13 Colonies Economy

In pre-revolutionary America, there were three developing regions known as the New England Colonies, the Middle Colonies, and the Southern Colonies. These regions were separate until the late 18th century. They are known as the thirteen colonies and they developed through many factors like religion, economics, and politics. Colonial America depended on their natural environment and labor forces to produce certain cash crops, and this will determine the economic ties between consumers and producers, and strengthen the economy of the New World in America. Although religion and politics had a great influence on the development of three separate and distinct colonial regions in the thirteen colonies, economics had the greatest influence because

This form of labor was called slavery. Slavery is a system in which people are considered as property and can be bought or sold without a chance of being free from his/her owner. This tortuous, painful, and new method of labor to the slaves may have brought them misery, but it brought money, extensive free labor, and a successful economy in the Southern Colonies. Before slaves were brought into the colonies, Europeans came in from their mother country to serve as indentured servants (work under a contract for a specific amount of time for essential needs, no pay, and a free passageway to the New World) but few Englishmen and women chose to emigrate as servants after 1669 because England’s economy provided jobs at home also, Virginia’s white population tripled between 1650 and 1700 which increased the number of planters competing and fighting for laborers. So colonists took a different approach to satisfy labor needs and they turned to Slaves in Africa. Slaves were kidnapped from Africa and suffered through a six to eight-week-long ocean voyage known as the Middle Passage to the West Indies. Those who survived the trip were up for sale and forced to work and live in harsh conditions in the Southern Colonies. Slaves worked as

Mercantilism is a system in the economy where trade among nations was a “zero-sum game” where one nation’s gain was another nation’s loss. It highly emphasized the strict regulations of trading, manufacturing, and producing goods. It defended the erection of power states in Western Europe and made a justification for building colonies in the New World The New England colonies adapted to this new form of economics in order to make money and gain for themselves. Because New England lived on rocky soil, the Puritans could not have an agricultural economy so they turned to a fishing industry and building ships which carried about one-third of all trade between England and their colonies. Manufactured goods were traded with Africa and the West Indies which established a famous triangle trade and quickly made Boston the largest single port within the Empire. Mercantilism in the New England Colonies was encompassed by the monarchies of Europe to unify and increase the wealth of the growing empires in which influenced the development of the colonial regions of the thirteen