Farms, Fish, and Atlantic Trade

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Key Factors

A New England farm was a place to get by, not to get rich. New England farmers grew food for their families, but their fields did not produce huge marketable surpluses. Instead of one big crop, a farmer grew many small ones. If farmers had extra, they sold to or traded with neighbors. Poor roads made travel difficult, time-consuming, and expensive, especially with bulky and heavy agricultural goods. The one major agricultural product the New England colonies exported — livestock — walked to market on its own legs. By 1770, New Englanders had only one-fourth as much wealth per capita as free colonists in the southern colonies.

As consumers, New England farmers participated in a diversified commercial economy that linked remote farms to markets throughout the Atlantic world. Merchants large and small stocked imported goods — British textiles, ceramics, and metal goods; Chinese tea; West Indian sugar; and Chesapeake tobacco. Farmers’ needs supported local shoemakers, tailors, wheelwrights, and carpenters. Larger towns, especially Boston, housed skilled tradesmen such as cabinetmakers, silversmiths, and printers. Shipbuilders were among the many New Englanders who made their fortunes at sea.

Fish accounted for more than a third of New England’s eighteenth-century exports; livestock and timber made up another third. The West Indies absorbed two-thirds of all New England’s exports. Almost all the rest of New England’s exports went to Britain and continental Europe (Map 5.2). This Atlantic commerce benefited the entire New England economy, providing jobs for laborers and tradesmen as well as for ship captains, clerks, merchants, and sailors.

image
Figure false: MAP 5.2 Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century
Figure false: This map illustrates the economic outlook of the colonies in the eighteenth century—east toward the Atlantic world rather than west toward the interior of North America. The long distances involved in the Atlantic trade and the uncertainties of ocean travel suggest the difficulties Britain experienced governing the colonies and regulating colonial commerce.
Figure false: > MAP ACTIVITY
Figure false: READING THE MAP: What were the major markets for trade coming out of Europe? What goods did the British colonies import and export?
Figure false: CONNECTIONS: In what ways did the flow of raw materials from the colonies affect British industry? How did British colonial trade policies influence the Atlantic trade?

Merchants dominated Atlantic commerce. The largest and most successful New England merchants lived in Boston at the hub of trade between local folk and the international market. The magnificence of a wealthy Boston merchant’s home stunned John Adams, who termed it a house that seemed fit “for a noble Man, a Prince.” Such luxurious Boston homes contrasted with the modest dwellings of Adams and other New Englanders, a measure of the polarization of wealth that developed in Boston and other seaports during the eighteenth century.

CHAPTER LOCATOR

How did the North American colonies change in the eighteenth century?

What changed in New England life and culture?

What spurred the growth of the middle colonies?

Why did slavery become the defining feature of the southern colonies?

What experiences tended to unify colonists in British North America?

Conclusion: What was the dual identity of British North American colonists?

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By 1770, the richest 5 percent of Bostonians owned about half the city’s wealth; the poorest two-thirds of the population owned less than one-tenth. Still, the incidence of genuine poverty did not change much. About 5 percent of New Englanders qualified for poor relief throughout the eighteenth century. Overall, colonists were better off than most people in England.

New England was more homogeneously English than any other colonial region. People of African ancestry (almost all of them slaves) numbered more than fifteen thousand by 1770, but they barely diversified the region’s 97 percent white majority. Most New Englanders had little use for slaves on their family farms. Instead, the few slaves concentrated in towns, especially Boston, where most of them worked as domestic servants and laborers.

By 1770, the population, wealth, and commercial activity of New England differed from what they had been in 1700. Ministers still enjoyed high status, but Yankee traders had replaced Puritan saints as the symbolic New Englanders. Atlantic commerce competed with religious convictions in ordering New Englanders’ daily lives.

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CHAPTER LOCATOR

How did the North American colonies change in the eighteenth century?

What changed in New England life and culture?

What spurred the growth of the middle colonies?

Why did slavery become the defining feature of the southern colonies?

What experiences tended to unify colonists in British North America?

Conclusion: What was the dual identity of British North American colonists?

image LearningCurve

Check what you know.