North America in 1763

Hello. I'm Ed Grey, professor of history at Florida State University.

And in this,

this the first of our five modules on the history of

North America in the second half of the 18th century.

I'd like to talk about the state of the British North American

colonies on the eve of the events associated with the American Revolution.

And I think the best way to do this is to, uh, look at the state of those colonies, um,

and the broader international circumstances of North America in the year 17 63.

And this is an important year because it marked the end of the global conflict.

Uh,

known in Europe as the Seven Years War and in

the United States is the French and Indian War.

This was a conflict that began,

uh,

in a skirmish between British colonial militiamen and agents of Imperial

France in an area near what is now Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania,

and erupted into a conflict with theatres of combat in

the West Indies in North America.

Obviously, uh, in Europe, in the Mediterranean, in South Asia and the Philippines,

so a truly global conflict.

Um, the war ended in 17 63 with the formal agreement of peace in Paris,

and among the consequences of that piece was a profound

transformation in the geopolitical character of Eastern North America.

So before the war,

this was an arena of contestation between the major European powers Spain,

France and Great Britain.

Um, in the aftermath of the war, at least according to the peace, um,

that was no longer the case.

Eastern North America would now be dominated by one primary European power,

and one has to use the the verb dominated advisedly.

Since, uh, no waited.

Britain and its empire dominate the entire continent,

but at least it had nominal claim

Are exclusionary claim to this region, Uh,

with respect to competing European powers.

Um,

so on the one hand, uh,

this would appear the war would appear to have come to an end very favourably.

For Great Britain and its empire, it no longer had to contend with, uh,

European rivals in North America.

Um, but unfortunately,

what appears on maps to be a total British victory ended up being a very,

very complicated in some ways,

extraordinarily costly victory for great Britain so costly that it

would eventually lose much of its imperial domain in,

uh, in North America.

Um, and we'll we'll come to that point, uh, in another talk, Um,

let me now turn to the state of Britain's mainland North American colonies, Uh,

in 17, 63 or thereabouts, um,

and talk a little bit about what these places were What they looked like,

what their sort of, uh, geographic, economic and social, uh, circumstances were.

And I think there there's one sort of overriding

point at the outset that we might make.

Um, and that is that Britain's mainland colonies, um,

were exceptionally dispersed from a from the perspective of

population that they were very sparsely settled regions,

Um, extraordinarily rural, uh, the largest urban area in British North America.

Philadelphia had a population of roughly 20,000 people.

Um, to give you some comparison, London, which is the largest city, uh,

in Europe at the time has three quarters of a million people.

So very few, uh, concentrations of population in British North America.

Very widely dispersed population.

Um, uh, the economy of British North America,

reflective of its of the dispersal of its population,

um, is overwhelmingly agricultural. Um, um, there's other economic activities.

A lot of Seaborne trade fishing, um, trade in, um, animal pelts for trade.

Uh, timber trade.

But the overwhelming majority of economic activity

in the colonies is is agricultural.

Um, and let me say something about the nature of that agricultural activity.

Uh, so I think one of the things that, um, um, shaped, uh,

commercial or shaped economic, uh, activity in in British North America.

Um, uh is one crucial economic variable and that is labour.

Um, so obviously, this is a pre modern economy,

not a lot of mechanisation in the economy.

Most economic activity is a function of human labour or

bio power applied to natural resources to yield consumable goods.

Um,

uh, the the input,

the crucial economic input for this process labour exists

in very scarce supply in British North America.

This was as true at the very early phases of colonisation in

the 17th century as it was was in the 18th century.

Um, and colonists devised a series of different mechanisms to address

this shortage of labour.

Um,

the most familiar of these is the institution of shadow slavery or African slavery.

Um, and we see this labour system, uh, dominating the, uh,

labour economies of the southern colonies,

particularly the low country regions of South Carolina

and the Tidewater regions of the Chesapeake.

Uh, these are both areas focused on the production of a single cash crop,

primarily rice in the low country tobacco in the Chesapeake, um,

regions where the initial investment, which is relatively high

and enslaved Africans,

was compensated for by the value of the commodity that was produced tobacco, rice,

and so forth elsewhere in the colonies, we see other, uh, systems, of course,

labour not nearly as coercive as slavery,

But indentured servitude is quite pervasive in the colonies.

Um um, what we might call contract labour, whereby,

uh,

potential agricultural labourers agree to sell their labour

for a period of a number of years,

5 to 7 years in exchange for some something of benefit to them.

In most cases, that something is the cost of transport from Europe,

particularly the British Isles to America.

With the prospect of once the term of servitude is concluded,

this person can become an independent,

um uh, producer on their own, um,

over half of the immigrants to British North America came as indentured servants.

So this is an enormously pervasive and common, uh,

labour system in British North America.

Um, much of British North America also relies on a system of labour more familiar,

uh, in the old world that simply family labour.

Um, family members, uh, women Children,

extended family laboured on family farms to

turn them into productive economic entities.

Um,

so I think these variables this this sort scarcity of labour and

the methods through which colonists or

with which colonists address those that scarcity

has a profound impact on the nature of the colonies. And one

impact is that it yields very different.

Social orders are very different kinds of societies.

So if we go to South Carolina and Georgia,

where the predominant labour system is shadow slavery,

you have one kind of society, uh looks very, very different than, say,

the mid Atlantic area around Philadelphia and

Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Delaware,

where the predominant systems of labour, our family,

labour and indentured servitude

This produces a very different kind of socio economic environment and new engl and

where the predominant modes of labour, our family labour, uh,

there's more wage labour in that region as well.

There is wage labour elsewhere in the colonies. Um,

but the point here is that these different systems of labour,

the different kinds of agricultural activities that they, uh, sustain, uh,

produce wide,

very creations in the social and economic character of the American colonies.

So I think if there's one thing we can say about those colonies

in 17 63

it's that they are very, very diverse and different kinds of places

that they occupy a very large,

wide, widely spread out a portion of an enormous North American continent.