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Author(s):  
Aaron Slater

Identifying and analyzing a unified system called the “economy of colonial British America” presents a number of challenges. The regions that came to constitute Britain’s North American empire developed according to a variety of factors, including climate and environment, relations with Native peoples, international competition and conflict, internal English/British politics, and the social system and cultural outlook of the various groups that settled each colony. Nevertheless, while there was great diversity in the socioeconomic organization across colonial British America, a few generalizations can be made. First, each region initially focused economic activity on some form of export-oriented production that tied it to the metropole. New England specialized in timber, fish, and shipping services, the Middle Colonies in furs, grains, and foodstuffs, the Chesapeake in tobacco, the South in rice, indigo, and hides, and the West Indies in sugar. Second, the maturation of the export-driven economy in each colony eventually spurred the development of an internal economy directed toward providing the ancillary goods and services necessary to promote the export trade. Third, despite variations within and across colonies, colonial British America underwent more rapid economic expansion over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries than did its European counterparts, to the point that, on the eve of the American Revolution, white settlers in British America enjoyed one of the highest living standards in the world at the time. A final commonality that all the regions shared was that this robust economic growth spurred an almost insatiable demand for land and labor. With the exception of the West Indies, where the Spanish had largely exterminated the Native inhabitants by the time the English arrived, frontier warfare was ubiquitous across British America, as land-hungry settlers invaded Indian territory and expropriated their lands. The labor problem, while also ubiquitous, showed much greater regional variation. The New England and the Middle colonies largely supplied their labor needs through a combination of family immigration, natural increase, and the importation of bound European workers known as indentured servants. The Chesapeake, Carolina, and West Indian colonies, on the other hand, developed “slave societies,” where captive peoples of African descent were imported in huge numbers and forced to serve as enslaved laborers on colonial plantations. Despite these differences, it should be emphasized that, by the outbreak of the American Revolution, the institution of slavery had, to a greater or lesser extent, insinuated itself into the economy of every British American colony. The expropriation of land from Indians and labor from enslaved Africans thus shaped the economic history of all the colonies of British America.


2021 ◽  
pp. 80-129
Author(s):  
Kirsten Sandrock

This chapter focuses on Scottish Atlantic literature from the 1660s to the early 1690s. It explores how colonial utopian writing broadened in the mid-seventeenth century to include drama, life writing, legal sources, and abolitionist texts, including not only literature directly linked to Atlantic expansion but also texts usually associated with domestic Scottish literature, such as Thomas Sydserf's Tarugo's Wiles: Or, the Coffee-House (1668) or Archibald Pitcairne's The Assembly; Or, Scotch Reformation (1691). Engaging with recent works on Scotland's role in Atlantic slavery and the Black Atlantic, the chapter seeks to broaden understandings of how Scottish literature and culture participated in the development of the Black Atlantic and Eurocentric thought. The chapter further looks at legal and governmental sources relating to New Jersey and the Middle Colonies from the 1680s onwards, at abolitionist writings, and texts that pertain to the Six Nations and indigenous populations of the Americas. All of these bring out the paradoxes of possession versus dispossession and of freedom versus enslavement in Scottish colonial literature. They illustrate how aesthetic devices of utopianism work towards spatializing the colonial sphere and trying to stabilize boundaries between colonizing and colonized subjects.


Author(s):  
Eric C. Smith

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Baptists in middle colonies like Pennsylvania competed against a staggering variety of religious denominations and sects. Essential for establishing and maintaining their denomination in this context was the founding of the Philadelphia Baptist Association in 1707, the first Baptist institutional structure in America. In addition to tracing his family lineage, this chapter explores the early influences of the Philadelphia Baptist Association on Oliver Hart, along with the Baptist rituals and doctrines he absorbed in the Pennepek Baptist Church. Hart’s exposure to Quaker and Keithian antislavery sentiments in Pennsylvania is also considered.


Author(s):  
Richard Lyman Bushman

In many parts of North America in the eighteenth century, as many as 40% of the people in a given area would move over the course of a decade, heading for frontier areas or cities where their prospects were better. Highly mobile farm families though common but are hard to trace because few names were unique. It is hard to know if a name in a new town’s records is the same person as the name in a former town. Lincoln family genealogy is useful in illustrating how moving families fared. Lincoln’s first American ancestors arrived in Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1637 and by the end of the century began to migrate, first to the Middle Colonies and later to Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. They were motivated by the need for additional land for their offspring. For the most part they succeeded, although President Lincoln’s grandfather Abraham did not. He was killed by Indians, and his son Thomas, Lincoln’s father, never flourished despite multiple moves. President Lincoln gave up on farming and chose to make his living as a postmaster, lawyer, and politician.


Author(s):  
Richard Lyman Bushman

Although population in North America grew at an astounding rate in the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin believed the vast open lands in North American could easily absorb the growth. He underestimated the tensions created by farm parents seeking land for their children in a time of rising prices. Through the seventeenth century, open lands along the coast and up the rivers provided adequate acreage for the rising generation. Land was distributed by headrights and grants in the South and Middle Colonies; in New England, it was given as townships to groups of settlers. These systems broke down as the population grew and land prices rose. Settlers in search of farms were forced on to lands that were in dispute. Adjoining colonies laid claim to the same areas, or the native people refused to acknowledge purchases by colonies or land companies. In these contested areas, violence broke out between the rival claimants. From the Carolinas to Vermont, farmers used force to defend their titles. They resisted law officers or fought with the Indians to protect the farms that supplied their families. After the Revolution, the new federal government developed systems for distributing land. Conflicts occurred occasionally and Indian wars lasted through the century, but the violence abated as institutions formed to help families acquire land for their children.


2017 ◽  
pp. 189-206
Author(s):  
C. Landsman Ned
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