The African Slavery

An 18th-century British writer was to stick with that hard worker project was the "fundamental prop and support" of Britain's abroad colonies, and the same was true for other European colonial powers Reynolds 108). The footing for this was rooted in preindustrial values and the relationship of land and labor in the New terra firma.

Apart from Spanish gold and silver, the head slyness products to be found in the New World were agricultural goods. Many grew under tropical conditions in which European workers could not thrive, or often even have very much prospect of survival. more(prenominal)over, the abundance of available unused land (once Indians had been set away or killed by the colonists) meant that a poor European colonist-could enjoy greater independence, and eat just as well, by subsistence-farming in the interior rather than by working in the plantation cash-crop frugal system. Moreover, "selfemployment" was a fundamental value in societies such(prenominal) as preindustrial England, where " cedemen were allayholders" (Eltis 19ff). Unless compelled into a cash-economy--by either the physical compulsion of slavery or the stinting compulsion of landlessness, unemployment, and hunger--stinting independence was more highly valued than the goods which a worker in the cash economy could potentially buy. In practical terms, with wages at subsistence levels, these goods were not really available to the worker in any case.

These economic fundamentals interacted, thro

By the new 18th century, however, a number of new social and economic factors were beginning--indirectly, at first--to undercut the slave economy and the slave trade that fed it. Adam Smith was one of the first to make headway that while the wages of workers were a cost to the individual employer, higher(prenominal) wages for labor would increase the overall level of economic activity and so be profitable to businesses in general. More principally, the spread of free-market economic theories led to the ideological belief that free labor purchased in the market was inherently more good than slave labor--even when, in fact, this was by no means ineluctably the case.

Historically, the "plantation vault of heaven" went into a long decline by and by Abolition, indicating that free labor could not "efficiently" be substituted for slave labor in it (Eltis 13-15).

ugh the 18th century, with the prevailing economic principle of mercantilism. Only the cash economy could contribute to the tax instal of the State. Policies such as Enclosure at home and the instruction of slave colonies abroad both tended to support the development of such a cash economy, and in the contemporary view thus redounded to the national advantage. As late as 1800, the "plantation sphere" was a major and thriving sector of the British mercantile economy, perhaps more important than the nascent industrial sector (Eltis 3-8). By contrast, there was no profit in establishing colonies of free subsistence farmers, whose cash contributions to the metropolitan power were minimal. The Northern colonies of the future unify States were founded largely as religious refuges, were of relatively little interest to Britain save as geopolitical tokens in the struggle with France, and were generally slower to develop than the Southern colonies.

Yet another decently ideological factor was the gradual em
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