Colonial America
Page 40
Also concentrated in these two areas was the silver industry, with numerous workshops in Connecticut and the towns of Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore. Here also were located other key metalworkers, notably gunsmiths and clockmakers. Another significant craft industry was cabinetmaking. As British colonial standards of living improved, so did the demand for furniture designed in the latest European fashion.
Other manufacturing industries which had developed by 1760 were pottery and glass. Both had existed as cottage industries from the early days, but the production of finer pieces had to await technical improvements and a more skilled workforce. By 1760 a number of factories had been established in the two main areas of manufacturing. The paper industry, too, established mills in these two areas.
One other incipient manufacturing activity was woolen and linen goods. During the seventeenth century, colonists imported cloth from England. By the eighteenth century, domestic production began to emerge as well, with specialist weavers producing cloth for sale in shops out of wool spun at home. The native wool was coarse and unable to compete with English cloths, but British producers were sufficiently apprehensive to have an act passed in 1699 prohibiting the export of colonial woolens. They need not have worried, since the colonists never had enough yarn to meet even their own domestic needs.
All this activity meant that the northern economy required additional labor to sustain its multifarious activities, especially skilled personnel like coopers, smiths, tanners, weavers, shipwrights, printers, and clerks. In New England this demand could be met from the resources of the local population. Not all fathers had sufficient land for their sons after 1700, as the population grew, and many younger sons had to be apprenticed to ensure themselves of a livelihood. Others did casual labor when not required on the family farm. One consequence was the emergence of a flexible multiskilled workforce.
The middle colonies, in contrast, continued to use the system of indentured servants as the mainstay of their labor force. Almost 100,000 were imported from the British Isles in the period 1700–75, while another 35,000 came from Germany. About half of all servants went to Pennsylvania, with Philadelphia becoming the great entrepôt for them. One result of indenture was an absence of the English apprenticeship system with its restrictive guilds. Employers either recruited already trained servants from Europe or chose suitable persons from the many eager young men anxious to learn a trade. The opportunities for developing skills were always greater in British North America than in Europe.
One resource which was not usually employed to solve the northern labor shortage to a significant extent was African slavery. Northern cereals and husbandry were less labor-intensive than southern cash crops. And since the growing season was shorter and the winters longer, there was less year-round work. In these circumstances the family, including a few indentured laborers and perhaps one slave, was usually sufficient to work most farms. Additional hands or casual labor could be found from the local white community if required. The same was true of manufacturing. Employers generally preferred to employ indentured servants, living and working as they did in close proximity to one another. An additional disincentive was the cost. African slaves cost considerably more than indentured servants, and most northern farmers (in contrast to the staples producers in the South and the West Indies) did not earn profits high enough to justify the investment.
One other question that has concerned historians is the extent to which the northern (and southern) economies were true capitalist systems operating through a market economy. Many key ingredients were certainly there, particularly in the North. Property could be sold without restrictions like primogeniture and entail (which did exist in some southern colonies), facilitating the accumulation of capital. Markets for labor were developing, with an incipient system of wage labor in the North which allowed the workforce to be deployed in a flexible and efficient manner, unencumbered by the restrictive practices of guilds and other craft associations. Sumptuary laws had been dispensed with, leaving individuals free to spend their money. They could also use their capital for investment without fear of prosecution for usury. Compared to the seventeenth century, the economy was now predominantly a cash-based one rather than one determined by barter and exchange.
On the other hand, many restrictions still operated, including restraints on wages, prices, and working conditions, and there was as yet no modern banking system. Moreover, in a society where most inhabitants still lived on small family farms, prices were never determined solely by impersonal economic forces. Also important were social factors like the good of the community and the personal needs of the household. Most farmers, for instance, assisted their neighbors at certain times of the season, receiving help in return, which made cooperation rather than competition the underlying principle of economic activity.16
4 The Mercantilist System
We have already seen that the colonial economy had to function within the parameters of the navigation laws, or the mercantilist system, to ensure that the colonies' trade and domestic economy were regulated for the benefit of the mother country. This system had become fully articulated by the eighteenth century.
Though we have seen that the system stimulated the expansion of British trade, there has been considerable debate about its impact on colonial economies. Some historians have asserted that it strangled development, others that it was an irrelevance; still others have claimed that it was beneficial.17 The truth undoubtedly lies somewhere in between.
Industrialization in the mother country brought a number of advantages to the colonists. First, it increased demand for colonial raw materials, which enjoyed a protected market, since high tariffs excluded foreign producers from selling in Britain. Second, it supplied capital to the colonists. As members of the landed classes still sent younger sons or relatives to build up estates, so merchants similarly sought trade outlets and partners, extending credit to their colonial contacts. Equally important was the export of human capital, especially skilled labor.
As the pace of industrialization quickened, Britain was also able to supply the best and cheapest manufactured goods to colonial buyers. These included machinery like saws, cogs, axles, crankshafts, and gears; nails, hooks, files, chisels, hammers, shovels, knives, plows, and anchors; implements of war, notably cannon, firearms, shot, and gunpowder; and navigational instruments like compasses and sextants. The wealthy imported British fabrics made from wool, linen, cotton, lace, silk, and felt. Many other household goods, such as lanterns, taps, mirrors, curtain rings, pewter, cutlery, kettles, sieves, measuring cans, and brass items like candlesticks could also be obtained from the mother country at ever lower prices. So, too, could books and fine-quality paper.
Being part of the British mercantilist system brought the colonists other advantages too, one of which was the benefit of insurance from Lloyds, which helped the flow of trade and furthered colonial economic development. Another was the protection afforded by the British navy. In wartime British trade suffered less disruption than that of any other European state. This continuity was crucial in a period of so much strife, with major wars from 1689 to 1713, 1739 to 1748, and 1755 to 1762. Moreover, after 1700 an increasing number of warships were employed in commerce protection, so that by 1720 the day of pirates like Teach and Kidd was over. In addition, mercantilism offered the collective advantages of British financial policies, which allowed many goods shipped for re-export incentives in the form of customs repayments. After 1704, Britain also gave various bounties to colonial industries which would otherwise not have been viable, notably naval stores.
The expansion of trade combined with the growth in the number of available ships, itself a side effect of the navigation laws, contributed to making transatlantic shipping more frequent and more efficient. By the eighteenth century, the time required to travel across the ocean was considerably shorter than it had been a century earlier. Maps and navigational techniques had improved with time and experience, and monthly packet boats
began traveling from London to the West Indies in 1702. The British navy's suppression of piracy by the 1720s made overseas voyages more regular and predictable. Shipping costs declined, benefiting both farmers who produced goods for export and colonial consumers, who could purchase goods for lower prices. An unanticipated benefit of the greater frequency of transatlantic crossings was the improvement of communications between Great Britain and its colonies. Eventually a regular mail service was established between London and a few of the mainland colonies, and families and friends began to send letters back and forth on a regular basis. Books, pamphlets, and sermons reached Boston and Philadelphia within months after they went into print in London. News reached the colonies while it was still reasonably fresh. By the middle of the century newspapers were being printed in virtually all of the mainland cities, carrying British political and diplomatic news, satirical essays from the Spectator, and information about British fashions. The increased flow of news and information stimulated consumer demand in the colonies for new and fashionable British products, creating an incentive for greater economic activity. Increased transatlantic communications would even have an impact on colonial culture, increasing colonial sympathy for and identification with Great Britain.18
A final aspect of British imperial policy which profoundly impacted colonial society was free immigration. Most other European powers controlled the flow of people to their colonies so as to exclude subversive elements. Both the French and the Spanish, for example, prohibited Protestants from emigrating to their colonies in New France and Spanish Florida.19 Britain, on the other hand, placed few obstacles in the way of troublesome elements like the Quakers and was even ready to open the door to the refugees of other nations, such as French Huguenots, many of whom were skilled craftsmen or persons with capital. Britain's liberal policy continued into the eighteenth century. Although fewer immigrants came now from England, new arrivals included large numbers of Scots, Irish, and Germans. Some historians estimate that as many as 300,000 or more new immigrants entered the 13 continental colonies in the period 1700–79.20 This open-door policy helped to facilitate the extraordinary speed with which British North America was settled.
Unfortunately no economic system can satisfy all its constituent elements. The British liked to assert that mercantilism was complementary: Britain sold its manufactures to the colonies, while they sent their produce in return. The disadvantage of being taxed for enumerated exports was theoretically offset by the advantage of a protected market. In practice the system did not work so well. In the Chesapeake a planter might receive £5 on a 1,000-pound hogshead of tobacco. After the shippers had added their charges and the Crown had collected duties of nearly £17, the same hogshead sold for £25. The amounts suggest a less than adequate return, as is also indicated by the fact that the Virginia and Maryland planters were constantly in debt to their British factors.
The question of Virginian indebtedness is a complex one, however. Contemporaries in Britain argued that such debts were the result of extravagance; the planters were simply too much given to importing expensive luxuries. Later historians believe that the planters should have been more efficient and made greater efforts to control the tobacco trade itself. Others have seen the planters' indebtedness as evidence of their creditworthiness and their debts as basically an investment in the system.21 What is not in doubt is that some planters resented their dependency on British merchants and that this may have been one reason why the Virginian elite later supported the Revolution so ardently.22
To some extent the Virginian tobacco industry was the victim of its own success. The planters overproduced, causing the depressions of 1704–13, 1720–34, and 1756–65, with their consequent loss of income. The eighteenth-century Chesapeake also demonstrated the classic weakness of a single-crop economy: reliance on tobacco left the planters especially vulnerable to market forces because they had little else to supplement their income. The same difficulties afflict many developing countries today.
Another, more obvious flaw in the argument that mercantilism was complementary is that New England and the middle colonies actually produced few raw materials for the mother country. This problem was partially solved by their supply of foodstuffs to the West Indies, which restored the principle of complementarity. Unfortunately, the middle colonies expanded so fast that by 1720 Britain was unable to use all that they produced. As a result surplus foodstuffs were sold to the French and Spanish colonies. Although this practice did not contravene the navigation laws in peacetime, the colonists began buying so much cheap French and Spanish sugar for their return voyages that the British islands then found themselves being undercut on their own market. The result was the Molasses Act of 1733, whereby all foreign sugar products imported into the colonies had to pay a duty of sixpence a gallon.
Had this act been enforced, it would have dealt a serious blow to the northern economy. However, customs machinery in the period 1714–60 was still rudimentary. The coast was divided into a number of districts, but they were poorly staffed. Many of the officers were corrupt and levied only a nominal duty of one penny a gallon, though the low yield suggests that some illicit trade must also have occurred.
This situation has led to the assertion that the mercantilist system was in fact maintained by smuggling. The extent of illegal trading is difficult to assess; as with social security fraud today, the perpetrators did not keep records. People certainly talked as though smuggling was common, though the evidence suggests that outside the West Indies most merchants obeyed the rules, especially when trading with Europe, since North American vessels were very conspicuous and could be easily policed by their British counterparts. Even in the West Indies there was a tendency to abide by the law. A Newport ship-owner instructed the master of one vessel on a voyage to St. Eustatius in 1750 as follows: “You may perhaps meet with some Frenchman … who may propose to make a French bottom of your vessel; but desire that you will not take up with any such proposal, as I would not have you go on any illicit trade.”
Religion was one reason for such a law-abiding attitude, since conscience clearly dictated that it was improper to deny the king his due. Quakers were especially insistent on the ethical conduct of business and had a vested interest in ensuring that others kept within the law. If there were infractions, these are likely to have occurred as a result of the 1733 Molasses Act, which seemed to have been passed to allow British sugar planters to live in idleness and luxury.
The increasing development of manufacturing in the northern colonies indicates a third discrepancy in the theory of complementarity. Shipbuilding, especially, ought to have been the preserve of the mother country, but the demands of British merchants for cheap ships overrode the cries of protest from British shipbuilders, who did not have the advantage of cheap timber. Protectionism prevailed, however, in other areas where colonial producers were seen as a threat. Wool, for example, was one of the oldest industries in England, accounting in the past for 80 percent of her exports. By the end of the seventeenth century the industry was under attack not only from America but from Ireland too. Accordingly a Woolen Act was passed in 1699 stating that no wool or finished items were to be exported from Ireland or the colonies, even to a neighboring province. All domestic produce must be sold where it was made. The hat industry, too, was regulated in this way. When this long-established British trade found itself in danger of losing its traditional markets to colonial producers, a ban was placed on the export of colonial hats in 1732. Regulations were also laid down concerning the number of apprentices who must be employed in the trade, ostensibly to maintain quality but in reality to restrict production. No slaves could be employed, and all apprentices had to serve for seven years.
The third major activity to be regulated in the interests of Britain was the iron industry, where the conflict was similar to that in the shipbuilding industry. British smelters wanted all colonial activity banned, while the makers of finished goods wanted cheap pig and bar iron from the colo
nies. The latter group eventually won. In 1750 Parliament enacted legislation banning the colonists from building or operating any “mill or other engine for slitting or rolling of iron, or any plating forge … or any furnace for making steel,” but in accordance with the principle of complementarity, no duties were to be levied on the import of any pig or bar iron. The North American colonies were to produce the raw materials, Britain the finished products, the latter of course being the more profitable activity.
The same reasoning led Britain to annul various colonial laws encouraging local manufactures. In 1705 the Privy Council disallowed a Pennsylvania law encouraging shoemaking. The following year it was New York's turn to have a sail-making venture condemned. In 1756 a Massachusetts law to facilitate the production of linen suffered a similar fate.
It is difficult to say how effective these prohibitions were, since governors and other officials had neither the information nor an inspectorate to enforce them. In any case, British concern was generally premature. The quality of British North American wool, for instance, was too poor to be exported. The number of slitting mills and forges for iron was relatively small, and the infant industry was not seriously inconvenienced. The ability to ship as much pig and bar iron as could be produced seems to have satisfied the North American iron industry. There was no outcry before 1760.
Nevertheless, these prohibitions on colonial manufacturing suggest that by 1750 there had been a qualitative change in the operation of the mercantilist system caused by British recognition that its economy now depended as much on the export of manufactured goods as on the import of cheap raw materials. In the seventeenth century the colonists had been encouraged to produce as many goods as possible: now they were being restricted in what they could do. It has been argued that this indicates that the system was being increasingly managed for the benefit of special interests, notably the merchants of London, in contrast to the seventeenth century when the aim had been to strengthen the kingdom as a whole. The evidence on this point is not conclusive, since the original navigation laws had been largely prompted by English merchant interests. Nevertheless the continued commitment of Britain to a system designed to benefit the imperial center certainly contained the potential for discord in the future.23