American history: How did the search for a viable labor force affect the development of the southern colonies?

Answer 1

lol, read this it might help........its really really long but hey its on the Colonial Economy

The colonial economy of British North America entailed a mix of several modes of production. As a preindustrial colonial extension of England, the American economy relied primarily on farming based on barter and export and a global mercantile trade based on staple products produced by African-American slaves on plantations. Over time, the colonial economy became more diversified, though dependence on a few important staple products for export dominated the local economy of farmers, planters, and urban workers across the eastern seaboard until the market revolution of the 1830s.
In the southern British North American colonies, the plantation system developed as an extension of the sugar plantation complex in Barbados and Jamaica in the British West Indies. In the early 17th century, white planters from these islands migrated with their slaves to the Carolinas to find more prosperous conditions. The plantation system in America relied on slavery as its major economic support. White owners held large landholdings where slaves cultivated staple crops that brought a large return in markets throughout the Atlantic region. Tobacco from Virginia, rice and indigo from the Carolinas, and sugar from Brazil and the West Indies formed the backbone of the Atlantic economy.

American colonies specialized in various staple crops and engaged in a triangular trade between the West Indies, Africa, and England. Whites expanded slavery to meet the growing needs and profitability of the plantation system by tapping into an existing slave trade between the west coast of Africa and the British West Indies in the mid-17th century. Elite white planters, some of them nobility, dominated the Southern economy and society. Many were absentee owners who lived thousands of miles away in England and the West Indies.

A focus on the colony of South Carolina reveals the economic dependence on mono-crop agriculture and slavery by white Southern farmers during the colonial period. In South Carolina, the slave trade became the economic basis of the colony by the early 18th century. The sale of people represented the most lucrative economic transaction due to recurrent ethnic violence and the lack of laborers. South Carolinians at first used Native Americans as slave laborers because of their abundance. Whites practiced a strategy of divide and conquer by encouraging Native Americans to fight one another. The losers were sold by whites into slavery, though Indians made poor slaves due to their knowledge of local geography and political connections to local Indian people. Nevertheless, by 1730, tens of thousands of Indians had been enslaved in the region, some of whom were transported as plantation workers to the British West Indies.

The development of rice cultivation in South Carolina in 1715 led to the widespread use of blacks as slave laborers. West Africans became essential to this Southern industry due to their experience with rice cultivation in Africa. In addition to serving as herders, blacks also processed indigo. A young white South Carolina woman named Elizabeth Lucas Pickney had adapted indigo from the West Indies to the moist lowland climate of South Carolina in the 1740s. Rice and indigo production grew rapidly over the next three decades due to the increasing presence of African slaves as agricultural workers. Both products by the 1770s had earned some of the highest returns of any staple export.

The growth of the plantation system in the Southern colonies stimulated the rural economy of the Northern colonies. The plantations of the sugar islands influenced Northern people by providing a convenient market for such American products as lumber, bread, fish, and meat. The near-total dependence on the export of staple crops by Southern plantation owners led to the need for imports from Northern farms. By the 1720s, farmers, merchants, and other producers in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania made a comfortable living by exporting wheat, corn, and bread to Southern colonies and the West Indies.

Trade with the West Indies created the first American merchant elite, who founded major urban economic institutions and businesses in Northern cities during the 18th century. Global traders in New England constructed factories in Boston, Newport, and Providence to process raw sugar imported from the West Indies into granulated sugar to be exported to England and Europe. These merchants also created alcohol distilleries to process molasses into rum for the foreign and domestic alcohol trade. Rum was a popular processing method for sugar since it could be more easily transported and stored for longer periods of time than in other forms. Some shipbuilders and merchants in the New England colonies also invested in building vessels to transport slaves from Africa to America.

Economic development in colonial cities in the 18th century led to a population explosion and the growth of local economic enterprise. Although colonial American cities accounted for only 5% of the total colonial population, their share of the export trade, both local and global, was much higher. Trade represented the single most important facet of the urban economy. Merchants ran the local commerce in farm products and also facilitated the importation of such luxury items as furniture, art, and perfume from Europe. In Philadelphia, for example, 150 merchants controlled 70% of the city's booming trade. Baltimore mushroomed from a small village into a major metropolis in a few decades in the 17th century due to the wheat trade with Southern plantations. As the only Southern seaport of any size, the city of Charleston represented an important center of Southern trade, particularly in deerskins, indigo, Indian slaves, and rice.

In addition, a major fishing industry grew from the efforts of Boston, Salem, and other New England-based ship owners and fishermen. They exported barreled and salted fish to Southern plantations to feed African-American slaves. By the mid-18th century, English fishing fleets based in colonial cities counted more than 600 vessels, providing employment to more than 4,000 black and white sailors. This sector of the colonial economy represented some of the only work available to free blacks living in urban areas.

Smaller cities with a less-developed connection to the global Atlantic-based economy relied more on local trade networks. People in towns depended on such local resources as trees, fish, and the soil to make ends meet. They also worked in the shipbuilding and lumber industries, two of the most important aspects of the colonial economy that affected smaller towns. In New Hampshire in the 1740s, for instance, 70 sawmills could be seen scattered along the Piscataqua River. The mills provided cheap lumber for housing and ship construction in the burgeoning local area. Artisans took advantage of a strong labor market to construct large ships for the export trade and smaller boats for river and coastal traffic. Shipyards in major east coast cities produced more than 15,000 tons of freighters each year. Colonial ships became so popular and profitable that by the end of the colonial period, more than one-third of England's merchant fleet was American-made.

Most colonial cities contained a vibrant working class. Small-scale artisan production dominated all major colonial cities, and artisans comprised half of the population. A variety of craftsmen—from silversmiths like Paul Revere to coopers, tailors, and hat-makers—could be found working in every major city. Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for example, possessed more than 200 German and English craftsmen who anchored the town's economic and social life. Many of these workers sought the benefits of craft guilds and early labor unions to protect their economic rights. Frequent lay-offs and downturns in the economy resulted from larger conflicts affecting the Atlantic trade network. Strikes and work slowdowns occurred, and women sometimes engaged in bread riots to protest high prices on needed goods.

Less-skilled laborers also formed an important sector of the economy. The lack of technology beyond wind and waterpower meant that the movement of goods necessitated human and animal labor. In colonial New York, for example, hundreds of stevedores, some of them free black men, unloaded goods at the wharves. The New York economy also depended on black slave laborers, who comprised 20% of city residents during the 18th century. Thousands of white men and women found work as artisan assistants, road builders, and farm hands. Integral in many ways to the "underground" colonial economy, women worked as washers, wet nurses, midwives, and prostitutes.

Indentured servants made up a large segment of the workforce that facilitated the colonial economy in the 17th and 18th centuries. In Philadelphia, for example, indentured servants and slaves comprised 25% of the city's residents and held half of the laboring jobs in the 1700s. After working for seven years to pay off their passage, indentured servants were free to enter the colonial economy as free wage laborers. Because most were unskilled (though some servants indentured to artisans and other skilled craftsmen learned a trade), they often became farm workers and casual laborers until they had earned enough income to purchase land, usually in the interior, where land prices were cheaper than in coastal areas.

Native Americans represented a crucial labor and transportation link between rural and urban colonial economies. Indians like the Huron and Iroquois provided the animal skins that were traded by white middlemen and shipped to coastal markets and finally to Europe. In return for the goods, Indians received processed materials that they could not make themselves, like iron, guns, and whiskey. Transportation of goods in the trade network between small interior towns and major coastal cities was facilitated by droves of teamsters and draymen who used boats and livestock to transport the lucrative staples.

Average colonial Americans in rural areas relied on barter and trade to run the local economy. Because cash (coins were used much more than paper currency) was always in short supply in colonial America, and great distances and poor transportation plagued the colonial infrastructure, average men and women exchanged labor and goods to make ends meet. For example, a surplus of young farm women in the New England colonies in the 18th century led to agreements between rural farm families to exchange the services of their daughters as textile and farm workers in exchange for their board. Cooperative labor arrangements suffused all aspects of the colonial economy. A farmer might help his neighbor harvest a wheat crop in exchange for his neighbor's help in laying in wood supplies for winter.

Life during the colonial period was precarious, however, since no safety net existed if people became too sick or injured to work. Children often were sent out to work at an early age, a common labor arrangement both in Europe and America during this time. Periods of economic stagnation forced many adults into poverty, thievery, and dependence on almshouses, local places where the poor could get a meal in exchange for work. The unpredictability of global trade that depended on the relative value of various staples made colonial life uncertain for most common people.

In contrast to most American colonists, merchants continued to attract a larger share of colonial wealth over time during the colonial period. By the 1770s, the poorest 60% of the taxable inhabitants of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia owned less than 5% of the taxable wealth. The top 10% of the population comprised merchants and other elites, who controlled more than 65% of the wealth.

The colonial economy depended on slave labor, rural farming families, and the plantation complex to provide stability and prosperity to colonial society and politics. To a significant extent, the inability of colonial white Americans to earn steady profits from the mercantile trade by the mid-18th century led them to protest British taxes and control of the colonial economy. This agitation ultimately led to victory in the American Revolution, which enabled the American people to engage in commerce free from the restraints of the British monarchy.



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Answer 2

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