The slow development of industry in North America was due primarily to the relative scarcity of capital and labor and the abundance of land in the colonies. For this reason most British Americans preferred the safer and cheaper investment, land. Furthermore, the economic policy of the British Empire protected industries in Britain and imposed limitations on colonial manufactures. The colonies were thought of as markets for British products, not centers of production. Therefore, Parliament restricted the development of colonial industry that might compete with British goods. The Iron Act, for example, prohibited the construction of new iron mills or the production of iron hardware in the colonies. Earlier, the Woolens (1699) and Hat (1732) Acts had similarly been aimed at preventing colonial export, and therefore large-scale production, of these goods. However, the vast natural resources, the cycle of the agricultural seasons—which usually did not require year-round work in northern col-onies—and the British demand for certain products all combined to produce some industrial development. The most notable colonial industries were milling, distilling, and shipbuilding.
Most manufacturing was not centralized but rather performed within the household. Women played a central role in these home-based industries. Labor was usually performed without power by simple hand tools, and it consisted primarily of made-to-order goods for customers located in the immediate vicinity.
In South Carolina slaves dominated craft positions to the exclusion of white people in many instances. In the Chesapeake region slaves also played an active role in craft production, although in fewer numbers then in the Lower South. Although principally woodworkers, slaves also worked in shipyards and in the ironworks in Baltimore and elsewhere in the Chesapeake area.
The demand for manufactured goods in the colonies increased steadily throughout the colonial era, which encouraged both imports of British goods and domestic production. Generally, colonial consumers preferred British manufactures to the usually less-refined colonial products. Although the quality of colonial-produced goods improved throughout the 18th century, many colonists, guided more by taste and fashion than by necessity in their purchases, continued to import goods from Britain.
One of the most important finished goods exported from the colonies was rum. Taking advantage of existing trade networks, the New England colonies in particular imported West Indian molasses and distilled it into rum. Similar to shipbuilding and other domestic products, American rum served as a less expensive replacement for West Indian rum and brandy. Although colonists drank much of the rum, a good deal was exported to Africa in exchange for slaves. In this and all colonial production, the mercantilist theory of the empire was undermined, because colonies were supposed to serve primarily as consumers rather than producers of manufactured goods.
Further reading: John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
—Jonathan Mercantini
World History
