Suchergebnisse

Roger Ransom takes exception on three counts to my published study of the burden of the Navigation Acts, questioning (1) the counterfactual proposition I employed, (2) my estimate of the relative burden, and (3) the likelihood of differing regional impacts of the Acts. I shall briefly take up each of these in turn.

Historians have long debated whether the American colonies on balance benefited or were hindered by British imperial regulation. George Bancroft thought the regulations worked a definite hardship on the colonies. George L. Beer believed these regulations nicely balanced and that the colonies shared in the general advantages. Lawrence Harper, in a now classic article, actually attempted to calculate the cost and found that British policies "placed a heavy burden upon the colonies." Oliver Dickerson wrote that "no case can be made … that such laws were economically oppressive," while Curtis P. Nettels, writing at the same time to the same point, stated: "British policy as it affected the colonies after 1763 was restrictive, injurious, negative." It is quite evident that a difference of opinion exists among reputable colonial historians over this important historical issue.

Historians of slavery and the slave trade have often left us with the impression that the slave trade was fantastically profitable. The view that it was the profits from the slave trade which financed the British Industrial Revolution and the first industrialization of the United States appears to be gaining adherents. These interpretations seem plausible enough on the surface; indeed, the latter provides part of the historical foundation for the claim by black militants for reparations. Black slaves, whether shipped directly from Africa, or born in the New World into slavery, served their masters against their wills in return for the subsistence allowed them. Surely there was a substantial difference between the value of what they produced and the value of the consumption goods allotted to them to allow survival.

Economic historians have always recognized the importance of changes in population to any investigation of economic growth or well-being. The payments to labor in every economy, even the highly industrialized modern economies, always constitute the bulk of national income when figured via the factor payments method. Hence what happens to the size and rate of compensation of the labor force is crucial to any economic history. With this in mind we present below new decade population and labor force estimates as a first step toward understanding the overall growth of seventeenth-century New England.