What aspects of the history of these colonies help explain their ethnic composition?
SOCIETY AND CULTURE IN PROVINCIAL AMERICA • 65
THE COLONIAL ECONOMIES
Farming, hunting, and fishing dominated almost all areas of European settlement and long- established Indian communities in North America throughout the seventeenth and eigh- teenth centuries. Even so, no colony was alike. Each developed its own economic focus and character—though all incorporated slavery into the routines of daily life.
Slavery and Economic Life In every colony, slave labor was essential to economic productivity. Slaves performed dif- ferent jobs under different conditions depending on their colony of residence, but were an integral and very visible part of every local culture. In Virginia where tobacco was the dominant crop, planters responded to the rising demand from markets in the colonies and Europe by bringing in more slaves to work larger plantations. By the mid-1700s, nearly 150,000 slaves lived in Virginia. South Carolina and Georgia relied on rice production, since the low-lying coastline with its many tidal rivers made it possible to create rice pad- dies that could be flooded and drained. Rice cultivation was so difficult and unhealthy that many white workers simply refused to perform it, forcing planters in South Carolina and Georgia to grow dependent on slave labor. African workers were highly valued as well because many had lived and worked in rice-producing regions of west Africa and were expert in cultivation techniques and harvesting strategies. In 1765 in South Carolina blacks, nearly all of whom were slaves, outnumbered whites 90,000 to 40,000, and the port of Charleston imported more slaves than any other city in the colonies.
There were fewer slaves in the North, in large part because of the lack of plantation- based economies dominated by a single crop. Slaves in Massachusetts, for example, worked on farms that raised a broad variety of crops, and many served as domestics and tradesmen. The colony was the center of the slave trade for New England and was home to about 4,500 slaves in 1754. The largest slave state in New England, though, was Connecticut. In 1774, nearly 6,500 slaves lived there and about one-half of all ministers, lawyers, judges, and public officials owned slaves.
Industry and Its Limits In northern New England, colder weather and hard, rocky soil made it difficult for colonists to develop the kind of large-scale commercial farming system that southerners were creat- ing. Conditions for agriculture were better in southern New England and the middle colo- nies, where the soil was fertile and the weather more temperate. New York, Pennsylvania, and the Connecticut River valley were the chief suppliers of wheat to much of New England, parts of the South, and the Caribbean. Even there, however, a substantial commercial economy emerged alongside the agricultural one.
Almost every colonist engaged in a certain amount of industry at home which occasion- ally provided families with surplus goods they could trade or sell. Beyond these domestic efforts, craftsmen and artisans established themselves in colonial towns as cobblers, black- smiths, rifle-makers, cabinetmakers, silversmiths, and printers. In some areas, entrepreneurs harnessed water power to run small mills for grinding grain, processing cloth, or milling lumber. And in several coastal areas, large-scale shipbuilding operations began to flourish.
The first effort to establish a significant metals industry in the colonies was an ironworks established in Saugus, Massachusetts, in the 1640s. The Saugus Ironworks used water power
66 • CHAPTER 3
to drive a bellows, which controlled the heat in a charcoal furnace. The carbon from the burning charcoal helped remove the oxygen from the ore and thus reduced its melting temperature. As the ore melted, it trickled down into molds or was taken in the form of simple “sow bars” to a nearby forge to be shaped into iron objects such as pots and anvils. There was also a mill suitable for turning the sow bars into narrow rods that blacksmiths could cut into nails. The Saugus Ironworks was a technological success but a financial failure. It began operations in 1646; in 1668, its financial problems forced it to close its doors.
Metalworks, however, only gradually became an important part of the colonial economy. The largest industrial enterprise anywhere in English North America was the ironworks of the German ironmaster Peter Hasenclever in northern New Jersey. Founded in 1764 with British capital, it employed several hundred laborers. There were other, smaller ironmaking enterprises in every northern colony, and there were ironworks as well in several of the southern colonies. Even so, these and other growing industries did not immediately become the basis for the kind of explosive industrial growth that Great Britain experienced in the late eighteenth century—in part because English parliamentary regulations such as the Iron Act of 1750 restricted metal processing in the colonies. Similar prohibitions limited the manufacture of woolens, hats, and other goods. But the biggest obstacles to industrialization in America were an inadequate labor supply, a small domestic market, and inadequate transportation facilities and energy supplies.
(©MPI/Archive Photos/Getty Images)
TOBACCO PLANT This image clearly links the production of tobacco to the recreational pursuit of smoking. Note that the smoker is white and well-groomed, linking ownership of the tobacco crop to society’s elites.
SOCIETY AND CULTURE IN PROVINCIAL AMERICA • 67
More important than manufacturing were industries that took advantage of the natural resources of the continent. By the mid-seventeenth century, the flourishing fur trade of earlier years was in decline. Taking its place were lumbering, mining, and fishing. These industries provided commodities that could be exported to England in exchange for manu- factured goods. And they helped produce the most distinctive feature of the northern economy: a thriving commercial class.
Technological progress, however, did not reach all colonists, even in the North. Up to half of all the farmers did not own a plow, even less a wagon. Substantial numbers of households lacked pots and kettles for cooking and only about half owned guns. Few owned candles because they were unable to afford candle molds or tallow (wax) or because they had no access to commercially produced candles. In the early eighteenth century, very few farmers owned wagons. The low levels of ownership of these and other elementary tools were not because such things were difficult to make but because most Americans remained too poor or too isolated to be able to obtain them.
Indeed, few colonists were self-sufficient in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. A popular image of early American households is of people who grew their own food, made their own clothes, and bought little from anyone else. In fact, relatively few colonial families owned spinning wheels or looms, which suggests that most people pur- chased whatever yarn and cloth they needed. Most farmers who grew grain took it to centralized facilities for processing. In general, people who lived in isolated or poor areas owned fewer tools and had less access to advanced technologies than did those in more populous or affluent areas.
The Rise of Colonial Commerce Perhaps the most remarkable feature of colonial commerce was that it was able to survive at all. American merchants faced bewildering obstacles and lacked so many of the basic institutions of trade that they managed to stay afloat only with great difficulty and through considerable ingenuity. The colonies had almost no gold or silver, and their paper currency was not acceptable as payment for goods from abroad. For many years, colonial merchants had to rely on barter or on money substitutes such as beaver skins, rice, sugar, or tobacco.
A second obstacle was lack of information about the supply and demand of goods and services. Traders had no way of knowing what they would find in foreign ports; American colonial vessels sometimes stayed at sea for years, journeying from one port to another, trading one commodity for another, attempting to find some way to turn a profit. There was also an enormous number of small, fiercely competitive companies, which made the problem of organizing the system of commerce even more acute.
Nevertheless, commerce in the colonies survived and grew. There was elaborate trade among the colonies themselves and with the West Indies. The mainland colonies offered their Caribbean trading partners rum, agricultural products, meat, and fish. The islands offered sugar, molasses, and at times slaves in return. There was also trade with England, continental Europe, and the west coast of Africa. This commerce has often been described, somewhat inaccurately, as the triangular trade, suggesting a neat process by which mer- chants carried rum and other goods from New England to Africa, exchanged their mer- chandise for slaves, whom they then transported to the West Indies (hence the term middle passage for the dreaded journey—it was the second of the three legs of the voyage), and then exchanged the slaves for sugar and molasses, which they shipped back to New England to be distilled into rum. In reality, the so-called triangular trade in rum, slaves, and sugar
68 • CHAPTER 3
was a complicated maze of highly diverse trade routes. Out of this risky trade emerged a group of adventurous entrepreneurs who by the mid-eighteenth century were beginning to constitute a distinct merchant class. The British Navigation Acts protected them from foreign competition in the colonies. They had ready access to the market in England for such colonial products as furs, timber, and American-built ships. But they also developed markets illegally outside the British Empire—in the French, Spanish, and Dutch West Indies—where they could often get higher prices for their goods than in the British colonies.
The Rise of Consumerism As affluent residents of the colonies grew in number, the growing prosperity and commer- cialism of British America created both new appetites and new opportunities to satisfy them. The result was an emerging preoccupation with the consumption of material goods.