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Profit Motive, Nicotine and Dysentery

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Eventually moved to African slavery, more later. How to be a success in business: ... Slavery in Virginia. Control issues as numbers of blacks increased ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: 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
6
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)
9
Hyperindividualism
  • John Smith (aka. Mel Gibson)
  • Cant get it together

10
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

12
Sir Edwin Sandys
  • Subpatents
  • Guarantee servants land if they live out their
    indenture
  • Headright system
  • House of Burgesses

13
Eddie says Thank You for Smoking
14
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

15
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

19
Indians arent Berkeleys only problem
  • Expansion
  • Overproduction, prices, more overproduction
  • Pesky indentured servants living longer
  • Moving out to the fringes of settlement

20
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

21
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

22
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

23
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
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