Note: This essay was my final, written in a timed setting of 2 hours.
Economics Triumph Over Ideology: Identifying the Key Determinants of 17th century Distinct Colonial English Developments
English colonialism in America in the 17th century was not one unified venture. Three distinct English identities quickly emerged in America, though never with totally clear boundaries: planters, Puritans, and pirates. Each of these groups existed because of economic factors, and their fates were ultimately determined because of economic factors. Puritans, no matter how ideological they were, gained agency from their middle-class status, a product of Henrician land redistribution and monasterial dissolution. The planters of the Chesapeake so often got their start as “vagrants” whose poverty forced upon them a desperation (and criminality) so great they’d end up in a new continent. Their consolation was a land grant after their terms of service, given to them because of the economic opportunity in the region, as well as many marriage prospects in those widowed by the high death rate of the Chesapeake. The pirates also owed their existence to economics. Mercantilism never worked as an economic practice, and the realities of Spanish economic dominance and specie needs in the English colonies made privateering profitable. Nonetheless, ideology played some role in these distinct colonial developments: it tinkered with the fates of the colonists in their various locations, making them not purely victims of a strange place at a strange time. Ideology made the town covenants of Massachusetts and added an extra motivation to piracy. The colonists had agency, and their ideas did mean something, but determining their ultimate fates and colonial structures were the plain economics of their time and the geography of the complicated lands they were living on, whether it be Massachusetts or Barbados.
In Virginia, there with those with ideological visions of top-down control like Smythe and the Earl of Warwick, but ultimately the colony became a mass of small planters thanks to the economic and geographic realities of the region. As much as some wanted top-down control, the Chesapeake was simply too difficult and intensive to plant for that sort of rule. Because of these labor needs, vast amounts of cheap labor were imported via indentured servitude. These indentured servants worked terms of about 7 years, and then were granted land. This system developed as an incentive to get people to be willing to come at all; the harsh climate and high mortality rate in the area made few people want to go without being economically incentivized or literally forced due to the essential illegality of poverty in England at the time.
Massachusetts on the other hand involved slightly more ideology. It was founded by Puritans, whose lack of belonging in the English state led them to want their own “city on the hill” to demonstrate their moral perfection. However, it is important to remember that this Puritan ideology was possible and popular due to their middle-class status in an economically developing England. Their economic success not through noble birth, but through tilling a small piece of land redistributed to them in government reforms, led them to value never-ending self-perfection and discipline. But their ideology of a “city on a hill” was difficult to accomplish, even if they did motivate themselves through this adherence to strict piety. While their ideology allowed them certain unique qualities—they had town covenants; they had more children than other colonists; they had mandatory church attendance—their economic realities and strategic location forced them into activities like shipbuilding, inter-colonial trade, and funding piracy, instead of the pious family farming they had always imagined. Even this love of family, discipline, and rules was enabled by geography, as Massachusetts was fundamentally more livable than Virginia by orders of magnitude. Their obsession with every family having a small amount of land also pit them against the Indigenous people, as happened in the Pequot War, when that land ran out.
New York, the Carolinas, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, just like Massachusetts, had each been motivated by distinct ideologies. Also just like Massachusetts, these ideologies never quite came to fruition, instead folding to the undefeatable nature of the New World economy and place. New York was supposed to be an absolutist dream of top down military rule described in the Duke’s Laws then enforced by the Assize Courts. Though the Duke’s Laws kept an assembly from forming until 1683, once one did, it was quite formidable. When Gov. Dongan was instructed to essentially disband it so the Stuarts could tax New York however much they wanted, there was a rebellion. While this rebellion was somewhat ideological in its Protestant vs Catholic underpinnings, it was also economic in the sense that it was taxes that motivated the dissolution of the assembly to begin with. Carolina was also a deeply ideological project in its start, though not founded in absolutism, but rather utopia like that described in Harrington’s Oceana. But the Constitution that Locke and Cooper theorized didn’t take into account the economic and geographic truths of the New World. For one, prices of New World crops weren’t fixed, undermining the economy the theorists had dreamed of with neither class tensions nor economic booms and busts. In addition, Carolinian land was often dense and forested, meaning it required capital to develop. Due again to the New World economy, pirates would be able to provide much of this capital, making Charleston a pirates’ nest. Maryland was founded with another utopia in mind, this time for Catholics. But, the Catholics who founded Maryland also had basic labor needs they had to fill with poor English Protestants who would soon require religious tolerance and by the end of the 18th century, control over the government. Pennsylvania too ran into problems with its religious utopia. Supposed to be a peaceable kingdom with full cooperation from the Indigenous, there were cultural challenges that couldn’t be overcome by the ideology of tolerance. The Indigenous considered land usable by all and truly owned by none, rendering Penn’s purchase of the land under Western notions of private property not nearly as complete as he intended.
In the Caribbean, ideology played an even smaller role, really only serving as a further motivation for piracy, which was fundamentally an economically motivated practice, as was the slavery and land consolidation that would soon define the Caribbean. Though hatred for the Spanish certainly involved themes like English patriotism and hatred for “Papists,” piracy (and planting in the region) ultimately thrived thanks to simple economic truths. One of these was the fact that mercantilism neither works in theory nor in practice. The theory of mercantilism was fundamentally incorrect: wealth isn’t finite, and in general, limiting the volume of trade through government monopolies and high tariffs are poor economic strategies. Even if mercantilism had involved good economic theory, and it didn’t, it was simply incomplete and ineffective. The English could barely police whole Caribbean island coasts, let alone the entire Atlantic. The second inescapable economic truth was that Spain was immensely rich. The hatred for the Spanish shouldn’t be understated, but there is no question that English privateers would not have bothered with raiding Spanish ships constantly if there weren’t pounds and pounds of Mexican and Peruvian precious metals aboard. The economic motivations for piracy in the Caribbean were so great that piracy became essentially state-sponsored by colonies (see the Hanna book for more on this) that relied on it for specie to mint coins or just the necessary capital to develop land.
The last inescapable truth of the Caribbean was first geographic, then economic: sugar. It is purely chance that sugar happens to grow very well in the Caribbean; it is also purely chance that sugar is the type of crop where the concept of economies of scale proves itself quite applicable. Sugar was simply too complicated (as Richard Ligon described), requiring too many physical structures, too much land, and such around-the-clock labor to be run by the small farmers that defined Massachusetts and the early Chesapeake. Sugar also just happens to be a product that is especially appetizing, even addictive (there is some medical debate to this issue but the fact that there is debate over whether a substance is addictive suggests it is at least somewhat so), and England happened to be in a geographic spot that prevented its easy access. These facts, the tastiness of sugar and its economies of scale, led to a distinct type of economic boom. This boom involved consolidation of land into large plantations and the importation of large numbers of slaves—who would then be subject to uniquely high levels of torture. The lawlessness of the Caribbean waters (as described, the English were not capable of policing it even during the theoretical monopoly of the Royal Africa Company) led to cheap slaves, and the English taste for sugar led to high profit. High profits and cheap slaves led to a system of slavery with a staggering mortality; tens to hundreds of thousands of slaves died in the 17th century alone from a specific and distinct type of slavery that developed in the arduous (and giant, thanks to land consolidation) sugar plantations.
The incompleteness of ideologies and the supremacy of economic and geographic truths only became more evident as the 17th century went on, culminating in moments of disruption in 1676 and the Glorious Revolution-era rebellions. After the Pequot War, the New England colonists had triangulated Indian forces and played all sides against each other, creating a patchwork of allies (Mohegans and Iroquois) and enemies (Wampanoags and Lenape) among the Indigenous. But this patchwork could only last so long, since New England ideology dictated that everyone have a small piece of land setting in motion never-ending expansion. Further economic stresses causing the events of 1676 were the alcohol trade with its health effects and the beaver trade and its negative effects on the soil (lack of dams leads to lack of water overflow leading to lack of silt). Metacom, motivated by these geographic and economic pains in his community, leads a revolt that genuinely hurts the Puritans of New England. While Metacom isn’t successful in wiping New England from the map, he does expose their weaknesses. As briefly touched on, the Puritans were forced by their geography and economic forces to engage in smuggling and to be generally against the Navigation Acts and the crown’s tariffs which hurt them economically. Metacom’s War sets off alarms in the British command, alerting them to the ways in which the Puritans are refusing their power by having no oath to the king, failing to enforce the Navigation Acts, and generally rejecting the crown’s oversight. In this way, Metacom’s War demonstrates to the English just how much New England has been changed by its economics and geography.
Bacon’s Rebellion equally demonstrates the supremacy of economics in the region. Bacon is only able to occupy Jamestown (and then later burn it) with the support of his army of poor frontier farmers. Though Virginia was often originally conceived of as a place for English elites to go to have servants farm for them and stick it to the Spanish with profits, Bacon’s Rebellion clearly demonstrates the failure of that ideology in bearing out. Instead, Virginia is a place of small landowners being forced ever further into the frontier, and England only finds this out when they have to send 1000 troops, the most so far to North America, to squash a rebellion of them.
This same economic tension motivated the Glorious Revolution-era rebellions. These rebellions were certainly somewhat about religion, but the ability to mobilize so many against the powers of the crown definitely begs the question of why so many were willing to take up arms. The Navigation Acts, especially hurting New England, and the monopoly of the Royal Africa Company, hurting the slave-owning regions of the Americas, motivated colonists to rise up against James II, even though his Catholicism did catalyze the uprisings. Had the colonies been only populated by rich nobility and poor successfully subdued servants, though, the rebellions could have never happened. The Navigation Acts and the Royal African Company were annoying to the rich, but they could be devastating to the poor and middle-class. Endless duties, yet successful smuggling, made people aware of the failures of mercantilism and when their colonial assemblies were ripped out from under them along with the Protestantism that was to unify the colonies, the colonists had no choice but to rebel.
Ideology played a central role in the founding of many colonies. The Carolinas were founded as an agrarian utopia; New England was founded on the perfectly moral ideal of a “city on a hill;” pirate nests in the Caribbean often started to stick it the Spanish. By the end of the 17th century and early 18th though, the English colonies of America more came to reflect their unique economies and geography than they did the ideologies that supposedly guided them. The Royal Africa Company lost its monopoly founded on mercantilist ideals thanks to the powerful sugar lobbies advocating for their need of cheap slaves. New England funded all the immoralities of pirates due to its need for specie, rather than standing as some ideal moral force in the world. Maryland lost any sense of Catholicism when their need for labor required them to import Protestants who would eventually take over. Pennsylvania would lose any right to claiming tolerance and peaceable-ness after the Walking Purchase demonstrated the irreconcilabilities of imperialism and fairness. The first English colonists of each colony had high ideals, but geographic and economic truths forced them to adapt if only to survive.