The First American Boom
Virginia 1618 to 1630
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4222599 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Edmund S Morgan (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1971 |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 169 |
| Publication date | 1971-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The William and Mary Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0043-5597 • E-ISSN: 1933-7698 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1917308 |
| OpenAlex | W2328728753 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
A MERICAN historians have always taken delight in the success that followed the introduction of private enterprise in England's first American colonies. Ralph Hamor recorded the spectacular change that came over Virginia with Gov. Thomas Dale's assignment of private gardens to settlers in i6I4: When our people were fedde out of the common store and laboured jointly in the manuring of the ground, and planting corne, glad was that man that could slippe from his labour, nay the most honest of them in a generall businesse, would not take so much faithfull and true paines, in a weeke, as now he will doe in a day, neither cared they for the increase, presuming that howsoever their harvest prospered, the generall store must maintain them, by which meanes we reaped not so much corne from the labours of 30 men, as three men have done for themselves.1 To which A. L. Rowse adds the comment that comes naturally to all of us: Well, of course.2 Governor Dale's assignment of private gardens in i6I4 amounted to only three acres a man, and he gave no one title to the land. But by i6I7 a substantial number of colonists had fulfilled their obligations to the Virginia Company and worked entirely for themselves. In the following year the old planters, those who had come to Virginia before i6i6, paying their own way, acquired a hundred acres of land in fee simple. Later settlers paying their own way were to get fifty acres apiece and another fifty for every other person whose way they paid. The Company reached for a new source of profit from the labors of tenants who would be transported to Virginia at Company expense. In seven years, while they lived and worked on Company lands, they would pay rent on a half-andhalf, sharecropping basis. And further to encourage immigration and financial investment the Company authorized groups or individual mem
Boom · Economic history · Governor · Political science · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · Archaeology and Natural History · Engineering · History · Law
Colonization and the Commodification of Nature
Slavery
Powhatan Priests and English Rectors
Charles I, Virginia, and the Idea of Atlantic History
The growth of population and labor force in the 17th-century Chesapeake
Economic growth in the seventeenth-century chesapeake
Plantation Production and White “Proto-Slavery”
American Origins and Regional Institutions
| Unique citing works | 8 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,17 |
| Citation span | 1978 - 2007 (30) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 8 |