HI 440 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Indentured Servant, Wage Labour, Southern Colonies
Cultivating a New World
The Atlantic World
● Movement and trade of people and goods between Europe, Africa and the Americas
● Europeans come to the New World to set up farms and factories to produce goods from
the natural landscape
● There is a great demand for human workers; Africa becomes a major source of workers
and very early, Spanish bring Africans to work on plantations
● Indentured servitude becomes property
● The Americas are connected to a global economy that relies on very basic labor
Puritan New England (Cronan goes into detail about this)
● Massachusetts Bay (1030-1040) - the landscape is a culmination of European economies
and has a long history of adaptations and false starts
● The first are fisheries; they were part of the reason that brought Europeans to the New
World, then comes lumber
● The problem for England was the lack of labor in the country, even forced Indian labor
was not practical for the English people
○ So they relied on child labor and wage labor
● A laboring class is created due to the decrease of available land in the mainland
(England) and in the Americas because the Natives were not very easy to push off of their
land
● New England (America) becomes very much like Old England and they abandon their
efforts here
Southern Colonies of British North America
● Agricultural crops were the center for settling, with the biggest crop being tobacco
● The difficult landscapes required immense amounts of skilled labor, so the British
needed African workers
○ However, it was very dangerous to use African labor. Disease, like malaria, ran
rampant among Europeans.
● Slave lives began to not matter, all that mattered was their ability to provide a product
through labor
● Controlling labor became the key to the economies in the south, and even necessary to
the success of smaller farms
○ The selling of Africans even included how they were immune to smallpox, so this
shows how influential disease was
● The “task system” created an ordered, systemic nature in slave labor. This was
especially used in rice plantations.
○ Ex: To complete this objective, you have one day.
○ There was a set schedule, but if a slave completed their task before it was due, the
slave had freedom to use their time as they wished
○ Many slaves grew gardens, traded, and were able to eat their own food
● The task system shows control over landscape and over human beings and how it
impacted the way in which humans interacted
Thomas Jefferson
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Document Summary
Movement and trade of people and goods between europe, africa and the americas. Europeans come to the new world to set up farms and factories to produce goods from the natural landscape. There is a great demand for human workers; africa becomes a major source of workers and very early, spanish bring africans to work on plantations. The americas are connected to a global economy that relies on very basic labor. Puritan new england (cronan goes into detail about this) Massachusetts bay (1030-1040) - the landscape is a culmination of european economies and has a long history of adaptations and false starts. The first are fisheries; they were part of the reason that brought europeans to the new. The problem for england was the lack of labor in the country, even forced indian labor was not practical for the english people. So they relied on child labor and wage labor.
