West Indies and the southern
mainland, as witnessed for example by Adam Smith's observation that
"our tobacco colonies send us home no such wealthy planters as we see
frequently arrive from our sugar islands."
21
" Smith, Wealth of Nations, 158.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 197
The clarity of contemporaries' perceptions of the differences in the
wealth of the major colonial regions was due not only to the striking
regional differences in the scale and organization of agriculture, but also in
part to the highly visible nature of the economic activity that was key to
the accumulation of wealth in these colonial settlements, specifically the
export of agricultural products. The prosperity of a colonial region de-
pended heavily on its ability to produce agricultural commodities that
were demanded in the much larger European markets. Table 4.10 shows
the difference among the regions in this respect in two different periods,
centered around 1700 and 1770. The ranking of the regions in the value of
exports per capita are similar in the two periods, with the southern main-
land colonies substantially higher than both New England and the Middle
Colonies, and the West Indies substantially higher than all the mainland
regions. The ordering of the regions in per capita exports in 1770 is also
similar to the ranking of the regions for total wealth per capita shown in
Table 4.9. And as in the case of wealth, the relative magnitudes across
regions change sharply when the value of exports is divided not by the
total population, but by the free population. In both periods, while the
values for the two northern mainland regions remain almost unchanged,
the values for the southern mainland colonies increase significantly, and
those for the West Indies increase enormously. And because of the increas-
ing quantitative importance of blacks in the southern mainland colonies
and the West Indies over time, the value of exports per free capita rises
more in these areas relative to simple exports per capita at the end of the
colonial period than in the middle. This difference reflects the very impor-
tant fact that the continuing growth of slavery in the Chesapeake, the
Carolinas, and above all the West Indies served to increase the commercial
power of many of the free residents of these regions over time. With
differences in per capita exports as large as those shown in Table 4.10, as
well as in the per capita wealth of the white populations, it is little wonder
that contemporaries were so clearly aware of the economic hierarchy that
existed among the mature colonial regions.
Not surprisingly, the very different levels of export activity among the
regions were associated with very different patterns of trade by destination.
Table 4.11 presents the percentage distributions of the value of each re-
gion's average annual overseas exports during 1768—72 by place of destina-
tion. Although these data do not include evidence on the trade among the
North American regions, they do provide interesting insights into the
contrasting patterns that had developed by the end of the colonial period.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Table 4.10. Average annual value of commodity exports by region, 1697—1705 and 1768-1722 (£ sterling)
1697-1705 1768-1772
Region
New England
Middle Colonies
Upper South
Lower South
West Indies
Total value of
exports
31,392
15,065
217,062
11,870
608,279
Value of exports
per capita
0.34
0.28
2.21
0.72
4.11
Value of exports
per free capita
0.35
0.30
2.55
0.87
18.43
Total value of
exports
439,101
526,545
1,046,883
551,949
3,910,600
Value of exports
per capita
0.76
0.95
1.61
1.60
8.16
Value of exports
per free capita
0.78
1.01
2.63
2.91
86.9
Note: Data for 1697-1705 include only exports to Great Britain; data for 1768-72 include exports to all overseas destinations.
Sources: Sir Charles Whitworth, State of the Trade of Great Britain in Its Imports and Exports, Progressively from the Year 1697 (London:
1776), 1-9; McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British America, 103-8, 130-6, 154-60, 172^1, 199-203.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Table 4.11. Percentage distributions of the value of average annual regional exports by destination, 1768-
7772
Exporting region
New England
Middle Colonies
Upper South
Lower South
West Indies
Great Britain
and Ireland
18
23
82
72
87
Southern
Europe
15
35
9
10
0
West Indies
63
42
9
18
0
Africa
4
0
0
0
0
North
America




13
Total
100
100
100
100
100
Note: For North American mainland colonies, exports to other mainland colonies were not
measured, and are consequently not included in this tabulation.
Source: McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British America, 108, 130,160,175,199.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
200 David W. Galenson
New England's major overseas trading partner from very early in the
colonial period was the West Indies, which received nearly two-thirds of
all New England's exports. The economy of early Massachusetts enjoyed
substantial continuing flows of immigrants throughout the 1630s, and
during this time many of the earliest settlers prospered by selling cattle
and other agricultural products to more recent arrivals. When political
prospects for Puritans in England improved in the early 1640s, however,
the rate of immigration to New England dropped sharply. Deprived of the
infusions of capital provided by new settlers, Massachusetts' economy
became depressed, and land and cattle prices fell abruptly. The colony's
government searched in vain for a new source of prosperity, passing laws
aimed at promoting such activities as the fur trade, iron manufacturing,
and cloth production, but no successful solution was found until New
England merchants became aware of the increasing need for food that had
arisen in the West Indies in the wake of that region's sugar revolution.
Boston merchants began to trade with the West Indies in the mid-1640s.
In 1647
a
correspondent from the islands wrote to John Winthrop in
Massachusetts that "Men are so intent upon planting sugar that they had
rather buy foode at very deare rates than produce it by labour, so infinite is
the profit of sugar workes after once accomplished."
22
New England began
to send a variety of foods to the West Indies, with fish, meats, and grain
the most important, and this trade continued throughout the remainder of
the colonial period. Some parts of the region, including the Narragansett
Country in southern Rhode Island, prospered by specializing in raising
cattle for export to the Caribbean islands. The Middle Colonies later
joined New England's farmers and merchants in benefiting from the West
Indies' monoculture in sugar. The Middle Colonies' major export, grain,
went in approximately equal amounts to the West Indies and southern
Europe. The Middle Colonies also sent meat and other food to the West
Indies on a smaller scale.
The trade of the Upper South from a very early date was dominated by
tobacco, which made up more than 70 percent of the region's total exports
even in 1770, and all of which was sent to Britain. The region's much
smaller volume of exports to the West Indies and southern Europe con-
sisted almost entirely of grain. Rice made up more than half of all exports
from the Lower South; two-thirds of this was sent to Britain, with the
" Quoted in Harold Innis, The Cod Fisheries (Toronto: 1954), 78.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 201
remainder divided equally between the West Indies and southern Europe.
The region's other important export, indigo, was all sent to Britain.
Sugar accounted for 80 percent of the West Indies' total exports in
1770, and virtually all was sent to Britain. The region's other important
export, rum, was divided among Britain and the mainland regions from
which the sugar islands imported the bulk of their food.
Taken together, Tables 4.10 and 4.11 serve to emphasize not only the
general importance of trade in generating colonial wealth, but also the
particular importance of trade with Great Britain. It was those colonial
regions that found staples that could be sent to Britain that were able to
prosper most through the production of exports. Those regions that could
not export to Britain on a large scale had to resort to exporting within the
colonies, or elsewhere in Europe, on a much smaller scale. The clear
division of the regions by degree of success in exporting to Britain, with
New England and the Middle Colonies the least favored, the southern
mainland regions considerably more successful, and the West Indies by far
the leader, furthermore suggests that in these preindustrial economies the
key to successful trade was overwhelmingly geographic, as those regions
whose climates and natural endowments differed most from those of the
mother country had the strongest basis for trade with the metropolis.
Contemporaries clearly recognized this, as evidenced by the argument of
the English mercantilist, Sir Josiah Child, in the late seventeenth century
that "New-England is the most prejudicial Plantation to the Kingdom of
England," precisely because of the similarity of its natural endowments to
those of England: "All our American Plantations, except that of New
England, produce Commodities of different Natures from those of this
Kingdom. . . . Whereas New-England produces generally the same we
have here, viz. Corn and Cattle." New England's products provided the
basis for little trade with England, while the region's export of those
foodstuffs to the West Indies reduced England's own trade with the sugar
islands. In consequence, Child concluded that "Old England suffers dimi-
nution by the growth of those Colonies settled in New-England," while in
this regard "that Plantation differs from those more Southerly, with re-
spect to the gain or loss of this Kingdom."
2
' Child's argument, based on
the straightforward use of the value of a colony's trade with England as a
measure of the colony's benefit to the mother country, underlines the fact
»» Sir Josiah Child, A New Discourse of Trade (London: 1698), 166, 204- 6.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
202 David W. Galenson
that the prosperity of English American colonies depended in large part on
their ability to produce goods that could profitably be sent to England.
The differences noted above in wealth levels may have translated into
significant regional differences in the material standard of living. Among
native-born colonial recruits for both the French and Indian War and the
Revolution, men born in the South were significantly taller than their
counterparts from the North. During the 1770s, even after allowing for
such characteristics as occupation and urban or rural residence, being born
in Virginia rather than New England added an average 0.6 inches to a
soldier's height, while being born in the Carolinas added an average of 0.8
inches relative to New England; men born in New York were also taller
than those from New England. As in the earlier comparison of the heights
of colonial soldiers with the English, the most likely source of these
regional differences in mean height is variation in levels of nutrition,
which in turn may point to differences in real incomes across regions that
follow the rankings of the regions by wealth.
The dominance of agriculture in the American economy even at the
close of the colonial era is clearly demonstrated in Table 4.12. Land
accounted for 68.4 percent of all nonhuman wealth in the mainland
colonies in 1774, while livestock made up another 11.5 percent, and
inventories of crops an additional 3.5 percent. Thus agriculture accounted
for more than four-fifths of all nonhuman wealth. Nonfarm capital goods
accounted for only 0.5 percent of nonhuman wealth in the colonies over-
all, and nonfarm business inventories only 1.9 percent. Some regional
variation does appear in the importance of nonfarm enterprise, as New
England and the Middle Colonies, which were more oriented toward
mercantile activity than the South, had combined nonfarm equipment and
inventories worth 3.8 percent and 4.5 percent of wealth, respectively,
compared to only 0.8 percent in the South, but in no region did agricul-
tural capital make up less than three-quarters of nonhuman wealth.
There were also considerable regional differences in the distribution of
wealth. Although systematic estimates of wealth distribution in the West
Indies are not available, the enormous value of the land, capital, and
bound labor of the great plantations must certainly have made wealth in-
equality much greater in the sugar islands than on the mainland. Compari-
sons of the mainland regions are shown in Table 4.13, which presents
evidence on the distribution of wealth among free adults. New England
and the South had somewhat greater concentration of wealthholding than
the Middle Colonies, measured by the share of total wealth held by the
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Table 4.12.
Category
Composition of nonhuman wealth, 1774
Thirteen Colonies
£per
capita %
New England
£per
capita %
Middle Colonies
£per
capita %
South
£per
capita %
Total
Land
Producers'
capital:
Livestock
Nonfarm
business
equipment
Crops
Nonfarm
business
inventory
Other
Consumers'
goods
37.4
25.6
4.3
0.2
1.3
0.7
1.6
3.7
100.0
68.4
11.5
0.5
3.5
1.9
4.3
9.9
36.4
26.1
2.8
0.4
0.2
1.0
1.7
4.4
100.0
71.1
7.7
1.1
0.5
2.7
4.7
12.1
40.2
25.9
4.8
0.3
2.1
1.5
1.7
4.0
100.0
64.4
11.9
0.7
5.2
3.7
4.2
10.0
36.4
25.1
4.8
0.1
1.5
0.2
1.5
3.1
100.0
69.0
13.2
0.3
4.1
0.5
4.1
8.5
Source: Jones, Wealth of a Nation to Be, Table 4.2, 96.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
204 David W. Galensm
Table 4.13. Distribution of total wealth by region, 1774
Percentage of
total wealth
held
by richest
1 percent
2 percent
10 percent
20 percent
50 percent
Gini coefficient
Mean (£)
Median (£)
Thirteen
Colonies
12.9
19.6
50.7
67.9
933
0.66
252.0
108.7
New
England
11.6
18.8
46.8
65.9
92.4
0.64
161.2
74.4
Middle
Colonies
12.0
16.0
35.1
52.7
88.8
0.54
189.2
152.5
South
10.4
16.9
46.9
69.6
94.2
0.67
394.7
144.5
Note: The population included in this tabulation is those eligible
to hold wealth; for definition of this group, see Jones, Wealth of a
Nation to Be, 33—7. For the definition of the Gini coefficient, see
ibid., 164-5.
Source: Jones, Wealth of a Nation to Be, Table 6.2, 164-5.
richest i o, 20, or 50 percent of wealthholders, or by the Gini coefficient.
New England and the South also had values of mean wealth per free adult
more than twice as high as their respective medians, compared with a
mean less than 25 percent greater than the median in the Middle Colo-
nies. Yet the South was rich with considerable inequality: the region's
mean total wealth per free adult was more than twice as high as those of
the other two regions. In sharp contrast, New England was relatively
poor, as it had both the lowest mean and the lowest median wealth per free
adult among the regions. That wealth inequality should be great in the
South is perhaps not surprising, because the region had many large planta-
tions that dwarfed the much more numerous small farms. The consider-
able concentration of wealth in New England may have been a result of the
contrast between the region's large and relatively poor agricultural sector
and its small but prosperous mercantile sector. The lesser degree of in-
equality in the Middle Colonies, together with mean wealth somewhat
higher than New England but well below the South, may have been a
result of the prosperity of the Middle Colonies' agriculture relative to that
of New England, but without the considerable variation in agricultural
scale made possible by the large plantations that appeared in the South.
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Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 205
Notwithstanding these regional differences within the colonies in
wealth inequality, it is likely that overall economic inequality was consid-
erably less in the mainland colonies than in England at the time. Visiting
contemporaries almost unanimously described colonial America, particu-
larly the northern mainland regions, as a remarkably egalitarian society,
and regularly commented on both the greater incidence of property owner-
ship and the more limited extent of extreme poverty in the colonies than
in Europe. When a visitor to Pennsylvania in 1775 remarked that "it was
the best country in the world for people of small fortunes, or in other
words, the best poor man's country," he was echoing the words of many
earlier immigrants who had contrasted their new homeland with the old in
letters to relatives and friends who remained behind.
24
Although careful
quantitative comparisons have yet to be carried out, contemporaries' per-
ceptions were probably correct, and modern historians generally believe
that wealthholding was considerably less concentrated in colonial America
than in England.
Another important question on which little systematic research has
been done concerns possible trends in the extent of economic inequality
that occurred during the course of the colonial period. No studies of
overall wealth inequality throughout the colonies are available for dates
prior to 1774. Yet a number of investigations have measured changes in
the distribution of wealth over time within particular communities. On
the basis of studies that found rising wealth concentration in specific
communities, including several large cities and prosperous rural counties
settled early in the colonial period, a number of scholars have argued that
wealth inequality probably rose throughout the mainland colonies during
much of the colonial period. Recently, however, this hypothesis of rising
overall colonial inequality has been challenged by an analysis that argues
that this generalization from the local studies is flawed by a fallacy of
composition. The new analysis recognizes that inequality was rising in
cities and in older agrarian regions along the Atlantic coast. Equally
significant for overall inequality, however, was the fact that new frontier
communities were being settled at very rapid rates during most of the
colonial period. The settlers in these new communities were drawn by the
economic opportunities offered by the frontier. Per capita wealth grew
** Quoted in Jackson Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton, NJ: 1965),
222. For an earlier example of this description, see Susan E. Klepp and Billy G. Smith, eds., The
Itifortutiatt: The Voyage and Adventures of William Moraley, an Indentured Servant (University Park, PA:
1992), 88-9.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
206 David W. Galenson
more rapidly in the new frontier communities than in the older coastal
settlements, and because the settlers in the newer communities were
initially poorer on average than the residents of older cities and towns, the
effect of this rapid growth in wealth on the frontier was to reduce overall
colonial inequality. The geographic redistribution of the colonial popula-
tion away from the Atlantic seacoast therefore served to reduce economic
inequality by offering younger, poorer, and more ambitious migrants from
older communities the opportunity to achieve greater economic success by
developing the frontier. Quantitatively, the impact of this redistribution
of population may have been large enough to counterbalance the rising
economic inequality that has been observed within some older communi-
ties, and the net effect may have been to produce relatively little change in
overall wealth inequality in the mainland colonies throughout most of the
colonial period.
The economic development of the colonies of English America was
surely rapid by preindustrial standards, and as in the case of population
growth this was clearly recognized by contemporaries. Adam Smith began
his general analysis of the economic growth of colonial regions with the
proposition that "the colony of a civilized nation which takes possession of
a waste country, or of one so thinly inhabited, that the natives easily give
place to the settlers, advances more rapidly to wealth and greatness than
any other human society."
2
' And Smith left no doubt as to the principal
evidence on which he based this generalization, stating that "there are no
colonies of which the progress has been more rapid than that of the
English in North America."
26
From a series of small settlements fighting
for their survival in the early seventeenth century, the English colonies
both in the West Indies and on the North American mainland reached
levels of economic development that afforded not only great riches for the
economic elite, but widespread levels of more modest but nonetheless
significant economic prosperity for many European settlers and their de-
scendants. Yet it is clear that the differences in the process of develop-
ment, and in the nature of the economies and societies that emerged, were
enormous among the regions that have been treated here. At one end of a
spectrum lay New England, which had the least wealth, the least foreign
trade, and the least bound labor among all the regions. At the opposite
end lay the West Indies, where the greatest volume of trade produced the
greatest physical wealth, and the greatest amount of the harshest form of
"» Smith, Wealth of Nations, 531- 2.
a6
Smith, Wealth 0/Nations, 538.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Settlement and Growth of the Colonies 207
bound labor. In intermediate positions along this spectrum in all these
respects were the three regions located geographically between New En-
gland and the West Indies, with greater trade and wealth and more slavery
in the Upper and Lower South, compared to lower levels of trade and
wealth and much less reliance on slave labor in the Middle Colonies. In
these respects, the characteristics of each of these five major regions of
English America were firmly in place by the time of the American Revolu-
tion, and they would not change significantly in the coming decades as a
result of the operation of purely economic forces. Thus by 1776 the early
growth and maturation of the colonial economy, and the operation of the
colonial labor market, had clearly laid down the geographic lines along
which later rhetorical, political, and military battles would be waged over
the abolition of slavery.
While this essay has documented the substantial variations in economic
conditions that emerged among the regions of colonial America, and
considered the responses of immigrants to these regional differences, it
remains apparent that the most substantial economic deprivation in En-
glish America was a result not of a lack of economic success of free
colonists, but was rather a result of the extremely circumscribed opportuni-
ties for the unfree. For the free, opportunities were impressive. Although
our view of the growth of the aggregate economy remains clouded, cau-
tious estimates have suggested that the real product per capita of the
mainland colonies rose at average annual rates of 0.3—0.5 percent during
the eighteenth century. Although modest by the standards of the rapid
modern economic growth that would occur in the nineteenth century,
these rates were considerable by the standards of Europe in the centuries
preceding the colonization of the New World. The achievement of this
intensive growth in a preindustrial economy is even more impressive in
view of colonial rates of population growth that averaged more than 3
percent per year. It is clear that the colonial period left an auspicious
economic legacy to the new republic, and placed it in a most advantaged
position from which to begin more rapid economic development. Al-
though more research is needed to chart the economic development of the
colonies over time more precisely, there is little doubt that the economic
and demographic accomplishments of the colonies of English America
together make up one of the most dramatic success stories of the preindus-
trial world.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE NORTHERN COLONIES:
ECONOMY AND SOCIETY, 1600-1775
DANIEL VICKERS
For most of the sixteenth century, the landholding and trading classes of
northwestern Europe imagined the New World, based on the example set
by the Spanish and Portuguese empires, as a field for conquest, plunder, and
dominion. When English, French, or Dutch adventurers trained their
minds on the Atlantic and its western shores, they dreamt of precious metals
seized from Spanish galleons and conquered Indian peoples, rich estates
worked by Indian or European subjects and supervised by transplanted
gentlemen, or lucrative trading posts where willing and naive Indians
would trade away their high-valued wares for next to nothing. Such projects
would reward their promoters, less in the hard-won profit margins of
competitive trade than in booty, rents, swindle, royal favor, and sometimes
in the sense of having done one's duty for king, country, or the true faith.
With a few magnificent exceptions, however, most of these adventures
came to nought. They did not repay their investors, nor did they establish
any of the north European countries as a significant colonial power. By the
turn of the century, therefore, a new generation of adventurers - first in
England and then more gradually on the continent - began to consider a
change in strategy. Listening to the arguments of men such as Richard
Hakluyt, they planned and promoted overseas settlements where Europeans
would support themselves by raising staple commodities for sale in the
Atlantic marketplace. This principle - that colonies could be sustained and
investors rewarded from the profits of trade — remained the common de-
nominator within all the successful overseas undertakings in the decades to
come.
For the settlers who actually founded the seventeenth-century colonies,
however, the commercial impulse was nor a goal in itself. Having grown
209
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
21 o Daniel Vickers
up in Europe, they understood the ways of the marketplace, but few of
them would have termed themselves professional traders when they em-
barked for America. Wheeling and dealing was for the great majority only
a means to an end. Some, who already possessed money and connections,
wished to enrich themselves and quit the drudgery of physical labor for the
life of a gentleman. A great many more of plainer backgrounds and more
modest ambitions hoped that commercial success would enable them to
settle themselves and their families in comfortable circumstances with the
power to govern their own working lives — to achieve what Englishmen of
the day would have termed a "competency."
1
For those bent on great fortunes, the northeastern corner of the New
World had limited appeal. By 1600, it was clear that if there was gold or
silver in the ground, the Indians had not discovered it. With the excep-
tion of fur-bearing animals, little of the natural flora and fauna seemed
exotic enough in extracted form to command much of a market at home.
And since the temperate climate of the Northeast was similar in seasonal
outline to most of northern Europe, no bonanza in tropical agriculture, of
the sort that was developing around the Caribbean and Portuguese Brazil,
was likely to be had there either. For working people interested in achiev-
ing a competent living in familiar surroundings, however, the very quali-
ties that drove away the fortune-hunters seemed positive advantages.
Those emigrants who sought in the New World a home - not just a profit-
able appendage but an improved replication of the society they had left
behind — chose this country precisely for its familiarity. Francis Higgin-
son delighted upon his arrival at Salem in 1629 to discover the apparent
ease with which New Englanders were managing to transplant European
crops. Not only had the colonists at New Plymouth "tryed . . . all our
severall Graines" with some success in what had proved to be "a fitting
Soyle for their nature" but even the Governor of Massachusetts after less
than a year in residence had "greene Pease growing in his Garden as good
as ever I eat in England. "
2
The Scottish proprietors of East Jersey attracted
the attention of prospective emigrants with reports that the colony could
support all of the fundamental elements of Scottish agriculture - perhaps
even better than Scotland itself. Similarly, William Penn reassured poten-
tial migrants in a promotional pamphlet of 1681 that farmers in Pennsylva-
nia would soon be able to "follow the English husbandry as they do in New
' See Daniel Vickers, "Competency and Competition: Economic Culture in Early America," William
and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 47 (1990), 3- 29.
• Francis Higginson, New-Englandi Plantation (London: 1630).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
The Northern Colonies: Economy and Society 211
England, and New York."* These were brave words that reality sometimes
belied, but they were rooted in a vision of colonization that was particular
to the American Northeast.
In large part, that vision was an article of faith. Although the northern
colonies were launched as commercial enterprises that had to provide a
return for their investors, they recruited a high proportion of their initial
colonists from a variety of reformed Protestant groups that saw in the New
World a refuge where true believers could worship free from persecution,
from the moral decay around them, and from the temptations into which
their own material impoverishment might lead them to fall. Integral to this
vision - and in spite of other differences, this was something that Puritans,
Quakers, Presbyterians, and German sectarians shared in common - was
finding a part of the world that could sustain the household economy.
"Nothing sorts better with Piety than compte[n]cy," announced John
White, a Puritan divine, on the eve of the Great Migration to New En-
gland. In this he was giving voice to the sentiment, shared amongst a great
many oppositional sects, that insofar as godliness prospered in well-ordered
families, those families needed the proper material support. Since the
American Northeast seemed to offer plenty of land in a climate suited to the
diversified production of a sort that competent households practiced in
Europe, it seemed fit for the purpose. Women could employ their skills in
processing the produce that men brought in from the forests and fields.
With the prospect of transplanting this basic productive relationship onto
untilled soil, therefore, the dissident emigrants of the seventeenth century
shipped themselves for New England, the Jerseys, and Pennsylvania in
family units. In Massachusetts, where in the Great Migration of the 1630s
nine out often colonists came with families or near relatives, this was truest.
Among the Presbyterian settlers of East Jersey and the Quakers in West
Jersey and Pennsylvania, a clear majority did the same. Together all of these
groups established household production as the fundamental economic prin-
ciple of the region.
This dedication to the ideal of competency for families bore fruit in the
northern colonies in a number of ways. First, it meant that from the very
beginning the settled population included an unusually equal balance
between the sexes. The mere presence of women, hence families and the
social institutions that growing families demanded, prompted a settle-
» William Penn to Robert Turner, Mar. 5, 1681; and Penn, So»a Account ofthe Province ofPennsylvania
in America (London, 1681), in Jean R. Soderlund, ed., William Penn and the Founding of Pennsylvania,
1680-1684 (Philadelphia: 1983), 64-65.
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212 Daniel Wickers
ment pattern that was expansive enough yet more immediately stable,
centralized, and urban than in the plantation colonies. Furthermore, since
labor was to be divided by gender, a system of mixed farming that
employed women efficiently by generating a variety of raw materials to
process made good economic sense. Diversified agriculture demanded in
turn a range of supporting services by artisans, and the complex network
of regional exchange among these farming and craft manufacturing house-
holds created an obvious field of profitable operation for a resident mer-
chant class. The merchant capital, expertise, and enterprise that were
natural byproducts of colonization everywhere accumulated in the case of
the northern colonies not in London, Glasgow, or Bristol but in Boston,
New York, and Philadelphia. In short, the emphasis on families pushed
dissident settlers to a land that seemed familiar or potentially so, caused
them to replicate the socioeconomic ways of the Old World, and enabled
them and the merchant interests that accompanied them to capture busi-
ness that in the plantation colonies flowed elsewhere. It is no accident that
New Plymouth, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New England, New York, and
Nova Scotia all sat in a part of the New World that was in the course of
time most successful at joining in the process of capitalist development,
and it was in the interplay between geography and the devotion to family
competency that the roots of economic development lay.
THE FRONTIER ECONOMY
The pursuit of competency might seem on the surface to be a modest enough
aspiration, and, from the perspective of the individual family, it was. When
entire societies adopted it, however, it lost its benign character and became
a force for both military conquest and commercial development. Its impe-
rial consequences were relatively straightforward. The thirst for indepen-
dent landholdings that had driven families in western Europe to stretch the
boundaries of their home countries to the bursting point during the six-
teenth century now launched them across the sea in search of new territory -
lands that were invariably in the possession of others and had to be con-
quered. Foremost in this invasion were the English. First in Ireland, then in
Virginia and New England, they invaded the country, swept it with
musket-fire and infectious diseases, and claimed it for themselves. Although
cloaked in a variety of rationalizations - the duty to civilize and carry the
gospel to the heathen, or the divine call to subdue a continent that appeared
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The Northern Colonies: Economy and Society 213
to "lie waste without any improvement" — settlement was initially a mili-
tary operation.
4
The commercial implications of competency, however,
were equally significant. As a social ethic, it included a sense of decent com-
fort that pushed colonists to furnish their homes with more than crude neces-
sities and involved their finding something - either the surplus or the by-
product of domestic economy — to market abroad and pay the expense. Fur-
thermore, even the barest impulse to reproduce one's family in competent
circumstances, especially in a healthy country where many children lived to
maturity, required some investment in capital goods. New households
needed guns, axeheads, plough irons, lumber, hearth equipment, cloth,
kitchenware, seed, stock - most of which could be obtained only or most
easily through commercial exchange. For all of these reasons, the frontier of
settlement possessed by its nature an economy of conquest and commerce.
In the northern colonies, as everywhere, the frontier should be under-
stood not as a line dividing cultures from one another but as an amorphous
and shifting zone of interpenetration between a set of intrusive European
cultures and their Native American counterparts.
5
It could be broad or
narrow, depending on whether the societies in question were at peace or
war. It could be advancing or retreating, according to the fortunes of
military conflict or the ravages of disease. Where intersocietal trade was
important, the frontier was a region of activity and cooperation; but where
the appropriation and settlement of land were the main European inter-
ests, it could become a no-man's land racked with war and raiding. In
general, however, frontier zones had a number of common characteristics.
Above all, since neither Indians nor Europeans were effectively dominant
there, trade and production always contained a powerful diplomatic and
military dimension. Assumptions regarding the propriety of bargaining,
the media of exchange, the nature of credit, the rules of property — almost
anything that fell under the category of economic culture — were not
necessarily shared by members of the different groups who worked and
dealt on "the middle ground" of the frontier, and they needed continual
redefinition.
6
Consequently, it was a region of some opportunity, at the
price of considerable risk, for those short on wealth and power.
4
John Winthrop, Reasons to Be Considered . . . for the Intended Plantation in New England (1629), in
Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco, eds., The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology (Cam-
bridge, MA: 1985), 72.
' Leonard Thompson and Howard Lamar, "Comparative Frontier History," in Lamar and Thompson,
eds., The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (New Haven, CT: 1981),
7- 11.
6
Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Gnat Lakes Region, 16)0—
181} (Cambridge: 1991), 50.
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214 Daniel Vickers
The fur trade did not create the frontier in the American or maritime
Northeast as it did in New France, but it accounted for a great deal of the
business transacted within it throughout the colonial period, especially in
the Middle Colonies. In Newfoundland, where beaver was relatively scarce
and where the native Beothuks acquired most of their metal goods by
pilfering from seasonally abandoned European waterfront premises, fur-
ring was always distinctly subordinate to fishing. From Nova Scotia south-
ward to Connecticut, the trade only flourished along a few river systems
and during the first half of the seventeenth century. About 1650, when
the geographic reality that the regions sat astride no major route to the
West began to dawn, and when the supply of local beaver began to run
out, New England's fur trade dipped into insignificance. In New Nether-
land and New York, by contrast, the commerce in beaver pelts dominated
the frontier economy until well into the eighteenth century. This was
partly a consequence of geography; without the Hudson-Mohawk river
system that linked the Atlantic coastline with the Great Lakes basin, the
trade would never have developed at all. That it flourished, however,
resulted from the combined astuteness of European colonists and Iroquois
Indians who succeeded in channeling a fairly constant flow of furs from the
West (and sometimes through Montreal) into Albany and off to England
right up to the American Revolution. After 1730, aggressive traders
operating out of Philadelphia, collecting deerskins as well as beaver over a
network of overland trails from the Ohio Valley, added still further to the
London-bound supply of peltry.
Unlike most early modern commerce, this was not a business in which
diversification paid. Although the import of cloth, rum, and other goods
for the Indian trade, as well as the export of furs to Europe, usually lay in
the hands of the larger merchants of New York City and Philadelphia, who
possessed a range of commercial interests, most of the trade on the frontier
fell to specialists. Some general merchants - like William Pynchon of
Springfield, Massachusetts, and the firm of Baynton, Wharton, and Mor-
gan from Philadelphia — organized the trade directly by sending employ-
ees into the interior, but even more preferred to deal through intermediar-
ies who possessed the vast fund of particular knowledge that this far-flung
intersocietal commerce required. Through the mechanism of credit, the
responsibilities, risks, and rewards of the trade were delegated in large
part to a crowd of tough, knowledgeable, and often cutthroat traders who
paddled canoes, poled batteaus, and drove pack horses through the fron-
tier zone to contact the Indians in their villages or at remote posts.
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The Northern Colonies: Economy and Society 215
Sometimes on straight barter and sometimes on carefully measured terms
of credit, trade goods and furs changed hands at fixed prices supplemented
by variable gifts in a complex combination, geared at once to the Indians'
dislike for open haggling and to the realities of supply and demand. Much
could go wrong in this trade. With no polity that was dominant within
the frontier zone, Native Americans and Europeans alike could cheat, rob,
or murder both partners and competitors and escape the punishment that
would have been a probable fate at home. Long lines of communication
could lead to confusion and misinformation that at times landed traders in
the midst of the forest with trade goods but no customers. Along the
attenuated chain by which furs made their way eastward, disease and tribal
warfare also could bring this commerce to a halt. And even when trading
parties had met up with each other and begun to deal, novice Europeans
could, by paying insufficient attention to the diplomatic rituals of trade,
so offend the Native American sense of propriety as to cause the business
relationship to break down altogether. Since the subtleties of the fur trade
were foreign to the experience of most colonists, it usually became the
province of specialized frontiersmen.
The main force for order within the trade was the collective self-interest
of the tribal units on the one hand and the colonial governments with their
merchant supporters on the other. From the Indian standpoint, furs not
only paid for the European goods upon which they depended but also
served as one of the underpinnings of intercultural diplomacy. The ship-
ments of peltry that the Iroquois could deliver to Albany were in a sense
chips that could be played in the negotiation of treaties to protect tribal
lands and their other interests. From the perspective of some colonial
governors, such as Thomas Dongan of New York, a healthy fur trade was
not only a source of customs revenue, personal profit, and patronage but
also a fair guarantee of the frontier peace that needed a minimum of
policing. Unfortunately for the cause of order, however, furs mattered less
to most colonial administrators than did the acquisition of land for settle-
ment. James Logan of Pennsylvania may have made a great deal of money
exporting deerskins from Philadelphia while serving as William Penn's
colonial secretary at the beginning of the eighteenth century — a business
that gave him a clear interest in the survival of his Indian suppliers and
customers. But the same Logan took an active role in engineering the
seizure of Conestoga and Shawnee lands in the Susquehanna Valley and the
settlement of German and English families on property he had acquired
there. This was a particularly flagrant version of a contradiction that
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216 Daniel Vickers
plagued commerce throughout the frontier: if there was good money to be
made in dealing with Indians, there were fortunes to be won in supplant-
ing them.
More than the trade in furs, therefore, the activity of land seizure,
speculation, and homesteading dominated the economy of the frontier
zone. What many historians have politely termed migration or geographic
mobility was in reality the ceaseless, aggressive, and fundamentally politi-
cal expansion inherent in the pursuit of family competency. During the
first decades of settlement when the frontier itself clung to the coast, most
of this movement took place within a small region, and a great deal could
be accommodated inside town boundaries. This sort of mobility has often
been overlooked by historians who conclude from the absence of migration
across town or county boundaries that these were stable times. In reality,
scattering was from the very earliest decades of settlement a truth of
colonial life — even in New England, where the founders possessed an
unusual sensitivity to what John Winthrop called "our . . . community in
the work."
7
Thus, as early as 1635 when some of his fellow colonists
decamped for Connecticut, even Winthrop could excuse their "strong
bent" to move on, for in Massachusetts they were already "much straitened
by their own nearness to one another, and their cattle . . . [was] much
increased."
8
The number of different paths that this process of conquest and settle-
ment could take was nearly beyond counting. Sometimes, as in the case of
the Puritan migration to Massachusetts Bay, epidemic disease preceded
the settlers' arrival and left broad stretches of abandoned land for the
Europeans to occupy. On occasion, as in Plymouth Colony's encroachment
on the lands of the Wampanoag Indians in the early 1670s (which helped
to provoke King Philip's War), the country was cleared of opposition by
force of arms. In other cases, as in the westward expansion of Pennsylvania
after Penn's departure in 1701, native groups beat a long, negotiated,
strategic retreat before the relentless pressure of land speculators, their
often ruthless back country agents, and the farm-hungry homesteaders
who had risked much to move to the frontier and were not to be disap-
pointed. A great many variables entered into the respective histories of
these different frontiers: geography, the relative importance of the fur
' John Winthrop, "A Model of Christian Charity" (1630), in Heimert and Delbanco, eds., The
Puritans in America, 91.
8
James K. Hosmer, ed. , Wintbrop's Journal: "History of New England," 2 vols., Original Narratives of
Early American History (New York: 1908), vol. 1, 142, 151.
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The Northern Colonies: Economy and Society
trade, and tribal and colonial diplomacy, not to mention the cultural
peculiarities of the particular groups that contested the land. Invariably,
however, homesteading took place on what was politically contested
ground, where settler power eventually prevailed.
This was especially true in the farther reaches of the back country.
Trouble commonly resulted when settlers encroached upon territory that
Indians had not actually ceded, squatted on proprietorial lands without
paying for the privilege, moved into a stretch of country over which there
was a dispute between proprietors, or simply set out claims that over-
lapped their neighbors'. Thus, Thomas Penn ran into difficulty with
squatters who had invaded unsurveyed lands in Lancaster County during
the 17 30s and organized "claims clubs" when he attempted to coerce them
into signing warrants. Along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, in East
Jersey, throughout the Green Mountains, and on the Maine frontier, the
indistinct claims of distant proprietors led to chronic conflict not only
between landlords and squatters but, in cases where proprietorial jurisdic-
tion was in dispute, between the occupiers themselves. Ultimately, the
trouble arose because there was no consensus over what created property
rights in conquered land. Was it defined in the terms of an Indian deed,
royal charter, or proprietary grant? Or, as one German tenant in Pennsylva-
nia argued before the Privy Council, was "the best Title a man can have"
in "new-settled Colonies" one defined by "Possession and Improvement"?
9
Even on a local scale, the founding of towns, manors, and townships, and
the assignment of undivided land within them was an intensely political
process, in which dozens of potential proprietors or landholders — great
and petty — attempted to lever the provincial governments or local authori-
ties into grants that they could either occupy and develop or hold for
speculative purposes. Although wildly complex and subject to all sorts of
local variation, the struggle that ensued over the establishment of private
property in frontier land generally resulted in a qualified victory for those
with connections within the colonial administration. As long as it lasted,
however, such conflict contributed to the risks and uncertainties of the
homesteading economy.
All of this mattered, of course, because on the homesteading frontier
the pace of development was so rapid. Even if families could convert no
more than a few acres of forest a year to European-style husbandry, it was
only a period of decades before towns acquired a settled appearance and
' Quoted in James T. Lemon, The Best Poor Man's Country: A Geographical Study of Southeastern
Pennsylvania (Baltimore, MD: 1972), 57.
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218 Daniel Wickers
property values rose. Such development was purchased at the cost of
considerable initial poverty. Travelers into frontier regions were often
appalled at the meager diet, squalid housing, and near-absence of creature
comforts to which homesteaders subjected themselves while they sank
most of their own time and resources, plus whatever credit they could
obtain from relatives, neighbors, or merchant connections, into the busi-
ness of farm development. The levels of indebtedness that frontier families
assumed were high in relation to the productive capacity of their farms,
and this involved diverting considerable effort into making returns. One
obvious marketable commodity was timber and cordwood from the forest
they felled, and there was almost no region where new settlement did not
generate a flourishing, if not always long-lived, export trade in wood
products. Even agricultural produce was often pared from domestic con-
sumption and shipped downriver or carted into town very soon after the
first fields were cleared in an effort to sustain the vital injections of credit.
With an enthusiasm, then, not for commerce in and of itself but for the
comfortable independence that was impossible to achieve without an eye
to commercial opportunity, homesteading farmers brought one range of
frontier land after another into the domain of rural economies on the
model of the Old World.
THE RURAL ECONOMY
Had the families of immigrants who sailed for the American and Canadian
Northeast in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries landed in the trop-
ics, the lure of plunder and plantation profits would undoubtedly have
proved irresistible, and their commitment to the household economy
employing male and female skills in combination would have been silently
shelved. That is what happened off the Nicaraguan coast at Providence
Island, where Puritan settlers of the 1630s abandoned the attempt to
reconstruct the economic institutions of home almost immediately and
turned their energies to privateering and the operation of slave-driven
cotton and tobacco farms. This also happened in the exotically cold climate
of the far northern colonies, where the few permanent residents shied away
from mixed husbandry and concentrated instead on fur and fish. New-
foundland in particular possessed too short a growing season to plant and
harvest grains or to raise enough fodder to see more than a handful of
animals through the winter. A small number of families persisted on its
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The Northern Colonies: Economy and Society 219
cool, infertile shores throughout the seventeenth century, but since there
was little productive employment to be had outside of the fishery, female
skills were not an economic necessity, and the household economy never
flourished.
Newfoundland was in this sense, however, the exception that proved
the rule. All the way from the modestly more temperate country of Nova
Scotia southward to Pennsylvania, geography confirmed the early immi-
grants in their intention to transplant the household basis of production.
Although farmers adjusted the balance between pasture and tillage land
and in different regions gave preference to different animals and crops,
virtually all remained wedded in large measure to the principle of agricul-
tural diversity through the end of the colonial period. The Acadian settlers
around the Bay of Fundy raised small surpluses of cattle, peas, and wheat,
which they sold to Boston and to fishermen on Cape Breton, but the
general orientation of their husbandry was toward local self-sufficiency and
reflected the same mix of husbandry that prevailed in the west of France,
whence most of them hailed. New Englanders had to adjust their agricul-
tural expectations to the reality that neither wheat nor barley prospered
there, so they grew rye and Indian corn instead, and eventually they came
to depend more on animal husbandry than their English forebears. In a
few favored regions, certain specialties arose — sheep raising and cheese
making on the shores of Narragansett Bay, horse breeding in the Connecti-
cut valley and growing flax for seed by the Merrimack River in southern
New Hampshire — but rarely in New England did farmers stray far from
the principle of diversity. In the Hudson River Valley, and throughout
New Jersey and Pennsylvania, fertile soil allowed wheat to grow into an
important staple export very soon after settlement. Yet the men and
women who operated even the most commercial grain farms in the Middle
Colonies were hardly specialists, for they pastured cattle and sheep, cut
timber, boiled potash, ran dairies, and barreled meat on a scale no less
impressive than their counterparts in Connecticut or Massachusetts.
If mixed farming was nearly universal in the northern colonies, so was
the division by gender of the labor that powered it. By 1700, every
agricultural region north of Maryland (save possibly Pennsylvania, whose
population was still dominated by large numbers of young and indentured
male immigrants) possessed a sex ratio that was close to equal. Within the
gender-balanced households that composed this rural population, the west
European tradition by which most men labored in the fields and forests
producing raw materials, while women normally worked around the house
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220 Daniel Vickers
and barn processing those materials into consumable items, survived the
trans-Atlantic passage reasonably intact. There was considerable elasticity
in these arrangements, of course, especially at busy seasons and in house-
holds where one sex outnumbered the other. Because of the complex mix
of German, Welsh, and Scots-Irish ethnicity that prevailed in the Middle
Colonies, the division of tasks between men and women there displayed
particular variety. As a general rule, however, the skills of domestic pro-
duction fell mainly within the female province, and with these the econo-
mies of the northeastern colonies were peculiarly blessed. In 1788, Brissot
de Warville remarked that a bachelor farmer he had met north of Philadel-
phia could not, without a family, keep poultry or pigeons, make cheese, or
"have any spinning done or collect goose feathers." It was, he added, "a
great disadvantage for him not to be able to profit from these domestic
farm industries, which can be carried on well only by farm women."
10
No
factor was more decisive in the northern colonies' long-term success in
diversification and import substitution than the roughly equal sex ratio
that prevailed there almost from their foundation.
The final element in the economic culture that migrated to the house-
holding colonies was the habit of exchange. To what extent was the rural
economy of the Northeast market-driven? Obviously, all farmers and their
wives dealt with others on a commercial basis from time to time. Most
farmers who kept diaries recorded several trips overland or downriver to
the market towns along the coast every year, and the accounts of shopkeep-
ers record the purchase of produce, at least in small quantities, from
people at all levels of rural society. Even the dealings that farmers con-
cluded in their own towns and villages were often competitive enough to
convince John Winthrop at times that it was "the common rule that most
men walked by in all their commerce, to buy as cheap as they could, and
to sell as dear."
11
At the same time, however, most rural production was
consumed at home and never entered the market at all. Even the highest
estimates of the agricultural surplus in typical farm households only place
it at between 25 and 40 percent of total output. Families did arrive at
decisions about the management of their farms — choosing whether or not
to replant a worn-out corn field in apple trees, or when to slaughter a
hog — with some awareness of the price at which these products could also
be bought or sold. But custom and a sense that family requirements came
10
Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the UnitedStates of America, 1788, in Joan M. Jensen, Loosening the
Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 17.50-1850 (New Haven, CT: 1986), 53.
11
Hosmer, ed. , Wintbrop's Journal, vol. 2, 20.
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The Northern Colonies: Economy and Society 221
first dampened their response; thus market forces impinged on farm man-
agement mainly in the broader considerations of long-run strategy. Much
of what men and women obtained around their neighborhoods to meet
their immediate needs changed hands in a system governed less by hag-
gling over terms than by unspoken reciprocity. The numerous petty debts
and credits that farmers built up with one another were rarely settled in
the commercial manner by payment in cash or in bookkeeping shuffles;
rather, they had to be repaid personally — sometimes in labor but more
often in equipment or produce. No farm family could prosper in utter
autonomy, or only with neighborly assistance, or simply through market
transactions. In their drive to preserve a modicum of competency and
confer it upon subsequent generations, men and women moved easily in
and out of all three tactical alternatives and, indeed, found the borders
between them to be rather indistinct.
None of these features set the northern colonies apart in any absolute
sense, for a numerical balance between the sexes and some economic
diversification came eventually to most of the New World, and a degree of
commercial production was common everywhere. The colonies north of
Maryland, however, were born with these characteristics and possessed in
their economic diversity a potential for constructive regional integration
that the southern colonies developed only hesitantly later on. Settlers in
the tobacco, rice, and sugar colonies did more business with consumers
and suppliers overseas than did their northern counterparts, but they did
less, particularly in the early years, with one another. For one thing, most
regions of the Northeast were involved, however indirectly, in the provi-
sioning of seaports. As early as 1648, Edward Johnson observed that the
inhabitants of Ipswich on Massachusetts' North Shore had "many hundred
quarters" of beef to spare and "feed, at the latter end of summer, the
Towne of Boston with good Beefe." Some of this was for export and some
for consumption, but a significant proportion went into victualing, "both
for their owne and Forreiners-ships, who resort hither for that end."
12
Not
only in Boston but later in Philadelphia and New York, the rapid settle-
ment of a highly diversified service and manufacturing population hinged
on the ability of farm families in the country round to provision them.
Although some of the produce that farmers brought into the seaport towns
was simply grain and livestock to be warehoused and exported directly,
even more produce either had been processed in the countryside (like
" J. Franklin Jameson, ed., Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence, 1629—1651, Original Narratives of
Early American History (New York: 1910), 71, 96.
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222 Daniel Vickers
butter, smoked and salted meat, malt, flour, and boards) or would be
processed by specialists in town (like bread, clothing, furniture, and
leather products). With remarkable speed, a network of regional ex-
change, connecting mariners to outfitters, bakers, farmers, millers, mill-
wrights, and so forth — in a primitive but recognizable reflection of the
mother country - was reestablished in the northern seaports and their
hinterland. Marketing the mixed surplus of domestic farm production was
not a likely path to fortune, but in a thousand little ways it employed the
talents of housewives, and artisans in town and country, capturing busi-
ness that would otherwise have fallen to Europeans.
In spite of these trans-Atlantic similarities and the long-term advan-
tages that derived from them, the northern colonies did not instantly nor
entirely replicate the rural economies of their metropolitan parents, owing
mostly to the ease with which the unimproved land and natural resources
of the New World could be appropriated. This reorganized northern agri-
culture in part by pushing farming households to be extensive in their
exploitation of the natural environment and sparing in their use of labor.
The dominant method of forest clearance — stripping the trees of bark and
waiting till they toppled, while cultivating the ground around them and
planting it with crops — spoke clearly to the way in which other chores
placed competing demands upon people's time. Swine were the favored
livestock in the initial stages of settlement for the same reason: since they
could grub for themselves on unimproved land and defend themselves
against natural predators, they put minimal demands upon human assis-
tance. European travelers across the Northeast remarked on what they
perceived to be sloppy farming: the absence of crop rotation, an inade-
quate attention to manuring and fodder crops, insufficient housing for
animals, poor selection and quality of implements, unselective breeding,
and so forth. Farmers in New York were said to clear out tracts of forest
and then "crop their fields with corn, till they are absolutely exhausted;
then they leave them, what they call fallow, that is, to run weeds for
several years, till they think the soil has recovered somewhat of its fertil-
ity, when they begin again with corn."'3 In an agricultural regime where
so much of the land was periodically abandoned, fencing was sensibly
impermanent and consisted mainly of stumps and logs, then posts and
rails, and sometimes stones, assembled along field boundaries in such
•» Anon.,American Husbandry (1775), quoted in Percy Wells Bidwell and John I. Falconer, History of
Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620- 7860 (Washington: 1925), 86.
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The Northern Colonies: Economy and Society 223
haste that complaints about strayed animals became chronic everywhere.
Although the agricultural critics of the day attributed most of this to sloth
and ignorance, the simple truth was that, where the supply of land was too
vast to be exhausted in a future that any colonist could imagine, it seemed
foolish to squander scarce labor and capital on conservation or cosmetic
tidiness.
Another significant consequence of the easy access to land and resources
was that European immigrants found it possible to realize on the western
shores of the Atlantic a degree of independence that would have been
inconceivable at home. In a rural economy without a highly profitable
export staple, this had a number of peculiar consequences. First, it meant
that relative to the availability of unimproved land and resources, produc-
tive equipment and labor time were in limited supply. Within individual
households, tools and livestock were usually inadequate to the opportuni-
ties that one's holdings afforded; those holdings themselves were less than
fully developed; and the time needed to make the necessary improvements
was chronically short. Between households, it meant that there was on the
one hand relatively little labor available for hire and on the other hand
comparatively little capital to set laborers to work. Although the demand
for labor was high in the northern colonies, it was chiefly a demand for
help in farm formation, which provided no immediate paying returns
sufficient to meet the cost of a large wage bill. Where hands could be
obtained and well-to-do colonists could afford the cost, the scarcity of
labor drove the wages of common laborers on northern farms up to a level
that ranged from is. 6d. to 2s. (in British currency) per day - half again
as high as those that prevailed in England. Since large employers were
relatively scarce, however, the quantity of labor marketed at these hand-
some wages remained by the standards of the old country comparatively
small. Ordinary farm families could not depend on the free market for the
help and equipment they needed (at ploughing and harvest times, espe-
cially) if they were to raise the surpluses on which the achievement of
household competency depended. The very opportunities created by the
proximity of the frontier simultaneously saddled farming as a business
with an unusual potential for risk.
Accordingly, as elsewhere in the New World, the productive systems
inherited from Europe were inadequate to the altered balance in factors of
production, and they had to be adjusted. The adoption of slavery was a
possibility that some considered. Emmanuel Downing of Massachusetts
understood plainly that successive generations would "hardly see this great
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224 Daniel Vickers
Continent filled with people" and that servants would "still desire free-
dome to plant for themselves, and not staye but for verie great wages." By
procuring "a stock of slaves suffitient to do all our busines," he speculated,
the colony might resolve the problem.
1
* Yet bound labor was costly, and
most northern farmers did not produce valuable enough surpluses to jus-
tify the expense. The adjustments they undertook, therefore, were geared
toward accepting the scarcity of outside help and coping with it by intensi-
fying the burden on their own families. For one thing, rural households
continually sought for ways in which work could be spread across the year.
This reinforced the existing commitment to diversification by encourag-
ing the planting of orchards that could be picked after the grain harvest,
the woodworking and other handicrafts that could be pursued in the
winter months, and the hunting and fishing that could fit into the odd
day spared from agriculture. Another way in which families adapted to the
scarcity of labor was by extending the dependency of their own children.
Living and working at home until marriage had not been universal or even
normal among the rural youth of western Europe in the early modern age.
Most young men and many young women spent a good proportion of their
teen-age and early adult years away from home in service or apprenticeship
to other households needing help. This tradition - a central element in
the regional labor markets of the Old World - did not survive transplanta-
tion to America in anything like its original shape. Here, the interdepen-
dence between parents and children was prolonged until marriage and
even beyond.
In New England, where soils were generally thinner, the climate cooler,
and commercial agriculture seldom capable of supporting the cost of
indentured servants or slaves, family labor was especially important. Vir-
ginia might thrive "by keeping many servants" wrote one seventeenth-
century observer, but New Englanders "conceit that they and their Chil-
dren can doe enough, and soe have rarely above one Servant."
1
' Although
all young people took part in the local exchange of favors, very few
actually left home to labor for others, and those who did rarely spent more
than a few months away. By far the greatest portion of their young
adulthood was invested in improving the farms that their parents operated
and developing the property that would one day form the basis of their
'* Emmanuel Downing to John Winthrop, ca. August 1645, Winthrop Papers, 1498-1649, 5 vols.
(Boston: 1929- 1947) , vol. 5, 38.
•> Anon. , Egerton MSS, British Museum, quoted in Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage:
White Servitude andConvict Labor in America, 1607-1776 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1947), 29.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
The Northern Colonies: Economy and Society 225
inheritance. Even when they had grown up, married, and begun to work a
corner of parental lands themselves, young men found their fathers
reluctant - especially during the first century of settlement - to deed
them control over the property they used. The formal marriage portions
that had been normal in the mother country were exceptional in colonial
New England. This system of household reproduction was very effective
for the initial tasks of farm formation and allowed that process to fan
outward swiftly from the initial point of settlement around Plymouth and
Massachusetts Bay. True, there were local exceptions to this pattern.
Where the agricultural potential of the land allowed, wealthier farmers
did purchase slaves and indentured servants and did hire common labor-
ers. With an eye to the provisioning market in the West Indies, John
Pynchon of Springfield raised wheat, barley, pigs, and cattle on the fertile
bottom lands of the Connecticut valley, using immigrant servants and the
paid labor of his dependent clients. On the western shores of Narragansett
Bay, where dairy and sheep farming proceeded on a large scale, many
planters kept Indian and African slaves. Still, in most of the New England
countryside, where commercial production was less important, farmers
could not afford this sort of help and relied on the more intensive exploita-
tion of family labor instead.
In the milder and more fertile Middle Colonies, where farms generated
more for export, especially in the way of cereal crops, household produc-
tion still dominated though not in quite the same form. For one thing,
the commercial potential of the Hudson Valley, the New Jersey lowlands,
and the rolling hills of eastern Pennsylvania attracted the attention of
many more wealthy developers, anxious to secure large tracts of land and
profit thereby. Much of this territory was carved up into proprietorships,
manors, and patents during the last quarter of the seventeenth century,
and these were then peopled with tenants. Although the leases that ten-
ants assumed ate into the income and independence they could enjoy, the
combination of modest annual rents (generally well below 4 percent of
farm value) and long credit on arrears (allowed by proprietors often more
interested in the speculative profits of having their uncleared land devel-
oped for future sale) permitted them to operate much like freeholders.
Whether leased or not, farms were larger in the Middle Colonies than in
New England — usually a hundred acres or more — and their operators
could afford more nonfamilial help. Some of them purchased indentured
servants, but in an agricultural system where the commercial crop was
wheat, the demand for hired help was highly seasonal, and most farmers
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226 Daniel Vickers
preferred to employ laborers by the day. In Pennsylvania, hundreds of
young men and women who had come to Philadelphia on indenture served
out their time in a craft or domestic workplace and then wandered into the
rural labor market. Although some moved in with farming households,
even more became "inmates" or "freemen," renting cottages with garden
plots on their employer's lands and selling their labor on a casual basis.
Many of those who moved to the Middle Colonies in family groups (and
disembarked for the most part in New York) would have been needy
enough in their earliest years to seek out similar arrangements. In this
way, the more productive economy of the Middle Colonies attracted the
flow of immigrants who, as free laborers, fueled farm development on a
larger and more commercial scale than was possible farther north. Yet the
difference is easy to overstate. Even on the best lands of eastern Pennsylva-
nia and the Hudson River Valley, farm production was sufficiently diversi-
fied and reliable farm labor sufficiently costly to cause agriculture to
remain distinctively a family business.
Although the structural features of the rural economy in the Northeast
remained fairly stable across the colonial period, there were shifts and
developments within that structure that are equally part of the region's
history. Preeminent among these, of course, was the pattern of rapid,
extensive growth. Immigration and natural increase, in a balance that
shifted decisively toward the latter over time — especially in New En-
gland, which received few new immigrants after 1645 - caused the popu-
lation of most regions to double, as Thomas Malthus observed, about
every twenty-five years. With a few local exceptions, demographic growth
combined with the favorable geography of the country and with the
colonists' military superiority and immunological advantages over the
Native Americans to allow settlement to spread and the economy to
experience more or less continuous extensive growth. Peculiar difficulties
in certain regions restricted colonial expansion. The severe climate and
thin soils of Newfoundland and the eastern shore of Nova Scotia caused
most potential colonists to think twice before taking up permanent resi-
dence there before the middle of the eighteenth century. French-English
conflict along the Atlantic Canadian coastline and in the Hudson and
Mohawk River valleys slowed settlement there until after the conquest of
New France in 1759. Certain Indian peoples - the Iroquois west of Al-
bany and' the Abenaki in Maine, for instance - were politically powerful
enough to slow European infestation of their lands. Yet the general picture
of swift, extensive growth is undeniable; indeed, most of the economic
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The Northern Colonies: Economy and Society 227
growth that the northern colonies measured before 1775 can be accounted
for by the mushrooming reproduction of rural households.
Much less economic growth, by comparison, stemmed from gains in
economic productivity. The northern colonists had a model for agricul-
tural improvement in the rural economy of England, which marked steady
progress from the late seventeenth century onward, but with land so
abundant, it made much more sense to invest time and resources into the
development of new land than into any attempt to work previously cleared
acreage more intensively. Even on the best soils of eastern Pennsylvania,
where the commercial incentive to raise productivity was strongest, inter-
est in proper rotation patterns, nutrient-fixing crops, protein-rich grasses,
fertilizers, and selective breeding remained limited to a tiny minority of
farmers until after the Revolution. Accordingly, insofar as changes in per
capita wealthholdings give some indication of changes in the level of
economic activity, it seems that rural people planted European husbandry
in American soil and raised its productivity up to European levels within
the first generation of settlement but did not improve upon their yields
and herds before the end of the colonial period. The livestock holdings of
most farmers in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts compared favorably with
those of their English counterparts within a quarter-century of settlement
but did not grow further before 1775. Grain and hay yields were high on
newer lands, but they did not rise (and in New England may, indeed, have
fallen) toward the end of the colonial period. The value of land and land
improvements climbed over time - most rapidly in the earliest decades of
settlement (when much of it was being cleared) and during the third
quarter of the eighteenth century (when the demand for foodstuffs overseas
was increasing) - but the degree to which this reflected growth in the
productivity of farm labor itself is unclear.
A more likely arena for rising productivity in the rural economy was in
craft manufacture. During the seventeenth century, when there was, in
William Bradford's words, so much "labour and servise to be done aboute
building and planting," and when opportunity to hunt and fish was as
close as the untamed forest, the craft skills that immigrants had brought
with them were largely laid aside.
l6
With the development of regional
markets and the growth of population in older towns beyond the employ-
ment opportunities in agriculture, farm families began to spend more of
their time on domestic manufacture, craft services, and wage labor. Al-
16
William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1641, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York:
1952), 28.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
228 Daniel Vicfeers
ways the principal workers in manufacture throughout the early modern
world, women participated in this development but probably experienced
it as less of a change. Spinning probably came to occupy more of their time
in the eighteenth century (or so it seems from the slowly rising incidence
of woolen and linen wheels in farm inventories), but textile work had
always lain within the female province even at the beginning of settle-
ment. The same was true with tailoring and the running of dairies;
although more of this production may have been commercially directed in
the later colonial period, the shift was slight. For men, the growing
interest in by-employments (craft manufacture and wage work pursued on
a part-time basis) marked more of a transformation - or at least a resump-
tion of Old World habits after the frontier interlude. Although a few
artisans such as smiths, millers, and carpenters normally moved into
newer settlements and stuck to their trades, the great majority of found-
ers, regardless of their training, styled themselves only as planters or
farmers and retained little in the way of specialized craft equipment. As
communities matured, the outdoor tasks of land clearance, fencing, con-
struction, and hunting — all of which framed the growing season —
diminished in importance, and men had to find ways of otherwise improv-
ing the idle days between harvest and ploughing times. In the second and
third generation, therefore, rural youths began learning trades to support
themselves until they came into land of their own and later to supplement
the income from their farms. In Acadia, although virtually all the planters
worked the land, a census taken as early as 1671 styled many inhabitants
by specialized occupational titles that included: surgeon, weaver, cooper,
farrier, gunsmith, joiner, mason, carpenter, tailor, and toolmaker. Shoe-
making, seafaring, and ironworking, as well as shipbuilding and other
forms of carpentry, were especially popular from New England southward
to Pennsylvania; but the full range of by-employments, which these young
colonists adopted to fortify themselves against the threat of underemploy-
ment, was very broad. Although it is impossible to measure the contribu-
tion that the combined labors of women and men in such by-employments
made to the rural economy, it provided the beginnings of import substitu-
tion. In the short run, it produced no industrial transformation of the sort
that was gathering force in western Europe after 1750, but it did set the
stage for something similar following Independence.
The density of economic integration within rural communities and
across the regions of which they formed a part did not distinguish the
northern colonies absolutely from their plantation counterparts. Still, the
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The Northern Colonies: Economy and Society 229
history of that integration - rooted in the diversified household labors of
both sexes and patterned on the European example - was already well
established in the Northeast when it began to spread across the South.
And it was this degree of regional integration that gave the northern
colonies a further distinctive quality: their dynamic maritime economy.
THE SEAPORT ECONOMY
Much of the money that financed the original settlement of the New
World came from merchants and gentry who planned to win their invest-
ment back from profits earned in the transoceanic business of supplying
the settlers and shipping their produce to market. Rarely did they antici-
pate moving to the New World, and rarely was it necessary. Although
there were many problems in the organization of production that had to be
sorted out on the western shores of the Atlantic, the business of provi-
sioning plantations and assembling staple crops for export was relatively
straightforward, and the colonial end could often be handled either by
agents or by the planters themselves. The real complexities of the trade lay
in the old country, where the problems of recruiting capital, assembling
dry goods for shipment to the colonies, distributing the colonial produce
to consumers across Europe, and dealing with the imperial administrators
and their regulations demanded that the major players be present. For
plain business reasons, the great merchant houses that organized the
colonial trades remained resident in Seville, Amsterdam, Genoa, Lisbon,
London, Bordeaux, and a host of smaller ports, and they rarely migrated
to the Americas.
In the northern colonies, trans-Atlantic trade started with vessels from
ports like Bristol, Plymouth, Le Havre, La Rochelle, and San Sebastian,
which conducted the early migratory fishery and carried dried cod to
Southern Europe. The commercial needs of New Englanders - in both the
import of dry goods and the export offish and timber - were first handled
chiefly by their Puritan connections within the merchant community of
London. The Dutch West India Company held a monopoly on trade in
New Netherland until 1639, and a small coterie of Amsterdam merchant
families dominated the colony's commerce thereafter. Philadelphia was
the last-founded of the major northern colonial ports and launched into
overseas trade faster than any other; yet in the first half-century, it too
depended on British or New England capital and shipping for most of its
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230 Daniel Vickers
trans-Atlantic business. Throughout the Northeast, even the earliest per-
manent settlements possessed wholesale merchants, who assembled car-
goes of fish and farm produce and placed sizable orders for European
goods, but almost never were these individuals "traders by sea," who
ventured their wealth abroad and assumed the full risk of commerce.
17
What distinguished the seaboard communities north of the Chesapeake
from their counterparts to the south was the rapidity with which northern
colonial traders evolved into merchants in the full sense of the word:
owning and managing ships, providing banking and insurance services for
other dealers, financing local industries, and buying and selling in a
multitude of different markets. Except for the local underwriting of insur-
ance, most of these functions had developed in Boston before 1675
a n
^
were common to Newport, New York, and Philadelphia by the early
eighteenth century. It is true that through to the end of the colonial
period, even the wealthiest of American merchants remained dependent in
much of their business on European capital. During the commercial boom
that followed the Seven Years' War, for example, British merchants
flooded the colonial ports with dry goods sent on their own accounts to be
sold on commission. By the outbreak of the Revolution, however, the four
port towns mentioned above had become general entrepots (centers of ware-
housing and distribution), on at least the scale of such secondary European
ports as Bristol, Nantes, or Cadiz.
For many years, historians have rightly celebrated the role of merchants
in the development of these seaport economies. One should not overesti-
mate the merchant contribution, however, since a great many of the
decisions taken in their name - constructing vessels, operating them,
negotiating in foreign ports, managing small manufactories, and so on -
were delegated to the master mariners and craftsmen who were the special-
ists in their respective fields. Where merchants did play a central role was
in the coordination of these separate activities through the manipulation of
capital. Thomas Doerflinger has argued that the economic dynamism of
the northern colonies depended upon the peculiarly "vigorous spirit of
enterprise" of the business class, which stemmed in turn from the special
challenge of trying to wring profits from a newly developing region that
exported little that could not be obtained within Europe itself.?
8
The more
17
Jacob M. Price, "Economic Function and the Growth of American Port Towns in the Eighteenth
Century," Perspectives in American History 8 (1974), 138.
18
Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolu-
tionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, NC: 1986).
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The Northern Colonies: Economy and Society 231
fundamental question, however, is why merchants were there in such
numbers to begin with. This is an important problem, because the local
residency of merchants was not a necessary consequence of settlement
itself, even in prosperous colonies, yet it was invariably a factor of consider-
able economic advantage. The most probable explanation is that in order
to profit from coordinating and financing such complex economies —
complex because diversified, and diversified because settled in families —
successful entrepreneurs had to be on the spot. Relatively simple colonial
economies based on one or two staple exports could be serviced from a
distance; witness the rapid growth of the Newfoundland fisheries and of
the Chesapeake and West Indian plantations - financed and often owned
overseas. The same was not true where colonies were more locally inte-
grated. The creative development of the carrying trades and the fisheries
was largely a merchant achievement therefore, but it was an achievement
that can be understood only within the context of the diversified regional
economies that demanded a merchant presence.
In New England, the first local merchants began by acquiring dry
goods imported on the accounts of London dealers and retailing them to
immigrant planters who paid for their purchases in the coin they had
brought with them. The calling of the Long Parliament in 1640 and the
subsequent outbreak of the English Civil War, however, brought an end to
the Puritan Migration and choked off this inflow of immigrant specie.
Merchants in Boston and Salem had to begin casting about immediately
for other ways of raising payment to cover their obligations overseas. This
they managed in remarkably short order by assembling cargoes of farm
produce, timber, and fish for delivery to English vessels and shipment to
the Wine Islands and Southern Europe. This was no simple business; it
involved coordinating a complex network of independent small producers.
In essence, the diversity of Massachusetts' population, even at this early
stage in its history, created both a demand for merchant services and an
opportunity for merchant profit. Fishermen had settled on the maritime
periphery of the Bay Colony because they could obtain there the land,
provisions, and equipment they required. Planters had carved farms from
the wilderness knowing that they could service precisely the sort of urban
market that fishermen provided. And craftsmen had scattered across the
region on the understanding that they might supply the specialized needs
of seamen and landsmen alike. There was money to be made in facilitating
the myriad small transactions that connected these families, and it was in
this activity - complicated enough to demand the sort of intricate local
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232 Daniel Vickers
knowledge that residence made possible - that the first generation of New
England merchants found their niche.
Building on their strategic position within this regional market, traders
in Boston (during the 1640s) and then in Salem and Newport (after 1660)
began to experiment in launching overseas ventures of their own. With
skilled shipwrights in towns like Newbury and Scituate to furnish them
with hulls, blacksmiths and riggers in the larger ports to ready these
vessels for sea, fishermen outfitted on credit to provide them with cargoes,
and farmers with cartloads of produce sufficient to provision voyages, local
merchants were in a position to compete effectively with their counter-
parts in the Old World: first in the coasting trades to Newfoundland,
Long Island, and the Chesapeake; then in the West Indian market; and
sometimes in voyages to certain portions of Europe itself. The objects of
this commerce included not only fish, meat, horses, flour, and barrel
staves, but also reexported English manufactures and Caribbean sugar,
and even the vessels themselves, which European shipowners appreciated
for their reasonable quality and low cost. The volume of trade was not
enormous, and into the early eighteenth century, New England commerce
retained a speculative flavor. The risks in trading across war-torn waters
into relatively thin colonial markets led to a rapid turnover in personal
fortunes, the continual reorganization of merchant groupings, and a prefer-
ence for operations on a fairly small scale. Yet the complexity of this
business was considerable, and Boston in particular evolved into a general
entrepot of surprising maturity within a half-century of its foundation.
The maritime economy of New England continued to grow in extent
and productivity, though at a diminishing rate, through the end of the
colonial period. Although the tonnage of shipping that cleared Boston
harbor annually for foreign ports only doubled, from 20,927 in 1714—7 to
42,506 in 1772, the volume of trade out of secondary ports like New-
buryport, Salem, and Marblehead picked up much of the pace. Shipbuild-
ing in Massachusetts rose by 150 percent between 1697—1704 and 1769—
71, and New Hampshire yards were also launching many more vessels
toward the end of the period. Annual exports of codfish from the Bay
Colony rose from 120,000 quintals in 1716 to average 350,000 during
the period 1765—75, and the yearly product of the whaling industry
(launched on Cape Cod and Nantucket at the beginning of the eighteenth
century) climbed from 600 barrels in 1715 to 30,000 barrels during
1772—5. During the fifty years leading up to the Revolution, productivity
in the various seafaring industries, as reflected (imperfectly) in declining
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The Northern Colonies: Economy and Society 233
ocean freight rates and rising per capita output of codfish and whale oil,
probably climbed at an annual rate of between 0.5 and 1.0 percent. Some
of these gains were organizational — mainly economies of scale made possi-
ble by the growing safety, regularity, and volume of trade within the
developing imperial market. Thus, by the end of the colonial period,
merchants could profitably employ larger ships with smaller man/tonnage
ratios, turn them around more swiftly in port, and pay less in insurance
than they had at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Other advances
had more to do with developments in technology. In the fishery, the
adoption of schooners untied crews from the coastline and freed them both
to follow the seasonal migrations of the cod from one offshore bank to
another and to remain in their ocean-bound workplace without interrup-
tion when the fish were biting. The whaling industry also moved to larger
vessels not only to extend its range but later to accommodate the installa-
tion of try works, used to render the whale oil on board the ship.
The pace of growth in New England's maritime industries declined in
the latter half of the colonial period for a number of reasons. For one
thing, as population began to press against the supply of productive land
throughout the region, shipowning merchants had to search farther afield
for cargoes. New England ports in general, and Boston in particular, had
also to bear the progressively sharper competition from their rivals in New
York and Philadelphia, and the deep-water transport that Yankees com-
monly performed for merchants in the Middle Colonies before the mid-
eighteenth century gradually dried up. In terms of productivity, more-
over, it is almost certain that the greatest gains were captured in the
seventeenth century, when merchants, seamen, shipbuilders, and the like
were first mastering the task of applying the knowledge of organization
and technology developed in the mature economy of the Old World to the
resource-abundant but practically undeveloped environment of the New.
The whaling industry is a case in point. Initially, the colonists on Long
Island and Nantucket prospered at an extraordinary rate simply by first
employing an inexpensive and traditional Basque and Dutch boat-based
technology on the herds of right whales migrating past their shores and
then selling the oil at a world price determined mostly by the far more
costly and capital-intensive whale fishery pursued by European whalers in
Arctic waters. As the eighteenth century wore on, the adoption of larger
ships and the launching of longer voyages allowed output to continue
rising but at a progressively slower pace. Thus the quantity of oil landed at
Nantucket rose at an annual rate of 12 percent between 1715 and 1730, 6
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234 Daniel Vickers
percent between 1730 and 1748; and only 4 percent between 1748 and
1772. In most branches of this preindustrial northern economy, economic
growth was most dynamic in the early days, when there was most to be
learned about this rich and lightly exploited environment. In New
England — the first-settled of the northern colonies — this slowdown, if
mild, was nonetheless measurable from the depression following Queen
Anne's War through the Revolutionary War.
New York was the oldest of the major American ports but also the
slowest to develop. Founded in the 1620s by the powerful Dutch West
India Company as a fort to protect the entry to the New Netherland
colony, it served next to no commercial function at first beyond the
warehousing of furs and trade goods. After the Company relinquished its
trade monopoly in 1639, most local commerce was captured by a handful
of Amsterdam firms, but a few colonists - among them, such ex-company
officials as Frederick Philipse and Oloff Van Cortlandt — joined in the
export trade on their own account. After New Netherlands passed into
English hands in the 1660s, merchants based in the colony and experi-
enced in the trade took advantage of the exclusion of Dutch shipping
under the Navigation Acts and began shipping furs abroad themselves.
Because peltry was high in value relative to its bulk, New Yorkers devel-
oped an early interest in searching out complementary cargoes - Virginia
tobacco, whale oil from Long Island, or logwood from the Yucatan - to
obtain the fullest possible lading for their vessels. Furs arrived in the
colonists' hands fully processed and did not become the object of further
manufacturing until delivered to the shops of European hatters and furri-
ers, hence they did not provide a particularly strong staple base for diversi-
fication and development. Furthermore, since the Dutch West India Com-
pany showed little interest in peopling its colony (and there was not much
else to persuade prospective emigrants to leave the prosperous, tolerant
Netherlands to face the difficulties of homesteading on a frontier contested
by English, French, and Iroquois), the growth of an agricultural hinter-
land and the business of servicing it was also slow to develop.
Beginning in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, however,
family farming on the model of the Old World began to develop in New
York — owing partly to natural increase amongst earlier inhabitants and
partly to the new inflow of German, English, Scottish, and French Hugue-
not families. With the spread of the household economy that they prac-
ticed (mainly as tenants in East Jersey and up the Hudson) arose in tandem
the commercial importance of New York as a port. The surplus of home
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The Northern Colonies: Economy and Society 235
produce found its way into the hands of Manhattan merchants, either
through dealings within the regional market or in the form of rents paid
directly in wheat (since most of the great landlords lived in town and were
also the colony's principal exporters); this fueled the growth of a sizable
export trade to the West Indies, southern Europe, and Britain from the
1670s onward. Some items were sent abroad in relatively unprocessed
form, but others like potash, whale oil, bread, and barrel staves were
products that passed through several hands in their local manufacture and
enriched those local traders who facilitated the necessary interregional
exchange. The considerable crops of wheat that were harvested in Albany
County, for example, kept local millers busy enough in 1769 to fill "31
sloops . . . which carry from 400 to 500 barrels of Flour each, trading
constantly from thence to [New] York & . . . make Eleven or 12 Trips a
year each."
19
A good many New York merchants had interests in the
numerous little mines and iron foundries across the Hudson in New Jersey
that they furnished with capital, specie for wage payment, provisions
obtained upriver, and shipping both locally and abroad. On the one hand,
it was the presence of a sizable merchant community on Manhattan that
spurred this sort of productive, linked development; on the other hand, it
was the rising activity of settled and diversified rural households from the
end of the seventeenth century onward that sustained the growth of a
resident trading community and profitable maritime sector in the first
place.
Although Philadelphia's history as a port began in 1682, a good half-
century after the foundings of Boston and New York, it had passed its
colonial competitors in population, cleared tonnage, and value of exports
by the middle of the eighteenth century. The city on the Delaware was
born with a combination of advantages that, in a preindustrial world, no
other North American urban center could match. The first was its large
and fertile hinterland — productive enough to allow Philadelphia mer-
chants to have begun a regular provisioning trade to the West Indies that
already numbered ten vessels annually in 1689. By 1700, wheat had
established itself as the colony's prime commodity and one that local
farmers could raise efficiently enough to penetrate even European markets,
where it had to compete with local produce. In 1711, Isaac Norris could
write that "the country has within 10 or 12 years Encreast to near Ten
times its . . . produce of Corne [,] wheat Especiallyf,] and the Markett of
'» Richard Smith, Journal (1769), quoted in Bidwell and Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern
United States, 140.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
236 DanielVickers
Lisbon hath been of great advantage to us."
20
This latter business could be
enormously profitable, especially during the years — not uncommon in the
eighteenth century — when European harvests foiled, prices soared, and
the wheat trade commanded at healthy freighting charges every idle ship
in the harbor.
Philadelphia's second edge stemmed from the character of Pennsylva-
nia's original migrant population. Like the Massachusetts Bay Company
but unlike the Dutch West India Company, William Penn had taken real
pains to encourage settlement in family units. Penn realized that although
single people might be willing to emigrate to parts of the New World that
lacked the diversity of services that Europe afforded, families in general
were not. From the beginning, therefore, he consciously recruited a wide
variety of skilled tradesmen and a fair community of merchants to coordi-
nate and exploit the complex of local talent, so that they themselves might
prosper as they facilitated the reproduction of households about them.
Samuel Carpenter, a Quaker merchant from Barbados, came to Pennsylva-
nia in 1683 and launched a collection of enterprises that seized upon this
plethora of human capital - organizing the construction of the town's first
wharf, financing several grain mills, founding a lime-burning business,
and trading to the West Indies — all with such success that by the 1690s,
he was the wealthiest trader in the province. Shipowning was an impor-
tant part of his business, and again he was well-situated in Philadelphia,
where local craftsmen had been launching vessels since the year he arrived.
By 1692, Isaac Norris could report that already "we are Rarely without ten
or twelve Vessels on ye Stocks."
21
The "laborious handicrafts{men]" and
"industrious husbandmen" that flocked to Pennsylvania generated enough
business in their desire to establish their own ships and farms and in their
demand for English imports to support Carpenter and dozens of other
dealers."
More than any of the other northern mainland colonies, Pennsylvanians
concentrated on the production of a single export crop - wheat. By itself,
as the example of the plantation colonies proved, no staple product how-
ever valuable could guarantee the parallel development of port facilities,
merchant exporters, or a thriving maritime sector. Considered strictly as
*> Isaac Norris to Joseph Pike [?], June 1711, quoted in Frederick B. Tolles, Meeting House and
Counting House: The Quaker Mmbants of Colonial Philadelphia, 1682-1763 (Chapel Hill: 1948),
87n.
" Quoted in Joseph A. Goldenberg, Shipbuilding in Colonial America (Charlottesville, VA: 1976), 50.
" Penn, "Some Account of the Province of Pennsylvania," in Soderlund, ed., William Penn and the
pounding of Pennsylvania, 63.
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The Northern Colonies: Economy and Society 237
an entrepot, Philadelphia remained the least sophisticated of the major
colonial seaports down to the middle of the eighteenth century. Prior to
1750, shipowning exporters confined themselves largely to coastal and
West Indian routes, and they purchased most of their European wares
through Boston. As a center for the processing of rural produce - milling,
tanning, hatmaking, shoemaking, weaving, butchering, and the like —
Philadelphia was second to none, but the welter of petty dealings that
scores of small producers served to generate broadened the base of the
resident merchant community without involving it in much trans-
Atlantic commerce. During the Seven Years' War, however, the British
government spent heavily in Pennsylvania, and this unprecedented vol-
ume of cash business prompted many of the more successful military
contractors to step up the scale of their operations. By the 1770s, Philadel-
phians supplied almost all of their own shipping and had shed their
dependence on Boston. The larger firms like Willing and Morris pulled
out of direct dealings with individual producers and delegated this busi-
ness to specialist grocers, flour dealers, and lumber merchants. Now they
concentrated on overseas business: multiplying the routes their vessels
worked, acquiring correspondents in dozens of different European ports,
and drawing heavily on European houses to finance ambitious and specula-
tive grain-bearing voyages abroad. Philadelphia had become such a mag-
net for American provisions and a market for English dry goods that
farmers from New Jersey to the Virginia backcountry now employed it as
their market town of choice. At the outbreak of the Revolution, the
Quaker seaport was the busiest in America.
The most thoroughly maritime economy in the Northeast, the history
of which set the experience of the mainland colonies in powerful relief, was
that of Newfoundland. This rugged and windswept island, scraped of
topsoil by glaciation and enveloped by the frigid Labrador current, had
served as an extended fishing camp for thousands of migrant French,
English, and Iberian fishermen since the sixteenth century. Every spring,
vessels packed with men - several dozen to more than a hundred - sailed
across from a number of ports on Europe's western coast to fish for cod
either in Newfoundland's inshore waters or on the Grand Banks them-
selves. At least in England, projects for settlement had been in the air
since 1578, and the advantages of residence in Newfoundland encouraged
hundreds of West Countrymen to move there more or less permanently
during the seventeenth century. Yet, chiefly because the scope for farming
and the female skills that farming required were so limited in Newfound-
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
238 DanielVickers
land, family householding in the English manner was slow to develop.
The naval raids that became common during the French—English conflicts
of the eighteenth century often dislodged these fragile settlements com-
pletely. Since there was limited scope for a diversity of business activities
on the island, and since the fishery itself was more sensibly organized in
England, very few merchants ever settled in Newfoundland prior to the
American Revolution. St. John's, the largest town on the island, counted
only 300 souls permanently resident in 1728 and never more than a
thousand before 1775. Even with its superb harbor and proximity to
fishing grounds, it always remained through this period more of a fishing
than a shipping port, let alone a genuine entrepot. Marblehead in Massa-
chusetts possessed an inferior harbor and a worse location, hundreds of
miles from the banks, but with a population of 5,000 and a locally owned
fleet of 150 fishing schooners (many of which traded to the West Indies
and Bilbao in winter), it was a far more sophisticated port. The cod fishery
at Newfoundland enriched a small number of entrepreneurs and sustained
a great many more common families, but few of them took up residence
there before 1775.
The economic development of the colonial Northeast is not effectively
characterized as an export-led phenomenon. Many New World colonies
cleared more ships with larger cargoes of far greater value than did any of
the northern seaports without generating markedly more overall prosper-
ity or building the type of economic structure that would facilitate indus-
trial development in the nineteenth century. Although mercantile activity
mattered enormously, of course, to local welfare and economic growth,
what mattered even more was the economic diversity that created enough
local business to sustain a resident trading community in the first place.
Merchants played a vital role within the colonial economy but only in
concert with the commercial interests of farm and craft families whose
petty but complex dealings — in regional and overseas markets - they
coordinated. Where that complexity was lacking, mercantile and mari-
time communities, along with all of the business they captured, never
took up residence.
PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS AND THE ECONOMY
The northern colonists, like their southern neighbors, were anxious to
transplant British institutions into American soil. All of them developed
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The Northern Colonies: Economy and Society 239
forms of government, land tenure, common law, poor relief, ecclesiastical
organization, and so forth that were recognizably part of a common inheri-
tance. At the same time, however, there were significant local variations
that stemmed both from the original intentions of the settlers and from
the nature of the land they encountered. What distinguished the institu-
tional life of the colonial Northeast was, first, the way in which locally
developed institutions served to support the social reproduction of compe-
tent households, and second, the manner in which these householding
colonies were able to capitalize on the mother country's imperial presence.
Since it was from the surplus of family production — used in numerous
ways — that wealth and power flowed in the colonial Northeast, the cre-
ation of social and economic institutions that could attract immigrant
families and nourish their mercantile interests was vital to the region's
economic development.
Like most British possessions in the New World, but quite unlike those
of Spain and France, the northern colonies enjoyed considerable freedom
to direct their internal affairs, especially at the outset. New York, owned
by the Dutch West India Company until 1664 and a personal possession
of James Stuart until 1689, constituted a partial exception to this rule.
Nova Scotia, founded in 1749 as a royal colony and ruled by a governor
and council with no assembly until 1758, was a bastion of imperial
authority until after the American Revolution. Newfoundland was gov-
erned from Britain and administered by the Navy and its appointees until
1832. Yet in Pennsylvania and all of the New England colonies, founded
in a spirit of religious dissent with their local privileges protected by royal
charter, the tradition of local self-government was central to the settlers'
purpose. During the Stuart Restoration (1660-89), these charters came
under attack, and only those of Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode
Island survived to the Revolution. Overall, however, even in royal colo-
nies, a sense of self-government activated assemblies throughout the
Northeast to defend local interests, assert their control over salaries and
appointments, and thus shape the practical administration especially of
justice and finance. Indeed, in most of these colonies, the commitment to
localism extended even further, down to the level of the county or town.
This was especially so in New England, where land division, common
pasture management, harbor regulation, and the construction of roads
and bridges lay in the hands of town authorities. Although this sense of
autonomy was not unique within the English possessions, it was probably
stronger in the northern colonies than elsewhere, especially in the seven-
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240 Daniel Vickers
teenth century, and it was part of what attracted family units there from
the beginning.
The attachment to local control in political matters was part of a broader
enthusiasm for local institutions in general. Most churches in both New
England and the Middle Colonies were founded in dissent and were quite
independent of metropolitan influences. Colleges primarily for the training
of ministers began in 1636 with the founding of Harvard in Massachusetts;
by the end of the colonial period, there were nearly a dozen similar institu-
tions north of the Chesapeake. Primary schools were particularly wide-
spread in New England, but northern communities in general were better
provided with educational facilities than were their southern counterparts.
The Bay Colony possessed printing facilities within a decade of settlement;
in Pennsylvania, the same was achieved in less than five years; and by 1700,
there were presses in New York, too. By comparison, there were no printing
houses in the southern colonies before 1726. Public marketplaces made
swift appearances in Boston (1634), New York (1648), and Philadelphia
(1685), and each one of them possessed a substantial covered building by
the early eighteenth century. The jails, almshouses, sewers, wharfs, and
bridges that were soon common to all of these towns indicate still further
the institutional depth that most northern colonies managed to achieve in
the first century of their existence. Compared to the influence of the Jesuits
in Portuguese Brazil or that of the Spanish mint in Peru, the direct eco-
nomic impact of these institutions was minimal. Furthermore, as the exam-
ple of the British plantation colonies illustrates, a panoply of institutions
was not an essential element of regional prosperity. Yet churches, schools,
and marketplaces did matter in one fundamental way: as a necessary part of
the process by which households might expect to reproduce themselves,
they reinforced the pattern of family immigration.
Although provincial and town governments were obviously concerned
about the course of local development, there is some debate over the
character of their intervention. Were the institutional structures that the
colonists imported from England and then reshaped to fit local preferences
vehicles of capitalist development or mechanisms of social control? In
effect, they served both purposes, but in intention, they were aimed at
something different. Although local and colonial authorities in the North-
east were deeply interested in husbanding the local economy, they under-
stood their goal as not to maximize the productivity of capital and labor
but rather to advance the welfare of individual households. When it was
felt that families could protect and advance their interests independently
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The Northern Colonies: Economy and Society 241
in a free marketplace, governments did what they could to facilitate
exchange among them. When it seemed, by contrast, that certain well-
connected individuals possessed the power to manipulate transactions in
such a way that fair bargaining was impossible, the authorities felt it
entirely proper to intervene. Thus the price of foodstuffs went almost
unregulated in the colonial countryside, where independence was rela-
tively widespread and monopolies almost impossible to establish. In the
larger seaports, however, wholly dependent on the provisioning trade and
prey to the machinations of speculators, the price of certain necessities
(especially bread) was often subject to public control. This is not to say
that town selectmen, members of colonial legislatures, and local magis-
trates decided on these policies because they had a direct self-interest in
household production; many depended far more on rents, fees, and the
profits of trade to support themselves. Ultimately, however, those in
power did recognize that the welfare of regions they lived in (and the
profits they could wring from the local economy) depended on the success
with which families in general pursued the goal of comfortable indepen-
dence. And it was family competency, with the diversified production that
it hung upon, that public economic policy successfully served to promote.
Sometimes public economic policy took the form of direct intervention.
Both chartered companies and proprietors took pains to people their colo-
nies with skilled tradesmen by actively recruiting them. To induce
shipwrights, millers, shoemakers, fishermen, and ironworkers to aid in
the reconstruction of a new England in America, the Massachusetts Bay
Company offered them attractive deals with guaranteed wages and prom-
ises of company business. Fifty years later, William Penn used his personal
connections to enlist "carpenters, masons, smiths, weavers, tailors, shoemakers,
shipwrights, etc." for the colony on the Delaware.^ Colonial assemblies
tailored their economic policies to maintaining an economic environment
in which householders could transact business with efficiency and security.
Thus, recognizing the role that credit would play in the regional economic
development, Massachusetts forbade the seizure of domestic capital or
perishable goods as surety against payment of debts or the imprisonment
of debtors after their trial.
Because the quality of locally finished goods was a real problem in a part
of the world where working people were chronically short of time, govern-
ments took a particular interest in promoting the reputation of those
'iPenn, "Some Account of the Province of Pennsylvania," in Soderlund, ed., William Penn and the
Founding of Pennsylvania, 63.
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242 Daniel Vickers
goods abroad. New York - in an act of direct intervention — began the
compulsory inspection of exported flour in 1665, and Pennsylvania
adopted similar regulations in 1722. The General Court in Massachusetts
took note of the "damage . . . to merchants trading hence by bade mak-
ing offish, and the . . . prejudice of our commerce with other nations,"
and ordered the institution offish cullers to grade the product in 1632. In
an effort to regularize business, all of the assemblies concerned themselves
with enforcing standardized weights and measures, appointing specific
market days, licensing ferries, and so forth. Local governments occasion-
ally played the same role on a smaller stage. Towns needing millers and
smiths or wishing to establish specialized local industries were quite
prepared to offer land and other privileges to prospective settlers with the
right skills. It was with an understanding of the difficulties in adapting
the household economy to frontier conditions, and the opportunities to
draw profit from householding operations, that local and provincial au-
thorities were ready to employ government's hand.
Still, the greatest service that public institutions provided to household-
ers was simply assuring them the means of acquiring propertied indepen-
dence, and nothing mattered more in this sphere than the security of land
tenure. Property rights varied from region to region throughout the North-
east, but insofar as land everywhere was held almost entirely under free
and common socage — that is, with full rights to exploit surface and
subsurface resources, as well as to sell or lease them and pass them along in
inheritance — landowners had considerable latitude to employ their prop-
erty as they saw fit. Some limitations did exist in certain colonies. Land-
holders in Pennsylvania were expected to pay quitrents to the Penn family,
from whom they had purchased farms, and manorial tenants in New York
occupied their lands on terms that carried certain feudal overtones (includ-
ing light labor services) to the end of the colonial period. In no portion of
British America, however, did customary limitations on tenure seriously
hamper the development of a commercial market in land. Even on manors
in the Hudson Valley, where freehold was unknown, leased farms changed
hands in practice with a minimum of fuss. The only important charges on
land throughout the colonies were taxes - low enough not to burden
improved property, but high enough to encourage the owners of undevel-
oped land to arrange for its development by working farmers as quickly as
possible. Free and common socage provided, therefore, not only the lib-
erty to carve up and employ land in the most profitable manner, but also a
penalty through rising taxes on those who did not. So, although it did not
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The Northern Colonies: Economy and Society 243
necessarily foster family production (slave-operated plantations were also
held under the same form of tenure), it was an element of English tradi-
tion suited to the pursuit of household competency.
Sometimes colonists in the Northeast went beyond English tradition to
encourage the development of land into family-sized parcels by creating
institutions of their own. In New England, town governments served at
their inception primarily as a means of carving wilderness land into inde-
pendent freeholds. For three or four decades after their founding —
indeed, as long as they possessed common lands at their disposal — town
governments devoted the majority of their meetings to the granting and
division of land to applicant settlers and settled proprietors. Between
1723 and 1755, Pennsylvania successfully operated a General Loan Office,
permitted to issue paper currency to householders on the security of their
lands and houses. Only property owners could qualify, and the loans had
to be repaid in annual installments, but a maximum limit of £100 per
loan ensured their wide distribution and allowed many householders to
pursue the small-scale developmental plans that liquid capital afforded.
The primary function of the Pennsylvania Land Office, however, was to
found and sustain a local currency. Although the shortage of sterling was
common to all of the British colonies, it was north of Maryland, where
internal markets were more highly developed, that the scarcity was espe-
cially acute and the demand for paper money most insistent. Still, the bills
of credit that provincial governments did authorize were not originally
intended as vehicles of long-term economic policy. With few exceptions,
assemblies issued them only in order to finance immediate expenditures,
especially in times of war. Massachusetts became the first to employ paper
currency in 1690 after the failure of Sir William Phips' attack on Quebec.
As Thomas Hutchinson, later governor of the colony, put it: "The govern-
ment was utterly unprepared for the return of the forces. They seem to
have presumed, not only upon success, but upon the enemy's treasure to
bear the charge of the expedition."
2
* Since the returning soldiers were on
the verge of mutiny for want of pay, the General Court passed an act
providing for the issuance of £7,000 in bills of credit that the colony
would accept in payment of taxes. Throughout most of the colonial North-
east, the problem of meeting extraordinary expenditures, not long-range
economic policy, lay at the origin of monetary innovation. Apart from
Pennsylvania, all of the mainland colonies north of Maryland that adopted
*< Thomas Hutchinson, The History oflht Colony and Province of Massachiuetti-Bay, ed. Lawrence Shaw
Mayo, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: 1936), 1, 340.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
244 Daniel Vickers
paper currency resorted to the expedient for the first time between 1690
and 1711 to pay off their military contributions to the wars with France
and Spain.
In time, however, the economic function that these bills performed
grew apparent to everybody, and the argument for keeping them in circula-
tion (and even augmenting them with new issues) acquired an economic
rationale. Not everyone agreed as to how exactly these currencies should
be managed: how much to issue, whether the issuing institution should be
public or private, how the bills were to be backed, or when they should be
retired. But over the need for some medium of local exchange - "to carry
on our domestick Affairs and Commerce," as the Pennsylvania House of
Representatives explained to the Penn family in 1725 — the vast majority
of colonists, especially in the countryside, concurred.
2
' Port merchants
who ran a considerable credit business with primary producers in the
hinterland and landlords whose tenants were in arrears feared the inflation
that resulted when some farmer-dominated legislatures, especially in New
England, began to issue bills in sufficient quantities to provoke their
depreciation. But even wealthy creditors supported more moderate issues
as necessary to the health of the regional markets in which they dealt and
won their profits.
An interesting counterexample to the patterns of institutional develop-
ment on the colonial mainland was the experience of Newfoundland.
Conceived of from the beginning - by English colonial officials, the
Navy, most merchants, and the great majority of fishermen — as possess-
ing value only as a summer fishing station, the island never developed
before 1775 even the rudiments of church and state. Occasional Anglican
missionaries had been serving the island since the seventeenth century;
Roman Catholic priests defied the law from time to time by ministering to
planters and servants of Irish descent; and by 1770 a few Methodists and
Moravians were preaching to fishermen and Innuit along the coast. Here
and there, many of these missionaries operated churches and schools for a
time, but on the whole, there was nothing established about any of the
Christian denominations in Newfoundland before the 1780s. Nor did the
island possess any recognizably English forms of government. Towns did
not exist; no legislature sat there in the eighteenth century; and property
" Address of the House of Representatives of the Province of Pennsylvania to the Descendants of the
late Honourable Proprietor, William Penn, Esq., Dec. 7, 172;, quoted in Leslie V. Brock, The
Currency of the American Colonies, 1700—7 764: A Study in Colonial Finance and Imperial Relations (New
York: 1975), 65.
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The Northern Colonies: Economy and Society 245
in land beyond that required for the fishery had no standing at law. Not
until 1729 were there governors or magistrates in Newfoundland. In the
outports, the most effective justice remained, until late in the century,
that administered locally by West Country shipmasters or "fishing admi-
rals." Of the precise relationship between institutional weakness on the
one hand and lack of permanent settlement or economic diversification on
the other - which was cause and which effect - we cannot know. The
correlation between the two, however, was undeniable and its excep-
tionality confirmed the general truth about the colonial Northeast that
family settlement, economic diversification, and institutional richness
were inextricably linked.
As householding societies with a resident merchant class, most of the
British American possessions were admirably placed to benefit from their
membership in the Empire. The Navigation Acts, passed after 1651 and
in force throughout British possessions until 1849, may have been costly
to the plantation colonies, but from Pennsylvania northward, they served
a function that was broadly developmental. True, the provisions that
restricted or even prohibited direct trade outside the Empire caused the
northern colonists to pay more for manufactures of European origin and
some tropical products such as sugar and molasses. But since the impor-
tant northern exports of timber products, barreled meat, fish, oil, and
grain were exempted from these regulations and could be exported directly
to any North Atlantic market — British or otherwise — the Navigation
Acts weighed easier on the northern colonists than on their southern
counterparts. Even the restrictions that existed on paper were often diffi-
cult to enforce in practice, and the smuggling-of European luxury wares
and French colonial sugar into New England and the Middle Colonies
continued down to the Revolution. Some of the Acts' provisions actually
spurred economic development in the Northeast. Those that forbade colo-
nial ports from employing European carriers created a protected market in
shipping, insulated from Dutch competition, that Americans exploited to
the hilt. By confining the colonial trades to vessels constructed within the
Empire, moreover, the Acts discriminated against European shipbuilders
and presented New Englanders in particular with a significant manufactur-
ing opportunity. Although the Navigation Acts were designed to benefit
Britain alone, colonies that had successfully replicated the socioeconomic
structure of the mother country, and built some mercantile muscle of their
own, reaped many of the same rewards.
In its military dimension, the Empire was equally important to the
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246 Daniel Vickers
economy of the Northeast, though the balance of its benefits is harder to
assess. Over the short run, war brought large injections of British currency
into all of the colonies - especially to those north of the Chesapeake and
closest to the important theaters of action, and especially during the 1740s
and 1750s, when the imperial struggle between France and England
intensified. After the Peace of Paris in 1763, Britain decided to maintain a
standing North American garrison, which probably generated close to
£150,000 of colonial business annually.
26
Military conflict was not an
unmitigated economic blessing everywhere, of course, and the struggle for
supremacy in North America disrupted form settlement, provincial fi-
nance, shipping, and the fisheries. In Massachusetts, where the colonists
themselves bore a real burden of military expenses in the form of higher
taxes and runaway inflation, the business of war rarely occasioned any
unmitigated local boom. Nova Scotia's tardy development in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries — owing largely to the ravages of raiding
and the disaster of the Acadian expulsion — well illustrates how massive
injections of military spending could foil to balance the destruction that
the imperial struggle wrought. Yet in colonies that were free of involve-
ment in fighting there was plenty of local business without the drawback
of serious fiscal cost or material destruction, and there wartime usually
brought prosperity. During King William's War (1689—97), for example,
New York served as a major supply base for the British Navy in its
Caribbean operations, opened a provisioning trade with the Spanish West
Indies, and profited by dealings with pirates and privateers — all with
such success that the local fleet grew from 35 vessels just before the
outbreak of hostilities to 124 in 1700. Again in King George's War
(1740-8), the profits from privateering and illegal trade with the French
and Spanish islands (at the extraordinary prices that British naval superior-
ity in the Caribbean had generated) resulted in New York's ship registra-
tions rising from 53 to 157. The immediate impact of war plainly varied
according to local circumstances, and it is difficult to tell if military
conflict primed the economy of the region as a whole.
The general strategic benefits that the presence of British power
brought to the region, however, are impossible to dispute. First, by
driving the French out of Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, and Newfoundland,
the mother country decisively reinforced New England's commercial perch
in the maritime Northeast, multiplied the fishing grounds in which Yan-
16
Robert Paul Thomas, "A Quantitative Approach to the Study of British Imperial Policy upon
Colonial Welfare: Some Preliminary Findings," Journal ofEconomic History 23 (196)), 634.
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The Northern Colonies: Economy and Society
kee schooners could safely operate, and provided New England settlers
with both security on their northern frontiers and a windfall of previously
cleared Acadian farmland to occupy. Then, by conquering Canada and
damaging thereby the bargaining position of the Iroquois, British military
might opened the western territories of New York and Pennsylvania to
colonial agricultural development. Most important of all was the British
Navy's long and successful campaign to achieve dominance over the North
Atlantic. Simply put, it helped to be on the winning side; the disruption
of foreign fleets and the privilege of operating under the protective wing of
the British Navy often enabled American traders and privateers to reap
windfalls from war they would otherwise have missed. By countering
French privateers, driving pirates from the seas, and paying an annual
tribute to the Barbary powers that persuaded the latter to leave British and
colonial shipping alone, the Crown and its navy made the North Atlantic
of the eighteenth century a protected arena for northern merchant trade.
Britain's struggle against France, Spain, and the Netherlands in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a program of commercial aggres-
sion, conceived with little attention to the interests of her colonial posses-
sions. Yet it was inevitable that colonial societies driven by the pursuit of
competency and possessed of commercial institutions similar to those of
the mother country would have profited too from the imperial triumph.
CONCLUSION
The northern provinces were by no means the most prosperous of Britain's
American possessions. By most measures, either in the performance of
their own economies or in their significance within the transoceanic econ-
omy, they suffered by comparison to the plantation colonies of the South.
The significance of their developments up to the outbreak of the Revolu-
tionary War, however, lay not in the quantity of growth they had achieved
but in the character of the economy they had acquired. Complex, mercan-
tile, and diversified, the colonies of the Northeast had not yet begun to
industrialize, but by 1775, they did possess social structures replete with
farmers, traders, seamen, craftsmen, and a matching contingent of skilled
housewives and daughters, all of whom would later be mobilized into
domestic outwork, petty manufacturing concerns, and factory production.
Truthfully, some of the plantation colonies were also moving in the direc-
tion of diversification in the eighteenth century. But they started late, and
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248 Daniel Vickers
the lead that their northern counterparts had gained early on in craft
production, shipping, and merchant services enabled the North to capture
much of the business that southern growth eventually did generate. In
essence, northeastern North America led the New World into the indus-
trial age, because it had come closest over its colonial history to imitating
successfully the first industrial nation of all: Great Britain. And paradoxi-
cally, it had done so for reasons that had in the beginning as much to do
with matters of faith and self-determination as they had with profit.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL
DEVELOPMENT OF THE SOUTH
RUSSELL R. MENARD
THE SOUTH ON THE EVE OF
INDEPENDENCE
At the eve of the American independence movement, the idea of the South
is an anachronism, a concept whose time is yet to come. If by the colonial
South one means the area bounded on the north by (roughly) the Ohio and
Susquehanna rivers, at the west by the Mississippi, and at the east and
south by the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, there is little to tie
the region together. Even under more restricted definitions confined to
territory long-claimed by the British (excluding, that is, the newly ac-
quired Floridas and the French settlement at Louisiana) or the more lim-
ited region actually colonized by the British (excluding the trans-
Appalachian west), the area has little unity. In 1775, there was no "South"
with a single, integrated economy, a unifying culture, or a cohesive ruling
class with a shared vision of the future. We are best served by recognizing
diversity from the start and rejecting the notion of a "South" in favor of a
concept of "Souths," four proximate but separate regions with distinctive
characteristics: the tobacco colonies around Chesapeake Bay; the rice and
indigo districts of the Carolina-Georgia lowcountry; an area of mixed
farming or "common husbandry" in the backcountry and around the
periphery of the plantation districts; and a frontier zone dominated by
cross-cultural trade. However, if the South was not yet a region, the
factors that would give it greater unity and define its character during the
early nineteenth century were firmly in place: an expansive plantation
agriculture, African slavery, and an emerging planter class with a sense of
purpose.
249
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
2 5 0 Russell R. Menard
Table 6.1. Estimated population of the South in 1775 (000 omitted)
Region
Tobacco Coast
Maryland
Virginia
NC coastal plain
Total
Lowcountry
Cape Fear, NC
South Carolina
Georgia
East Florida
Total
Area of "common husbandry"/backcountry
Western Maryland
Valley of Virginia
NC Piedmont
South Carolina
Georgia
Total
Frontier
West Florida
Southern Interior
Northern Interior
Louisiana
Total
Total
Red
0.2
0.3
0.2
0.7
0.1
0.1
0.1
1.5
1.8
0.1
0.1
0.2
0.4
0.5
1.3
50
33-2
2.0
3.7
43-9
47.7
White
127.5
234.3
76.8
438.6
7.0
21.5
5.0
1.8
35.3
24.3
45.2
88.7
50.4
9.0
217.6
4.0
2.1
0.3
10.9
17.3
708.8
Black
69.9
181.2
44.0
295.1
7.8
71.7
12.0
1.0
92.5
2.3
5.2
22.2
11.8
1.0
42.5
1.5
0.7
0.0
9.6
11.8
441.9
Total
197.6
415.8
121.0
734.4
14.9
93.3
17.1
4.3
129.6
26.7
50.5
111.1
62.6
10.5
261.4
10.5
36.0
2.3
24.2
73.0
1,198.4
Sources: Estimated by the author from a variety of sources, principally: U.S. Bureau of the Census,
Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC: 1975), II, 1168 (Ser.
Z, 1-19); John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789
(Chapel Hill, NC, 1985), 136, 172; Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American
Population before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York, 1937); Stella H. Sutherland, Population
Distribution in Colonial America (New York, 1936); Peter H. Wood, "The Changing Population of the
Colonial South: An Overview by Race and Region, 1685-1790," in Peter H. Wood, Gregory A.
Waselkov, and M. Thomas Hartley, eds., Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast (Lincoln,
NE, 1989), 35-103.
As a point of entry to the "South" and its several regions, Table 6.1
offers some population estimates for 1775. These numbers are at best
approximate. The regions do not conform to the boundaries of colonies,
for which we have reliable (or at least widely accepted) figures, while the
inclusion of Indians requires estimating the size of groups seldom
counted, let alone counted carefully. Although rough, the figures are
accurate enough to capture major differences between the regions and to
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Economic and Social Development of the South 251
establish some important points about the South. The area was home to
about 1.2 million people in 1775. A substantial majority (slightly less
than 60 percent) were whites, immigrants from Europe and their descen-
dants, who had begun to settle ("invade" is perhaps the more accurate
term) the region early in the seventeenth century. A bit more than a third
were Africans and their descendants brought as slaves to work for Euro-
pean masters. Only a small proportion — just under 50,000, about 4
percent of the total — were Indians, descendants of the region's aboriginal
inhabitants.
From a British perspective, the oldest South was the tobacco coast, the
regions around Chesapeake Bay that, in some degree at least, had an
economy built around tobacco. The area includes all of Maryland and
Virginia east of the Blue Ridge as well as North Carolina's coastal plain
above Cape Fear. The oldest region was also the most populous, its
700,000-plus inhabitants accounting for more than 60 percent of the
South's people. European Americans were the majority in the region, but
Africans at 40 percent of the total were a substantial presence and in
some areas outnumbered whites. Tobacco production had thoroughly
dominated the regional economy in the seventeenth century, but as the
colonial era progressed, a gradual diversification ended the relative homo-
geneity. By the eve of the Revolution, the region resembled a horseshoe
with a plantation district raising tobacco for European markets at the
center and a farming area producing grains and forest products around
the periphery.
The lowcountry, a narrow coastal strip stretching from Cape Fear in
North Carolina to the Altamaha River in Georgia and including the
newly acquired British colony of East Florida, was home to roughly
130,000 people, just over 10 percent of the population of the South. In
contrast to the Chesapeake, blacks were a majority in the lowcountry,
accounting for over 70 percent of the total, even higher in the great
plantation district around Charlestown. The regional economy was domi-
nated by rice and indigo, produced by slaves on big plantations for
export to Europe, crops which made the great planters rich and
lowcountry prosperity legendary.
The backcountry, a region of "common husbandry" stretching from
Western Maryland down the great Valley of Virginia to include North
Carolina's piedmont and the small farming areas of South Carolina and
Georgia, grew rapidly during the eighteenth century. By 1775, it had
some 260,000 inhabitants, just over 20 percent of the South's popula-
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252 Russell R. Menard
tion.
1
In contrast to the longer-settled regions nearer the coast, slaves were
a minor part of the population, only 15 percent of the total. The region
was dominated by small, family-operated farms producing livestock and
grains for home consumption, although some of that output was shipped
to the coast. Families often made small quantities of tobacco, hemp and
flax, and forest products for export. As a region, the backcountry exhib-
ited less unity than either the lowcountry or the tobacco coast, in part
because its various segments were loosely integrated into the Atlantic
world through ties to the tidewater, but also because it was a shifting,
transitional area gradually acquiring plantation characteristics.
The frontier, a vast but sparsely settled area stretching from the
backcountry to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and the Gulf of Mexico,
was inhabited by some 73,000 people in 1775, only 6 percent of the
South's population. The region exhibited considerable diversity, with a
rapidly developing plantation district in the Mississippi delta and some
areas of small farms where the frontier receded and became backcountry.
The region's distinguishing characteristic was the large native presence.
More than 90 percent of the South's native peoples lived in this section,
principally Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws but including
numerous smaller groups, and they accounted for more than 60 percent of
the population of the frontier. Despite the growing plantation district and
the pressure of European settlers, the frontier was "Indian country" in
1775, a place where native peoples shaped the rules of exchange and where
their behavior and aspirations continued to structure the economy.
The South was overwhelmingly rural in 1775. If we use a modest
threshold of 2,000, perhaps 4 percent of the "colonial" (persons of Euro-
pean and African descent) population lived in towns; a lower threshold of
1,000 increases the proportion only to about 5 percent. While all of the
subregions were largely rural, there were notable differences. Oddly, the
frontier region, where the European presence was recent and still tenuous,
was the most urbanized. New Orleans, whose population approached
5,000 in 1775, was home to nearly 20 percent of the area's colonial
inhabitants. The tobacco coast, the oldest colonial region, may have been
the least urbanized with perhaps 3 percent of its residents living in substan-
tial towns. The backcountry displayed a level of urbanization similar to
that along the tobacco coast, but the rapid growth of Frederick and
Winchester as well as the proliferation of small towns along the Great
1
The phrase "common husbandry" is from Harry J. Carman, ed., American Husbandry (New York:
1939 [orig. publ. 1775D. 240.
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Economic and Social Development of the South 253
Wagon Road suggests a great potential for town development. Roughly
12 percent of the lowcountry's colonial population lived in towns, in large
part because of Charlestown's rise as a market center but also because of its
role as the seat of government and as a consumer city where rich planters
gathered to socialize and spend. With 12,000 inhabitants in 1775,
Charlestown was by far the South's largest city. It was also the richest,
reflecting its place as the capital of British North America's wealthiest
agricultural region.
The economic history of the South usually is told as a story of growth,
what Adam Smith described as an "advance . . . to wealth and great-
ness."
2
For the most part, this essay follows convention. While that
growth was bought at an enormous cost to the region's aboriginal inhabit-
ants and to African slaves, Smith identified from a European perspective
the central theme in the economic history of the South during the colonial
era. The evidence describes a remarkable and broadly shared prosperity
among European Americans on the eve of the Revolution. Colonists were
well fed by the standards of the time, hardly surprising given the abun-
dance of land and an economy in which perhaps 85 percent of the labor
force worked on farms and plantations. The quality of diet is revealed in
the stature of the population: by the time of the Revolution, southern-
born men of European ancestry were, on average, just over 5*8" tall, about
3.5 inches taller than their English counterparts, slightly taller than
northerners, and about the same height as Americans who served in the
military during World War II.
White southerners were also well clothed, in part because their lively
export economies and membership in the British Empire during the early
states of industrialization gave them easy access to English textiles. Even
families with modest incomes were able to acquire amenities that made
life more comfortable: good bedding, tableware and ceramics, sugar, tea,
spices, and the like. Such high levels of comfort were not always the case.
Food was ample from the beginning, at least after the terrible "starving
times" that afflicted several early settlements were overcome, but the
standard of life remained crude for several decades after the initial English
invasion. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, there had been a con-
siderable improvement.
Improvements were less marked in housing, and by this measure, most
colonists did not live as well as their peers in the parent country. The great
1
An Inquiry into lit Nature andCauses oftie Wealth ofNations, ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and
W. B. Todd (Oxford: 1976 [orig. pub., 1776]), II, 564.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
254 Russell R. Menard
planters of the South built in the grand style, especially in the years after
1725, but the majority of European settlers lagged behind. Their houses
were generally small and had few rooms, lacked foundations or wood floors,
and were often of wood construction. By the eve of the Revolution, perhaps
only 15 percent of the housing stock in the South consisted of substantial
two-story stone structures with stairways, differentiated rooms, brick chim-
neys, and glass windows. In the backcountry and, indeed, among most
small planters nearer the coast, the typical house was a 20' by 16' box frame
structure sided with clapboards and roofed with shingles, with a wattle and
daub chimney and a floor of beaten earth. Such houses had a single room or
at most two and a loft; glassless, curtainless windows with shutters to keep
out the cold; and unadorned, unpainted walls chinked with clay against the
elements. The inferiority of southern dwellings reflects the rapid growth of
population, which put great pressure on the housing stock, the scarcity of
skilled craftsmen, and the high price of labor generally, all of which made
substantial homes relatively expensive. Despite their prosperity, southern-
ers put up with houses that were crowded, poorly insulated, dark, unsafe,
and unattractive by the standards of the English-speaking world.
Perhaps the most compelling evidence of southern economic perfor-
mance is found in the growth of population, which increased at a rate
"without parallel in history. "3 The "colonial" segment of the population
grew from less than 15,000 in 1650 to nearly 120,000 by 1700, more
than half a million by 1750, and to well over a million by 1775 (Figure
6.1). The contrast with Europe is striking. From 1700 to 1750, when the
South's population rose more than fourfold, England's increased by 14
percent from 5.1 million to 5.8 million, while that of Europe as a whole
grew by 17 percent from 125 million to 146 million.
Reflection on the sources of population growth clarifies the relationship
between demographic performance and southern prosperity. Immigration
made an important contribution. Thousands of Europeans crossed the
Atlantic to pursue colonial opportunities; thousands of Africans were
wrenched to the South to make some European dreams a reality. But much
of the high southern growth rate was a product of natural increase. This
was not because of lower mortality; death rates were higher in the South
than in England. Rather, the rapid increases stemmed from colonial mar-
riage patterns. Women in the South — white or black, rich or poor, tidewa-
ter or backcountry — married earlier and in higher proportions than in
» Thomas Robert Malchus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Futon Improvement of
Mankind (London: 1798), 10;.
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1,800,000
1,600,000
1,400,000
130,000
1,000,000
800,000
600,000
400,000
200,000
I 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1—) 1 1 1 1 1 1
Figure 6. i. Estimated southern population. (Source: See source note to Table
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
256 Russell R. Menard
England or the northern colonies. This distinct marriage pattern led to
larger numbers of children and played the main role in the high southern
growth rates. As contemporaries often explained, these "more general, and
more generally early" marriages were rooted in colonial prosperity, espe-
cially in the "liberal reward of labour," the abundance of land, and the
consequent "Ease and Convenience of supporting a Family. "*
By combining data on population size with estimates of per capita
income, it is possible to chart the size of the economy in that part of the
South that joined the American independence movement. Based on a
careful analysis of probate records, Alice Hanson Jones concluded that
per capita income in the South in 1774 ranged between £10.4 and
£12.1 sterling, or $1,145
t o
I
1
.332 in 1990 dollars. Given a population
of 1.12 million and using the midpoint of Jones' range yields a gross
product for the South in 1775 of $1,387 billion (1990 dollars). With an
assumption about rates of productivity gain, it is possible to chart the
growth of the southern economy from the mid-seventeenth century to
the end of the colonial era. Table 6.2 performs such a calculation,
assuming that per capita incomes rose at 0.5 percent annually over the
125 years following 1650, a rate near the midpoint of the range for that
period suggested by recent scholarship. Under that assumption, per
capita income in the South was roughly $660 in 1650 and $935 in
1720. In the aggregate, the economy expanded at a rate of 4.2 percent
annually over the entire period, 3.7 percent in the years following 1720.
That is an impressive performance by any standard. For the early modern
era, when stagnation and decline were more common than growth and
when even the highly successful English economy grew at only 0.5
percent per year, it is remarkable.
To a large extent, southern prosperity rested on the performance of the
export sector, especially of the major plantation crops — tobacco, rice, and
indigo. Together, those three crops accounted for about three-quarters of
the value of all exports from the South on the eve of the Revolution and
roughly 40 percent of the value of exports from all of Britain's continental
colonies. In per capita terms, southern exports averaged about £1.8 ster-
ling per year at the end of the colonial period, roughly twice the level
achieved by New England and the Middle Colonies. If attention is con-
fined to the free population, which, after all, controlled the resulting
' Benjamin Franklin, "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries,
etc." (1751), in Leonard W. Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, CT:
I 959- ) . IV, 228; Smith, Wealth ofNationi, II, 565.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Per capita
regional product
$660
$935
$1,238
Aggregate
regional
product
(millions)
$8.4
$185.3
$1,387.9
Economic and Social Development of the South 257
Table 6.2. Estimated income in the southern colonies, 1650-
1774 (1990 dollars)
Year
1650
1720
1774
Note: The calculation begins with the midpoint of Alice
Hanson Jones's estimate of per capita GNP in 1774.
Wealth of a Nation to Be: The American Colonies on the Eve
of the Revolution (New York, 1980), 63. Figures for 1650
and 1720 were then derived assuming an annual growth
rate of 0.5 percent. Aggregate GNP was derived by
multiplying the per capita figure by the population
estimate in Table 6.1. Figures were converted to 1990
dollars by the price index in John J. McCusker, "How
Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index
for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of
the United States," American Antiquarian Society,
Proceedings, 101 (Oct. 1991), 323-32. Compare John J.
McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British
America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill, NC: 1985), 57.
income, exports averaged more than £3 sterling per head, triple that for
the northern colonies.
While exports were critical, production for home consumption and for
local exchange accounted for the bulk of the output in the southern
economy, even in the plantation districts. Given per capita incomes in the
neighborhood of £10 sterling, export earnings made up some 15 to 20
percent of the total. For example, on the Cole estate, a small plantation in
southern Maryland, exports accounted for just over one-third of total
revenues during the 1660s, production for home use a bit less than one-
half, and local exchanges just under one-fifth. In the late eighteenth
century, when dependency ratios were higher and local markets larger, the
export sector must have contributed even a smaller share of the whole.
European American women, it is important to note, although restricted
by the conventions of a patriarchal society to only limited participation in
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
258 Russell R. Menard
the export sector, played a central role in production for home use and in
managing local exchange, especially at the neighborhood level. Such activi-
ties are poorly documented and are only now finding their historians, but
we should not let their obscurity conceal their contribution to colonial
living standards.
The benefits of southern economic growth were not evenly distributed.
For one thing, there were substantial regional differences. The extent of
those differences is illustrated in Table 6.3, which summarizes data from
probate inventories taken in 1774 for three places: Anne Arundel County,
Maryland, along the tobacco coast; Orange County, North Carolina, in the
backcountry; and the Charlestown district of South Carolina, at the heart
of the lowcountry. The lowcountry was by far the richest of the three
regions: probated decedents in the Charlestown area were worth nearly
four times their counterparts along the Chesapeake and nearly ten times
those in Orange County. The data reveal other notable differences in the
structure of wealth between the three regions. The most striking is the
importance of slavery, which clearly was more central to the economies of
the tidewater plantation districts than to the backcountry. Real estate
accounted for a smaller share of wealth in the backcountry than in the
other two regions, reflecting differences in the availability of land as well
as the limited improvements in a region still in the farm-building state.
Differences in product mix are also evident: livestock was relatively more
important in the backcountry than along the coast, crops less so, a func-
tion of distance from markets and of participation in the great export
trades of the Atlantic economy. While the differences are striking, there
are some important similarities. Residents of Orange County invested the
same share of their assets in consumer goods as did their coastal counter-
parts, and as their financial assets and liabilities show, they were equally
engaged in the world of credit and debt. Living standards in the
backcountry may have been crude, but settlers did not abandon their
aspirations for the good life or turn their backs to the market when they
moved to the interior.
There were striking differences in wealth by region in the South by the
end of the colonial era, but it is unclear whether inequality among free
whites increased during the eighteenth century. While abundant resources
and scarce labor kept inequality among free colonists low by comparison to
Europe, many historians now argue that the poor were on the rise and that
a growing share of regional income was captured by a few big merchants
and great planters. That position finds support in studies of long-settled
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Table 6.3. Property owned by probate-type wealthholders in selected counties, 1774 (in pounds sterling)
Total worth
Servants and slaves
Estates (%) with servants or slaves
Servants and slaves*
Nonhuman wealth'
Real estate*
Livestock*
Crops'
Consumers' goods'
Financial assets*
Financial liabilities'
Net worth'
N inventories
Anne Arundel Co.,
MD
711.7
169.2
66.7%
7.1
540.8
352.1 (65.1%)
43.4 (8.0%)
25.7 (4.8%)
42.9 (7.9%)
53.3 (9.9%)
51.3(9.5%)
660.4
27
Orange Co.,
NC
274.6
89.6 (32.6%)
37.5%
2.2
193.9
60.7 (31.3%)
52.3 (27.0%)
1.9(1.0%)
16.7 (.8.6%)
38.2 (19.7%)
47.1(24.2%)
227.5
32
Charlestown
District,
SC
2690.3
1325.0(49.3%)
83.3%
27.9
1359.6
734.9(54.1%)
65.2 (4.8%)
68.9(5.1%)
99.1 (3.7%)
352.6(26.3%)
352.6(25.9%)
2337.7
84
'Per estate.
Source: Alice Hanson Jones, Wealth of a Nation to Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution
(New York, 1976), 379; Jones, American Colonial Wealth: Documents and Methods (New York, 1977), II,
1239-94,1443-71; III, 1473-1619.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
260 Russell R. Menard
communities in the tidewater where overcrowding led to higher rents,
lower wages, and rising inequality. On the other hand, limited opportuni-
ties on the coast encouraged migration to the interior, where prospects
were better and wealth more evenly distributed. Whether movement to
areas of low inequality fully offset coastal trends is uncertain, but it is clear
that inequality remained low by comparison to England or to later periods
in southern history and that the benefits of growth were widely shared
among free colonists.'
The issue has a different look if we consider slaves and slavery. The
African American population of the South grew rapidly over the period
(Figure 6. i) from roughly 900 blacks (3 percent of the total) in 1730 to
over 400,000 (41 percent) in 1770. Slaves played a critical role in the
southern economy and made a major contribution to the living standards
of the free population. Their presence tempers romantic notions of a
region marked by equality, opportunity, and a widely shared prosperity.
This is not to say that slaves were without income or even that those
incomes failed to rise over the colonial period. Slaves had to be fed,
housed, and clothed, and there is evidence that their material conditions
improved over time. The best evidence of such improvement is demo-
graphic. Beginning in the 1720s in the Chesapeake region and in the
17 50s in the lowcountry, the African American population grew rapidly
through reproduction, a rare achievement among New World slave soci-
eties. But they paid a frightful price for those modest gains.
The economy of the South grew impressively in the 125 years following
1650, and it distributed the benefits of growth widely among those of
European ancestry. Given the sharp differences in the South, the dynamics
of growth are best approached through analysis of the several subregions.
Before narrowing the focus, however, it is useful to think about the South
more broadly, to incorporate a Native American perspective. Although
Adam Smith's notion of an "advance . . . to wealth and greatness" aptly
summarizes southern economic history from a European point of view,
colonization brought disaster to native peoples. We do not know how
many people lived in the South on the eve of Europe's invasion, nor is it
likely that we ever will. In 1670, however, by which time the evidence
will support an informed guess, there were roughly 250,000 to 300,000
Indians in the region. While this already represented a substantial reduc-
tion since the beginning of the century, their numbers fell further, reach-
> Peter H. Linden and Jeffery G. Williamson, "Three Centuries of American Inequality," in Research
in Economic History I (1976), 69- 123.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Economic and Social Development of the South 261
ing 100,000 in 1700 and 50,000 in 1750. By now, of course, this is a
familiar pattern, well-known from all parts of Americas. What is less-
often recognized is the impact of that decline on the population as a
whole. As Figure 6.1 shows, the total population of the South actually fell
until 1700 and it was only in the 1720s that it surpassed its level of 1670,
and doubtless much later when it regained the size attained on the eve of
the invasion. "Advances to wealth and greatness," it would seem, depend
on the beholder's breadth of vision.
TOBACCO AND THE RISE OF THE
CHESAPEAKE ECONOMY
"Tobacco is the only solid Staple Commodity" of the Chesapeake colonies,
George Alsop reported in 1666, a crop "generally made by all the Inhabit-
ants. . . . " "Tobacco as our Staple is our All," Governor Benedict Leonard
Calvert added in 1729, "and indeed leaves no room for anything else."
6
Both men exaggerated - not everyone grew tobacco, and there were other
products — but they did not exaggerate by much. Tobacco was "king" in
the region, as dominant as sugar in the islands, rice in the lowcountry, and
cotton in the antebellum South. It was not king from the start, however,
and Virginia floundered before planters discovered that they could build
prosperity on smoke. As late as 1616 - nearly a decade following the
arrival at Jamestown, after an investment of more than £50,000 sterling
and the migration of over 1,700 settlers - there were only 351 Europeans
in the colony, many of them hungry, most of them disgruntled and
disappointed. In that year, John Rolfe shipped off the first crop of Virginia
leaf to London. The Chesapeake boom was on.
An overview of price and production trends in the Chesapeake tobacco
industry suggests three stages - two lengthy eras of expansion that sur-
rounded a shorter period of little or no growth. During the first growth
phase, lasting into the 1680s, tobacco output rose at a rapid but decelerat-
ing pace while prices fell. Output grew more rapidly than prices dropped,
however, and the farm value of the crop climbed, from £20,000 sterling at
mid-century to more than £100,000 by the 1680s. During the second
6
George Alsop, "A Character of the Province of Maryland" (1666), in Clayton Colrrtan Hall, ed.,
Narratives of Early Maryland, 1633-1684 (New York, 1910), 363; Benedict Leonard Calvert to the
Lord Proprietary, October 26, 1729, in W. H. Browne ct al., eds., Archives of Maryland (Baltimore,
1883-), XXV, 602.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
262 Russell R. Menard
expansion, which began about 1720 and lasted until the Revolution,
output and prices rose in tandem, pushing the value of the crop to more
than £750,000 by the 1770s. These two periods of expansion sandwiched
a generation of stagnation, stretching from the 1680s to the 1710s, when
both prices and production showed little change over the long run. Cut-
ting across all three periods was a recurring pattern of boom and bust in
which prices and output rose and fell in the short term and earnings from
the staple fluctuated dramatically.
The seventeenth-century expansion of the tobacco industry has puzzled
historians because it was accompanied by sharply falling prices. Falling
prices, it is often argued, reflected: a restrictive mercantilist policy that
kept the Dutch out of the trade and channeled tobacco through England
no matter where its final market; parasitic governments, which laid high
taxes on the leaf and thus restricted its market; and overproduction by
hard-pressed planters struggling to make ends meet. And low prices
brought hard times, leading some scholars to characterize the second half
of the seventeenth century as a period of prolonged depression around the
Bay. While not entirely wrong, that argument misses the main point.
Prices fell because planters and merchants improved productivity and
lowered costs. Lower costs meant lower prices, and lower prices meant
more people could afford the Chesapeake leaf. More customers meant
larger markets, and larger markets fueled the expansion of the tobacco
industry. It was not until the 1680s, when the long-term decline in prices
stopped in the face of rising production costs (a function of higher prices
for land and labor), that the industry stagnated. Planters then weathered
thirty years of "hard times."
One reason for the confusion among historians is that planters often
complained of depressed tobacco prices, and they blamed their difficulties
on mercantilist policies, taxes, and overproduction. Such complaints were
not constant but rather followed a recurring pattern rooted in the instabil-
ity of the Atlantic economy. The long-term movements of price and
production were not smooth but occurred in a series of sharp, short swings
as the tobacco industry moved quickly from buoyant prosperity to deep
depression in a largely self-contained price and production cycle. Short-
term increases in European demand led to a flurry of activity along the Bay
as planters bought new workers and put new land into cultivation to raise
output and capture the profits that higher prices promised. The response
was usually too robust, however, and markets were quickly glutted. Prices
fell, and planters reduced investments in new workers and new land.
Lower prices made Chesapeake leaf more competitive with tobacco grown
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Economic and Social Development of the South 263
elsewhere and permitted the penetration of new markets. Demand rose,
boom followed bust, and the cycle repeated itself.
While planters muttered about "mysterys in Trade . . . as great as
those in Religion" that alternately swelled and shrank their incomes, they
acted vigorously to control the economy, especially during the down-
turns.
7
Their efforts were both public and private. Depression encouraged
legislation to raise tobacco prices by limiting production and controlling
quality, to diversify the economy by promoting towns and local manufac-
tures, to develop new markets, and to promote other exports. Individu-
ally, planters tried to lower costs and increase productivity in tobacco and
to create more self-sufficient and diverse operations so they would be
better able to ride out the hard times. Eventually those efforts, especially
the private efforts, erected a hedge, but the hedge proved low, and it grew
slowly. The problem persisted in large part because boom regularly fol-
lowed bust, and when tobacco prices improved, planters again concen-
trated on the staple.
The productivity gains that fueled the expansion of the tobacco industry
in the seventeenth century had several sources. There were, for one thing,
major savings in distribution costs as the industry was transformed from a
high-risk venture "accompanied both by Sea and land with . . . many
hazards" into "a certaine and orderly kind of trade. "
8
In particular, freight
charges on shipping the crop to London fell from 3d per pound in the mid-
16205 to less than a penny by the 1680s, largely because of better packag-
ing, while the commission that English merchants charged for selling
tobacco on consignment tumbled from 10 percent to 2.5 percent. Also,
prices for English manufactured goods fell as trade risks declined and
higher settlement densities permitted some scale economies in marketing,
while food became cheaper as planters built working farms. Most impor-
tant, the amount of tobacco produced per worker more than doubled
across the seventeenth century, from about 700 pounds in the 1620s to
more than 1800 by the 1680s.
The development of what has been called "the Chesapeake system of
husbandry" played the key role in improving agricultural productivity
around the Bay.
9
The system blended European and Native American
farming techniques with new methods worked out locally through experi-
mentation. As planters "learned by doing," they created a long-fallow
7
William Byrd to Mr. C. Smith, August 23, 1735, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography DC
(1901-2), 118.
8
S. Kingsbury, ed., Tbt Records of the Virginia Company of London (Washington: 1906—3)), IV, 264.
» The phrase is from Lois Green Carr, Russell R. Menard, and Lorena S. Walsh, Robert Cole's World:
Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland (Chapel Hill: 1991).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
264 Russell R. Menard
agriculture with a twenty-year field rotation system using simple tools
(hoes and axes were sufficient) to grow tobacco and corn, and they raised
cattle and hogs that were allowed to range freely in the still sparsely
populated colonies. Contemporaries were sharply critical, even contemptu-
ous, of the system — an "exceeding Ill-Husbandry" Robert Beverley called
it — but they underestimated its suitability to local circumstances.
10
The
Chesapeake system of husbandry yielded export income to purchase manu-
factured goods and servants while producing food for the family. It both
saved labor, the scarce resource in the seventeenth century, and preserved
the long-term fertility of the soil. Critics also failed to appreciate the
creativity of the achievement. As planters worked out the details of the
system - discovered, for example, the optimum distance between hills for
setting plants, the best methods for curing the leaf, how to bring new land
into cultivation without plowing or pulling stumps, how to manage work
schedules to maximize output, and how to raise livestock without fencing
it in — they greatly improved both the productivity of their agriculture
and their standard of living. The precise particulars of the process of
development are now lost, but their obscurity should not undermine
appreciation of their significance.
The Chesapeake system of husbandry also helped to shape the structure
of society along the tobacco coast in the seventeenth century. One needed
only a few simple tools, a few head of cattle, and about fifty acres of land
to set up as an independent planter, all within reach of newly freed
servants or free immigrants of modest means, especially while a rapidly
expanding tobacco industry generated easy credit. Further, the system
offered few returns to scale, and it placed substantial barriers in the way of
large plantations. Given the land requirements of tobacco and corn, most
planters could manage only four or five workers efficiently. Going beyond
that required the establishment of a separate operation, called a "quarter,"
which was hard to do incrementally but instead required a plunge - the
purchase of several workers who had to be provided with tools, livestock,
food, and clothing while the new plantation was put into working order.
As a result, small owner-operated farms worked by a family with the help
of a few servants and hired hands dominated the economy, while small
planters played a major role in government, often dominating the local
level. The seventeenth century was "the age of the yeoman planter" in the
Chesapeake region.
10
Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia (Chapel Hill: 1947 [orig. publ. 1705]),
291.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Economic and Social Development of the South 265
This open, relatively undifferentiated society of small planters was trans-
formed in the decades surrounding 1700. For one thing, the long expan-
sion of the tobacco industry slowly ground to a halt in the 1680s, and
output stagnated at just under 30 million pounds before beginning an-
other sustained rise around 1720. The inability of planters to achieve
further cost reductions was chiefly responsible for the slowdown and even-
tual stagnation. The major efficiencies in the Chesapeake system of hus-
bandry had been achieved by the 1680s, and planters faced increasing
prices for land and labor. Merchants did reduce transport and marketing
costs after 1680, but the savings had to be passed on to the planter to
offset rising production costs. The tobacco industry could no longer ex-
pand by lowering consumer prices. Further expansion would require in-
creased demand, unlikely while the Atlantic economy was disrupted by
war and Europe's population was in decline. As a result, the Chesapeake
region suffered three decades of hard times, interrupted only by a brief
boom around 1700, and a sharp contraction in opportunities for poor
families to climb the agricultural ladder.
The turn of the century also witnessed major changes in demography.
The growth of slavery was the most striking change. Indentured servants,
who often shared a common social origin with the planters they served and
who hoped to become masters in their own right once they completed
their indenture, dominated the unfree work force before 1680. As the
century progressed, planters faced difficulties in recruiting enough ser-
vants. A declining population, depression, and slowly rising real wages in
England joined with constricting opportunities in the Chesapeake and
growing American demand for workers to produce a shortage of inden-
tured labor on the tobacco coast and a change in the composition of the
work force as planters purchased slaves to replace servants. In 1680,
servants outnumbered slaves along the Bay by about three to one, and
blacks were only 7 percent of the region's population. By 1720, slaves
greatly outnumbered servants, and blacks were nearly 20 percent of the
population, while in some areas their proportion approached one-third.
Changes in the composition of the white population reflected the grad-
ual rise of a native-born majority in the colonies. The Chesapeake demo-
graphic regime of the seventeenth century was harsh and peculiar. Immi-
grants were predominantly male, with sex ratios ranging from over 600
men per 100 women in the 1630s to about 250 by the 1670s, and they
encountered a destructive disease environment that kept more than half of
both men and women from reaching age 40, nearly three-quarters from
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266 Russell R. Menard
age 50. The few women who did immigrate, furthermore, married late, in
their middle twenties on average, as most had to finish indenture terms
before they could find a husband, set up a household, and begin having
children. As a result, deaths exceeded births until near the end of the
seventeenth century, and the region long retained the male surplus and
low dependency ratios characteristic of frontier populations. Those immi-
grants did have some children, however, and they gradually transformed
the demographic regime. The native-born lived longer than their immi-
grant forebears, the sex ratio among them was balanced, and they married
much earlier. By the early eighteenth century, native-born adults were a
majority in the region, rapid growth through reproduction had begun,
and the age structure and sex ratio acquired a more settled character.
The decades around 1700 also witnessed the first, tentative steps to-
ward a gradual diversification of the Chesapeake Planters in coastal North
Carolina, the lower James River basin in Virginia, and on the lower
eastern shore, where soils yielded only low-grade leaf. They abandoned
tobacco almost entirely during periods of low prices after 1680. They
concentrated instead on naval stores, wood products, grains, livestock,
and subsistence farming, and they looked more to markets in the Carib-
bean than in England. Although planters made some tobacco when prices
were especially high, the region did not again become a major participant
in the tobacco trade. The pace of diversification increased in the eigh-
teenth century, especially after 1750, when rising food prices persuaded
planters in northern Maryland to abandon tobacco for wheat and planters
elsewhere to supplement their income from the traditional staple with
grains. Table 6.4, which describes exports from Maryland, Virginia, and
North Carolina on the eve of independence, understates the extent of
diversification because it does not include the growing coastal trade to
other regions in British North America nor the substantial overland busi-
ness with Philadelphia. Nevertheless, it suggests the extent and limits of
change. Tobacco remained the dominant export, accounting for about
two-thirds of the total value; Great Britain was still the dominant trading
partner, taking more than three-quarters of all exports. However, those
shares had dropped considerably, from perhaps 95 percent of the total in
1700, in large part due to the rise of the grain trade to the sugar islands
and southern Europe.
The Chesapeake tobacco industry entered a period of renewed expansion
around 1720. At first, growth brought only slight encouragement. To-
bacco prices rose slowly (if at all) over the long term, and there were severe
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Table 6.4. Average annual value of exports from Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, 1768-72, by
destination (in thousands of pounds sterling)
Commodity
Tobacco
Grains, grain products
Naval stores
Wood products
Iron
Other
Total
Great Britain
763.8
10.6
35.4
7.0
28.3
20.9
866.0
Ireland
23.5
2.3
0.4
3.9
30.1
Southern
Europe
98.6
2.4
0.9
101.9
West Indies
75.5
23.2
0.5
16.7
115.9
Total
763.8
208.1
35.4
34.9
29.2
42.4
1,113.8
Source: James F. Shepherd and Gary M. Walton, Shipping, Maritime Trade, and the Economic Development of
Colonial North America (Cambridge, 1972), 213-25.
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268 Russell R. Menard
depressions in the industry during the late 1720s to early 1730s and again
in the mid-i74os. Prices rose fairly steadily after 1750, although there
were periods of contraction in the later stages of the Seven Years' War and
in the aftermath of the British credit crisis of 1772. Rising prices joined
with growing output to push up incomes, bringing an era of unprece-
dented prosperity to the tobacco coast while extending cultivation of the
crop and tidewater social institutions into Virginia's southside and
piedmont regions.
The eighteenth-century expansion of the export sector led to some
modest urbanization in the area. The region had been almost entirely rural
before 1720. The extensive river system permitted decentralized trade,
while tobacco needed little processing and did not require elaborate stor-
age facilities or a highly developed internal transport network. Further,
the trade was controlled by metropolitan rather than colonial merchants,
which meant that transport and finance remained in English hands.
Changes in the organization of the tobacco trade led to a proliferation of
small towns in the plantation district after 1720 as the colonial legisla-
tures set up inspection and warehouse systems to control quality, and
British merchants centralized collection of the crop to reduce port times
for the fleet. The most important developments occurred on the periphery
of the plantation sector and reflected the diversification of exports. Grains
required more processing, storage, and transport facilities than tobacco,
and the grain trade was dominated by local rather than metropolitan
merchants. Baltimore and Norfolk, each with about 6,000 inhabitants in
1775, were the two largest cities in the region by far. Each owed its
success more to the relatively modest business of supplying grains and
wood products to the Caribbean and southern Europe than to the much
larger tobacco trade with Great Britain.
The expansion of the export sector first stretched and then transformed
the Chesapeake system of husbandry. To take advantage of eighteenth-
century opportunities in grains, planters had to find ways around the land
and labor constraints that made it impossible to raise large surpluses of
corn or wheat without cutting back on tobacco. Some labor time was freed
up by the introduction of plows, a possibility once the region was defor-
ested and fields slowly cleared of stumps and roots. The change in the
work force also provided additional time since planters could push slaves
harder than indentured servants, making them work more intensely for
more hours in the day and more days in the year. Some of the new labor
time was used to pen and feed livestock, which meant that manure was
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Economic and Social Development of the South 269
made available to fertilize fields, permitting shorter fellow periods and
higher yields per acre. These changes were related in what has been called
"the plow—corn—livestock—manure complex."
11
The use of plows during
planting season released labor that could be used to grow more corn; the
corn was fed to animals, now penned, fed, and trained to the plow; and
the animals produced fertilizer, which permitted planters to add workers
without adding new land. While the new complex eventually exhausted
and eroded the soil, it allowed planters to respond to the rising prices for
food and tobacco and made an important contribution to Chesapeake
prosperity.
A remarkable set of probate records permit estimates of wealth per
capita on Maryland's lower western shore from the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury to the Revolution. These show a rapid increase at a rate of about 2.5
percent annually from 1660 to the early 1680s followed by a slight decline
to the beginning of the eighteenth century. Per capita wealth then leveled
out or perhaps fell gently until about 1750 before growing rapidly, again
at a yearly rate of roughly 2.5 percent, in the quarter-century preceding
independence. The pattern seems consistent with an export-led growth
process. The seventeenth-century expansion of the tobacco industry appar-
ently led to real gains in income and wealth, while the period of stagna-
tion around 1700 produced decline. The renewed expansion of tobacco
exports after 1720 ended or at least slowed the decline, but this growth
was achieved without major productivity gains and through the geo-
graphic extension of cultivation. It was not of the sort to produce rising
wealth per head. Beginning in 1750, however, rising prices for grains and
tobacco created new opportunities and drove per capita wealth to new
highs. Apparently, incomes along the tobacco coast were driven by the
foreign sector.
Or so it would seem. However, there are difficulties with the argument,
at least for the seventeenth century. For one thing, income per head from
tobacco declined sharply until 1640 and then fell slowly. The staple placed
a floor under incomes, but it was an unstable floor with a gently falling
slope. For another, when wealth levels for the lower western shore are
disaggregated, it becomes clear that each neighborhood went through a
period of initially rapid increase lasting about 20 years followed by a
leveling out, with the timing of change related not to the behavior of
11
The phrase is from Lois Green Cart and Russell R. Menard, "Land, Labor, and Economies of Scale
in Early Maryland: Some Limits to Growth in Chesapeake System of Husbandry," Journal of Economic
History 49 (1989), 417.
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270 Russell R. Menard
tobacco exports but to the date of settlement and to rising dependency
ratios as the population shed its early, frontier characteristics.
The increase in wealth during the seventeenth century occurred despite
falling income per head from exports and in the face of demographic
changes that reduced the share of the population in the work force. The
gains were a result of farm building. New settlements were poor and
living standards crude, but carving out farms provided opportunities for
saving, investment, and accumulation and pushed wealth levels up. Fami-
lies worked hard to clear land, erect buildings and fences, build up their
livestock herds, plant orchards and gardens, construct and improve their
homes. While these activities drove per capita wealth higher, there were
limits to the process. Once it had a farm in full operation, there was little
a family could do to further increase wealth. The early growth spurt was
followed by a long period of stability, perhaps by slight decline as depen-
dency ratios continued to rise, lasting until the mid-eighteenth century.
World food shortages, rising prices for tobacco, and shifts in the terms of
trade toward agriculture then pushed Chesapeake wealth levels up.
The wealth of the region was not evenly shared by colonists of European
ancestry. The early settlements at Jamestown and St. Mary's were marked
by high levels of inequality as both colonies were at first dominated by
ambitious, grasping men who used family fortunes and English connec-
tions to control development. Early inequalities diminished, however, as
rapid expansion under the constraints imposed by the Chesapeake system
of husbandry ushered in the small planter's age. Thereafter, inequality
rose in response to four largely sequential processes. First, farm building
created opportunities for accumulation and permitted some men to pull
ahead of their neighbors. Second, the rise of a native-born population
contributed to inequalities as inherited fortunes became a major source of
wealth and power. Third, slavery furthered the progress of inequality by
allowing some planters to command much larger work forces than had
been possible in the seventeenth century. Finally, while the diversification
of the export sector created new opportunities along the Bay, many small
planters lacked the resources to adopt the new methods and found them-
selves trapped in the old style of husbandry, unable to participate in the
wave of prosperity that followed 1750. The cumulative effect of these
processes was substantial. In the middle of the seventeenth century, at the
height of the small planter's age, the richest 10 percent of the families in
the tidewater owned roughly 40 percent of the wealth, a figure that was to
approach 70 percent by the eve of independence.
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Economic and Social Development of the South 271
To some extent, the progress of inequality in the tidewater was coun-
tered by the extension of the Chesapeake frontier. From the middle de-
cades of the seventeenth century to the Revolutionary era, the area of the
colonial occupation increased steadily in response to a recurring process.
Frontier opportunities - cheap land, the possibilities of farm making, and
credit supplied by land developers and merchants - attracted migrants,
especially newly freed servants and the children of poor families, to the
edge of colonial settlement. Migrants both relieved the pressures produced
by growing population in the tidewater and re-created the social structures
of the yeoman planter's age. Initially, the prospects that poor planters
could establish households and acquire land were good and levels of in-
equality low. However, rapid population growth, differential success in
farm building and inheritance, and the arrival of planters of means, who
moved in with substantial slave work forces as the region's potential for
development became clear, transformed the new settlement in ways that
made it increasingly like the old tidewater. As population densities grew,
land prices and inequalities rose, tenancy became more common, and
young adults left the region with growing frequency to find better pros-
pects, thereby further extending the Chesapeake frontier.
While this process operated as a brake on inequality and preserved some
measure of opportunity in the Chesapeake region throughout the colonial
era, there is evidence of strain as the eighteenth century progressed. By
the 17 50s, more than half the households in many tidewater counties were
established on rented lands, often with short-term leases that offered little
chance to build equity and slowly climb the agricultural ladder. Tenancy
was less common and prospects somewhat brighter in the piedmont and
on the Virginia southside, but even those regions were filling up, with
little unimproved land remaining and that too expensive for poor men to
purchase. By the 1780s, there was no longer any place in the Chesapeake
region that could be described as "good poor man's country." Poor men
and women now had to leave the area altogether, strike out for the raw
frontiers of the southern backcountry, Kentucky and Tennessee, or the
Northwest to find land and opportunity.
Any discussion of inequality must consider the rise of slavery and the
lives of African Americans. Blacks were only 2 percent of the region's
population in 1650, but their share grew steadily over the next century,
reaching 13 percent by 1700, 25 percent by 1730s, and 40 percent by
1750, where it hovered into the nineteenth century. The rise of slavery
contributed to the growth of inequality among whites by permitting the
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272 Russell R. Menard
accumulation of great estates while clearly separating planters who worked
their fields from gentlemen who supervised others. Evidence from Prince
George's County, Maryland, a prime tobacco region on the Potomac,
documents the emerging structure. During the initial decade of the eigh-
teenth century, when slaves were first brought into the county in large
numbers, roughly one-quarter of the households owned slaves. The major-
ity held only three or fewer blacks, and there were only a handful of great
planters; perhaps 5 percent of the masters (less than 2 percent of the
household heads) owned 20 or more slaves. Although tenancy was on the
rise, small, owner-operated farms without slaves remained the typical unit
of production in the county. By the 1770s, conditions had changed. More
than half the households owned slaves, the average size of slaveholdings
more than doubled (although it remained small by lowcountry standards),
and the number and wealth of great planters rose sharply. Perhaps the
most striking development was the near disappearance of small landown-
ers without slaves, who by then accounted for fewer than 10 percent of the
households. Slavery brought sharp distinctions to Euro-American society
in the Chesapeake, dividing it into masters who owned both land and
slaves and those who owned neither, while at the same time permitting a
few great planters to pull far ahead of their neighbors.
More important was the impact of slavery on African Americans them-
selves. Uncertainties surrounding the status of blacks in the middle de-
cades of the seventeenth century permitted a few to acquire freedom and
modest estates, but as their numbers grew, racial lines hardened into a
rigid class system, and opportunities disappeared. By the late 1670s,
when Africans began to arrive in large numbers, their fate was sealed: they
would be slaves in a harsh regime. Like white immigrants, they faced a
severe disease environment and a skewed sex ratio that limited reproduc-
tion. But their situation was worsened by isolation on small plantations,
restrictions on mobility, more rigorous work demands, the degradations of
slavery, and masters harsh enough to use dismemberment as a regular
method of discipline, as with Robert Carter who boasted of having "cured
many a negro of running away" by cutting off their toes.
12
Despite these brutal circumstances, blacks experienced a demographic
transition similar to that among whites as the gradual growth of an
American-born slave population led to the beginnings of reproductive
increase in the 1720s. By the eve of the Revolution, most blacks had been
" Robert Carter to Robert Jones, 10 October 1727, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 101
(1993), 280.
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Economic and Social Development of the South 273
born in the region, and the rate of natural population growth was high
enough to push the slave trade into sharp decline. Slavery remained harsh
and oppressive, but reproductive growth, rising population densities, and
increasing plantation sizes helped slaves to build ties of affection, family,
and friendship while permitting the articulation of a distinct African
American culture that shaped black identities and undermined the cul-
tural homogeneity of Chesapeake colonial society.
The growing inequalities in Chesapeake society are perhaps most evi-
dent at the top, in the rise of the gentry. A disruptive demographic
regime, high rates of immigration, rapid upward mobility, and con-
straints on wealth accumulation had forestalled the development of a
cohesive ruling class during the seventeenth century. Things began to
change around 1700, however, as demographic conditions permitted
longer lives, more stable families, and dense kin networks, as immigration
fell off and opportunities contracted, and as slavery allowed some to build
great plantations. The Chesapeake gentry slowly emerged as a cohesive
ruling class in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Its wealth was
based on land and slaves, its solidarity rested on shared interests nurtured
by family ties and a common culture that set them apart from the majority
of planters, its world view informed by an ideology that mixed racism,
republicanism, and patriarchalism, and its cohesiveness reinforced by the
need to control blacks and retain the cooperation of poor whites. By the
1730s, a powerful class of great planters was established in the tidewater
and was slowly extending its reach onto the Chesapeake frontier. Despite
occasional challenges to its authority - for example, the riots against to-
bacco regulation in the 1730s, and the evangelical revolt of the 1760s —
the great planters were confident of their abilities and secure in their
position, sufficiently so to lead the region into rebellion and to play the
major role in the construction of the new nation that followed in the
rebellion's wake.
RICE AND THE RISE OF THE LOWCOUNTRY
By the beginning of the American independence movement, the rapid
growth of the lowcountry economy and the opportunities it provided had
assumed legendary dimensions. The lowcountry was "the most opulent
and flourishing" region in British North America, even "the most thriving
Country perhaps on this Globe." It was a place where a "frugal and
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274 Russell R. Menard
industrious" white man was promised "a sure road to competency and
independence," where planters could "all get rich," and where merchants
rose "from humble and moderate Fortunes to great affluence." Contempo-
raries were amazed by lowcountry achievements, by "the rapid ascendency
of families which in less than ten years have risen from the lowest rank,
have acquired upward of £100,000, and have moreover, gained this
wealth in a simple and easy manner." Josiah Quincy's notes on Joseph
Alls ton, a Winyah Bay planter, are typical. Allston started just "a few
years ago" at 40 years of age "with only five negroes" but now had "an
immense income all of his own acquisition" resting on five plantations and
more than 500 slaves, which yielded a net income of £5,000 to £6,000 a
year. And, Quincy added, as if the story were not yet up to the legend, "he
is reputed much richer. "'3
Lowcountry wealth rested on the remarkable growth of its leading
exports, rice and indigo. Success was not immediate, however, at least by
the standards of the early colonists, many of whom measured their perfor-
mance against the incomes earned by sugar planters. Such expectations
were come by honestly, for the first English settlements in the lowcountry
were rooted in the Barbadian sugar revolution of the mid-seventeenth
century. By 1660, Barbados was overcrowded by American colonial stan-
dards: its population density had reached 250 persons per square mile,
most of the arable land was occupied and cultivated, and entry costs into
sugar production were high enough to keep all but those with substantial
resources out of the planter class. Indentured servants who finished their
terms found few opportunities, and many simply left, sometimes signing
new indentures to finance the move - stark comment on island prospects.
By one estimate, roughly 10,000 Barbadians, most of them recently freed
servants, left the colony for other parts of British America during the
seventeenth century. An expanding market for provisions and timber
accompanied this outmigration as planters concentrated on sugar and
denuded the island of trees, creating opportunities for colonists elsewhere
to grow food for the large and increasing slave population and to supply
Barbados with wood for building, fuel, and cask making. By 1660,
entrepreneurs realized that by tapping the Barbadian migrant stream, the
North American coastline between the Chesapeake and Spanish Florida, as
•' For the sources of the quotations, see Russell R. Menard, "Slavery, Economic Growth, and Revolu-
tionary Ideology in the South Carolina Lowcountry," in Ronald Hoffman, John J. McCusker,
Russell R. Menard, and Peter J. Albert, eds., The Economy of Early America: The Revolutionary Period,
'763-179° (Charlottesville, VA: 1988), 256, 268-9.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Economic and Social Development of the South 275
yet unoccupied by Europeans, could be colonized, the imperial designs of
competing nations preempted, and the needs of the sugar islands for wood
and food met.
After several false starts, a permanent settlement was established on the
Ashley River in 1670, near the site of Charlestown. Although troubled by
food shortages and disease, the colony grew steadily: by 1700, it was home
to roughly 3,300 Europeans and about 2,600 African and Native Ameri-
can slaves. The first several decades were years of experimentation during
which Carolinians explored the local resource base and tested overseas
demand. In the process, they built a diverse economy by colonial stan-
dards. Self-sufficient agriculture and form building were the major activi-
ties, but settlers also produced exports that could be exchanged for manu-
factured goods, servants, and slaves. The early export trade centered on
the supply of provisions and wood products to Barbados (making early
Carolina a colony's colony) supplemented by a trade in furs to England.
The economy did not generate great fortunes, but it provided local mer-
chants and planters a variety of opportunities for small-scale production
and exchange.
The experimentation ended with the emergence of rice as the major
commercial product of the lowcountry early in the eighteenth century.
The industry grew rapidly at first, as exports of a mere 10,000 pounds in
1698 reached 6.5 million by 1720, and peaked at more than 43 million in
1740 before entering a decade of stagnation and decline. A reliable price
series is not available before the 1720s, but scattered observations suggest
a steady fall, indicating that productivity gains helped to fuel the initial
expansion. Exports rose more rapidly than prices fell, and the value of the
crop increased, from roughly £20,000 sterling around 1720 to about
£100,000 around 1740. By then, rice was one of the major exports of
British America and the dominant crop in the lowcountry, "the chief
support" of the region and "its great source of opulence," as much the
"staple Commodity" of the area "as Sugar is to Barbados or Jamaica, or
Tobacco to Virginia and Maryland."
1
''
While rice became the lowcountry staple in the early decades of the
eighteenth century, initially the growth of that industry was part of a
more general expansion, an export boom that began around 1700. Some of
that boom reflected continued growth in trades established during the
" Alexander Hewatt, An Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the Colonies of South Carolina and
Georgia, 2 vols. (London: 1779), I, 119; [James Glen], A Description of South Carolina . . .
(London: 1761), 87.
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276 Russell R. Menard
seventeenth century, especially the production of food stuffs and timber
for the sugar islands and the shipment of deerskins to England. Much of
the boom turned on naval stores, a new set of products of little importance
before 1700. The English government, reacting to wartime disruption of
its supply from the Baltic, provided the incentive for the industry in 1705
in the form of bounties for products made in the colonies. The incentives
worked: Charlestown exports of pitch and tar exceeded 6,500 barrels in
1712, 50,000 in 1718, and peaked at nearly 60,000 in 1725.
The export boom continued until about 1740, but in its latter stages,
its character changed as planters concentrated on rice. Corn exports, for
example, reached nearly 95,000 bushels in 1735 before falling to only
15,000 in 1739. Exports of barrel staves fell by half over the same period,
while leather exports, a byproduct of meat production, fell by about two-
thirds from 1734 to 1739. The most important change, however, was in
the naval stores industry. Exports of pitch, tar, and turpentine peaked at
about 60,000 barrels worth perhaps £25,000 sterling in the mid-i72os.
By 1732, exports were at roughly 25,000 barrels worth £7,000; by 1739,
11,000 barrels worth less than £3,000.
The decline of the lowcountry naval stores industry is usually attributed •
to shifts in British policy. In 1724, the government insisted that quality
standards be met before bounties were paid, and in 1729, it reduced the
premiums substantially. While it is true that high labor costs in the colonies
led producers to use methods that sacrificed quality for quantity, and that
bounties were important to the beginnings of the industry, the decline had
other sources. Naval stores were crowded out of the lowcountry, along with
foodstuffs and wood products for the sugar industry, being pushed to the
periphery of the plantation district, to the South Carolina backcountry, to
Georgia, and, especially, to the Cape Fear River Valley of North Carolina.
Lowcountry planters concentrated on rice, their most profitable staple, and
had little time for anything else. The consequences of that focus are appar-
ent in the increased specialization of the lowcountry economy revealed in
the growth of rice exports per capita, which rose from about 70 pounds in
1700 to 380 in 1720 and to nearly 1,000 in 1740.
The lowcountry export boom transformed coastal South Carolina, mak-
ing it into a plantation society more similar to the British Caribbean than
to the other mainland colonies. The extent of that transformation is
evident in the population of the region, especially in the growth of slavery.
The export boom led to a sharp increase in demand for labor, an increase
met largely by African slaves. Charlestown slave imports averaged 275 a
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Economic and Social Development of the South 277
year in the 1710s, almost 900 in the 1720s, and more than 2,000 in the
1730s. Slaves were a majority in colonial Carolina by 1708 and accounted
for 72 percent of the population by 1740, making the region seem "more
like a negro country than like a country settled by white people."
1
' The
change is also evident in the difficulties both whites and blacks had
achieving reproduction, as the export boom and the articulation of a
plantation complex brought the destructive demographic regime of the
sugar islands to the lowcountry. The impact on slaves was especially harsh,
because rise production (like sugar) consumed workers. "The cultivation of
it is dreadful," the author of American Husbandry noted, a "horrible employ-
ment, . . . not far short of digging in Potosi."
16
Demographic changes tell only part of the story. Other aspects of the
export-led transformation of the lowcountry are reflected in the probate
inventories summarized in Table 6.5. Perhaps the most striking change
was in the scale of operations and in wealth levels, especially among the
rich. Average estate values (exclusive of real property) rose from just over
£200 sterling in the seventeenth century to more than £350 in the 1720s
and nearly £540 in the 1740s, just following the end of the export
boom. Those increases reflected a substantial growth in scale as large
plantations "swallowed up" small farms: the average number of slaves per
estate rose from less than 3 in the seventeenth century to 10 in the 1720s
and 17 in the 1740s. Change was especially impressive at the top of the
wealth distribution, as the mean estate value for the richest 10 percent
doubled during the early stages of the export boom and then increased
by half again from the 1720s to the 1740s, while the number of slaves in
those estates grew even faster. The data reflect the centrality of slavery in
the transformation of the lowcountry. Slaves accounted for only 20 per-
cent of inventoried wealth in the seventeenth century, before the start of
the export boom, but nearly 60 percent by the 1720s and 65 percent in
the 1740s. Indeed, the net wealth exclusive of slaves in the region
actually fell before the 1720s and then rose only modestly until the
1740s.
In the sharp increase in wealth and in scale as well as in the growing
centrality of slavery, the export-led transformation of the lowcountry re-
sembled the earlier, sugar-induced changes in the West Indies. There were
limits to the resemblance, however, due to ways in which the lowcountry
11
Letter of Samuel Syssli, Dec. 3, 1737, South Carolina Historical andGenealogical Magazine 23 (1922),
90.

6
Carman, ed., American Husbandry, 277.
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2 7 8 Russell R. Menard
Table 6.5. Some characteristics of lowcountry South Carolina probate inventories, 1678-1764
N inventories
Mean movables (in sterling)
% wealth in slaves
Slaves per estate
% estates with slaves
% planters with slaves
% estates with land
% planters with land
Share wealth, top 10%
Share slaves, top 10%
Mean wealth, top 10%
Mean slaves, top 10%
Mean nonhuman movable wealth
1678-98
50
204
21
2.6
62
69


41
48
£835
12.6
£161
1722-6
158
357
58
9.6
78
93
73
90
46
49
1,636
46.8
150
1743-5
154
539
65
16.7
81
94
70
93
44
43
2,422
74.5
189
1764
142
1,145
54
17.9
88
96
68
92
60
51
7,018
92
527
Sources: Records of the Secretary of the Province, 1675-95, 1692-1700, 1700-10,
1722-6; Wills, Inventories & Miscellaneous Records, 1722-4, 1724-5; Inventories,
1739-^4, 1744-6, 1763-7. South Carolina Department of Archives and History,
Columbia. All values converted to sterling following the exchange rates in John J.
McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600-1775: A Handbook
(Chapel Hill, NC: 1978), 222^1. For the period before 1699, when McCusker
reports no exchange rates, I assumed that £1 sterling equaled £1.1 in South Carolina
currency. Readers should note that these figures have not been adjusted for changes
in age structure among inventoried decedents or for changes in the proportion of
wealthowning decedents whose estates were inventoried.
developed its own distinctive plantation complex. Some of the differences
are apparent in the probate inventories. Remarkably, the export boom was
accompanied by little increase in inequality among wealthowners and by
widespread access to the basic factors of production among whites. In the
1740s, following half a century of rapid growth, the share of wealth
owned by the richest 10 percent barely differed from seventeenth-century
levels, while the great majority of decedents (and nearly all planters)
owned both land and slaves. The export boom had made the lowcountry a
republic of slaveowners.
Other developments further distinguished the lowcountry from the
sugar islands. For one thing, in Charlestown, British America's fourth
largest city for most of the eighteenth century, the lowcountry had a
commercial, political, and social center that provided a focus not found in
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Economic and Social Development of the South 279
the West Indies. For another, the region developed a merchant class much
larger and wealthier and with more independence than in the sugar is-
lands, where traders remained thoroughly subordinate to metropolitan
interests. Thirdly, a region of "common husbandry" developed around the
edges of the plantation district, providing planters food for their slaves
and Charlestown merchants a flow of diversified products for export and a
lively market for manufactured goods and commercial services. Perhaps
most important were differences in scale. Rice plantations were large by
mainland standards but much smaller than sugar estates; lowcountry plant-
ers were not as rich as sugar magnates. As a result, absenteeism was more
limited in the lowcountry than on the islands, planters more often man-
aged their plantations, and they spent a larger share of their income at
home. The limits on planter absenteeism had important political conse-
quences, for it permitted the growth of an indigenous ruling class, a
powerful, self-conscious group capable of shaping the region's future.
The lowcountry's transformation was bought at a frightful price, par-
ticularly in the lives of Indian and African slaves, chief victims of the
planter's vicious scramble to capture the fruits of the export boom. It was
also expensive: over the course of the boom, planters spent roughly a
million sterling on slaves alone, to which must be added expenditures on
land, buildings, tools, and livestock needed to start plantations. Given
the costs, it is worth asking how the export boom was financed. There are
several possibilities. Planters could have borrowed from English investors
or on a local credit market, acquired short-term commercial credit from
English merchants, brought substantial capital with them when they
immigrated, or paid for slaves out of current income. All of these methods
were used in all of the colonies, but their importance differed between
regions. Outside capital was apparently a greater source of credit during
the Barbadian sugar boom than at other times or places. In the Chesa-
peake, the slow pace of Africanization suggests that savings and current
income played the central role. In coastal Carolina, a local mortgage
market that was developed early in the eighteenth century was especially
important. Planters were able to borrow funds to pay for agricultural
development, particularly for the purchase of Africans, in the local capital
market where Charlestown merchants loaned money earned in trade on
mortgages secured by land and, especially, slaves. The local mortgage
market played a key role in the growth of the Carolina economy. It
quickened the pace of development beyond what would have been possible
had planters been forced to rely on savings, while providing local lenders
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280 Russell R. Menard
the opportunity to make secure investments in a rapidly expanding export
sector. And it permitted small and middling planters with modest in-
comes but high aspirations, who perhaps seemed poor risks in other credit
markets, access to capital to acquire labor and build estates. If there was
any truth to the claims of Revolutionary ideologues that the lowcountry
was both a slaveholder's republic and a good poor man's country, the local
mortgage market deserves some credit for making their perverse vision a
reality.
The great lowcountry export boom ground to a halt around 1740 in a
series of events sufficiently disruptive and threatening to shake planter
confidence and make them wonder about the choices they had made and
the society they had built. The first shock was a yellow fever epidemic that
struck Charlestown in late August 1739, bringing with it a "great Sick-
ness & Mortality the like whereof has never been known in the Prov-
ince."
17
Coming on the heels of a major outbreak of smallpox the previous
year, the epidemic was terrifying. And it was only the beginning. On
September 9, with the fever still raging in the city, a small band of slaves
from the western branch of Stono River, hoping to reach the Spanish
settlement at St. Augustine, rose in insurrection. Although most of the
rebels were quickly "taken or Cut to Peices[«r]," the group grew to some
60 to 100 blacks on the march south, and they "murthered in their way
there between Twenty & Thirty white People & Burnt Severall houses."
18
Stono was the culmination of a decade of mounting African protest, a
resistance more frightening because of the supposed refuge at St. Augus-
tine and persistent rumors of an imminent Spanish invasion of the
lowcountry. And Stono was followed by continued unrest among slaves,
by a failed English invasion of St. Augustine, by a major fire in Charles-
town in September 1740 (attributed by some to black arsonists, feared by
others as likely opportunity for another insurrection), by the landing of a
large Spanish force at St. Simon's off the Georgia coast, and by a gradual
slide into a long depression as the lowcountry economy felt the impact of
King George's War. "This province," Robert Pringle lamented, "Seems to
be Subject to Series of Accidents & Missfortunes."'
9
The 1740s depression marked a turning point in the history of the
lowcountry. King George's War (1739-48) hit the region hard, especially
•' Robert Pringle to Thomas Burrill, Oct. 10, 1739, Walter B. Edgar, ed., Tht Lttterbook of Robert
Pringle, 2 vols. (Columbia, SC, 1972), I, 139.
'' Pringle to John Richards, Sept. 26, 1739, ibid., I, 135.
'» Pringle to Andrew Pringle, July 10, 1742, ibid., I, 388.
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Economic and Social Development of the South 281
once France joined the fray and fighting intensified in the Atlantic in 1744.
War pushed shipping costs up, and rice profitability declined, since rice was
a bulky commodity that soon lost its competitive edge in European markets
when burdened with heavy freight and insurance charges. Prices, which had
fallen gently as productivity gains were passed on to consumers, plummeted
from as much as 9 shillings per hundredweight in the late 1730s to just over
2 shillings in the mid-i74os. Exports, too, fell sharply, from an average
approaching 40 million pounds a year around 1740 to less than 30 million
in the last half of the decade. Lower prices and declining exports pushed the
value of the crop down dramatically, from a peak of nearly £150,000
sterling in 1740 to less than £30,000 in 1746, at the bottom of the
depression. Since rice was "king" in the lowcountry, its troubles affected
everything. The land boom of the 1730s came to a halt, planters stopped
importing Africans (in part because of a high tax on imports imposed in
Stono's wake), European goods became scarce and expensive, the local credit
market tightened, and overextended planters were forced into bankruptcy.
Other trades did better than rice, but those had long since become too small
to carry planters through a long period of hard times. The great lowcountry
export boom had clearly run its course as King George's War brought the
region "to the Brink of Ruin."
20
Although severely shaken by events of the 1740s, planters quickly
regained confidence in the lowcountry economy after mid-century. For one
thing, planters emerged from the depression with more diverse opera-
tions, as they trained slaves in crafts, organized workers to grow their own
food, and began to make some of the shoes and clothing needed by slaves.
More important than the development of plantation self-sufficiency was
experimentation with new crops in an effort to find additional exports that
would provide alternatives or supplements to rice. With indigo they had a
great success. The war gave lowcountry planters an opening by cutting off
supplies of the dye from the French Caribbean, while the British govern-
ment boosted the infant industry with a bounty. Early efforts produced a
poor quality dye, however, and exports collapsed when peace restored
trade with the French islands. The Seven Years' War brought a rapid
recovery, and the crop entered what contemporaries called its "golden
days" when indigo planters were "full of money."
21
The value of exports
*° James Glen to Robert Dinwiddie, Mar. 3, 1754, in William L. McDowell, Jr., ed., Colonial Records
of South Carolina: Documtnts Relating to Indian Affairs, May 21, 1750 - August 7, 1734 (Columbia,
SC, 1958), 478.
11
Quoted in Robert M. Weir, Colonial South Carolina: A History (Millwood, NY: 1983), 146.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
282 Russell R. Menard
grew enormously, from an annual average of less than £10,000 in the early
1750s to nearly £150,000 in the early 1770s, when it approached 40
percent of the value of the lowcountry rice crop. The rise of indigo let
planters and merchants face the possibility of war with optimism, with the
hope that "a new War will learn us how to propogate [sic] other useful
Articles."
22
It was also critical to growing planter confidence that the slave popula-
tion seemed less threatening after mid-century. That is not to say that all
planters slept easily all the time, but Stono was the last major scare of the
eighteenth century. The reasons for growing planter confidence in their
abilities to control slaves are complex. Stono left masters determined to
discipline slaves more effectively; the Spanish threat gradually receded and
was finally eliminated when Florida passed to the British in 1763; and the
settlement of the backcountry left lowcountry whites, although still out-
numbered, confident of help should an emergency arise. Also important
were changes in the composition of the population and the organization of
plantation work. Many slaves, Gov. James Glen explained in 1751, "are
natives of Carolina" who "have been brought up among white people."
The conclusion Glen drew from this observation — that they had "no
notion of liberty, nor no longing after any other country," that slaves were
"pleased with their masters, contented with their condition, reconciled to
servitude" — is stunning in its complacency, but he did isolate an impor-
tant truth.
2
' The growth of a Creole majority, a process quickened when
African imports stopped in the 1740s, transformed the slave population in
ways that made them less terrifying to their owners. That transformation
also permitted slaves to form families, make firm and lasting friendships,
and build communities on the large lowcountry plantations. The slaves
also utilized the development of a task system to gain some control over
their working lives; this provided opportunities to work on their own
account and accumulate small amounts of property. Lowcountry slavery
remained harsh and oppressive, but the changes that occurred around mid-
century left blacks less willing to risk all in open rebellion.
The renewed success of the lowcountry rice industry provided a further
source of growing planter confidence. The value of the crop grew more
than threefold in the quarter-century following King George's War, from
roughly £115,000 sterling around 1750 to £380,000 in the early 1770s.
" Henry Laurens to Sarah Nickelson, Aug. I, 1755, Laurtns Papers I, 309.
*' Glen to the Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, March 1751, in H. Roy Merrens, ed.,
The Colonial South Carolina Scene: Contemporary Views, 1697-1774 (Columbia, SC: 1977), 183.
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Economic and Social Development of the South 283
It was not simply that the rice industry grew; planters achieved major
improvements in productivity, evident both in technical changes in rice
production and in the ability to hold prices stable in the face of rising
costs. "The culture of rice" in the region, David Ramsay noted, "was in a
state of constant improvement" as production shifted first from the moist
uplands to inland swamps and later to the tidewater, as complex irrigation
systems were developed, as new varieties were discovered better suited to
local conditions, and as the cleaning process was improved.
2
'* It is possible
that this creativity rested on the skills of slaves. Indeed, it has been
suggested that Africans introduced the technology of rice cultivation to
the lowcountry and that rice planters sought (and paid premium prices for)
slaves from ethnic groups familiar with the crop. While the notion that
technological restraints were removed only with the arrival of skilled
Africans after having been a major barrier to the commercial cultivation of
rice seems insufficiently attentive to the key role played by rising Euro-
pean demand, Africans did bring important technical skills across the
Atlantic, and the abilities and accumulated knowledge of slaves was cru-
cial to the success of plantation economies. This may have been particu-
larly true with rice. The crop was widely grown in West Africa under a
variety of conditions and by different techniques, while the lowcountry
. tasking system placed major responsibilities for the organization of work
in the hands of slaves and offered them incentives to work efficiently. It
would not be surprising if some of the productivity gains rested on innova-
tions by slaves. Planters took the credit, however, reading into the re-
newed expansion of the rice industry, the growing diversity of their planta-
tions, the rise of indigo, and the general success of lowcountry agriculture
clear evidence of their creativity and inventiveness, their ability to manage
slaves and deal with adversity, and their competence to shape the future.
The growing expansiveness of lowcountry planters was reflected in the
geographic expansion of the lowcountry plantation complex. Georgia was
the focus of that expansion and its greatest success. Georgia's founders had
not intended that the colony become a "new Carolina." The Georgia
Trustees designed the colony as an area of "common husbandry," a settle-
ment of farms rather than plantations where a society of sturdy white
yeomen would work for their own account without slaves, forming both a
buffer against Spanish and French ambitions and a refuge for England's
dispossessed. By the early 1750s, only 20 years after the colony's found-
*• David Ramsey, The History of South Carolina, from Its First Sett/meat in / 670, to the Year 1808, 2 vols.
(Charleston, SC, 1809), II, 206.
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284 Russell R. Menard
ing, the vision had collapsed, victim of the Trustee's incompetence, the
ambitions of Georgia settlers, and the demands of Carolina planters for
fresh rice lands. The prohibition against slavery was lifted, planters and
slaves poured in, and Georgia became both a royal colony and "a province
to South Carolina" as the lowcountry plantation complex took root on the
coastal strip and along the southern bank of the Savannah River, f" By
1770, blacks were 45 percent of the colony's population (70 percent in the
coastal strip), its rice and indigo crops worth more than £40,000 sterling.
The years before the Revolution also witnessed the spread of the
lowcountry plantation complex to the lower Cape Fear region of North
Carolina as well as efforts to establish it below the Altamaha River and in the
newly acquired colony of East Florida. The Cape Fear district had become a
South Carolina satellite much earlier, in the 1730s, as the naval stores
industry displaced by the expansion of rice moved north. By the 1760s, the
process that had earlier transformed coastal South Carolina reached the
lower Cape Fear when large plantations, rice, indigo, and slaves pushed
small farmers and naval stores producers into the interior. The other efforts
proved less successful. The Altamaha project collapsed almost before it
started, as royal authorities first prohibited settlement while the region was
claimed by Spain and then, after 1763 when the Spanish claim was re-
moved, proved unable to settle complex land title disputes that had to be
unraveled before investment could proceed. East Florida at least got off the
ground when British investors went "Florida mad" and lowcountry planters
moved in to build a new Carolina. A few large plantations were established
and small crops of indigo produced by the early 1770s, but that effort too
proved a failure as investors fell victim to the strange environment and
(again) British administrative incompetence.
The success of rice and indigo and the geographic expansion of the
plantation complex suggest that the lowcountry export sector witnessed
extraordinary growth in the quarter-century before the American Revolu-
tion. Comprehensive trade statistics specific to the region are not avail-
able, but data for South Carolina and Georgia capture the pattern. In
1748, when Georgia's exports were minimal, a contemporary valued ex-
ports from South Carolina at £160,000 sterling. Between 1768 and 1772,
exports from South Carolina and Georgia were worth an average of
£511,000, a more than threefold increase in only 20 years (Table 6.6). If
we exclude all commodities but rice and indigo as likely to have been
*> James Habersham to Benjamin Marty n, March 15, 1756, Habersham Papers, Library of Congress.
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Economic and Social Development of the South 285
Table 6.6. Average annual value of exports firm South Carolina and Georgia, 1768-72, by
destination (in thousands of pounds sterling)
Commodity
Rice
Indigo
Deerskins
Naval stores
Wood products
Grains
Livestock, beef, and pork
Other
Total
Great
Britain
198.2
111.8
28.1
6.0
0.5
0.2
0.1
2.7
347.6
Southern
Europe
51.0
0.2
0.3
0.1
0.4
52.0
West
Indies
55.7
8.8
5.0
6.8
2.1
78.4
Mainland
Colonies
21.3
0.7
0.2
5.0
5.7
32.9
Total
326.2
111.8
28.1
6.7
9.7
10.5
7.0
10.9
510.9
Source: James F. Shepherd and Gary M. Walton, Shipping, Maritime Trade, and the
Economic Development of Colonial North America (Cambridge, 1972), 215-27; Shepherd
and Samuel H. Williamson, "The Coastal Trade of the British North American
Colonies, 1768-1772," Journal of Economic History 32 (1972), 809.
produced in the interior, these data suggest that lowcountry exports per
capita approached £4, roughly three times the figure for the rest of the
mainland. For the lowcountry whites, exports per head approached £17,
perhaps half again as large as total income per capita for the colonies as a
whole.
The successes of the export sector were accomplished by a substantial
increase in lowcountry wealth — it emerged as the richest area in British
North America. Estate inventories show that mean wealth among pro-
bated decedents nearly doubled from the 1740s to the 1760s and contin-
ued to grow impressively into the next decade. By the eve of the Revolu-
tion, wealthholders in the Charlestown district at the center of the
lowcountry held assets valued at more than seven times those owned by
their counterparts in the thirteen continental colonies as a whole. In
contrast to the process during the initial export boom, this later growth
was accompanied by a fall in the share of all wealth represented by slaves
and by a sharp increase in inequality as the great planters and big mer-
chants built substantial estates and pulled far ahead of their neighbors.
Despite the rise of inequality, there is evidence of an impressive
solidarity - "harmony" was how contemporaries described it - among Eu-
ropean Americans in the region, especially among the very rich. It was, for
one, a small population of only 35,000 people, perhaps 6,000 families, in
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286 Russell R. Menard
1775, a group bound together by frequent face-to-face contact, high rates of
intermarriage, and a gradual blurring of the distinction between merchant
and planter. It was also a population bound together by its isolation: the
substantial black majority within the region and the restive backcountry
farmers encircling it to the west combined to curb disagreements and foster
group consciousness. In the end, however, that solidarity was rooted less in
fear and isolation than in an optimism and expansiveness that grew out of a
defining characteristic of the lowcountry plantation regime: an impressive
prosperity that provided most white men access to land and labor, made a
favored few very rich indeed, and took the region into the revolutionary era
as a slaveowner's republic.
BACKCOUNTRY AND FRONTIER
In contrast to the coastal districts, where the regional constructs of
lowcountry and tobacco coast have a certain integrity and firmness,
backcountry and frontier are problematic concepts. Despite the still-
looming presence of Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis, this re-
flects the force of historiographic tradition. At least among colonialists,
the interior has received much less attention than the seaboard. It also
reflects reality. True, there is some fuzziness about the edges of the coastal
regions, especially the Chesapeake, where high rates of migration led to
rapid expansion and the sometimes problematic integration of new terri-
tory, and where diversification had removed some older settlements from
the tobacco economy by the revolutionary era. However, lowcountry and
tobacco coast were held together by a shared commitment to common
exports, plantation agriculture, and African slavery as well as by emerging
planter classes gradually consolidating power, growing in solidarity, and
developing a vision for the future. Backcountry and frontier lacked the
stability and cohesiveness produced by such integrating institutions. They
were places in the process of transformation as the aspirations of settlers
joined with the aggressive expansion of tidewater society to first turn
frontier into backcountry and then build a plantation regime in the
backcountry settlements.
The characteristic economic institution of the southern frontier was the
trade in animal pelts, especially deerskins, much in demand in Europe
where they were turned into gloves and bookbindings. Unfortunately, it is
impossible to describe the volume of that trade precisely. Deerskins were
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Economic and Social Development of the South 287
shipped out of several colonial ports and to various European nations; since
volume and prices fluctuated dramatically with changing conditions in the
interior, no one has yet compiled a consistent series. However, evidence
from Charlestown and New Orleans, the dominant export centers, sug-
gests a slow expansion from a total of roughly £30,000 sterling around
1710 to perhaps £50,000 in 1750, and £80,000 in 1770. The trade made
an important contribution to southern export earnings, although its share
declined as plantation agriculture expanded. Still, at mid-century, deer-
skins accounted for about a third of the value of exports through New
Orleans, and 18 percent for Charlestown, figures that fell to about 20
percent and 6 percent, respectively, by the 1770s.
For a time, a trade in Native American slaves was also an important part
of the frontier economy. The evidence will not support a precise descrip-
tion of the volume of that trade, but it is possible to sketch its outline.
The Spanish had raided the Southeast for slaves since the sixteenth cen-
tury, while the English in Virginia and the French in Louisiana acquired
Indian slaves when opportunities appeared. The trade, however, centered
on Charlestown and the lowcountry. Although Indian slaves appeared in
South Carolina as early as 1683, the trade was initially a secondary activ-
ity, subordinate to the trade in deerskins and the political aims of the
English and their Native allies. Indian slaves were captured almost inciden-
tally, as a byproduct of other processes, and most were exported to earn
foreign exchange. After 1700, however, the lowcountry export boom led
to a sharp increase in demand for labor, which transformed relationships
between the English and Native peoples. The slave trade gained in impor-
tance and was no longer subordinated to the deerskin trade or to political
concerns. More Indians were captured and more were kept in the
lowcountry to make rice, grow provisions, and produce naval stores.
During the first decade of the eighteenth century, Indian slaves were the
fastest growing group in South Carolina, rising from 200 (3 percent of the
total population) in 1700 to 1500 (15 percent) by 1710. Their numbers
continued to grow in the next decade, but less rapidly. In 1720, there
were roughly 2,000 Indian slaves, but they made up only 11 percent of
the population. Thereafter, both their numbers and their share fell
sharply, to fewer than 500 and less than 1 percent of the inhabitants by
1740.
The intensification of the slave trade proved devastating to the Indians.
It was a bloody, violent business, impossible to institutionalize, that
demanded increased warfare and ever more raiding. It produced sharp
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288 Russell R. Menard
population decline and the total destruction of several smaller groups.
And it led to major political changes as Indians struggled to protect
themselves by forming larger and more effective federations and by elabo-
rating a "play-off" system in which rivalries between the English, French,
and Spanish were exploited in efforts to control the worst excesses of the
European invasion. Population decline and political restructuring quickly
lowered the supply of Indian slaves, reducing it to a mere trickle by the
1720s.
It has been argued that planter preferences played the key role in the
decline of Native slavery, that they found Indians unsatisfactory as workers
and replaced them with Africans as soon as possible. However, prices for
Indian slaves rose rather than fell as their numbers declined, by 50 to 100
percent from the 1720s to the 1730s, suggesting that planters would have
purchased more had they been available. But if the preferences of the
individual planter purchasers did not produce the collapse of the native slave
trade, their political concerns as members of an emerging ruling class
proved critical. Beginning in 1716, the Carolina Assembly began to assert
control over the Indian trade, enacting over the next 15 years legislation
that, among other things, restricted dealing in slaves. The legislation was a
reaction to the dangers that trade posed, dangers clearly revealed in the
Yamasee War ofi7i5—17. While the origins of the conflict are complex, it
is clear that Indian grievances against the slave trade helped to initiate it and
that slave traders welcomed it as a way of increasing supplies. The war
devastated the colony. Some 400 colonists were killed, more than f 100,000
in property was destroyed, half the cultivated land was abandoned, starva-
tion threatened, trade was disrupted, and taxes rose sharply to pay for
defense. And it was nearly worse, with only luck and skillful diplomacy
preventing the alliance of Creeks, Choctaws, and Yamasees from overwhelm-
ing Carolina and destroying the colony. In the midst of a rapid expansion
produced by the export boom, Carolina planters had too much at stake to
tolerate such risks.
While the consequences of the Indian slave trade were clearly disastrous
for Native peoples, the impact of the trade in deerskins is less certain. On
the one hand, it led to increases in income as commercial hunting raised
productivity and as access to guns, metal tools and utensils, and manufac-
tured textiles improved material living standards. On the other hand, it led
to dependency and decline over the long term. When pelt supplies fell,
Indians were left with heavy debts and dependent on European manufac-
tures, but with much smaller incomes from deerskin production and a
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Economic and Social Development of the South 289
territory so reduced in size that return to precontact forms of economic
organization was no longer an option. There is evidence that for some
Native peoples on the southern frontier, the gains outweighed the costs
during the middle to late decades of the eighteenth century. Although there
were periods of ferocious conflict when Indian groups fought each other over
territory, resisted European expansion, or were caught up in imperial wars,
the level of violence declined with the collapse of the slave trade. Further,
some groups were able to use the play-off system to maintain or even
increase autonomy as the French (and later Spanish) presence in the lower
Mississippi valley grew. The slow expansion of the deerskin trade appar-
ently did not deplete supplies, and many Indian groups were able to inte-
grate commercial hunting with agriculture, fishing, and gathering in ways
that enhanced income. Moreover, the activity generated by the trade offered
some additional employment opportunities, especially in transport, while
the growing European presence provided a market for food and handicrafts.
The best evidence of relative prosperity is demographic. The rapid decline
that reduced Indian numbers began to slow in the 1720s and was actually
replaced by a modest increase starting in the 1750s (see Figure 6.1). Decline
continued among natives along the coast, but in the southern interior, in
what was still "Indian country," some groups registered remarkable gains.
The Choctaws and Chickasaws, for example, grew from a low of about
14,000 in 1730 to nearly 18,000 in 1790, while the Creeks increased from
io. ooo in 1715 to 15,000 in 1790.
This relatively prosperous interlude between the demographic collapse
of the early stages of contact and the nineteenth-century era of removal was
threatened and ultimately destroyed by European expansion. One threat
came from the French settlements along the Gulf Coast and in the lower
Mississippi valley, a region usefully thought of as "greater Louisiana."
Although they established a permanent presence in 1699, the French were
slow to gain a firm foothold: as late as 1715, the colonial population
amounted to only 400 people, most of them soldiers, officials, or clerics
scattered among several small administrative outposts. The region experi-
enced a minor population boom in the 1720s, shortly after the French
government turned the colony over to John Law's Compagnie des Indes in
1717. Over the next 15 years, the Company shipped some 7,000 Europe-
ans and an equal number of Africans to the colony. Conditions were ter-
rible, however, "and the country was emptied as rapidly as it had filled."
26
26
Pierre Francois Xavier de Charlevoix, History and General Description of New Prance, 6 vols., trans.
John Gilmary Shea (New York, 1866-72), VI, 69.
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290 Russell R. Menard
By 1730, the colonial population numbered only 5,300, about two-thirds
of them African slaves. Disappointment with the Company's effort was
compounded by a deterioration in relations with neighboring Indians,
culminating in the destructive Natchez War of 1729—31. In the after-
math, the French government resumed control of the colony but showed
little interest in its development. In 1760, the colonial population of
greater Louisiana amounted to just over 9,000, including perhaps 5,300
slaves.
Colonial development quickened when the region was partitioned in
the aftermath of the Seven Years' War. France ceded its territory east of the
Mississippi above Lake Pontchartrain to Great Britain, which reorganized
the region as West Florida. New Orleans, the lower delta, and the west
bank became Spanish Louisiana. Both colonial powers worked to promote
trade and plantation agriculture, attract immigrants, and encourage invest-
ment. Population boomed, more than doubling between 1760 and 1775,
doubling again by 1790, when the colonial inhabitants surpassed 42,000,
including some 23,000 slaves. By then, the entire region was under
Spanish control, albeit temporarily, as a result of Spain's conquest of West
Florida in 1783.
Economic developments mirrored the growth of population. Until the
end of the French period, the economy was dominated by the Indian trade.
A small plantation sector began to emerge during the 1720s around New
Orleans and upriver at Point Coupee, where planters used slaves to make
modest quantities of tobacco, indigo, and timber products for export as
well as foodstuffs for the local market. That sector grew slowly for the next
40 years, but it was not until the era of partition that greater Louisiana
emerged as a plantation colony. By 1775, annual exports of indigo and
tobacco from New Orleans were worth more than six times the value of
deerskin exports. Plantation development was less rapid in British West
Florida, and peltries remained the dominant export there for a longer
time. However, that colony also produced significant amounts of indigo,
tobacco, and forest products by 1775.
While the expansion of great Louisiana intruded on "Indian country"
during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the greater threat
came from the east and the invasion of the southern backcountry. Al-
though there is a sense in which the South had a backcountry from the last
decades of the seventeenth century as relentless expansion extended the
area of colonial occupation steadily inland from the Chesapeake Bay, it was
not until the 1730s when settlers crossed the Fall Line (the line east of the
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Economic and Social Development of the South 291
Appalachians marking the end of the coastal plains and the beginning of
the Piedmont Plateau) in substantial numbers that phrases such as "Back
Parts," "Back Settlements," and "Back Country" entered contemporary
usage. The concept was clearly Eurocentric: from the perspective of Native
peoples, a phrase such as "front country" appears more apt. And it served
to contrast the orderly, hierarchical, "civilized" coast with the violent,
leveling, "primitive" interior. Historians, following Turner, have stripped
the notion of its pejorative implications but retained the contrast and its
underlying assumption that a fundamental social, economic, and cultural
unity bound the backcountry into a coherent region with an integrity of
its own.
There is evidence to support the assumption. The regions' population
was chiefly European in background, without the substantial African
presence so critical to coastal societies. The backcountry was dominated by
farms rather than plantations, shipped less of its output abroad than did
the tidewater, and exhibited lower wealth levels and less inequality.
Backcountry settlers also had grievances against coastal-dominated govern-
ments, grievances which sometimes brought large numbers of them to-
gether to advance a common political agenda. Nevertheless, the assump-
tion that the backcountry formed a coherent, unified social, economic,
and cultural region is misleading, on several counts.
For one thing, the region grew explosively in the half-century before the
American Revolution, at rates more than twice the mainland average. Still
"Indian country" in 1730, by 1775 the backcountry was home to more than
a quarter of a million colonials, more than 20 percent of the South's popula-
tion and nearly a third of the whites. Such rapid growth would test the
coherence and unity of any society, but the migrant streams which fed that
rapid increase were especially diverse. Immigrants from the north of En-
gland, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany, most of whom entered the region
by way of Philadelphia (leading Turner to call the region a "new Pennsylva-
nia"^), were joined by migrants from the East, many of them third- or
fourth-generation Americans seeking the opportunity no longer found in
the tidewater. Many of the men who moved to the backcountry shared
aspirations, especially a determination to maintain their "independence" -
meaning that they and their dependents could live comfortably and securely
without relying on the good will of others — and to achieve "improvement"
by acquiring the capital and labor to develop their farms and by transform-
" Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: 1947), 68.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
292 Russell R. Menard
ing the backcountry in ways that would make it more like the societies of
the seaboard.'
8
However, broadly shared aspirations did not mean an ab-
sence of conflict or the general acceptance of the rule of those in power, and
political authority remained fragile at the eve of the Revolution.
Further, sharp regional differences quickly appeared in the structure of
backcountry society, differences in large part related to the date of Euro-
pean settlement and the degree of integration to the coast. New settle-
ments in the backcountry went through a process similar to that along the
tobacco coast. Opportunities attracted migrants who at first built a rela-
tively egalitarian (if poor) society that later witnessed rising wealth levels,
growing inequality, a contraction of opportunities as the region filled up,
and high rates of outmigration as residents, unable to achieve indepen-
dence, struck out for better prospects. These developments were often
accompanied by a noticeable economic reorientation as farmers, who had
initially concentrated on food production for home use and the local
market, gradually increased their wealth through the farm-making pro-
cess, acquired slaves, and began to ship livestock and livestock products,
tobacco, indigo, hemp, and grains overland and downriver to tidewater
ports for sale abroad. Coastal planters and merchants often encouraged
such reorientation as they invested in land, sent out their younger sons
with slaves to develop estates, extended credit, and built stores both to
purchase backcountry produce for export and to supply settlers tools,
clothing, and amenities. These processes led to considerable differentia-
tion within the region as the oldest parts of the backcountry were "im-
proved" and became more like the coast. In South Carolina on the eve of
the Revolution, for example, the inventories of decedents who lived near
the Fall Line were appraised at slightly more than about £300 sterling and
reported an average of six slaves; those who lived farther inland were worth
£150, with only two slaves per estate. Eventually, contemporaries ac-
knowledged the process by using the terms middlecountry and upcountry to
distinguish the two areas.
2
'
Perhaps the strongest evidence that the backcountry was a coherent
region comes from the regulator movements, the outbreaks of insurrectionary
violence that shook North and South Carolina in the 1760s and 1770s. In
18
See Jack P. Greene, "Independence, Improvement, and Authority: Towards a Framework for
Understanding the Histories of the Southern Backcountry during the Era of the American Revolu-
tion," in Ronald Hoffman, Thad W. Tate, and Peter J. Albert, eds., An Uncivil War: The Southern
Backcountry during the American Revolution (Charlottesville, VA, 198;), 3—36.
*» For the terminology, see Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in
the South Carolina Backcountry, 7760-1808 (Chapel Hill, 1990), 7.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Economic and Social Development of the South 293
part, the violence aimed to redress grievances against governments domi-
nated by tidewater planters and unresponsive to backcountry interests.
Complaints included inadequate representation, corruption in land policy
and local government, tax policies that favored the tidewater, and a lack of
concern with defense of the frontier, control of local criminals, and public
improvements, especially in transport. While the regulator movements
built solidarity and distinguished backcountry from tidewater, they also
served the interests of some settlers to "improve" the region, to hasten its
transformation by creating conditions important to the development of
plantation agriculture. Most regulator violence was directed not against
the coast but internally, against "vagrants" who were "little more than
white Indians," "back inhabitants who choose to live by the wandering
indolence of hunting than by the more honest and domestic employment
of planting."'
0
It was not simply that such people offended the sensibili-
ties of improving farmers. They also threatened security by stealing prop-
erty, taking livestock, and, especially, offering refuge to escaped slaves.
While the region remained frontier, such "vagrants" were of slight con-
cern, but as settlers flooded in, built farms, and aspired to plantation
agriculture, the "vagrants" had to be forced out so that the process of
"improvement" could proceed apace.
CONCLUSION
The economy of the several Souths grew impressively during the century
and a half of British colonial rule. While growth came at a high price to
Indians and Africans, its benefits were shared widely among white south-
erners, and a few big planters and merchants grew rich. Growth and the
prosperity it brought rested not simply on American resources but on the
ability to exploit opportunities within the framework provided by the Old
Empire, to take advantage of its markets, cheap manufactured goods,
protection, commercial services, and credit. Given the apparent material
benefits of membership in the Empire, why did colonists mount a resis-
tance to Great Britain after 1760 and then fight a long, costly war for
independence? The puzzle deepens when it is recalled that growth was
especially rapid in the quarter-century leading up to the Revolution, and
it deepens yet further when the short-term costs of independence are
*> For the quotations, see ibid., 51.
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294 Russell R. Menard
assessed. For the colonies as a whole, incomes fell sharply during the war
and recovery was slow: it was not until the first decade of the nineteenth
century that per capita incomes in the United States again reached the
level achieved in the colonies in 1774. The costs of independence were
especially high in the South. Southern per capita incomes, at or above the
"national" average in 1774, were perhaps one-third below that average in
1798, while the southern share of "national" exports fell from 63 percent
in ca. 1770 to 40—45 percent in the early 1790s. Colonists, and especially
the southern gentry, seem to have committed "econocide." Why?
One answer is that southerners were heavily indebted to British mer-
chants and saw the Revolution as an opportunity to escape those obliga-
tions. This line of reasoning implies that colonial prosperity was false and
achieved by mortgaging the future. While British credit helped to finance
the purchase of manufactures and slaves, and while some planters were
overextended and burdened by chronic indebtedness, for the South as a
whole, the size of the debt owed to foreign creditors was not excessive.
The average annual value of southern exports seems to have been larger
than that debt. Most planters were good risks, and the debt they carried
was modest given their incomes. Nor were southerners overly dependent
on Britain for investment capital: by the 1770s, the internal debt (loans
between southerners) dwarfed the external one, suggesting that the South
could finance continued growth out of its own resources. Southern prosper-
ity did not rest on mortgaged futures and planters who lived beyond their
means but on the productivity of its farms and plantations and especially
on its ability to produce crops much in demand elsewhere in the Atlantic
world.
Another answer is that economic concerns were unimportant to the
Revolutionary leadership, that the conflict turned on politics, especially
questions of liberty, representation, and self-government. That is a narrow
view of the movement, however. Economic developments provided the
means for independence and shaped the aspirations that gave colonists the
nerve to take the risks. Independence was thinkable in the 1770s because
growth in the colonial era had created an economy that could stand alone
and support a government able to hold its own against the great powers of
the day. Perhaps more important, economic progress filled colonists with
pride in their accomplishments and nurtured visions of a bountiful future.
Southerners were surrounded by evidence of their rise to "wealth and great-
ness" in the form of prosperous farms and big plantations, impressive
fortunes held by the gentry, great crops of tobacco, rice, and indigo, and the
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Economic and Social Development of the South 295
growth of population and of colonized territory. That evidence was pro-
jected into the future by southern gentlemen, eager for their "turn to figure
on the face of the earth, and in the annals of the world," whose aspirations
were shaped by visions of an American empire that would extend the
accomplishments of the colonial economy and the key institutions of an
emerging South — plantation agriculture, African slavery, and the develop-
ing planter class — into the next century and across the continent. 3
1
>• David Ramsey, The History of the American Revolution, 2 vols. (Trenton, NJ: 1811), II, 452.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
7
ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL
DEVELOPMENT OF THE BRITISH
WEST INDIES, FROM SETTLEMENT
TO ca. 1850
B. W. HIGMAN
In 1775, it was an open question whether Britain's colonies in the Carib-
bean would follow the thirteen continental colonies into independence.
The tropical colonies were integral elements in an economic system that
linked them with the North American mainland; to a large extent, they
shared common cultural and political traditions. As McCusker and
Menard comment, "The economies of the mainland and the islands were
so tightly intertwined that full understanding of development in one is
impossible without an appreciation of developments in the other."
1
At the
same time, the Caribbean colonies possessed characteristics that distin-
guished them from the English settlements to the north; it was these
features that determined their unique political and economic future.
The principal distinguishing characteristics of the British West Indian
colonial economy were its monocultural focus and dependence on external
trade, the dominance of large-scale plantations and involuntary labor sys-
tems, the drain of wealth associated with a high ratio of absentee propri-
etorship, and the role of the servile population in the internal market.
Why these features occurred in exaggerated form in the Caribbean rather
than in other regions of the Atlantic system is an important question for
debate. The British colonies in the Caribbean were subject to an imperial
policy common to all of that state's territories, and the colonizing stock of
"settlers" was essentially the same for all of the regions occupied by the
British before the middle of the seventeenth century, the formative stage
of settlement. Thus, the role of (imperial) cultural and political factors in
1
JohnJ. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, Tbt Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill:
1985), p. 145.
297
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
ATLANTIC OCEAN
Gulf of Mexico
» MARTINIQUE
< ST. LUCIA
> BARBADOS
C A R I B B E A N S E A
ST. VINCENT
'GRENADA
PACIFIC
OCEAN
The West Indies
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
British West Indies Economic and Social Development 299
engendering British West Indian distinctiveness is likely to have been
insignificant.
Two aspects of the physical environment were crucial: the fact that
almost all of the British colonies in the Caribbean were islands, and the
tropical climate which permitted the growth of certain crops. Islands were
particularly suited to development as export-oriented plantation econo-
mies because, with the available technologies of the early seventeenth
century, they presented great opportunities for occupation and territorial
control, and they minimized transportation costs by offering easy or direct
access to the sea. Thus, as Richard Sheridan has observed, the system was
articulated first on the small islands of the eastern Caribbean and later
applied to larger islands and mainland coastal and riverine areas.
2
Not only
were these small islands closer to Europe and Africa, reducing costs of
transportation and defense, but they also possessed high ratios of coastline
to land area, which enabled plantations to have direct or cheap access to
ocean-going ships. Thus, the early settled British sugar island of St. Kitts
had a ratio of 8.8 miles of coastline to every 10 square miles of area, Nevis
6.9, and Barbados 3.5. In St. Kitts and Nevis, the elongated plantations
were simply strung around the islands, each holding having a piece of the
coast and a slice of every possible ecological zone proceeding into the
interior. Jamaica, the largest of the British island-colonies, had only 1.1
miles of coastline per 10 square miles of area, but even this ratio was high
compared to any mainland area other than the Chesapeake.
The second critical environmental factor was the tropical climate of the
Caribbean. This made possible the efficient cultivation of tropical crops, for
which there was a significant demand on the European market. Sugar was
the most important of these crops and quickly came to dominate the land-
scape. The choice was important, because the technological requirements of
sugar making brought in their train a whole series of consequences.
The emphasis placed on these physical factors in the development of the
British West Indian economy is not meant to echo any crude form of
environmental determinism. Arguments of this type — purporting to ex-
plain the dependence on African slave labor by reference to the inability of
Europeans to perform manual work in the tropics - were popular elements
of the climatic theory of the plantation until about 1940. The more recent
historiography rightly has no place for such interpretations, but the fact
that the tropical Caribbean region was made up of fragmented, insular
• Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British Wat Indies, 1623-177}
(Barbados, 1974), p. 104.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
300 B. W. Higman
units rather than presenting a solid land mass to the European colonizing
class was surely significant. It permitted the development of a plantation
system in which the planter could operate in a highly independent fash-
ion, relying on long-distance trade rather than local markets and inputs,
creating a landscape in which the colonial town and merchant had only a
marginal place.
Although the analysis that follows in this essay is not intended as a
review of the historiography, emphasis will be placed on questions of
interpretation that have concerned historians of the British West Indian
economy. Most if not all of these questions have significance beyond the
region, so that the development of a Caribbean perspective must not be
seen as an indication of a creeping parochialism. In terms of theory, the
most influential has been the plantation economy model, designed to explain
the role of the plantation system in the Atlantic economy and the implica-
tions of that system for economic growth within the Caribbean. This
model draws on staple theory and, more particularly, ideas advanced by
Eric Williams in his seminal work, Capitalism and Slavery, first published
in 1944. Particular questions that can be linked with this set of concepts
concern the sources of capital for the plantation system, the "profitability"
of the colonies for the British Empire, the drain of wealth from the
colonies to Great Britain and the role of that capital in the Industrial
Revolution, the failure of industrialization in the colonies themselves, and
the causes of slavery and abolition.
Questions more obviously internal to the history of the region, many of
which have emerged from discussion of the larger issues, include the
reasons for the negative rate of natural increase in the West Indian slave
population (often compared to the rapid natural growth experienced in
North America); the structure and significance of the domestic economy;
the extent of internal economic diversification and of regional variations;
the role of trade with non-British imperial territories within the Carib-
bean; the chronology of plantation profitability and the decline of the
British West Indies; the significance of absentee proprietorship for social
and economic development; the variety of systems of labor domination
after emancipation; and the relationship between the free peasantry and
the protopeasantry of the slave period. It is issues such as these that have in
recent times provoked substantial debate within the historiography of the
British West Indies, emphasizing as they do the equal significance of local
perspectives and events with those broader structures and external events
that made the region an integral part of the Atlantic world economy.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
British West Indies Economic and Social Development 301
SUGAR AND SLAVERY
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION
Spanish colonization of the Americas had its beginnings in the Caribbean,
but the focus of settlement was the larger western islands that provided
springboards to the mainland and the treasure of Mexico and Peru (see
map on page 298). The streams of precious metals passed through the
islands on their way to the coffers of the King of Spain, placing immense
temptation in the way of his European rivals. Contact with the Spanish
reduced the indigenous populations of the Greater Antilles to a mere
remnant by the middle of the sixteenth century through deliberate geno-
cide, disease, and hard labor. The French and later the English took
advantage of the hundreds of islands and thousands of miles of sparsely
occupied coastline to engage in illicit trade with the Spanish settlements
and to raid and plunder these and the precious metals fleets themselves.
English ventures to the Caribbean began with John Hawkins in the
1560s, but it was not until the outbreak of war between England and
Spain in 1585 that privateers entered the region in numbers. Privateering,
which gave way to piracy in the seventeenth century, was an important
source of the capital required for initial settlement and the source of the
swashbuckling, risky image of the tropical plantation economies that was
to stick fast very much longer.
When the English moved from plunder to settlement in the 1620s,
they established themselves in the eastern Caribbean islands of St. Kitts,
Nevis, and Barbados, far from the securely fortified western bases of the
Spanish. By that time, English as well as French and Dutch marauders had
demonstrated the vulnerability of the outlying possessions, and the Span-
ish had shown themselves unwilling to commit resources to the retention
of islands that appeared both unproductive and costly to control. For the
private colonizing parties of the English, the first settled islands held the
attractions of fertile soils suited to tobacco cultivation, safe harbors, and
small Amerindian populations. Antigua and Montserrat were soon added
(Table 7.1). Small-scale agricultural economies were created, based largely
on tobacco cultivation and the labor of indentured white servants and
Amerindian and African slaves. Such fragile settlements were naturally the
subject of European rivalry
The Sugar Revolution, felt first in Barbados in the 1640s, transformed
the settlers' expectations of profit and led to the addition of the relatively
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Table 7.1. Population! of Ox British West Indian colonies, 1750 and IH10
Colony
Barbados
St. Kitts
Nevis
Antigua
Montserrat
Virgin Islands
Jamaica
Dominica
St. Lucia
St. Vincent
Grenada
Tobago
Trinidad
British Guiana
British Honduras
Cayman Islands
Bahamas
Anguilla
Barbuda
Year of British
Colonization
1627
1625
1628
1632
1632
1672
1655
1763
1803
1763
1763
1763
1797
1803
1670
1734
1648
1650
1685
Area (square
miles)
166
65
36
108
39
59
4,411
305
233
150
133
114
1.864
83.000
8.867
100
5.548
35
62
Slaves
63,410
21.782
8.299
31.123
8,767
6,062
127,881
5,769
9,764
7,184
12,000
3,082
310
7,987
114
100
1,145
1,962
150
316,891
Population
Whites
16,772
2,783
1,118
3,435
1,430
1,184
12,000
1,718
2.524
2.104
1,285
238
126
726
50
70
1,268
350
40
49,221
1750
Free colored
235
109
81
305
86
59
2.119
300
506
230
455
82
295
65
6

76
38

5,047
Total
80,417
24.674
9,498
34,863
10,283
7.305
142,000
7,787
12,794
9,518
13,740
3,402
731
8,778
170
170
2,489
2,350
190
371,159
Slaves
82,026
19,094
9,194
29,600
6,300
5,148
319,074
14,706
13,395
23,100
23,884
12,551
22,757
88,665
1,898
1,000
9,503
2,600
500
684,995
Population
Whites
14,812
1,498
453
1,887
353
603
18,903
703
1,012
1,400
710
453
3,323
3,701
302
350
5,007
300
3
55,773
1830
Free colored
5,312
2,808
1,403
5,513
847
1,699
40,073
3,591
3,993
3,500
3,806
1,146
15,985
8,234
2.000
150
2,520
400

102,980
Total
102,150
23,400
11,050
37,000
7.500
7,450
378,050
19,000
18,400
28,000
28,400
14,150
42,065
100,600
4.200
1,500
17,030
3,300
503
843,748
Sources: B. W. Higman, Slave Populations oftbt British Caritbtan. 1807-18)4 (Baltimore, 1984), 41; Stanley L. Engerman and B. W.
Higman, "The Demographic Structure of the Caribbean Slave Societies in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," in Franklin W.
Knight, ed., UNESCO Cmtral History oftbt Caribbean, Vol. Ill (in press).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
British West Indies Economic and Social Development 303
large island of Jamaica to the English colonies in 1655. Throughout the
seventeenth century, however, the wealth to be gained by piracy and
plunder rivaled that offered by sugar planting, and Jamaica moved only
gradually from a mercantile to a plantation economy. The capture of
Jamaica from the Spanish was unusual in being a state venture, an unin-
tended result of Oliver Cromwell's "Western Design," which was really
meant to take Cuba or Hispaniola and to displace the Dutch.
In the second phase of British settlement, during the 1760s, the state
became the instigator. All of the Caribbean islands added to the Empire in
that decade were "conquered" colonies, acquired through European trea-
ties rather than being taken directly from indigenous peoples. Dominica,
St. Vincent, Tobago, Grenada, and the Grenadines were ceded to Britain
under the Peace of Paris, concluded in 1763, but did not remain secure as
British territory. Tobago was occupied by the French between 1780 and
1803, and Dominica between 1778 and 1784. All of the islands in this
group were relatively small, adding only 700 square miles to the British
Empire, compared to the 10,000 square miles acquired in the seventeenth
century.
This second phase of British expansion occurred during what Richard
Pares termed the silver age of sugar (in contrast to the short-lived golden age
of the 1640s). During this "era of West Indian prosperity," stretching
from 1750 to 1775, according to Richard Sheridan, metropolitan sugar
prices remained high, and British settlement quickly changed the diversi-
fied agricultural economies of the ceded islands into sugar monocultures.
3
The minor export staples — cacao, coffee, and cotton — were not com-
pletely abandoned, however, because the wet and mountainous environ-
ments of the islands prevented a transformation as total as that seen in
Barbados and the Leeward Islands.
The third and final phase of British expansion in the Caribbean saw
Trinidad taken from the Spanish in 1797, St. Lucia from the French in
1803,
a n
d Demerara, Essequibo, and Berbice (which came to be called
collectively British Guiana and, later, Guyana) taken from the Dutch in the
same year. Trinidad and St. Lucia were, like the ceded islands, latecomers to
the Sugar Revolution. The British continued the trend toward sugar cultiva-
tion, but once again the physical environments of the islands prevented the
emergence of full-scale monocultures. The mainland colonies of Guyana
became a focus for planters in the long-settled British islands, many of
3
Richard Pares, Merchants and Planters, Economic History Review Supplement 4 (Cambridge, i 960),
p. 40; Richard Sheridan, An Era of Wat Indian Prosperity, 1750-177} (Barbados, 1970).
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304 B. W. Higman
whom moved their slaves to plantations on the rich coastal soils. For a brief
period, these colonies became the largest producers of cotton and coffee in
the British Empire, but they were forced to retreat as sugar was promoted
and United States cotton came to dominate the market. The total land area
added to the Empire in this final phase was large (Table 7.1), but the
effective area of settlement was limited to the coastal and riverine zones of
Guyana, making the gross amount misleading.
In terms of territorial extent, the British Empire in the Caribbean was a
constantly expanding entity with regular increments to its resource base
and potential for production. Thus, there was always the possibility of
increasing output by bringing new lands into cultivation as well as by
improving factor productivity. This potential was closed off only in the
early nineteenth century, and even then several of the newly acquired
colonies contained within them a significant open frontier.
Another important feature of the pattern of British territorial expansion
in the Caribbean is that it reflected the fragmented, insular character of
the region as a whole. Spain's colonies came to be confined to the larger
islands of the western Caribbean, but for the British as well as the French
and Dutch, there was a dispersion and interdigitation of colonial posses-
sions that served to exaggerate the insular nature of the settlements and
their separate political and economic relations, and, simultaneously, to
facilitate trade and communication with the colonies of other empires
whether or not this was permitted by law. These aspects of colonization
were particularly important for the British, because their colonies were the
most widely scattered within the Caribbean.
Of great significance for the British West Indian economy was the
diversity of land types and resource bases contained within the Empire's
possessions. Not only did the colonies differ in size, shape, and location;
they also varied in topography, soils, and climate. Some were flat, never
rising above 200 feet. This was true of the Bahamas, Anguilla, Barbuda,
and the Cayman Islands, none of which produced sugar or depended on
the plantation system. It was also true of the coastal settlements of British
Honduras (Belize) and Guyana, the latter supporting one of the most
complete plantation regimes. The low-lying islands were made up of
shallow limestone banks and coral reefs, with thin soils, light rainfall, and
frequent droughts. The other island colonies belonged to partially sub-
merged mountain systems and tended to be relatively rugged, while
Barbados was composed of coral terraces resting on a submarine ridge and
hence displayed a more gentle topography. Especially in the larger islands,
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British West Indies Economic and Social Development 305
such as Jamaica, the internal variety of topography, soil, and climate was
great.
POPULATION AND LABOR
The population history of the British West Indies until 1850 was a prod-
uct of the plantation system's demand for labor. In the initial stages of
settlement, before the Sugar Revolution, it seemed the islands might
follow the same course as the mainland colonies. The Sugar Revolution
dramatically altered that trajectory, creating a population dominated by
African slaves, in which the white component declined persistently and
the mixed or "coloured" sector grew. Both the African and the white
populations depended on immigration to sustain their numbers — forced
migration through the Atlantic slave trade in the case of the Africans, and
a mixture of voluntary and involuntary movements in the case of the
whites.
Only in the later phases of British expansion in the Caribbean did
colonization begin with a substantial existing population. The small Amer-
indian communities of the Leeward Islands were sometimes enslaved but
were more often the subject of genocide. One reason why Barbados was so
attractive to the English was that it was uninhabited at the time of
settlement. The Amerindian population of Jamaica had been almost com-
pletely destroyed as a result of the encounter with the Spanish, and the
smallness of the slave and free population facilitated the island's capture by
the English. Amerindians made up larger proportions of the populations
found in the Windward Islands, Trinidad, and Guyana, but in no case did
they have a significant impact on the overall pattern of growth. On the
other hand, the established French, Dutch, and Spanish settler popula-
tions of the colonies acquired late by the British, and more importantly
their slave populations, provided a substantial base and tended to be more
influential culturally.
British territorial expansion in the Caribbean did not mean an increas-
ing share of the region's population or of that of the British Empire in the
Americas. Rather, the British West Indian population reached an early
peak on these indicators and experienced a steady relative decline from
about 1700. The islands did have a larger population than the mainland
colonies until the 1660s but then quickly slipped behind; by 1775, the
colonies that joined the Revolution had more than four times as many
people (2,204,500 according to Robert Wells) as the British West.Indies
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306 B. W. Higman
(483,00c).
4
This disparity is not surprising in view of the difference in the
available land area; it is the initial dominance of the tropical island colo-
nies that requires explanation.
Further contrasts of significance appear when the components of the
populations are considered. The most obvious, something very apparent to
contemporary observers, was the relative importance of blacks and whites.
In 1670, when the mainland settlements first outstripped the islands,
already had twice as many whites yet the islands had more than ten times the
number of blacks, almost all of them slaves. It was not until the time of the
American Revolution that the slave population of the mainland (460,000
according to John McCusker) exceeded that of the islands (434,000).'
Thereafter, the gap widened dramatically. The slave population of the
British West Indies failed to achieve a positive natural increase and de-
pended for continued growth on the Atlantic slave trade, which was closed
by the British in 1808. The slave population of the mainland, on the other
hand, grew rapidly through natural increase and relied relatively little on
imports. Once again, this contrast struck contemporaries forcibly and de-
mands analysis.
In both the island and mainland colonies, the ratio of blacks to whites
increased steadily between 1620 and 1770, but the ratio on the mainland
in 1770 (0.27) was barely above that found on the islands as early as 1640.
In the sugar colonies, however, the ratio jumped to 1.2 by 1670, 5.0 in
1720, 10.2 in 1780, and 12.5 in 1830 immediately before emancipa-
tion.
6
Even within the Caribbean, the British colonies exhibited a rela-
tively high blackrwhite ratio; only the French settlements approached
similar levels.
Why did black slavery become such a dominant feature of the British
West Indian labor force? Contemporary whites explained this develop-
ment in simple racial terms, referring to the inability of the white man to
perform manual labor in a tropical climate and, on the other hand, the
natural place of the black in such an environment. The English in the
West Indies, much more than the Spanish and even the French, saw the
islands as sites of production rather than colonies of settlement. In conse-
quence, they became absentee proprietors as soon as their plantation prof-
its could support them at home, thus escaping the debilitating diseases of
the tropics and fulfilling ambitions of elevated status in English society.
< Robert V. Wells, The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of Census Data
(Princeton, 1975), p. 284.
' John J. McCusker, Rum and the American Revolution: The Rum Trade and the Balance of Payments of the
Thirteen Continental Colonies (New York, 1989), 384, 712.
6
B. W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 7807-1834 (Baltimore, 1984), 77, 112.
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British West Indies Economic and Social Development 307
They played for high stakes, hoping to make their fortunes quicker than
death could catch them in this high-risk disease environment. By concen-
trating on the production of sugar, the crop with the greatest returns to
investment, and employing large gangs of black slave labor working under
a small corps of white supervisors, a high proportion of planters in the
British West Indies managed to achieve their long-term goals and become
absentees within a generation or so.
Absentee proprietorship tended to be most common in colonies with
the heaviest focus on sugar. The exception was Barbados, which retained a
significant residential planter class throughout the period of slavery. In
1830, for example, whites still made up 14.5 percent of the population of
Barbados, compared to less than 5.0 percent in almost all of the other
British sugar colonies. This pattern reflected the relatively small scale of
the sugar plantations of Barbados. Wherever sugar was produced on really
large units (of more than 1,000 acres or 250 slaves), absentee ownership
had become the norm by the late eighteenth century. At the time of
emancipation, more than half of the slaves of Jamaica belonged to absen-
tees. Only in the marginal, nonsugar colonies, such as the Bahamas and
the Cayman Islands, did whites amount to more than 20 percent of the
population, and these islands contained no more than a minute proportion
of the total British West Indian population.
Modern explanations for the dominance of black slavery in the British
West Indies generally draw on large-scale theories applicable to all regions
of the Americas. An argument particularly associated with Evsey Domar
in its modern version contends that slavery and other forms of involuntary
labor tend to occur in areas with low population densities or "open re-
sources."
7
In places such as Barbados, according to this model, entrepre-
neurs wishing to produce a high-value product like sugar needed to make
a large investment in land and processing plant and, therefore, had to
secure large labor forces in order to ensure continuity of output and
profits. Free persons were too easily able to obtain land of their own in
Barbados, or in other parts of the seventeenth-century Caribbean and
North American mainland, to supply dependable and productive wage
labor on sugar plantations.
Barbados and most of the other Caribbean territories colonized by the
British in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had no significant
indigenous populations by that time; hence, population density was in-
deed low, and all labor had to be imported. It is clear, however, that
7
Evsey D. Domar, "The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis," Journal of Economic History 30
(1970), 18-32.
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308 B. W. Higman
population density by itself cannot account for the central role of involun-
tary labor in the British West Indies. The existence of a capitalist entre-
preneurial class, determined to make fortunes without themselves per-
forming manual labor, was equally essential. The population-density theory
in its simple form may also be challenged on the grounds that it cannot
say why slaves came to be preferred over indentured servants - a transi-
tion that occurred in Barbados as a consequence of the sugar revolution
of the 1640s — or why blacks were enslaved while whites were inden-
tured. Once the system had been firmly established, these questions
could be answered with a sense of inevitability, and the system could
easily spread to new areas which lacked the originating variables. But it
was in the Caribbean and, most fundamentally for the British, in Barba-
dos that the decisions were first made. There was nothing inevitable
about that genesis. Models existed in Brazil and the Atlantic Islands, but
the association of sugar and slavery was cemented in Barbados and the
other British West Indian colonies. The planters or protoplanters of
Barbados have been conceived as rational profit maximizers, who shifted
from white indentured servants to black slaves because the marginal
revenues derivable from slave labor came to be larger.
8
This shift had to
do with changes on the supply side, in Great Britain and Africa, and the
advantages to the planter of having a slave's labor for life as well as the
labor of his/her children, contrasted to the limited labor periods of
indenture. As long as the white servants remained under indenture, it
has been argued, their conditions of labor and standards of living were
very similar to those experienced by black slaves, and their labor time
had a capital value that was equally transferable. At the same time, all of
the decisions underlying these conditions and transitions were taken
within the context of a deep-seated racism that, at the very least, pro-
vided ideological rationalizations for behavior that appeared to conform
with economic rationality on the planter's part.
Once established, the slave system of the British West Indies proved a
voracious consumer of black people. If the planters saw profit in the
offspring of the slaves, they also saw disadvantages in having pregnant and
nursing women in their field gangs, and they chose to "buy rather than
8
Hilary McD. Beckles and Andrew Downes, "An Economic Formalisation of the Origins of Black
Slavery in the British West Indies, 1624—164;," Social and Economic Studies 34 (198;), 1—24; Hilary
McD. Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 1627-1715 (Knoxville, 1989); David
W. Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (Cambridge, 1981); and
Russell R. Menard, "From Servants to Slaves: The Transformation of the Chesapeake Labor Force,"
Southern Studies 16 (1973), 333- 90.
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British West Indies Economic and Social Development 309
breed." There is debate among scholars regarding the relative importance
of fertility and mortality in this general failure of the West Indian slave
population to grow by natural increase. What is certain is that there was a
very strong association between sugar production on large-scale planta-
tions and the decline of the slave population. Only in the case of Barbados
did a positive natural increase occur, before the abolition of the British
Atlantic slave trade in 1808. Where crops other than sugar were grown,
particularly in the nonplantation colonies, there was, however, quite rapid
growth through natural increase. This contrast seems to have little to do
with differences in the natural environment or the disease environment in
which the slaves lived. Nutritional deficiencies played a part, as can be
seen in the relatively short stature of the slaves in the sugar colonies, but it
was the environment of labor in gangs, under brutal management, to-
gether with unusually long hours of work in factory as well as field, that
best explains the demographic crisis.
9
The failure of natural increase was accompanied by very large imports of
Africans into the British West Indian colonies. Over the whole history of
the Atlantic slave trade, according to the estimates of Philip Curtin, the
British West Indies (excluding Guyana) imported 1,657,000 slaves, or
17.3 percent of the total inflow into the Americas. By comparison, the
territories of the United States received only 4.5 percent of the total,
reflecting a very different demand and experience of growth by natural
increase. Of the British West Indian colonies, the largest receiver was
Jamaica, with 748,000 slaves imported, and a slave population of just
354,000 in 1808 at the end of the Atlantic trade. Barbados took 387,000,
and the Leeward Islands 346,000. Territories settled by the British at the
end of the eighteenth century saw high levels of imports in the short-term
but did not experience the sustained inflows typical of the older colo-
nies. f° Some of the British territories, especially Jamaica, engaged in a
reexport trade, sending slaves to nearby Spanish Caribbean colonies.
Whites in the British West Indies also experienced relatively high
mortality rates, so high that Richard Dunn has called the region a demo-
graphic disaster area.' * This experience was a spur to absentee proprietor-
ship, and it also contributed to the emigration and resettlement of some
' Higman, Slave Populations, 280- 378.
'° Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, 1969), 88—9; Stanley L. Engerman
and B. W. Higman, "The Demographic Structure of the Caribbean Slave Societies in the Eigh-
teenth and Nineteenth Centuries," in Franklin W. Knight, ed., UNESCO General History of the
Caribbean, Vol. Ill (forthcoming).
" RichardS. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713
(Chapel Hill, 1972), 334.
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310 B. W. Higman
English colonizers and time-expired indentured servants. Most of the
latter moved to the mainland colonies of North America, remaining
within the British imperial system. Occasionally, planters forced their
slaves and servants to move with them, as in the well-known migration
from Barbados to South Carolina in the second half of the seventeenth
century. There was also a steady stream of movement from the older sugar
colonies and the nonplantation colonies to the newly settled British territo-
ries within the Caribbean, continuing to the time of emancipation. Very
often this meant removal from relatively healthy locations to sites of
intense plantation production and high mortality. For the white popula-
tion, migration within the Atlantic world led to a complex network of
kinship and communication that contributed to the development of in-
terregional trade and placed the tropical and temperate colonies of the
British in reciprocal economic dependence within the larger framework of
mercantilism. In many respects, this was an experience denied the black
slave population, tied as they were to their owners' plantations.
Settlement patterns within the British West Indian colonies during
slavery were fairly simple. More than 90 percent of the population was
rural; the majority lived in large plantation units, each with its own
community identity and clearly defined boundaries. The slaves typically
lived in "villages" of 30 to 70 huts or houses (hardly ever in barracks)
located close to the sugar factory and the "great house" of the owner or
overseer. These plantation domains dominated the landscape. Interspersed
were smallholders' farms with their own minor population nucleations. In
the larger territories, such as Jamaica and Guyana, Maroons lived in
separate, isolated communities in the interior, on lands granted by treaty
following successful guerrilla warfare by slave bands. Almost all of the
true towns of the colonies were also ports, strung along the coastlines of
the islands. The largest of these towns, Kingston in Jamaica, had a total
population of about 35,000 in 1810, and the concentration of slaves in
towns was in feet significantly greater in the West Indies than in the
United States at that time.
12
PLANTATION ECONOMY
Just as there was nothing inevitable about the centrality of black slavery in
the labor force of the British West Indian colonies, so the commanding
role of sugar and the plantation was by no means foreordained. Arguments
11
Higman, Slave Populations, 93—4.
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British West Indies Economic and Social Development 311
advanced to account for these patterns of economic organization often see
sugar, slavery, and the plantation as a trinity, indivisible and essentially
determined by the production function of sugar associated with a particu-
lar stage of technological development. This can be regarded as a variety of
crop determinism, more sophisticated than earlier determinist models
based on climate or race but still reductionist in effect if not in intent.
Sugar cane requires intensive cultivation. In the seventeenth century,
this meant hand hoeing and digging of cane holes in preparation for
planting; regular weeding during the growing phase; and heavy labor in
the cutting of canes during a harvest or "crop" season, often extending
over half the year. More important than these requirements was the fact
that the milling (grinding) of sugar cane should take place within 48
hours of harvest in order to obtain satisfactory returns of juice. The
milling machinery used in the West Indies in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries was relatively advanced; it used animal, wind, or water
power, dependent on expensive aqueducts, mill towers, or herds of live-
stock. The boiling and curing processes also required heavy capital invest-
ment in buildings and machinery, and additional resources were needed if
rum was to be distilled as a part of the enterprise.
Cane could be grown by smallholders, using their own labor, and it is
indeed grown this way to some extent in many parts of the tropical world
today. As long as sugar mills remained small-scale, however, the cane
farmer could sell to competing mills in a region, merely having to weigh the
cost of cartage. No miller could dominate an entire region in the way that
modern central sugar mills can do. Further, the smallholder could in turn
choose to produce alternate crops, such as tobacco or cotton, in response to
short-term changes in market conditions. Thus, the seventeenth-century
sugar miller, having invested in expensive capital equipment, was deter-
mined to maximize returns by ensuring a constant supply of cane and, in
order to achieve this goal, sought to monopolize ownership of land immedi-
ately surrounding the mill site to an extent sufficient to cultivate cane equal
to the annual capacity of the mill. The outcome was that millers came also to
be planters, controlling large estates. The demands of intensive cultivation
and harvest operations meant, in turn, the need for a large labor force,
committed to labor on the planter's property. The planter's solution was
black slavery, which involved the most total control of people as workers.
The high demand for sugar in Europe, and the consequent high price for the
commodity, created large profits and confirmed for the planter-miller the
correctness of his choice.
The 1640s, the primary decade of the Sugar Revolution, saw a great
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312 B. W. Higman
deal of experimentation. Different types of labor arrangements were tried,
as were different methods of relating cane cultivation to sugar processing,
and different technologies in field and factory. There was also experimenta-
tion with alternative crops. Sugar emerged as champion because of the
high returns it offered to investment; once this choice had been made by
the potential nonlaboring, protocapitalist class, the plantation economy
emerged as the most profitable solution within the constraints of contem-
porary technology and allowable systems of exploiting the labor of speci-
fied groups of human beings. All of these decisions were embedded in
seventeenth-century European economic ideology and moral philosophy.
It must be emphasized also that the English were not required to be the
original creators of this system. They manipulated models of plantation
economy and technology that had been already established in Brazil and
carried to the West Indies by Dutch traders, who also provided slaves and
credit to enable the English planters to establish plantations on a grand
scale.''
Once the sugar-slavery-plantation system had been firmly established in
Barbados and the Leeward Islands, it was rapidly diffused to other English
West Indian colonies and replicated in detail. Some scholars have argued
that the technology remained fixed until the time of emancipation and
that slavery was incompatible with invention and innovation. It is also
argued by some that absenteeism made the planters poorly informed man-
agers of their properties and reluctant innovators. Recent research has
largely rejected this view. In fact, there is evidence of significant innova-
tion in cultivation techniques during the eighteenth century and a willing-
ness to accept new high-yield cane varieties. Numerous inventions were
patented in the islands for improved milling and processing machinery,
and Jamaica was the site of the first industrial application of steam power
to any manufacturing process, in 1768. Boulton and Watt found a substan-
tial market for their steam engines, particularly in Jamaica and the new
sugar colonies of the British Caribbean.
I4
•> Robert Cartyle Batie, "Why Sugar? Economic Cycles and the Changing of Staples on the English
and French Antilles, 1624- 54, " journal of Caribbean History 8 (1976), 1-41; Jonathan I. Israel,
Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585-1740 (Oxford, 1989), 236- 7; P. C. Emmer, "The Dutch and
the Making of the Second Atlantic System," in Barbara L. Solow, ed., Slavery and the Rise of the
Atlantic System (Cambridge, 1991), 75— 96.
•« J. H. Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from Its Origins to 1914 (Cam-
bridge, 1989), 134- 42; Noel Deerr and Alexander Brooks, "The Early Use of Steam Power in the
Cane Sugar Industry," Transactions of the Newcomen Society 21 (1940-1), 11- 21; B. W. Higman,
Jamaica Surveyed: Plantation Maps and Plans of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Kingston,
1988), m - 5 8 ; Veront M. Satcheli, Technological Change and the Jamaican Sugar Industry, 1750-
1830 (unpublished Ph. D. dissertation. University of the West Indies, Mona, 1994).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
British West Indies Economic and Social Development 313
The plantation itself was only the most fundamental unit in a much
larger system, called by some the plantation complex, which was in turn an
essential element in the Atlantic world economy.
15
The distinguishing
characteristics of the plantation economy model were export-orientation,
monoculture, and large-scale production units. This model, articulated by
West Indian political economists in the 1960s, has since come to be seen
as too rigid to represent accurately the historical experience of the re-
gion.
l 6
In the first place, there were breaches in the system resulting from
slave resistance and accommodation, from diversity in the resource base,
and from changes in the political and commercial regulation of the colo-
nies. To some extent, it may be argued that the significance of these
breaches depends on the perspective taken. From a metropolitan point of
view, they did not always appear to upset seriously the system as a whole.
From the vantage point of the Caribbean, and particularly from the per-
spective of the slave community, the breaches were important in indicat-
ing the creation of a "dual" or "creole economy," which challenged the
basic assumptions of the planter class about the distribution of power and
affirmed the cultural creativity and economic productivity of the Africans
and the "lesser whites."
17
Plantation land-use patterns varied according to topography. Where the
whole of a plantation's land area consisted of soils suited to cane
cultivation - as was commonly the case in, for example, Barbados - other
crops were given little space. Some land was used for pasture, to feed the
animals used in traction, and food crops for consumption by the slaves were
intercropped with cane. Overall, plantations of this type fitted very closely
the plantation economy model of monoculture and export-orientation, de-
pending heavily on external sources for many of their inputs - food, live-
stock, and timber, in particular. Elsewhere, and most obviously in the case
of Jamaica, the plantations were normally much larger (1,000 acres com-
pared to 200 in Barbados) and contained within their boundaries a variety of
•» Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge,
1990).
16
Lloyd Best, "Outlines of a Model of Pure Plantation Economy," Social and Economic Studies 17
(1968), 283- 326; George L. Beckfbrd, Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of
the Third World (New York, 1972); Hilary McD. Beckles, " The Williams Effect': Eric Williams's
Capitalism and Slavery and the Growth of West Indian Political Economy," in Barbara L. Solow and
Stanley L. Engerman, eds., British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams
(Cambridge, 1987); Alex Dupuy, "Slavery and Underdevelopmcnt in the Caribbean: A Critique of
the 'Plantation Economy' Perspective," Dialectical Anthropology, 7 (1983), 237- 51.
•' Richard B. Sheridan, "From Chattel to Wage Slavery in Jamaica, 1740-1860, " Slavery and Abolition
14(1993), iy,EdmidBmtlnniK,TheDevelopmentof Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770—2820 (Oxford,
1971), 80-95.
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314
B
- W- Higman
soils and topographic zones. This variety meant that even where, say, 300
acres were planted in cane, a large proportion of the space could be retained
in woodland (to supply fuel, lumber for building and furniture, and staves
for the sugar casks, for example), pasture (to raise and maintain livestock),
and most importantly "provision grounds" (for the slaves' cultivation of
food crops for their own use). The diversity of land types in Jamaica also
meant that plantations could combine other export staples (such as coffee,
cotton, indigo, and pimento) with sugar production, and that plantations
specializing in different crops could be found in different regions of the
island, creating the potential for an internal trade between plantation units.
Extensive areas of Jamaica were devoted to livestock raising on properties
known as pens, and these played a vital role in the internal trade of the
island.
l8
Between the extremes of Jamaica and Barbados, the other British
West Indian sugar colonies showed a range of variety in their mix of crops,
while the nonsugar colonies concentrated on items such as logwood, mahog-
any, cotton, and salt, all for export, and food crops for local consumption.
It was the provision-ground system that did most to transform the char-
acter of plantation economy, since it provided a strictly domestic orienta-
tion and must be seen as the joint creation of the slave and slaveowning
classes. This system emerged early in Jamaica and came to be common in
many other colonies where the resource base was conducive. Its ultimate
origin can be found in the planters' desire to reduce expenditure both on
imported food supplies for their slaves and on the alternative method of
producing food by the slave mode of supervised gang labor. Where lands
existed that were unsuited to sugar cultivation, or in excess of the factory's
ability to process, the planters allocated plots to the slaves and forced them
to cultivate their own food crops. The planters also allocated small areas
around the slaves' huts to be used as gardens. Although this provision-
ground system meant that the slaves had to work longer hours than where
rationed allowances were provided, the system had attractions that made
most slaves willing participants. Above all, it provided the potential for
choice. The slaves could decide what to plant and when, how to cultivate,
when and what to harvest, whether to consume or market the produce,
with whom to share, and how to use the proceeds of sales and exchange.
The system also provided a temporary escape from the regimentation of
gang labor, the whip of the driver, and the routine of the factory. It offered
18
B. W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807—1834 (Cambridge, 1976); Verene A.
Shepherd, "Livestock and Sugar: Aspects of Jamaica's Agricultural Development from the Late
Seventeenth to the Early Nineteenth Century," Historical Journal 34 (1991), 627- 43.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
British West Indies Economic and Social Development 315
opportunities for marketing, accumulation, and the acquisition of con-
sumption goods, including imported items.?
9
It is less certain that the
system served to improve nutrition, and the reverse may be true. But there
is no doubt that the provision-ground system, together with the diversity
of plantation production, created an economic landscape which from many
points of view was not composed of an unbroken blanket of sugar cane.
PRODUCTION AND TRADE
Throughout the period of slavery, British West Indian production was
measured by the planters and imperial government almost exclusively in
terms of the quantities of sugar shipped by the colonies. The profitability
of plantation enterprise and of empire were measured in the same way.
From the colonial perspective, however, the slave community must have
thought more of variations in the productivity of their provision grounds,
their most immediate source of sustenance, and the prices which their
produce could command in the local markets. Drought and hunger
walked hand in hand, and the price of sugar in the London market meant
relatively little for the everyday living standard of the slave. The free
colored people and the lesser whites often shared this domestic orienta-
tion, though the markets for their goods and services tended to depend
more directly on what was happening in the sugar sector.
Attempts to quantify the output and productivity of the different sec-
tors of the British West Indian economy are constrained by the state's
limited conception of the kinds of data that should be collected. Even in
the case of sugar, statistics are available for exports but not for total
production, because data were collected only where goods entered the net
of the customs house. The same applied to rum, coffee, the other export
staples, and all perishable products which were not exportable with exist-
ing technology. Thus, the extent to which an accurate picture of total
output can be constructed depends on the ratio of exports to production
for each item.
West Indian slaves were surrounded by vast storehouses of energy, the
cane fields, yet they were permitted to consume only a small proportion
of that bounty. In general, less than 2 percent of the sugar produced was
sold within the colonies, to local merchants and planters, and an even
'» Sidney W. Mintz and Douglas Hall, The Origins of the Jamaican Internal Marketing System," Yale
University Publications in Anthropology, No. 37 (i960); Sidney W. Mintz, "Caribbean Marketplaces and
Caribbean History," Nona Americana 1 (1978), 333- 44; Higman, Slave Populations, 204- 18.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
316 B. W. Higman
smaller proportion was consumed by the producers. The byproduct mo-
lasses was also largely directed toward the export market. Rum, on the
other hand, was consumed heavily by the colonial population.
20
It was
used to lubricate the internal market, covering local costs wherever
possible. The other export staples - coffee, cotton, indigo, pimento,
cacao, logwood, mahogany - all had very high export:output ratios, so it
is only for rum that the external trade data provide a truly inadequate
measure of production. For the products directed entirely at the local
market, the data are uniformly problematic.
From the 1640s to the time of emancipation, sugar steadily increased
its share of output and trade. The minor staples were driven out, surviving
successfully only in the late-settled colonies, such as Dominica and Gre-
nada, and in ecological zones unsuited to sugar, such as the Blue Moun-
tain coffee region of Jamaica. By 1830, sugar and its byproducts molasses
and rum accounted for 97 to 98 percent of the value of exports from
Barbados and the Leeward Islands, and 90 percent for Trinidad. For
Jamaica, they composed only 72 percent of total exports, and for most of
the late-settled colonies an even smaller proportion.
Seventeenth-century trade data for the British West Indies are fragmen-
tary. Sugar exports from Barbados increased rapidly from about 3,750 tons
in 1651 to 9,525 tons in 1669, in which year the Leeward Islands ex-
ported only 1,679
t o n s afl
d Jamaica 500 tons. From 1698 to 1834, the
data are much more complete.
21
Trends for a sample of colonies are shown
in Figure 7.1. Barbados had by 1698 already increased its exports to more
than 13,000 tons, but this proved to be a peak followed by stagnation and
absolute decline into the 1770s. Minor troughs in the graph indicate
short-term difficulties, such as droughts and hurricanes, but the longer-
term decline is generally attributed to soil exhaustion and a failure to
innovate. Barbados experienced something of a revival in the late eigh-
teenth century, however, characterized by improved methods of cultiva-
tion, adoption of new cane varieties, and better factory technologies. By
1834, exports reached almost 20,000 tons. Jamaica, on the other hand,
showed steady and almost uninterrupted growth in the eighteenth cen-
tury. It had surpassed Barbados by 1730 and the Leeward Islands group by
" B. W. Higman, "Jamaican Port Towns in the Early Nineteenth Century," in Franklin W. Knight
and Peggy K. Liss, eds., Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World,
1650- 1850 (Knoxville, 1991), 117-48; Higman, Slave Populations, 52- 66; Higman, Slave Popula-
tion and Economy, 21.
11
NoelDeerr, The History of Sugar (London, 1949-50); Galloway, Sugar Cane Industry, 86; Hilary McD.
Beckles, A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Nation-state (Cambridge, 1990), 22.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
100,000 -
80,000 -
60,000 -
40,000 -
"55* 20.000
I
§ 10,000
5" 8,000
(5 6,000
0 5
4,000 H
2,000 -
1,000
1690 1700
I
1710
o Jamaica
+ Barbados
A Trinidad
1720 1730 1740
1
1750
i
1760
i
1770
i
1780
i
1790
i
1800
i
1810
i
1820
i
1830
i
1840 1850
Figure 7. 1. Exports of sugar from Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad, 1698—1850 (semi-log scale). (Based on data in Noel Deerr,
History of Sugar [London, 1949-50].)
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
3i8 B.W.Higman
1740, reaching a peak of almost 100,000 tons in 1805, when the island
was the world's largest exporter. Jamaica then declined and stagnated
through the same period that saw growth in Barbados, until the time of
emancipation. By then, Guyana had increased its output to become a
serious rival. Jamaica had already been overtaken by Cuba, in 1829. The
dominance of the British West Indies as a group in the early nineteenth
century owed much to the collapse of the sugar industry in St. Domingue/
Haiti following the great slave revolution of the 1790s. St. Domingue's
exports had exceeded those of Jamaica by the 1750s and did so regularly
until 1792. But the segmentation of international/imperial markets,
which persisted until 1834, meant that the sugar of the British West
Indies did not have to compete on equal terms with the products of the
French and Spanish colonies, and competition tended more often to be
between the individual British colonies.
Long-term trends in the production and export of other crops are harder
to establish. Rum production tended to move in tandem with sugar but
became relatively more important during the eighteenth century as mar-
kets developed and expanded in North America. Jamaica's export of rum
peaked at 6.8 million gallons in 1806, the year following peak sugar
exports. Molasses, the base ingredient of rum, naturally became somewhat
less important as an export commodity. North American distillers took
the most. By about 1770, according to McCusker and Menard, the British
West Indies exported molasses to the value of £9,648 sterling to North
America and only £222 to Great Britain. Rum exports, however, valued
£380,943 to Great Britain and £333,337 to North America, and sugar
exports valued £3,002,750 to Great Britain and £183,700 to North
America.
22
Coffee came late to the Caribbean but exhibited rapid growth for a
brief period. The case of Jamaica was most spectacular. Exports increased
sharply from just 1 million pounds in 1789 to peak at 34 million in
1814, falling off to 17 million in 1834. This boom and bust pattern
followed deforestation of the Jamaican mountains and disastrous erosion
in storms. In the new sugar colonies of the eastern Caribbean, coffee
expons fell sharply after 1800 but as a consequence of crop replacement
rather than environmental disaster. Cotton exports declined in the long
term, sometimes being replaced by sugar and sometimes as a result of
the depletion of the soil, as in the Bahamas. Cacao boomed in Trinidad,
" McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America, 160.
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British West Indies Economic and Social Development 319
in the early nineteenth century, and various other crops experienced brief
periods of significance in some colonies. Occasionally, minor crops pro-
duced by slaves in their own time entered the export markets — as, for
example, arrowroot in St. Vincent and Barbados
23
— but the lion's share
of British West Indian external trade consisted of plantation-produced
sugar and rum.
National income estimates are rare for the British West Indies in the
period before 1850. Accounts have, however, been prepared for Jamaica in
1832 and 1850, and Guyana in 1832 and 1852, calculated by Gisela
Eisner and Michael Moohr, respectively.
24
Unfortunately, these data are
not easily compared because Moohr's estimates are expressed only in 1913
prices, whereas Eisner offers estimates at both current and 1910 prices.
The difference is significant, particularly due to the substantial decline in
metropolitan sugar prices over the long term. In spite of these deficien-
cies, the accounts provide the best approach to an understanding of the
components of the total economies.
According to Eisner, exports accounted for 41.4 percent of the Gross
Domestic Product of Jamaica in 1832, at current prices, or 31.7 percent at
I9ioprices, compared tO43-3percent for Guyana at I9i3prices. Recalcu-
lating Moohr's data gives roughly 56 percent at 1832 prices. These gross
contrasts show at least that the internal economy of Jamaica was relatively
very important, since comparison with the "pure" plantation economies of
Barbados and the Leeward Islands would certainly reveal an even greater
disparity than Guyana. Eisner estimated "food production for local con-
sumption" at 17.8 percent of Gross Domestic Product in Jamaica in 1832
at current prices (or 28.6 percent at 1910 prices), a proportion very similar
to Moohr's estimate for Guyana. Eisner attributed the vast majority of this
food production to "Ground Provisions," meaning the basic tuber and tree
crops cultivated by the slaves on their provision grounds. Other items that
contributed significantly to Jamaica's Gross Domestic Product in 1832
were ownership of houses (11.0 percent at current prices), public adminis-
tration (6.4 percent), manufacturing for local consumption (6.3 percent),
and distribution (5.7 percent).
Of particular interest in this national-income accounting exercise is the
categorization of Gross Domestic Product, in which the models of both
15
) . S. Handler, "The History of Arrowroot and the Origin of Peasantries in the British West Indies,"
Journal of Caribbean History 2 (1971), 46—93.
** Gisela Eisner, Jamaica, 1830—7930: A Study in Economic Growth (Manchester, 1961), 118—9;
Michael Moohr, "The Economic Impact of Slave Emancipation in British Guiana, 1832-1852, "
Economic History Review 25 (1972), 589.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
320 B. W. Higman
Eisner and Moohr distinguish "exports" from "manufacturing for local
consumption" but make no attempt to separate the product of agriculture
and manufacturing generally. The category "manufacturing for local con-
sumption" was made up entirely of sugar and rum consumed within the
colony, and it is acceptable to assume that other manufacturing for the
domestic market was indeed on a small scale. On the other hand, the
category "exports" includes the majority of the rum and most of the sugar
produced by the plantations. The question is, should this not be divided
into agricultural and manufacturing components? Eisner explicitly argues
that manufacturing in Jamaica "was limited to the processing necessary to
ensure good condition for overseas markets." The fact that sugar cane and
its juice could not be exported efficiently because of the bulk and rapid
rate of deterioration did not make the sugar factory a mere site for "process-
ing" rather than manufacturing. These processes were quite elaborate and
the technology complex. Eisner's bald statement that "rum distillation has
to be done locally" is not supportable and is actually denied by the vibrant
trade in molasses from the British and French colonies of the eastern
Caribbean to the distilleries of New England. Planters could choose to
make different proportions of sugar, molasses, and rum from a fixed
quantity of sugar cane. It is equally misleading to say that "manufacturing
industry in Jamaica lacked the natural stimulus of raw materials and cheap
fuel."
25
The raw material was the cane, and the cheap fuel was, above all,
water power, just as it was in the "first" Industrial Revolution in Great
Britain.
The sugar factory and distillery had a volume of output and labor force
on a scale rarely matched in European or North American factories before
the end of the eighteenth century, and it had a management regime with
many "modern" industrial features. It is true that the linkages of this
system were largely external to the region and that the development of the
factory did not lead to an industrial revolution within the Caribbean. But
the "exports" category in the Gross Domestic Product estimates for both
Jamaica and Guyana needs to be disaggregated to indicate a substantial
contribution from manufacturing alongside agriculture. The result is a
reduction in (i) the apparent gap between pre-industrial Europe, colonial
North America, and the sugar plantation economies of the British West
Indies in terms of their relative stages of development as indicated by the
quantity and composition of their output, and (2) the gap between core
•' Eisner, Jamaica, 172—3.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
British West Indies Economic and Social Development 321
and periphery that gives the plantation a much more central and innova-
tive role, while recognizing the growing divergence in systems of labor
domination.
WEALTH AND INCOME
The significance of the British West Indies in the Atlantic world economy
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is strikingly revealed by the
wealth of the colonies. Slavery created gross disparities, the slave being
defined by European law and ideology as chattel, as property, and incapa-
ble of being the possessor of property. Such definition, depriving the mass
of the population of the right to become wealthholders, did not in itself
prevent the creation of a large capital wealth stock. Indeed, the definition
of the slave as property meant that capital which might have been used to
pay wages, or the transaction costs of alternate systems of labor domina-
tion, was allocated to slaveownership and thus entered the concept of
wealth and its measurement. From a more theoretical point of view, it may
be asked how far inequality in the distribution of wealth was an inescap-
able partner of economic growth.
Interest in the capacity of the plantation colonies to generate wealth and
income for the British Empire has been a source of controversy since the
time of Adam Smith and the American Revolution, at least, and a defini-
tive answer to the question of whether the colonies were a source of profit
or loss remains elusive. For the British West Indies, the most systematic
attempt to provide a quantitative measure of wealth is that of Richard
Sheridan published in 1965. Using the probate inventories for Jamaica in
the years immediately preceding the American Revolution, Sheridan
found a total capital wealth stock of £18 million sterling. Application of
the income-capitalization formula produced a similar result. He extended
his estimate to cover the entire British West Indies, on the assumption
that Jamaica accounted for 60 percent of the total, for an aggregate wealth
of about £30 million.
Sheridan has also offered measures of income. He found £1.5 million "a
close approximation of the annual net income of the Jamaicans and the
British merchants and absentees who were closely identified with that
island." Multiplying the Jamaican figure to find the total for the colonies,
Sheridan concludes that "it may be conservatively estimated that from 8 to
10 percent of the income of the mother country came from the West Indies
in the closing years of the eighteenth century, and probably a larger
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
322 B. W. Higman
percentage in the period preceding the American War of Independence. "
t6
In arguing that the tropical colonies were vital contributors to British
economic growth, Sheridan rejects the opinion of Smith and lends support
to the model advanced by Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery, in
which the Atlantic system based on sugar and slavery in the British West
Indies is seen as fundamental to the capitalization of the British Industrial
Revolution.
Sheridan's wealth and income estimates have been criticized by Robert
Paul Thomas. Using the same database, Thomas recalculated the measures
to find higher figures than Sheridan for the wealth stock, at about £22
million for Jamaica and £37 for the British West Indies as a whole. On the
other hand, Thomas reduces Sheridan's estimate of annual income by
almost one-half, to £870,450 for Jamaica and £1,450,750 for the British
West Indies, calling this "an optimistic measure of the profits received by
the merchants and planters engaged in the West Indies."
27
In order to
move beyond this estimate of private profit, Thomas argues that the social
profit or loss to Great Britain at large must take account of the costs of
Empire, particularly in terms of (1) the mercantilist tariff preferences
granted to the sugar planters, and (2) the administration and defense of
the colonies. Sugar imported to Great Britain from its colonies paid duties
one-third to one-half less than sugars imported from foreign colonies, the
duty varying according to the quality of the sugar. Thomas contends that
the tariff cost British consumers at least £383,250 per annum between
1771 and 1775. Adding the costs of defense and administration, Thomas
finds a total social return of £660,750, or less than 2 percent on invested
capital. Thus, the British would have been better off investing their
capital at home and buying their sugar from more efficient foreign produc-
ers, notably the French.
Sheridan's rejoinder to this argument of Thomas raises many method-
ological issues but no significantly different wealth estimates. Sheridan
concludes that for Britain's Atlantic Empire of the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries, in its informal as well as its formal aspects, it is "a
misreading of economic history to deny the contribution of the West
Indian colonies."
28
The literature surrounding this debate has grown sub-
16
R. B. Sheridan, "The Wealth of Jamaica in the Eighteenth Century," Economic History Review 18
(1965), 306.
17
Robert Paul Thomas, "The Sugar Colonies of the Old Empire: Profit or Loss for Great Britain?"
Economic History Review 21 (1968), 36.
18
R. B. Sheridan, "The Wealth of Jamaica in the Eighteenth Century: A Rejoinder," Economic History
Review 21 (1968), 61.
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British West Indies Economic and Social Development 323
stantially since the exchange between Sheridan and Thomas, but definitive
answers to the central questions remain elusive. It appears, however, that
there is a growing acknowledgment of (1) the significance of slavery in the
development of the Atlantic system, and (2) the fundamental role of
commodities produced by slaves within that system in the genesis of
industrial capitalism.
2
" That Great Britain was the "first industrial na-
tion" necessarily implies a strong link with the British West Indies, where
sugar and slavery created the most specialized subregion of the Atlantic
economy, a booming sector that not only produced investment capital but
perhaps also offered a paradoxical model of the factory complex, with its
mix of modern technologies and ancient mode of labor domination.
The importance of the British West Indies can also be seen by compari-
son with wealth estimates for the North American colonies. In 1774, the
British West Indies had a total population only one-fifth that of the
thirteen colonies but, according to the estimates of Alice Hanson Jones, a
total private physical wealth one-third as large as the mainland.'
0
Ja-
maica's wealth was almost exactly equivalent to that of the New England
colonies, but the composition of this wealth was quite different. In the
thirteen colonies, slaves and servants accounted for only 19.6 percent of
private physical wealth, whereas in the dominant sugar sector of Jamaica,
slaves made up 81.6 percent of total inventory valuation in 1771-5
(increasing from 55 percent in 1741-5). Even in the South, slaves and
servants accounted for just 33.6 percent.
These data demonstrate clearly the significance of slavery for the British
West Indian economy and society and, at the same time, indicate the
concentration of wealth in the hands of the planter class. They also high-
light the problems of definition and categorization that challenge attempts
to measure wealth. Jones, Sheridan, and Thomas all accept contemporary
legal and customary definitions of wealthholders, generally including only
the free white and black adult male population, and some free women.'
1
The picture changes substantially if slaves are excluded from the accounting
or if, on the other hand, the undoubtedly meager possessions of the slaves
are included in the calculation. In the British West Indies, custom came to
acknowledge the rights of the slaves to inherit and otherwise transmit goods
and chattels and even access to particular plots of land. The planters rapidly
** Barbara L. Solow, ed., Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (Cambridge, 1991); Joseph E.
Inikori, Slavery and the Rise of Capitalism (Mona, 1993).
y Alice Hanson Jones, Wealth of a Nation to Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution (New
York, 1980), 51.
.'• McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America, 262—5.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
324 B. W. Higman
recognized the advantages of actively encouraging the slaves' marketing and
other income-generating activities. Writing in 1751, an anonymous author
commented on the current shortage of coin in Jamaica and warned that any
attempt to withdraw the slaves' access to money and markets would only
create discontent and rebellion. Couching the argument in explicit social
control terms, the writer argued,
It is plain that they do not subsist only by the allowance given them by their
owners; what renders their slavery tolerable to them, is, that little shadow of
property and freedom which they seem to enjoy, in having their own little parcels
of ground to occupy and improve; and a great part of its produce they bring to
market, there to dispose of it; which, besides supplying the white inhabitants
with a great plenty of wholesome provisions, enables the Negroes to purchase
little comforts and conveniences for themselves and their little ones; these sweets
they have tasted for some years successively.
i2
SLAVE SOCIETY OR CREOLE SOCIETY?
British West Indian society before emancipation has been interpreted by
modern scholars according to two competing models. One side of the
debate, represented particularly by Elsa Goveia, argues that the term slave
society best characterizes the structure that emerged in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. The opposing view, advocated most strongly by
Kamau Brathwaite, prefers to conceive the situation as a Creole society. Both
sides of the debate recognize slavery as the fundamental element of the
society. The difference lies in the extent and quality of interaction between
slave and free, and the outcome of that process.
Goveia denned slave society as "the whole community based on slavery,
including masters and freedmen as well as slaves," and stated that her
work sought "to identify the basic principles which held the white mas-
ters, coloured freedmen, and Negro slaves together as a community, and
to trace the influence of these principles on the relations between the
Negro slave and his white master, which largely determined the form and
content of the society."« In this model, the ultimate sanctions rested in
physical coercion — the superior power of the white/slaveowning class be-
ing expressed in force and law. But habit and opinion also served to
»' An Inquiry concerning the trade, commerce, and policy of Jamaica, relative to the scarcity of money, and the
causes and bad effects of stub scarcity, ptculiar to that island (London: 1759), 32- 3.
» Elsa V. Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (New
Haven, 1965), vii.
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British West Indies Economic and Social Development 325
ingrain the system through adoption of norms and personality traits that
suggested acceptance of caste distinctions between slave, free colored, free
black, and white groups. Thus, the slave society of the British West Indies
can be seen as fitting very closely the plural society model developed to
explain hegemonic relations in tightly structured communities, generally
organized on caste lines.
Brathwaite, protagonist of the Creole society interpretation, sees the
plural society model, with its prognosis of tension and violent conflict, as
excessively negative and pessimistic. He is more hopeful for modern West
Indian society and argues that such hope can be founded even on the
experience of slavery. In characterizing the society as Creole, he contends
that the process of creolization was just as important as the slavery that
provided the socioeconomic framework for its development. Creolization
emphasizes interculturation rather than a one-way acculturation with its
assumption of superior and inferior power relations. Creolization thus
gives greater credit to the contributions of Africa and the slaves while
reducing the apparent social and cultural dominance of Europe.''' Evi-
dence of creolization can be found in language, customs, and folkways, as
well as in economic organization, most obviously in the internal market-
ing system with its amalgam of West African and European forms.
Brathwaite's reading of creolization makes it a process comprehending a
region much wider than the British West Indian colonies, extending
throughout the Americas with variations along a continuum of interactive
relations. Recent studies of North America in the eighteenth century have
done much to introduce this conception to understanding of those colonial
societies, though generally without reference to the West Indian experi-
ence or scholarship." Refinement of the concept of creolization is likely,
however, to see distinctions emerging from comparative studies, along the
lines of Brathwaite's continuum, having to do with differences in eco-
> nomic structures and demographic composition.
British West Indian society before, and after, emancipation recognized
a fine gradation of color groups. Mulatto was used exclusively to refer to
children of black and white parents. On the side approaching white and
free, persons could be quadroon, mustee, musteephino, while the children of
black and mulatto parents were sambo. These distinctions were made
significant in terms of occupational allocation on the plantations and,
M
Brathwaite, Development of Crtole Society, vii, 306—11.
" For example, Medial Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-
Century Virginia (Princeton, 1987).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
326 B. W. Higman
hence, affected the ability of slaves to earn and accumulate. It was a
general rule that on sugar and other plantations, the females "of color"
were put to domestic tasks and the males to skilled trades. These occupa-
tions carried a relatively high status compared to field labor, and slaves
with these occupations received rations and other material benefits from
the masters superior in quantity and quality to that provided to other
slaves. The males, and to a lesser extent the females, had marketable
skills. Slaves of color thus came to be concentrated in the towns, where
they entered a variety of arrangements with their owners for "self-hire" and
relatively independent economic activity.
Slaves of color were more likely to be manumitted (freed) than black
slaves, partly because of their superior economic resources and, more
importantly, because their fathers were most often whites or freedmen.
Thus, the freed population tended to have a high proportion of colored
people in its ranks; again there developed an urban concentration. Black
slaves had a much harder road to freedom through emancipation.
Escape from slavery was achieved not only through manumission.
Marronage, or physical escape from slaveowners, similarly resulted in
effective freedom for some, within both the urban context and the recog-
nized Maroon communities such as emerged in Jamaica in the eighteenth
century. In the eastern Caribbean archipelago, some slaves became mari-
time maroons, taking boats from one island to another, moving out of
British imperial territory completely, or leaving the Caribbean for external
destinations including the North American mainland. This movement
was facilitated by the network of trade and communication that linked the
region and created a Creole Atlantic world.
THE WEST INDIES AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
The failure of the British West Indies to follow the continental colonies
into independence cannot be explained by political passivity on the part of
the white colonists or by economic insignificance. Massachusetts and
Virginia, leaders of the revolt against British imperial rule, were far less
important economically than the sugar colonies, and the representative
assemblies of Jamaica and Barbados had long histories of constitutional
struggle with the crown. Why, then, did the island colonies not revolt?
One interpretation is that the fundamental division of West Indian
society, and the high ratio of slave to free, made the whites fearful for their
security and continued prosperity if disconnected from the mother coun-
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British West Indies Economic and Social Development 327
try. Survival without the British navy and army was unthinkable. Thus,
when the legislatures of Jamaica, Barbados, Grenada, and Tobago passed
resolutions in support of the American colonies during the Stamp Duties
crisis, they attacked parliamentary tyranny rather than self-confidently
claiming local autonomy. They merely sought to preserve their powers to
govern internal affairs, notably the slave system. Brathwaite has expanded
this interpretation to contend that, in the case of Jamaica, the Creoles who
possessed political power remained essentially colonial in their attitudes,
that they were not sufficiently creolized to surrender their dependence on
the metropolis.*
6
An alternative interpretation has been advanced by T. R. Clayton, who
rejects the security issues and puts sociopolitical factors at the center. The
Jamaican political system, Clayton argues, bestowed hegemony on the
gentry and, in contrast to the mainland colonies, provided "ample opportu-
nities for ambitious young members of the provincial elite." At the same
time, the period between the Seven Years' War and the American Revolu-
tion was one of prosperity for the British West Indian plantocracy, whereas
for the continental colonies it was "a period of increasing social, economic,
and political crisis."
37
The British West Indian legislatures' decision to align with the mother
country rather than with the continental colonies had major economic
implications in both the short term and the long run. The naval war
resulted in (1) heavy loss of shipping in trade between the West Indies and
Europe, and (2) a consequent rise in freight rates and insurance. Increases
in the prices of American commodities were less immediate, since most
colonies had large stocks on hand at the beginning of 1776. Indeed, it can
be argued that these stocks and the relatively low prices charged for
American commodities were an important cause of the Revolution in that
they resulted from a mercantilist imbalance within the British Empire.
The removal of this imbalance was perhaps the most important aspect of
the Revolution from the Caribbean point of view.
The embargo placed on trade between the British West Indies and the
rebel colonies during the War of Independence broke the close commerce
that had linked the temperate zone producers of fish, flour, corn, and
lumber with the tropical sugar islands. Efforts by the West Indian planters
and merchants to reorganize their resources took several forms. The imme-
3* Brathwaite, Development of Creole Society, i oo.
" T. R. Clayton, "Sophistry, Security, and Socio-political Structures in the American Revolution; or,
Why did Jamaica not Rebel?" Historical Journal 29 (1986), 344.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
328 B. W. Higman
diate problem of short supplies was avoided to some extent by putting
more emphasis on the provision-ground system, using available back
lands, or taking land out of cane and planting food crops. Great Britain
relaxed the Corn Laws to permit exportation of wheat, and some islands
were able to import provisions and lumber from French and Spanish
colonies. New sources of supply were provided by the opening of trade
with Ireland in 1778. Contraband trade with the Americans flourished.
The Dutch colony of St. Eustatius, for example, became an entrepdt
(distribution center), selling manufactured goods and military supplies to
the Americans, on the one hand, and mainland lumber and provisions to
the British islands, on the other. Some historians argue that these adjust-
ments enabled the planters and their slaves to obtain ample and cheap
supplies of food. Others, however, have contended that the consequences
of trade restrictions were disastrous. Sheridan holds that the Revolution
created a crisis of slave subsistence, in which "hunger stalked the islands
and thousands of slaves died from causes either directly or indirectly
related to the war. "
38
The crisis was exacerbated by severe hurricanes that
hit the islands six times between 1780 and 1786.
Another immediate effect of the Revolution was that in order to pay for
the war, the British increased customs duties on imports of sugar. It was at
this point that the duties first came to be seen as a source of revenue rather
than simply the means of regulating trade. The duty was doubled between
1776 and 1782, and doubled again by 1830. Sugar prices (exclusive of
duty) increased significantly during the American war, however, and those
planters who managed to find shipping to get their product to market
reaped large profits. Prices fell after 1783 but remained fairly stable at
levels a little above prewar averages until 1820.
The Revolution also had a minor demographic impact on the British
West Indies. Although most of the North American colonists who chose
to remain loyal to the crown went to Canada, significant numbers settled
in the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Dominica. Their slaves were forced to
follow. As a result, the population of the Bahamas tripled between 1783
and 1789. Many of these Loyalists had been cotton planters, and the
introduction of the crop to the Bahamas resulted in a minor plantation
revolution. In Jamaica, on the other hand, areas granted by the Assembly
were swamplands, and many Loyalists chose to locate in the towns.
With the Peace of Versailles in 1783, the Americans looked forward to a
3* Richard B. Sheridan, "The Crisis of Slave Subsistence in the British West Indies during and after
the American Revolution," William ami Mary Quarterly 3d set., 33 (1976), 641.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
British West Indies Economic and Social Development 329
reopening of their previously profitable trade with the British West In-
dies. Similarly, the sugar planters called for reestablishment of the trade
on a liberal footing. But British reluctance to enter into a commercial
treaty with the United States meant that from 1783 to 1822, provisions
and supplies could enter the islands only if carried in British ships. In
turn, the colonies could export their staples to the United States only
under restrictive tariff regulations. Illicit trading became common. Can-
ada, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland increased their trade in fish and
lumber, but the United States retained the trade in flour. Thus, trade
between the tropical and temperate zones continued along established
lines, though indirectly and at greatly increased prices. Most of the restric-
tions were removed in 1822, but it was not until 1830 that the trade was
truly reopened. By that time, the Atlantic slave trade of the British had
been abolished, and the price of sugar had collapsed.
ECONOMIC DECLINE AND THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY
The identification of "economic decline" has an important place in the
historiography of the British West Indies. This importance may be traced
in part to a fundamental cyclic metaphor. Something that went so high, as
in the superprofits of the golden and silver ages of sugar, must inevitably
suffer a mighty fall. The concept of economic decline also has a central role
in the history of the region, because it undermines the traditional British
humanitarian interpretation, in which the slave trade and slavery were
abolished for righteous rather than material motives. The significance of
this last debate is also rooted in a long continued focus on movements
toward abolition rather than on the experience of slavery or even adjust-
ments to freedom after emancipation.
Modern historiographic interests have shifted away from these preoccu-
pations; this, in turn, demands a rethinking of the notion of economic
decline. Most historians have measured decline in terms of the plantation
economy: the output of sugar, metropolitan prices for export commodi-
ties, and the profitability of the system to the planter class and the larger
British imperial economy. There is little place here for a colonial or Creole
perspective, and none at all for measures that mattered to the slave popula-
tion: the output of grounds and gardens, opportunities for accumulation
through self-hire, marronage and the internal marketing system, and
changes in nutrition and levels of living. Trends in these indexes did not
follow in any simple fashion the patterns observed in the plantation export
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
330 B. W. Higman
sector, and the income of the planter had little immediate impact on the
life of the slave. For the long term, it can, however, be argued that the
planter-slaveowner was the key to the system and that changes in the
plantation sector's profitability determined imperial policy, including the
legality of different forms of labor domination. If this argument is ac-
cepted, then the debate over "economic decline" remains important.
Questions of chronology are basic to the interpretation. The British
Parliament passed a bill for the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in
1807, with effect from 1808. In 1833, the Emancipation Act was passed.
Slaves in some islands, such as Antigua, were freed from 1834, but the
majority entered a period of compulsory "Apprenticeship" to their former
masters, which did not end until 1838. The British provided £20 million
for the compensation of slaveowners throughout the Empire for the loss of
their slave property, nothing for the slaves themselves. In terms of this
chronology, the question is, did the plantation economy based on the slave
system enter decline before 1833 or 1807 and so bring about abolition and
emancipation, or were abolition and emancipation responsible for that
decline?
There is general agreement that sugar prices declined significantly dur-
ing the 1820s, undercutting the profits of the planters. Thus, it is easily
conceded that economic decline was a contributory factor in the passing of
the Emancipation Act. Other important factors, only tenuously linked to
decline, were the Jamaican slave rebellion of 1831—2, the mobilization of
public opinion in Great Britain, and Reform of the British Parliament in
1832. By 1833, the political power of the West Indian "interest," or
lobby, was reduced to a shadow, and many absentee planters expressed a
willingness to accept emancipation with compensation.
Debate centers on the abolition of the slave trade and the state of the
plantation economy between 1750 and 1820. Some argue that the seeds of
destruction were planted in 1763, when the Peace of Paris added new
territories to the British tropical Empire, removing the effective protec-
tion formerly enjoyed by the old sugar colonies and leading to overproduc-
tion. « According to this interpretation, the failure of the planter class to
adopt technological innovations in field and factory, as well as the exhaus-
tion of the soil, and the inefficiencies of absentee management, led inevita-
bly to the bankruptcy of the planters and the collapse of the system. Other
interpretations date the decline of the system to the American Revolution,
» Lowell Joseph Ragatz, The Fall oftbt Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763-1833 (New York,
1928), 111-3.
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British West Indies Economic and Social Development 331
placing particular emphasis on the dislocation of trade between the tropi-
cal and temperate colonies, the consequent increase in costs of production,
and the British government's desire to extract revenue from the sugar
trade.*
0
The revolution in St. Domingue, on the other hand, provided an
artificial respite for the British West Indies, removing its major competi-
tor from the European market and pushing up metropolitan prices.
Interpretations that deny the importance of 1763 and the American
Revolution generally identify continued planter prosperity until about
1815, after which sugar prices fell consistently until 1830, when they
were only one-third the level of 1815.
4
' Sugar production declined in
some British West Indian colonies after 1800, but overall they showed
substantial growth until emancipation. It can be argued, therefore, that
(1) the British abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 occurred at a
point when the system of sugar and slavery was flourishing rather than in
decline, and (2) the abolition was itself an important factor in the reduc-
tion of planter profits after 1815. The demographic structure of the slave
labor force was also changed by the abolition of the slave trade, creating
tensions that worked to undermine the system indirectly, and made it
increasingly Creole in composition and outlook. These transformations, in
turn, affected the expectations of slaves and planters, within both Creole/
slave society and the coming world of freedom.
POSTEMANCIPATION ADJUSTMENTS
DEMOGRAPHIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE
Political power remained in the hands of the colonial planter and merchant
classes until 1850, with the exception of the Crown Colonies (Trinidad,
St. Lucia, and Guyana), which were ruled directly from London. Regard-
less of the locus of authority, the state sought to maintain the export-
oriented plantation system as the basis of the British West Indian econ-
omy. The capitalist classes believed that (1) the plantation was the best
possible mode of organizing land and labor for the extraction of profit, and
4 0
Eric Wi l l i ams , Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hi l l , 1944) , 1 0 8 - 2 5 ; Sheridan, "Crisis of Slave
Subsistence," 641; Selwyn H. H. Carrington, The British West Indies during the American Revolution
(Dordrecht, 1988), 180- 1.
41
Seymour Drescher, Eamocide: British Slavery in the Era ofAbolition (Pittsburgh, 1977), I5~37;J. R.
Ward, "The Profitability of Sugar Planting in the British West Indies, 1650—1834," Economic
History Review 31 (1978), 197- 213.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
332 B. W. Higman
(2) saw it as an institution with a civilizing force capable of defending
colonial society from the barbarism of Africa and the more insidious
features of creolization. Thus, government was deployed in the service of
the planter class, seeking to control labor and restrict access to land.
The politically marginalized ex-slave population of the British West
Indies, on the other hand, saw in freedom not only the right to bargain for
wages and the right to mobility within the labor market but also rights to
the houses and gardens that they and their ancestors had occupied for
generations and to the grounds that they had cultivated in their own time.
They were the true inheritors of the land and believed that the Crown
intended them to have access to this resource as well as freeing their labor
from their former masters.
The consequence of these conflicting readings of the meaning of free-
dom was competition for land and labor that, by 1850, resulted in new
forms of labor domination, the establishment of an independent peasantry,
and population moves within the Caribbean region. But the pattern of
adjustment was by no means uniform throughout the British West Indies,
and historians continue to debate the causes of these variations. One
particularly resilient theory is tied to population density and the existence
of open or closed resources.** This theory is, of course, the counterpart to
the population-density interpretation of the emergence of involuntary labor
systems. Where the population was dense, as in Barbados and the Leeward
Islands, the ex-slaves had no real alternatives to remaining on the planta-
tions and working as tied wage laborers at low rates of remuneration. For
this reason, the planters of Antigua decided to dispense completely with
the Apprenticeship. In such situations, the plantation system survived
intact, and a peasantry, emerged only painfully on the margins of the
estates. Where population was sparse, as in Jamaica and the Windward
Islands, the planters were unable to hold the ex-slaves to wage labor
because of the attractions of free or cheap land, which permitted the
establishment of a thriving peasantry, with its roots in the protopeasantry
spawned by the provision-ground and internal marketing systems during
slavery. In these colonies, many sugar plantations were abandoned, with
the white population migrating out of the region, and attempts were
*' William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Gnat Experiment 1830—
1865 (Oxford, 1976), 192—3; Stanley L. Engerman, "Economic Adjustments to Emancipation in
the United States and the British West Indies," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 13 (1982), 191-
220; Stanley L. Engerman, "Economic Change and Contract Labor in the British Caribbean: The
End of Slavery and the Adjustment to Emancipation," Explorations in Economic History 21 (1984),
133- 50.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
British West Indies Economic and Social Development 333
made to introduce assisted immigrants and contract labor. In colonies
with sparse populations and new, vibrant sugar economies, such as Trini-
dad and Guyana, the planters brought in large numbers of indentured
immigrants to meet the demand for labor and ensure continuance of the
plantation system.
In general terms, the population-density model appears to fit the British
West Indian case quite well. It has, however, been subjected to criticism in
recent times, particularly by Nigel Bolland, who argues that population
density is too simple a ratio to capture fully the experience of the colonies.'
43
Bolland introduces the case of Belize, a colony with low population density
but little peasant development or immigration, to show that the structure
of planter hegemony was equally important. To understand the pattern in
all its ramifications, contends Bolland, it is necessary to see the struggle for
labor domination in dialectical terms. This argument links directly with
other current issues in postemancipation historiography. Until recently, it
was widely believed that the ex-slave population left the plantations behind
as quickly as possible, wherever free land was available, in order to escape
the scene of their enslavement. It has been shown, however, that the ex-
slaves' attachment to their community, as expressed in houses, gardens,
grounds, kinship, and burial sites, was well developed and embodied an
alternative reading of the plantation landscape. Rather than a "flight from
the estates," it is argued, the ex-slaves were pushed off by a planter class that
adopted a crude interpretation of freehold property rights, charging rents
for houses and yards occupied by generations and requiring plantation labor
as a precondition of continued residence.
44
Here the dialectic was played out
in the politics of plantation economy, in competition for resources within
the separate niches of planter and ex-slave.
In this struggle, the planters used state funds to assist immigration to
the British West Indies in order to put both moral and numerical pressure
on the ex-slave population to offer its labor to the plantation sector.
British and German settlers were brought to Jamaica, and Portuguese to
Trinidad and Guyana, beginning in 1834.
4
' Efforts were also made during
the Apprenticeship period to recruit contract labor from the marginal
islands of the Bahamas and the Leeward Islands to Trinidad and Guyana,
45
O. Nigel Bolland, "Systems of Domination after Slavery: The Control of Land and Labour in the
British West Indies after 1838," Comparative Stadia in Society and History 23 (1981), 591—619.
*> Douglas Hall, "The Flight from the Estates Reconsidered: The British West Indies, 1838-42, "
Journal of Caribbean History 10/11 (1978), 7- 24; Woodville K. Marshall, The Post-Slavery Problem
Revisited (Mona, Department of History, University of the West Indies, 1991).
« K. O. Laurence, Immigration into the West Indies in the 19th Century (Barbados, 1971), 9—23.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
334 B. W. Higman
but this practice was prohibited by the Colonial Office. The Barbados
legislature did everything possible to prevent labor recruiters from enter-
ing that island. Indentured Indians arrived first in Guyana in May 1838
and thus inaugurated the major flow of contract labor into the region,
which was to continue until 1917, substantially augmenting the popula-
tion of Guyana and Trinidad and, to a lesser extent, Jamaica. Bountied
and "liberated" Africans also added to the numbers. Thus, the 1840s saw
considerable experimentation with immigrant labor, under a variety of
styles of contract and from a variety of origins, but the financial crisis of
1847 and the equalization of the sugar duties resulted in bankruptcy for
many sugar planters. Large-scale immigration based on long-term con-
tracts was not commenced until the 1850s.
Immigration created an increasingly plural society in the British West
Indies, separating the older sugar colonies and marginal colonies, with
their large African and small white (essentially British) populations, from
the new sugar colonies with their growing Asian and varied European
components. It is in the postemancipation period that the plural society
model comes to prove most convincing as an explanation of social seg-
mentation and its relation to political power.
46
The increasing complexity
of the populations of Guyana and Trinidad also resulted from a relatively
slow growth of the ex-slave population by natural increase. Elsewhere in
the British West Indies, emancipation was followed by a quite rapid shift
from decline to positive natural increase, and the high black:white ratios
of the period of slavery became even higher.
PRODUCTION AND TRADE
The period between 1834 and 1850 witnessed a significant overall decline
in the export of sugar from the British West Indies in consequence of the
abandonment of plantations and the reduced output of the surviving
estates (Figure 7.1). In Jamaica, the leading producer, exports were
halved: Jamaica exported 62,812 tons of sugar in 1834 but only 28,750
tons in 1850, and output did not return to preemancipation levels until
the 1930s. The next most important producer, Guyana, experienced a
similar decline in the short term but saw recovery by the late 1840s and
exceeded its preemancipation peak by 1863. Trinidad reached a peak
position by 1845, demonstrating the importance of contract labor in
<
6
Brian L. Moore, Race, Powtr and Social Segmentation in Colonial Society: Guyana after Slavery, 1838—
1891 (New York, 1987).
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British West Indies Economic and Social Development 335
maintaining output in the new sugar colonies. Guyana and Trinidad also
led the way in introducing new factory technologies derived from steam
power — productivity gains were not simply a matter of altered labor
inputs.
In the old sugar colonies, where the population was dense and the state
held tight control of the community, exports increased in many cases
without resort to contract labor or technological innovations. Barbados,
for example, peaked in 1838 when 23,679 tons of sugar were exported,
and it peaked again in 1849 and 1850 by exporting more than 24,000
tons. St. Kitts, Nevis, and Antigua followed a similar trajectory, but
Montserrat's production fell off dramatically to recover only in the 1860s,
and the British Virgin Islands stopped exporting sugar completely soon
after 1850. Marginal, small-scale producers were forced from the market.
The Windward Islands experienced reduced production but stayed in the
market until the end of the nineteenth century.
Decline in the export sector was not balanced by growth in the domestic
sector. In Jamaica, exports contributed 41.4 percent of Gross Domestic
Product in 1832 (at current prices) but only 23.4 percent in 1850, accord-
ing to the calculations of Eisner, *
7
Food production for local consumption,
on the other hand, moved from 17.8 percent to 28.1 percent, indicating
the growth of the independent peasantry and its role in perpetuating the
productivity of the provision-ground system in new and old settings. In
absolute terms, Eisner's calculations show an increase of only 16.2 percent
in the local food sector, yet this was the major growth area. Jamaica's
Gross Domestic Product overall fell by 26.1 percent between 1832 and
1850.
Guyana, the other British West Indian colony for which national in-
come estimates have been prepared, experienced a somewhat different
pattern.*
8
Between 1832 and 1852, Guyana's Gross Domestic Product
increased by 8.2 percent absolutely (at 1913 prices), while the export
sector's share fell from 43.3 to 22.8 percent. Food production for local
consumption moved from 27.3 to 31.6 percent, but the real gains were in
manufacturing for local consumption, public administration, and profes-
sional services. As in Jamaica, the immediate postemancipation period
saw growth in building and construction, largely in response to the de-
mand for improved housing among the peasantry and free villagers.
The external trade of the British West Indies was until the 1840s gov-
•" Eisner, Jamaica 1830-1930, 118.
«* Moohr, "Economic Impact of Slave Emancipation," 589.
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336 B. W. Higman
erned by the Navigation Laws, which tied the colonies to Great Britain. But
the relaxation of restrictions on trade with the United States, beginning in
1830, initiated significant changes in the geographical pattern of markets
for exports and sources of imports. By 1850, Jamaica, for example, took
20.4 percent of its imports from the United States and another 10.2 percent
from Canada. The United States received 6.0 percent of Jamaica's exports
and South America 11.7 percent. Great Britain remained overwhelming in
the pattern of trade, however, supplying 64.6 percent of imports to Jamaica
in 1850, and taking 77.9 percent of its exports.
49
By the early 1830s, the
British West Indies already imported most of its lumber, flour, meal, and
corn from the United States, largely restoring the pre-1776 pattern; by
1850, hardly any food supplies came from Europe.
Growth of the peasantry and expansion of food production for local
consumption went together, in at least some of the major British West
Indian colonies, with further articulation of the internal marketing sys-
tem. The establishment of interior market towns moved rapidly, as planta-
tion villages were deserted following planter pressure or actual clearances,
and church-founded free villages emerged. The profitability of such mar-
keting continued to depend, however, on cash flow among the wage-
earning plantation labor force. Abandonment of estates and planters' at-
tempts to reduce wages, by the later 1840s, undercut the growth of the
peasant and distributive sectors to some extent.
The second half of the nineteenth century was thus marked by a pro-
longed process of readjustment. In some of the British West Indian colo-
nies, such as Jamaica and the Windward Islands, the economies became
increasingly inward-looking until the 1870s, when new technologies cre-
ated external consumer markets and investment opportunities for trade in
crops such as bananas, formerly the food of the poor. The consequence was
a growing penetration by United States capital; in 1890, the United States
came to replace Great Britain as Jamaica's major trading partner. In other
British West Indian colonies, such as Barbados and the Leeward Islands,
the sugar plantation economy survived relatively intact throughout this
period, and trade patterns changed less dramatically, though the Ameri-
can connection expanded everywhere. The British West Indies gradually
became less important elements in the Caribbean region at the same time
as American influences and interests became increasingly pervasive.
<» Eisner, Jamaica 1830—1930, 269—70.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
8
BRITISH MERCANTILIST POLICIES
AND THE AMERICAN COLONIES
JOHN J. McCUSKER
Mercantilism was the guiding doctrine behind the attempts of regimes
and peoples of the early modern Atlantic World to organize their economic
existence. The aim of mercantilism was to structure the financial founda-
tion of the nation-state — the emerging postmedieval governmental mode
that rapidly replaced feudal localism in northern and western Europe after
the mid-fifteenth century — so that the state could survive and prosper.
Nationalism held the promise of political stability and a better life for all,
a considerable improvement over the chaos of an earlier era. Mercantilist
policies were thus meant to be the economic means to larger political and
social ends.
Like similar economic belief systems - socialism and capitalism, for
instance - mercantilism had its faithful few and its querulous many. Never-
theless, all of early modern Europe recognized and conformed, in various
degrees, to the doctrines of mercantilism.
1
It became "the unchallenged
assumption that . . . government had the right and responsibility to regu-
late economic activities in the interest of the common good. "
2
Mercantilism
attracted a following because it seemed to work. Relative to the earlier era,
there was more peace and greater prosperity. Yet the success of the nation-
states of early modern Atlantic Europe encouraged dissenters as well as the
faithful. Inherent in a system that promised all a greater good — and more
goods — was the potential that, in its success or in its failure, it might
encourage the expression of alternative voices and other doctrines.
1
See John J. McCusker, "Mercantilism," in Jacob E. Cooke, ed., The Encyclopedia of the North American
Colonies, 3 vols. (New York, 1993), I, 459—65.
2
Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ,
1978), 99-
337
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
338 JohnJ. McCusker
Mercantilist thinkers argued that a strong central government was so
important that the Crown had to have the power to turn every element
of the state to achieving that purpose, including the economy. Mercantil-
ism recognized broadly the needs and concerns of both of the other
components of the economy — businesses and workers. Mercantilism ar-
gued just that the organizers of production and those who did the work
could attain satisfaction only within the protective embrace of a strong
nation-state. Thus, business and labor must be prepared not only to
accept the sacrifices necessary to establish and support that state but also
to acquiesce in its guidance. The national interest was paramount; the
Crown knew best. (Capitalism and socialism, the competing successors
to mercantilism, aspire to the same grand objective - general human
happiness — and appreciate that the same three elements are in play.
Capitalism argues that the organizers of production are the people best
equipped to make the necessary decisions. Socialism says that it is the
workers who know best.' After two hundred years of struggle, the world
of the twenty-first century seems headed toward socially managed capital-
ism as the dominant doctrine.)
What the nation-state needed most from the economy was money:
regular revenues to meet the continuing demands of government and
dependable sources of support to meet emergencies. The traditional ways
in which these needs had been met were no longer satisfactory, either
because they did not yield enough money or because they ran counter to
the larger goals of the mercantilist state. Taxes on land created internal
dissent; taxes on internal trade fragmented the national economy; the
monarch's borrowing abroad limited the independence of the state. New
ways had to be found to fund the monarch's diplomats in peace and armies
in war. International trade provided the mechanism. Duties on foreign
trade, funneled directly to the monarch's treasury, were seen as both more
reliable and less divisive than land taxes. Loans from the nation's large-
scale merchants, exacted or merely solicited, tapped into a group of people
> Or, put another way: "Mercantilism called upon government to develop the economy in the best
interests of the state. Capitalism called upon government to develop the economy in the best
interests of business. Socialism called upon government to develop the economy in the best interests
of the workers. None of these three doctrines necessarily denied the need for attention to the
concerns of the other partners in the enterprise. AH three recognized the symbiotic relationship of
the state, business, and workers. The focus of each was simply a matter of emphasis, of subordina-
tion" (McCusker, "Mercantilism," in Cooke, ed., Encyclopedia of the North Amman Colonies, I, 459).
Compare, among many others, the depiction of the latter stage in this progression in the essays
by Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York, 1942).
It should not be necessary to remind readers that the origin and even the widespread acceptance
of a doctrine and the enthronement of that doctrine as public policy do not necessarily follow one
another either quickly or surely.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
British Mercantilist Policies and the Colonies 339
whose allegiance could be assured by the nation's encouragement and
protection of their overseas enterprises. 1* According to Benjamin Worsley,
the author of the Ordinance of 1651 and other English statutes that
enacted mercantilism into law, "it is by Trade, and the due ordering and
governing of it, and by no other means, that Wealth and Shipping can
either bee encreased, or upheld; and consequently by . . . no other, that
the power or any Nation can bee susteined."
5
Mercantilism's infatuation with expanding overseas trade was reinforced
by an important corollary. The promotion of one's own merchants dimin-
ished the power of foreign merchants. The increase of one's own overseas
trade came at a cost to the overseas trade of other, competing nation-
states. The gold in our own monarch's treasury and the gold in our own
merchants' money chests was gold denied others. That, at least, is what
mercantilists believed. The world of the mercantilist was a "zero-sum"
world, a world in which trade and bullion were fixed in amount. It was a
predatory world. Our gains were our enemies' losses. In the words of
Thomas Mun, writing in the mid-i62os: "Onely so much will remain and
abide with us as is gained and incorporated into the estate of the Kingdom
by the overballance of the trade."
6
All the better, then, that we follow the
4
One is reminded in this context of the remark about the role of Jewish businessmen during the years
before the reign of Edward I when they alone in England were allowed to lend money at interest and
became rich doing so. Joseph Bridges Matthews, The Law of Money-Lending, Past andPraent: Being a
Short History of the Usury Laws in England . . . (London, 1906), 3, recalls that: "Under the Norman
and early Angevin kings the Jews were employed as a sponge to suck up the wealth of their subjects,
and be periodically squeezed to supply the wants of the Crown." See Thomas Madox, The History and
Antiquities of the Exchequer of the Kings of England . . . , 2d ed., 2 vols. (London, 1769), I, 221—61.
Compare Alfred Marshall, Industry and Trade: A Study of Industrial Technique and Business Organization;
and of Their Influences on the Conditions of Various Classes and Nations (London, 1919), 171:". . . but
gradually even powerful rulers began to lean for financial support on the shoulders of those who had
reaped the harvests of large mercantile business."
' Benjamin Worsley, The Advocate (London, 1651), 12. In 1651 Worsley was secretary to the Common-
wealth Council of Trade. He was continuously active thereafter as a paid expert advisor to govern-
ment on matters of trade and the colonies, "in all probability [he] had . . . some part in drafting the
navigation act of 1660," he sat on other, later committees similar to the first one, and he ended his
career as secretary to the Council for Trade and Plantations set up in 1672. For more on Worsley, see
Charles M. Andrews, England's Commercial and Colonial Policy, Vol. IV of The Colonial Period of
American History (New Haven, CT, 1938), 41, n. 1, 58- 60, and elsewhere (quotation, p. 58);
Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas
Traders, IJJO—I6}3 (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 588—90, 605—7, 626—7.
Another useful definition thus sees "mercantilism as an inclusive system of economic regulation,
which was designed to provide revenues for the nation-state and monopoly rents for successful
'projectors' of monopoly and cartel schemes." Robert B. Ekelund, Jr., and Robert D. Tollison,
Mercantilism as a Rent-Seeking Society: Economic Regulation in Historical Perspective (College Station, TX,
1981), xi -xi i .
6
Thomas Mun, England's Treasure by Forraign Trade (London, 1664), 84, as quoted in Appleby,
Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England, 39. See also Lynn Muchmore, "A Note
on Thomas Mun's 'England's Treasure by Forraign Trade,' " Economic History Review, 2d Ser., 23
(I97O), 498- 503-
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340 JohnJ. McCusker
dictates of mercantilist doctrine. Our nation will prosper and prevail over
its enemies. Victory for us will ensure our peace and prosperity.
One suggested mechanism for expanding overseas trade in the highly
competitive world of sixteenth-century Europe was by adding to the terri-
tory over which the monarch wielded power. The success of Portugal and
Spain provided an extraordinary incentive. In the space of a few decades,
Spain had proceeded from a patchwork of principalities on the Iberian Penin-
sula to the premier nation-state of Europe, the possessor of a worldwide
empire. Its overseas trade grew from negligible to enormous; Spanish ships
and Spanish merchants dominated Atlantic Europe; and the Spanish monar-
chy became the richest and most powerful in the world. The secret of its
success was no secret at all. Spanish colonies in the Far East and the Far West
tremendously increased the overseas trade of the nation. Taxes on that trade
swelled the Crown's coffers. And Spain, which, like most of pre—sixteenth-
century Europe, had bowed to the merchant bankers of the Italian city states
when it needed to borrow, no longer had the need. The new capital of trade
and finance in Atlantic Europe was Antwerp in the Spanish Netherlands.
Spain was the best possible example for the apostles of mercantilism.
The lesson of the Spanish and Portuguese empires was not lost upon the
rest of Europe. Englishmen, in particular, appreciated and envied the
effect on their own country of English consumption of Portuguese sugars
from Brazil imported into London from the sugar refineries of Antwerp,
and of Spanish tobacco from the Spanish colonies in the New World
imported from Iberian ports. Every English silver penny spent on such
commodities paid some profit to a Spanish merchant, paid some duty to
the Spanish Crown, enhanced and empowered the nation-state of Spain,
which, not incidentally, threatened ever more the much weaker nation,
England. It is in no way coincidental that the reign of Queen Elizabeth I
(1558—1603) experienced the nearly successful invasion by the Spanish
Armada and the first if feeble attempts to gain control of and expand the
overseas trade of the country. Expanding that trade meant among other
things the creation of joint-stock companies to establish an English com-
mercial presence in both East and West. The English East India Company
was formed in 1600; the London Company of Virginia was set up in 1606;
and there were others. In encouraging all of this activity, the government
of Queen Elizabeth I was acting upon the dictates of mercantilism and
appealing for her subjects' support using mercantilist mantras. It was in
tribute to their mercantilist queen, the greatest of Great Britain's mon-
archs, that the first successful colony was named in her honor, Virginia.
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British Mercantilist Policies and the Colonies 341
Just as mercantilist thinking provoked and justified the establishment
of British colonies in the New World, so also did mercantilist imperatives
dictate the expectations that Great Britain had for those colonies. As the
nation-state and its empire grew, the formalization of the relationship
between the parts of that interrelated whole became more structured. The
structure was a mercantilist one, in theory, at the start. The policies of the
Old Empire, the First British Empire, toward the entirety of that empire,
at home and abroad, had their roots in mercantilist theory just as the
nation-state Great Britain did. Nevertheless, as the Empire developed, so
did the thinking of those who were its citizens, its administrators, its
beneficiaries, at home and abroad. The tensions between the older, mercan-
tilist ideas and the newer realities resolved themselves in many different
ways. Ultimately, of course, inspired by the likes of Adam Smith, Great
Britain shook itself loose of mercantilist doctrines altogether. By then, it
had become the nation-state of Europe, the Atlantic World, indeed the
entire world. The seat of power need no longer be the monarchy; it could
shift. Under capitalism, it could shift to those who controlled production;
or, alternatively, under socialism to those who spoke for the working
classes; or, perhaps, under a managed capitalism, to those who claimed to
speak for both management and labor. We who are the witnesses of the
latest stage in that progression may understand our current condition
better by knowing something more about it origins.
In the same way that Great Britain eventually threw off the mantle of
mercantilism, so did some of its colonies throw down the bonds of Em-
pire, at much the same time and for closely related reasons. Those imperial
links, fashioned of regulation and statute, mercantilist in origin, were
forged in the interests of the rising nation-state. Such policies were success-
ful. They helped to establish the nation Great Britain, to create, at home,
the desired era of peace and prosperity, and, not incidentally, to enrich the
European inhabitants who settled in the colonies that constituted the
outlying regions of that same empire. Among the latter were some people
who eventually used a fair portion of their economic prosperity to acquire
political independence and become a successful, and rival, nation-state.
Those colonies - and, most particularly, one of the nations that hived off
the British Empire, the United States - are the focus of this volume. The
policies that the British Empire — better, the Old Empire — developed
and introduced over time are the subject of this essay.
Even though there were significant temporal variations, the policies of
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342 John]. McCusker
Great Britain toward its New World colonies — as we will see — were
essentially mercantilistic almost to the very end. They were all fashioned
solely with the interests of the nation-state at heart. The nation-state may
well have included all the parts, including the colonies, but first among
the parts was always England itself. The successful establishment of the
nation-state England required that everything possible be done to secure
and increase royal revenues — both the regular revenues of peacetime and
the reserve revenues to be tapped in emergencies. Mercantilist colonial
policies always pursued those purposes. Many of the seeming disagree-
ments and contradictions during the history of British colonial administra-
tion can be clarified when viewed in this light. The nation Great Britain
was the end; controlling every aspect of the economy of the Empire to the
nation's benefit was one means toward that end.
Government policies changed over time, nevertheless, as the times
changed. The initial period, up to the Restoration of King Charles II in
1660, is the first of three periods in the development of British colonial
policy. The changes wrought in the first years of King Charles H's reign
established the essential framework of mercantilist policy in the Old Empire
and set the tone for about a century, the second period in that progress. The
reforms initiated in the middle of the eighteenth century and installed by
the end of the Seven Years' War were the beginning of a third phase - but
one much less mercantilistic than earlier, in the end marked more by a
rejection of what had gone before, a period of transition. In all three periods
there was much variety, a certain confusion, sometimes a weakness in
purpose, and certainly differences among regions in the Empire, but the
essential goals stayed constant. The central government and its need for
financial strength were matters of first priority; central government domina-
tion of everything — including the economy — was required to attain that
objective. Only after the end of the Old Empire, indeed only after the final
defeat of Napoleon and victory in the Second Hundred Years' War (1689-
1815), did "free trade" replace the Acts of Trade, did capitalism replace
mercantilism as the doctrine that dictated public policy.
For the mercantilist, getting full benefit out of colonies involved the
development, implementation, and enforcement of policies designed to
attain three interrelated objectives. One can recite them, as in a cate-
chism. England (later, after 1707, Great Britain) was to be the exclusive
beneficiary of the trade in the products of its colonies. England (later
Great Britain) was to be the exclusive beneficiary of the trade in the supply
of goods to its colonies. England (later Great Britain) was to be the
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British Mercantilist Policies and the Colonies 343
exclusive beneficiary of the carrying trade of the colonies. The emphasis in
all these matters was on the trade itself. Other things to do with the
colonies, even the general economy, mattered much less. Maintaining as
far as possible a monopoly on the movement of goods and ships into and
out of the colonies ensured both that the revenue from the duties would be
maximized and that the profits to English merchants would be maxi-
mized. Effecting all of this, reconciling some inherent contradictions, and
enforcing the policies all became a major part of the story of English
colonial administration.
One overarching element in this story needs to be clear from the begin-
ning. England viewed the colonies as a simple extension of itself; the
colonies were, for the most part, merely English counties somewhere to
the south and west of Cornwall. England considered the colonists as
English citizens living at a distance. The colonists thought likewise; thus
they, as much as Lancashire or Yorkshire men and women, were to be both
the subjects of those mercantilistic policies and the people who benefited
from them. Merchants resident in colonial ports were English merchants.
Ships built and owned in the colonies qualified in every way as English
ships. It followed, then, in theory, at least at first, that no distinctions of a
mercantilistic nature were ever to exist between colonists and residents of
the metropolis. Other ideas, other expectations might emerge. The gov-
ernment was to sort out conflicts, claims of preferment from different
groups from different parts of the realm, Boston as well as Bristol, but the
colonists were at no necessary disadvantage, from the mercantilistic per-
spective. The law of the realm applied for all, to all, everywhere - at least
at first, certainly in theory.
The failure of the colonists to conform in practice to mercantilist doc-
trines became a major problem during the first of the three periods into
which we divide the colonial experience (1600-60). England did not help
matters by being vague in its expectations and inconsistent, nearly invisi-
ble, when it came to encouraging or enforcing behavior consistent with
mercantilist maxims. The first six decades of the seventeenth century were
a painful period of learning for all parties.
Prior to 1660, there was considerable confusion as to how best to turn
the colonies to mercantilist ends. Thus, it is not surprising that, by the
middle of the seventeenth century, each of the several colonies had gone its
own way. We can feel some sympathy with all of a mercantilistic bent in
England who expressed concern about what was happening. Not only were
the nation's colonies not benefiting the nation but, in fact, they were
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344 JohnJ. McCusker
enriching England's chief rival, The Netherlands. These well-based percep-
tions and fears, sounding as they did a profoundly dissonant chord in a
mercantilistic world, became the call to arms that finally established in
statute law the colonial policy of the Old Empire.
The situation that developed over the first half of the seventeenth
century is completely understandable. The English men and women who
had migrated to the New World pursued their own self-interest there, just
as they had done at home, with little regard for the mercantilistic expecta-
tions of a remote government. They sold their produce to the highest
bidder, increasingly often a Dutch merchant. Many of the colonists, espe-
cially in the West Indies, had earlier borrowed from a Dutch merchant
house the capital to set up their enterprises. While this was especially true
of the sugar planters of Barbados, the frequency with which the names of
Dutch traders turn up in the county records of Virginia argues their
importance there, too. The colonists found it efficient — and cheaper — to
buy what they needed from the same company. The company's representa-
tive, the supercargo of the Dutch vessel that had brought out the Euro-
pean goods which the colonists had just purchased, offered to buy and ship
to market the products that the colonists had for sale. The price that he
offered was higher and the freight rates and insurance costs that he offered
were lower than any English vessel could offer. The Dutch were the
masters of the carrying trades and commerce generally during the first
two-thirds of the seventeenth century. It was the "Golden Age of The
Netherlands." On a level playing field, the wholesale merchants based in
London or Bristol could not hope to compete.
Worse still, during much of this time, the field of play was tipped
against the English side. As the Puritan Revolution turned into the Civil
War during the second half of this early period, whatever hope the English
had to better the Dutch evaporated. By the late 1630s, all modes of
economic life in England, but especially trade and transportation, were
suffering increasingly. With Cavalier and Roundhead more interested in
destroying each other than carrying on business, concern about the colo-
nies became lost in a haze of musket-fire. Nor were the Dutch shy about
pursuing their competitive advantage. Sailing from their trading posts in
the Caribbean, on Curacao and St. Eustatius, and in North America, at
New Amsterdam, they became a regular presence in the ports of Boston
and Bridgetown and the estuaries of the Chesapeake that served as ports
for Maryland and Virginia.
What had begun for the English colonists as a passive acceptance of the
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British Mercantilist Policies and the Colonies 345
opportunities offered by the Dutch presence, quickly became an absolute
necessity to be promoted and protected. Even had the Virginians preferred
to deal with other Englishmen, events soon denied them that opportunity.
Prior to the Virginia Company's dissolution in 1624, the company had
insisted upon its monopoly right to all the planters' trade; after the
company's demise, the English monarchs issued orders-in-council that
sought fitfully to secure the colony's trade in English hands and English
ships. But, in the absence of English ships during the Civil War, Vir-
ginia's tobacco planters faced ruin if they did not accept the Dutch offer —
and at a good profit, too. In the 1640s, several colonies, from Massachu-
setts south, passed legislation to ease the way for Dutch merchants and
Dutch vessels. It was a matter of survival.
Consider, nevertheless, the implications of these actions for the English
mercantilist. The English nation suffered in several ways from this turn of
events. Lost were any profits to the English wholesale merchant from the
sale of the Chesapeake tobacco; lost, too, were the profits on the foregone
sale of any goods shipped from England to the colonies. Lost to the
English shipowners were the profits from the freighting of goods in both
directions. Additionally, the loss of income to the English — almost exclu-
sively London - merchant elite diminished the very group upon which the
government relied, increasingly, for material support. Most significantly,
lost to the central government were the import and export duties that
would have been paid had the goods passed through metropolitan ports.
Worse still, all those losses to the English went, guilder for pound, into
the treasury of the Dutch government and the purses of Dutch merchants.
The fat burghers of Amsterdam prospered; fair England languished.
Not mentioned among the list of losses was the diminished employ-
ment for English seamen or the damage to English industry from the lost
sale of English manufactured goods. England's chief industry during this
era was her woolen industry. To the extent that the colonists bought
woolen cloth, it was ultimately English woolen goods no matter from
whom they bought it. English wool and English cloth made from English
wool had long dominated the cloth trade of northern Europe. A good deal
of the finishing of English cloth still took place on the Continent, much of
it in The Netherlands, north and south; thus, it passed through England's
ports and paid the duties.'
7
English clothiers were ardent supporters of mercantilism, because they believed that it would result
in heightened exports of wool. See Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Samtemtb-Century
England, 158- 98 and elsewhere.
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346 JohnJ. McCusker
In the seventeenth century, however much the stimulation of English
industry may have been the text of English mercantilist tracts, it was
considerably less significant as a matter of public policy. During this period
and after, mercantilist legislation and regulation was more concerned with
promoting English trade than with promoting English industry. In 1641,
Lewes Roberts, the well-connected merchant and writer on commercial
matters, indicated a willingness to accept government promotion of manu-
facturing provided it offered English wholesale merchants compensation for
the lost trade.
8
Even later attempts at limiting colonial manufacturing give
evidence of this same ambivalence. Manufacturing of whatever in the colo-
nies was not so much outlawed as was the export of colonial manufactured
goods prohibited. It was the trade that mattered, because it was the trade
that was taxed.
9
British manufacturers benefited the Crown much less,
because their business yielded no direct tax revenues. Only after the middle
of the eighteenth century, when more broadly based British business inter-
ests began to assume more power, did the attitude of central government
change — and for reasons that had nothing to do with mercantilism but that
looked to a newer doctrine for guidance and justification.
Similarly, the argument that the Empire helped the nation by encourag-
ing the merchant marine was never consistently pursued. There were
strategic benefits, of course, in having a trained corps of seamen readily
accessible during time of war. Yet that realization did not turn into a
pursuit of commercial policy, per se. The benefit was frequently men-
tioned; such statements reoccurred as part of the rhetoric of debate when
acts were deliberated. But laws and regulations in pursuit of this end exist
nowhere by themselves. For instance, the provisions in both the major
navigation acts of the post-Restoration period that stipulated that colonial
trade had to take place in vessels having crews at least three-quarters
English had nothing to do with promoting English sailors. "The predomi-
nant, if not the only reason for the requirement was to identify vessels
more easily," to guarantee that they were English bottoms, owned by
English owners.
10
The benefit as pursued in policy was a subsidiary bene-
8
Lewes Roberts, The Treasure ofTraffite. Or a Discourse o/Forraign Trade (London, 1641). See Valerie
Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution: City Government and National Politics, 1625—
43 (Oxford, 1961), 283.
» "The injurious effects of the Wool Act of 1699, the Hat Act of 1732 [and] the Iron Act of 1750 . . .
have been greatly overstated." Andrews, England's Commercial and Colonial Policy, 349, n. 4. He
referred, respectively, to 10 William III, c. 16; 5 George II, c. 22; and 23 George II, c. 29.
10
Lawrence A. Harper, The English Navigation Laws: A Seventeenth-Century Experiment in Social Engineer-
ing (New York, 1939), 55.
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British Mercantilist Policies and the Colonies 347
fit.?
1
When a conflict arose between what may have resulted in the promo-
tion of seamen and the multiplication of the duties, the latter won. If it
came to it, money could - and did — buy fighting men, just as it bought
ships. Money was all-important to the mercantilist nation state.
And so it came to pass that, when King Charles I was dead and the
Parliament needed money to put England back together again, the sham-
bles of the Empire cried out for reform. The "Navigation Act" of 1651,
the Act of 8 October 1651, "the first parliamentary statute that in any
comprehensive way defined England's commercial policy" proved itself
quintessentially mercantilistic by seeking money, first, and the reform of
trade within the Empire hardly at all.
12
The primary concern of its
several sections was to enhance the role that the London merchant elite
played in the vital trades into and out of England's own ports by restrict-
ing the role of Dutch merchants. With certain exceptions, only English
ships — including the English in the colonies - could carry goods into
English ports from Asia, Africa, the Americas, or Europe. A key excep-
tion was the trade with Europe, in that a merchant of any other Euro-
pean nation could bring goods produced in that nation directly to En-
gland. The purpose of the act was twofold: to deny the Dutch their
carrying trade, insofar as it involved England, and to encourage English
businesses to take over the carrying trade that had previously been
Dutch. The English merchants, especially the largest London merchant
houses, upon which the Puritan Commonwealth depended for its finan-
cial support, were the beneficiaries — and backers — of this act.'
3
As
Charles M. Andrews put it: "The ordinance of 1651 was the work of the
great commercial companies concerned in the 'rich trades,' as over
against the lesser merchants of London and the outports . . . ."'•» One
particularly well-informed contemporary observer, Daniel O'Neill, wrote
that the "act was procured by some few men for their interest."'
5
Consider — as many did during the 1650s — what the Act of 1651 did
11
In the exception that proves my rule, the promotion of the fisheries as "the nursery of seamen" was
pursued. Thus, there evolved the policy of discouraging permanent settlements on the island of
Newfoundland. See Cfliffbrd] Grant Head, Eighteenth Century Newfoundland: A Geographer's Perspec-
tive (Toronto, 1976), 38—41 and elsewhere.
" Andrews, England's Commercial and Colonial Policy, 36.
15
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 577—632 and elsewhere.
14
Andrews, England's Commercial and Colonial Policy, 42.
•' "A brief relation of the affares of England, March 1653," as quoted in Qharles] H. Firth, "Crom-
well and the Expulsion of the Long Parliament in 1653," English Historical Review, VIII (July
1893), 531. Compare G[eorge] N. Clark, "The English Navigation Act of 1651," History: The
Journal of the Historical Association, New Series, VII (Jan. 1923), 285- 6.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
348 JohnJ. McCusker
not address, at least as far as the colonies were concerned. While the act
barred Dutch ships from carrying anything but Dutch goods into colonial
ports, it did not outlaw them from being there. That omission alone left
the gate swinging wide. Moreover, any English vessel could bring goods
from anywhere into colonial ports. And every one of those ships, Dutch as
well as English, could do what they had always been doing and carry the
produce of the colonies anywhere at all. Chesapeake tobacco and Barbados
sugar could, and was, quite legitimately, carried by English and Dutch
vessels to any port, London or Amsterdam. Indeed, some recognized in
the free trade in Barbadian sugar a major opportunity to promote the
English sugar industry and to squelch both the established industry of
Brazil (then in the hands of the Dutch) and the new sugar industry being
set up in the French West Indies. Yet the Act of 1651, by taking a first
step in the control of England's trade, made a second step that much
easier. More English trade was in the hands of London's mercantile mag-
nates. Secured and enhanced, thereby, were the nation's financial resources
for emergencies, such as Oliver Cromwell's Anglo—Dutch War (1652-4)
and his "Western Design" (1654—5). Kmg Charles II would secure an
increase in the regular revenues.
The Restoration of King Charles II, and the Restoration Compromise
that eased his way, ushered in a new era, the second of the three periods .
into which we can break English trade policies prior to the American
Revolution. The Restoration also swept the Act of 1651 into a constitu-
tional waste bin. While the lawmakers and the wholesale merchants had
to begin again, they had now both theory and some practice to draw upon
as they confronted the needs of the nation England. Their appetites whet-
ted by their success under the protection of the first navigation act,
English merchant princes sought the restoration of that coverage and
more. Having successfully excluded the merchants of The Netherlands
from some of the trade at English metropolitan ports, they argued to
exclude them from more ports, elsewhere in the Old Empire. The appe-
tites of the merchant elite for greater profits was more than matched by
the appetite of the monarchy - King Charles II, Nell Gwynn, and
company - for more money. The revenues from the customs duties, usu-
ally easier to increase than the land taxes and the excise taxes, seemed
especially attractive in this regard. The trade of the colonies and the trade
in colonial commodities combined to offer an easy opportunity to achieve
both Crown and company purposes. The first years of the new regime
witnessed th&.passage of the famed Act of 1660 (12 Charles II, c. 18) and
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British Mercantilist Policies and the Colonies 349
Act of 1663 (15 Charles II, c.7), which accomplished the immediate needs
of a mercantilistic empire and established a colonial system under which
that empire existed for over a century.
The navigation acts of 1660 and 1663 — the Acts of Trade — must be
understood for both what they did and what they did not do. While we
are here concerned most particularly with their impact on those of En-
gland's colonies that later became the United States of America, the acts
had as their target not just those colonies but all of England's then and
future overseas colonies, not only its colonies but the entirety of the
Empire, including England itself, and its trade with the rest of the
world - especially, again, The Netherlands. These two acts were de-
signed, directly and specifically, to guide the trade of the Empire into
directions that benefited the rising nation-state of England and, very
particularly, the central government of that state, most especially, the
monarch. The benefit to government came in the ways already re-
counted: a reliable and increasing flow of revenue from the customs
duties, and an increasing pool of wealthy businessmen whose fortunes
were tied to trade — and, thus, to government — and who could be
counted on to lend funds to government when the need arose. Both
regular revenues and emergency support served to buttress the govern-
ment, which, in turn, used its strength to support and expand the
Empire and its trade. From a mercantilistic perspective, colonies were
important only insofar as they enhanced the trade and, thus, the power
of the English nation-state.
The Act of 1660 and Act of 1663 addressed colonial trade from the
perspective of the mercantilist. These two acts and other later acts supple-
mental to them (1662, 1670, 1671, 1673,
an
d 1696), strove to direct
more trade through English ports and to establish more of that trade in
the hands of the major English companies.
16
The Act of 1660 in its first
section set the tone for all that were to follow. No trade into or out of any
English colony could take place in anything but an English ship. An Eng-
lish ship was defined, once again, as one built in England, owned by Eng-
lishmen, captained by an English master, and sailed by a crew three-
quarters of which was English. Note that in this instance as in others, the
English colonies and English colonists are English for all the purposes of
the act. Excluded from English colonial trade of every sort were all
foreign ships, sailors, masters, and merchants. The clear beneficiary of
16
The supplemental pieces of legislation referred to are: 14 Charles II, c. 11 (the "Act of Frauds'); 22
and 23 Charles II, c. 11; 22 and 23 Charles II, c. 26; 25 Charles II, c. 7; 7 and 8 William III, c. 22.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
35° JohnJ. McCusker
the act was the important English merchant to whom was handed,
exclusively, the lucrative and expanding trade of the colonies.
The next several paragraphs of the Act of 1660 dealt with the same
issues as had the Act of 1651. In a highly convoluted way, the Act of 1651
had sought to enhance the trade of English wholesale merchants by limit-
ing the carrying trade of the Dutch in English ports. It attempted to do so
by stipulating that commodities produced in any particular place could be
shipped to England only by merchants of that place in their own ships or
by English merchants in English ships. For instance, wine from Bordeaux
could be carried to London by either French merchants in French ships or
English merchants in English ships. The Act of 1651, by its inclusiveness,
had become a burden on trade. The Act of 1660 pursued essentially the
same purposes but by precisely the opposite means. Instead of saying that
all such goods should be traded in such fashion, it specified only those
products that were of most importance. The act included two lists, one of
European products — including such vital commodities as salt, grain
("corn" in the English usage), wine, timber, and all Turkish goods — and
one of the produce of the English colonies. What these goods had in
common was their value in the carrying trade and their worth to the royal
revenue.
The enumeration or listing of colonial commodities did not echo the
Act of 1651. While it did hearken back to an earlier era, much more
importantly, it sounded a significant advance, signaled a different tack. In
ways reminiscent of attempts under King James I and King Charles I to
circumscribe the market for tobacco, not only were the listed commodities
to be carried only in English ships, but they were also to be brought only
to English ports.
I7
Included in the original list and the subsequent addi-
tions to it were all those colonial commodities that earned the wholesale
merchants good profits and brought the revenue considerable custom
duties. They were the major staple commodities produced in English
colonies, profit makers for English merchants and revenue earners for the
Royal customs. They included goods in demand among England's
consumers - ginger, sugar, and tobacco — and goods in demand by En-
gland's producers — cotton and dye stuffs, such as indigo. Later legislation
(1705) added rice to that first group and added molasses, for distillation,
and a variety of products vital in the building of ships ("naval stores") to
the second group. Copper and the pelts of fur-bearing animals such as the
" Harper, English Navigation Laws, 35-6; George Louis Beer, The Origins of the British Colonial System,
i.578-i66o(New York, 1908), 89-240.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
British Mercantilist Policies and the Colonies . 351
beaver were designated enumerated commodities in 1721; and in 1763,
the list grew again when numerous other commodities were appended to
the benefit of English manufacturing interests. By then, however, a cen-
tury after the Act of 1660, the fundamental nature of English legislation
had changed, as we will see. The additions of 1763 reflect that change
more than they do the intention of those who drafted the Act of 1660.
l8
The Act of 1660 erected the first of the two mercantilist pillars de-
signed to support the nation-state England; the Act of 1663 erected the
second. Just as the first law sought to direct the export trade of the
colonies into channels that would benefit England exclusively, so did the
second law seek to accomplish the same objective with the import trade of
the colonies. As in 1660, the Act of 1663 dealt with numerous issues
besides the colonial import trade, but its central thrust was significant.
No goods were to be imported into the colonies from Europe other than by
way of England. (Reasonable exceptions made the rules more bearable.) In
coming by way of England, such goods had, of course, to pay English
customs duties. They all had to travel on English ships. English merchant
houses earned the money from the carrying of the goods and from the
profits in their sale. The government of England earned the revenues from
the duties.
Two later seventeenth-century pieces of legislation supplemented the
Act of 1660 and the Act of 1663. The Act of 1673 and the Act of 1696
added nothing of substance to the earlier acts. They were almost exclu-
sively administrative in character. Even the Act of 1673, popularly known
as the Revenue Act (or "Plantation Duty" Act) of that year, was not
designed to raise any revenue. The purpose of that and the later acts was to
hone the administration of the earlier acts, the better to effect their
enforcement and assure their observance. Of all the provisions of the two
acts, the one that went furthest toward that goal was a section of the
earlier Jaw. The Act of 1673 installed royal appointees as customs collec-
tors in every port in the colonies. From that time forward, the royal
revenues and the monopoly of the commercial magnates was ensured. One
of the most powerful and strident contemporary critics of the navigation
acts of the 1660s recognized them for just what they were. The effect of
the acts was to fatten the coffers of the Crown and the treasure chests of
rich merchants. Roger Coke lamented the result - "the Kings Customs,
and particular men may grow rich by a trade" — but many more, then and
18
Andrews, England's Commercial and Colonial Policy, 106- 7. Th
e
*tx& mentioned are.3 & 4 Anne, c.
5; 3 & 4 Anne, c. 9; 8 George I, c. 15; 4 George III, c. 15.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
352 JohnJ. McCusker
later, had no such complaint." That is what mercantilism was all about.
Mercantilism was a star, rising.
The century of Great Britain's ascendancy after the passage of these
early acts was a powerful confirmation of their successful implementation.
The century also witnessed great changes in the nation, the Empire, and
the way people thought about the economics of building and sustaining a
nation-state. The success that mercantilism created for the British nation
also encouraged among many a dissatisfaction with the way in which that
success was shared. As with other successful ideas, mercantilism in En-
gland sowed and nurtured the seeds of its own destruction. While many
prospered within the realm, the extreme prosperity of a very few moti-
vated others to claim more for themselves. Businessmen generally decided
that the state should no longer be the chief beneficiary of the growing
economy. After all, they, the producers of goods and services, were central
to its functioning. By the middle of the eighteenth century, mercantilistic
thinking had begun to give way to the ideas of David Hume and Adam
Smith. They preached to a choir of converts the "good news" of free trade.
The gospel of mercantilism was about to be replaced by a new doctrine,
capitalism.
Over the century between 1660 and 1760, England and its Empire
epitomized the power of the mercantilist nation-state. The Acts of Trade
were enforced, and they were obeyed. Englishmen and Englishwomen, at
home and abroad, were far better off at the end of that hundred years than
their ancestors had been four and five generations earlier. The European
settlers in England's colonies, nearly one-third the population of the realm,
had attained, on average, higher levels of income and wealth than any other
group of people in the world.
20
(That their African American slave laborers
'» Coke, A Discourse of Trade, In Two Parts. The First Treats of the Reason of the Decay of the Strength,
Wealth, and Trade of England. The Latter, of the Growth and Increase of the Dutch Trade above the English
(London, 1670), 40. See Andrews, England's Commercial and Colonial Policy, 132- 3. Compare the
writings of Francis Brewster, John Cary, Josiah Child, Joshua Gee, and others, as Andrews suggests
{England's Commercial and Colonial Policy, 134). See, particularly, John Cary's An Essay on the State of
England in Relation to Its Trade . . . (Bristol, 1695), which Andrews calls, "the most uncompromis-
ing defense of orthodox mercantilism in the seventeenth century" (ibid., 134).
10
So claimed in John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607—
1789, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill, 1991), 55, based on Alice Hanson Jones, "Wealth Estimates for the
American Middle Colonies, 1774," Economic Development and Cultural Change, XVIII (1970). Re-
vised calculations suggest an even higher figure for average per capita gross national product,
roughly £13 sterling (1774). Compare Peter Mathias and Patrick [K. ] O'Brien, "Taxation in
Britain and France, 1715-1810: A Comparison of the Social and Economic Incidence of Taxes
Collected for the Central Governments," The Journal of European Economic History, V (1976), 601 —
50, who presented data (611, 613) that indicate per capita commodity output figures of £7 for
Great Britain and £6 for France (177$).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
British Mercantilist Policies and the Colonies 353
were denied a share in this abundance mattered not in the European settlers'
accounting, however much the descendants of both groups have lived to
bear the cost of such blind greed.) The colonists correctly perceived threats
to that good life in Parliament's late-mercantilist revision of the Acts of
Trade to accommodate, first one interest group and then another. The
decision to resist and then rebel rent the Old Empire. Yet England, the
nation-state built on mercantilism, showed how powerful it really had
become by emerging from that defeat to fight again. The ultimate victory
over its ancient rival France in the final phase of the Second Hundred Years'
War was the consummate tribute to a nation-state that could and did draw
on its revenues from trade to maintain itself in peacetime and to fund its
needs in war.
21
Central to the success of the English nation-state in its long
contest with France was its ability to create and service a national debt to
meet such national emergencies. That, after all, was what mercantilism was
about.
22
The English colonists, at once both subject to and nurtured by the Empire
and the Acts of Trade, quickly fitted into the laws and regulations promul-
gated from Westminster and Whitehall. They had to; they had no other
choice. The Act of 1660 and Act of 1663 contained provisions to enforce
compliance. Alternatives evaporated. The lessons taught to the Dutch in
the three Anglo—Dutch wars (1652-4, 1665-7, 1672-4) were reinforced
for that nation by the increasingly predatory armies and navies of France.
It was surely better for The Netherlands to accept a limited economic
defeat at the hands of Protestant England than a total annihilation by the
cannons of Catholic France. With the Dutch absent from their ports and
their markets, the English colonists rapidly realized the new reality. Colo-
nial staple commodities, neatly enumerated by the acts, traveled to the
proper markets along the proper paths. Colonial purchases of European
goods came by way of English ports in English ships. Bonding procedures,
" The lessons that John Brewer draws most powerfully for the first five phases of that war apply even
more forcefully for the sixth and last phase. See Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the
English State, 1688-1783 (London, 1988).
" That France, the larger and grander of the two powers, lost this contest may with equal justice be
laid to the difficulty it had in creating and servicing a national debt. The failure of the French
government to overcome institutional obstacles to the regular funding of its indebtedness irrepara-
bly inhibited its ability to borrow in emergencies. See Francois J. Velde and David R. Weir, "The
Financial Market and Government Debt Policy in France, 1746—1793, "Journal of Economic History,
LJI (1992), t—39, and the many works which they cite there, including, most especially, the path-
breaking studies by James C. Riley, International Government Finance and the Amsterdam Capital
Maria, 1740—1813 (Cambridge, 1980); and The Seven Years War and the Old Regime in France: The
Economic and Financial Toll (Princeton, NJ, 1986).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
354 John]. McCusker
customs officers, admiralty courts, and the Royal Navy were marshaled to
encourage colonial compliance with the Acts of Trade. The governments of
the colonies themselves were enlisted to ensure their enforcement. All
served together to limit the ability of the colonists to do other than obey.
Such a formulation might suggest colonial resistance to the Acts of
Trade when, in fact, there was little.
23
The colonists, just as did everyone
else affected by these laws, debated and petitioned for and against pro-
cesses they liked and disliked. The history of the passage of each of the
laws that constitute the corpus of statutory mercantilism is rich with the
exchanges that are part of the legislative processes of Parliament. We
would be very wrong to read these debates as anything precursory to the
American Revolution. We would be very wrong to sense in any of the
debaters a precursor to the likes of Patrick Henry, Sam Adams, or Thomas
Paine.
What smuggling occurred hardly mattered over the long haul in the
large scope of things. Again, seeing in any smuggling during the pre-
1763 period some kind of "patriotic resistance" to English oppression
before the fact is to distort greatly both in intention and scale what was
simply the pursuit of immediate self-interest. And doing so badly distorts
what the American Revolution was really about. Considerable anecdotal
evidence of the existence of smugglers and their activities does little more
than lend a flavor to the history of the period - on both sides of the
Atlantic. Such evidence contributes not at all to any discussion of either
the importance of such activity to the overall trade or the attitudes of
smugglers or the motives of their supporters. The fallacy of composition
should be a significant caution in such matters. The economic historian
who worked hardest on this subject, Lawrence A. Harper, settled the
issue: "illicit trade constituted only a small fraction of the legitimate
commerce of the colonies."
24
Full stop; end of discussion.
This is not to suggest for one moment that in 1660 every colonist from
Newfoundland to Barbados fell instantly into lock step, marching to the
beat of Parliament's drum. There were loud and continuing protests
against the restraints on trade, more vocal from some groups, more persis-
tent from others. The tobacco planters of the Chesapeake and the sugar
planters of the West Indies felt the constraints most and argued strongly
against the Acts of Trade. Yet the number of their petitions fell off rapidly
•) The case for this position is powerfully made by Oliver M. Dickerson, The Navigation Acts and the
American Revolution (Philadelphia, PA,
"< Harper, English Navigation Laws, 263.
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British Mercantilist Policies and the Colonies 355
in the 1660s; after the passage of the Act of 1673 (
t n e
"Plantation Duty"
Act), their objections were heard little more. Later on, they and others in
the Empire petitioned in favor or against some new measure within the
compass of Acts of Trade. But such actions evince rather more their
acceptance of the Old Colonial System than they do resistance to it.
The New England merchants, sustained by a government that recognized
no Parliamentary limitation on the rights granted by the charter given the
Massachusetts Bay Company in 1629, maintained their rather more belliger-
ent arguments and actions into the 1680s. In 1677, John Hull, merchant of
Boston, lamented that the Acts of Trade hurt New England's trade greatly:
it "is as the cutting off o{u]r hands & feet . . . we must neither doe nor
walke any m o r e . . . . This orphant Plantation will be Crushed. "*' All they
accomplished was to attract the attention of a new government agency, a
"Lord Committee of Trade and Plantations" - the first Board of Trade -
that put in suit their sacred charter. In 1684, the English government won
the suit, abrogated the charter, dissolved the colony's government, and
installed a new royal government of a new colony, the Dominion of New
England. The merchant community in New England quickly had a change
of heart, even the good merchants of Boston.
26
The Act of 1696 crowned the
government's successes. Even Charles M. Andrews, even if unenthusiasti-
cally, did allow that by the end of the seventeenth century, Britain's leaders
"had been able to win the day. "
27
Part of that change of heart occurred because the merchants of Boston
had come to appreciate that the new order allowed them considerable
advantages over the older scheme of things. Much more significant than
what English colonists in the New World were forbidden to do by the Acts
of Trade was what they could now profitably do. The most important
opportunity opened to the colonists was the expanded role for merchants
engaged in the carrying trade. Colonial merchants seized this chance and
turned it to their best advantage. Consider, first, that within the Acts of
Trade, the colonists were English in every sense. Colonial ships were
English ships; colonial captains were English captains; and colonial sailors
were English sailors. Every trade newly protected within the Empire by
the Act of 1660 and the Act of 1663 was just as open to the merchants of
Boston as it was to the merchants of Bristol.
'* John Hull, at Boston, to [William) Stoughcon and Peter Bulkeley, at London, Boston, 22 Dec.
1677, John Hull Letter Book, 1670-1685, [section 15], John Hull Papers, American Antiquarian
Society, Worcester, MA.
•* Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1955).
" Andrews, England's Commercial and Colonial Policy, 177.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
356 JohnJ. McCusker
There was more. Colonial merchants had an even better opportunity in
the intercolonial trade of the Western Hemisphere than did merchants
based in London or "the outports" (the other ports of England). Colonial
merchants were closer at hand, had better sources of information, and ran
smaller vessels that could operate more efficiently in the colonial trades
and navigate more easily in coastal waterways.
28
Before 1664, the Dutch
merchants based at Curasao, St. Eustatius, and New Amsterdam had
nearly monopolized trade along the eastern seaboard of the Americas. The
colonists quickly and smartly took over their role and even one of their
bases. New Amsterdam became New York with unseemly ease. By the
1690s, Londoners could well complain that the New Englanders were fast
becoming the Dutch of the Empire, but no one moved to limit that role,
at least not until much later.
There was still more. Nothing in the Acts of Trade prevented the
English colonial merchant from trading with the colonists of other powers
in the New World. The governments that owned such colonies might
object, but the English government passed no law against it. As long as
colonial merchants did not import into the English colonies any goods of
European origin, and as long as colonial merchants did not export from
the English colonies any enumerated commodities, the colonial merchant
who traded anywhere in the Western Hemisphere was never in breach of
the navigation acts. The "Molasses Act" of 1733 (6 George III, c. 13) in
effect confirmed the legality of these trades by levying a tax on certain of
the imports from the foreign West Indies (sugar, molasses, and rum). The
trade with the French, the Dutch, the Danes, and the Spanish was per-
fectly legal from the perspective of Parliament.
So were many other trades legal for the colonists under the Acts of
Trade. Most notably, colonial merchants and colonial ships could carry
enumerated commodities to England itself, could carry nonenumerated
commodities from the colonies to some European ports, and could carry
European goods to English ports, pay the duties, and bring them back to
the colonies.
2
' Colonial ships could engage in the African trade on the
same footing as other English merchants, once the monopoly of the Royal
African Company had been ended. Some did, even if the number was
insignificant. While the East India Company maintained its monopoly of
28
See Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, i6j}-i 740: An Exploration of Communication and Continuity
(New York, 1986), 00 the increasingly facile flow of information within the Old Empire over the
century after the Restoration.
*» Andrews, England's Commercial and Colonial Policy, 62 and after; Harper, English Navigation Laws,
248.
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British Mercantilist Policies and the Colonies 357
English trade beyond the Cape of Good Hope, any trade within the
Atlantic World that was open to the merchants of the metropolis was also
open to merchants resident in any of the colonial ports.
Nor should that surprise us. The mercantilist minds that moved the
Restoration Parliament of Charles II were more concerned about promot-
ing English trade than in accomplishing anything else. Although few
thought it through in quite this fashion, from the mercantilistic perspec-
tive ships owned by colonial merchants that freighted goods which paid
the custom duties were no different from ships owned by merchants who
lived in metropolitan ports. The legislation itself, by never drawing any
such distinction, carries that point. It was the duties that mattered.
Moreover, at least insofar as these trades profited the larger London
merchant houses who traded in the staple commodities and who sup-
plied the colonists with European goods, colonial traders served the
second purpose that mercantilism sought to attain - enriching a class of
wealthy supporters of government. Eventually, some colonial planters
and some colonial merchants grew rich enough themselves to buy En-
glish government bonds, to lend the English government money in the
emergencies of the Second Hundred Years' War. Mercantilists could
hardly complain.
Some colonists did indeed become rich. Richest of all were the sugar
planters of the West Indies. The planters of South Carolina and the
Chesapeake were not far behind their Caribbean counterparts. Many of
the merchants in the ports of Boston and New York, Philadelphia and
Charleston also earned considerable fortunes. Their wealth was founded
on the opportunities encompassed and encouraged by a British Empire
bounded and bonded by the Acts of Trade. The effect was, sooner rather
than later, to weld the concerns of all to the rising nation-state Great
Britain.
Nevertheless, some did complain. The Old Empire, run by the very few
for the well-being of a very few more, had left little scope for influence by
any but the largest trading companies, which had been, in effect, exten-
sions of the central government. The Glorious Revolution of 1688—9
an<
^
the profound political changes that had followed from it inaugurated a
new mode of government that found it wise and proper to draw support
more broadly. After the end of the seventeenth century, the older metro-
politan mercantile elite, based in London, came to be supplanted by the
more numerous middling and smaller businesses of London and elsewhere
who were organized not through the once great chartered companies but
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
358 JohnJ. McCusker
into interest groups that lobbied from a different perspective.'
0
Some
among them grumbled that they should not have to face competition from
colonial enterprises. Such objections and the greater merit accorded them
were part of a changing climate of opinion which contended, essentially,
that the financial concerns of central government should no longer be
given exclusive priority. British businessmen, the producers of goods and
services, needed to have their concerns addressed, also. When, in the
middle of the eighteenth century, some of these new ideas and new interest
groups moved Parliament to a different track that threatened significantly
the basis of the prosperity of the Continental Colonies, only then did the
bonds of the Old Empire begin to weaken.
The beginning of the end, "the close of the great creative period of
mercantilism," as Charles Wilson has noted, can be marked to 1721—42,
the "Age of Walpole. "3
1
In 1721, in the speech from the throne opening
the new Parliamentary session that Robert Walpole wrote as Prime Minis-
ter and that King George I delivered, the government announced its
intention to restructure the existing mercantile law. The emphasis would
shift away from the purely fiscal, to a new encouragement of manufactur-
ing. Duties on the import of raw materials used by British manufactures
would be lowered or dropped. Export duties on British manufactures
would also be lowered, while duties on imported foreign manufactured
goods would be raised. Walpole won thereby the support of both the
rising manufacturing interest and the more broadly based business inter-
ests. In playing to the interests of the era, he ushered in a change of
profound significance. While the full course of that change would not be
run out for another hundred years, well begun was truly half done.
The North American colonists felt the results of this shift in emphasis
almost immediately. The Molasses Act of 1733 signaled that change,
although, given the lack of its enforcement, nothing much really hap-
pened. The "Age of Walpole" had, obviously, opened up the corridors of
power to a wider range of interests. Among them was the West Indian
•" See, among others, Michael Kammcn, Empire and Interest: The American Colonies and the Politics of
Mercantilism (Philadelphia, 1970). "The two decades separating 1763 and 1783 may properly be
called an age of interests, for . . . [the interests] so dominated [British] politics that men observed
that mercantilism had changed from the control of trade in the interest of national policy to the
control of national policy in the interest of trade" (ibid., 9;).
»' C[harles] H. Wilson, "Trade, Society and the State," in E[dwin] E. Rich and Qharles] H. Wilson,
eds., The Economy of Expanding Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Volume IV of The
Cambridge Economic History of Europe (Cambridge, 1967), 516. For the address, given 19 October
1721, see [Great Britain, Parliament, House of Commons], The Journals of the Home of Commons, in
progress ([London]: [House of Commons], 1742 to date), XIX, 645—66.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
British Mercantilist Policies and the Colonies 359
lobby. In the late 1720s and the early 1730s, the supporters of the British
West Indians worked to gain advantage for them by having Parliament
pass a law designed effectively to enthrall British North America. What
the West Indian interest wanted was a ban on any trade between the North
Americans and the foreign West Indian colonies. What Parliament passed
was a set of taxes designed to inhibit that trade. What applied in practice
was much less than that. The North Americans, nevertheless, got quite a
scare — and a pointed message.
The message for the North Americans in the passage of the Molasses Act
was that some of the older imperatives dictated by mercantilist theory
were not quite as powerful as they had been. The nation-state, much more
secure financially, was now prepared to diminish some trades — notably
those of the North Americans - and thereby to sacrifice some immediate
revenue on the altar of political expediency. The West Indian business
lobby, much more a political power in Westminster than the North Ameri-
cans, could expect to have its desires attended to by a government that
increasingly recognized such distinctions and deferred to such differences.
Other interest groups would avail themselves of a similar hearing. The era
of the nation-state was giving way to an era of the interests. It is for these
reasons that Charles M. Andrews could call the passage of the Molasses
Act a mercantilist defeat.**
The primacy of the nation-state — ever so securely installed - would
yield to the primacy of the managers of business. Reality and theory would
coincide in the eventual replacement of mercantilist doctrine by capitalist
doctrine: government must be organized to the benefit of business. The
monarchy, the epitome of the earlier mode, had already succumbed to
Parliament, increasingly the instrument of the rising business interest.
For the North American colonists, who had grown up under the former
arrangements, this new situation was becoming uncomfortable because
their economic concerns - whatever the financial contribution of their
trade to the nation-state — were less valued. Indeed, with almost no voice
at all in Parliament, the economic agenda of the Continental Colonies
came increasingly to be ignored. When the colonists were recognized, it
was as competitors to those who did have a say in Parliament."
All of this came to a head beginning at midcentury. The reconstituted
>' Andrews, England's Commercial and Colonial Policy, 89, n. 2.
" The careers of some of chose who had such a say, members of the new order of British businessmen,
is the subject of the work of David J. Hancock, now a thesis, soon to be a series of books: " 'Citizen
of the World': Commercial Success, Social Development and the Experience of Eighteenth-Century
British Merchants Who Traded with America" (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1990).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
360 JohnJ. McCusker
Board of Trade of 1748 and after, enjoined by government partially to
reform "the problems" with the colonies, was just a start. The subsequent
acts of a Parliament increasingly at odds with reluctant, recalcitrant, eventu-
ally rebellious colonists are well known. These acts were not "acts of trade";
they do not concern us here. These new statutes of the 1760s and 1770s were
designed to manage better an empire in order to obtain full compliance from
its component parts with the needs of the central government, but these
were new needs. They were needs as perceived by a Parliament increasingly
controlled by or at least willing to accede to the demands of the most
powerful economic groups among its constituencies, now, increasingly, the
middling merchants and manufacturers of the nation.
As an example, the British financial community that had funded Brit-
ish success in the Seven Years' War with France demanded that govern-
ment fully and immediately service that indebtedness. Failure to do so
raised the threat that future borrowing could not be guaranteed. The
contrast has to be drawn with the actions of that grand mercantilist
monarch, King Charles II. When, early in 1672, he was told that future
borrowing was in some doubt because of concerns about sums already
owed, he simply stopped payment on the national debt; he put a "Stop to
the Exchequer. "
34
By declaring national bankruptcy, the government effec-
tively collected a massive tax on the same businessmen that its Acts of
Trade had enriched. They could and did do nothing. Existing tax reve-
nues, now unencumbered by earlier loans, became available to service new
debts. New loans were soon forthcoming.
A century later, the British government behaved very differently to-
ward its business community. There would be no "Stop to the Exchequer";
indeed, there would be no new taxes either. After a review of revenue
sources and an intense debate within Parliament, the government effec-
tively negated any resort to further increases in domestic taxes. British
business could not tolerate i t . " In 1767, the House of Commons abso-
lutely refused to vote higher land taxes. All recognized an easier solution
of the problem, a shift of the tax burden away from the metropolis and to
the colonies. For instance, the imposition of a transactions tax on business
conducted within the colonies, to be collected as in England by charges for
» J. Keith Horsefield, "The 'Stop of the Exchequer' Revisited," Economic History Review, i d. Ser.,
XXXV (1982), 511- 28.
» By the end of the war, it was feared that taxes were already high enough to "be detremental to many
branches of the manufactures, produce, and trade of This Kingdom." [Thomas Whately], Consider-
ations on the Trade and Finances of this Kingdom, and on the Measures of Administration,' with Respect to
Those Great National Objects since tbt Conclusion of the Peace (London, 1766), 11.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
British Mercantilist Policies and the Colonies 361
affixing a seal or a stamp on documents, had every potential for raising
considerable revenue. *
6
Its novelty to the colonists - operational, finan-
cial, and constitutional - mattered not at all. It was certainly no act of
trade. The objections registered against the "Stamp Act" of 1765 (5
George HI, c. 12), fiercer in the West Indies even than in North America,
were seen in London only as the self-serving rationalizations of colonial
tax-dodgers. "We need more revenue; we will tax them one way or an-
other; they will pay" was the government's response. It was all just an
administrative matter. The Old Empire had changed. The Acts of Trade,
crafted, successfully, to empower the nation-state in a mercantilist mode,
had been superseded a century later by revenue acts designed to spread out
the burden of direct taxes in a powerful nation-state. While central govern-
ment revenues were a continuing issue, significant differences separated
the generations. The former strove merely to maximize them; the latter,
to diminish the burden borne by business. A set of ideas - mercantilism —
that sought to mold trade into patterns that had the design of underpin-
ning central government had achieved their purpose. Trade to be taxed
directly and wealthy merchants to be taxed indirectly had been the means
to that essentially political end. A newer set of ideas — capitalism — that
sought to order the economy to the best interests of business were just
coming into play on the eve of the American Revolution. Using govern-
ment to deflect the burden of taxation away from trade toward consump-
tion and the colonies - the better to guarantee profits to producers -
became the new objective. Great Britain had become, in the disparaging
words of Adam Smith, "a nation that is governed by shopkeepers."
37
Just
as Jean-Baptiste Colbert was a student of Thomas Mun, so also does
Napoleon seem to have read his Adam Smith.
Colonies fit one way into a nation governed by the grander, national
goals of the King in Council and quite a different way into a nation
governed by a Parliament ruled by the narrower, more immediate con-
56
John L. Bullion, A Great and Necessary Measure: George Grerwille and the Genesis of the Stamp Act,
1763-1765 (Columbia, MO, 1982).
« Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), edited by R[oy]
H. Campbell, A[ndrew] S. Skinner, and W[illiam] B. Todd, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1976), II, 613.
Smith actually argued that this was the case at the time of the passage of the Acts of Trade. He
stretched his point anachronistically in order to make it. Worsley, Roberts, and company were
hardly shopkeepers. Compare Andrews' description of the people whose interests were served by the
passage of the Act of 1651 quoted above. Smith was much more accurate in describing what
England had become.
In his revisions for the second edition of Wealth of Nations, Smith altered the passage to read "a
nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers."
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362 JohnJ. McCusker
cerns of businessmen. Central to that difference, as far as the North
Americans were concerned, was the government's attitude toward the
colonists' own economic behavior. As long as what the colonists did
increased the taxable trade of the Empire, mercantilists were content.
When what the colonists were doing somehow competed with metropoli-
tan businessmen, capitalists were not happy.'
8
English business groups,
increasingly adept at pulling the levers of political power, pushed Parlia-
ment to deal harshly with tax-dodgers in the colonies.
39
They brushed
aside colonial constitutional objections as mere words. So far from mercan-
tilist doctrine had Westminster and Whitehall strayed by the 1760s and
1770s that plans were even discussed in government circles to circum-
scribe the commercial activity of the colonists, perhaps to restrict them
each to the carrying trade of their own colonies.
40
The potential for a
colonial empire more strictly divided into colonial providers of raw materi-
als and metropolitan producers of finished manufactures, whatever the
immediate implications for central government finance, seemed altogether
appropriate to those who shared such thinking. Thence came a rebellion, a
rebellion that, just like such thinking, had nothing to do with the Acts of
Trade and nothing to do with mercantilism.
'
B
See, in this regard, Bernard Donoughue's explanation as to why the merchants of Great Britain
withdrew their support of the colonists' cause on the eve of the American Revolution (British Politics
and the American Revolution: The Path to War, 1773-75 {London, 1964], 150-6).
» Should one be at all tempted to think that the Stamp Act of 1765 was solely a revenue measure, he or
she should read about the fiercely repressive way in which the British government applied essentially
the same law in Ireland, Great Britain's oldest colony. For the law, see the Act of 13 and 14 George III,
c. 6, in [Ireland (Eire), Laws and Statutes], The Statutes at Large, Passed in the Parliaments Held in Ireland
from . . . 1310 . . . to 1800, 20 vols. (Dublin, 1786—1801), X, 366—79. For its execution, see
M[ary] Pollard, Dublin's Trade in Books, 1550-1800 (Oxford, 1989), 22- 30.
<f Precisely these restrictions were imposed as part of the punitive measures that Parliament passed in
the spring of 1775 (15 George III, c. 10; 15 George III, c. 18). They were said to be temporary and
coercive in nature, but that did not prevent John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the
Admiralty, from arguing during the debate over the second bill's passage that it should be made "a
perpetual law of commercial regulation, operating to extend our trade, to increase our seamen, and
to strengthen our naval power." [Great Britain, Parliament], The Parliamentary History of England
from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, edited by William Cobbett, 36 vols. (London, 1806-20),
XVIII, 448. The "our" in Lord Sandwich's pronouncement had none of the inclusive sense common
to the Acts of Trade.
Compare the nearly contemporary comment by Charles Whitworth, State of the Trade of Great
B r i t a i n i n Its Imports a n d Exports Progressively from the Year 1 6 9 7 {to 1 7 7 3 ) . . . . ( L o n d o n , 1 7 7 6 ) , l v ,
on the reason for the establishment of the colony of Georgia: " . . . to turn the industry of this new
people from the timber and provision trade, which the other colonies had prosecuted too largely,
into channels more advantageous to the public." The "other colonies," had been engaging in trade
"too largely," which he deemed was not "advantageous to the public"!
Dickerson, The Navigation Acts and the American Revolution, x, calls all the post-1764 laws and
regulations an "anti-trade policy" - and they were.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE REVOLUTION,
THE CONSTITUTION,
AND THE NEW NATION
CATHY MATSON
THE REVOLUTION
Although a fundamental economic transformation took place in America
only after the Revolutionary and Constitutional periods, many colonists
expressed heightened expectations for rapid international and internal
development even in the 1750s. Their expectations derived largely from
the accelerated pace of economic change in the late colonial years, as well
as from the visible signs of material improvement. Although predomi-
nantly a rural people, the revolutionary generation experienced aspects of a
trans-Atlantic "consumer revolution" affecting the colonial cities and
coastal villages before the Imperial Crisis. The aggressive market behavior
of importing dry goods merchants connected colonists to British sources of
textiles, sewing notions, agricultural implements, glassware, pottery, and
other finished goods. By the 1740s, tea, coffee, citrus fruits, sugar and
candy, snuff, and smaller quantities of exotic foodstuffs were common in
coastal cities. More diverse consumption was made possible by the positive
benefits of imperial membership, including naval protection, easy and
long credit from British firms, inexpensive British manufactures, and the
many unregulated export commodities that could be marketed competi-
tively and without duties. Expanding consumption among "middling"
colonists was also made possible by greater agricultural productivity in the
mid-Atlantic and Chesapeake regions, as well as by increased staples
exportation from southern colonies.
Economic successes over the late colonial period were in turn nurtured
by republican ideology, which offered a language about the common good
and a polity in virtuous control of its own economic destiny. As fears and
363
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364 Cathy Matson
frustrations peaked in response to imperial political relations after 1763,
colonists referred more often to their own achievements and the potential
of their commerce. Modestly successful experiments with reorganized pro-
duction under the aegis of the nonimportation movements of 1765 to
1774, as well as the Continental Congress's Association Agreement of
1774, linked political liberty with autonomous international commerce;
their sponsors also promised Americans that temporary sacrifices of self-
interest for the common welfare would lay the groundwork for a bounte-
ous economic future. When English government tried to keep colonial
economic interests subordinate to mercantile goals with new legislation,
colonial merchants redoubled their efforts to create colonial economic
autonomy. The Sugar Act of 1764, which taxed and regulated trade
centered at the West Indies, and the Currency Act of 1764, which cur-
tailed the emission of independent currencies that colonists believed they
needed to expand trade, were especially irksome to commercial interests.
In reality, these hopes were delayed, for the Revolutionary War both
disrupted and redirected a significant portion of the colonial foreign mar-
ket economy, and the war absorbed domestic economic energies in trying
to sustain basic military and civilian needs. The nonimportation, nonex-
portation, and nonconsumption policies outlined in the Continental Con-
gress's Association Agreement of 1774 eliminated all direct legal trade
between the colonies and other portions of the British Empire. By mid-
1775, there were acute shortages of war materiel such as muskets, gunpow-
der, salt, shoes, and clothing. Merchants made myriad complaints about
losing British credit and British buyers for American-made vessels, as well
as paying higher freight rates for bulky exports. To satisfy some of the
country's military need, Congress entertained resolutions presented by
Benjamin Franklin to create "free trade" for American merchants; Con-
gress's partial acceptance of the resolutions resulted in limited trade in late
1775 to the non-British West Indies. On April 6, 1776, Congress passed a
more extensive "free trade" decree to permit trade with any foreign nation
or colony.
1
Until mid-1778, France, Spain, and the Netherlands - and in
particular, their island colonies — became important sources of necessary
commodities.
However, Congress's policy of creating free ports proved difficult to
1
For proposals and the final resolution of "free trade," see {Feb. 26?], Apr. 6, 1776, Journals of the
Continental Congress, ed. Worthington Ford, 34 vols. (Washington, DC, 1904-39), H:2oo, IV:257-
9; and Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, ed. Edmund Cody Burnett, 8 vols. (Washington,
DC, 1921-36), 1:402-3.
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The Revolution, Constitution, and New Nation 365
sustain. As the war progressed, delegates at Philadelphia voiced strong
objections. Moreover, British blockades at various American ports, British
depredations against American ships in the West Indies., and long-term
British occupation of New York City dampened efforts by both American
and foreign merchants to enter and clear goods along the coastline. As a
consequence, Congress resorted to negotiating specific treaties of com-
merce with individual nations. France was the most important trading
partner to agree, in early 1778; thereafter, Spain and the Netherlands
joined the American side of the war and continued to carry Chesapeake
tobacco and mid-Atlantic naval stores and grain to European markets. In
addition, Dutch St. Eustatius (until 1781) and Spanish Cuba continued to
receive small amounts of American surpluses. Although a few merchants
were able to accumulate modest fortunes from commissions earned in
supplying troops, their more common preference was to enter the venera-
ble traffic in privateering against the enemy; the capture and sale of over
2,000 British vessels and their cargoes added a great quantity of consumer
goods to American markets, gave the satisfaction of significant fortunes to
a few merchants, employed hundreds of American seamen, and bolstered
the American fleet. By the last year of the war, however, all commerce
diminished due to stepped-up British blockade activity.
Indeed, wartime American commerce was significantly lower from
1779 to 1781 than during the 1750s or mid-i77os. Blockades increased
the risks and costs of trans-Atlantic trade — including higher freight and
insurance rates - with the result that lower quantities of imports of manu-
factured goods marked the war years. As British demand for southern
tobacco declined, production of that commodity fell to about one-third of
its prewar level. Americans lost British bounties on indigo and naval
stores, and shipbuilding suffered because of the loss of cordage, sail cloth,
and specialized hardware that was essential to the enterprise. British block-
ades curtailed the transport of sugar (which would have been refined),
molasses (which would have been distilled), and cotton (which would have
been spun and woven) from West Indies ports to the new northern states.
Everywhere there were shortages of containers and molds for snuff, eggs,
cheese, medicines, and other perishables. Troop movements disrupted
settled areas of commercial farming in the mid-Atlantic area, and long-
established trade linkages were suspended — especially those northern ones
related to grain shipments and shipbuilding. Many wholesale exporters
who hoped for economic success turned from international trade to Con-
gress's private contract system and internal business by 1779. Working
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366 Cathy Matson
through the commissary and paymaster departments, dozens of the most
eminent former merchants proposed to construct barracks, start iron-
works, hire wagons, transport rations and supplies, raise sheep for wool,
or distill substitutes for rum.
The discontinuities of international commerce were the most consequen-
tial economic difficulty that Americans faced during the war; but it was
the domestic economy that captured the attention of Congress as it faced
the ongoing exigencies of sustaining an army. Overall, the role of govern-
ment in economic activity, regulation, and public welfare was not clarified
in these years. Weakened by Revolutionary ideology that opposed central-
ized political authority, Congress turned to the new state legislatures for
help in harnessing private energies at all levels of society to the service of
army and country. Together, Congress and the states pursued policies
intended to meet the most pressing demands of the war. In the most
important cases, these policies drew upon experiences associated with their
former condition as colonists. But the ability of the new states to respond
more directly and effectively to diverse local circumstances strengthened
their authority, at the expense of Congress's, by the later years of the war.
One legacy of colonial policies was "currency finance," by which Con-
gress followed an inflationary policy of issuing paper bills of credit —
continentals — in increasing quantities and delaying their retirement from
circulation. From 1777 through 1779, Congress issued $191 million in
bills of credit, and from 1776 to 1778, it issued approximately $67
million in loan certificates to private creditors at 3 percent and 6 percent
interest. Together, these paper obligations were used to purchase supplies
from farmers and artisans, on the pledge of their future redemption in
either silver or gold specie or canceled tax obligations. In addition, Con-
gress received over $12 million as loans from France, Holland, and Spain,
which bolstered the confidence of the new government's private creditors
and war contractors. Despite these infusions of specie, however, Congress
continued to issue larger amounts of bills of credit than the foreign loans
covered, and the country experienced a steeply rising rate of inflation.
Farmers and local businessmen across the states who accepted the currency
complained bitterly about its declining value.
The states separately emitted their own supplies of paper money, which
often were connected to sounder funding schemes. Virginia, North Caro-
lina, and South Carolina emitted the largest sums; together, all the states
emitted over $200 million between 1777 and 1781. In some northern
states, merchants began to place their faith in state regimes and make
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The Revolution, Constitution, and New Nation 367
their loans to local authorities rather than to Congress; many states in turn
began to issue great quantities of IOUs to these merchants in anticipation
of tax revenues to pay the state debts. In numerous rural areas, taxes rose
to two to six times higher than prewar levels. As states like Connecticut,
New Jersey, and New York tried to supply nearby armies and hold down
the rate of inflation, local groups of farmers and shopkeepers resisted
paying the taxes that would help to retire outstanding currency emissions
and, simultaneously, demanded more paper money. Other regional inter-
ests argued that the vast tracts of unsettled land in their former colonial
domains could provide the sinking fund for land banks as well as for
militia veterans' pay. Georgia, North Carolina, New York, Pennsylvania,
and Virginia were especially well endowed with western tracts, and all of
the states had large contingents of advocates for state control over their
currency and debts. Although colonial governments that found themselves
in serious deficit-spending spirals typically resorted to hard currency poli-
cies, many of the new states responded favorably after 1777 to myriad
local interests clamoring for more paper money, legal tender laws, and
higher agricultural prices.
Meanwhile, Congress's monetary system slowly collapsed. By 1777, it
took 3 dollars in Congressional bills to buy goods that cost 1 dollar in gold
or silver. By 1778, the ratio increased to 7:1; by 1779, it was 42:1; by
1780, it was 100:1; and by April 1781, it took about $147 of Congres-
sional bills to purchase what one dollar in silver specie obtained. Congress
received a loan of $6 million in specie from France in 1778, which it set
aside as security for a Continental Loan Office that dispersed $27 million
in government certificates to domestic investors who expected to earn
interest at over prewar market rates (normally 4 percent to 5 percent in
northern cities in 1774). Military need, however, prevented timely repay-
ment of this government debt and diminished the credibility of Congress
when it sought further loans during the later months of the war.
By March 1780, there was still $200 million of Congressional currency
and certificates in circulation, and delegates requested the states to tax
some of the national currency out of circulation at the rate of one silver
dollar for every forty paper continentals. Devaluation at such a steep ratio
increased speculative activities throughout the states; over 1781 and
1782, Americans in all walks of life with even small amounts of specie
accumulated Congressional bills of credit, at the rates of 80, 100, and
even 120 to 1. Those who accumulated the bills cashed them in at state
locations for double or triple their investment. This plan redeemed $120
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368 Cathy Matson
million in continental currency at a cost of about $3 million in specie. A
small number of speculators held most of the remaining $71 million of
Congressional issues in the hope that political independence would pave
the way for policies supportive of their full redemption at face value.
The second legacy of colonial-era policies appeared beginning in early
1777, as Congress recognized the difficulties of uniting the new states in
order to conduct the war; given the enduring localism of the states,
Congress urged them to assume neomercantile responsibilities for regula-
tion, promotion, and production of wartime necessities. Some states re-
sponded to this mandate enthusiastically by creating new enterprises,
channeling domestic resources into import substitutes, and promoting
greater wartime production in traditional economic areas. Furnaces,
forges, and rolling mills that dotted the countryside of New Jersey, Penn-
sylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia since the 1750s increased the
size of their operations during the war, and some produced higher-quality
pig and bar iron and higher-quality finished goods. Greater quantities of
bar iron were "put out" to independent craftsmen for finishing into pails,
nails, and horseshoes. Ambitious farmers responded to state government
appeals to open up new tracts of land for grazing sheep for wool, which did
not require as much labor in clearing and tilling as grain and vegetable
crops. States aided farmers in getting sheep and cattle closer to armies and
urban markets by offering commissions to appointed drivers. They also
offered state payments for (1) wool to convert into army blankets and
clothing, and (2) the services of butchers, coopers, carters, and weavers.
Further, the states promoted increased use of cereals in making beer and
whiskey, which lessened dependence on imported wines and West Indies
rum. In addition, states hired skilled workmen to make and repair thou-
sands of barges, bridges, barracks, and wagons.
Various states also resorted to wage- and price-fixing schemes. "Unwor-
thy" as these laws might be in "infant republics," noted Congressional
delegates, they had "become necessary to supply the defect of public
virtue" unleashed by the Revolution.? Delegates from the New England
states had met in late 1776 to set prices for goods produced and traded
domestically. The following year, a meeting took place in Hartford for
similar reasons but added wage guidelines for farm laborers and artisans as
well. New Englanders were asked to limit prices for both agricultural
products and finished crafts to 75 percent over 1774 specie prices, al-
1
Feb. 15, Nov. 22, Dec. 20, 1777 Journals ofthe Continental Congress, VII:i24,1X1953-7, 1043-7,
quote at 1046.
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The Revolution, Constitution, and New Nation 369
though certain urban trades were limited to a mere 25 percent increase. By
early
I
779» regional conventions had discussed, and individual state legis-
latures had enacted, an impressive array of import and export duties; wage
and price ceilings, laws against forestalling; limits on profits of 25 percent
to 40 percent; embargoes on foodstuffs; and, in some northern states,
requisitions of wagons, horses, and forage.
Not all urban and rural inhabitants believed that wage and price fixing
was wise. Rather, the issue helped draw lines of economic interest be-
tween, as well as within, groups of commercial farmers and urban produc-
ers more sharply, preparing the way for post-Revolutionary discussions
about the role of state governments in the economy. Current research
suggests that inhabitants who provided needed services and scarce supplies
to the state militias and Continental Army were sometimes in a position
to inflate prices for their labor and commodities far beyond what state
legislation permitted. Sterling prices of grain, for example, rose 200 to
600 percent in the first 2 years of the war around at least Hartford,
Providence, and Philadelphia. Despite state price-fixing legislation, Mary-
land salt appreciated in value 3,900 percent between 1777 and 1780;
wheat appreciated 5,000 percent in the same period. Despite state embar-
goes of exports from the major ports, exports of flour continued, and the
price of flour rose 100 to 300 percent in Philadelphia and Wilmington by
1779. Merchants trading on their own credit, local producers, appointed
wagonmasters, rations masters, deputy quartermasters, and overland hunt-
ers and herders were among the growing number of creditors of military
suppliers.
Few rural inhabitants became prosperous from these activities, and
nowhere did the countryside experience uniform benefits from wartime
opportunities. Indeed, beyond the ribbon of settlement along the northern
coastline, rural Americans may have experienced significant short-term
hardship. Military recruitment took away a significant proportion of farm
laborers and livestock. Worn-down equipment was virtually impossible to
replace as long as the war effort absorbed new production of wood crafts,
earthenware, and metalware. Many farmers claimed that prices of farm
commodities did not keep up with urban black-market prices of shoes and
clothing for their families. Farmers who suffered economic distress
through the war often complained that state financing schemes were reck-
less, that embargoes deprived them of markets, and that army officials
seized their grain and paid for it well below market prices. State officials
compounded their fears by fixing farm prices at unacceptably low prices,
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370 Cathy Matson
while peddlers and domestic retailers charged them steeply rising prices
for necessities produced in coastal towns. Rural seasonal and day laborers
joined commercial farmers in protesting state policies because their own
fixed wages diminished in purchasing power as prices rose for basic needs
that they had to obtain from towns.
Urban craftsmen and small retailers were more supportive of price-
fixing measures in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island,
Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, where local populations at times resorted
to "taxation populaire," or the community's efforts to enforce customary
pricing and marketing. In 1779, for example, a crowd in Philadelphia
seized a merchant suspected of exporting flour that was needed at home.
After forcing him to sell the flour to them at prices they were willing to
pay, a public meeting proceeded to post prices - both wholesale and
retail — for over thirty commodities that civilians and soldiers required.
Boston and New York experienced similar actions, and fishermen's wives
in small ports periodically forced local merchants to lower their markups
on imports as well.
Conflicts in the states over currency finance and myriad economic regu-
lations should not obscure the significant degree to which the new sover-
eign states met pressing war needs. Moreover, certain kinds of local pro-
duction received an impetus from wartime need to expand and mature.
Home manufacturing provides an important example of widespread pro-
ductive energies that were applauded by state governments and that flour-
ished in the absence of any concerted efforts by the states to foster new
technology or a new division of labor. As they flourished, home manufac-
tures promoted new connections between city and country, merchants and
rural villagers. In some regions, Americans responded to military de-
mands by simply producing greater quantities of agricultural commodi-
ties, such as hemp, linen, and woolens, with traditional household meth-
ods. Independent rural artisans owned their own tools and raw materials,
worked largely for a local market with relatively stable demand, did not
require complex merchandising or credit operations, and may have weath-
ered the vagaries of markets with informal and often noncash arrange-
ments. This form of protoindustrialization, the most traditional and slow-
est to change, often involved females of a household between adolescence
and old age spinning - and weaving, once the Revolution skimmed off
itinerant skilled males - for local storekeepers, who provided the linkage
to customers. Farmers in near-western Massachusetts, and skilled slaves
and free whites in Virginia and Maryland, produced large quantities of
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The Revolution, Constitution, and New Nation 371
yarn and somewhat less cloth for local markets. Although New York and
Massachusetts made periodic experiments with "factories" that clustered
large numbers of spinners and weavers under one roof, the more prevalent
form of production was the single independent craftsman who responded
to local demand.
In other areas, more mature commercial agriculture and nearby commer-
cial ports combined in ways that promoted some reorganization of textiles
production before the advent of factories. At Philadelphia, Wilmington,
Newport, Salem, and other northern coastal cities, merchant-manu-
facturers who were dependent on foreign or major urban markets and
sources of credit assumed responsibility for putting out raw and semi-
finished materials to cotters, who lived in the countryside or small villages
and usually owned spinning wheels and sometimes their own looms, but
relied on the merchant for raw materials, collection of the cloth, and its
subsequent marketing. In addition to market and credit needs, merchants
involved in this system required fairly large numbers of local rural laborers
to be successful. Sudden outmigration, or dramatic changes in crop prices
that demanded more intensive farming and less attention to by-employ-
ments in textiles, adversely affected the merchant's labor supply. How-
ever, where textiles production expanded during the Revolution, it linked
women who performed a traditional household activity to the far-flung
requirements of the Revolutionary war and challenged extant values associ-
ated with female domestic labor. New patterns of production and distribu-
tion based on household manufacturing prepared a way for more capital-
intensive investments and factories in later years.
Many wartime economic experiments taught Revolutionary leaders that
governmental regulation and protection of the domestic economy were
essential for Americans' success - their critique of mercantilism notwith-
standing — and that international commerce could be forsaken only at the
peril of the new union. They believed that the new rural enterprises could
not be accomplished by self-interested economic agents in self-regulating
markets. They further charged that new state legislatures vied among them-
selves for scarce resources and funds, and failed to provide the states with
sufficient revenue from taxation. However, even when these critics articu-
lated the necessity for greater central government control over the domestic
economy, they expressed the hope that international commerce would be less
encumbered with regulations in the future. Revolutionaries like John Jay
predicted that political independence would make "the whole world open to
us, and we shall be at liberty to purchase from those who will sell on the best
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372 Cathy Mat son
terms" and perhaps make possible "a prohibition of all laws in restraint of
trade" only in the context of restored international commerce. 3 By 1781,
disgruntled army officers, frustrated Congressional and state leaders, and
many urban residents who had not yet recovered from wartime dislocations
all began to identify with a group known as the Nationalists, who called for
familiar remedies to economic dislocation: healthy international commerce,
sound credit based on the reputation of a commercial elite, and specie-based
currency.
THE CRITICAL PERIOD
Nationalists did not represent a majority of Americans between 1781 and
1784, but their numbers grew. Many urban inhabitants joined merchants
in celebrating a great flurry of commercial importation in response to
pent-up consumer demand, from the end of active war in 1781 to the
beginning of 1784. Eager to replenish depleted inventories and make
quick profits, American merchants placed orders with former correspon-
dents in British ports. As before, British imports were cheaper, of higher
quality, and of greater variety than those of any other foreign country.
Despite increased domestic productivity during the war, Americans could
not supply enough of the woolens, Irish linens, and hardwares and
housewares to satisfy demand after 1781, which further underscored their
reliance on international commerce. The bitterness of war did not com-
pletely overwhelm Americans' long-standing cultural ties to Britain. Com-
mercial correspondence with British firms resumed; prices and terms of
sales were communicated easily in familiar channels.
Outside the ranks of Nationalists, many observers insisted that postwar
commerce would flourish best if it was linked to the expanding domestic
economy and independent of European connections. Optimism about mu-
tual interest in commerce and the internal economy often arose in the
ranks of state leaders, of merchants and overland traders who prospered
during the Revolution, and of commercial farmers who looked forward to
internal improvements and rising demand for their surpluses. In a wide-
ranging public discussion of America's prospects, they described how
commerce aided initiatives in state banking and brokerage, as well as
> John Jay to Robert R. Livingston, Paris, Nov. 17, 1782, in Francis Wharton, ed., Tie Revolution-
ary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, 6 vols. (Washington, DC, 1889), VI: 11- 49, quote
at 31.
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The Revolution, Constitution, and New Nation 373
recovery of shipbuilding and shipping services, on which urban growth
depended. Rapid resettlement of farms and rising land values throughout
the western reaches of the new states were portrayed as the natural con-
comitant of successful commerce. The same optimists noted that commer-
cial policies ought to be linked to the "civilizing tendencies" of small
farmers and planters, who hoped to earn additional income from by-
employments related to the production and transport of exportable sur-
pluses. Higher incomes would make consumption of more imported goods
within reach of most Americans in the near future, argued these writers.
They also noted natural interregional dependencies: commercial centers
would be most successful in their manufacturing when they could draw on
sources of both rural surplus foodstuffs and necessary raw materials like
lumber, hides, wool, and stone. By the end of the war, they reminded
readers, small producers could provide great quantities of necessary com-
modities and move them over long distances to markets. What was not
consumed in coastal settlements could be exported, in turn attracting
foreign coin and correcting the persistent shortages of specie. Some state
leaders added that public education, promotional societies, and wide-
spread experimentation in agriculture and technology would prepare the
ground for interclass and interregional cooperation and teach Americans to
avoid the dangers of expensive luxury imports. Internal migration to
western lands and immigration to coastal towns and cities would provide a
necessary pool of labor. Recent estimates of what observers in the 1780s
only roughly beheld show that the total American population grew from
1.2 million in 1750 to 2.3 million in 1776; it increased to 3.9 million by
1790.
Two sets of circumstances dampened this postwar enthusiasm and reori-
ented public and private views toward the Nationalists. The first was
troubled international commerce. After 1783, governments in England
and other nations enacted laws that interfered with Americans' ability to
compete freely for foreign markets, thereby worsening the effects of a mid-
decade depression in American port cities. The second set of circumstances
was the centrifugal, contentious economic interests rising among the
states. Together, international and domestic economic crises underscored
that American hopes for rapid recovery and new development after the
Revolution might be misplaced; many Americans who were initially opti-
mistic about political and economic arrangements in the new state govern-
ments began to turn to Nationalists for different solutions after 1785.
Aggressive British actions against American trade were initiated begin-
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374 Cathy Matson
ning on July 2, 1783, despite the policy of open British ports negotiated
at the time of the peace treaty that same year. British Orders in Council
decreed that England would no longer tolerate the presence of American-
built ships in trade to the British West Indies, a measure that sharply
curtailed business for American shipbuilders and their artisans and halted
West Indies exports of rum, molasses, sugar, cocoa-nuts, ginger, coffee,
and pimento to northern ports. By mid-1785, additional legislation
banned American meat and salted fish from British Caribbean possessions
and placed heavy duties on American whale oil, rice, tobacco, naval stores,
pig and bar iron, and certain kinds of peltry going to Britain. By 1784,
Britain cut off the Newfoundland and Nova Scotia whale and fishing
traffic to American vessels and prohibited American fish, whale oil, and
salted meats from entering England. The combined losses of ship sales and
services, declining commerce in fish and dressed meats, and steep duties
on American whale oil and naval stores traded directly to Britain hit New
England hardest. But southern exporters also faced the longer-term pros-
pects of stagnating markets for tobacco and rice due to high duties. Even
without legislation, however, New York and Pennsylvania merchants en-
countered obstacles to grain exporting to England and British West Indies
possessions because of fluctuating price levels and periodic foreign gluts
between mid-1784 and early 1787.
American observers noted uniformly that the Orders seriously damaged
American economic interests; as John Adams wrote, "They [the West
Indies] can neither do without us, nor we without them."
4
In fact, Ameri-
cans sold one-third fewer finished vessels to West Indies buyers from 1784
to 1787 than in the final colonial years; they also experienced dramatically
reduced demand from West Indians for American shipping services over
these years. At first, American merchants were able to shift some trade
toward the French West Indies, building on experiences during the Revo-
lution. However, France and Spain also passed mercantile restrictions
against American trading of fish and beef with their West Indies posses-
sions. In July 1784, Spain also closed the lower Mississippi River to
American traffic, which raised serious concerns among southerners about
their access to the transmontane hinterland.
Trade with other areas of the world was not sufficient to offset the losses in
traditional American exports or in the valuable benefits that Americans had
enjoyed as members of the British Empire. In fact, increased imports of
* John Adams to Robert R. Livingston, July 14, 1783, in ibid., VI:54O—2.
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The Revolution, Constitution, and New Nation 375
European and for eastern goods called forth renewed fears of exotic luxuries
and their corrupting effect on the American consumer. Until American
policy makers sanctioned the invasion of Tripoli in 1805, the Mediterranean
trade was threatened by Barbary pirates. The wine, olive oil, slave, and
spice trades with Madeira and the Canary Islands revived slowly after the
Revolution, reaching prewar levels only about 1800. Commerce with the
Low Countries and France revived in part very quickly - especially under
the auspices of the mid-Atlantic states' merchants who were active in the
war years - but did not reach prewar levels until the Napoleonic Wars. New
arenas of commerce after 1784, especially the East Indies and China trades,
replaced many of England's reexport items, such as spices, textiles, dried
fruits, and medicinal herbs. But their value as a portion of all American
imports was small before the 1840s, and the extent of their consumption by
the American population is still uncertain.
Commercial instability reached its heights during the mid-17 80s depres-
sion. It began as a serious credit crisis, not unlike the one Americans had
experienced as recently as 1772. Everywhere, consumer spending had risen
precipitously in 1783-4, prompted by generous long-term credit from
English firms that permitted Americans to assuage pent-up demand. But
by late 1784, many state governments lowered private purchasing power by
raising taxes, making further purchases and repayment of current debts
problematic. Americans imported goods valued at about 2.75 million
pounds sterling from England per year in 1784 and 1785, compared to the
2.5 million pounds sterling of American imports from England per year
over 1772 to 1774. In 1784, New England merchants purchased British
goods valued at £600,000 sterling, which was approximately the annual
amount they imported over the mid-i76os to mid-i77Os.
Even if merchants and shopkeepers had not imported so heavily immedi-
ately after the Revolution, the declining and temporarily dislocated export
trades would have accounted for many mid-decade hardships. Exports to
Great Britain and British West Indies possessions over 1771 to 1773
averaged $7.5 million per year. While Americans exported a total value of
about $10.7 million in 1775, they exported only about $5.8 million per
year over 1785 to 1787, and the export total recovered to only $11.6
million in 1787. From 1781 to 1783, northern farm prices began to
recover, only to fall below prewar levels by mid-1784. Between mid-1784
and mid-1789, wholesale commodity prices at Philadelphia and Charles-
ton declined about 25 percent and 12 percent, respectively. This decline
was perhaps clearest in near-coastal areas, especially for semiprocessed
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376 Cathy Matson
farm goods that were exported to the West Indies. Export prices for flour,
timber products, cheese, and shoes fell fester than the prices of European
imports. In addition, there were increased domestic land and property
taxes. Moreover, lower prices for rural and village consumers' agricultural
surpluses resulted in delays in repaying debts and lower levels of consump-
tion until the depression abated after 1786 (1787 in areas of western New
York and frontier New England). Most urban craftsmen fared better dur-
ing these years, because prices of necessary commodities remained stable at
relatively high levels, as did consumer demand for their goods.
By mid-1784, it was clear that foreign firms remained reluctant to
extend enough credit to American merchants to satisfy pent-up wartime
demand for their imports; nor did merchants in the northern states have
sufficient specie to pay debts to foreign creditors. Observers in Massachu-
setts estimated only £150,000 in specie in circulation there, and the chain
of unpaid debts stretched far into the countryside, into the regional court-
houses and homes of western Massachusetts farmers, until the outbreak of
violence associated with Daniel Shays in September 1786. But the pattern
of crisis and reaction was similar in most states that had both active
commercial ports and populated hinterlands. Debts connected to land
usage and improvements increased everywhere. Three new commercial
banks, in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston - which issued IOUs,
held deposits, made loans, and discounted foreign currencies - served the
merchant populations of those cities. Few middling and lower-class Ameri-
cans shared the benefits of these new institutions. Moreover, through the
1780s, bank note issues were greatly surpassed by the traditional forms of
mercantile business, primarily the use of bills of exchange drawn on a
merchant's private reputation. Larger-scale enterprises that required more
capital outlay than commercial ventures, such as sugar refining and candy
making, distilling, paper making, tobacco refining, or glass and pottery
working, were hit hard with bankruptcies by 1785, as were most peltry
and lumber exporters. Plans to initiate new manufactures were discussed
only rarely between 1785 and 1787.
The South may have suffered postwar setbacks in international com-
merce even more than New England, and these persisted long after north-
ern agricultural recovery began. Tobacco, the staple export of greatest
value before the war, would never reach prewar levels again. Although the
volume of southern tobacco exports to England and Europe steadily rose
until 1786, it declined thereafter. Even more important, British duties on
tobacco imports, higher warehousing fees in England, and lower consumer
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The Revolution, Constitution, and New Nation 377
prices there reduced dramatically the value of American exports by the
mid-i78os. And after 1792, the direct trade of tobacco to Holland and
France entered permanent decline. Southern rice and naval stores exports
also declined in value during the 1780s because of British restrictions, and
only during the years of high demand for these commodities during the
Napoleonic Wars did values and volume increase temporarily. Finally,
although northern states were steadily gaining over England in the ability
to carry southern exports in northern vessels, England still transported
about 50 percent of southern exports in 1789.
Some commercial decline was doubtless a result of the reorganization
and restructuring in the domestic economy in the wake of the Revolution.
The growing domestic population was most likely consuming much of the
rise in production of agricultural and small craft commodities, until west-
ern farm output rose faster than demand. It may also be true that a
growing population in settled areas absorbed farm surpluses that might
otherwise have been exported. Small retailers, grocers, merchant-
manufacturers with little capital, ambitious peddlers, and "mechanicks"
all created demand for food and rural byproducts. Although immigrants
often brought investment capital with them and the sons of American
merchants diverted investments toward coastal trade and some "infant
manufactures," many of these new efforts involved minimal amounts of
capital and little or no changes in the organization of production and
labor. Unstable international commercial conditions prevailed. Although
the various regions of the country experienced great differences in their
productive capacities and in their pace of economic recovery following the
Revolution, current estimates of per capita exports, as well as of per capita
wealth, suggest that there was little or no growth nationwide over the
period 1781 to 1793. Some evidence suggests years of declining incomes
in many locales.
The commercial troubles of the 1780s derived not only from the down-
turn in international markets and from British policies but also from the
limitations of Congressional power under the Articles of Confederation.
The various states stepped into this vacuum, much as they had during the
Revolutionary years, and responded to particular immediate interests with
bold and timely measures that at first drew praise for state leaders. By the
mid-i78os, however, it was becoming clear to Americans concerned about
international and interstate developments that distinct state policies often
pitted some groups of Americans against others. Different state taxation
policies, or discriminatory legislation against the commerce of neighbor-
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378 Cathy Mat son
ing states, said Nationalists, weakened the economies of all states. "State
particularism" heightened the critical character of the decade.
In a retreat from reliance on the now-worthless continental paper
money, leading Nationalists helped to convince Congress to appoint Rob-
ert Morris as Superintendent of Finance and to give him significant powers
over the conduct of the war in the first years of Congress's existence under
the new Articles of Confederation. In February 1781, Congress chartered
the first note and specie bank of national proportions, the Bank of North
America, and located it near Congress in Philadelphia. In his capacity as
Superintendent from May 1781 to December 1784, Morris issued notes
redeemable in specie and covered by the credit and reputation of Congress
and Morris' own fortune; its function was to discharge the great public
war debt. His bank might have functioned well during the 1780s except
that both potential sources for providing a fund for the BNA failed to
materialize: foreign loans of specie, and the grant from the states to
Congress of the power to levy a uniform national impost. Congress's
February 1781 proposal for a permanent uniform national duty of 5 per-
cent on the value of all goods imported — which was dependent on the
united consent of all the states — was defeated by some northern state
legislatures, as were similar proposals in 1783 and 1785.
Instead, the states continued to experiment with their own means of
raising revenues and defraying financial obligations, thereby undermining
further Congress's minimal authority. In the North, varied interests threw
their support behind state attempts to (1) raise revenue from commerce,
(2) repay private and public debts, (3) create temporary monopolies to
foster the development of inland navigation routes, (4) promote new
inventions to advance commercial agriculture, and (5) support shipbuild-
ing and immigration of skilled labor. Although some degree of state
promotion and regulation continued over the 1780s, state efforts to pro-
vide a circulating currency and to retire Revolutionary debts were more
consequential during depression years. Some states also reverted to the
colonial experiments in land banks — a practice whereby individual sub-
scribers put up personal real estate as collateral against a loan of paper
money for conducting long-distance exchange. But even these measures
were insufficient, and only seven states were issuing paper money by
1785, when the depression hit. By declaring this paper money legal
tender, and by fixing the periods of its circulation, these states were
somewhat successful in their efforts to ease the burden of Revolutionary
war debts. Moreover, although the Nationalists made familiar warnings
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The Revolution, Constitution, and New Nation 379
against inflationary panaceas, there was widespread sentiment that the
states were providing a circulating medium to which urban artisans, lesser
merchants, and itinerant craftsmen all could subscribe. State issues of
paper currency, they argued, were superior to federal notes such as Robert
Morris's because they were locally controlled and more conveniently ob-
tained. Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York could point to a rela-
tively smooth system of state finance; Georgia, South Carolina, and North
Carolina also emitted their own monies. New York, Connecticut, and
Pennsylvania fostered alliances between agricultural and commercial inter-
ests by effectively balancing solicitude for creditors with a popular commit-
ment to paper currency. Their assumption plans neither repudiated Revo-
lutionary debts nor depreciated them into oblivion, nor did they repay
state debts with specie. But just as often these Confederation-era curren-
cies depreciated in value in relation to specie - Rhode Island's abuses were
the most serious — and caused endless quarrels about whether they should
be accepted at face or depreciated value. Massachusetts legislators com-
pounded the problem of using paper money by requiring that all taxes and
private debts be paid in specie, which in effect scoffed at individual efforts
to use paper money at all.
In addition, six states enacted their own imposts rather than approve a
uniform Congressional form of revenue. Nine states interpreted the 1783
British Orders in Council as a cue to pass steeper duties against British
imports than other foreign imports after 1784. Duties ranged from 5
percent to 25 percent; Rhode Island placed a treble duty on British goods.
Pennsylvania passed an act in 1785 that became a model for the first
national tariff in 1789. Seven of the states passed duties on British ship
entrances and commodities, varying from 5 percent to 8 percent ad
valorem. A few states also passed duties against other foreign trade, al-
though in nominal amounts ranging from 2 percent to 4.5 percent. Three
New England states even prohibited British vessels from exporting Ameri-
can products, thus forcing the ships to unload their British and European
goods and then retreat to another port with an empty hold.
Although state commercial discrimination seemed to combine the best
contemporary wisdom about protecting "infant manufactures" at home
and providing "free trade" for American ships and agricultural surpluses,
results were mixed. At first, state protective tariffs on luxuries and new
American manufactures seemed to abet initiatives for "useful manufac-
tures." New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Mary-
land, and Virginia passed legislation to prohibit imports of certain fin-
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380 Cathy Matson
ished commodities; the list grew to fifty-eight items in Massachusetts by
1786. By 1785—6, some states passed additional tonnage and ad valorem
duties on foreign commerce.
Many northern wholesale importers objected that duties were a burden-
some additional cost to them. Some wholesalers went so far as to assert that
the costs of commercial taxation prevented them from seeking supplemen-
tal investment opportunities in processing imported goods. Nor did state
paper-currency emissions offer consolation to retailers and wholesalers, who
required specie for international remittances. Their long-term credit had
been stretched to the breaking point by late 1785, as commercial formers
and "country buyers" proved unable to pay dry goods importers their debts.
Particularly where state duties on the imports of sugar, molasses, and
tobacco were high, distilling, refining, and snuff manufacturing became
costly enough to drive even established concerns into bankruptcy and their
workers into unemployment. Only five New York distilleries were in busi-
ness in 1786, compared to twelve in 1774; in Boston, sugar, barreled salted
meat, and snuff manufactories frequently suffered until at least 1788. Nomi-
nal prices of iron goods and textiles fluctuated until the time of the ratifica-
tion controversy, when they finally began to increase.
States with major port cities, especially New York and Massachusetts,
took advantage of their superior position in international commerce and in
regional markets to pass discriminatory duties against neighboring states'
traffic at their ports, while weaker states tried to divert trade to themselves
by abolishing duties altogether, thus setting parameters for intense inter-
state rivalries by mid-1785. In early 1785, the New York legislature
imposed an additional 5 percent tax on all commodities imported from
other states for sale to New Yorkers. New York pursued interstate discrimi-
nation with respect to exports, too, when it continued a long-term policy
of embargoing exports of its own wheat and flour - thereby encouraging
bolters and bakers to lower prices to consumers as supplies accumulated —
while raising prices of wheat and flour from Connecticut and New Jersey.
Since 1784, New York had extended the double duty on British imports
to reexports destined for out-of-state customers.
But these policies did not necessarily establish a preeminent place for
large ports in New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts; weaker states
could counter with distinct policies. New Jersey and Delaware, states
without dominant ports, established free-floating grain prices and free
exporting, while they simultaneously discouraged the flow of raw materi-
als to manufacturers in states which assessed heavy taxes on "foreign" —
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The Revolution, Constitution, and New Nation 381
that is, other states' — commodities. These initiatives enjoyed some suc-
cess, at least in the region around Wilmington where numerous flour
mills and a vigorous shipping industry flourished. But merchants in Provi-
dence, Rhode Island, believed that they were virtually barred from trade
by 1785 because of the high state duties at Massachusetts and New York
ports. Moreover, it is unclear whether "free ports" in Rhode Island, Con-
necticut, and New Jersey alienated portions of the agrarian farmers and
middling artisans in those states; until we know who benefited from
untaxed wholesale prices and who paid the burdensome transport fees and
export duties at some ports, we will not be able to say how such "free
trade" satisfied specific interests. It can be said with a degree of certainty,
however, that Connecticut's free ports policy did not succeed in attracting
British carriers to New Haven and New London; Connecticut's commer-
cial farmers continued to gather agricultural surpluses from the country-
side for transshipment to New York. Most of Connecticut's foreign goods
also came through New York between 1783 and 1786. Other state laws
were not especially helpful to aspiring manufacturers and artisans, because
the effects of protective legislation were undercut by the high duties
placed on raw materials and form goods imported from nearby states. The
consequences were that (1) artisans and exporters could not compete with
their British counterparts for the trade of the southern states, and (2) the
mutual dependencies of country and city could not be developed to their
fullest potential. And, as noted by many contemporaries, state duties
promoted smuggling across state borders in the interiors.
The crises of international commercial recovery and interstate rivalries
made it impossible for Congress to attend to the most pressing issues
threatening the stability of the republic. From the vantage point of Nation-
alists in the mid-i78os, one issue was the enormous sum of Revolutionary
debts still outstanding. From 1776 to 1780, Congress emitted certificates
with a face value of $241.6 million; the specie value of this debt was
approximately $3.7 million by 1782. From 1776 to 1782, Congress also
borrowed $63.6 million from private American sources. The specie value
of the foreign debt was about $7.8 million by 1783. Although state
requisitions of money and state assumption of some war debts reduced
Congress's debts in the first months of peace, the total federal debt by
1784 came to $39.3 million owed to domestic and foreign creditors. In
1785 and 1786, only $1,110,000 was remitted by states to help defray a
small portion of the interest due to foreign governments and private
American creditors. By January 1790, Congress reported the federal Revo-
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382 Cathy Matson
lutionary war debt at $52,788,000. The total of individual state debts
came to about $13.5 million in 1787, even after commendable efforts by
some of the states to repay large portions of it. North Carolina owed
private creditors over $1.7 million; Virginia owed about $2.7 million. By
January 1790, the combined state debt was well over $18 million.
Although the remaining debts of the states tended to concentrate in
fewer hands over the early 1780s, it was the concentration of the federal
debt at tremendously discounted prices that drew most public attention.
Small war suppliers, commercial farmers, and veterans tended to sell their
Congressional warrants and notes quickly. Some were in desperate need of
ready cash to meet postwar needs. Others feared that because Congress had
no authority to tax the states — and thus no means to create a revenue
which might serve as a fund to convert its note obligations to citizens into
cash — it was prudent to dispense with the notes quickly. Buyers, on the
other hand, were willing to accumulate large quantities of these notes at
low prices, because they anticipated that Congress would redeem the debt
at face value.
But, argued Nationalists, redemption could proceed only if Congress
secured a reliable source of revenue. It had failed to secure impost duties
and tariffs on foreign goods and ships, and the states enjoyed the benefits
of commercial revenues from their own imposts. Taxes on land, most
policy makers admitted, would be difficult to secure; a national domain
created by the land cessions of states with vast western reserves would not
produce significant revenue from the anticipated numbers of small farmers
moving west, while such a policy might see land passed into the hands of
speculators. And manufacturing for markets accounted for a minuscule
part of American productive energies as yet; although some rising small
entrepreneurs began to insist on protective tariffs, they were forced to rely
on the rather piecemeal efforts of states trying to serve myriad distinct
interests. The specter of mutually annihilating special interests — a com-
mon lament of Nationalists by 1785 — seemed to endanger the continued
existence of the new republic.
FEDERALISTS AND ANTIFEDERALISTS
By early 1786, the core of Nationalists had broadened to incorporate
interests suffering from the decline in international commerce and from
thwarted expectations in manufactures, as well as state leaders who grew
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The Revolution, Constitution, and New Nation 383
disgruntled with fragmented responses to conflicting interstate — and
intrastate — demands. By mid-1786, a vocal group of Americans in each
region, occupation, and socioeconomic standing expressed opposition to
state particularism. Nationalists who met at Annapolis in September 1786
to promote a "uniform system in their commercial intercourse and regula-
tions" articulated an increasingly representative sentiment for a more
authoritative central government. Expansionists, developers, and "projec-
tors" joined Nationalists in Congress and state governments to call for the
creation of a national domain that might be surveyed and sold to citizens
who sponsored commercialization of the frontier with new enterprises and
settlement; proceeds from land sales might also help to defray the national
debt. Westward migration held out the prospect for new agricultural
bounty only if the "drain" of population into "savage" country could be
given sufficient economic and social order, and if distinct state jurisdic-
tional quarrels could be halted. Squatters and speculators who spread onto
the frontier in advance of surveys or with little regard for developmental
transformation of the frontier thwarted hopes of national leaders to create a
national domain that would provide revenue from, and give coherence to,
settlement west of the Appalachian ridge.
Following the Revolutionary peace settlement, the old Northwest Terri-
tory comprised the claims of many former colonies to lands granted in
original charters or acquired from Indians. Virginia's claims overlapped all
of the others. Complicating the issue for Nationalists was Maryland's
insistence that, as a "landless" state without western claims, it would not
ratify the Articles of Confederation until other states made cessions to a
national domain that settled overlapping and extensive western claims.
New York did so in 1781-2, establishing agreements with the Iroquois
and also setting a western boundary; Virginia made its momentous contri-
bution to the national domain in 1784. Following these cessions, Con-
gress passed the Land Ordinance of May 20, 1785, a plan for creating an
extensive national domain that would be surveyed, sold, and deeded in
regular portions and governed much as extant states were. Following the
venerable New England township tradition, surveys were to be of 6-mile-
square tracts, each with 36 sections of 640 acres. The Northwest Ordi-
nance of 1787 furthered these plans by creating one large territory that
included three to five potential new states; further, it prohibited the
extension of slavery into this new domain.
But ambiguities remained. For one, the Ordinance itself could not
ensure the integration of new states into the national political economy
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384 Cathy Matson
without a centralized enforcement of its provisions. For another, the inse-
curities of frontier life required that an external authority be created with
the power to negotiate ongoing disputes as the region was integrated into
the union. Conflicting claims of migrants showed repeatedly the need for
resources and planning for newly settled areas. New roads and canals built
by the states inspired even grander interstate projects that would promote
production in the budding local markets along internal waterways, except
when continuous disruption in the countryside — exemplified by the tur-
moil in western Massachusetts starting in September 1786 under Captain
Daniel Shays — could not be tamed by state authorities.
Nationalists were also joined by failing distillers and sugar refiners who
decried the West Indies British Orders in Council, and by shipbuilders
and whalers who wanted their Newfoundland and general Atlantic trading
rights returned but found the states incapable of securing their interests.
Real estate brokers, retailers, and ambitious tradesmen joined in the
attack against state sovereignty by arguing that banks and other urban
institutions would boost commodities exchange, money transactions, in-
vention, education, and a host of services; but contemporary state experi-
ments along these lines were inadequate to the magnitude of these tasks
and deprived creditors of essential confidence in their dealings with debt-
ors. Aspiring urban entrepreneurs, some of them craftsmen and some of
them former merchants, began to promote regulations for the uniform
quality and transport of agricultural goods, uniform tender laws, and a
uniform currency in order to correct discriminatory interstate laws.
Delegates at the Constitutional Convention made important strides
toward creating the political authority necessary for establishing America's
commercial reputation among nations and its own internal economic devel-
opment. On some issues, especially the creation of a federal revenue
through a uniform 5 percent impost, there was considerable agreement
among delegates. Such a measure recognized that international commerce
was (1) a primary source of revenue from which to repay outstanding
foreign and domestic debts, and (2) the basis for national accountability in
seeking future international loans for internal development. A uniform tax
on imports, they continued, would curb the most damaging contentions
among the states, because its burdens would be shared relatively equally
among importers.
More consequential in the long run, but less easy to glimpse in 1787,
was delegates' agreement to eliminate barriers against competitive trade
among the states: they began to create an arena of what Hamilton would
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The Revolution, Constitution, and New Nation 385
call in Federalist Nos. 11 and 12 the "natural reciprocity" among various
interest within America. What has come to be called the interstate commerce
clause of the Constitution embodied a grant of authority to Congress that
created the conditions for the free movement of people, transport of
products and capital, and uniform institutions that, together, proved
crucial to establishing a national market. A similar grant of power to
Congress to settle the conditions under which (1) new territory would be
developed, (2) new states admitted to the union, and (3) boundaries set
was also integral to creating this national market over time.
Many delegates at the Convention anticipated a market economy of
great dimensions when they established the theoretical and institutional
safeguards for contracts and the rights of private property against custom-
ary rights or popular agitation - Shaysites and Rhode Island debtors were
fresh on the minds of the founders. The national government would
regulate the commerce of Americans as citizens of the same country, with
the same obligations and immunities, irrespective of state of residence —
thus setting the stage for standardization of business practices, weights
and measures, patenting, and dissemination of information and invention
across the states and national sections. Finally, America's international
reputation would be fostered by the federal government's power over
foreign affairs, especially those on the high seas. The Constitution also
granted the federal government power over unorganized territory and over
admitting new states to the union, steps that would bolster central control
over the creation of a national market. Further, Congress alone would coin
money, regulate its value, and establish uniform rules about bankruptcy
and naturalization, thereby overcoming additional state particularisms.
However, despite Nationalist expectations for a more authoritative cen-
tral government that would dispense with divisive forms of state sover-
eignty, they neither destroyed all state economic powers nor extended
federal economic powers as far as their avowed hopes during the 1780s. The
federal system created in 1787 permitted a dual governmental authority
over economic affairs; with respect to the powers granted to the proposed
national government, only a few of the far-reaching possible grants of power
were adopted by the delegates. The most plausible explanation for their self-
limiting tendencies lay in delegates' acute awareness of the distinct interests
they represented, and the likelihood that those interests had even more
varied representation in the several states. If they made more than a few
significant alterations in the structure of the political economy, they might
invite opposition that could collectively defeat the whole plan.
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386 Cathy Matson
Unlike the impost discussion, controversy over export taxes most clearly
revealed delegates' broadly divergent and apparently contradictory assess-
ments of local and regional interests represented at the Convention. Since
the early years of the Revolution, such divisions over commerce had been
apparent.' During the 1780s, in the face of British discrimination, south-
erners called even more loudly for open, competitive trade with all foreign
nations, thereby keeping freight rates down and prices for staples up.
Southerners were afraid that the northern states would exploit their tempo-
rary advantage in Congress to impoverish the South; southern staple ex-
porters were convinced that export duties would burden their region with
a disproportionate share of the national taxes and that resulting higher
transport costs would undermine its prosperity. For their part, northern
merchants believed that export duties were generally less harmful than
import duties; while exports usually bore lower rates, Americans' "taste
for refinements" created demand for luxuries and foreign imports that
were taxed steeply. Many importers argued that higher import duties
would be passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices. How-
ever, they argued, lower import duties would encourage greater consump-
tion and promote American shipping and commercial interests, while a
tolerable rise in export duties would support American manufactures by
discouraging the exportation of valuable raw materials.
The Convention delegates proposed to compromise such differences by
circumscribing national power over exports, but they were aware of the
sectionalism that would be made manifest with the discussion over slavery
after July 13. Although many Convention delegates from northern states
opposed slavery on moral grounds, almost all the delegates were willing to
make important concessions to the South's continued reliance on the
institution in order to gain approval for northern navigation rights. In the
famous Convention compromise of August 16-24, delegates guaranteed
the interests of slaveholding staple producers by denying Congress the
right to prohibit the importation of slaves before 1800; at the same time,
however, Congress would have the power to pass, by a simple majority
vote, navigation acts that affected shipping and commodities at American
ports — a concession to northern commercial interests. The next day, dele-
gates easily passed a motion to extend the limit on congressional interfer-
' See early examples of admitted sectionalism in Speech of William Henry Drayton to the South
Carolina Assembly, Jan. 1778, repr. in Hezekiah Niles, Principles and Acts of the Revolution in
America (Baltimore, MD, 1822), 357—64, esp. 363; and Journals of the Continental Congress, Jan.
20, 1778.
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The Revolution, Constitution, and New Nation 387
ence in the slave trade to 1808; on August 28, they agreed not to permit
export duties by the states, although on September 13, they settled on the
principle that a state might levy "incidental duties necessary for the inspec-
tion & safekeeping" of exports. In effect, delegates had created a written
structure that recognized the rift between North and South that had
developed over the colonial and Revolutionary periods.
6
With respect to internal improvements and manufacturing, Convention
committees charged with considering these issues never reported back to
the whole delegation, probably out of fear that specific proposals for
development would jeopardize intersectional harmony. Some delegates
privately admitted that different parts of the country would benefit un-
equally from improved transportation links among frontier settlements.
Others worried about the interregional conflicts resulting from measures
fostering manufactures. The idea that the new union might serve these
diverse, sometimes conflicting interests was crucial to its appeal. Equally
crucial was its ability to avoid express commitments that showed a re-
gional bias. Along the same lines, the Convention delegates hesitated to
give Congress specific authority to issue paper currency, even as they
prevented state emissions in the future. The prospects of assuming state
debts and eradicating the dilemma of depreciating paper currencies came
up only briefly. Delegates also explicitly excluded sumptuary legislation
from the powers of the federal government, and they limited monopoly
rights to patents and copyrights.
As Nationalists - identified after 1787 as Federalists - sought ratifica-
tion of the Constitution, their opponents rallied. Antifederalists were not
convinced that the Constitution was a truly representative or federal pro-
posal, and they opposed its. economic provisions in every major particular.
Especially when contemplating whether the new settlements of the West
would favor economic and cultural exchange with the North or South,
they feared deepening sectional divisions. Other opponents challenged the
right of delegates to destroy the sovereign powers of the states and give
them to the new Federal government. Tax powers would be shared be-
tween federal and state authorities in the future, and uniform import
duties threatened to eradicate the states' control over their commerce.
They feared Federalists would resort to excise taxes - a fear proved correct
in 1791 - and they predicted that a federal Congress would sooner or later
6
James Madison Notes, and George Mason Speech, Sept. 13, Sept. 15, 1787, The Records of the
Federal Convention 0/ 1787, ed. Max Far rand, 4 vols. (New Haven, CT, 19x1; repr. 1966), 2:60;,
631.
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388 Cathy Matson
levy export taxes. Finally, Antifederalists also expressed opposition to the
distinct class interests served by Constitutional provisions. Melancthon
Smith spoke for the "respectable yeomanry," or "middling classes," who
were "the best possible security to liberty" in the republic; by creating a
consolidated regime, the new national government would reduce the eco-
nomic rights of an emerging middle class that had pinned its hopes on
state governments, thereby subverting the liberty of the nation.
Antifederalists were not economic naysayers. They welcomed self-
interest, entrepreneurship, and legislation agreeable to protection and
promotion of new business and internal improvements controlled locally.
They chided Federalists for blaming the mid-1780s depression on state
economic policies, and they correctly identified deeper causes for the
trauma. Finally, it was the local economy, Antifederalists believed, that
would remain most responsive to the plural economic interests of citizens,
especially the "men of middling property." A national economy was a
chimera, a ruse to satisfy the interests of a few "commercial aristocrats."
Many critics of the Constitution had internalized this outspoken antipathy
to consolidation of the political economy. Others hoped to imitate
neomercantilist policies in the various states; these rising entrepreneurs
and commercial agriculturalists hoped to channel revenues into commer-
cial banks and internal improvements that would remain under state
control. Ironically, although Federalists appropriated the language and
demands of spokesmen for territorial expansion, internal improvements,
and institutional reforms as they moved ahead to create a nationally coordi-
nated economy, some of the most vital, ongoing economic activism would
originate in the states for decades to come.
THE EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD
Temporarily at least, a majority of Americans approved of the expansive,
developmental, international vision of Federalists. Their enthusiasm for
the potential of America's political economy that accompanied ratification
of the Constitution was bolstered in May and June 1789 as the first
Congress set immediately to the task of creating a revenue for conducting
government and servicing portions of the war debts. Delegates quickly
approved the principles of an impost, a measure maligned by various states
during the Revolutionary and Confederation years. These tariffs — and
their increases until 1816- would provide roughly 90 percent of the
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The Revolution, Constitution, and New Nation 389
income of the national government, the remainder coming from periodic
public land sales. Federalist efforts to use this income for the assumption
of state debts and the funding of the public debt also contributed to the
international reputation as well as to the power of central government.
The second Congressional measure in 1789 was a Tonnage Act, which
was intended to raise revenue by levying duties on ships entering American
ports according to a scale: highest taxes — 50 cents a ton — on foreign-
owned and foreign-built ships, less taxation on foreign-owned, American-
built ships, and virtually no duties on American-built, American-owned
vessels. The twofold effect of this act was to give American shippers a
distinct advantage over foreign shippers and to eliminate almost all competi-
tion from the coastal trade and northern fisheries. Indeed, Congressional
delegates made arguments that were strikingly similar to those made by
British policymakers who passed the Orders in Council against American
commerce in 1783.
The Tonnage Act raised few serious objections in Congress, since its
purpose was primarily to protect American shipping. Even the committed
"agrarian" Thomas Jefferson assented to the wisdom of legislation that
would "render the use of [the sea] as great as possible" and "preserve an
equality of right to [exporters] in the transportation of commodities,"
with the goal of more reciprocal trade with foreign nations in the future.
7
But while most of the delegates had supported the 1789 Tariff Act as a
modest attempt at protectionism and a valuable source of government
revenue, opposition to the act arose outside of Congress. The tariff and
tonnage measures underscored to contemporaries that "southern and north-
ern will often be the division of Congress — The thought is disagreeable;
but the distinction is founded in nature, and will last as long as the
Union."
8
And there were more than sectional tensions; some artisan
groups were dissatisfied with the particular commodities being taxed,
while some others protested that the level of protection was too low to be
an effective deterrent for importation of foreign goods.
This opposition did not grow significantly until the "consolidationists,"
or Hamiltonians, brought forward additional proposals that intensified
7
Jefferson indicated his support for temporary commercial discrimination many times. See, e. g. ,
Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, Paris, Aug. 23, 1785, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, eds. Julian
Boyd, et al., 24 vols. to date (Princeton, NJ, 1950 — ), 8:426—8; Jefferson, Notes on the State of
Virginia, written 1781- 3, first publ. Paris, 1784, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill, NC, 1955),
chap. 19, 22; and Jefferson to Madison, 27 April 1785, and to Monroe, 16 June 1785, Papers,
8:110—1, 216.
8
Edward Bangs to George Thatcher, [1791}, Thatcher Papers, Boston Public Library.
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390 Cathy Matson
Congressional and public debates. One thing was clear to all Congressional
delegates, as well as to the many Americans watching carefully to see
whether the government would endure: those who controlled the funding
and repayment of war-era debts held enormous potential power. In 1790, it
was still not clear if the debts would be repaid and, if so, whether by the
states or federal government, and under what conditions. Sensitive to the
pressures of prominent public creditors outside Congress, Robert Morris
asked fellow Congressmen to create a permanent national debt with a
funding system to service portions of the public obligations left over from
the Revolutionary years. He called for exchanging the securities issued over
the course of the Revolution for new securities, without discriminating
among original holders and their subsequent purchasers. Moreover, only
the interest on the debt should be paid, from revenue created by the impost,
while the principal would remain in a central fund administered by Con-
gress. Such a fund would give tangible, material form to the federal govern-
ment, thereby enhancing its reputation at home and abroad.
It was not a new argument; the same reasoning lay behind the Bank of
England in the late seventeenth century and was revived by Morris and
others in the early years of the Revolutionary War to support the Continen-
tal Army and Congress's suppliers. Now Hamilton was asked to prepare a
report embodying Morris's argument, which he offered to the House of
Representatives in January 1790 in the Report on Public Credit. The
national debt, he wrote, amounted to more than $54 million, of which
nearly $12 million was owed to foreign nations. The total state debts he
estimated at about $25 million. Moreover, these many financial obliga-
tions were dispersed widely: in other countries, to war veterans, to former
suppliers, to urban merchant creditors. Hamilton proposed to tie signifi-
cant amounts of federal revenues to a fund for making long-term payments
of the interest on the debt, in order to consolidate the various kinds of
certificates and warrants issued during the Revolution into a more uniform
system of federal certificates — without discriminating between original
and subsequent holders — to assume the outstanding state debts, and to
pass an excise on certain "luxuries" to generate additional revenue. Over-
arching the entire proposal, Hamilton asked Congress to establish a na-
tional bank.
James Madison was an early and strong opponent of Hamilton's report.
He countered with arguments (1) to discriminate between original
holders — soldiers and small suppliers, for the most part - and the specula-
tors who currently held most of the debt, and (2) to leave the individual
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The Revolution, Constitution, and New Nation 391
states' Revolutionary War debt in the states. Madison and a minority of
supporters in Congress pointed out that securities speculation had become
a major business in America, especially in the northern states, over the
1780s; more recently, scholars have shown that by 1790, almost 80 per-
cent of all federal securities issued to citizens of Massachusetts were sold to
a few inhabitants who had sufficient specie to purchase them. Investors in
the Low Countries held nearly $3 million of Congress's certificates.
On February n , Madison proposed (1) that current holders of public
securities who were not original holders should receive no more than the
highest market value they could acquire on their sale, and (2) that the
balance due from the public - presumably the national government's
fund - be paid to the original holders. However much justice Congress-
men saw in this proposal, it would have been an accounting nightmare,
since original holders, as well as intervening holders, amounted to thou-
sands of citizens dispersed throughout a shifting and growing population.
Some Hamiltonians argued that Madison's plan was not just at all, since it
represented a violation of contracts implicitly made among exchangers of
securities in their capacities as buyers and sellers of property. Congress
defeated Madison's proposal, 36 to 13, on February 22.
Madison led Congressional opposition again when discussion turned to
assumption of state debts. More than the other measures, assumption bore
the marks of sectional interests, since many of the northern states re-
mained heavily indebted to public creditors, and most southern states —
South Carolina was the main exception - had repaid large portions. More-
over, northern speculators had bought much of the outstanding southern
debt; forty-seven northerners owned $3.2 million of the Virginia, North
Carolina, and South Carolina securities, a figure representing 40 percent
of those states' unpaid debts. Of the $3.2 million, thirteen or fourteen
persons in New York and New Jersey owned about 63 percent. Thus,
southern Congressmen tended to see northern interests conspiring to anni-
hilate the powers of the states with a consolidated debt. Although the
House defeated assumption in early April, in a vote of 31 to 29, the Senate
overrode the House in late July with a one-vote margin and combined
assumption with a funding bill as well as an agreement to place the capital
along the Potomac.
Until the end of 1790, opponents of the Hamiltonian proposals only
hinted at their class and sectional disagreements; when the Report on a
National Bank and a bill for an excise tax to raise federal revenues were
introduced officially in January 1791, the thorny issues of institutional
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392 Cathy Matson
ethics and the moral virtue of a citizenry were brought to the fore. The
Bank, argued its opponents, would tie disreputable interests to the reputa-
tion of the national government; it would also create an overweening
structure at great distance from the watchful eyes of the electorate. Some
even argued that public banks of any kind stretched the virtues of a
people, since they created artificial sources of credit, development, and
circulating currency.
These same opponents believed that the excise tax also was an excessive
use of federal power over the market relationships of ordinary Americans of
the interior. Albert Gallatin argued that it was proper to tax foreign
commerce but impermissible to tax the internal traffic of citizens in the
nation. Bolstering this opposition were myriad public appeals in newspa-
pers and pamphlets to defeat internal taxing schemes; Hamilronians
seemed to be treating the American people as British policymakers had in
the 1760s, when the latter insisted on their absolute authority to tax.
Objections notwithstanding, Hamilton's bank bill passed with a signifi-
cant Congressional margin. Operations of the Bank of the United States
(BUS), begun in 1791, were a joint venture between private and federal
government capital. The BUS was chartered for 20 years, with one-fifth of
its stock held by the U.S. Treasury and the rest by private persons. The
central bank in Philadelphia soon spawned branches in Boston, New York,
Charleston, Norfolk, Washington, Baltimore, Savannah, and New Or-
leans. It was a fully commercial bank, issuing notes that circulated,
holding deposits of investors, and making loans. Moreover, it held depos-
its of the federal government's revenue, and it lent the government money
upon its reputation. Further, the BUS was a conservative brake on the
lending policies of state banks; since it received large quantities of state
bank notes as part of its reserves, it could present the former for redemp-
tion at any time, thus forcing the state banks to moderate the quantities of
notes they issued. In 1792, the Mint Act provided for a mint in Philadel-
phia and set the United States on a bimetallic course of 15 ounces of silver
to 1 ounce of gold and a plan to circulate specie coins instead of paper
money in common business transactions.
This financial and taxing infrastructure shaped crucial aspects of Amer-
ica's economy for decades to come. But 2 years after Hamilton's first report,
his December 1791 Report on Manufactures failed to pass Congress. On the
surface of it, the Report was modeled upon the current wisdom about the
compatibility of commerce, agriculture, and manufactures; it called for
creating bounties, premiums, and awards for contributions to economic
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The Revolution, Constitution, and New Nation 393
development and recommended twenty-one tariff increases on finished im-
ports and five tariff reductions on raw materials. Increased productivity,
Hamilton argued, would spur increases of revenue and consumption while
promoting further investment, new inventions, and the immigration of
skilled labor. Manufacturers and their laborers would absorb agricultural
surpluses; the new institutions would provide extensive employment for
women and children. But when critics began to connect the Report to
Hamilton's ill-fated Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures (SEUM)
in Paterson, New Jersey, these broader goals dissolved into fears that a few
securities holders in northern cities would be the sole beneficiaries of manu-
facturing incentives. Hamilton's Report also opened the door for bickering
among individual promoters or inventors who would compete for the bene-
fits of government bounties he proposed - far better, argued critics of the
Report, to create general protective duties that would affect myriad artisans
and lesser merchants. Southerners and commercial farmers producing for
export predicted that the excise taxes recommended by Hamilton would fall
disproportionately on their staple products; these anxieties flourished
among western Pennsylvanians involved in the Whiskey Rebellion of
1792-4.
Objections to the first federal administration's programs grew stronger
over the 1790s, culminating in the Democratic-Republican victory of
1800 and a greatly weakened Federalist party. Democratic-Republican
strength derived not only from the as-yet unproved capacity of Federalists
to aid many economic interests and growing impatience among Americans
for rapid change. It also derived from the continuing importance of state
assistance to small entrepreneurs and rising artisans after 1790. Although
the Bank of the United States continued to place checks on the note issues
of state banks, the latter grew in number. In 1795, there were about
twenty state banks; by 1812, there were ninety, and their combined
circulating loans and bills of credit were far greater than the BUS's.
Northern and southern state legislatures also assisted commercial farmers
with canals and turnpikes in the 1790s. New York, Pennsylvania, Vir-
ginia, and Massachusetts extended loans to private enterprises such as
potteries, iron furnaces, tanneries, and textile spinning factories. Even in
the absence of funds, state governments promoted conditions for innova-
tive private economic endeavors. Some commercial firms, for example,
began to specialize in the commodities they traded with the help of
beneficial commercial codes. Some even curtailed their commodities ex-
changes in order to begin functioning as brokers, as in the case of Alexan-
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394 Cathy Matson
der Brown and Sons of Baltimore, when the firm shifted from wheat
exports and textiles imports toward negotiating "paper" obligations and
acting as brokers for other commercial firms. A portion of this company's
commissions typically went toward speculation in foreign securities.
Other firms in Philadelphia and Boston organized lotteries that drew on
the small savings of myriad local inhabitants to fund state-backed projects
in education and manufacturing.
From 1789 to 1819, state legislatures issued over 2,500 special charters
to new businesses, over 300 of which were state-chartered banks. Al-
though the BUS was huge compared to these experimental, and fragile,
operations, it was not indispensable; when the BUS was not rechartered in
1811, the gap was filled with almost 200 new state and local banks by
1816. Most charters defined businesses' privileges in borrowing private
capital and their immunities from tax or right-of-way legislation. Increas-
ingly, these charters gave monopoly rights over routes or roadways and
stipulated the private collection of toll monies. But many charters re-
mained "mixed enterprises" of combined state and private revenues. The
governments in Connecticut and Maryland acknowledged that the typical
weaver could produce about 5 yards of cloth per day; with state aid to
private merchant establishments that set up ten to twenty looms, how-
ever, it was easy to produce 100 yards of linen or woolen cloth per day.
The Erie Canal project also received state aid in the form of tax revenues
and government-issued "Erie bonds." The latter attracted British financial
investment; firms and individuals looking for secure investments by the
end of the Napoleonic Wars purchased over one-half of the debt of "Clin-
ton's Ditch" during the 1820s.
Efforts to shape federal economic policy and stretch innovatively the
resources of state governments must be set within a larger context of
American economic development. Statesmen and publicists recognized
two clusters of circumstances that shaped the greater contours of Amer-
ica's economy: (1) wars and famine in European nations between 1792
and 1814, and (2) major demographic realignment within America that
would subtly, but decisively, prepare the country for regional conflicts
and interdependencies influencing generations to come.
Recovery and development of the national economy was most conse-
quentially affected by events of the Napoleonic war years, when European
demand for foodstuffs and shipping services soared, and when American
carriers filled the positions formerly held by Europeans in trans-Atlantic
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The Revolution, Constitution, and New Nation 395
trade. Reveling in the neutral position of the United States, formers,
planters, and merchants channeled exports toward the belligerent nations.
Already large numbers of mid-Atlantic and Chesapeake farmers had
shifted from tobacco production toward grain. Following the recent disrup-
tion of American warfare, European conflicts offered unprecedented oppor-
tunities to expand their exports. Although prices varied sharply from
month to month, those for traditional commodities, such as grain, flour,
prepared meat, lumber, and fish, rose steadily from 1792 to 1818, with
the exception of the embargo years 1807 and 1808. Over the 1790s, the
value of domestic exports from New York, New Jersey, and portions of
New England rose rapidly. The value of reexports from northern ports of
southern cotton, and of foreign and British West Indies sugar and dye-
woods, rose even more rapidly. Overall, all American exports rose, albeit
unevenly, from about $20 million in 1790 to more than $108 million in
1807. Over the same period, earnings from the carrying trade rose steeply
as well. Only the end of 1802 and beginning of 1803 saw a partial decline
in European demand. Thereafter, not only the war but continuous poor
harvests in France and Eastern Europe drew as much surplus grain and
flour as Americans could export. Both England and France were forced to
suspend their mercantile regulations against American trade in order to
take advantage of American merchants' services in transporting Caribbean
and East Indies goods to trans-Atlantic ports. Pepper, salt, tea, coffee, and
sugar were among American merchants' reexports to England and France;
however, the same commodities also figured more significantly in the
northern states' patterns of consumption as well.
Earnings from American exports and reexports allowed Americans to
import large quantities of finished goods without increasing their debt to
foreign nations. Although the value of exports increased rapidly during
the 1790s, freight earnings of merchant vessels also accounted for Ameri-
cans' ability to consume more imports. The latter averaged more than $20
million a year between 1793 and 1802, compared to about $6.3 million in
1792. From 1803 to 1812, they rose to an annual average of $31 million,
despite the embargo in the middle of that decade. Added to freight
earnings are those from shipbuilding and ship sales. Tonnage owned by
American merchants increased from 355,000 tons in 1790 to 1,089,000
tons in 1808. In 1790, 59 percent of the entrances and clearances in
American ports involved domestically owned vessels; in 1807, it was 92
percent. Records indicate that American shippers were also increasing the
size of the cargoes and the fees that they charged foreign nations for
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396 Cathy Matson
services; they were also decreasing turnaround time during the war. Until
1807—8, sales of vessels to warring European countries also rose steadily.
Incomplete information also suggests that the coastal trade, especially that
between the southern cotton states and the northeastern corridor, provided
lucrative opportunities for lesser merchants and new, aggressive interests
in shipping services. Together, these circumstances enhanced the vitality
of seaport towns and reemployed great numbers of local young men. New
jobs and relatively stable employment existed for artisans of all sorts, as
well as insurance and notes brokers, warehouse and port facilities person-
nel, millers, and internal transport workers.
Coinciding with trans-Atlantic events was the equally important redis-
tribution of America's population, and the distinctive characteristics that
southern, western, and northeastern regions began to develop as a result.
In 1790, America's total population stood at 3.9 million, of whom 3.7
million were rural and fewer than 62,000 lived in the two largest cities.
Since about 1770, the white population had grown about 80 percent; the
high birth rate pressed down the median age of the white male population
to 15.9 years in 1790. By 1820, the total number of inhabitants reached
about 9.6 million; it continued to grow at a rate that doubled the coun-
try's inhabitants every 23 years, as it had in pre-Revolutionary decades.
Population growth was accompanied by territorial expansion west of the
Alleghenies, especially in the first three states carved out of the former
Northwest Territory. Kentucky grew from 73,677 in 1790 to 220,955 in
1800 and to 406,511 in 1810; Tennessee grew from 35,691 in 1790 to
105,602 in 1800 and to 261,727 in 1810; and Ohio rose even more
rapidly, from 45,365 in 1800 to 230,760 in 1810. In the entire area west
and north of the Revolutionary generation's settlement in 1770, to the
Mississippi River, there were nearly 1.5 million new residents by 1810;
by 1820, there were nearly 2.5 million. To the west of the Mississippi
River, the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 offered opportunities not only to
small farmers but for expanding cotton production and slavery as well,
The peace of 1783 yielded Americans 889,000 square miles of territory;
the 1803 purchase from Napoleon for $15 million netted another 827,000
square miles.
Although scholars of the early "transportation revolution" have shown
the steady momentum toward integrated, long-distance routes of ex-
change, until the 1820s, the predominant organization of the Midwest
involved little urbanization, little labor specialization, and — for the
majority of new settlers — integration of markets mainly on only a local
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The Revolution, Constitution, and New Nation 397
scale. The truly interregional economic contact between this first post-
Revolutionary frontier and the settled southern, mid-Atlantic, and north-
eastern sectors awaited subsequent generations.
Still, developments in older areas were consequential for the pace of
westward movement. Southerners were in the envious position of having
ready markets for cotton exports beginning during the Napoleonic war
years, especially with respect to bundled cotton for Britain's textile indus-
try. Cotton exports from the southern states accounted for nearly one-half
the growth of American exports from 1793
t 0
1807. Although the main
story of a booming cotton economy is to be told after 1815, Eli Whitney's
introduction of the cotton gin, and its immediate adoption, permitted a
for greater amount of cotton to be processed for export. Moreover, cultiva-
tion of short staple cotton (a variety that adapted well to dry inland areas)
and the creation of plantations in the future states of Alabama, Missis-
sippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee was well underway by 1815. Slavery grew
and expanded with the cotton economy. In 1790, there were about
700,000 slaves, largely in the settled plantation states producing tobacco,
rice, and indigo. By 1820, the number of slaves grew to 1.8 million,
nearly 20 percent of the American population, and had shifted to a very
great degree into the lucrative cotton lands of Alabama, Mississippi,
Louisiana, and west Tennessee. Annual cotton production rose from 3
million pounds in 1793 to 93 million pounds in 1815. Although southern-
ers exported almost no cotton over the 1780s, by 1800, American exports
amounted to 18 million pounds.
The East Coast also showed significant amounts of interregional reorga-
nization between 1790 and 1815, before eastern urban and industrializing
inhabitants were ready to absorb the commodities that would eventually
flow to them from the West. Already large numbers of mid-Atlantic and
Chesapeake farmers had shifted toward grain production, spurred by the
disruptions of the Revolution and the unprecedented opportunities to
export to other nations following it. Other eastern farmers began to special-
ize in those perishable goods that could be marketed locally - cheese,
milk, fruits, and vegetables. Some farmers gave up grain cultivation and
turned to grazing sheep for wool for the textile industry that was emerging
near them; others turned to raising cattle and pigs for both meat and
hides. Some eastern rural peoples migrated out of their villages in these
early national decades, but probably an equal number combined tradi-
tional farming with home production for small amounts of cash, day labor
in the community, or apprenticeships to acquire skills. Thus, while some
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398 Cathy Matson
eastern farmers specialized, others diversified their forms of labor. Until at
least the 1820s, no particular trend characterized the majority of eastern
rural people from Maine to Maryland.
The Erie Canal, completed in 1825, epitomized the transition from
traditional agriculture to interregional capitalist markets that was occur-
ring in certain eastern areas. The steamboat, invented in 1807, made the
trip from New Orleans to Louisville against the river current regularly by
1820, making another contribution to cheaper transportation costs and
more rapid conveyance of manufactured imports and urban crafts. The
return trip brought perishable goods to the southern states and eastern
coastal cities. In other ways, too, the local markets of the Northeast began
to expand, especially when one accounts for the proliferation of turnpike
companies and licenses for peddlers and tavern owners who doubled as
shopkeepers. But the majority of farmers were probably utilizing the same
tools and techniques, methods of fertilization, crop rotation, deep furrow-
ing, soil banking, and cross-breeding of crops that were known from at
least 1700 to at least the 1820s. Those farmers who exploited new opportu-
nities for exporting surpluses to long-distance markets often cultivated
fields without using fertilizers or permitting periods of fallow, thereby
maximizing short-term productivity but exhausting soil in the long run.
Although many contemporary political economists recognized that
America's future prosperity lay as much with manufactures as with agricul-
ture, it was when the Napoleonic war years spurred commerce to new
heights that entrepreneurs could undertake the creation and operation of
many new. manufactures. After a period of indirect protection by European
and American wars that curtailed importation from roughly 1792 to
1815, cotton textiles manufacturers appealed to Congress to legislate
protective tariffs for their "infant industries." Moreover, by 1800, numer-
ous iron furnaces dotted major eastern waterways, most of them represent-
ing a proliferating of traditional-style establishments that produced only
pig iron. Within the next decade, many foundries in New England and
Pennsylvania began to produce simple cooking or agricultural imple-
ments, a portion of which found their way to Europe. Whitney got a
government contract in 1799 to produce 10,000 muskets, in the making
of which he claimed he would use stamping and cutting machines to
create interchangeable parts. After 1802, the Du Pont family produced
gunpowder on the Brandywine River with large work forces and extensive
real estate and capital investments. Although inventors like Oliver Evans
of Philadelphia improved flour milling techniques as early as the 1780s,
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The Revolution, Constitution, and New Nation 399
only after 1810 did rapidly rising export demand provide the impetus for
many commercial firms to adopt those innovations. The organization of
textiles production begun by Samuel Slater in Pawtucket, Rhode Island,
in the 1790s was replicated in at least thirteen other locations where the
correct combination of labor supply, numbers of spinning machines, and
entrepreneurial impetus existed.
But if it was foreign war that enhanced demand for some "infant manu-
factures," the Embargo of December 1807 to March 1809 affected small
producers and wealthy capitalists in uneven ways. The effect of the Em-
bargo was drastic for shippers and shipbuilders. It also brought down the
prices of farm goods and threw many urban artisans into unemployment
by mid-1808. Although the Embargo was repealed in March 1809 and
replaced with a Non-Intercourse Act, which permitted trade with all
nations except Britain and France, prosperity did not return. In 1810,
France agreed to repeal its decrees against American trade in return for
American refusal to trade with Britain. From that time until late 1813,
American shipping declined once again, especially once Britain declared
war and blockaded American traffic.
Although some small manufacturers suffered bankruptcy during the
embargo years, others were able to grow, especially those that were related
to the still predominantly agricultural economy. New textile mills were
appearing wherever there was a sufficient water supply; there were over
eighty such mills by 1809. In 1813, the largest establishment to that
date — the Boston Manufacturing Company in Waltham, Massachusetts -
was created with the capital of wealthy Lowell and Cabot family members.
Waltham was the first mill of its kind to integrate weaving and spinning
in one factory; it was also one of the few genuine factories to survive the
postwar depression and economic panic of 1819, perhaps because it drew
on an available labor pool of young women and minors.
The rate of growth in textiles, shoes, construction, furniture making,
and iron goods production should not be overestimated. In 1809, six
textile factories in Philadelphia produced 65,000 yards of material, but
nearby cottage spinners and weavers produced 230,000 yards. More and
more, women were setting up looms and undertaking the tasks that were
traditionally left to itinerant males; some villages had their own fulling
mills as well, where cloth, especially wool, was shrunk or thickened with
moisture, heat, and pressure. First spurred by the Revolution, and then
reinforced during the Embargo years, urban promoters encouraged rural
inhabitants to keep sheep for meat and wool and to build fulling and
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400 Cathy Matson
spinning mills along waterways. Still, there was little technological inno-
vation or business reorganization required to produce these home manufac-
tures; indeed, treatise writers called them an ideal occupation for a rural
people.
Urban craftsmen often resisted the new market arrangements, especially
when they involved replacing the small craft shop with large establish-
ments controlled by merchant-manufacturers. Artisans who had earlier
attempted to exclude lower-priced foreign imports of comparable com-
modities now also struggled to establish uniform wage rates to be paid by
masters who owned shops or by merchants who marketed their finished
goods. Also, within crafts such as cordwainers (leatherworkers) and tai-
lors, the increasing separation of traditional roles of master and journey-
man, brought on by a transition toward wage labor, led to frequent labor
quarrels. Nevertheless, by the 1820s, many artisans were being elimi-
nated from traditional sectors of the economy; some became self-employed
property owners, while many gravitated toward factories or became un-
skilled laborers.
The Panic of 1819, precipitated by the revival of European farming and
a sharp drop in world agricultural prices, marked the end of almost three
decades of commercial recovery. Peace was far less prosperous than war, as
many colonists in the eighteenth century would have agreed. The market
for American cotton fell quickly, as did those for grain and flour, thus
reducing incomes in both northern and southern states. The drop in farm
prices caused widespread default on loans from local and state banks -
especially in the Ohio River Valley - and defaults on credit from coastal
merchants. By the end of 1819, the credit system linking commercial
agriculture and banking had collapsed. As it recovered in the 1820s, the
export-centered economy would experience more orientation toward inter-
nal economic development.
Was there economic growth between 1790 and 1820? Evidence to date
suggests that although there was commercial recovery at particular mo-
ments, and although farm prices and artisans' regular employment may
have been satisfactory at certain times over these decades, per capita
incomes probably rose more slowly in these years than for the 1760s, and
long-term recovery was uncertain in all regions. Among mariners and
laborers, real wages fell dramatically in the 1780s and rose to prewar levels
during the late 1790s; for almost two decades after 1800, weekly wages of
semiskilled artisans barely kept up with the rising cost of living. Farmers'
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The Revolution, Constitution, and New Nation 401
and large planters' prices rose and fell erratically within short cycles. Even
with significant activity in scientific societies, entrepreneurial investment,
and promotional government legislation, very few infant manufactures
survived the War of 1812. Although population continued to grow rap-
idly between 1790 and 1820, the rate of increase was slower than for the
1780s. America's economy was not yet fully integrated; regions and even
small locales continued to show distinct patterns of development for some
time to come. Moreover, within regions, the rapid changes in social
relations of poor and middling urban residents, farm laborers, and com-
mercial exporters were not yet accompanied by the more sophisticated
credit, consumption, and wage labor arrangements that integrated Ameri-
cans to a higher degree during industrialization.
Still, important transformations were beginning. Although export val-
ues per capita declined after 1815, this probably signaled a reallocation of
human and material resources into domestic channels. Ultimately, these
changes would lead to industrialization. Moreover, despite the setbacks
and slow-growth years of the Revolution and 1780s, Americans sustained
the highest standard of living known in the world during the 1790s.
Thus, if they had not yet realized the economic promise of political
independence — the intensive economic growth that would raise their
standard of living - neither had they experienced the ravages of war and
agricultural famine that so many European nations had in the same years.
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Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS
CHAPTER i (SALISBURY)
The coming generation of basic reference works on Native American his-
tory is in the process of publication. When complete, the twenty volumes
of Handbook of North American Indians, gen. ed. William C. Sturtevant (9
vols. to date, Washington, DC, 1978-), will provide exhaustive coverage
by region and topic. Especially relevant for economic history are many of
the essays in Vol. 4: History of Indian—White Relations, ed. Wilcomb E.
Washburn (1988). The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Ameri-
cas, Vol. 1: North America, ed. Bruce G. Trigger and Wilcomb E. Wash-
burn (Cambridge, England, in preparation), will consist of chapters cover-
ing the entire span of Native American history, from the earliest arrivals
via the Bering land bridge to the present. Two valuable historical atlases
are: R. Cole Harris, ed., Historical Atlas of Canada, Vol. 1: From the
Beginning to 1800 (Toronto, 1987); and Helen Hornbeck Tanner, ed.,
Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History (Norman, 1987). The best overviews of
precontact archaeology are Brian M. Fagan, Ancient North America: The
Archaeology of a Continent (London, 1991) and Stuart J. Fiedel, Prehistory of
the Americas, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, England, 1992). See also Michael Coe
et al., eds., Atlas of Ancient America (New York, 1986), and Lynda Norene
Shaffer, Native Americans Before 1492: The Moundbuilding Centers of the
Eastern Woodlands (Armonk, NY, 1992). For a brief but illuminating
discussion of exchange in pre-Columbian North American, see William
A. Turnbaugh, "Wide-Area Connections in Native North America,"
American Indian Culture and Research Journal 1:4 (1976), 22- 8.
General considerations of Indian-European interactions have been un-
403
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404 Bibliographical Essays
dertaken from a number of perspectives. On epidemiology and ecology,
see two works by Alfred W. Crosby: The Columbian Exchange: Biological and
Cultural Consequences of 1492 Westport, CT, 1972), and Ecological Imperial-
ism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900—1900 (Cambridge, England,
1986). On demography, the survey by Russell Thornton, American Indian
Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman, 1987),
should be supplemented by Sheila Ryan Johansson, "The Demographic
History of the Native Peoples of North America: A Selective Bibliogra-
phy," Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 25 (1982), 133-52, and John D.
Daniels, "The Indian Population of North American in 1492," William
and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 49 (1992), 298-320. On economic relations,
see Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, 1982), ch.
6, and Ronald L. Trosper, "That Other Discipline: Economics and Ameri-
can Indian History," in Colin G. Calloway, ed., New Directions in American
Indian History (Norman, 1988). See also Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions
of North America (New York, 1994); the relevant chapters of Howard Lamar
and Leonard Thompson, eds., The Frontier in History: North America and
Southern Africa Compared (New Haven, 1981); and James Axtell, The Euro-
pean and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New
York, 1981), chs. 9—10.
The very first contacts between Indians and Europeans remain the least
understood. Carl Ortwin Sauer, Sixteenth Century North America (Berkeley,
1971), is still useful. Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser, eds.,
The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521—
1704 (Atlanta, GA, 1994) greatly advances understanding of that region.
On the Atlantic coast and northeastern interior, see William W. Fitzhugh,
ed., Cultures in Contact: The Impact of European Contacts on Native American
Cultural Institutions, A.D. 1000-1800 (Washington, 1985), and James
Axtell, "At the Water's Edge: Trading in the Sixteenth Century," in his
After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New
York, 1988). On the multifaceted debate as to Indians' motives in their
earliest interactions with Europeans, see Calvin Martin, Keepers of the
Game: Indian—Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade (Berkeley, 1978);
Shepard Krech III, ed., Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade: A Critique of
Keepers of the Game (Athens, GA, 1981); Christopher L. Miller and George
R. Hammell, "A New Perspective on Indian—White Contact: Cultural
Symbols and Colonial Trade, " Journal of American History 73 (1986), 311—
28; Bruce G. Trigger, "Early Native North American responses to Euro-
pean Contact: Romantic versus Rationalistic Interpretations," Journal of
American History 78 (1991), 1195—1215.
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Bibliographical Essays 405
Seventeenth-century contacts between natives and colonizers in the
Northeast are treated in Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians,
Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, 1975); Neal Salisbury,
Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England,
1500-1643 (New York, 1982); William Cronon, Changes in the Land:
Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983); Bruce
G. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada's "Heroic Age" Reconsidered^ (Mon-
treal, 1985); Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of
the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hi l l , 1992).
On the Southeast, see J. Leitch Wright, Jr. , The Only Land They Knew: The
Tragic Story of the Indians of the Old South (New York, 1983). On the
Southwest, see Elizabeth A. H. John, Storms Brewed in Other Men's Worlds:
The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540—
1795 (Lincoln, NE, 1975); Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: the Impact
of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533—
1960 (Tucson, 1962); Allen H. Anderson, "The Encomienda in New
Mexico, 1598-1680, " New Mexico Historical Review 60 (1985), 353-77;
John L. Kessell, Kiva, Cross, and Crown: The Pecos Indians and New Mexico,
1540-1840 (Washington, 1979), and Ram6n A. Gutierrez, When Jesus
Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New
Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford, 1991).
During the eighteenth century, Indians east of the Mississippi went
from positions of relative autonomy to dependency and subjugation.
Among the highlights of the vast literature on this era, see especially
Richard Whi te, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the
Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, England, 1991); Francis
Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation
of Indian Tribes with English Colonies from its Beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty
of 1744 (New York, 1984), and Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and
Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York, 1988); Anthony F. C.
Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York, 1969); Michael N.
McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples 1724-
1774 (Lincoln, NE, 1992); and Randolph C. Downes, Council Fires on the
Upper Ohio: A Narrative of Indian Affairs in the Upper Ohio valley until 1795
(Pittsburgh, 1940) on the Northeast. On the Southeast, see Wright, Only
Land They Knew (cited above); Verner W. Crane, The Southern Frontier,
1670-1732 (Ann Arbor, 1956); Peter H. Wood et al., eds., Powhatan's
Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast (Lincoln, NE, 1989); Timothy
Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South
Atlantic Forests, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, England, 1990); James H. Mer-
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406 Bibliographical Essays
rell, The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European
Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill, 1989); Daniel H. Usner,
Jr. , Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower
Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill, 1992); Richard White, Roots of
Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws,
Paumees, andNavajos (Lincoln, NE, 1983), chs. 1-5; and James H. O'Don-
nell, HI, Southern Indians in the American Revolution (Knoxville, 1973).
Eastern Indians and their relations with the United States are treated in
Francis Paul Prucha, The Great-Father: The United States Government and the
American Indian, 2 vols. (Lincoln, NE, 1984); Reginald Horsman, Expan-
sion and American Indian Policy, 1783-1812 (Lansing, MI, 1967); R.
David Edmunds, The Shaumee Prophet (Lincoln, NE, 1983); William G.
McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence: 1794-1833 (Princeton, 1987); Theda
Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866 (Knoxville,
1979); Michael D. Green, The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government
and Society in Crisis (Lincoln, NE, 1985); Mary E. Young, Redskins, Ruf-
fleshirts, and Rednecks: Indian Allotments in Alabama and Mississippi, 1830—
i860 (Norman, 1961); and Anthony F. C. Wallace, Prelude to Disaster: The
Course of Indian-White Relations Which Led to the Black Hawk War of 1832
(Springfield, IL, 1970).
The fur trade in eastern and central Canada during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries has been studied from several perspectives. See, espe-
cially, W. J. Eccles, "The Fur Trade and Eighteenth Century Imperial-
ism," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 40 (1983), 341-62; E. E.
Rich, The Fur Trade and the Northwest to 1857 (Toronto, 1967); Arthur J.
Ray, Indians in the Fur Trade: Their Role as Hunters, Trappers, and Middlemen
in the Lands Southwest of Hudson Bay, 1660-1870 (Toronto, 1974); Ray and
Donald Freeman, "Give Us Good Measure": An Economic Analysis of Relations
between the Indians and the Hudson's Bay Company before 1763 (Toronto,
1978); Daniel Francis and Toby Morantz, Partners in Purs: A History of the
Fur Trade in Eastern James Bay, 1600-1870 (Montreal, 1983); Shepard
Krech, III, The Subarctic Fur Trade (Vancouver, 1984); Jenifer S. H.
Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country
(Vancouver, 1980); Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade
Society, 1670-1870 (Norman, 1980). On Canadian government policy, see
Robert J. Surtees, "The Development of an Indian Reserve Policy in
Canada," Ontario History 61 (1979), 87- 98; and John L. Tobias, "Protec-
tion, Civilization, Assimilation: an Outline History of Canada's Indian
Policy," Western Canadian Journal of Anthropology 6 (1976), 13-30.
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Bibliographical Essays 407
On the economic and cultural transformations overtaking peoples of
the Plains and Rocky Mountains, see Robert M. Utley, The Indian
Frontier of the American West, 1846-1890 (Albuquerque, NM, 1984),
chs. 1-3; Richard White, "The Winning of the West: The Expansion of
the Western Sioux in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," Journal
of American History 65 (1978), 319-43; White, Roots of Dependency (cited
above), chs. 6—9; John C. Ewers, The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern
Plains (Norman, 1958), and Indian Life on the Upper Missouri (Norman,
1968); Preston Holder, The Hoe and the Horse on the Plains: A Study of
Cultural Development among North American Indians (Lincoln, NE, 1970);
Joseph Jablow, The Cheyenne in Plains Indian Trade Relations, 1795—1840
(New York, 1950); Paul C. Phillips, The Fur Trade, 2 vols. (Norman,
1961); Richard E. Ogelsby, Manuel Lisa and the Opening of the Missouri
Fur Trade (Norman, 1963); David J. Wishart, The Fur Trade of the
American West: A Geographical Synthesis (Lincoln, NE, 1979). On the
Southwest during the same period, see John, Storms Brewed in Other Men's
Worlds, and Spicer, Cycles of Conquest (both cited above); David J. Weber,
The Taos Trappers: The Fur Trade in the Far Southwest, 1540-1846 (Nor-
man, 1971); Oakah L. Jones, Jr., Pueblo Warriors and Spanish Conquest
(Norman, 1966); Dolores A. Gunnerson, The Jicarilla Apaches: A Study in
Survival (DeKalb, IL, 1974); Charles L. Kenner, A History of New
Mexican—Plains Indian Relations (Norman, 1969). For California, see Sher-
burne F. Cook, The Conflict between the California Indian and White Civili-
zation (Berkeley, 1943; reprinted 1976); George H. Phillips, Jr., Chiefs
and Challengers: Indian Resistance and Cooperation in Southern California
(Berkeley, 1975); and Albert Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California
Borderland Frontier, 1819—1860 (New Haven, 1988). On the Northwest,
see Robin Fisher, Contact and Conflict: Indian—European Relations in British
Columbia, 17-74-1890 (Vancouver, 1977); and James R. Gibson, Otter
Skins, Boston Ships and China Goods: The Maritime Fur Trade of the North-
west Coast, 1785-1841 (Seattle, 1992).
CHAPTER 2 (THORNTON)
The primary sources for Atlantic Africa in the seventeenth through nine-
teenth centuries are chiefly written documents of African writers, where
there was literacy, and European visitors and residents. Oral traditions
collected in more recent times are sometimes valuable for dynastic history
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408 Bibliographical Essays
and military chronicles; they are much less helpful for social and economic
history. Archaeology has occasionally provided insights, although most
archaeological work has focused on somewhat earlier periods.
Wri.tten documents vary widely in quality and regional distribution.
For a discussion of their problems and case studies, see Adam Jones and
Beatrix Heintze, eds., European Sources for Sub-Saharan Africa before
1900: Use and Abuse, special issue of Paideuma 33 (1987). John Fage, A
Guide to Original Sources for Precoloonial Western Africa Published in Euro-
pean Languages (rev. ed., Madison, 1994), provides an annotated survey
of sources published up to that date. Writing is of the best quality
where there were long-lasting on-shore European bases (Senegambia, the
Gold Coast, Slave Coast, and Angola) or where there were literate
African societies (Senegambia and Angola). Areas that were visited only
for trade, such as the Ivory Coast, Niger Delta, and Gabon Coast, are
very poorly documented.
Written material is in many languages; most western European lan-
guages are represented, but Portuguese, English, French, Dutch, and
Danish are the most important. In addition, useful material is in Arabic.
African language texts from the period exist, but their value is largely for
cultural and religious issues rather than for social and economic ones.
Publication and translation of manuscript documentation has just begun,
and many of the texts published in earlier times still need modern or
accessible editions and translations. An evaluation of the quality of mod-
ern editions and translations is found in Adam Jones, Raw, Medium, and
Well Done: A Critical Review of Editorial and Quasi-Editorial Work on Pre-
1885 European Sources for Sub-Saharan Africa, 1960-1986 (Madison,
1986). For the earliest periods, up to 1700, a large body of archival
materials has been published in Ant6nio Brasio, Monumenta Missionaria
Africana (First series, 15 volumes, Lisbonn, 1952—88), in original lan-
guages for Angola, and for the Upper Guinea Coast (Second series, 5
volumes, Lisbon, 1958-79). The Linschoten Vereeniging (Hague) has
published many Dutch and German documents in the original languages,
while the Haklyut Society (London) has published English texts and En-
glish translations of many other primarily pre-1700 texts. P.E.H. Hair
has translated many of the Upper Guinea Coast documents for the seven-
teenth century in "Sources for Early Sierra Leone," African Research Bulletin
(Freetown) 4-13 (1974-84). The Centra da Cartografia Antiga (Lisbon)
has also produced editions and translations (into various languages) of
additional material.
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Bibliographical Essays 409
For the later periods much less has been published, and thousands of
valuable documents remain in archives. The most valuable archival collec-
tions are the records of the English, French, Dutch, and Danish African
companies. The Vatican archives are also extremely valuable. Albert Van
Dantzig, The Dutch on the Guinea Coast 1674-1742: A Collection of Docu-
ments from the General State Archives at the Hague (Accra, 1978), represents
an initial attempt to publish English translations of selected documents
from Dutch archives for the Gold Coast. English documents for the Slave
Coast have been published by Robin Law, Correspondence from the Royal
African Company's Factories at Offra and Whydah (Edinburgh, 1990) and
Further Correspondence of the Royal African Company Relating to the 'Slave
Coast,' 1681-1699 (Madison, 1991). For Senegambia, a good number of
useful documents have been published in the Bulletin of the Institut
Foundamental de I'Afrique noire. Those not in French have been translated
into French. Many eighteenth-century books on Africa have been re-
printed in recent years, although critical editions are more rare.
Secondary literature on Africa in this period has grown immensely since
1960. Earlier work tended to focus almost entirely on the lives and work
of Europeans in Africa. The earliest scholars focused on political history
and relations between Africans and Europeans; social and economic history
has grown much more slowly. Comprehensive surveys of the results of this
first thrust can be found in The Cambridge History of Africa, especially
volume 4 (Cambridge, 1975), which covers 1600—1790; a different but
more recent survey is in UNESCO General History of Africa, especially
volume 5 (Berkeley, 1992). Another important survey for this period is
found in J.F.A. Ajayi and Michael Crowder, eds., History of West Africa (2
vols., 3rd edition, London, 1985), volume i , which focuses on west
Africa. An interpretation of the relation of African social and economic
history to the slave trade and African American history in the period
before 1680 is in John Thorton, African and Africans in the Making of the
Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (Cambridge, 1992). Writing on the history of
the African economy in this period was stimulated by A.G. Hopkins, An
Economic History of West Africa (London, 1973) for west Africa; Philip D.
Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era off the
Slave Trade (2 vols., Madison, 1975) f°
r
Senegambia; and Ralph Austen,
African Economic History (London, 1987) for Africa as a whole. Valuable
background information on the environment and its impact on the history
of the region can be found in Thornton, Africa and Africans; George
Brooks, Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa,
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410 Bibliographical Essays
1000—1630 (Boulder, 1993) for Senegambia; and Joseph C. Miller, Way of
Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830 (Madi-
son, 1986), and "The Significance of drought, disease and famine in the
agriculturally marginal zone of west-central Africa," Journal of African
History 22 (1982): 17—61, for Angola.
I. A. Akinjogbin, Dahomey and Its Neighbours, 1708-1818 (Cambridge,
1967); A.F.C. Ryder, Benin and the Europeans, 1485—1897 (London,
1969); Daaku, Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600-ijoo (Oxford,
1970); Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast (Oxford, 1970);
and Boubacar Barry, Le royaume du Waalo: Senegal avant la conquete (Paris,
1972), and La SenSgambie du XVe au XIXe Siecle: Traite Negriere, Islam et
Conquet Coloniale (Paris, 1988), pioneered a number of issues in the social
and economic history of west Africa; their focus was particularly the
impact of European commerce. A later generation of work focusing on
Senegambia has continued many of these themes in greater detail, among
them Abdulaye Bathily, Les Portes de I'Or: Le royaume de Galam (Senegal) de
I'ere musulmane au temps des negriers (VHIe-XViiie sikles) (Paris, 1989);
Sekene-Mody Cissoko, Contribution a I'histoire politique de Khasso dans le
Haut-S&nigal, Des origines a 1854 (Paris, 1986); James Searing, West Afri-
can Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700—1860
(Cambridge, 1993); and Michael Gomez, Pragmatism in the Age of Jihad:
The Precolonial State of Bundu (Cambridge, 1991). R. A. Kea's history of
the seventeenth-century Gold Coast, Settlements, Trade and Politics on the
Seventeenth Century Gold Coast (Baltimore, 1982), is important for the
systematic detail it gives to internal dynamics of an African society, as is
the more detailed work of Yann Deffontaine, Guerre et Sociitiau royaume de
Fetu, Ghana, 1471—1720 (Paris, 1993). Similar work has been published
by Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550-17 50: The Impact of the
Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society (Oxford, 1991), building on
earlier work, The Oyo Empire, c. 1500—1836 (Oxford, 1977). The discus-
sion of Dahomey as a slave-trading kingdom has been particularly devel-
oped, beginning with Karl Polanyi, Dahomey and the Slave Trade: An
Analysis of an Archaic Economy (Seattle, 1966), and including discussion by
Werner Peukert, Der Atlantische Sklavenhandel von Dahomey, 1749—1797
(Wiesbaden, 1978); Patrick Manning, Slavery, Colonialism, and Economic
Growth in Dahomey, 1640-1960 (Cambridge, 1982); and Law, The Slave
Coast. In central Africa, an important early survey of the whole region by
Jan Vansina, Kingdoms of the Savanna (Madison, 1966), set the tone for
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Bibliographical Essays 411
further work. The Kingdom of Kongo, especially the period before 1700,
has attracted considerable attention. Anthropological interpretation goes
back to Georges Balandieri, Daily Life in the Kingdom of the Kongo, Sixteenth
to Eighteenth Centuries (New York, 1968); and W.G.L. Randies, L'ancien
royaume du Congo des origines a la fin du XIXe siecle (Paris, 1968). Historians
working on these lines include John Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil
War and Transition, 1641—1718 (Madison, 1983); and Anne Hilton, The
Kingdom of Kongo (Oxford, 1985). Angolan history was pioneered by David
Birmingham, Trade and Conquest in Angola: The Mbundu and Their Neigh-
bours under the Influence of the Portuguese, 1483—1790 (Oxford, 1966), and
continued by Joseph C. Miller, Kings and Kinsmen: Early Mbundu States in
Angola (Oxford, 1976); and Way of Death. Jean-Luc Vellut, "Notes sur le
Lunda at la frontiere luso-africaine, 1700-1900," Etudes d'histoire africaines
3 (1972): 61—166, produced an additional important study of Lunda in
the eighteenth century.
The study of slavery in Africa has been developed as a part of a general
investigation of social history and the impact of the slave trade. Important
early work was done by Claude Meillassoux, ed., L'esclavage en afrique
prkoloniale (Paris, 1976); Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in
Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison, 1977); J. E.
Inikori, ed., Forced Migration (London, 1982); and Claire Robertson and
Martin Klein, eds., Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison, 1983).
A considerable amount of work has been done on quantifying the slave
trade since Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison,
1969), a pioneering study. More recent work, such as that of Paul Lovejoy,
Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge, 1983),
and Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and
African Slavery (Cambridge, 1990), has shifted from quantification of
exports to examining impacts on Africa. Work on African demography,
both in its own terms and in response to the slave trade, includes Christo-
pher Fyfe and David McMaster, eds., African Historical Demography (2
vols., Edinburgh, 1977, 1981); Thornton, "Demography and History in
the Kingsom of Kongo, 1660-1750," Journal of African History 18
(1977)^507—30, and "The slave trade in eighteenth century Angola: ef-
fects oon demographic structure," Canadian Journal of African Studies 14
(i98i):4i7—27. Modeling exercises, beginning with John Fage, A History
of West Africa (London, 1969), and continuing with Thorton, "The Demo-
graphic Effect of the Slave Trade on Western Africa, 1500-1800" (in Fyfe
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
412 Bibliographical Essays
and McMaster, eds., African Historical Demography), 2:691—720, and Man-
ning, Slavery and African Life, have sought to explore the demographic
impact of the slave trade beyond the direct evidence of documentation.
CHAPTER 3 (JONES)
Works that trace detailed similarities between Europe and North Amer-
ica include J. R. T. Hughes, Social Control in the Colonial Economy (Char-
lottesville, VA: 1976) and his "Transference and Development of Institu-
tional Constraints Upon Economic Activity," Research in Economic History
I (1976), 45—68; and Terry G. Jordan and Matti Kaups, The American
Backwoods Frontier: An Ethnic and Ecological Interpretation (Baltimore:
1989). Terry G. Jordan, "Readaptation and European Colonization in
Rural North America," Annals of the Association of American Geogra-
phers 79 (1989), 489—500, states the preadaptationist case as well as
reviewing other explanations. Another statement of the continuity and
readaptation hypotheses is Forrest McDonald, "Cultural Continuity and
the Shaping of the American South," in Eugene D. Genovese and Leon-
ard Hochberg, eds., Geographical Perspectives in History (Oxford: 1989). A
different interpretation can be derived from R. Cole Harris, "The Simpli-
fication of Europe Overseas," Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 67 (1977), 469- 83.
David H. Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Ox-
ford: 1989), is the major exposition of regional continuity by an historian.
See also the "Forum" on this book in The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd
ser., XLVIII (1991), 223-308, especially Fischer's conceptual remarks,
PP- 3°3- 7-
C. M. White, Russia and America: The Roots of Economic Divergence (Lon-
don: 1987), thoughtfully treats the economic implications of colonizing
North America, in the Russian mirror. W. A. Knittle, Early Eighteenth-
century Palatine Emigration (Philadelphia, PA: 1937), and John A.
Hostetler, Amish Society (Baltimore: 1963), are useful on European groups
in America. An interesting account of one regional group that emigrated
to early Massachusetts is Frank Thistlewaite, Dorset Pilgrims: the Story of
West Country Pilgrims who went to New England in the 1 jth Century (London:
1989). Material on what was transmitted is to be found in W. C. Mac-
Leod, "Celt and Indian: Britain's old world frontier in relation to the
new," in Paul Bohannon and Fred Plog, eds., Beyond the Frontier: Social
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Bibliographical Essays 413
Process and Cultural Change (Garden City, NY: 1967), 25- 41, and K. R.
Andrews, ed., The Westward Enterprise (Liverpool: 1978).
The isolationist literature on the American frontier in the tradition of
Frederick Jackson Turner is usually unhelpful. Related but different expla-
nations of the relationship between the old and new worlds include Walter
Prescott Webb, The Great Frontier (Boston, MA: 1952) and Louis Hartz et
al., The Founding of New Societies (New York: 1964). Whether both sides of
the Atlantic changed in response to common stimuli is addressed by Peter
Karsten, '"Bottomed on Justice': A Reappraisal of Critical Legal Studies
Scholarship Concerning Breaches of Labor Contracts by Quitting or Firing
in Britain and the U.S., 1630-1889, " American Journal of Legal History 34
(1990), 213- 61.
On the British and European side, two useful bibliographies are
Charles Wilson and Geoffrey Parker, eds., An Introduction to the Sources of
European Economic History 1500-1800 (London 1980), and W. H. Cha-
loner and R. C. Richardson, eds., British Economic and Social History: A
Bibliographical Guide (Manchester, 1976). For European background, see
E. L. Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics
in the History of Europe and Asia, second ed. (Cambridge 1987), R. A.
Dodgshon, The European Past: Social Evolution and Spatial Order (Bas-
ingstoke, 1987) (on process) and N. J. G. Pounds, An Historical Geogra-
phy of Europe 1500-1840 (Cambridge, 1979) (for description, though
excluding Britain and Russia).
On rural life in continental Europe, see Jerome Blum, The End of the Old
Order in Rural Europe (Princeton, 1978). Dudley Dillard, Economic Develop-
ment of the North Atlantic Community: Historical Introduction to Modern Econom-
ics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1967), covers economic change on both sides of
the Atlantic fully. See also Ralph Davis, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies
(London, 1973).
Jan de Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600—1750
(Cambridge: 1976), is an accessible economic history of early modern Eu-
rope. Among economic histories of England, see D. C. Coleman, The
Economy of England I450-i75o(0xfoid: 1977); B. A. Holderness, Pre-indus-
trial England: Economy and Society, 1300-1750 (Totowa, NJ: 1976); and
Brian Murphy, A History of the British Economy 1086—1740 (London: 1973).
The classic study of English society by an American is Carl Briden-
baugh, Vexed and Troubled Englishmen 1590—1642 (New York: 1968). For
the American side, see Carl N. Degler, Out of Our Past: The Forces That
Shaped Modern America, second ed. (New York: 1970); from the European,
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414 Bibliographical Essays
see Edward P. Cheyney, European Background of American History 1300—
1600 (New York: 1961).
On agriculture and ecology, see Carl O. Sauer, Selected Essays 1963—
'975 (Berkeley, CA: 1981) especially "The Settlement of the Humid East"
and "European Backgrounds of American Agricultural Settlement." See
also Homer L. Kerr, "Introduction of Forage Plants Into Ante-Bellum
United States," Agricultural History 38 (1964), 87- 9 and E. L. Jones,
"Creative Disruptions in American Agriculture, 1620-1820," Agricul-
tural History 48 (1974), 510-28.
Ann Kussmaul, A General View of the Rural Economy of England, 1538—
1840 (Cambridge: 1989), is analytically excellent on English agricultural
history in the period. A fuller descriptive coverage is Joan Thirsk, ed., The
Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vol. IV, 1500-1640 (Cambridge:
1967). From the American side, Sumner Chilton Powell, Puritan Village:
The Formation of a New England Town (Garden City, NY: 1965), empha-
sizes English agrarian origins.
CHAPTER 4 (GALENSON)
INSTITUTIONS OF SETTLEMENT
The most authoritative and detailed survey of the history of English
colonization in North America and the West Indies is Charles M. An-
drews, The Colonial Period of American History, 4 vols. (New Haven, 1934-
8). Good brief introductions are given by W. Frank Craven, "The Early
Settlements: A European Investment of Capital and Labor," in Harold F.
Williamson, ed., The Growth of the American Economy, second ed. (New
York, 1951), 19—43,
a n
d Bernard Bailyn, "Shaping the Republic," in
Bailyn et. al., The Great Republic, Vol. 1 (Lexington, MA, 1977), 1-225.
Other general accounts of the early development of the colonies include
William B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, 1620—
1789, 2 vols. (Boston, 1891); George Louis Beer, The Origins of the British
Colonial System, 1578—1660 (New York, 1908); Lewis Cecil Gray, History
of Agriculture in the Southern United States to i860, 2 vols. (Washington,
D. C. , 1933); W. F. Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century,
1607—1689 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1949); Richard Pares, Merchants and Plant-
ers (Cambridge, i960); W. F. Craven, The Colonies in Transition, 1660—
1713 (New York, 1968); John E. Pomfret, Founding the American Colonies,
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Bibliographical Essays 415
1583-1660 (New York, 1970); and K. G. Davies, The North Atlantic
World in the Seventeenth Century (Minneapolis, 1974), which also compares
the English colonization experience to those of other European nations.
The classic study of the Virginia Company is W. F. Craven, Dissolution of
the Virginia Company (New York, 1932); a more recent account is included in
Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colo-
nial Virginia (New York, 1975). On investment in English joint-stock
companies at the time, see Theodore Rabb, Enterprise and Empire (Cam-
bridge, MA, 1967). On the labor problem and the social revolution in early
Virginia, see Sigmund Diamond, "From Organization to Society: Virginia
in the Seventeenth Century," American Journal of Sociology 63 (1958), 457-
75; and Diamond, "Values as an Obstacle to Economic Growth: The Ameri-
can Colonies," Journal of Economic History 27 (1967), 561—75. A recent
account of the early settlement of New England is given by John Frederick
Martin, Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship and the Founding of New
England Towns in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, 1991). On the evolu-
tion of the colonial economy and society, see E. A. J. Johnson, American
Economic Thought in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1932); J. R. T. Hughes,
Social Control in the Colonial Economy (Charlottesville, VA, 1976); David W.
Galenson and Russell R. Menard, "Approaches to the Analysis of Economic
Growth in Colonial British America," Historical Methods 13 (1980), 3- 18;
James T. Lemon, "Spatial Order: Households in Local Communities and
Regions," in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, Colonial British America (Balti-
more, 1984); John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of
British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill, 1985); and Barbara L. Solow,
"Slavery and Colonization," in Solow, ed., Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic
System (Cambridge, 1991), 21- 42.
LABOR MARKET INSTITUTIONS
The authoritative history of indentured servitude is Abbot Emerson
Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America,
I6OJ-I-/J6 (Chapel Hill, 1947); a more recent treatment is David W.
Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (Cam-
bridge, 1981). On the English background of indentured servitude, see
Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost, second ed. (London, 1971); Las-
lett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge, 1977);
Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford, 1978);
David Souden, " 'Rogues, Whores and Vagabonds'? Indentured Servant
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416 Bibliographical Essays
Emigrants to North America, and the Case of Mid-Seventeenth-Century
Bristol," Social History 3 (1978), 23- 41; Ann Kussmaul, Servants in
Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1981); and David W.
Galenson, "The Rise of Free Labor: Economic Change and the Enforce-
ment of Service Contracts in England, 1351-1875, " in John James and
Mark Thomas, eds., Capitalism in Context: Essays on Economic Development
and Cultural Change in Honor of R. M. Hartwell (Chicago, 1994). Addi-
tional information on indentured servitude is contained in J. C. Ballagh,
White Servitude in the Colony of Virginia (Baltimore, 1895); Kari Frederick
Geiser, Redemptioners and Indentured Servants in the Colony and Common-
wealth of Pennsylvania (New Haven, 1901); Eugene I. McCormac, White
Servitude in Maryland, 16)4—1820 (Baltimore, 1904); Philip Alexander
Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (New
York, 1907); Cheesman A. Herrick, White Servitude in Pennsylvania (Phila-
delphia, 1926); Richard B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early Amer-
ica (New York, 1946); Wesley Frank Craven, White, Red and Black: The
Seventeenth-Century Virginian (Charlottesville, VA, 1971); A. Roger
Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the
Colonies (Oxford, 1987); and Hilary Beckles, White Servitude and Black
Slavery in Barbados, 162J-IJ15 (Knoxville, TN, 1989). On the trans-
Atlantic trade in servants, see David Souden, "English Indentured Ser-
vants and the Transatlantic Colonial Economy," in Shula Marks and Peter
Richardson, eds., International Labour Migration: Historical Perspectives
(London, 1984), 19- 33; Farley Grubb, "The Market for Indentured
Immigrants: Evidence on the Efficiency of Forward-Labor Contracting in
Philadelphia, 1745—1773," Journal of Economic History 45 (1985), 855-
68; and Russell R. Menard, "British Migration to the Chesapeake Colo-
nies in the Seventeenth Century," in Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan,
and Jean B. Russo, eds., Colonial Chesapeake Society (Chapel Hill, 1988),
99—132. On the legal basis of indentured servitude, see Robert J.
Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English
and American Law and Culture, 1350-1870 (Chapel Hill, 1991). The
evolution of servitude is treated in David W. Galenson, "The Rise and
Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis,"
Journal of Economic History 44 (1984), 1-26.
Basic studies of the volume and routes of the slave trade include Philip
D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, WI, 1969); Paul
Lovejoy, "The Volume of the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis," Journal of
African History 23 (1982), 473- 501; and Lovejoy, Transformations in Slav-
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Bibliographical Essays 417
ery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge, 1983). On slavery within
Africa, see also Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa:
Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Track, 2 vols. (Madison, WI, 1975);
Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa (Madison, WI ,
1977); John Thornton, "The Slave Trade in Eighteenth Century Angola:
Effects on Demographic Structures," Canadian Journal of African Studies 14
(1980), 417- 27; Philip D. Curtin, "The Abolition of the Slave Trade
from Senegambia," in David Eltis and James Walvin, eds., The Abolition of
the Atlantic Slave Trade (Madison, WI, 1981), 83- 98; Claire C. Robertson
and Martin A. Klein, eds., Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison, WI,
1983); and Martin A. Klein, "The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on
the Societies of the Western Sudan," Social Science History 14 (1990), 231 —
53. Primary evidence on the slave trade is presented in Elizabeth Donnan,
ed., Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade to America, 4 vols. (Washing-
ton, D. C. , 1930-5).
Recent studies of the operation of the trans-Atlantic slave trade include
Herbert S. Klein, The Middle Passage; Comparative Studies in the Atlantic
Slave Trade (Princeton, NJ, 1978); Henry Gemery and Jan Hogendorn,
eds., The Uncommon Market: Essays on the Economic History of the Atlantic
Slave Trade (New York, 1978); Colin Palmer, Human Cargoes: The British
Slave Trade to Spanish America (Urbana, IL, 1981); James A. Rawley, The
Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1981); and Barbara L. Solow, ed.,
Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (Cambridge, 1991). On the
economics of the trade, also see Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn,
"The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Tentative Economic Model," Journal of Afri-
can History 15 (1974), 223—46; Richard N. Bean, The British Trans-
Atlantic Slave Trade, 1650-1775 (New York, 1975); and Richard N. Bean
and Robert P. Thomas, "The Adoption of Slave Labor in British America,"
in Gemery and Hogendorn, eds., The Uncommon Market, 377—98. For the
history of the English slave-trading companies, see George Frederick
Zook, The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa (Lancaster, PA,
1919); K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company (London, 1957); and
David W. Galenson, Traders, Planters, and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early
English America (Cambridge, 1986). On the demographic composition of
the trade, see David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, "Fluctuations in Sex
and Age Ratios in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1663—1864," Economic
History Review, 26. Ser. 46 (1993), 308- 23. On the finance of the slave
trade, see Jacob M. Price, "Credit in the Slave Trade and the Plantation
Economies," in Solow, ed., Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, 293-
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418 Bibliographical Essays
339. On mortality in the slave trade, among many studies see Philip D.
Curtin, "Epidemiology and the Slave Trade," Political Science Quarterly 83
(1968), 190-216; Roger T. Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British
Abolition, 1760-1810 (London, 1975); Joseph C. Miller, "Mortality in
the Atlantic Slave Trade: Statistical Evidence on Casuality," Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 11 (1981), 385-423; and Richard B. Sheridan,
Doctors and Slaves: a Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British
West Indies, 1680-1834 (Cambridge, 1985). For comparative evidence on
the mortality of whites on trans-Atlantic voyages, see Kenneth Morgan,
"The Organization of the Convict Trade to Maryland: Stevenson, Ran-
dolph & Cheston, 1768-1775, " William and Mary Quarterly, 3d. Ser., 42
(1985); and Farley Grubb, "Morbidity and Mortality on the North Atlan-
tic Passage: Eighteenth-Century German Immigration," Journal of Interdis-
ciplinary History 17 (1987), 565- 85. The mortality in Africa of English
employees of the Royal African Company is treated by K. G. Davies, "The
Living and the Dead: White Mortality in West Africa, 1684-1732, " in
Stanley Engerman and Eugene Genovese, eds., Race and Slavery in the
Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (Princeton, 1975).
For evidence on slavery in particular colonial regions, see Lorenzo John-
ston Greene, TheNegro in Colonial New England (New York, 1942); Richard
S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West
Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill, 1972); Carl Bridenbaugh and Roberta
Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1624—
1690 (New York, 1972); Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave
Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (London, 1972); Richard B. Sheri-
dan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623—
1775 (Barbados, 1974); Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial
South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1975); Betty
Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730—1775 (Athens, GA, 1984); Jean
R. Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery (Princeton, NJ, 1985); and Allan
Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: the Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesa-
peake, 1680—1800 (Chapel Hill, 1986). For treatments of many particular
aspects of slavery, see Randall M. Miller and John David Smith, eds.,
Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery (New York, 1988). On the legal develop-
ment of slavery, see Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Atti-
tudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968); and A. Leon
Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process, The
Colonial Period (New York, 1978). The economics of the growth of slavery in
the Chesapeake is analyzed by Russell R. Menard, "From Servants to Slaves:
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Bibliographical Essays 419
The Transformation of the Chesapeake Labor System," Southern Studies 16
(
r
977)> 355~9°;
an<
l David W. Galenson, "Economic Aspects of the
Growth of Slavery in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake," in Solow, ed.,
Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, 2 6 5 - 9 2 .
On hired labor in the English colonies, see Percy Wells Bidwell and
John I. Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States to i860,
(Washington, D. C. , 1925); Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family:
Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (Boston,
1944); Charles S. Grant, Democracy in the Connecticut Frontier Town of Kent
(New York, 1961); John Demos, "Families in Colonial Bristol, Rhode
Island: An Exercise in Historical Demography," 'William and Mary Quar-
terly, 3d. Ser., 25 (1968), 40- 57; Philip J. Greven, Four Generations:
Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, NY,
1970); John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony
(London, 1970); Kenneth A. Lockridge, A New England Town: The First
Hundred Years (New York, 1970); Stephen Innes, Labor in a New Land:
Economy and Society in Seventeenth-Century Springfield (Princeton, NJ, 1983);
Jackson Turner Main, Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut (Princeton,
NJ, 1985); Daniel Vickers, "Working the Fields in a Developing Econ-
omy: Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1675, " in Stephen Innes, ed.,
Work and Labor in Early America (Chapel Hill, 1988), 49- 69; Vickers,
"Merchant Credit and Labour Strategies in the Cod Fishery of Colonial
Massachusetts," in Rosemary E. Ommer, ed., Merchant Credit and Labour
Strategies in Historical Perspective (Fredericton, New Brunswick, 1990), 36—
48; and Winifred B. Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy:
The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750-1850 (Chicago, 1992).
On the evolving legal basis of hired labor, see Christopher Tomlins, Law,
Labor and Ideology in the Early Republic (Cambridge, 1993).
For overviews of the colonial labor market, see Richard S. Dunn, "Ser-
vants and Slaves: The Recruitment and Employment of Labor," in Greene
and Pole, eds., Colonial British America, 157-94; and David W. Galenson,
"Labor Market Behavior in Colonial America: Servitude, Slavery, and Free
Labor," in Galenson, ed. , Markets in History: Economic Studies of the Past
(Cambridge, 1989), 52—96.
POPULATION GROWTH AND THE LABOR FORCE
Population estimates by region are presented and discussed in McCusker
and Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789; these were con-
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420 Bibliographical Essays
strutted from earlier works including Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D.
Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New
York, 1932); Stella H. Sutherland, Population Distribution in Colonial Amer-
ica (New York, 1936); and Robert V. Wells, The Population of the British
Colonies in America before 1776 (Princeton, NJ, 1975). For estimates of
white immigration, see Henry Gemery, "Emigration from the British Isles
to the New World, 1630-1700: Inferences from Colonial Populations,"
Research in Economic History 5 (1980), 170-231; and Gemery, "European
Emigration to North America, 1700-1820," Perspectives in American His-
tory (1984), 283-342.
Studies of migration to the colonies include Mildred Campbell, "En-
glish Emigration on the Eve of the American Revolution," American His-
torical Review 61 (1955), 1-20; David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four
British Folkways to America (New York, 1989); Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling
of British North America (New York, 1986); Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A
Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York,
1986); David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between
England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987);
Richard Archer, "New England Mosaic: A Demographic Analysis for the
Seventeenth Century," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d. Ser., 47 (1990),
477—502; and Ida Altman and James Horn, eds., "To Make America":
European Emigration in the Early Modern Period (Berkeley, 1991).
The determinants of the population growth in the colonies are analyzed
by J. Potter, "The Growth of Population in America, 1700-1860," in D.
Glass and D. Eversley, eds., Population in History (London, 1965), 631—
88; Daniel Scott Smith, "The Demographic History of Colonial New
England," Journal of Economic History 32 (1972), 165-83; LorenaS. Walsh
and Russell R. Menard, "Death in the Chesapeake: Two Life Tables for
Men in Early Colonial Maryland," Maryland Historical Magazine 69
(1974), 211—27; Russell R. Menard, "The Maryland Slave Population,
1658 to 1730: A Demographic Profile of Blacks in Four Counties," Wil-
liam and Mary Quarterly, 3d. Ser., 32 (1975), 29-54; Russell R. Menard,
"Immigrants and Their Increase: The Process of Population Growth in
Early Colonial Maryland," in Aubrey Land, Lois Carr, and Edward
Papenfuse, eds., Law, Society, and Politics in Early Maryland (Baltimore,
1977), 88—110; Maris Vinovskis, ed., Studies in American Historical Demog-
raphy (New York, 1979); Vinovskis, Fertility in Massachusetts from the Revolu-
tion to the Civil War (New York, 1981); Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H.
Rutman, A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1750, 2 vols.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Bibliographical Essays 421
(New York, 1984); Jim Potter, "Demographic Development and Family
Structure," in Greene and Pole, eds., Colonial British America, 123-56;
Daniel S. Levy, "The Life Expectancies of Colonial Maryland Legislators,"
Historical Methods 20 (1987), 17—28; Levy, "The Economic Demography
of the Colonial South" (unpublished dissertation, University of Chicago,
1991); and Robert V. Wells, "The Population of England's Colonies in
America: Old English or New Americans?," Population Studies 46 (1992),
85—102. For comparative evidence on population growth in England, see
E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England,
1541—1871 (Cambridge, MA, 1981).
The economic progress of immigrants to the colonies is studied by
Russell R. Menard, "From Servant to Freeholder: Status Mobility and
Property Accumulation in Seventeenth-Century Maryland," William and
Mary Quarterly, 3d. Ser., 30 (1973), 37—64; and Lois Green Carr and
Menard, "Immigration and Opportunity: The Freedman in Early Colonial
Maryland," in Thad Tate and David Ammerman, eds., The Chesapeake in
the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1979), 206-42.
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
The authoritative study of wealth in the late colonial period is Alice
Hanson Jones, Wealth of a Nation To Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of
the Revolution (New York, 1980); supporting evidence is provided in
Jones, American Colonial Wealth: Documents and Methods, 3 vols., rev. ed.
(New York, 1978). Wealth in Maryland in 1700 is estimated by Gloria
L. Main, Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650-1720 (Princeton,
NJ, 1982). For additional colonial wealth estimates, see Dunn, Sugar
and Slaves; Russell R. Menard, P. M. G. Harris, and Lois Green Carr,
"Opportunity and Inequality: The Distribution of Wealth on the Lower
Western Shore of Maryland, 1638-1705, " Maryland Historical Magazine
69 (1974), 169-184; and Gloria Main, "Personal Wealth in Colonial
America: Explorations in the Use of Probate Records from Maryland and
Massachusetts, 1650—1720," (unpublished dissertation, Columbia Uni-
versity, 1972). Comparative estimates for England can be found in C. H.
Feinstein, "Capital Formation in Great Britain," in Peter Mathias and
M. M. Postan, eds., Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 7 (Cam-
bridge, 1978), 28- 96.
For discussions of agricultural productivity change in the early Chesa-
peake, see Lorena S. Walsh, "Plantation Management in the Chesapeake,
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422 Bibliographical Essays
1620—1820," Journal of Economic History 49 (1989), 393-406; Lois Green
Carr and Russell R. Menard, "Land, Labor and Economies of Scale in Early
Maryland: Some Limits to Growth in the Chesapeake System of Hus-
bandry, "Journal of Economic History, 49 (1989), 407-18; and Lois Green
Carr, Russell R. Menard, and Lorena S. Walsh, Robert Cole's World: Agricul-
ture and Society in Early Maryland(Chapel Hill, 1991).
On the heights of colonial soldiers and implications for the standard of
living, see Kenneth Sokoloff and Georgia Villaflor, "The Early Achieve-
ment of Modern Stature in America," Social Science History 6 (1982), 453-
81; for English comparisons, see Roderick Floud, Kenneth Wachter, and
Annabel Gregory, Height, Health and History; Nutritional Status in the
United Kingdom, 1750—1980 (Cambridge, 1990). On the material stan-
dard of living in the early Chesapeake, see Lois Green Carr, "Emigration
and the Standard of Living: the Seventeenth Century Chesapeake, "Journal
of Economic History, 52 (1992), 271—91.
Studies of literacy rates in England and the colonies include R. S.
Schofield, "Dimensions of Illiteracy, 1750—1850," Explorations in Economic
History 10 (1973), 437—54; Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial
New England (New York, 1974); David W. Galenson, "Literacy and the
Social Origins of Some Early Americans," Historical Journal 22 (1979),
75- 91; David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in
Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980); David W. Galenson, "Liter-
acy and Age in Preindustrial England: Quantitative Evidence and Implica-
tions," Economic Development and Cultural Change 29 (1981), 813—29; Lee
Sol tow and Edward Stevens, The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the
United States (Chicago, 1981); Robert E. Gallman, "Two Problems in the
Measurement of American Colonial Signature-Mark Literacy," Historical
Methods 20 (1987), 137—41; and Gallman, "Changes in the Level of.
Literacy in a New Community of Early America," Journal of Economic
History 48 (1988), 567-82.
For comparisons of wealth across colonies and discussion, see Jackson
Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton, NJ,
1965); S. L. Engerman, "Notes on the Patterns of Economic Growth in
the British North American Colonies in the Seventeenth, Eighteenth,
and Nineteenth Centuries," in Paul Bairoch and Maurice Levy-Leboyer,
eds., Disparities in Economic Development Since the Industrial Revolution (Lon-
don, 1981), 46- 57; Jacob M. Price, "The Transatlantic Economy," in
Greene and Pole, eds., Colonial British America, 18-42; Richard B.
Sheridan, "The Domestic Economy," in ibid., 43—85; and Jackson Tur-
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Bibliographical Essays 423
ner Main, Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut (Princeton, NJ,
1985). On the measurement and analysis of economic inequality in the
mainland colonies over time, see Jeffrey G. Williamson and Peter H.
Lindert, "Long-Term Trends in American Wealth Inequality," in James
D. Smith, ed. , Modeling the Distribution and Intergenerational Transmission
of Wealth (Chicago, 1980), 9- 93.
On colonial trade, see Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter, English Overseas
Trade Statistics, 1697-1S08 (Oxford, i960); Bernard Bailyn, The New
England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1955);
Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1962); James F. Shepherdand Gary M. Wal-
t on, Shipping, Maritime Trade, and the Economic Development of Colonial North
America (Cambridge, 1972); Jacob M. Price, Capital and Credit in British
Overseas Trade: The View from the Chesapeake, 1700-1-776 (Cambridge, MA,
1980); and Price, Perry of London: A Family and a Firm on the Seaborne
Frontier, 1615-1753 (Cambridge, MA, 1992). For colonial exchange
rates, see John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America,
1600-1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hi l l , 1978).
CHAPTER 5 (VICKERS)
The social and economic history of the northern colonies is best approached
through the appropriate chapters in two comprehensive and superbly refer-
enced studies: John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of
British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill, 1985); and Jack P. Greene,
Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies
and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hi l l , 1988). The former
contains an excellent bibliography that is particularly strong in older stud-
ies and published primary sources. These two studies may be supplemented
by Frank Freidel, ed., Harvard Guide to American History, 2 vols. (Cam-
bridge, MA, 1974), which is extensive although dated. The core periodical
in the field is the William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser. (1944- ), which
contains many seminal articles and which reviews virtually all of the impor-
tant published work on the American colonies — North and South. Much
useful material also appears in regional historical journals, especially
Acadiensis, the New England Quarterly, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and
Biography, Essex Institute, Historical Collections, and New York History.
The history of settlement and the transfer of European culture to New
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424 Bibliographical Essays
England and the middle colonies is the subject of David Hackett Fischer,
Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York, 1989), a compre-
hensive and stimulating, if sometimes eccentric, overview. The regional
literature is strongest on New England: see especially David G. Allen, In
English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transfer of English Local Law
and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill,
1981); and Virginia Dejohn Anderson, New England's Generation: The
Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth
Century (Cambridge, 1991). The middle colonies are less well-served, but
see the excellent studies by Ned Landsman, Scotland and its First American
Colony, 1683—IJ6$ (Princeton, NJ, 1985) on East Jersey; Barry Levy,
Quakers and the American Family: Settlement in the Delaware Valley (New
York, 1988) on the Welsh Tract in Pennsylvania; and Oliver A. Rink,
Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York
(Ithaca, NY, 1986) on the Hudson Valley. The settlement of the colonial
North is best followed into the eighteenth century in Bernard Bailyn, The
Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York, 1986); and
Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the
Revolution (New York, 1986).
Studies of the northern frontier do not usefully fall into discrete fields of
history, and this probably constitutes their advantage. Since shared as-
sumptions amongst the many Indian and European groups that dealt with
one another along the frontier were few in number, culture there had to be
the product of continuous negotiation; this has forced those who study the
frontier into treatments that cross the borders between economic, social,
political, and military history. The most sophisticated treatment of this
theme is Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Repub-
lics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, 1991). In the
Atlantic Canadian context, one can still begin with Alfred G. Bailey, The
Conflict of European and Eastern Algonkian Cultures (St. John, N. B. , 1937);
the controversial study by Calvin Martin, Keepers of the Game: Indian-
Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade (Berkeley, CA, 1978); Shepard
Krech III, Indians, Animals and the Fur Trade: A Critique of Keepers of the
Game (Athens, GA, 1981); and a review of subsequent literature by Ralph
T. Pastore, "Native History in the Atlantic Region During the Colonial
Period," Acadiensis XX (1990), 200-25. For New England, there are
some older studies: Francis X. Moloney, The Fur Trade in New England,
1620-1676 (Cambridge, MA, 1931); Douglas Edward Leach, The North-
ern Colonial Frontier, 1607-1763 (New York, 1966); and Alden T.
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Bibliographical Essays 425
Vaughan, The New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620—1675
(Boston, MA, 1965). But these have largely been supplanted by Francis
Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonists, and the Cant of Con-
quest (Chapel Hill, 1975); William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians,
Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983); and Peter A.
Thomas, "Cultural Change on the Southern New England Frontier,
1630—1665," in William W. Fitzhugh, ed., Cultures in Conflict: the Euro-
pean Impact on Native Cultural Institutions in Eastern North America, 1000-
1800 (Washington, D. C. , 1985), 131-62. On the Middle Colonies, see
Thomas Eliot Norton, The Fur Trade in Colonial New York, 1686-1776
(Madison, WI, 1974); and especially two works by Francis Jennings: The
Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes
with English Colonists from its beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744 (New
York, 1984); and Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and the Seven Years War
in America (New York, 1988). For the way in which Europeans operated
within the frontier zone, there is much suggestive material in George W.
Franz, Paxton: A Study of Community Structure and Mobility in the Colonial
Pennsylvania Backcountry (New York, 1989); Bailyn's Voyagers to the West,
especially the chapters on Nova Scotia and New York; and the early
chapters of both Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier
Epilogue to the American Revolution (New York, 1986); and Alan Taylor,
Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine
Frontier, 1760-1820 (Chapel Hill, 1990).
The best single overview of rural economy in the northern colonies
remains Percy Wells Bidwell and John I. Falconer, History of Agriculture in
the Northern United States, 1620-1860 (Washington, D. C. , 1925), al-
though New England has more recently received two rather different
synthetic treatments in Howard S. Russell, A Long, Deep Furrow: Three
Centuries of Farming in New England (Hanover, NH, 1976), parts 1 and 2;
and Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in
New England (Chapel Hill, 1989). Beyond these, the reader is best advised
to investigate the immense regional and local literature produced by the
"new social" and "new economic" historians of the past 30 years.
On Pennsylvania, see James T. Lemon, The Best Poor Man's Country: A
Geographical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania (Baltimore, MD,
1972); Duane E. Ball and Gary M. Walton, "Agricultural Productivity
Change in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania, "Journal of Economic History
36 (1976), 102-17; and "Discussion" by Russell M. Menard in ibid.,
118-25; Lucy Simler, "Tenancy in Colonial Pennsylvania: The Case of
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426 Bibliographical Essays
Chester County," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XLIII (1986),
542—69; Paul G. E. Clemens and Lucy Simler, "Rural Labor and the Farm
Household in Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1750-1820," in Stephen
Innes, ed., Work and Labor in Early America (Chapel Hill, 1988), 106-43;
Joan M. Jensen, Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750-
1850 (New Haven, CT, 1986); as well as Levy, Quakers and the American
Family. Historians have tended to ignore New Jersey, but see John E.
Pomfret, The New Jersey Proprietors and their Lands, 1664—1776 (Princeton,
NJ, 1964); Peter O. Wacker, Land and People: A Cultural Geography of
Preindustrial New Jersey: Origins and Settlement Patterns (New Brunswick,
NJ, 1975); as well as Landsman, Scotland in America. The rural history of
colonial New York is dominated by discussions of its manorial system, and
on this topic, Sung Bok Kim, Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York:
Manorial Society, 1664-1775 (Chapel Hill, 1978), is now authoritative.
The literature on the New England town used to slight questions of
political economy, but this is no longer the case. John Frederick Martin,
Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship and the Founding of New England
Towns in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, 1991), is one fine recent study
that reflects this recent trend to reconceptualize the New England experi-
ence in precisely these terms. Some important regional studies that focus on
the question of growth are Terry L. Anderson, "Economic Growth in Colo-
nial New England: "Statistical Renaissance,"Journal ofEconomic History, 39
(1979), 243—57; Bruce C. Daniels, "Economic Development in Colonial
and Revolutionary Connecticut: An Overview" William and Mary Quarterly,
3d Ser., 37 (1980), 429—50; and Gloria L. Main and Jackson T. Main,
"Economic Growth and the Standard of Living in Southern New England,
1640—1774," Journal of Economic History, 48 (1988), 27—46. On social
structure, Jackson Turner Main, Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut
(Princeton, NJ, 1985), contains much useful information; and on geo-
graphic mobility, see Fred Anderson, "A People's Army: Provincial Mili-
tary Service in Massachusetts During the Seven Years' War," William and
Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 40 (1983), 499-527; and Douglas Lamar Jones,
"The Strolling Poor: Transiency in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,"
Journal of Social History, 8 (1975), 28-54. The role of women and of gender
relations within the rural economy needs further study, but for two contrast-
ing perspectives, see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality
in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (New York,
1980), especially part 1; and Carol Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a
Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York, 1987). The impor-
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Bibliographical Essays 427
tance of market relationships within the rural economy of the colonial
North (and especially New England) has been the subject of lively debate
among many historians, including Michael Merrill, "Cash Is Good to Eat:
Self-Sufficiency and Exchange in the Rural Economy of the United States,"
Radical History Review, 3 (1977), 42- 71; James A. Henretta, "Families and
Farms: Mentaliti in Pre-Industrial America," William and Mary Quarterly,
3d Ser., 35 (1978), 3-32; Bettye Hobbs Pruitt, "Self-Sufficiency and the
Agricultural Economy of Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts," ibid., 3d
Ser., 41 (1984), 333-64; Winifred Barr Rothenberg, From Market-Places to
a Market Economy: the Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 175 0- 1850.
(Chicago, IL, 1992). The issues within this debate are well summarized in
Allan Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville,
VA, 1992).
There are dozens of useful studies that deal with these and other sub-
jects in the context of a single New England town or county but space here
to mention only the most significant. Philip J. Greven, Four Generations:
Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, NY,
1970); Kenneth A. Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred
Years: Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636-1-736 (New York, 1970); and Robert
A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World(New York, 1976) offer a Mai thu-
sian interpretation of initial abundance followed by mounting population
and social crisis. This has been challenged from different perspectives by
Christopher M. Jedrey, The World of John Cleaveland: Family and Community
in Eighteenth-Century New England (New York, 1979); Stephen Innes, Labor
in a New Land: Economy and Society in Seventeenth-Century Springfield^(Prince-
ton, NJ, 1983); Toby L. Di tz, Property and Kinship: Inheritance in Early
Connecticut, 1750-1820 (Princeton, NJ, 1986); John L. Brooke, The Heart
of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massa-
chusetts, 1713-1861 (Cambridge, 1989); and Daniel Vickers, Farmers and
Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1850
(Chapel Hill, 1994).
North of Massachusetts, the countryside thinned out, as does the histori-
cal literature. The development of rural New Hampshire and Maine are
covered in Charles E. Clarke, The Eastern Frontier: The Settlement of Northern
New England, 1610-1763 (New York, 1970); and David E. Van Deventer,
The Emergence of Provincial New Hampshire, 1623-1741 (Baltimore, MD,
1976). Andrew Hi l l Clark, Acadia: The Geography of Early Nova Scotia to
1760 (Madison, WI , 1968), does a very thorough job on the early history
of Nova Scotia.
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428 Bibliographical Essays
The maritime industries of the northern colonies possess even less in the
way of synthetic treatment than does the rural economy. K. R. Andrews,
Trade, Plunder, and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the
British Empire, 1480—1630 (Cambridge, 1984) covers the subject well but
only in its earliest and essentially pre-colonial years. For later periods,
even the broadest treatments focus in on specific subjects. On trade and
shipping, Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry (London,
1962), is still fundamental; it can be supplemented with James F. Shep-
herd and Gary M. Walton, Shipping, Maritime Trade, and the Economic
Development of Colonial America (Cambridge, 1972). James F. Shepherd,
"Commodity Exports from the British North American Colonies to Over-
seas Areas, 1768-1772: Magnitudes and Patterns of Trade," Explorations
in Economic History, 2d Ser., 8 (1970-71), 5-76, is especially useful for
the trade statistics it presents. One way to study trade is through the men
who organized it, and colonial American history is very rich in merchant
studies. There are several excellent biographies including William T.
Baxter, The House of Hancock: Business in Boston, 1724-1775 (Cambridge,
MA, 1945); and James B. Hedges, The Browns of Providence Plantations:
The Colonial Years (Cambridge, MA, 1952). Virginia D. Harrington, The
New York Merchant on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1935); Frederick
B. Tolles, Meeting House and Counting House: The Quaker Merchants of Colo-
nial Philadelphia, 1682-1763 (Chapel Hill, 1948); Bernard Bailyn, The
New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1955);
and most recently, Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise:
Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel
Hill, 1986) are all excellent collective portraits of the merchant class and
indispensable to an understanding of colonial trade. Since the urban his-
tory of the northern colonies is also port history, there is much about trade
in such works as Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: The First
Century of Urban Life in America, 1625-1742 (New York, 1938); and Cities
in Revolt: Urban Life in American, 1743-1776 (New York, 1955); Gary B.
Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the
Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1979), Lynne Withey,
Urban Growth in Colonial Rhode Island: Newport and Providence in the Eigh-
teenth Century (Albany, NY, 1983); Jacob Price, "Economic Function and
the Growth of American Port towns in the Eighteenth Century," Perspec-
tives in American History, 8 (1974), 121-86. Other useful studies on the
social and economic life of colonial ports include Billy G. Smith, The
"Lower Sort": Philadelphia's Laboring People, 1750-1800 (Ithaca, NY,
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Bibliographical Essays 429
1990); and Sharon V. Salinger, "To serve well and faithfully": Labor and
Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800 (New York, 1987).
Other branches of the maritime economy deserve more attention than
they have previously received. The trans-Atlantic fisheries are reasonably
well covered by Harold A. Innis, The Cod Fisheries: The History of an
International Economy (Toronto, 1940); Gillian T. Cell, English Enterprise in
Newfoundland, 1577-1660 (Toronto, 1969); Keith Matthews "A History
of the West of England-Newfoundland Fishery" (Ph.D. diss., Oxford
University, 1968); and the superb Plates 21- 28 in R. Cole Harris, ed.,
Historical Atlas of Canada, Vol. I, From the Beginning to 1800 (Toronto,
1987). Two recent works on the resident cod fishery in Massachusetts are
Christine Heyrman, Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of
Colonial Massachusetts, 1690-1760 (New York, 1983) and Daniel Vickers,
Farmers and Fishermen (cited above). The colonial whaling industry has
received less attention, but the best introduction is contained in Edward
Byers, The Nation of Nan tucket: Society and Politics in an Early American
Commercial Center, 1660-1820 (Boston, MA, 1987). The history of ship-
building and, indeed, all waterfront crafts is practically nonexistent, but
see Joseph A. Goldenberg's cautious Shipbuilding in Colonial America (Char-
lottesville, VA, 1976); and Bernard Bailyn and Lotte Bailyn, Massachusetts
Shipping, 1697-1714: A Statistical Study (Cambridge, MA, 1959).
On the role of government in the public economy of the northern
colonies, the literature is daunting in quantity; one can begin at the top
with some classic imperial overviews, including Charles M. Andrews, The
Colonial Period of American History, 4 vols. (New Haven, CT, 1934-8),
especially Vol. IV, England's Commercial and Colonial Policy; Lawrence A.
Harper, The English Navigation Laws: A Seventeenth-Century Experiment in
Social Engineering (New York, 1939); Wesley Frank Craven, The Colonies in
Transition, 1660-1713 (New York, 1968); Michael Kammen, Empire and
Interest: the American Colonies and the Politics of Mercantilism (Philadelphia,
PA, 1970); Jack P. Greene, "An Uneasy Connection: An Analysis of the
Preconditions of the American Revolution," in Stephen G. Kurtz and
James H. Hutson, eds., Essays on the American Revolution (Chapel Hill,
I
973). 32—80; and Robert Paul Thomas, "A Quantitative Approach to
the Study of the Effects of British Imperial Policy upon Colonial Welfare:
Some Preliminary Findings," Journal of Economic History, 25 (1965), 615—
38; with Jacob Price, "Discussion," in ibid., 656-69. Some useful studies
that deal specifically with imperial policy in the colonial Northeast in-
clude G. M. Waller, Samuel Vetch: Colonial Enterpriser (Chapel Hill, i960);
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43° Bibliographical Essays
George A. Rawlyk, Nova Scotia's Massachusetts: A Study of Massachusetts-
Nova Scotia Relations, 1630-1784 (Montreal, 1973); Michael G. Hall,
Edward Randolph and the American Colonies, 1676-1703 (Chapel Hill,
i960); J. A. Schutz, William Shirley, King's Governor of Massachusetts (Cha-
pel Hill, NC, 1961); Stanley N. Katz, Newcastle's New York: Anglo-
American Politics, 1732-1753 (Cambridge, MA, 1968); and James H.
Hutson, Pennsylvania Politics, 1746—1770/ The Movement for Royal Govern-
ment and its Consequences (Princeton, NJ, 1972).
On the social policiesx>f colonial governments as well as the connections
between law and the economy, see such overviews as J. R. T. Hughes,
Social Control in the Colonial Economy (Charlottesville, VA, 1976); Richard
B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (New York, 1946); and
Leslie V. Brock, The Currency of the American Colonies, 1700—1764: A Study
in Colonial Finance and Imperial Relations (New York, 1975). Studies that
deal effectively with individual colonies include George Lee Haskins, Law
and Authority in Early Massachusetts: A Study in Tradition and Design (New
York, i960); Bruce H. Mann, Neighbors and Strangers: Law and Community
in Early Connecticut (Chapel Hill, 1987); and Mary Schweitzer, Custom and
Contract: Household, Government, and the Economy in Colonial Pennsylvania
(New York, 1987).
CHAPTER 6 (MENARD)
Given the uncertain nature of the South as a concept in the eighteenth
century, it should come as no surprise that there is little literature focused
on the region as a whole, and that interested scholars have to turn to more
general works on the colonies as a whole or on more focused studies of
particular regions. Having laid down those rules, let me begin with an
exception to them; what in my view remains the best book on the eco-
nomic history of the colonial South, and a good starting point for nearly
any research in early southern economic history, Lewis C. Gray, History of
Agriculture in the Southern United States to i860, 2 vols. 430 (Washington,
D. C. , 1933). Especially useful colonial-wide studies include, for wealth
and welfare issues, Alice Hanson Jones, The Wealth of a Nation to Be: The
American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1980); for the labor
force, David Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America (New York,
1981); for external trade, James F. Shepherd and Gary M. Walton, Ship-
ping, Maritime Trade and the Economic Development of Colonial North America
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Bibliographical Essays 431
(Cambridge, 1972). John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Econ-
omy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill, 1985), touches on the
major issues and has a fairly comprehensive bibliography. Peter Wood's,
"The Changing Population of the Colonial South: An Overview by Race
and Region, 1685-1790," in Peter Wood, Gregory A. Waselkov, and M.
Thomas Hatley, eds. , Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast
(Lincoln, NE, 1991) 35—127, offers a comprehensive set of population
estimates that seem to me more reliable than earlier estimates.
The past 25 years or so have witnessed a major boom in scholarship on
the tobacco coast. A good starting point is Edmund S. Morgan's magnifi-
cent overview: American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial
Virginia (New York, 1975). Three collections of essays introduce the new
scholarships: Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds., The Chesa-
peake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society & Politics
(Chapel Hill, 1979); Aubrey C. Land, Lois Green Carr, and Edward C.
Papenfuse eds. , Law, Society and Politics in Early Maryland (Baltimore,
1977); and Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo, eds.,
Colonial Chesapeake Society (Chapel Hill, 1988). There are also several
recent books that are essential reading. Lois Green Carr, Russell R.
Menard, and Lorena S. Walsh, Robert Cole's World: Agriculture and Society in
Early Maryland (Chapel Hill, 1991), is a detailed study of the farm-
building process. Gloria L. Main, Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland,
1650—1720 (Princeton, NJ, 1982), is especially good on wealth and
welfare issues. On the process of diversification, see Paul G. E. Clemens,
The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland's Eastern Shore: From Tobacco to
Slaves (Ithaca, NY, 1980). Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Develop-
ment of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800 (Chapel Hi l l , 1986),
is an extraordinarily well-executed local history. Jacob M. Price is the
premier historian of the tobacco trade. Students of the industry should
read his numerous essays and his books, particularly: Capital and Credit in
British Overseas Trade: The View from the Chesapeake, 1700-1776 (Cam-
bridge, MA, 1980); France and the Chesapeake: A History of the French
Tobacco Monopoly, 1674—1791, and of its Relationship to the British American
Tobacco Trade, 2 vols. , (Ann Arbor, MI, 1973); Perry of London: A Family
and a Firm on the Seaborne Frontier, 1615—1753 (Cambridge, MA, 1992).
While the recent scholarship on the lower South remains slim by Chesa-
peake standards, there have been some impressive recent works. Peter H.
Wood's Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through
the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974) has already earned itself a secure place
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432 Bibliographical Essays
in the canon of early American historiography. Joyce Chaplin, An Anxious
Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South (Chapel Hill,
1993), is a stunning combination of intellectual and economic history.
Peter Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South
Carolina Low Country, 7670—1920 (New York, 1989) is a useful overview.
Russell R. Menard, "Financing the Lowcountry Export Boom: Capital and
Credit in Early South Carolina," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d. Ser., 51
(1994), 659—76, examines how plantation development was financed.
There are signs that a major boom in backcountry studies is about to
begin. Especially impressive recent work includes books by: Rachel Klein,
Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina
Backcountry, 1760-1800 (Chapel Hill, 1990); Robert D. Mitchell, Com-
mercialism and Frontier: Perspectives on the Early Shenandoah Valley (Charlottes-
ville, VA, 1977); and Richard Beeman, Evolution of the Southern
Backcountry: A Case Study of Lunenburg County, Virginia, 1746—1832 (Phila-
delphia, PA, 1984). Gregory Nobles, "Breaking into the Backcountry:
New Approaches to the Early American Frontier," in William and Mary
Quarterly, 3d Ser., 46 (1989) 641- 70, is a helpful survey of the literature
and the major issues. Unfortunately, much of the scholarship on back-
country agriculture is being conducted in the "moral economy tradition"
and within the "transition to capitalism debate." For the tradition and
debate, see Winifred B. Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Econ-
omy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750-1850 (Chicago, IL,
1992), and Allan Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism
(Charlottesville, VA, 1992). That tradition and debate seems to me to
have confounded capitalism and commercialism. Whereas, if I understand
Drew McCoy's The Elusive Republic, many contemporaries saw commercial
farming as a way of avoiding capitalism, or at least of avoiding some of its
worst consequences.
CHAPTER 7 (HIGMAN)
In the historiography of the British West Indies, emphasis has shifted
from seeing the tropical colonies as elements of an imperial system, in
which the colonies had no real, internal history of their own, to interpreta-
tions based on local, Caribbean perspectives. The first historians of the
colonies, writing before the American Revolution, had no doubt of the
importance of the tropical units and focused on their contributions to the
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Bibliographical Essays 433
imperial economy. In the nineteenth century, however, the relative decline
of the British West Indies was paralleled by a failing in the historiography.
The emergence of a vibrant school of American colonial history in the early
twentieth century, associated with the establishment of "professional" his-
tory in the universities of the United States, was not matched by the
British West Indies before the middle of the twentieth century. It was not
until the achievement of political independence, beginning with Jamaica
in 1962, that a truly Caribbean vision of history made its appearance.
By comparison with the United States, the historiography of the British
West Indies for the period before 1850 remains incomplete. Many features
of the economic history of the region remain to be studied. It is sympto-
matic of this state of historiographical underdevelopment that there is still
no general economic history text for the region as a whole or indeed for any
large part of the region. If this inability to reach synthesis is unfortunate,
it is not proof of an absence of sophisticated work on certain topics, nor is
it evidence of a lack of debate on central issues of interpretation.
The most recent general work covering the history of the region as a
whole is Franklin W. Knight, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented
Nationalism, second ed. (New York, 1990). Valuable for its broad environ-
mental perspective is The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and
Environmental Change since 1492 by David Watts (Cambridge, 1987).
There are several useful works with a strong focus on the economic history
of the British West Indies, covering long periods of time. From the
economist's point of view, the most important of these is Richard B.
Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies,
1623—177.5 (Barbados, 1974). Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The
Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-171$ (Chapel Hill,
1972), covers the Sugar Revolution, while J. R. Ward, British West Indian
Slavery, 1750-1834: The Process of Amelioration (Oxford, 1988), carries the
account from the middle of the eighteenth century to the abolition of
slavery; the postemancipation period is surveyed in William A. Green,
British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment
1830—1865 (Oxford, 1976). Useful collections of papers from journals are
found in Caribbean Slave Society and Economy: A Student Reader (Kingston,
1991) and Caribbean Freedom: Economy and Society from Emancipation to the
Present (Kingston, 1993), edited by Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd.
Still important in the historiography is Lowell Joseph Ragatz, The Fall of
the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763-1833 (New York, 1928).
For the larger context, placing the British West Indies within the
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434 Bibliographical Essays
Atlantic world, useful studies include John J. McCusker and Russell R.
Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill, 1985);
Barbara L. Solow, ed., Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (Cam-
bridge, 1991); Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Com-
plex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge, 1990); Ralph Davis, The Rise of
the Atlantic Economies (Ithaca, 1973); Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic
1675—1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York,
1986); Peggy K. Liss, Atlantic Empires: The Network of Trade and Revolution,
1713-1826 (Baltimore, 1983); and D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of Amer-
ica: A Geographical Perspective of 500 Years of History: vol. I, Atlantic Amer-
ica, 1492—1800 (New Haven, 1986).
Demographic studies covering the British West Indies as a whole are
Robert V. Wells, The Population of the British Colonies in America before
1776: A Survey of Census Data (Princeton, 1975); Richard B. Sheridan,
Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British
West Indies, 1680-1834 (Cambridge, 1985); Kenneth F. Kiple, The Carib-
bean Slave: A Biological History (Cambridge, 1984); B. W. Higman, Slave
Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807—1834 (Baltimore, 1984); and
Stanley L. Engerman and B. W. Higman, "The Demographic Structure of
the Caribbean Slave Societies in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centu-
ries," UNESCO General History of the Caribbean, Vol. HI, edited by Frank-
lin W. Knight (in press). Much useful population data is included in John
J. McCusker, Rum and the American Revolution: The Rum Trade and the
Balance of Payments of the Thirteen Continental Colonies (New York, 1989).
The transition from indentured to slave labor is covered by Hilary
McD. Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 1627-1715
(Knoxville, 1989), and David W. Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial
America: An Economic Analysis (Cambridge, 1981). For the Atlantic slave
trade, the classic study is Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A
Census (Madison, 1969). Other useful works on the slave trade include
Johannes Menne Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade 1600-18x5
(Cambridge, 1990), and David W. Galenson, Traders, Planters, and Slaves:
Market Behaviour in Early English America (Cambridge, 1986).
Studies of slave labor and plantation economy in particular colonies
include A. Meredith John, The Plantation Slaves of Trinidad, 1783-1816:
A Mathematical and Demographic Enquiry (Cambridge, 1988); Michael Cra-
ton, Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation Life in Jamaica
(Cambridge, MA, 1978); B. W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in
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Bibliographical Essays 435
Jamaica, 1807—1834 (Cambridge, 1976); and Richard Pares, A West-India
Fortune (London, 1950).
The general history of the sugar industry has been studied by Noel
Deerr in The History of Sugar (London, 1949-50), and more recently by J.
H. Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from Us
Origins to 1914 (Cambridge, 1989). Deerr remains the best source for
production and price statistics, although he is not always reliable. The
most important work on rum is McCusker's Rum and the American Revolu-
tion. Coffee and the other export staples await their students.
For the structure and organization of plantation space see B. W.
Hi gman, Jamaica Surveyed: Plantation Maps and Plans of the Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Centuries (Kingston, 1988). An important study, combining
historical and archaeological materials to reveal the inner economy, is
Plantation Slavery in Barbados by Jerome S. Handler and Frederick W.
Lange (Cambridge, MA, 1978). The most recent works on the provision-
ground system and the internal marketing system are Roderick A. Mc-
Donal d, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the
Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton Rouge, 1993), and Rob-
ert Dirks, The Black Saturnalia: Conflict and its Ritual Expression on British
West Indian Slave Plantations (Gainesville, 1987). Still useful is the classic
paper by Sidney W. Mintz and Douglas Hall, "The Origins of the Jamai-
can Internal Marketing System," Yale University Publications in Anthropol-
ogy, No. 57 (i960). Interesting studies of the white population within
slave plantation society include Douglas Hall, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas
Thistletvood in Jamaica, IJ50-86 (London, 1989), and Alan L. Karras,
Sojourners in the Sun: Scottish Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake, 1740—
1800 (Ithaca, NY, 1992).
External trade is analyzed in Richard Pares, Merchants and Planters
(Cambridge, i960); Thomas M. Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 1660—1783
(Cambridge 1988); Frances Armytage, The Free Port System in the British
West Indies: A Study in Commercial Policy, 1766-1822 (London, 1953); and
Richard Pares' still useful War and Trade in the West Indies, 1739-1763
(London, 1936).
Economic relations between the British West Indies and the continental
colonies are covered by Richard Pares, Yankees and Creoles: The Trade between
North America and the West Indies before the American Revolution (London,
X
956); James F. Shepherd and Gary M. Walton, Shipping, Maritime Trade
and the Economic Development of Colonial North America (Cambridge, 1972);
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436 Bibliographical Essays
and Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and
Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (New York, 1986). The
most important modern work dealing particularly with the impact of the
American Revolution is Selwyn H. H. Carrington, The British West Indies
during the American Revolution (Dordrecht, 1988).
Discussions of the role of slavery and the slave trade in the rise of
capitalism in Great Britain, and of the decline and fell of the slave system,
must begin with Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill,
1944). Later contributions to the debate include Seymour Drescher, Econo-
cide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh, 1977); Seymour
Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative
Perspective (New York, 1987); Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L. Engerman,
eds., British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams
(Cambridge, 1987); Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery
IJ76-1848 (London, 1988); and Joseph E. Inikori, Slavery and the Rise of
Capitalism (Mona, 1993).
Social structure and cultural interaction are central to Elsa V. Goveia,
Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century
(New Haven, 1965); Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analy-
sis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica
(London, 1967); and Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society
in Jamaica 1770—1820 (Oxford, 1971). Gender issues are addressed in
Marietta Morrissey, Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in
the Caribbean (Lawrence, 1989); Hilary McD. Beckles, Natural Rebels: A
Social History of Ens laved Black Women in Barbados (New Brunswick, 1989);
and Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838 (Kings-
ton, 1990). Works on the free colored and free black population include
Jerome S. Handler, The Unappropriated People: Freedmen in the Slave Society of
Barbados (Baltimore, 1974); Gad J. Heuman, Between Black and White:
Race, Politics, and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792 -1865 (Westport,
1981); Edward L. Cox, Free Coloreds in the Slave Societies of St. Kitts and
Grenada, 1763—1833 (Knoxville, 1984); and Carl C. Campbell, Cedulants
and Capitulants: The Politics of the Coloured Opposition in the Slave Society of
Trinidad 1783—1838 (Port of Spain, 1992). Resistance struggles are taken
up in Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British
West Indies (Ithaca, NY, 1982); Mavis C. Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica
1655—1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration and Betrayal (Granby,
MA, 1988); Hilary Beckles, Black Rebellion in Barbados: The Struggle
Against Slavery, 1627—1838 (Bridgetown, 1984); and David Barry Gas-
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Bibliographical Essays 437
par, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master—Slave Relations in Antigua
(Baltimore, 1985).
For the postemancipation period, the most important studies of particu-
lar colonies or groups of colonies include Douglas Hall, Free Jamaica,
1838-1865 (New Haven, CT, 1959); Gisela Eisner, _/<*»&*«», 1830-1930:
A Study in Economic Growth (Manchester, 1961); Thomas C. Holt, The
Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-
1938 (Baltimore, 1992); Douglas Hall, Five of the Leewards: The Major
Problems of the Post-Emancipation Period in Antigua, Barbuda, Montserrat,
Nevis and St. Kitts (Barbados, 1971); Donald Wood, Trinidad in Transition:
The Years after Slavery (London, 1968); Alan H. Adamson, Sugar Without
Slaves: The Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838-1904 (New Haven,
1972); Brian L. Moore, Race, Power and Social Segmentation in Colonial
Society: Guyana after Slavery, 1838-1891 (New York, 1987).
Valuable works on the nonsugar, marginal colonies include Narda Dob-
son, A History of Belize (London, 1973); O. Nigel Bolland, The Formation
of a Colonial Society: Belize, from Conquest to Crown Colony (Baltimore,
1977); Michael Craton and Gail Saunders, Islanders in the Stream: A History
of the Bahamian People: vol. 1, From Aboriginal Times to the End of Slavery
(Athens, GA, 1992); and Howard Johnson, The Bahamas in Slavery and
Freedom (Kingston, 1991).
CHAPTER 8 (McCUSKER)
The basic modern interpretative works on mercantilism - Von Schmoller,
Heckscher, and the rest - are all referenced in three very valuable encyclo-
pedic essays: William R. Allen, "Mercantilism," in John Eatwell, Murray
Milgate, and Peter Newman, eds., The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of
Economics, 4 vols. (London, 1987), III, 445- 9; Raymond [A.} DeRoover,
"Ancient and Medieval {Economic] Thought," in David L. Sills, ed.,
International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 17 vols. ([New York:]
[1968]), IV, 430- 5; and Jacob Viner, "Mercantilist [Economic]
Thought," in ibid., IV, 435—43. There is no point in repeating the
contents of their bibliographies here.
What is better done is to explicate the items referred to in the text and
notes of this chapter. At the same level as all the usual "standard treat-
ments" mentioned above, if not of greater importance, is the discussion of
mercantilism in Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, edited
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438 Bibliographical Essays
by [Romaine] Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter (New York: [1954]). It is not
always cited in such company but should be. See also Joseph A.
Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: 1942). These
essays were published in two subsequent editions and a German transla-
tion during Schumpeter's lifetime and in several later editions. Contrast
the reception given them, on the one hand, in Arnold Heertje, ed.,
Schumpeter's Vision: Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy after 40 Years (New
York: 1981), and, on the other hand, by F[rederic] M. Scherer,
"Schumpeter and Plausible Capitalism," Journal of Economic Literature, 30
(1992), 1416- 33.
For a wider view of economic thought in the early modern era and one
of a more recent vintage, see the quite learned analysis of Terence [W.]
Hutchison, Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy, 1662—
1776 (Oxford: 1988). Other, more general treatments of mercantilism
cited herein are Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in
Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: 1978); Alfred Marshall, Indus-
try and Trade: A Study of Industrial Technique and Business Organization; and
of Their Influences on the Conditions of Various Classes and Nations (London:
1919); Robert B. Ekelund, Jr., and Robert D. Tollison, Mercantilism as a
Rent-Seeking Society: Economic Regulation in Historical Perspective (College Sta-
tion, TX: {1981]); and Qharles] H. Wilson, "Trade, Society and the
State," in The Economy of Expanding Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries, edited by E[dwin] E. Rich and C[harles} H. Wilson, Vol. IV of
The Cambridge Economic History of Europe (Cambridge: 1967), 487-575.
Most of the works mentioned so far pay only the most peripheral
attention to early British America, but they are fundamental to any appre-
ciation that the colonies were central to mercantilism. Some articles and
books that focus more precisely on that point are: Charles M. Andrews,
"The Acts of Trade," in The Old Empire: From the Beginnings to 1783, Vol. I
of The Cambridge History of the British Empire, edited by J[ohn] Holland
Rose, Afrthur] P. Newton, and E[rnest] A. Benians (Cambridge: 1929),
268—99; Andrews, England's Commercial and Colonial Policy, Vol. W of The
Colonial Period of American History (New Haven, CT: 1938); Andrews,
"The Government of the Empire, 1660-1763, " in The Old Empire, edited
by Rose, Newton, and Benians, 405—36; George Louis Beer, The Origins of
the British Colonial System, 1578-1660 (New York: 1908); G[eorge] N.
Clark, "The English Navigation Act of 1651," History: The Journal of the
Historical Association, New Series, 7 (1923), 282- 6; Oliver M. Dickerson,
The Navigation Acts and the American Revolution (Philadelphia, PA: Univer-
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Bibliographical Essays 439.
sity of Pennsylvania Press, 1951); Albert Arthur Giesecke, American Com-
mercial Legislation before 17S9 (New York: D. Appleton, 1910); Lawrence
A. Harper, The English Navigation Laws: A Seventeenth-Century Experiment in
Social Engineering (New York: 1939); Michael Kammen, Empire and Interest:
The American Colonies and the Politics of Mercantilism (Philadelphia: [1970]);
JohnJ. McCusker, "Mercantilism," in Jacob E. Cooke, ed., The Encyclope-
dia of the North American Colonies, 3 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1993), I, 459- 65; McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of
British America, 1607—1789, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill, 1991); and J£ames] F.
Rees, "Mercantilism and the Colonies," in Rose, Newton, and Benians,
eds., The Old Empire, 561—602. There are relevant bibliographies in all of
these works. See especially the bibliography in McCusker, "Mercantil-
ism," 464—5; and the notes and bibliography in McCusker and Menard,
Economy of British America, 35-50, 381-487.
Other works that treat one or more aspects of the British colonial story
are, as cited herein, Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the
Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: 1955); Robert Brenner, Merchants
and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas
Traders, 1550-1653 (Princeton, NJ: 1993); John Brewer, The Sinews of
Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (London: 1988); John
L. Bullion, A Great and Necessary Measure: George Grenville and the Genesis of
the Stamp Act, 1763—1765 (Columbia, MO: 1982); Bernard Donoughue,
British Politics and the American Revolution: The Path to War, 1773—75
(London: 1964); C[harles] H. Firth, "Cromwell and the Expulsion of the
Long Parliament in 1653," English Historical Review 8 (1893), 526-34;
David J. Hancock, " 'Citizen of the World': Commercial Success, Social
Development and the Experience of Eighteenth-Century British Mer-
chants Who Traded with America" (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard Univer-
sity, 1990); Clifford] Grant Head, Eighteenth Century Newfoundland: A
Geographer's Perspective (Toronto: 1976); J. Keith Horsefield, "The 'Stop of
the Exchequer' Revisited." Economic History Review, 2d Ser., 35 (1982),
511—28; Alice Hanson Jones, "Wealth Estimates for the American Middle
Colonies, 1774," Economic Development and Cultural Change, 18, (1970);
Valerie Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution: City Govern-
ment and National Politics, 1625-43 (Oxford: 1961); M[ary] Pollard, Dub-
lin's Trade in Books, 1550—1800 (Oxford: 1989); John Reeves, A History of
the Law of Shipping and Navigation (London: 1792); and Ian K. Steele, The
English Atlantic, 1675-1740: An Exploration of Communication and Continu-
ity (New York: 1986).
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440 Bibliographical Essays
Some of the wider, comparative dimensions of the discussion are dealt
with in Peter Mathias and Patrick [K.] O'Brien "Taxation in Britain and
France, 1715-1810: A Comparison of the Social and Economic Incidence
of Taxes Collected for the Central Governments," The Journal of European
Economic History, 5 (1976), 601—50; James C. Riley, International Govern-
ment Finance and the Amsterdam Capital Market, 1740-1815 (Cambridge:
[1980]); Riley, The Seven Years War and the Old Regime in France: The
Economic and Financial Toll (Princeton, NJ: 1986); and Francois J. Velde
and David R. Weir, "The Financial Market and Government Debt Policy
in France, 1746-1793" Journal of Economic History, 52 (1992), 1-39.
Some important contemporary tracts are: Francis Brewster, New Essays
on Trade (London: 1702); John Cary, An Essay on the State of England in
Relation to Its Trade . . . (Bristol: 1695); [Josiah Child}, A Discourse about
Trade ([London]: 1690); Roger Coke, A Discourse of Trade. In Two Parts.
The First Treats of the Reason of the Decay of Strength, Wealth, and Trade of
England. The Latter, of the Growth and Increase of the Dutch Trade above the
English (London: 1670); [Joshua Gee} The Trade and Navigation of Great-
Britain Considered, [1st ed.] (London: 1729); Thomas Mun, England's
Treasure by Forraign Trade (London: 1664); Lewes Roberts, The Treasure of
Traffike. Or a Discourse of Forraign Trade (London: 1641); Adam Smith, An
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), edited by
R[oy] H. Campbell, A[ndrew] S. Skinner, and W[illiam] B. Todd, 2
vols. (Oxford: 1976); [Thomas Whately], Considerations on the Trade and
Finances of this Kingdom, and on the Measures of Administration, with Respect to
Those Great National Objects since the Conclusion of the Peace, (London: 1766);
and Charles Whitworth, State of the Trade of Great Britain in Its Imports and
Exports Progressively from the Year 1697 {to 1773} . . . (London, 1776). See
especially [Benjamin Worsley], The Advocate (London: [Nicholas Bourne
(?)], 1651). There was a second, corrected version of his pamphlet pub-
lished in 1652. See also the other of the two anonymously issued pam-
phlets that we now know Worsley wrote: Free Ports: The Nature and
Necessitie of Them Stated (London: 1652). It, too, had been published in a
slightly different version, in 1651. Worsley issued The Advocate under the
pseudonym OiXojiaxQto. Compare similar ideas expressed later by an au-
thor (although not Sir Josiah Child) who used the same pseudonym: A
Treatise Wherein is Demonstrated . . . That the East-India Trade is the Most
National of all Foreign Trades . . . (London: 1681). Concerning Mun, see
Lynn Muchmore, "A Note on Thomas Mun's 'England's Treasure by
Forraign Trade' " Economic History Review, 26 Set., 23 (1970), 498-503.
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Bibliographical Essays 441
See also Joseph Bridges Matthews, The Law of Money-Lending, Past and
Present: Being a Short History of the Usury Laws in England . . . (London,
1906); and Thomas Madox, The History and Antiquities of the Exchequer of
the Kings of England . . . 2d ed., 2 vols. (London, 1769).
The text of all English and British statute laws mentioned herein can
be found in more than one collection. See, for instance, [Great Britain,
Laws and Statutes], The Statutes at Large . . . of Great Britain, edited by
Danby Pickering, 46 vols. (Cambridge: 1762-1807). The acts passed
during the Commonwealth are in [Great Britain, Laws and Statutes,
1649—1660 (Commonwealth)], Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum,
1642—1660, edited by C[harles] H. Firth and R[obert] S. Raith, 3 vols.
(London: 1911). At the Restoration, all such acts were expunged from
the regular statute books. For the limited record of the activities of
Parliament, see [Great Britain, Parliament], The Parliamentary History of
England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, edited by William
Cobbett, 36 vols. (London: 1806—20); [Great Britain, Parliament,
House of Commons], The Journals of the House of Commons, in progress
([London]: [House of Commons], 1742 to date). For acts passed by the
Irish Parliament in Dublin, see [Ireland (Eire), Laws and Statutes], The
Statutes at Large, Passed in the Parliaments Held in Ireland from . . .
1310 . . . to 1800, 20 vols. (Dublin: 1786-1801).
CHAPTER 9 (MATSON)
Primary sources for the period 177610 1815 are abundant, and only a few of
the major collections that incorporate observations about many states or
interregional perspectives are noted here. For research into specific states, or
particular issues, see the bibliographies of secondary sources that follow.
The most extensive collection of revolutionary records is in William Sumner
Jenkins, ed., Records of the States of the United States (Washington, D. C. ,
1950, 1951), on reels of microfilm, available through the Library of Con-
gress; and the manuscripts, "Papers of the Continental Congress," at the
National Archives. For the Revolution and Critical Period, consult Paul H.
Smith, ed., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774-1789, 25 vols. when
complete, (Washington, D.C.: 1976— ); and Merrill Jensen, John P.
Kaminski, Gaspare P. Saladino, and Richard Leffler, eds., The Documentary
History of the Ratification of the Constitution, 10 vols. to date, (Madison: State
Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1976- ). Few of the myriad manuscript
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442 Bibliographical Essays
collections of merchants' accounts and general shipping records spanning
this period have been edited and published; two exceptions include Philip
L. White, ed., The Beekman Mercantile Papers, 1746—1799, 3 vols. (New
York: 1956); and Arthur H. Cole, ed., Industrial and Commercial Correspon-
dence of Alexander Hamilton, Anticipating his Report on Manufactures, (New
York: 1968; orig. publ. 1928). Scholars who wish to pursue contemporary
views of economic circumstances should consult the papers of prominent
statesmen such as Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Franklin, as well
as the editorial columns of extant newspapers. This latter source contains a
wealth of information about the ideological debates of this era, as well as
useful data about shipping, prices, internal improvements, and new manu-
factures; for Pennsylvania, consult Anne Bezanson, Wholesale Prices in Phila-
delphia, 1784-1861 (Philadelphia: 1936).
Contemporary essays and pamphlets tended to present polemical views
of certain aspects of the political economy rather than systematic apprecia-
tions of economic activities. Nevertheless, they illustrate economic visions
that went along with concrete economic possibilities and limitations. It is
useful to start with some of the following tracts. See Matthew Carey, ed.,
Debates and Proceedings of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania, on the . . .
Charter of the Bank, (Philadelphia, 1786); Tench Coxe, A View of the United
States of America (Philadelphia, 1784); Timothy Davis, Thoughts on Taxa-
tion in a Letter to a Friend (New York, 1784); Timothy Pitkin, Statistical
View of the Commerce of the United States of America, 2nd ed. (Hartford,
1817); Samuel Wells, The Dangers of our National Prosperity (Hartford,
1785); Noah Webster, Sketches of American Policy (Hartford, 1785); Pe-
letiah Webster, Political Essays on the Nature and Operations of Money, Public
Finance and Other Subjects (Philadelphia, 1791); [St. George Tucker], Reflec-
tions on the Policy and Necessity of Encouraging the Commerce . . . of the United
States, (New York, 1786); and John Witherspoon, Essay on Money as a
Medium of Commerce, (Philadelphia, 1786).
For general secondary treatments oftheentireera, 1776101815, scholars
must start with John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of
British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill: 1985), Chap. 17; the essays in
Ronald Hoffman, John J. McCusker, Russell R. Menard, and Peter J.
Albert eds., The Economy of Early America: The Revolutionary Period, 1763-
1789 (Charlottesville, VA, 1988) - especially those by James Henretta,
James Shepherd, Thomas Doerflinger, and Jacob Price; and C. P. Nettels,
The Emergence of a National Economy, 1775-1815 (New York: 1962), espe-
cially his bibliography.
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Bibliographical Essays 443
For the Revolutionary war as a transforming economic experience, see
Jackson Turner Main, The Sovereign States in the New Nation, 1775—1783
(New York, 1973); Allan Nevins, The American States During and After the
Revolution, 1775-1789 (New York, 1924); Gary M. Walton and James F.
Shepherd, The Economic Rise of Early America (Cambridge, 1979), chap. 7,
8, 9; Thomas Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and
Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: 1986); Ron-
ald Hoffman, A Spirit of Dissention: Economics, Politics, and the Revolution in
Maryland (Baltimore, 1973); Robert A. East, Business Enterprise in the
American Revolutionary War Era (Gloucester, MA, 1964); Edward Papen-
fuse, In Pursuit of Profit: The Annapolis Merchants in the Era of the American
Revolution (Baltimore, 1975); and Marc Egnal and Joseph A. Ernst, "An
Economic Interpretation of the American Revolution," William and Mary
Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 29 (1972), 3- 32.
For the economic circumstances of the 1780s see Merrill Jensen, The
New Nation: A History of the United States during the Confederation, 1781—
1789 (New York, 1950), for the view that there was not much critical
about the decade. Contrast his work with that of Nettels, Emergence;
Gordon C. Bjork, "The Weaning of the American Economy: Indepen-
dence, Market Changes, and Economic Development," Journal of Economic
History 24 (Dec. 1964), 541-60; Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert,
eds., The Sovereign States in an Age of Uncertainty (Charlottesville, VA:
1981); John E. Crowley, "Neo-Mercantilism and The Wealth of Nations:
British Commercial Policy after the American Revolution," Historical Jour-
nal 33 (1990), 339—60; James F. Shepherd and Gary M. Walton, "Eco-
nomic Change after the American Revolution: Pre- and Post-War Compari-
sons of Maritime Shipping and Trade," Explorations in Economic History 13
(1976); Vernon G. Setser, The Commercial Reciprocity Policy of the United
States (Philadelphia, 1937); Albert Giesecke, American Commercial Legisla-
tion Before 1789 (Philadelphia, 1910); W. A. Low, "Merchant and Planter
Relations in Post-Revolutionary Virginia, 1783—1789," Virginia Maga-
zine of History and Biography 61 (1953), 314-24; and Cathy Matson,
"American Political Economy in the Constitutional Decade," R. C. Sim-
mons and A. E. Dick Howard, eds., The United States Constitution: The
First 200 Years (Manchester, UK, 1988), 16-35. McCusker and Menard
itemize the numerous dissertations and articles on individual states during
the 1780s on p. 367, n. 27, of Economy of British America. For the credit,
debt, and currency crisis of the 1780s, the best source is still E. James
Ferguson, The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance,
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444 Bibliographical Essays
1776—1790 (Chapel Hill, 1961). See also, idem., "State Assumption of
the Federal Debt During the Confederation," Mississippi Valley Historical
Review 38 (1951), 403—24; Joseph S. Davis, Essays in the Earlier History of
American Corporations, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1917); and Janet Ries-
man, "Money, Credit, and Federalist Political Economy," in Richard
Beeman et al., eds., Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and
American National Identity (Chapel Hill, 1987), 128- 61.
For the vision of political economists in the 1780S-90S and the glim-
merings of manufactures, see Samuel Rezneck, "The Rise and Early Devel-
opment of Industrial Consciousness in the United States, 1760—1830,"
Journal of Economic and Business History 4 (1932), 784—811; Drew McCoy,
The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill,
1980); and Cathy D. Matson and Peter S. Onuf, A Union of Interests:
Economy and Politics in the Revolutionary Era (Lawrence, KS, 1990).
Other valuable works on the 1790s include Merrill D. Peterson,
"Thomas Jefferson and Commercial Policy, 1783-1793, " William and
Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 21 (1965), 584-610; John R. Nelson, Jr. ,
"Alexander Hamilton and American Manufacturing: A Reexamination,"
Journal of American History 65 (1979), 971- 95; and Douglass C. North,
The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790-1860 (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ, 1961), chaps. 1 and 2. A recent influential view is found in Joyce
Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the
1790's (New York, 1984).
Until relatively recently, only a few scholars studied the economic
developments that affected early formers, westward migrants, rural shop-
keepers, and protomanufacturers. But see older works by Percy Bidwell
and John Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States,
1620—1860 (Washington, D. C. , 1925); Victor S. Clark, A History of
Manufactures in the United States, Vol. 1: 1607-1860, (Washington, D.C.,
1929); and their citations. New research about this majority of Ameri-
cans, including their economic roles as both producers and consumers,
promises to increase our knowledge of the era significantly. See, for exam-
ple, Carole Shammas, "How Self-Sufficient Was Early America?" Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 13 (1982), 247-72; Billy G. Smith, "The Material
Lives of Laboring Philadelphians, 1750-1800, " William and Mary Quar-
terly, 3d. Ser., 38 (1981), 163-202; Joan Jensen, "Cloth, Butter, and
Boarders: Women's Household Production for the Market," Reviews in
Radical Political Economy 12 (1980), 14-24; and Lois Green Carr and
Lorena S. Walsh, "Economic Diversification and Labor Organization in
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Bibliographical Essays 445
the Chesapeake, 1650—1820," in Stephen Innes, ed., Work and Labor in
Early American (Chapel Hill, 1988), 144-88.
For the period 1800—15, scholars will want to consult Paul A. David,
"The Growth of Real Product in the United States Before 1840," Journal of
Economic History, 27 (1967); George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation
Revolution, 1815-1860 (New York, 1968); Rolla M. Tryon, Household
Manufactures in the United States: 1640-1860 (New York [orig. publ.,
I
9
I
7) ) ; Jonathan Prude, The Coming of the Industrial Order: Town and
Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810-1860 (New York, 1983), chap.
1; John R. Nelson, Jr. , Liberty and Property: Political Economy and Policymak-
ing in the New Nation, 1789-1812 (Baltimore, 1987); and Allan Pred,
"Manufacturing in the Mercantile City, 1800-1840," Annals of the Asso-
ciation of American Geographers 56 (1966), 307-25.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

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