-Regional economies
-The Caribbean sugar islands
-Lowland crops
-The dominance of tobacco
-New England seafaring industries
-Diversity in the Middle Colonies
-The backcountry subsistence society

[SLIDE 1]

Items that we consider today to be basic commodities were not always available and originated at certain points in history. Tobacco, coffee, and sugar were new consumer goods in Europe that had quickly risen in popularity. Sugar was a rarity in Europe until the 18th century, when it became more widely available and then popular because of sugar plantations in the New World. Slave plantations in the Caribbean turned it into a mass-market product. By the 19th century, sugar was considered a necessity. Consequently, the greatest wealth in England's New World colonies came not from the mainland but from the sugar islands in the Caribbean. England's sugar profits from Jamaica and Barbados exceeded all its imports from China and India. Absentee owners lived elsewhere in luxury, reaping the profits while slaves lived in misery working the cane fields and processed the raw sugar into molasses in huge boiling vats.

[SLIDE 2]

The lowlands of South Carolina and Georgia were the areas along the Atlantic coastline. Rice was the source of wealth for the large plantation owners, followed somewhat later by indigo. 

[SLIDE 3]

Tobacco was still dominant in the Chesapeake areas of Virginia and Maryland, but high taxes on the crop made 18th century planters look to wheat and other grains for export. The tobacco crop gradually moved inland to other areas: the Potomac, James River, and the piedmont, so that tobacco was being grown in both the Upper and Lower Southern colonies. Growing and then curing tobacco was labor intensive, and the massive need for laborers encouraged the growth of slavery in these areas. By the 18th century, slavery had replaced the use of indentured servants in the tobacco fields. The demand for tobacco in Europe kept growing, causing ever greater areas of land to be planted in tobacco, and requiring ever greater numbers of slaves.

[SLIDE 4]

The two southern regions provided most of the mainland's agricultural exports to England. Although some tobacco farming was done in the Connecticut River valley, the rocky landscape of most of New England was not conducive to farming on large tracts of land. Instead, New England's economy depended on shipbuilding and the carrying trade. The economy of the Middle Colonies, which included the territory that would become Delaware, was diverse. Wheat and flour to feed Europe, flax for the linen industry in Ireland, timber products for shipbuilding, and trade of all kinds were all important, along with the transport of goods along the coast, to the Caribbean, and across the ocean. Wherever shipping took place, a large number of professions was involved: merchants, retailers, agents, shopkeepers, seamen, and laborers. There might also be nearby shipbuilding facilities with all of those allied trades.

[SLIDE 5]

Inland were lands on the frontier, or what Indians considered the invasion line. They were thinly populated by people seeking a place for themselves: recent immigrants, freed servants, younger sons of plantation owners. These were subsistence communities. The farmers did not have sufficient hands to clear and farm enough land to produce a surplus for market. It was hard enough to produce sufficient food for their own needs. Nevertheless, they brought with them to their homes the manufactured tools and supplies that came into the colonial ports.

[SLIDE 6]

Some early English settlers had come as part of private venture companies seeking to escape religious discrimination. Once the English government smelled profit, however, the crown took a greater hand in controlling what was happening in English territories. Mercantilism was the dominant economic theory from the 16th–19th centuries. It meant that a country's government tried to keep the country's monopoly over trade. In the case of the American colonies, this meant preventing American trade with other countries. Colonists felt that this was keeping them from making a living or being able to obtain the goods they needed.

[SLIDE 7]

Since the 17th century, colonial trade was regulated by the Navigation Acts. Colonists were forced to buy English manufactured goods because of tariffs on the goods of other countries and could only ship certain especially profitable goods to England.

[SLIDE 8]

North Carolina in particular suffered from regulations preventing trade with other colonies; for example, they carried on a lively trade in tobacco with Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Smuggling was a way for planters to get around the restrictions. Over 90% of colonial imports came from England, but some supplies did come into the colonies from non-English sources: wine, salt, and spices came from Southern Europe; sugar, rum, and cotton from the Spanish and French West Indies. The English, for their part, purchased half of all the crops, furs, and mined items that were produced for market in the colonies. Domestic trade within the colonies was lively in less regulated commodities, like Carolina rice, Massachusetts fish, or Pennsylvania flour.