Economic history of Colonial Maryland

Last updated

Maryland's colonial economic history is marked by a heavy reliance on the tobacco crop. Though it would remain a slave state until the end of the Civil War, it was not until the 1700s that labor began to drive agricultural production in the colony. The colonial-era would also see Maryland begin early industrialization and urbanization, experiment with different monetary systems, and make efforts to diversify its economy.

Contents

Landing initially on St. Clement's Island on March 25, 1634, Maryland's first settlers would establish their colony around St. Mary's City. Where they successfully grew enough food to prevent starvation and to export back to Britain. [1] In these early days, the majority of settlers were indentured servants. [2] Though Lord Baltimore initially hoped to establish a "landholding aristocracy" through the provision of affordable land, the colony's land system promoted the creation of a large number of small farms. [3] Many were owned by former indentured servants. [4] By the late 1600s, more than two-thirds of farmers in the colony held estates worth less than £100. [5] They practiced a form of agriculture that employed twenty-year crop rotations and that preserved the viability of the land but limited economies of scale. [6]

Depression and regulation (1640s to 1660s)

In the period following Oliver Cromwell's fall in England, the colony grew and transitioned to a slave economy. It saw the beginnings of industry and urbanization.

At the turn of the eighteenth century, King William's War (1689–1697) and Queen Anne's War (1702–1714) brought Maryland into depression again as European demand for tobacco decreased sharply. As a result, many poorer farmers began to diversify their efforts, adding cattle and grain to their fields and adopting crafts. [7] Despite the economic uncertainty, indentured servants arrived in large numbers until the end of the seventeenth century. With the dawn of the 1700s, however, farmers shifted to slave labor for their fields. [8] Between 1704 and 1720, the slave population shot from 4,475 to 25,000. [9]

During this period, the slave population was increasingly concentrated in estates with more than ten slaves. [10] [11] Some historians consider this transition to a slave economy to be the start of greater social stratification in the colony, as wealthier Marylanders were then able to increase their farms' productivity through the increasing returns that slave labor enabled. [9]

Other changes were afoot, too. In the 1730s, farmers began to smelt iron near Annapolis. [12] In Annapolis itself, then the largest city in the colony, the urban population doubled between 1715 and 1740. [13] In this era of transition, the colony again fell into economic depression in the 1730s. [14]

Towards the Revolution (1740s to 1770s)

In the final decades of the colonial period, the Maryland economy increasingly diversified from its tobacco colony roots. Monetary policy evolved, as well.

Following the French and Indian War, grain exports reached one-third of the level of tobacco production. [15] Still, the Maryland wheat trade suffered in the 1760s due to crown restrictions on shipping to Britain. Maryland wheat was shipped instead to continental Europe, where it competed against local producers. [16] To supplement their income, large planters increasingly turned to money lending and renting land to tenant farmers. [17] All the while, tobacco production continued to increase. In 1740s, the colony averaged around 20 million pounds per year. By the 1760s, Maryland produced 25 million pounds per year. [12] [17]

English law initially forbade either the export of British currency or the establishment of colonial mints. As a result, currency shortages were frequent in Maryland and merchants often paid British firms with bills of exchange. [18] [19] In fact, until legislative action in 1747, tobacco was a frequently-used internal currency. Thereafter, paper money increasingly replaced the barter system. [20] Unlike most colonial currencies, which were backed by future tax receipts or mortgages on land or metals, Maryland's paper money was backed by a sinking fund in the Bank of England that would periodically convert a portion of its holdings to sterling. [21]

Notes

  1. ↑ Land 1974, p. 5.
  2. ↑ Terrar 1996, p. 90.
  3. ↑ Land 1974, p. 10.
  4. ↑ Menard 1973, p. 40.
  5. ↑ Land 1974, p. 16.
  6. ↑ Carr & Menard 1989, p. 409.
  7. ↑ Clemens 1977, p. 165.
  8. ↑ Carr & Menard 1989, p. 410.
  9. 1 2 Land 1974, p. 27.
  10. ↑ Main 1977, p. 144.
  11. ↑ Clemens 1977, p. 164.
  12. 1 2 Land 1974, p. 39.
  13. ↑ Papenfuse 1975, p. 14.
  14. ↑ Clemens 1977, p. 163.
  15. ↑ Papenfuse 1975, p. 36.
  16. ↑ Walsh 1974, p. 84.
  17. 1 2 Walsh 1974, p. 81.
  18. ↑ Cuddy 2008, p. 60.
  19. ↑ Papenfuse 1975, p. 37.
  20. ↑ Gould 1915, pp. 71–72.
  21. ↑ Smith 1985.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Colonial history of the United States</span>

The colonial history of the United States covers the period of European colonization of North America from the early 16th century until the incorporation of the Thirteen Colonies into the United States after the Revolutionary War. In the late 16th century, England, France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic launched major colonization expeditions in North America. The death rate was very high among early immigrants, and some early attempts disappeared altogether, such as the English Lost Colony of Roanoke. Nevertheless, successful colonies were established within several decades.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Indentured servitude</span> Consensual or punitive unpaid labor

Indentured servitude is a form of labor in which a person is contracted to work without salary for a specific number of years. The contract, called an "indenture", may be entered voluntarily for purported eventual compensation or debt repayment, or imposed involuntarily as a judicial punishment. Many came with forged or no contract they ever saw.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">St. Mary's City, Maryland</span> Unincorporated community in Maryland, United States

St. Mary's City is a former colonial town that was founded in March 1634, as Maryland's first European settlement and capital. It is now a state-run historic area, which includes a reconstruction of the original colonial settlement and a designated living history venue and museum complex. Half the area is occupied by the campus of St. Mary's College of Maryland. The entire area contains a community of about 933 permanent residents and some 1,400 students living in campus dorms and apartments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Province of Maryland</span> British colony in North America (1634–1776)

The Province of Maryland was an English and later British colony in North America from 1634 until 1776, when the province was one of the Thirteen Colonies that joined in supporting the American Revolution against Great Britain. In 1781, Maryland was the 13th signatory to the Articles of Confederation. The province's first settlement and capital was in St. Mary's City, located at the southern end of St. Mary's County, a peninsula in the Chesapeake Bay bordered by four tidal rivers.

A headright refers to a legal grant of land given to settlers during the period of European colonization in the Americas. A "headright" includes both the grant of land and the owner that claims the land. The person who has a right to the land is the one who paid to transport people to a colony. Headrights are most notable for their role in the expansion of the Thirteen Colonies; the Virginia Company gave headrights to settlers, and the Plymouth Company followed suit. The headright system was used in several colonies, including Maryland, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. Most headrights were for 1 to 1,000 acres (4.0 km2) of land, and were granted to those who were willing to cross the Atlantic and help populate the colonies. Headrights were granted to anyone who would pay for the transportation costs of an indentured laborer. These land grants consisted of 50 acres (0.20 km2) for someone newly moving to the area and 100 acres (0.40 km2) for people previously living in the area. By ensuring the landowning masters had legal ownership of all land acquired, the indentured laborers after their indenture period had passed had little opportunity to procure their own land. This kept a large portion of the citizens of the Thirteen Colonies poor and led to tensions between the laborers and the landowners.

The tobacco colonies were those that lined the sea-level coastal region of English North America known as Tidewater, extending from a small part of Delaware south through Maryland and Virginia into the Albemarle Sound region of North Carolina. During the seventeenth century, the European demand for tobacco increased more than tenfold. This increased demand called for a greater supply of tobacco, and as a result, tobacco became the staple crop of the Chesapeake Bay Region.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chesapeake Colonies</span> Historic region of British North America, now in the central East Coast of the United States

The Chesapeake Colonies were the Colony and Dominion of Virginia, later the Commonwealth of Virginia, and Province of Maryland, later Maryland, both colonies located in British America and centered on the Chesapeake Bay.

<i>Tobacco and Slaves</i> Book by Allan Kulikoff

Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800, is a book written by historian Allan Kulikoff. Published in 1986, it is the first major study that synthesized the historiography of the colonial Chesapeake region of the United States. Tobacco and Slaves is a neo-Marxist study that explains the creation of a racial caste system in the tobacco-growing regions of Maryland and Virginia and the origins of southern slave society. Kulikoff uses statistics compiled from colonial court and church records, tobacco sales, and land surveys to conclude that economic, political, and social developments in the 18th-century Chesapeake established the foundations of economics, politics, and society in the 19th-century South.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anthony Johnson (colonist)</span> Indentured servant, farmer, enslaver (1600–1670)

Anthony Johnson was an Angolan-born man who achieved wealth in the early 17th-century Colony of Virginia. Held as an indentured servant in 1621, he earned his freedom after several years and was granted land by the colony.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Dulany the Elder</span> American politician (1685–1753)

Daniel Dulany the Elder (1685–1753) was a prominent lawyer and land-developer in colonial Maryland, who held a number of colonial offices. In 1722 Dulany wrote a pamphlet entitled The Right of the Inhabitants of Maryland, to the Benefit of the English Laws, asserting the rights of Marylanders over the Proprietary Government.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward C. Papenfuse</span> Maryland State Archivist and Commissioner of Land Patents

Edward C. Papenfuse is the retired Maryland State Archivist and Commissioner of Land Patents.

During the British colonization of North America, the Thirteen Colonies provided England with an outlet for surplus population as well as a new market. The colonies exported naval stores, fur, lumber and tobacco to Britain, and food for the British sugar plantations in the Caribbean. The culture of the Southern and Chesapeake Colonies was different from that of the Northern and Middle Colonies and from that of their common origin in the Kingdom of Great Britain.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maryland in the American Revolution</span>

Then Province of Maryland had been a British / English colony since 1632, when Sir George Calvert, first Baron of Baltimore and Lord Baltimore (1579-1632), received a charter and grant from King Charles I of England and first created a haven for English Roman Catholics in the New World, with his son, Cecilius Calvert (1605-1675), the second Lord Baltimore equipping and sending over the first colonists to the Chesapeake Bay region in March 1634. The first signs of rebellion against the mother country occurred in 1765, when the tax collector Zachariah Hood was injured while landing at the second provincial capital of Annapolis docks, arguably the first violent resistance to British taxation in the colonies. After a decade of bitter argument and internal discord, Maryland declared itself a sovereign state in 1776. The province was one of the Thirteen Colonies of British America to declare independence from Great Britain and joined the others in signing a collective Declaration of Independence that summer in the Second Continental Congress in nearby Philadelphia. Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton signed on Maryland's behalf.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tobacco in the American colonies</span>

Tobacco cultivation and exports formed an essential component of the American colonial economy. It was distinct from rice, wheat, cotton and other cash crops in terms of agricultural demands, trade, slave labor, and plantation culture. Many influential American revolutionaries, including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, owned tobacco plantations, and were hurt by debt to British tobacco merchants shortly before the American Revolution. For the later period see History of commercial tobacco in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of slavery in Maryland</span>

Slavery in Maryland lasted over 200 years, from its beginnings in 1642 when the first Africans were brought as slaves to St. Mary's City, to its end after the Civil War. While Maryland developed similarly to neighboring Virginia, slavery declined in Maryland as an institution earlier, and it had the largest free black population by 1860 of any state. The early settlements and population centers of the province tended to cluster around the rivers and other waterways that empty into the Chesapeake Bay. Maryland planters cultivated tobacco as the chief commodity crop, as the market for cash crops was strong in Europe. Tobacco was labor-intensive in both cultivation and processing, and planters struggled to manage workers as tobacco prices declined in the late 17th century, even as farms became larger and more efficient. At first, indentured servants from England supplied much of the necessary labor but, as England's economy improved, fewer came to the colonies. Maryland colonists turned to importing indentured and enslaved Africans to satisfy the labor demand.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of slavery in Virginia</span>

Slavery in Virginia began with the capture and enslavement of Native Americans during the early days of the English Colony of Virginia and through the late eighteenth century. They primarily worked in tobacco fields. Africans were first brought to colonial Virginia in 1619, when 20 Africans from present-day Angola arrived in Virginia aboard the ship The White Lion.

The history of African Americans in Maryland is long and complex. Southern Maryland is the home of the first person of African descent to be elected to and serve in a legislature in America. His name was Mathias de Sousa and he was one of the original colonists to arrive in 1634. Southern Maryland is also the place where Josiah Henson was enslaved, and the place of brutality he wrote about in his later autobiography, which became the basis for Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin".

The Maryland Tobacco Inspection Act of 1747 was enacted in the colony of Maryland with the aim of improving the general quality of tobacco production and exports. Since tobacco was so widely used as commodity money, the act affected currency as well as the structure of tobacco farming and export. As the primary export and revenue source for Maryland, tobacco played a vital role in the economy. The Tobacco Inspection Act of 1747 guaranteed that a specified quality would be met, with the intention of increasing demand for Maryland Tobacco and hence increasing its price, and overall revenue.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Indentured servitude in British America</span> 17th–19th century labor system in the British American colonies

Indentured servitude in British America was the prominent system of labor in the British American colonies until it was eventually supplanted by slavery. During its time, the system was so prominent that more than half of all immigrants to British colonies south of New England were white servants, and that nearly half of total white immigration to the Thirteen Colonies came under indenture. By the beginning of the American Revolutionary War in 1775, only 2 to 3 percent of the colonial labor force was composed of indentured servants.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Planter class</span> Racial and socio-economic caste of Pan-American society

The planter class was a racial and socioeconomic caste which emerged in the Americas during European colonization in the early modern period. Members of the caste, most of whom were settlers of European descent, consisted of individuals who owned or were financially connected to plantations, large-scale farms devoted to the production of cash crops in high demand across Euro-American markets. These plantations were operated by the forced labour of slaves and indentured servants and typically existed in tropical climates, where the soil was fertile enough to handle the intensity of plantation agriculture. Cash crops produced on plantations owned by the planter class included tobacco, sugarcane, cotton, indigo, coffee, tea, cocoa, sisal, oil seeds, oil palms, hemp, rubber trees, and fruits. In North America, the planter class formed part of the American gentry.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.