Colonial Economy Quotes

New planted Colonies are generally attended with a Force and Necessity of Planting the known and approved Staple and Product of the Country, as well as all the Provisions their Families spend.

Whereas, the plantations and estates of this Province cannot be well and sufficiently managed and brought into use without the labor and service of negroes and other slaves …

I attended a funeral once in Pickens county in my State. . . . This funeral was peculiarly sad. It was a poor “one gallus” fellow, whose breeches struck him under the armpits and hit him at the other end about the knee—he didn’t believe in decollete clothes. They buried him in the midst of a marble quarry: they cut through solid marble to make his grave; and yet a little tombstone they put above him was from Vermont. They buried him in the heart of a pine forest, and yet the pine coffin was imported from Cincinnati. They buried him within touch of an iron mine, and yet the nails in his coffin and the iron in the shovel that dug his grave were imported from Pittsburg. They buried him by the side of the best sheep-grazing country on the earth, and yet the wool in the coffin bands and the coffin bands themselves were brought from the North. The South didn’t furnish a thing on earth for that funeral but the corpse and the hole in the ground. There they put him away and the clods rattled down on his coffin, and they buried him in a New York coat and a Boston pair of shoes and a pair of breeches from Chicago and a shirt from Cincinnati, leaving him nothing to carry into the next world with him to remind him of the country in which he lived, and for which he fought for four years, but the chill of blood in his veins and the marrow in his bones.

In the four Colonies of New England, viz. New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Connecticut, their Currency being Paper, is promiscuously the same. …. particularly in our Paper Money Colonies, the Currencies have incredibly depreciated from Sterling, and from one another.

The greatest estates we have in this colony were made … by taking up and purchasing at very low rates the rich back lands which were thought nothing of in those days, but are now the most valuable lands we possess.

All our riches for the present do consist in Tobacco.

British authorities were … outraged that Colonial merchants had made illicit fortunes by supplying French forces during the 7 Years War.

In government as well as in trade a new era came to the colonies in 1763.

The historic dearth of labor was perhaps the central feature of the American economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The men and women who occupied the east coast of North America between 1607 and 1800 have been more closely scrutinized than any other collection of people in American history.

The Old Country must wake up if she intends to maintain her old position of pre-eminence in her Colonial trade against foreign competitors.

From Virginia and Maryland are exported communibus annis 90,000 hogsheads of tobacco to Great Britain of which it I supposed 60,000 of them are then exported. But these colonies not being permitted to send their tobacco immediately in proportion to their [foreign] demands, the re-exported tobacco pays double freight, double insurance, commission and other shipping charges. If the [other British] colonies were not restrained from directly importing foreign commodities they would … pay less for them, even by 50 percent, than they do at present

Iron would soon become cheaper, and Linens and Woolens of our own [made in the colonies] make would grow more in use, as the Spinners and Weavers improved in making them, but there is no setting up such Works because there is no Money to Pay the Labourer

Increase of slaves in this colony is injurious to the poor and inconvenient

During my stay in Philadelphia, I could not help be surprised at the great increase in that City in Buildings, Mechanicks, and Manufactures…. The People of Pennsylvania lay their plans with more Temper and Judgment and pursue with more patience and Steadfastness…. They are silently stealing in Mechanicks and Manufactures; and if they go on as they have hitherto done, they will probably in a few years Supply themselves with many of the necessary articles which they now import from Great Britain.

British-built railways in India helped the British to make money and maintain order and, as a by-product, served to unite the country, ripe for independence.

We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.

The British merchants represented that they received some profit indeed from Virginia and South Carolina, as well as the West Indies; but as for the rest of this continent, they were constant losers in trade.

Massachusetts can not thrive until we get in a stock of slaves sufficient to do all our business.

I pity them greatly, but I must be mum, for how could we do without sugar and rum?

The British Empire (with the exception of a very short period in the 1930s) was a free trade empire, unlike all the other great empires of the world …. Anyone could trade with the British Empire.

Some of them [traders and planters] seem to think that nothing is to be regarded but Gold or Silver. They may at length repent the pains they have taken to teach the Planters to love these tempting metals, for should they ever prefer Gold or Silver to British Manufactures the Cloaths and Household furniture that they are at present fond of and be forced to make such things as they have not money to purchase Britain will reap far less benefit from her Provinces

Without this trade, it would have been and will always be, utterly impossible for the inhabitants of this colony to subsist themselves, or to pay for any considerable quantity of British goods

In 1776 one-fifth of America’s trade ran through the Middle East and that trade involved, in essence, large barrels of rum from Boston in particular, which were sent out of New England to the Ottoman Empire. There it was dumped and the barrels were filled up with opium. From there, the ships went to China and they dumped the opium in China and filled it up with tea and came back to New England.

The truth is, I love history and studied it in college, with a particular focus on early American history. My love is so deep, in fact, I went to school at The College of William & Mary in Colonial Williamsburg.