The economic and institutional lessons of these first settlements, though negative, proved useful in later ventures, and colonization continued with only intermittent lapses throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Because North America rendered no early discoveries of gold or silver mines or ancient populations prepared to exchange exotic wares, trading post establishments characteristic of the European outposts in South America and the Orient proved inadequate. North America’s frontier demanded a more permanent form of settlement. For this to result without continuous company or Crown subsidization, the discovery of “cash crops” or other items that could be produced in the colonies and exchanged commercially was essential. Consequently, the production of tobacco and rice and the expansion of many other economic activities discussed in chapter 3 proved vital in giving deep roots and permanent features to British settlement in North America. In addition, substantial organizational changes were made to increase production efficiency. The joint-stock company arrangement, which facilitated the raising of capital and had served the British well in other areas of the world, faltered when forced to conform to the conditions in North America. Modeled after such great eastern trading companies as the East India Company, new companies— including the London Company, the New Plymouth Company, the Massachusetts Bay Company—must receive credit for establishing the first British settlements in the New World. But their success was limited merely to securing a colonial foothold. With the exceptions of the Hudson Bay Company (founded in 1670 and still in operation today) and the unique Georgia experiment in the late colonial period, the joint-stock company (with absentee direction from England) survived less than two decades in British North America.
The ordeals of the Jamestown experience forcefully accent the difficulties encountered and the adjustments required by the early settlers. The early Jamestown settlers were brought over by the company and given “planter shares,” with profits to be divided five years later. Meanwhile, they were to live at the company’s expense and work wholly for the company. In effect, the colony originally operated as a collective unit, in which both production methods and consumption were shared. But collectivity encouraged individuals to work less and resulted in much discontent. Unmarried men complained of working without recompense for other men’s wives and children. Stronger, more able workers were embittered when they did not receive larger amounts of food and supplies than others who could or would not work as hard. In addition, common ownership stifled incentives to care for and improve lands and to make innovations in production.
In addition, absentee direction from England created problems, because successful production required local managerial direction. Futile insistent demands from England for quick profits sidetracked productive efforts and added to the settlers’ discouragement.
Jamestown residents gained greater control over local matters in 1609 when small garden plots of land were given to individuals and again in 1612 when various institutional reforms were undertaken. To generate more flexible leadership and local autonomy in that hostile environment, a deputy governor was stationed in Virginia. Steadily thereafter, centralized direction from England became less and less frequent.
As private landholdings replaced common ownership, work incentives improved; the full return for individual effort became a reality, superseding output-sharing arrangements. In 1614, private landholdings of 3 acres were allowed. A second and more significant step toward private property came in 1618 with the establishment of the headright system. Under this system, any settler who paid his own way to Virginia was given 50 acres and another 50 acres for anyone else whose transportation he paid. In 1623—only 16 years after the first Jamestown settlers had arrived—all landholdings were converted to private ownership. The royal investigation of that year also ushered in the dissolutions of the corporate form of the colony. In 1625, Virginia was converted to a Crown colony.
Many of the difficulties experienced in early Jamestown were also felt elsewhere in the colonies. But the Puritan settlements of New England, first at Plymouth (the Plymouth Company in 1620) and then at Boston (the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1630), avoided some of the problems faced by the Jamestown settlers. For instance, because the Massachusetts Bay Company actually carried its own charter to the New World, it avoided costly direction and absentee control from England. Stronger social and cultural cohesion and more homogeneous religious beliefs may have contributed to a greater success of communal arrangements there, but as noted in Economic Insight 2.1, the Plymouth colonies also reverted to private holdings. Town corporations prolonged the use of common landholdings, but private landholdings steadily replaced land held in common. By 1650, privately owned family farms were predominant in New England.
Another noteworthy colony established by a joint-stock venture was New York, first settled by the Dutch West India Company (1620) but taken in a bloodless confrontation in 1664 by the British. Maryland and Pennsylvania were initiated through proprietary grants, respectively, to Lord Baltimore in 1634 and to William Penn in 1681. The former’s desire was to create a haven for Roman Catholics, profitably if possible, and the latter’s was the same for Quakers and other persecuted religious groups. Rhode Island’s settlement was also religiously motivated because of Roger Williams’s banishment from Puritan Massachusetts in 1644. These, the Carolinas, and the last mainland colony to be settled, Georgia (1733), benefited from the many hardships and lessons provided by the earlier settlements. Despite each colony’s organizational form, the Crown assured all settlers except slaves the rights due English citizens. The British empire in North America extended from French Canada to Spanish Florida and through to the sugar plantation islands of the Caribbean.
World History
