{"id":6461,"date":"2016-11-02T15:03:31","date_gmt":"2016-11-02T15:03:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/preconfederation\/?post_type=chapter&p=6461"},"modified":"2016-11-02T15:03:31","modified_gmt":"2016-11-02T15:03:31","slug":"6-5-the-plantation-colonies","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/preconfederation\/chapter\/6-5-the-plantation-colonies\/","title":{"raw":"6.5 The Plantation Colonies","rendered":"6.5 The Plantation Colonies"},"content":{"raw":"

Plantation economies arose first in the West Indies. These produced enormous quantities of products that were essentially new to Europe. Sugar, for example, competed more with honey than with other sources of cane, so there was no displacement of an indigenous European sugar industry to worry about.\u00a0Likewise the production of tobacco on island colonies added something new to the European marketplace; there were no existing producers of tobacco in Europe who might, for example, block imports of the colonial product.\u00a0In the 17th century the business model of plantation farming was transported to the mainland of North America and took root from\u00a0the Carolinas north to Maryland.\n\nOf the colonies associated with the plantation economy, none matters more to the history of Canada than Virginia. First colonized early in the 17th century, it grew rapidly and was aggressively expansive. What emerged was an economy based on private land ownership that resembled in some measure the aristocratic norms of England. Large landholdings conferred power and respectability on owners, all of whom depended on armies of unpaid labour in order to plant, maintain, harvest, and ship their products.\n\nTobacco\u00a0was the main crop of the colony from the early 17th century. Initially this labour-intensive plant\u00a0was managed by\u00a0indentured servants: English workers\u00a0and then Africans were recruited for fixed terms as indentured servants.\u00a0 While this indentured servitude was an option for many people\u00a0-- both whites and Africans -- in many colonies (including Vancouver Island in the 19th century),\u00a0in the West Indies and the mainland plantation colonies,\u00a0it sometimes was a death sentence. Working conditions were poor, and most workers did not adjust well\u00a0to the climate and the environment.\u00a0 Chattel slavery and African prisoners soon\u00a0became synonymous, and ubiquitous in the plantation colonies. Aboriginal people were enslaved as well, though most were exported (mainly from North Carolina) to the West Indies to reduce the likelihood of them running away. It has been estimated by one American historian that the number of Aboriginal individuals enslaved between 1670 and 1715 was approximately 24,000 to 50,000.[footnote]Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South 1670-1717<\/em> (Princeton: Yale University Press, 2002), 298\u2013301.[\/footnote]\n\nGrowing tobacco required large tracts of land that favoured river transportation over\u00a0roads. The plantation economy therefore snaked its way deep into the colony's hinterland and, as the tobacco crop ate into the soil fertility, the leading landowners looked for new territories into which they could expand. Virginia\u00a0was the first of the plantation colonies to turn its attention to New France\u00a0as it sought to punch a hole in the Appalachian barrier to settlement in the West, but that did not happen until the mid-18th\u00a0century.\n\nRemarkably, perhaps, for a colony built on a foundation of inequality, Virginia was the first to experiment successfully with a kind of democratic representative government. The House of Burgesses was established in the 1620s as a legislative body that both advised and, in some measure, directed the governor. In practical terms it became a colony run by the largest and wealthiest planters; offers of free land were taken up by English emigrants but they had to have sufficient capital to make a go of it. These factors --\u00a0the high costs of plantation farming, the implications of having to purchase and manage\u00a0a workforce made up of African slaves, and the enormous profits that could be made from tobacco farming -- sustained a gentry-style regime with strong common interests and anxieties.\n<\/p>

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Key Points<\/h2>\n