The Exploitative Colony of Virginia

The Exploitative Colony of Virginia

I believe that the early settlers of the colony of Virginia made it into an exploitative and ignorant colony, due to the fact that it was set up primarily to make a small number of individuals wealthy while ignoring the rights of its other members. In the year 1607, a group of adventurers from the Virginia Company established the first English-American colony in the Chesapeake Bay area (Greene, 1988). They landed in Jamestown, and it became the first English settlement to survive in the New World. They named the colony Virginia. In its early history, Virginia was known for its drive to conquer the land and in some cases people, so that it would bring its main benefactors wealth and power (Morton, 1960). This is where the colony of Virginia became highly exploitative because of the greediness of so few people. The wealth and power that these benefactors were looking for mainly came from the growing of tobacco, a labor intensive crop, which was sold in the European market. In order to grow this crop they needed workers to maintain the fields, however, at this time Virginia was characterized as having a high mortality rate. Thus, they had to go out and find a source of laborers. They went out and at first got the labor they needed by recruiting indentured servants from England. These economically poor Europeans were used and abused by their own people, but not as much as the as the black African slaves. In the mid-seventeenth century, slaves became the main source of labor for the labor starved colony, so that the cultivation of the tobacco plantations would continue. The Europeans degraded these people and treated them in some cases, as bad as a dog treats a fire hydrant. One group ...

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