Thinking of seventeenth-century Virginians as maximizers is nothing new. Indeed, seventeenth-century Virginians themselves seem to have made the same assumption. But observers then and now have sharply disagreed over what, how, and why these planters maximized.
For instance, there is a ubiquitous (usually implicit) assumption in seventeenth-century writing that Virginians maximized tobacco production. But these contemporaries certainly had no notion that, in maximizing tobacco production, planters were maximizing capital accumulation, a distinctly twentieth-century idea. Indeed, seventeenth-century observers were more likely to attribute this maximization to either the planters’ laziness or the lack of capital that prevented Virginians from being able to discover and develop alternative staples.
But even present-day scholars who do presume that seventeenth-century Virginians were maximizing capital accumulation sharply differ on how they went about doing it. Some historians presume that planters simply maximized tobacco production because it was the most profitable activity at hand. But other historians suggest that planters did not maximize tobacco production; rather they moved in and out of tobacco as the market directed, expanding tobacco production when the demand was high and contracting when the demand was low.
Curiously enough, when these maximizing assumptions are rigorously tested, one finds a type of behavior that neither contemporary observers nor modern historians would lead us to expect. Quite at odds with maximizing anything, planters seem to have behaved in a way one typically associates with the stereotype of the lazy peasant in a pre-capitalist economy. Far from maximizing tobacco production or responding positively to market incentives, seventeenth-century tobacco planters were found to respond quite perversely. Whereas contemporaries and historians believe that rising tobacco prices either encouraged planters to increase tobacco production and demand for labor and land, or had little impact on planters already maximizing production, rising tobacco prices actually resulted in a decrease in tobacco production and reduced demand for labor and land.
The View from the Seventeenth-Century
While Europeans in general went to America for “God, gold, and glory,” Englishmen also went intent on producing staple commodities that could be shipped back to the mother country. Such staples would both help make England more self-sufficient‑-a central goal of much of the mercantilist literature of the times‑-and generate the income necessary to help the colony pay its own way. Virginians over the course of the seventeenth century experimented with various staples like sassafras, silk, and wine. But the only consistently profitable staple that they were able to produce in the seventeenth century was tobacco.
Nobody can deny the central importance of tobacco to colonial Virginia. Tobacco assured the very survival of the colony. Yet tobacco was the from the start a highly problematic staple. In all of the lists of expected staples that colonial promoters believed Virginia could and would produce, nobody listed tobacco. After all, James I had thoroughly condemned tobacco in his 1604 pamphlet A Counter-Blaste to Tobacco.[ref]C. M. MacInnes, The Early English Tobacco Trade (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1926) 36-49; Jerome E. Brooks, The Mighty Leaf: Tobacco Through the Centuries (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952) 69-72.[/ref] English and Virginia officials would deny that tobacco could be even a staple because it could only contribute to the vices rather than the wealth of England; they spoke of its “unstapleness.”[ref]See, e.g., Jon Kukla, “Some Acts not in Hening’s Statutes: The Acts of Assembly, October 1660,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 83 (1975), 88.[/ref] What possible good could come from sucking in and blowing out the smoke of a burning weed?
Throughout the seventeenth century, Virginia could never escape the stigma which King Charles I laid on her in 1627 of being a colony “wholly built upon smoke…and that so easy to be turned into air.”[ref]”Virginia in 1626-27,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 16 (1908): 35. Cf. “Virginia in 1637,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 9 (1901): 176-7; “Instructions to Berkeley, 1662,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 3 (1895): 17. See also David Bertelson, The Lazy South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967) 27-9; James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994) 159, 275.[/ref] Every commentator was convinced that there had to be more profitable and beneficial staples if only the planters would seek them out and develop them.[ref]On the belief in more profitable staples as early as 1620, see Bertelson, Lazy South 27-8; A Perfect Description of Virginia, Tracts and Other Papers, comp. Peter Force, Vol. 2, No. 8 (New York: Peter Smith, 1947) 6; William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619, 13 vols. (Richmond, 1809-23) 1: 420; John Hammond, Leah and Rachel, or the Two Fruitfull Sisters Virginia, and Mary‑land, Tracts and Other Papers, comp. Peter Force, Vol. 3, No. 14 (New York: Peter Smith, 1947) 19; Thomas Glover, An Account of Virginia, its Scituation, Temperature, Productions, Inhabitants and their manner of planting and ordering Tobacco &c (1676; Oxford: Horace Hart, 1904) 12; Joseph Ewen and Nesta Ewen, John Banister and His Natural History of Virginia 1678‑1692 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970) 40.[/ref] Surely the economic incentive was strengthened even further as the increased supply of tobacco outran world demand, sending the price of tobacco tumbling through much of the seventeenth century.
Virginians offered numerous explanations for this failure to diversify. At one time or another they stressed their lack of skills, political corruption, Indian attacks, the dismembering of the colony in the founding of Maryland and later the Northern Neck grant, restrictions on free trade, the lack of towns and markets, the Navigation Acts, factional disputes, catastrophes, God’s will, the abundance of land, and the lack of interest on the part of merchants.[ref]See, e.g., H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1619-1658/59 (Richmond, 1915) 126; Hammond, Leah and Rachel 7; William Berkeley, A Discourse and View of Virginia (London, 1663) 4-8; Hening, Statutes 2: 515-6; Glover, Account of Virginia 12; Ewen and Ewen, John Banister 40; Henry Hartwell, James Blair, and Edward Chilton, The Present State of Virginia, and the College, ed. Hunter Dickinson Farish (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg, 1940) 7, 9-10; Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia, ed. Louis B. Wright (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947) 72, 135, 319; John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina (London, 1709) 112-3; Alexander Spotswood, The Official Letters of Alexander Spotswood, ed. R. A. Brock, 2 vols. (Richmond, 1882) 2: 43, 48, 61-2, 73. See also Harold Lee Hitchens, “Sir William Berkeley, Virginian Economist,” William and Mary Quarterly 2nd ser. 18 (1938): 167; Jane Dennison Carson, “Sir William Berkeley, Governor of Virginia: A Study in Colonial Policy,” diss., University of Virginia, 1951, 205-7, 216-8; Robert E. Brown and B. Katherine Brown, Virginia 1705-1786: Democracy or Aristocracy? (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1964) 8-10; Sister Joan de Lourdes Leonard, “Operation Checkmate: the Birth and Death of a Virginia Blueprint for Progress 1660-1676,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 24 (1967): 50-1; Bertelson, Lazy South 51; John C. Rainbolt, From Prescription To Persuasion: Manipulation of Eighteenth [Seventeenth] Century Virginia Economy (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1974) 57; Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975) 187-91.[/ref] A most popular explanation among Virginians in the early years of settlement was the lack of desire among early settlers to settle permanently in the colony, desiring as they did only “to gett a little wealth by Tobacco…and to return to Englande.”[ref]See Robert M. Bliss, Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990) 20-1. See also E. A. J. Johnson, American Economic Thought in the Seventeenth Century (London: King, 1932) 39; Morgan, American Slavery 89-90; Jon Kukla, Political Institutions in Virginia, 1619‑1660 (New York: Garland, 1989) 28-30. Sometime around the 1630s, Virginians stopped using non-permanence as an explanation. See McIlwaine, 1619-1658/59 60; Berkeley, Discourse 5-6; Beverley, History 30; William Byrd, The Prose Works of William Byrd of Westover: Narratives of a Colonial Virginian, ed. Louis B. Wright (Cambridge: Belknap, 1966) 159-60; Bliss, Revolution and Empire 20-1. Berkeley’s comments in 1663 are the one exception that proves the rule. See Carson, “Sir William Berkeley” 205; Leonard, “Operation Checkmate” 60; Morgan, American Slavery 191. These historians have made much of this comment as proof of the operative values of late seventeenth-century Virginians, but the comment was totally atypical. There is ample evidence that numerous colonists indeed sought to return permanently to England, but no one apart from Berkeley in this one instance ever identified this as a major operative value or the basis of Virginia’s problems. See Kenneth S. Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston: Little, 1959) 4; Richard Beale Davis, ed., William Fitzhugh and his Chesapeake World, 1676-1701: The Fitzhugh Letters and Other Documents (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963) 15-6; Carole Shammas, “English‑Born and Creole Elites in Turn-of-the-Century Virginia,” The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo‑American Society, eds. Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979) 282-3.[/ref] But the most general seventeenth-century explanations about why planters maximized tobacco production and ignored other staples typically stressed one of two things: indolence or poverty.
Lazing in Lubberland
Underlying all the writing about Virginia, either implicitly or explicitly, lay a shared image. For the poor laborer, Virginia, lying in the same latitude as all of “the Gardens of the World,” was a Lubberland where “the earth bringeth foorth all things in aboundance, as in the first creation, without toile or labour.”[ref]Beverley, History 17, 296-7.[/ref] For the ambitious gentleman, Virginia promised quick riches to restore flagging fortunes.
Complementing these personal visions, the public vision of Virginians throughout the seventeenth century–echoing the goal of colonial promoters, Company and Crown officials alike–consistently championed the idea of turning the Virginia wilderness into a garden. They sought to plant a “colony” rather than a mere trading post, to replicate in Virginia the complex social economy of England supplemented with the trades and industries that England lacked.[ref]For contemporary descriptions, see “Aspinwall Papers,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 4th ser. 9 (1871): 108, 110; Hening, Statutes 2: 221-2, 516; Anon., The Planters Plea, or The Grounds of Plantation Examined, and vsuall Objections answered, Tracts and Other Papers, comp. Peter Force, Vol. 2, No. 3 (New York: Peter Smith, 1947) 1; Hammond, Leah and Rachel 9, 19-20; Hartwell et al, Present State 6; Beverley, History 55; Hugh Jones, The Present State of Virginia from Whence Is Inferred a Short View of Maryland and North Carolina, ed. Richard L. Morton (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956) 91-2, 129-45. For the Company years, see Bertelson, Lazy South 19-20, 26-9, 249n3, 250n29; Rainbolt, From Prescription to Persuasion 27-8; Gary B. Nash, “The Image of the Indian in the Southern Colonial Mind,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 29 (1972) 208-9; Loren E. Pennington, “The Amerindian in English Promotional Literature 1575-1625,” The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480-1650, eds. K. R. Andrews et al. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979) 175-94; Kukla, Political Institutions 28, 42, 65. For later years, see Hunter Dickinson Farish, ed., The Present State of Virginia, and the College, by Henry Hartwell, James Blair, and Edward Chilton (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg, 1940) lxii-lxiii; Carson, “Sir William Berkeley” 206-7, 212-6; Leonard, “Operation Checkmate” 44-74; Rainbolt, From Prescription to Persuasion 26-31, 142-4; Morgan, American Slavery 192. In this chapter, I push the limits of the seventeenth century to include the insightful early eighteenth-century work of Robert Beverley II, William Byrd II, Hugh Jones, Alexander Spotswood, and others.[/ref] Virginians, while celebrating the natural abundance of the land, encouraged their fellow planters to improve upon nature.[ref]Ewen and Ewen, John Banister 40.[/ref] The more specific goals associated with this image included at various times the development of towns, manufactures, agricultural reform, and, most importantly, alternative staples for export.
America appeared to Englishmen as a possible solution to the problems in England associated with overpopulation and poverty‑-in particular, the problem of idleness, “the root of all evil.” New World abundance, they believed, would transform the poor into the competent and the idle into the industrious, both at home and abroad.[ref]E. Johnson, American Economic Thought 51; Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization 1606‑1865, 5 vols. (New York: Viking, 1946-59) 1: 5, 25-6; Bertelson, Lazy South 3-15, 19-20, 26-7, 35.[/ref]
Nevertheless, on both sides of the Atlantic, the image of the promised land quickly tarnished when exposed to reality. Indeed, from almost the first, the “promise” of Virginia became the “problem” of Virginia. Instead of the promised industry and abundance, there were repeated reports of terrible hardships. Instead of the many beneficial staples that the colony was capable of producing, Virginians shipped only tobacco.
For many observers throughout the seventeenth century, the immediate source of Virginia’s woes was readily apparent‑-the indolence of her settlers. In short, Virginians were simply too lazy to fulfill the promise of Virginia. The problem was laid out in the first official report from the governing council in Virginia on June 22, 1607, which called for the “home Council [to] enact stricter regulations for the conduct and labor obligation of the hired workman,” claiming “the land would Flowe with milke and honey if so seconded.” While not denying the natural abundance of Virginia, the report stressed the downside of Lubberland proclaiming that a proper colony would only come with industry.[ref]Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South 1585-1763, 3 vols. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978) 1: 15.[/ref] This view became the accepted dogma of Virginia’s critics in England, Company officials like Sir Thomas Dale, and numerous visitors.[ref]Susan Myra Kingsbury, ed., The Records of the Virginia Company of London, 4 vols. (Washington: GPO, 1906-35) 4: 493; Bertelson, Lazy South 19, 35-7; Darrett B. Rutman, The Morning of America, 1603-1789 (Boston: Houghton, 1971) 27-34. Cf. Hening, Statutes 1: 114; “Aspinwall Papers” 73, 108.[/ref] John Smith, and later natives like Robert Beverley and William Byrd II, shared much in common with these writers, although their views were tempered by boosterism.[ref]For other examples, see Perfect Description; Durand de Dauphiné, A Hugenot Exile in Virginia, ed. Gilbert Chinard (New York: Press of the Pioneers, 1934) 111-27, 175; Beverley, History 35, 123-6, 146, 153, 275, 287, 292-3, 296-7; Lawson, New Voyage 79-81; H. Jones, Present State 46, 83, 129-45. See also Farish, Present State lxii; Leonard, “Operation Checkmate” 61-2, 70; Alden T. Vaughan, “The Evolution of Virginia History: Early Historians of the First Colony,” Perspectives on Early American History: Essays in Honor of Richard B. Morris, eds. Alden T. Vaughan and George Athan Billias (New York: Harper, 1973) 15; Rainbolt, From Prescription to Persuasion 142, 166. For frontier literature, see Arthur K. Moore, The Frontier Mind: A Cultural Analysis of the Kentucky Frontiersman (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957) 25-43; Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973) 25; Ray Allen Billington, Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Norton, 1981) 215-25; Bliss, Revolution and Empire 32. Virginians unanimously believed that, whatever the reasons for Virginia’s failure to live up to its promise, the problem did not lie in the land itself. See, e.g., H. Jones, Present State 47, 101; Bertelson, Lazy South 20, 67.[/ref]
Many of the early critics traced the source of Virginia’s indolence to the quality of her colonists. “It was accepted in England,” concludes historian Nicholas P. Canny, “that only those in need of employment were likely to be attracted as settlers to either Ireland or Virginia, and since they were generally considered to be lazy, licentious and rebellious, it was consistent that the promoters saw little hope that colonization efforts would bear fruit unless commanded by leaders whose ’eminence or nobility’ would restrain the ‘servile nature’ of the majority.”[ref]Nicholas Canny, “Dominant Minorities: English Settlers in Ireland and Virginia, 1550-1650,” Minorities in History, ed. A. C. Hepburn (New York: St. Martin’s, 1979) 53. See also John Oldmixon, qtd. in Carl Bridenbaugh, Jamestown 1544-1699 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980) 121; John Fiske, Old Virginia and her Neighbours, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, 1902) 205-10; Jay B. Hubbell, “Cavalier and Indentured Servant in Virginia Fiction,” South Atlantic Quarterly 26 (1927): 22, 28-34; Marcus Wilson Jernegan, Laboring and Dependent Classes in Colonial America 1607-1783 (1931; New York: Ungar, 1960) 48; Pierre Marambaud, “Colonel William Byrd I: A Fortune Founded on Smoke,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 82 (1974): 258; Nicholas Canny, “The Permissive Frontier: Social Control in English Settlements in Ireland and Virginia, 1550‑1650,” The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480‑1650, eds. K. R. Andrews et al. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979) 17-44; Shammas, “English-Born and Creole Elites” 275; David Souden, “‘Rogues, Whores, and Vagabonds’?: Indentured Servant Emigration to North America and the Case of Mid-seventeenth-century Bristol,” Migration and Society in Early Modern England, eds. Peter Clark and David Souden (Totowa, NJ: Barnes, 1988) 150-1.[/ref] Furthermore, contemporaries could hardly be surprised by the results of a promotional literature which, they clearly recognized, appealed to the lazy streak in potential colonists.[ref]Canny, “Permissive Frontier” 27.[/ref] These critics came to reject any New World transformation in the natures of the dregs shipped out to Virginia. Samuel Purchas captured English opinion about Virginians when he observed that a “prodigious prodigal here is not easily metamorphosed in a Virginian passage to a thrifty planter.”[ref]Bertelson, Lazy South 31; Canny, “Dominant Minorities” 53. See also Ralph Hamor, A True Discourse on the Present Estate of Virginia, Virginia: Four Personal Narratives (New York: Arno, 1972) 19.[/ref]
The literature of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth century is as replete with criticisms of “this slothful indolence” as that of the early seventeenth century.[ref]Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, eds., The Reverend John Clayton: A Parson with a Scientific Mind: His Scientific Writings and Other Related Papers (Charlottesvile: University Press of Virginia, 1965) xxvii, 78-90; Beverley, History 134-5, 292-8, 314-9; Hartwell et al., Present State 9; Spotswood, Official Letters 2: 96. Byrd, in his celebrated History of the Dividing Line, ridiculed North Carolinians in particular, but his comments differed little from his criticisms of southern Virginians. More mildy he chastized the indolence of his fellow planters in general. See Byrd, Correspondence 1: 381. See also Bertelson, Lazy South 67, 74-6; Marambaud, “Colonel William Byrd I” 229-31; R. Davis, Intellectual Life 1: 68-74, 90-1, 95; 2: 940-4.[/ref] Yet by the end of seventeenth century, native Virginians like Beverley and Byrd along with transplanted Virginians like John Clayton and Hugh Jones were proliferating explanations that highlighted not so much the quality of the immigrants as the negative impact of abundance on industry.[ref]E. Johnson, American Economic Thought 38, 64‑5, 111, 118, 263; Bertelson, Lazy South 67-9, 80. Bertelson while noting these ideas unfortunately offers a very weak explanation for their appearance as simply “reasonable.” Indeed a few environmentalist arguments did appear in the Virginia literature. George Donne in his 1638 plan for Virginia reflected a strong Machiavellian influence when he said “a country in its own nature fruitfull without Art and Industry, waste into A Barrennesse. This alone vice of Idlenes drawes on into a Common Wealth Beggary Theft Excesse, faction Discontent [and] at last open rebellion,” in contrast to the prosperity of China where not a beggar or idle person was allowed. See T. H. Breen, “George Donne’s ‘Virginia Reviewed’: A 1638 Plan to Reform Colonial Society,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 30 (1973): 462. John Hammond in the 1640s similarly described the early problems of Virginia after the massacre of 1622, when Virginians “again began to bud forth, to spread further, to gather wealth, which they rather profusely spent (as gotten with ease then providently husbanded, or aimed at any publique good; or to make a Country for posterity; but from hand to mouth, and for a present being,” neglecting “discoveries” and long-term investments for the short-term profits of tobacco production, earning their reputation in England as “an indigent and sottish people” until forced by laws “suppressing vices and compelling industry.” See Hammond, Leah and Rachel 8-9. Thus Donne and Hammond believed like Machiavelli that good laws could (and indeed did) correct the effects of abundance. See Bertelson, Lazy South 8-10, 21-7, 36-7, 39-41, 51, 67; Canny, “Dominant Minorities” 53; Canny, “Permissive Frontier” 41‑2. Hammond explicitly denied that Virginia was a Lubberland but his statements suggest that she fit that descriptions before good laws were instituted.[/ref] In 1684, Clayton described Virginia as “a place where plenty makes poverty, Ignorance ingenuity, and coveteousnesse causes hospitality that is thus every one covets so much and there is such vast extent of land that they spread so far they cannot manage well a hundred partt of what they have every one can live at ease and therefore they scorne and hate to worke to advantage themselves so are poor with abundance.”[ref]Berkeley and Berkeley, Reverend John Clayton 4.[/ref] Or Beverley: “If there be any excuse for them in this Matter [their Laziness], ’tis the exceeding plenty of good things, with which Nature has blest them; for where God Almighty is so Merciful as to work for People, they never work for themselves.”[ref]Beverley, History 296‑7. Cf. Beverley, History 319. See also Brown and Brown, Virginia 1705-1786 10‑1.[/ref] And Byrd in his description of “Lubberland”: “To speak the truth, ’tis a thorough aversion to labor that makes people file off to North Carolina, where plenty and a warm sun confirm them in their disposition to laziness for their whole lives.”[ref]Byrd, Prose Works 205. Cf. Byrd, Prose Works 312. See also Bertelson, Lazy South 68, 73-4.[/ref] Similarly, Jones: “The common planters leading easy lives don’t much admire labour, or any manly exercise, except horse-racing, nor diversion, except cock-fighting, in which some greatly delight. This easy way of living, and the heat of the summer makes some very lazy, who are then said to be climate-struck.”[ref]H. Jones, Present State 84. For other environmentalist analyses, see Lawson, New Voyage 83, 86-7. John Banister noted “too much land” as the reason for the lack of diversification, but did not go into any more detail. See Ewen and Ewen, John Banister 40.[/ref]
In the earliest years, critics believed that only the martial policy of Sir Thomas Gates and Sir Thomas Dale could put the colonists on the right track.[ref]True Declaration 19-20; Kingsbury, Records 3: 521; Darrett B. Rutman, “The Virginia Company and Its Military Regime,” The Old Dominion: Essays for Thomas Perkins Abernethy, ed. Darrett B. Rutman (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1964) 1-20; R. Davis, Intellectual Life 1: 25; Kukla, Political Institutions 14.[/ref] Later critics tended to rely more on moral suasion and the market to cure indolence.[ref]See Bertelson, Lazy South 67-9, 70-80; Rainbolt, From Prescription to Persuasion 24-6. Rainbolt implies a nominally similar transition from “prescription” to “persuasion,” but his lumping of the theoretically distinct different poverty and indolence approaches confuses the real changes. See Rainbolt, From Prescription to Persuasion 4, 96-8, 161. Thus Hugh Jones was atypical when he defended forced transportation from England on the basis that “there can be no injury in such moderate legal compulsion as forces people to be honest and industrious, though it be contrary to their inclinations or their false notions, which ought to be subjected to the publick good and opinion of the community; and restrained and directed by the civil power to pursue such methods as the legislature shall judge most convenient for the united interest of all the society or empire” and which “would tend as well to their private as the publick good.” See H. Jones, Present State 133.[/ref] Men like Byrd and Beverley in the early eighteenth century seemed to assume that they could simply shame their fellow Virginians into industry, as Beverley believed they shamed each other to reinforce the Virginian tradition of open hospitality: “If there happen to be a Churl, that either out of Covetousness, or Ill-nature, won’t comply with this generous Custom, he has a mark of Infamy set upon him, and is abhorr’d by all.”[ref]Beverley, History 313. Compare the use by John Smith of a notice board to reward industry and shame idleness. See Bertelson, Lazy South 23-4. Similarly, the Governor and Council in agreeing in 1631 to abide by his Majesty’s Commission declared “if there shall be found any unwilling or turbulent spirit amongst us or any other enemy to peace we desire he may be cast out of all good society and accompted as a firebrand to kind those flames of dissentions which must in the first place ruinate himself and his estate.” See “Virginia in 1631,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 8 (1900): 45.[/ref] “I should be asham’d,” said Beverley, “to publish this slothful Indolence of my Countrymen, but that I hope it will rouse them out of their Lethargy, and excite them to make the most of all those happy Advantages which Nature has given them; and if it does this, I am sure they will have the Goodness to forgive me.”[ref]Beverley, History 319.[/ref]
Other Virginians, while condemning indolence, seemed resolved to letting the market have its way. They avowed that only the market pressure of still lower tobacco prices and dire poverty would ween planters away from tobacco and force diversification.[ref]Besides the examples listed below, see True Declaration 15; Hamor, True Discourse 50; Durand, Hugenot Exile 111-3, 128, 132, 163-4. See also E. Johnson, American Economic Thought 66; Dorfman, Economic Mind 1: 20-1; Bertelson, Lazy South 21-7, 36-7, 67; J. E. Crowley, This Sheba, Self: The Conceptualization of Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) 2-3, 50-95; Morgan, American Slavery 73; Canny, “Permissive Frontier” 27-30; R. Davis, Intellectual Life 1: 21.[/ref] Governor Harvey, for example, in 1630 observed that “seeinge the base condition of Tobacco, [the people] are willinge with all convenience to set themselves upon the raisinge other comodities.”[ref]”Virginia in 1629 and 1630” 381-2.[/ref] Governor William Berkeley concluded in a 1663 letter to Lord Clarendon that “truly my Lord this is now our case, that if the Merchants give us a good price for our Tobacco wee are well, if they do not wee are much better, for that will make us fall on such Commodities as god will blesse us, for when wee know not how to excuse forty years promoting the basest and foolishest vice in the world.”[ref]Hitchens, “Sir William Berkeley” 167; Carson, “Sir William Berkeley” 207; Leonard, “Operation Checkmate” 61.[/ref] “Wee have it certainly in our power,” observed Thomas Ludwell in 1667, “to be a very rich and happy collony were wee not of soe ill a constitution as not to be industrious till necessity compells us.”[ref]Leonard, “Operation Checkmate” 61.[/ref] Nicholas Spencer in 1683 noted that a slight rise in the price of tobacco
quieted the minds of our unthrifty inhabitants, who cannot be persuaded to undertake some new industry, but prefer to live miserably by tobacco. The pleasing thought of a cessation of planting they have for the present laid aside…By my observation I cannot persuade myself that either a cessation or a stint in the number of plants will effect what is intended. The work must do itself; the crop must grow to such vast quantities that no one will come to fetch it, and then the law of necessity will force them to new industries.[ref]Brooks, The Mighty Leaf 113; Leonard, “Operation Checkmate” 58, quotes Nicholas Spencer, 21 Mar 1682/3, CO 1/51,f.213. Cf. the earlier statement by Spencer: “Their greatest enemy to be feared is their Poverty thro’ the small or no value of their tobacco, unless the King give his assent to a cessation‑‑a check to all other manufactories‑‑their greatest hope in flax, in which they are still very unskilful.” See Spencer to Sec. Sir Leoline Jenkins, May 13, 1681, “Virginia in 1680-1681,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 25 (1917): 271.[/ref]
Governor William Gooch believed Virginians in the 1730s “an indolent people who would abandon economic habits only out of necessity.”[ref]Rainbolt, From Prescription to Persuasion 162.[/ref]
Poverty in a Land of Plenty
However vociferously Virginia’s critics blamed the colony’s woes on the indolence of the colonists, Virginians for the most part publicly rejected such arguments. Colonial leaders and other supporters of the colony throughout the seventeenth century‑-echoing the optimism of early promoters of colonization‑-downplayed the issues of the quality of immigrants and the need for coercion. Recognizing the bankruptcy of jeremiads and of martial law as policy for attracting potential colonists, most colonial leaders continued to maintain the optimistic view that the problem lay neither in the land nor the people, that New World abundance would indeed transform the indolent into the industrious. From the 1620s until Robert Beverley’s scathing attack on the indolence of his fellow Virginians in 1705, almost every official public statement made by colonists suggested a very industrious lot in Virginia.[ref]For an early example, see Gov. West and Council to Heath Atty Genl, Feb. 27, 1627/8, “Virginia in 1628,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 7 (1900): 258-9.[/ref] When Nathaniel Bacon declared to his followers that “there is nothing soe hard, but by Labour and Industry it may bee overcome,” he said it with the expectation that his Virginians did indeed have the requisite industry.[ref]”Narrative of Bacon’s Rebellion,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 4 (1896): 139.[/ref] Indeed, in the classic style of a jeremiad, Beverley himself romanticized the great industry of the past when Berkeley “set all hands industrously to Work in making Country Improvements.”[ref]Beverley, History 68.[/ref]
Behind this more positive view of Virginians lay a firm belief in the central role of hope and opportunity in driving economic development.[ref]McIlwaine, 1619-1658/59 17, 24, 26-7, 36, 49, 121, 105; E. Johnson, American Economic Thought 207; Dorfman, Economic Mind 1: 19-20.[/ref] America‑-the very land of hope and opportunity‑-naturally worked miracles on idle Englishmen, much as pre-Jamestown colonial promoters had hypothesized. Sir William Berkeley’s A Discourse and View of Virginia (1663) provides the classic statement of this view:
An other greater imputation lyes on the Countrey, that none but those of the meanest quality and corruptest lives go thither. This to our Maligners we would easily grant, if they would consent to the omen of it: for was not Rome thus begun and composed?…[T]hose that come from hence with those ungoverned manners and affections, change them there for sober and thrifty passions and desires, which is evident in most that are there; and those that will either experimentally or morally weigh the nature and conditions of men, shall find, that naturally this change will follow the alteration of our conditions…and the natural reason is evident, for it is hope and a proposed end that quickens our industry, and bridles our intemperance.”[ref]Berkeley, Discourse 3‑4.[/ref]
These supporters of Virginia traced the failure of the colony to live up to its promise, not to indolence, but to poverty. Planters throughout the seventeenth century complained about their poverty, attributing the source variously to exorbitant prices of commodity imports, high taxes, soil depletion, natural calamities, lack of shipping, but most especially, falling tobacco prices.[ref]On commodity prices, see, e.g., Francis Louis Michel, “Report of the Journey of Francis Louis Michel from Berne, Switzerland, to Virginia, October 2, 1701-December 1, 1702,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 24 (1916): 293; Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia, 2 vols., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960) 1: 212‑3; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) 129. On taxes, tithes, import duties, fines, and other forms of government stick, see William Zebina Ripley, The Financial History of Virginia 1609-1776 (1893; New York: AMS, 1970); Philip Alexander Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: Putnam’s, 1910) 2: 522-604; Robert Anthony Wheeler, “Lancaster County, Virginia, 1650‑1750: The Evolution of a Southern Tidewater Community,” diss., Brown U, 1972, 61. On natural calamities, see Morton, Colonial Virginia 1: 190, 214; John C. Rainbolt, From Prescription To Persuasion 67‑8. On duties, see Brooks, The Mighty Leaf 114; Jacob M. Price, Perry of London: A Family and a Firm on the Seaborne Frontier, 1615-1753 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992) 52.[/ref] Economic historians highlighting the domestic economy have rightly pointed out that subsistence production (at market prices) made up a greater share of total household income than income from marketed staples in colonial southern (and northern) households.[ref]Wesley Frank Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607‑1689 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1949) 123-4, 209; David W. Galenson and Russell R. Menard, “Approaches to the Analysis of Economic Growth in Colonial British America,” Historical Methods 13 (1980): 10; Richard B. Sheridan, “The Domestic Economy,” Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984) 43; Edwin J. Perkins, The Economy of Colonial America, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) 33, 42-3. Cf. Russell R. Menard, Lois Green Carr, and Lorena S. Walsh, “A Small Planter’s Profits: The Cole Estate and the Growth of the Early Chesapeake Economy,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 40 (1983): 174, 180-4.[/ref] Nevertheless, in the view of both contemporaries and economic historians who highlight the export economy, uncertainties in the farm price of tobacco far outweighed other elements in the perception of poverty for the seventeenth century as a whole. Tobacco prices were the barometer of poverty and prosperity. The comment by Charles Carroll III to an English friend in the late eighteenth century could be applied to the entire colonial era: “Our estates differ much from yours, the income is never certain. It depends upon the casual rise or fall of the price of tobacco.”[ref]Philip Alexander Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (1895; New York: Peter Smith, 1935) 1: 407; Vertrees J. Wyckoff, Tobacco Regulation in Colonial Maryland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1936) 191-2; Carville V. Earle, The Evolution of a Tidewater Settlement System: All Hallow’s Parish, Maryland, 1650-1783 (Chicago: University of Chicago, Dept. of Geography, 1975) 14; Russell R. Menard, “The Tobacco Industry in the Chesapeake Colonies, 1617-1730: An Interpretation,” Research in Economic History 5 (1980): 123, 128. The only data on income streams at the individual level is that from Robert Cole’s estate in Maryland which shows for the years 1662-73 a regular income in the 30-40 pound per annum range but sharp variations which Menard, Carr, and Walsh attribute chiefly to booms and busts in the export sector and secondarily to unexplained variations in local sales and levels of tobacco production. See Menard, Carr, and Walsh, “A Small Planter’s Profits” 180-2.[/ref]
And Virginians weeped over the low prices of tobacco from as early as 1620, as tobacco prices quickly plummeted from their initial astronomical heights. Although Governor Berkeley lamented in 1663 that tobacco at less than two pence per pound “at length has brought them to that extremity, that they can neither handsomely subsist with it, nor without it,” Virginians in 1626 had similarly complained about the contract price of twelve pence per pound: “How can wee councell the planter to make his tobacco principall good, which now soe much concernes us, if hee still bee enforced to make soe great quantities to furnish himself with necessaries.”[ref]Berkeley, Discourse 5‑6; “Virginia in 1625-26,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 15 (1908): 368. See also E. Johnson, American Economic Thought 118; Byrd, Correspondence 1: 63-4; Hartwell et al., Present State 7, 9; Bertelson, Lazy South 52-3.[/ref] Four years earlier in 1622 (when tobacco prices were still higher) Captain Francis West and other “auncient Planters and Adventurers on the behalf of themselves and the rest of your poore distressed Subjects of that Plantation” had petitioned the King “on the behalf of themselves and the rest of your poore distressed Subjects of that Plantation” “that by their long experience hazard and chardge both of their persons and estates, for many yeares now past,” they have found that the colony could produce many staples to supply the needs of Kingdom “but by mainteyning warre with the Indians, and the former benefitt, which hath bene made by Tobacco they have bene hindered and mispent their times therein.” Because now “tobacco is of noe value,” unless the King be pleased to take them under his protection and institute a tobacco contract with an assured reasonable price giving the planters the “meanes to subsist for the present, and apply themselves for the future to plant some reall commodity there, to which that Country is apt and fitt,” they lamented they “are like to perish, and soe hopefull a Plantation will presently sinck and become of noe use at all.”[ref]Kingsbury, Records 3: 580.[/ref] The rhetoricians of poverty were caught in the paradox of living in a Lubberland where “any laborious honest man may in a short time become rich” while at the same time bemoaning their poverty and the low price of tobacco–“the only meanes for our present supportacon and subsistence”–two themes echoed over and over again in the seventeenth century.[ref]Kingsbury, Records 3: 589; McIlwaine, 1619-1658/59 45-7, 58-62; Hening, Statutes 3: 142.[/ref]
Poverty‑-often with graphic details of nakedness, the suffering of women and children, abandonment, ruin, destruction, and “great wants and miseries”‑-was the most frequent specific explanation given for any action or non-action in the seventeenth century and was used at one time or another to justify practically everything.[ref]Kingsbury, Records 4: 107; Hening, Statutes 1: 346; 2: 259-60; Berkeley, Discourse 5‑8; McIlwaine, 1659/60-1693 49, 60; Spotswood, Official Letters 2: 96. See also Max Savelle, Seeds of Liberty: The Genesis of the American Mind (New York: Knopf, 1948) 201-4; Morton, Colonial Virginia 1: 195, 231, 299-302, 339, 396; Leonard, “Operation Checkmate” 62-6; Bridenbaugh, Jamestown 85.[/ref] Poverty was used to justify the remittance or reduction of tobacco duties (1624, 1679, 1713); a grant to Virginia of the sole rights of tobacco importation into England (1624); the repeal of tobacco importation monopolies granted by the king to private individuals (1625, 1628, 1638); the imposition of a set price for tobacco by the colony (1632); opposition to central tobacco warehouses (1638); the removal of restrictions on tobacco production (1638, 1663); stricter controls on the quantity and quality of tobacco production (1640, 1663, 1665, 1666, 1680, 1681, 1686); free trade with all English ports (1645); elimination of tobacco as a circulating medium (1645); restrictions on civil law suits (1646,1658); encouragement of the trade with the Dutch (1647); establishment of county markets (1656); prohibition of the importation of unnecessary commodities (1661); timetables for debt payment (1666); setting up public manufactures (1666); inability to pay the cost of defense against the Dutch or Indians (1667, 1672, 1673, 1679); promotion of town development (1680); opposition to adjournment of the Assembly (1682); prohibition of the exportation of certain raw materials and semi-finished manufactures (1682); and opposition to the removal to England of jurisdiction over certain types of court cases (1684).[ref]Kingsbury, Records 4: 101; McIlwaine, 1619-1658/59 26, 45, 55, 74, 124, 60; H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1659/60-1693 (Richmond, 1914) 35, 58-9, 118, 130-1, 137, 145-6, 158-9, 229; Hening, Statutes 1: 224-5, 296, 308, 331, 412, 451; 2: 18, 200-1, 221-2, 224-6, 232, 238-9; 2: 493; 3: 34-5.[/ref]
Poverty checked the economic development of Virginia in two major ways. First, poverty destroyed the hope and opportunity which Virginians believed provided the ultimate key to colonial development. Second, poverty meant insufficient capital and time to search out and develop alternative staples.[ref]See, e.g., “Aspinwall Papers” 8‑9; Hening, Statutes 1: 209‑10; 2: 201; McIlwaine, 1619-1658/59 62. Virginians did not fall neatly into indolence and poverty camps. On some points all Virginians agreed, such as the faith they shared that certain undiscovered or undeveloped staples which an industrious people would search out and produce would prove more profitable than tobacco. If the earliest promotional tracts had too easily stressed the Lubberland image alone, writers from Ralph Hamor and John Rolfe in the early seventeenth century, through John Hammond at mid-century, to Beverley and William Byrd II in the early eighteenth century would ambiguously tend to combine images of both “natural paradise” (abundance without industry) and “potential paradise” (abundance only with industry) in uneasy tension. For contemporary descriptions, see Hamor, True Discourse 19, 22, 24; John Rolf, Virginia in 1616, Virginia: Four Personal Narratives (New York: Arno, 1972) 104, 107; Hammond, Leah and Rachel 7-14. Cf. George Alsop, A Character of the Province of Maryland, ed. John Gilmor Shea (1666; New York, 1869) 42-3, 54. See also E. Johnson, American Economic Thought 35-9; Dorfman, Economic Mind 1: 25; Bertelson, Lazy South 14-5, 19, 30-1, 35-43, 66-9, 80-1; Rutman, Morning of America 27-34; R. Nash, Wilderness 25-6; Rainbolt, From Prescription to Persuasion 13-4; R. Davis, Intellectual Life 1: 9-46, 66-102; 3: 1372-4; Billington, Land of Savagery 1, 5-10. Some commentators reconciled the two views by assuming that God had furnished Virginia with “all necessaries of life,” and “industry” would supply her with “all conveniences and advantages, for profit, ease, and pleasure.” See H. Jones, Present State 46. Or, as Beverley put it, the lack of dire poverty suggests “that this may in truth, be term’d the best poor Man’s Country in the World,” yet without industry such an existence might perhaps be suitable for an Indian but hardly for a self-respecting Englishman who should improve on nature. See Beverley, History 275. See also “Aspinwall Papers” 8-9; Beverley, History 35, 319.[/ref] Every cause given for the lack of diversification and overproduction of tobacco was equally a cause of poverty, although the poverty argument normally identified the ultimate source in external forces.[ref]See n. 13 above.[/ref] Perhaps the most egregious and direct link with poverty was the vicious “debt cycle” quite familiar to contemporaries and historians of the postbellum South. Planters complained that merchants took advantage of the planters by selling them clothes and provisions (and less useful commodities) at excessive rates while paying low rates for tobacco, placing the planters in debt almost to the value of the next crop. Necessity forced planters to continue planting tobacco which kept them in perpetual debt and “continual slavery.”[ref]McIlwaine, 1619-1658/59 55, 58; McIlwaine, 1659/60-1693 158-9; Hening, Statutes 2: 18. See also Rainbolt, From Prescription to Persuasion 47-8, 86.[/ref] Planters who attempted to avoid the problems of tobacco by transplanting a more traditional English agriculture soon failed and found themselves forced to turn to tobacco for survival.[ref]H. Jones, Present State 137; Lawson, New Voyage 112; Bruce, Economic History 1: 459.[/ref]
Before Virginia could achieve its promise, the colony first had to escape poverty. So the colonists pushed for Crown policies‑-like allowing free exportation into non-English ports and the prohibition of domestic tobacco production in England‑-that would drive tobacco prices upward. Higher tobacco prices would provide the poor planters with both the hope (escape from poverty) and means (especially capital) necessary “to sett up those staple commodities which require a longe expectation of proffitt.”[ref]McIlwaine, 1619-1658/59 26‑7. See also Kingsbury, Records 4: 452; McIlwaine, 1619-1658/59 45-6, 49, 55, 58, 60, 121, 123; Hening, Statutes 1: 204, 209-10, 224-5; Berkeley, Discourse 7-8. See also Dorfman, Economic Mind 1: 19-22; Leonard, “Operation Checkmate” 59, 61-3; Rainbolt, From Prescription to Persuasion 44-6. Rainbolt suggests that in the 1660s, whereas the Virginia leaders linked tobacco restriction to long-range diversification, the Maryland government “viewed the cessation largely as a temporary expedient to increase the price of tobacco” to alleviate immediate poverty. See Rainbolt, From Prescription to Persuasion 64.[/ref] Cessation, stinting, or other physical restrictions on tobacco production as the methods for raising tobacco prices were further recommended as providing the requisite time along with the capital to search out and develop such projects.[ref]McIlwaine, 1619-1658/59 126; McIlwaine, 1659/60-1693 137; Hening, Statutes 2: 190-1, 221-2, 224-6; Beverley, History 70; Rainbolt, From Prescription to Persuasion 113; Morgan, American Slavery 186, 192. For behavioral evidence in support of this view, see R. Davis, Fitzhugh 82. For evidence that the Crown recognized both capital and time arguments, see Rainbolt, From Prescription to Persuasion 48-9.[/ref]
Maximizers All!
Despite the widely variant contemporaneous interpretations of Virginia’s problems, interestingly enough commentators could agree on one thing: that tobacco planters were quite industrious when it came to producing tobacco. Indeed one might say that practically every discussion about tobacco coming out of seventeenth-century Virginia was premised on the assertion that Virginians maximized tobacco production.
This is quite obvious for the defenders of Virginia who stressed over and over how industrious Virginians were at the same time they lamented that Virginians had no other outlet for that industry except tobacco. Furthermore, with tobacco prices as low as they were, Virginians were forced to produce as much tobacco as they could simply in order to survive. In their justification for stinting or cessation of tobacco, Virginians also suggested that planters literally had no free time to experiment with or cultive alternative staples, so tied up were they with growing tobacco.
But even those who criticized the indolence of Virginians accepted matter-of-factly that planters maximized tobacco. John Hammond in 1656 observed that after the 1622 massacre, Virginians
again began to bud forth, to spread further, to gather wealth, which they rather profusely spent (as gotten with ease then providently husbanded, or aimed at any publique good; or to make a Country for posterity; but from hand to mouth, and for a present being; neglected discoveries, planting of Orchards, providing for the Winter preservation of their stocks, or thinking of any thing staple or firm; and whilest Tobacco, the onely Commodity they had to subsist on bore a price, they wholy and eagerly followed that, neglecting their very planting of Corn, and much relyed on England for the chiefest part of their provisions.[ref]Hammond, Leah and Rachel 8.[/ref]
Hartwell, Blair, and Chilton made a similar observation at the end of the seventeenth century:
The only Thing whereof they make as much as they can, is Tobacco; there being always a Vent for that at one Time of the Year or other; besides that their Want of Cloaths and Household-Furniture, and all their other Necessaries, instigate them to make as much Tobacco as they can, this being the Money of that Country which Answers all Things.[ref]Hartwell et al., Present State 9.[/ref]
But for both the poverty and indolence camps, the assumption of maximization is more often left implicit than explicit. Contemporaries rarely talked about the option of planters increasing tobacco production. Some Virginians did sometimes (but not often) stress that the reason for the Virginians’ concentration on tobacco was the relatively high return to their labor in tobacco than in other commodities, hinting that higher prices for some other staple and/or lower prices for tobacco might lead planters to shift from tobacco to the other staple.[ref]See, e.g., E. Johnson, American Economic Thought 118; Perfect Description 6. William Bullock recommends any “slight Engines, that will save hand‑labour, there being nothing dear in the Countrey but labour.” See William Bullock, Virginia Impartially examined, and left to publick view, to be considered by all judicious and honest men (London, 1649) 62-3.[/ref] A handful of statements by Governors Berkeley, Culpeper, and Gooch pushed the relative profitability argument so far in the direction of classical economic theory (with its assumptions of perfect substitutability between commodities in a market equilibrium) as to suggest that a lowering of the price of tobacco or a raising of the price of an alternative staple would ceteris paribus promote a reduction in tobacco production and vice versa.[ref]Rainbolt, From Prescription to Persuasion 51‑2, 122. Rainbolt incorrectly treats such statements as typical of Virginian thought. As further argument will show, an emphasis on relative price effects, while typical of many statements by British low-wage theorists when applied to the middle and upper classes, were highly atypical in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Virginia in the face of a ubiquitous presumption of the central role of necessity in an essentially one-crop economy. Indeed, such extraneous comments seem more closely linked to the rhetoric of indolence than poverty.[/ref]
But such statements were rare. More typically, Virginians depicted tobacco production as a matter of all or nothing, either being totally dependent upon tobacco or abandoning it altogether. Surely observers who condemned planters as lazy might have suggested that those same planters might have chosen to increase tobacco production rather than diversify in response to falling tobacco prices. But they did not. The implicit assumption is that planters were already making as much tobacco as they could, whether as a matter of survival or out of habit.
Modern Historical Interpretations
Historians today tend to reject seventeenth-century explanations that trace the problems of Virginia to the planters being either lazy or strapped for capital. David Bertelson’s The Lazy South drew heavily on the example of seventeenth-century Virginia to prove that the South was anything but lazy as we understand the term today:
The problem then is to explain why most men in the southern colonies seemed to lead idle lives when in actuality they were often very busy. The answer lies in the fact that they were not busy all of the time. Diligent labor of the sort Max Weber has associated with the “spirit of capitalism” is not necessary if men work mainly for gain, for there is no reason why they should be busy during periods when activity will yield no reward…Hunters and herders, as well as farmers and planters, could conceivably have had and did have many periods of free time. This sporadic inactivity would have contributed to an impression of idleness, which belied the underlying reality. With “the great labor about tobacco being only in summertime,” the Virginia planters “acquire great habits of idleness all the rest of the year,” a description of the colony noted.[ref]Bertelson, Lazy South 75.[/ref]
Numerous historians have echoed the seventeenth-century view that tobacco planters maximized tobacco production regardless of changes in tobacco prices. Reasons given are diverse. Older historians like Philip A. Bruce, L. C. Gray, and others concluded that planters continually overproduced regardless of the price of tobacco out of habit, lack of foresight, or institutional constraints.[ref]Bruce, Economic History 1: 408; George Louis Beer, The Origins of the British Colonial System 1578-1660 (1908; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1959) 92; Avery O. Craven, Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland, 1606-1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1926) 56; Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 2 vols. (1933; New York: Peter Smith, 1958) 1: 275-6; Brooks, The Mighty Leaf 154; R. Davis, Intellectual Life 2: 940-4.[/ref] Avery O. Craven argued that for a hundred years after the enactment of the Navigation Acts, with only occasional breaks of a few years duration, a depression led to an insatiable demand for land placing planters “under constant pressure for [earning the] largest returns from his soils.”[ref]A. Craven, Soil Exhaustion 43, 45-6, 55-6; Morgan, American Slavery 172.[/ref] James Curtis Ballagh, Richard B. Morris, Wesley Frank Craven, and others have asserted that the goal of planters was to acquire as much land and labor as they could.[ref]Bruce, Economic History 1: 584-7; Ballagh 41, 84; Richard B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946) 3-4; W. Craven, Southern Colonies 219; J. Mills Thornton, III, “The Thrusting Out of Governor Harvey: A Seventeenth‑Century Rebellion,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 76 (1968): 17; Morgan, American Slavery 114-15; Warren M. Billings, John E. Selby, and Thad W. Tate, Colonial Virginia: A History (White Plains, NY: KTO, 1986) 121-2; Bliss, Revolution and Empire 30-1.[/ref] More recent historians like Edmund S. Morgan, Darrett B. and Anita H. Rutman, and Charles Wetherell have claimed that planters maximized tobacco production in order to survive in the New World wilderness, to provide for the next generation, as the best way to maximize profits and capital accumulation, simply because the opportunity existed, and/or as a traditional strategy that planters maintained despite the vagaries of the market because there were simply no seemingly more profitable alternatives without undertaking great risk and uncertainty.[ref]Morgan, American Slavery 108-9, 172, 302; Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia 1650-1750 (New York: Norton, 1984) 42-3, 75, 183-4; Charles Wetherell, “‘Boom and Bust’ in the Colonial Chesapeake Economy,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 15 (1984): 185-210, esp. 197, 204, 208-9; Anita H. Rutman, “Still Planting the Seeds of Hope: The Recent Literature of the Early Chesapeake Region,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 95 (1987): 5-7; Darrett B. Rutman, Small Worlds, Large Questions: Explorations in Early American Social History, 1600-1850 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994) 10-1.[/ref]
Since the mid-1970s, some historians and economists have come to challenge this idea that planters simply maximized tobacco production. These historians have argued that Virginians actually followed the ups and downs of the tobacco market fairly closely. Historians Russell R. Menard, John J. McCusker, Lorena S. Walsh, Paul G. E. Clemens, Gloria L. Main, Allan Kulikoff, and James Horn, and economists Terry L. Anderson, Robert Paul Thomas, and David W. Galenson, under the aegis of “staples” theory‑-with its emphasis on the export-led nature of colonial economic-demographic development‑-have highlighted a cyclical pattern of booms and busts throughout the seventeenth century. Periods of rising tobacco prices saw expanding tobacco production, increases in the pace of immigration, and the advance of settlement; periods of falling tobacco prices led to contracting tobacco production, experiments with alternative staples, and the spread of manufacturing. Planters only attempted to maximize tobacco production in boom periods.[ref]Lorena Seebach Walsh, “Charles County, Maryland, 1658‑1705: A Study of Chesapeake Social and Political Structure,” diss., Michigan State University, 1977, 263, 271, 277-80, 283-5; Terry L. Anderson and Robert Paul Thomas, “Economic Growth in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake,” Explorations in Economic History 15 (1978): 368-87; Galenson and Menard, “Approaches” 6-10; Paul G. Clemens, The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland’s Eastern Shore; Gloria L. Main, “Maryland and the Chesapeake Economy, 1670-1720,” Law, Society, and Politics in Early Maryland, eds. Aubrey C. Land, Lois Green Carr, and Edward C. Papenfuse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) 134-52; Gloria L. Main, Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650-1720 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Lorena S. Walsh, “Plantation Management in the Chesapeake, 1620-1820,” Journal of Economic History 49 (1989), 393; Lorena S. Walsh, “Slave Life, Slave Society, and Tobacco Production in the Tidewater Chesapeake, 1620-1820,” Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, eds. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993) 170-1; Horn, Adapting to a New World 6-7, 142-3. Many scholars over the years have emphasized the increased level of diversification, domestic manufactures, and general self-sufficiency that arose during tobacco busts, only to fall off during booms. As U. B. Phillips commented, “the planters complained of miscarriages and misfits, of poor quality and high charges, but they got a habit of homespun recourse only when hard times impelled it.” See U. B. Phillips, Life and Labor 35. On diversification and self-sufficiency, see Bruce, Economic History 1: 369-70, 479; Gray, History 1: 231-3; Morton, Colonial Virginia 2: 423; Bertelson, Lazy South 52; Earle, Evolution 14, 101-41, 169-75; Main, Tobacco Colony 21, 24, 48-96; John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985) 127. On domestic manufactures, see Bruce, Economic History 2: 467-8; Gray, History 1: 231-3; Margaret G. Reid, Economics of Household Production (New York: Wiley, 1934) 37; Arthur Pierce Middleton, Tobacco Coast: A Maritime History of Chesapeake Bay in the Colonial Era (Newport News, VA: Mariners’ Museum, 1953) 159; Morton, Colonial Virginia 2: 423; Main, Tobacco Colony 21, 73-4, 182-3, 262; McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America 127. Staples historians would suggest such reversals rest not on laziness but simply that planters were a little short-sighted in responding too readily to short-run relative price shifts. See, e.g., Menard, “Tobacco Industry” 125-6; Galenson and Menard, “Approaches” 8; McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America 126.[/ref]
Curiously, some of these same historians have felt compelled to acknowledge that, for certain planters at certain times, falling tobacco prices may have actually spurred the expansion of the tobacco economy. Some who make this claim suggest this was the situation only for the poorest, most debt-ridden planters. “Small planters,” Russell Menard concludes, “had fixed expenses and debts to pay; when tobacco prices declined they felt pressures to expand production in order to maintain the income of their farms.”[ref]Russell R. Menard, Economy and Society in Early Colonial Maryland (New York: Garland, 1985) 256. See also Russell R. Menard, “Immigration to the Chesapeake Colonies in the Seventeenth Century: A Review Essay,” Maryland Historical Magazine 68 (1973): 328; Menard, “Tobacco Industry” 126-7; Menard, Economy and Society 119. Cf. Jacob M. Price, “The Economic Growth of the Chesapeake and the European Market, 1697-1775,” Journal of Economic History 24 (1964): 498-9.[/ref] For certain planters, writes Gloria Main, “no real alternative to planting existed. They needed the income to pay their debts and to hang on for another year. The response of people in this position was to increase their effort, that is, to raise more in order to obtain the same income.”[ref]Main, Tobacco Colony 24 (original emphasis). See also Main, Tobacco Colony 40, 58, 181-2.[/ref]
But other scholars have suggested that the planter class as a whole may have at times responded to falling tobacco prices by expanding tobacco production. This was an idea first suggested by L. C. Gray in his seminal study of the History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860. Drawing his insight from some early eighteenth-century observer, Gray concluded
It was observed that for a considerable time after the beginning of a depression period the planter class actually increased the acreage planted, trying by the production of a larger quantity to make up for the smaller price.[ref]L. C. Gray, “The Market Surplus Problem of Colonial Tobacco,” Agricultural History 2 (1928): 22. Cf. Gray, History 1: 276.[/ref]
Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, in their classic community study of Middlesex County, capture succinctly the general constraints on production decisions:
The farmer could not readily respond to lower prices by shifting to other crops. Even at a low price, tobacco retained an assured market of sorts. And…after all, the Chesapeake farmer knew that he need simply semiclear a few more acres and find another laborer and hoe in order to increase the productivity (and profitability) of his farm.[ref]Rutman and Rutman, A Place in Time 42‑3.[/ref]
Robert Brenner similarly concludes:
Despite their recognition as a body of the need for economic diversification, the planters as individuals generally tried to overcome their financial difficulties simply by increasing their tobacco output. This naturally led to crises of overproduction, further falls in prices, and ever‑deepening debt.[ref]Brenner, Merchants and Revolution 129. For other statements, see Middleton, Tobacco Coast 112; Marambaud, “Colonel William Byrd I” 439.[/ref]
Other historians go further to suggest that Chesapeake planters were constantly spurred to expand production through good times and bad, pushed during busts and pulled during booms.[ref]For a similar view of the South Carolina rice culture, see Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974) 153.[/ref] If L. C. Gray thought that a depression could spur production for a time, he also believed that booms‑-like the good prices before the War of Spanish Succession‑-could as well.[ref]Gray, “Market Surplus” 5.[/ref] John Rainbolt, finding evidence that planters expanded production in response to falling prices, pithily noted that, “ironically, the private economic behavior of the great planters exacerbated the economic condition their public policy sought to resolve.” But Rainbolt also argued that with a slight increase in tobacco prices after Bacon’s Rebellion, “the modest improvement only encouraged overproduction in subsequent years.”[ref]Rainbolt, From Prescription to Persuasion 56, 110-1. See also Rainbolt, Prescription 71, 96-7, 131. For other casual pull statements, see Morton, Colonial Virginia 2: 456.[/ref] Clemens observes that “the price of tobacco remained strong enough to drive up the level of production,” but, in the same paragraph argues, “as prices continued to fall, the pressure to increase farm production and maintain profit levels intensified.”[ref]Clemens, Atlantic Economy 35.[/ref] Allan Kulikoff provides the baldest statement of this ambivalent view:
Increasing Continental demand for tobacco led Chesapeake planters to overproduce, and these surpluses magnified the impact of depressions. Each downturn in tobacco prices triggered a similar sequence of events. When prices began to decline, planters responded by attempting to increase their tobacco output. Continued production led to even lower prices, and economic decline accelerated. Marginal producers, unable to cover their costs, dropped out of the market, and total exports stagnated. After several years of level exports, short-term European demand for tobacco usually improved. Prices therefore began to rise, and planters redoubled their efforts to grow tobacco. The stage was set for another depression and a repetition of the entire economic cycle.[ref]Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves 81. For Kulikoff’s boom interpretation, cf. Allan Kulikoff, “The Colonial Chesapeake: Seedbed of Antebellum Southern Culture?,” Journal of Southern History 45 (1979): 525; Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves 5, 31-2, 78, 80. Anita Rutman critiques these “apparently contradictory contentions.” See A. Rutman, “Still Planting” 17. For a similar critique of Douglass North’s staples model, see James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: Vintage, 1983) 265-6n.[/ref]
According to other scholars, there were two distinct kinds of expansive responses to changes in tobacco: while rising tobacco prices led to extensive development through increased acquisition of labor and land, falling tobacco prices led to intensive development through increased effort (at least in the short run) and improvements in the technology of tobacco culture.[ref] John M. Hemphill, II, Virginia and the English Commercial System, 1689-1733: Studies in the Development and Fluctuations of a Colonial Economy under Imperial Control (New York: Garland, 1985) 5-51; Galenson and Menard, “Approaches” 6-8.[/ref]
Putting Theories to the Test
None of these notions about tobacco production and the failure of Virginia to diversify has ever been put to any rigorous test. Much of the analysis has been restricted to descriptive graphs and tables, subject to multiple contradictory interpretations. For instance, historians have long recognized that tobacco productivity rose over the course of the seventeenth century while tobacco prices were falling. The data in Figures I and II are based on aggregate English tobacco import and tithable population data, but the same trends of rising productivity in the seventeenth century are suggested by contemporary literary estimates and analysis of probate records.[ref]Thomas J. Wertenbaker, The Planters of Colonial Virginia (1922; New York: Russell, 1958) 63-4; Gray, History 1: 218-9; Melvin Herndon, Tobacco in Colonial Virginia: ‘The Sovereign Remedy’ (Williamsburg, VA; Virginia 350th Anniversary Celebration Corporation, 1957) 11; Rainbolt, From Prescription To Persuasion 56; Edmund S. Morgan, “The First American Boom: Virginia 1618 to 1630,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 28 (1971): 177‑8; Morgan, American Slavery 109-10, 110n12, 142, 142-3n33, 302; Anderson and Thomas, “Economic Growth” 377, 382-5; Menard, “Tobacco Industry” 115, 145, 153; Clemens, Atlantic Economy 35, 111-2, 150-1; Main, Tobacco Colony 38, 40; Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, A Place in Time: Explicatus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984) 9-24; Menard, Economy and Society 202-5, 239-42, 401n92, 459-62; Walsh, “Plantation Management” 394-5.[/ref]
Historians have interpreted this inverse relationship in numerous ways. Certainly there is a general consensus that rising productivity drove down the price of tobacco. But what drove tobacco productivity up? Allan Kulikoff suggests that high profits drove the process:
Between 1620 and about 1680 the price and production of tobacco followed a classic new product curve, similar to that of electronic calculators in the 1970s. Tobacco planters received very high prices for their product in the 1620s, and that encouraged both higher output and a search for ways to increase productivity. As production per hand increased from about 750 pounds a year in the 1630s to 1,650 a year in the 1670s and shipping costs declined the price for tobacco fell, but planters still received a profit for their tobacco because they produced more of it with the same labor.[ref]Kulikoff, “Colonial Chesapeake” 525.[/ref]
Others, however, like Galenson and Menard, believe that “some of the major gains in productivity were achieved during depressions.”[ref]Galenson and Menard, “Approaches” 8-9. See also McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America 126.[/ref] In general, most historians suggest that the seventeenth-century increase in productivity was the result of permanent advances in technological or organizational efficiency in tobacco culture fairly unrelated to tobacco prices. This was the result of adjusting to the environment or “learning by doing” during the earliest years of settlement. None of this negates the consensus that these planters were industrious maximizers for all assume regular daily levels of physical and mental effort remained fairly constant while productivity was rising.[ref]Morgan, American Slavery 110; Galenson and Menard, “Approaches” 8-9; McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America 248-9; Walsh, “Plantation Management” 394; Walsh, “Slave Life” 174. Most historians who even bother to mention the subject give little more than passing notice to any role for changing levels of industry. See, e.g., Morgan, American Slavery 142-3n33; Menard, “Tobacco Industry” 145; Main, Tobacco Colony 40.[/ref]
But which if any of these views is more correct? Did higher tobacco prices spur planters to increased productivity? Or did lower prices? Or were increases in productivity independent of tobacco prices? All of the above? Such questions can only be answered by fairly sophisticated statistical analysis.
But statistical analyses of such empirical evidence are few and far between in the study of the colonial Chesapeake. Some historians have reported a strong positive correlation between changes in taxable population and tobacco prices.[ref]Clemens, Atlantic Economy 53.[/ref] Others have found a positive correlation between unindentured servant registration and tobacco prices.[ref]Menard, “Immigration to the Chesapeake Colonies” 326‑8; Russell R. Menard, “From Servants to Slaves: The Transformation of the Chesapeake Labor System,” Southern Studies 16 (1977): 363‑5; Russell R. Menard, “British Migration to the Chesapeake Colonies in the Seventeenth Century,” Colonial Chesapeake Society, eds. Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. Russo (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988) 115‑117; Walsh, “Charles County” 26‑27.[/ref] One historian has even concluded there was a strong positive correlation between premarital sex and tobacco prices.[ref]Lee A. Gladwin, “Tobacco and Sex: Some Factors Affecting Non-Marital Sexual Behavior in Colonial Virginia,” Journal of Social History 12 (1978): 63‑65.[/ref] Charles Wetherell employed a fairly sophisticated Box‑Jenkins time series approach to study the relationship between English tobacco imports and farm tobacco prices but found only a very weak, if any, correlation.[ref]Wetherell, “‘Boom and Bust'” 203.[/ref] However, as I am sure all these authors would readly concede, none of these studies could qualify as a definitive statistical test of the various interpretive frameworks of economic development in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake.
As a result of the work of numerous scholars of colonial Maryland and Virginia, the seventeenth-century Chesapeake is hardly the “statistical ‘dark age'” it was called as recently as 1978.[ref]Anderson and Thomas, “Economic Growth” 368.[/ref] Chesapeake scholars have performed miracles in generating quantifiable data from stingy surviving records. Although we do not have much individual-level data, we do have enough aggregate-level data‑-for example, annual times series of tobacco imports, population, prices, acreage‑-from the late seventeenth century to analyze three key elements in the colonial Chesapeake economy: tobacco productivity, demand for labor, and demand for land.
I tested these three economic measures were tested employing fairly straightforward multiple regression analysis, the kind that economists typically use to test their hypotheses. Now any discussion of multiple regression analysis is going to be necessarily very dry and complex, so the details have been left for the appendices. But, very briefly, the analyses involved a lot of experimentation with variables and combinations of variables in search of a better fit between predicted and actual data. For example, the examination of tobacco productivity drew on such data as the annual totals of tobacco imports into England, the size of the working population in the Chesapeake, the farm price of tobacco, various measures to gauge the availability of shipping, and proxies of land and labor quality. One of the more innovative aspects of the approach employed here was‑-rather than simply to assume that planters responded to the most immediate prices (as staples theorists often presume)‑-to experiment with various other ways planters might have reacted to price changes, for example, averaging the price of tobacco over the last so many years or taking into account the minimum price over the last so many years.
The results were, as already suggested, quite surprising. Far from maximizing tobacco production or responding positively to market incentives, seventeenth-century tobacco planters were found to respond quite perversely. Whereas historians and contemporaries would have us believe that rising tobacco prices either encouraged planters to increase tobacco production and demand for labor and land, or had little impact on planters already maximizing production, multiple regression analysis shows something quite different. Supposedly maximizing planters in aggregate responded to rising tobacco prices by curtailing tobacco production. Rising tobacco prices led to a decrease in tobacco productivity, demand for labor, and demand for land. (See Appendices I, II, and III.)
Furthermore, the evidence also suggests that planters hardly responded like stockjobbers to rapid fluctuations in prices. They were conservative in their decision-making; they did not respond quickly to rapidly changing tobacco prices, but rather averaged in current prices with those of the recent past in making their production decisions. Furthermore, they were risk-averse; they hedged their bets by basing their decision in part on minimum prices, suggesting an unwillingness to gamble that prices would not fall back to such lows again.[ref]The conservative, risk-averse nature of planter behavior is strongly suggested by the sensitivity analysis in Table II showing the superior explanatory power of models of tobacco prices employing unweighted previous price averages rather than current prices, weighted distributed lags (tending to emphasize most recent prices), or extrapolations from recent trends.[/ref]
These findings seem to turn on its head the central assumption of practically all historians of early America that seventeenth-century Virginians were industrious maximizers. But if they were not industrious maximizers, what were they? Here we might start by going back to the observation of some historians we have already discussed, the observation that falling tobacco prices may have actually spurred improvements in tobacco productivity. Indeed we find this to be quite generally true.
Undoubtedly over the course of the seventeenth century some of this increase in productivity came from long-run “irreversible” changes in technological or organizational efficiency. But much of this increase also came simply from increased physical, and mental, effort.[ref]Indeed, as both the analysis and historians have suggested, there was little in the way of improvements in efficiency in the late seventeenth century.[/ref] And these short-run improvements in productivity were inherently “reversible.” Falling tobacco prices spurred increased effort. But when prices rose, planters in aggregate did not maintain the same level of effort, let alone increase it. No, they reduced their effort. Thus, not only did planters in aggregate not maximize their labor‑-even when there was profit to be made‑-but they acted very much like the classic stereotype of the lazy peasant: the more you paid them, the less they worked.[ref]The analysis suggests that planters preferred intensifying tobacco production in response to falling tobacco prices‑-increasing overall effort devoted to tobacco with present labor and land supplies in response‑-rather than acquiring new servants and new land in order to increase production. This is suggested by the reversal of sign on the check variable (CHECK) between Tables I and III and the statistical weakness of the coefficients on the price variables (PA2, PMIN4, CHECK) in Table IV. On the other hand, planters simply cut back on that effort when tobacco prices began to rise again. The preference could suggest that planters in aggregate faced market or institutional constraints in increasing their supplies of land and labor which channeled their responses in the direction of intensification. Or it could suggest that planters were even more risk-averse than drudgery-averse, less willing to risk investment in additional land and labor rather than simply modifying effort in response to falling and rising necessity.[/ref]
What exactly did planters do to decrease productivity in periods of rising tobacco prices? That is a very difficult question to answer with confidence. Tobacco was a very labor-intensive crop. Over the course of the planting year there was much room for modifying total output, from the seeding of the beds in January, making of the hills in April, transplanting in May, topping, hoeing, and suckering in June and July, cutting in August, and casking in October.[ref]Middleton, Tobacco Coast 99-102; Rutman and Rutman, A Place in Time 42.[/ref] However, since historians have concluded that most of the increase in tobacco productivity over the seventeenth century came primarily as a result of an increased number of plants per laborer (which advanced six- to ten-fold), most likely intermittent reductions in productivity came from a decrease in the number of plants tended per laborer.[ref]Middleton, Tobacco Coast 377-8n27; Morgan, American Slavery 126‑7; Menard, “Tobacco Industry” 145-6; Billings, Selby, and Tate, Colonial Virginia 121. See, however, Middleton, Tobacco Coast 112; Wheeler, “Lancaster County” 60-1.[/ref]
These findings on tobacco productivity raise significant questions about the nature of labor relations in the colonial Chesapeake when servants and slaves comprised a significant part of the labor force. Edmund S. Morgan shows that for every head of household in late seventeenth-century Virginia, there were another one or two dependent laborers.[ref]Morgan, American Slavery 228, 419. More specifically, Morgan reports 2.60 as the average number of tithables per household for six counties in Virginia in 1679. For two counties in 1699 the figures were 3.56 (Lancaster) and 1.9 (Surry).[/ref] Furthermore, slavery was an ever larger part of this dependent labor force over the time period (1679-1703) that I analyzed tobacco productivity; in Maryland, slaves went from 20% of the bound labor force in the late 1670s to 75% in the late 1690s.[ref]Menard, “From Servants to Slaves” 360.[/ref] If the labor force in aggregate responded perversely to changes in tobacco prices, what does this say about the master-servant and master-slave relationship? Surely it raises doubts about Morgan’s thesis that planters turned to slavery as a “way of compelling men to a maximum output of labor without as great a risk of rebellion.”[ref]Morgan, American Slavery 296.[/ref]
A “peasant” framework of planter behavior is further confirmed by the findings on how planters responded to changing tobacco prices in their decisions on purchasing labor or patenting land. Quite simply, labor and land became more valuable as tobacco prices fell, less valuable as tobacco prices rose. Again this shows that planters were hardly maximizers. It also challenges the view of some scholars that there were two distinct kinds of expansive responses to changes in tobacco, extensive and intensive. Rather falling tobacco prices pushed planters toward both intensive efforts to increase tobacco productivity and extensive efforts to acquire additional labor and land to expand production. Rising tobacco prices led to contraction.
Understanding planters in this way provides additional support for various other interpretations of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake. For example, contemporaries and historians alike have noted that poverty in the form of falling tobacco prices pushed planters to experiment with alternative staples, take up domestic manufactures, and increase subsistence production, projects which more often than not fell apart when good times returned. Although scholars have tended to interpret such behavior in terms of the responsiveness of “economic men” to market incentives, the behavior seems even more typical of the kind of reversible effort we see with regard to tobacco productivity. Not only did tobacco busts spur increased effort in the tobacco fields, they also promoted increased effort to try to find alternative sources of income. Rising tobacco prices reversed these trends.[ref]McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America 127; Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, “Economic Diversification and Labor Organization in the Chesapeake, 1650-1820,” Work and Labor in Early America, ed. Stephen Innes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988) 145-6.[/ref]
Perhaps more importantly, these findings about the demand for labor in late seventeenth century Virginia strongly second the view of some historians that the late seventeenth-century tobacco depression played a major role in the shift from indentured servitude to chattel slavery.[ref]Rutman, Morning of America 77; K. G. Davies, The North Atlantic in the Seventeenth Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974) 152; Clemens, Atlantic Economy 82, 214-5; Rutman and Rutman, A Place in Time 184; Billings, Selby, and Tate, Colonial Virginia 124. For a similar interpretation of the rise of slavery in ancient Greece, see Michael H. Jameson, “Agriculture and Slavery in Classical Athens,” Classical Journal 73 (1977/8): 122-45. For the opposing prosperity view of the shift to slavery based on the traditional interpretation of relatively high tobacco prices after 1680, see Middleton, Tobacco Coast 134-5.[/ref] This is not to deny the importance of many other factors that historians have emphasized, such as the reduced supply of servants from England, increased availability of slaves, improving mortality, Queen Anne’s War, and increasing labor tensions.[ref]T. H. Breen, “A Changing Labor Force and Race Relations in Virginia 1660-1710,” Journal of Social History 7 (1973), 14-16; Morgan, American Slavery 295-315; Main, “Maryland and the Chesapeake Economy” 139-41; Menard, “From Servants to Slaves” 355-90; Richard Nelson Bean and Robert P. Thomas, “The Adoption of Slave Labor in British America,” The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, eds. Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (New York: ???, 1979) 379-98; Galenson and Menard, “Approaches” 11-13; Richard S. Dunn, “Servants and Slaves: The Recruitment and Employment of Labor,” Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, eds. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984) 166-7; David W. Galenson, “Economic Aspects of the Growth of Slavery in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake,” Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, ed. Barbara L. Solow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 265-92; Farley Grubb and Tony Stitt, “The Liverpool Emigrant Servant Trade and the Transition to Slave Labor in the Chesapeake, 1697-1707: Market Adjustments to War,” Explorations in Economic History 31 (1994), 376-405; Walsh, “Slave Life” 174.[/ref] But surely it is not totally coincidental that, as Farley Grubb and Tony Stitt have recently noted, “the transition to slave labor occurred when tobacco prices had fallen to their lowest.”[ref]Grubb and Stitt, “The Liverpool Servant Trade” 378.[/ref] Russell R. Menard has convincingly shown that there was much resistance to slavery among middling and poorer planters who positively favored English servants to African slaves. Besides the greater cost and risk associated with purchasing a slave, masters simply preferred dealing with servants who shared a common language and culture.[ref]Menard, “From Servants to Slaves” 374.[/ref] In such a scenario, perhaps the pressure of rock-bottom tobacco prices was sufficient catalyst for these planters in the 1690s to experiment with slavery in an attempt to realize the benefits that wealthier planters had been reaping since the 1660s.
A Curious Blindspot
Such perverse behavior is indeed troublesome for both Smithians and Marxians. Smithians might suggest that the planters were only maximizing utility with a greater preference for leisure over additional income. Marxians might claim that such behavior substantiates the precapitalist nature of early Americans. After all, as Max Weber concluded, such a leisure preference was the essence of “traditionalism,” “the most important opponent with which the spirit of capitalism…has had to struggle.”[ref]Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s, 1958) 58‑60.[/ref] But neither Marxian nor Smithian Americanists have ever entertained the possibility that early Americans were ever so “backward.”
This suggests a curious blindspot in early American historiography: a failure to take seriously any evidence that might suggest that early Americans might have responded to increases in opportunity in a “perverse” manner. Fundamentally, neither Marxian nor Smithian frameworks offers a satisfactory explanation of planter values or behavior because none, underlining a paradigmatic bias in early American historiography with regard to the nature of the New World environment and/or the Anglo-American character, is prepared to deal seriously with the prevalence of “indolence” in early America.[ref]See, e.g., the essays in Stephen Innes, ed., Work and Labor in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). The exception that proves the rule is Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) esp. 21-6, 62-4. For more fruitful but still problematic attempts to treat the rhetoric of indolence in early America, see, e.g., Crowley, This Sheba 82-3; Rainbolt, From Prescription to Persuasion 88-90; R. Davis, Intellectual Life 1: 21, 46, 68, 90-1, 95, 102; 2: 938; David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) 365-8.[/ref]
This can readily be seen in the reaction of historians to contemporary observers of the American frontier from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries who have with the same broad strokes ubiquitously condemned both the avarice and the indolence of early Americans, thus projecting competing images of the frontier as a Hobbesian state of nature and a Lubberland.[ref]On seventeenth-century Virginia, see Hammond, Leah and Rachel 8-9; Durand, Hugenot Exile 109-13, 128-30, 132, 163-4; Brown and Brown, Virginia 1705-1786 7-11; Breen, “George Donne’s ‘Virginia Reviewed'” 460-3; Richard Gray, Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 12. For other examples of stereotypes of indolence and avarice similar to Durand, see J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Albert E. Stone (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981) 72-9, 84; Carl Bücher, Industrian Evolution, trans. S. Morley Wickett (New York: Holt, 1901) 81-2; Weber, Protestant Ethic 56-7; Edmund S. Morgan, “The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 24 (1967): 20-2; C. Vann Woodward, “The Southern Ethic in a Puritan World,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 25 (1968): 349-53; Frank E. Huggett, The Land Question and European Society (London: Thames, 1975) 9-10. Ray Allen Billington and other frontier historians note much evidence for an alternative Lubberland frontier interpretation, but consistently downplay this evidence as frontier myth in contrast to the Hobbesian reality. See, e.g., John Lauren Harr, “The Ante-Bellum Southwest, 1815-1861,” diss., University of Chicago, 1941, 128-33; Ray Allen Billington, America’s Frontier Heritage (New York: Holt, 1966) 5, 41-3, 60, 168; Ray Allen Billington, The American Frontier Thesis: Attack and Defense (Washington: American Historical Association, 1971) 42-4; Billington, Land of Savagery 1, 191-3, 211. That Turner himself recognized this alternative frontier potential, see his passive acceptance of William Byrd’s description of the North Carolina frontier as a Lubberland, perhaps reflecting the sectional nature of his frontier interpretation and the influence of John Fiske who had a similar view of poor white trash on the Southern frontier. See John Fiske, Old Virginia and her Neighbours, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, 1902) 363-76; Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (1920; New York: Holt, 1962) 94; Frederick Jackson Turner, The Early Writings of Frederick Jackson Turner (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1938) 78-9.[/ref] Historians have simply never known what to do with these comments about lazy Americans in Lubberland. In order to resolve this rhetoric of indolence with assumptions of maximizing behavior, historians have ignored the rhetoric, downplayed indolence as atypical behavior, or tried to explain away such ubiquitous complaints as evidence of something else like avarice, status anxiety, or a lack of opportunity‑-anything but laziness.[ref]Kenneth S. Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston: Little, 1959) 19-20; Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town 1630-1649 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965) 143, 242-3; Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966) 53; Bertelson, Lazy South 68-80; Darrett B. Rutman, Husbandmen of Plymouth: Farms and Villages in the Old Colony, 1620-1692 (Boston: Beacon, 1967) 60, 93n62; Darrett B. Rutman, American Puritanism: Faith and Practice (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970) 83; Morgan, American Slavery 141, 141‑2n32; James A. Henretta, “Families and Farms: Mentalités in Pre-Industrial America,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 35 (1978): 3-32; Shammas, “English-Born and Creole Elites” 288-9. With regard to Heimert’s and Bertelson’s argument that Virginians equated indolence with failure to perform public works due to a preoccupation with private works, one might note that most contemporaneous charges of indolence in England rested simply on a Biblical standard of a six-day, sunrise-to-sunset work week, by which standard no Virginian could be described as industrious. See Winton U. Solberg, Redeem the Times: The Puritan Sabbath in Early America (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1977) ix-xi, 1-80. For examples, see Henry Pollexfen, A Discourse of Trade, Coyn, and Paper Credit: and of Ways and Means to Gain and Retain Riches (London, 1697) 49; Henry Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers and Related Writings, ed. Malvin R. Zirker (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1988) 80-1; William Temple, A Vindication of Commerce and the Arts, A Select Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts on Commerce, ed. John R. McCulloch (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966) 501; William Temple, An Essay on Trade and Commerce (London, 1770) 24, 28-9, 38, 40, 49, 55, 61-2; James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy, ed. Andrew S. Skinner, 2 vols. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966) 2: 692. See also Edgar S. Furniss, The Position of the Laborer in a System of Nationalism: A Study in the Labor Theories of Later English Mercantilists (1920; New York: Kelley, 1957) 44‑5, 135, 195n; Robert W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society 1700-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973) 94. Edmund Morgan attributes charges of idleness in the early years of Virginia colonization to conditions in England (i.e., poverty and malnutrition, failure of the government to synchronize division of labor, and restraints on men working two trades simultaneously) aggravated in Jamestown by expectations based on the Spanish experience and an attempt to establish a mini-England with a full complement of occupations. However, this does not explain the charges of indolence directed at Morgan’s avaricious, slave-driving tobacco planters. See Edmund Morgan, “The Labor Problem at Jamestown, 1607-18,” American Historical Review 78 (1971): 595-611.[/ref]
The bias is reflected in colonial Chesapeake historiography in the interpretation of many seemingly ambiguous behaviors‑-such as the agricultural regression from English standards (persistence of primitive slash-and-burn agriculture, the lack of a plow, lack of agricultural reform), the concentration on tobacco to the exclusion of corn in the early years and other commodities in later years, and dispersed settlement and the lack of town development. On such behaviors, open to push as well as pull interpretations, historians come down universally on the side of pull.
Darrett and Anita Rutman lay out the two opposing ways we could interpret such ambiguous behaviors:
In one sense, the tobacco cultivation of the Chesapeake was crude, even slovenly, a stark contrast to the cross‑plowing, harrowing, and ditching of English agriculture‑‑the elaborate working of the soil of an increasingly intensive farming system. In another sense, however, it was a model of efficiency, of the principle of the least effort applied to gain the greatest profit. There was no need for elaboration when, with no more equipment than a hoe, a single laborer could set and tend two to three acres of semicleared land, between six and ten thousand plants, making a crop of eleven to twelve hundred pounds cured and packed in a good year, seven or eight hundred in a bad one, roughly three to six pounds sterling at Virginia’s mid‑century price.[ref]Rutman and Rutman, A Place in Time 41.[/ref]
The question is which sense is more accurate: laziness or efficiency? Yet no historian who analyzes such behaviors seriously entertains laziness or even a leisure preference as an explanation when an entrepreneurial interpretation will do just as well.[ref]Cf. Bruce, Economic History 2: 61; A. Craven, Soil Exhaustion 56; Gray, History 1: 448; Main, Tobacco Colony 44, 69-70; McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America 305-7; Lois Green Carr, Russell R. Menard, and Lorena S. Walsh, Robert Cole’s World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991) xvii-xviii. Grady McWhiney develops a similar approach but applies the interpretation only to Southern Celtic culture. See Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988) 59-79.[/ref]
When one starts looking for this anti-indolence or maximizing bias, one finds its effects everywhere. For instance, besides issues of production already considered, one can also see its impact on approaches to consumption. There is a general consensus among historians of the dominance in seventeenth-century Virginia of a Spartan, ascetic attitude toward consumption, presuming that planters survived on the barest necessaries and rolled back any remaining profits into capital accumulation or the purchase of additional factors of production. As Gloria L. Main puts it, “By rigorously limiting his purchases and applying all his labor, and that of his wife, to extracting the maximum quantity of tobacco from the land, a planter could hope to build surplus credits and eventually acquire a servant to expand the crop still further.”[ref]Main, Tobacco Colony 7, 71 (quote), 239-41, 254-60. See also Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, “The Standard of Living in the Colonial Chesapeake,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 45 (1988): 136; Horn, Adapting to a New World 330-1. For a similar view of Spartan asceticism on later American frontiers, see David C. McClelland, The Achieving Society (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1961) 13; Oakes, Ruling Race 81-7. On the other hand, archaeologists take a rather ambiguous stance on non-durable consumption in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake. See, e.g., Cary Carson, Norma F. Barka, William M. Kelso, Garry Wheeler Stone, and Dell Upton, “Impermanent Architecture in the Southern American Colonies,” Winterthur Portfolio 16 (1981): 163, 168-9. A far less common view is to place the ultimate basis of capital accumulation in the demand for more and more goods. See, e.g., Clemens, Atlantic Economy 48. However, some historians note that non-durable consumption was a positive function of wealth and income both during tobacco booms and busts and over the course of the life cycle. As Menard, Carr, and Walsh found on the Cole plantation, “expenditures were closely tied to income” with “belt-tightening when earnings were low” and “more lavish spending during good years,” although “the relationship was not perfect and expenditures show much less variation than income.” See Carl Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South (New York: Atheneum, 1966) 19-20; Earle, Evolution 14; Main, Tobacco Colony 24, 57-9, 69, 71-2, 170, 206-7, 215, 241, 243, 253, 259, 262; Menard, Carr, and Walsh, “A Small Planter’s Profits” 184. James Horn in his recent synthesis also does not stress ascetism. See Horn, Adapting to a New World 1, 7, 307-33. For a classic description linking asceticism and the spirit of capitalism, see Weber, Protestant Ethic 155-83.[/ref] While perhaps consistent with evidence from probate records (which reveal very limited amounts of consumer “durables”), this view ignores much contemporary evidence on the importation of “non-durables”‑-what contemporaries called “unnecessary commodities” or “luxuries” along with “necessaries” like distilled grain spirits, wine, rum, and a great variety of other “strong waters”‑-that an older generation of historians at the turn of the century highlighted as quite typical of Englishmen and which took up much of planter income.[ref]
On strong liquors as necessaries, see Hening, Statutes 1: 245. On liquor consumption, see, e.g., Durand, Hugenot Exile 32-3, 111, 129-30, 138-9, 147-8, 151, 158-9; Main, Tobacco Colony 198‑9, 210-2. For qualitative evidence on the large quantities of liquor imported, see, e.g., Beer, Origins 358; John J. McCusker, Rum and the American Revolution: The Rum Trade and the Balance of Payments of the Thirteen Continental Colonies, 2 vols. (New York: Garland, 1989). For repeated condemnations of “the loathsome sinne of drunkeness,” see Hening, Statutes 1: 114, 193-4, 240, 433, 508; Kingsbury, Records 4: 454; Warren M. Billings, “Some Acts Not in Hening’s Statutes: The Acts of Assembly, April 1652, November 1652, and July 1653,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 83 (1975): 32. For disparaging remarks about individual drunkards or acts of drunkenness, see, e.g., Kingsbury, Records 4: 454; “Aspinwall Papers,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 4th ser. 9 (1871): 175; Morgan, “Boom” 179. For numerous laws regulating retail trade in wines and strong waters, justified alternately by the abuse caused by exorbitant rates; the encouragement of idleness, riot, and debauchery; and the proclivity of Englishmen to drink themselves into debt, disease, and death, see Kingsbury, Records 4: 453; Hening, Statutes 1: 287, 295, 300, 319, 350, 489-90, 519, 521‑2; 2: 19-20, 112-3, 128, 212, 234, 263, 268-9; 2: 298-8, 361-2, 393-4; 3: 44-5; Billings, “Some Acts” 49-50; Jon Kukla, “Some Acts Not in Hening’s Statutes: The Acts of Assembly, October 1660,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 83 (1975): 85, 95. See also Paton Yoder, “Tavern Regulation in Virginia: Rationale and Reality,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 87 (1979): 259-78; Xiaoxiong Li, “Liquor and Ordinaries in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1991. On contemporary comments on the English taste for liquour and a tendency toward the sin of drunkenness, see John Cooke [Cook], Unum Necessarium: or The Poore Mans Case (London, 1648) 9-10, 25-6; [Charles Davenant], An Essay upon Ways and Means of Supplying the War (London, 1695) 45-7, 137-8; Jacob Vanderlint, Money Answers All Things, ed. Jacob H. Hollander (1734; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1914) 86, 117; Malachy Postlethwayt, Great‑Britain’s True System (1757; Farnborough, Hants., England: Gregg, 1968) 219-20; Clyde V. Williams, “Taverners, Tapsters, and Topers: A Study of Drinking and Drunkenness in the Literature of the English Renaissance,” 2 vols., diss., Louisiana State University, 1969.
On “luxuries”, see “Aspinwall Papers” 11-4; George Louis Beer, The Old Colonial System, 1660-1754, 2 vols. (1913; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1958) 39-42; Louis B. Wright, The First Gentlemen of Virginia: Intellectual Qualities of the Early Colonial Ruling Class (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1940) 72-81; R. Davis, Intellectual Life 3: 1574‑5. For seventeenth-century condemnations of luxury, see Hening, Statutes 1: 114, 519; 2: 18, 127-8; Kukla, “Some Acts” 95; Hammond, Leah and Rachel 8. See also Bertelson, Lazy South 74. Indeed one should not play down the fact that most of the tobacco income went to imported goods, reflected in the importance that the Virginians gave to the Dutch who brought few indentured servants or slaves and gave little credit; complaints about an insufficient supply of goods on ships coming to collect tobacco; the specification of minimum tobacco prices in terms not of sterling but the price of goods purchased at first penny, suggesting tobacco was merely bartered for goods; and the fear that so insatiable was the demand for English commodities that, just as Englishmen might drink themselves into debt, so they might spend themselves into debt, as inelastic demand drove the prices of commodities sky high. On exports to Virginia from England, see N. C. P. Tyack, “The Trade Relations of Bristol with Virginia during the 17th Century,” master’s thesis, Bristol University, 48-54; Susan E. Hillier, “The Trade of the Virginia Colony 1606 to 1660,” diss., University of Liverpool, 1971; Horn, Adapting to a New World 1, 7, 140, 307-28. On the Dutch trade, see McIlwaine, 1619-1658/59 74; Hening, Statutes 1: 540; Beer, Origins 358. On complaints about a lack of goods, see Hening, Statutes 1: 216‑7. On price specifications in terms of goods, see Hening, Statutes 1: 126, 150-1, 162-3, 188-90, 206, 210, 225. On fear of debt and condemnations of forestalling, see “Aspinwall Papers” 77-8; McIlwaine, 1619-1658/59 46, 49, 56-9; Hening, Statutes 1: 150‑1; Billings, “Some Acts” 75.[/ref] One can easily accept the importance of real changes in durable consumption in the eighteenth century highlighted by Lois Green Carr, Lorena S. Walsh, and others, without the dubious presumption of an earlier maximizing asceticism.[ref]Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, “Inventories and the Analysis of Wealth and Consumption Patterns in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, 1658-1777,” Historical Methods 13 (1980): 81-104; Carson et al., “Impermanent Architecture” 135-96; Lorena S. Walsh, “Urban Amenities and Rural Sufficiency: Living Standards and Consumer Behavior in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1643-1777,” Journal of Economic History 43 (1983): 109-17; T. H. Breen, “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690-1776,” Journal of British Studies 25 (1986): 467-99; Carr and Walsh, “Standard of Living” 135-59; Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds., Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994).[/ref]
Beyond the Colonial Chesapeake
Of course, you might be asking how far we might go in extrapolating from multiple regression analysis. Perhaps you simply could not be convinced by any such statistical analysis anyway. Or maybe you are thinking the problem is that we simply misjudged these Virginians; either they valued leisure over additional profits (as Smithians might say) or they were pre-capitalists (as Marxians might say).
But I will take the argument one step further and argue that Englishmen in early modern England acted in the same perverse way. Yes, England, almost universally acknowledged to be the true birthplace of capitalism, whatever pretensions the United States can make as to having achieved capitalism’s fullest form. Scholars have argued over when the transition to capitalism occurred in England. Some, following Marx, have highlighted late eighteenth-century industrialization. Others have argued for the earlier emergence of capitalism in a sixteenth-century commercial agrarian revolution with its enclosure movement and the emergence of the putting-out system ala R. H. Tawney. Others follow Max Weber in stressing a seventeenth-century intellectual revolution, the triumph of the bourgeoisie in the English Civil War, and the rise of the economic and political liberalism of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Alan Macfarlane dates the transition way back in the Dark Ages, rooted in the ancient English tradition of private property rights. But few doubt that the transition occurred some time between the sixteenth and early nineteenth century.[ref]For an overview of the recent literature on the European debates, see Richard Lachmann, “Origins of Capitalism in Western Europe: Economic and Political Aspects,” Annual Review of Sociology 15 (1989), 47-72.[/ref] For their part, practically all American Marxians and Smithians, whatever their difference over early Americans, assert the bourgeois capitalist nature of seventeenth-century English society.[ref]For the view of American Marxians, see Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969) 25; Allan Kulikoff, “The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 46 (1989): 124. For American Smithians, see Rutman, Morning of America 2-8; Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988) 34-6; Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989) 36; James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990) 43; Stephen Innes, “Puritanism and Capitalism in Early Massachusetts,” Capitalism in Context: Essays on Economic Development and Cultural Change in Honor of R. M. Hartwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) 98.[/ref]
Interesting, though, seventeenth-century Englishmen, whether in the colonies or the mother country, would have had no trouble understanding the perverse behavior we discovered through statistical analysis. Indeed, to them, such behavior was quite normal. Unfortunately we have lost the language that was once so common. Before we can challenge our biases, we need to hearken back to another world and a species of economic analysis that predates Smith and Marx.
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