Profit Motive, Nicotine and Dysentery

1
Profit Motive, Nicotine and Dysentery

• Virginia, 1607-1700
• Understanding Corporate Colonization

2
Virginia Company

• Joint stock corporation started in 1606.
• Investors finance colonization and settlement to
  make money.
  
• Profit-driven colonization more the norm than
  religious motivation.

3
Mercantilism know it, think it, live it

• Dominant economic system of period.
• A nations power determined by its holdings of
  specie gold and silver.
  
• Closed trading system.
• Goal to accumulate wealth in the mother country.
• Colonial expansion to find that wealth and
  develop it.

4
Goals of the Virginia Company

• Bling
• Northwest Passage
• Challenge Spains dominance
• Raw materials
• New markets
• Expected easy wealth, cheap labor

5
James I
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How to be a success in business

• Low costs biggest costs typically labor
• Spanish model Indian slaves
• Doesnt work in Virginia
• Relied first upon white indentured servants
• Eventually moved to African slavery, more later

7
How to be a success in business

• Business success requires good planning
• Location, location, location Jamestown
• Defects of Jamestown site
• Mortality rate seasoning period
• Starving Time winter 1609-1610

8
Tastes just like chicken!(Apologies to Norman
Rockwell)
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Hyperindividualism

• John Smith (aka. Mel Gibson)
• Cant get it together

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How to succeed in business

• Businesses ought to be profitable
• Virginia Company is not
• Produces nothing of value AND
• Labor supply too limited to do much about it

11
Labor Shortage

• People tend to die
• Terms of seven years
• People who live want to go home
• Need to convince them to stay

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Sir Edwin Sandys

• Subpatents
• Guarantee servants land if they live out their
  indenture
  
• Headright system
• House of Burgesses

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Eddie says Thank You for Smoking
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Now we need a crop

• Tobacco
• Introduced by John Rolfe, 1612
• Addictive product, high prices
• Status symbol
• Tobacco has some inherent problems that will
  drive our story from this point

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Problems with tobacco

• It kills people, but people died young back then
  so no one noticed
  
• Labor intensive
• Hard on soil and ecosystems
• Overproduction
• Becomes the dominant crop anyway
• Not enough to save the Virginia Company

16
Dysfunctional relationships

• Colonists and Indians
• Made more so by Virginians reliance upon tobacco

17
Powhatan Confederation

• 30,000 in Chesapeake region
• Confederations of small bands
• Primarily agricultural, some hunting

18
Tobacco puts English on collision course with
Indians

• Used up lands and moved inland
• 1644 major war initiated by Indians, but too late
  to drive out English
  
• English self-sufficient at this point
• War of annihilation ordered by royal governor
  William Berkeley
  
• Established a boundary for white settlement

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Indians arent Berkeleys only problem

• Expansion
• Overproduction, prices, more overproduction
• Pesky indentured servants living longer
• Moving out to the fringes of settlement

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Bacons Rebellion (1676)

• Clash between interests of backcountry
  settlers/squatters/farmers and those of big
  planters in Tidewater
  
• Nathaniel Bacon
• Short-lived uprising against Governor Berkeley

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Why should you care?

• Class overtones lower class whites turn on
  elites
  
• Colonial elites had changed
• Marks beginning of turn toward slavery as the
  primary labor system

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Slavery in Virginia

• First Africans imported in 1619 didnt really
  catch on
  
• Costs v. indentured labor
• Early on, legal place ambiguous
• Bacons Rebellion helps fuel an increase in
  African slaves

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Slavery in Virginia

• Control issues as numbers of blacks increased
• White unity to preserve the system AND
• Keep upper class whites at the top
• Defining slavery through slave codes
• By 1700, VA is 40 slave SC is 66 slave