Labour

Labour was the main factor limiting colonial development. The earliest emigres consisted mainly of English men and women but also of Scots, Irish, and Germans. Immigrants either paid their own way to the New World or entered into labour supply contracts whereby a local factor paid for the voyage against the sale of a labour contract that stipulated the terms and conditions of employment. The former were known as free labour and the latter as indentured servants. To these were added convicts, who opted for transportation to the New World to avoid imprisonment in Britain; they too served a fixed but longer, typically twice as long, than applied to indentured servants. Once the southern colonies began to focus on the production of staple crops, initially tobacco and subsequently cotton, the traditional sources of labour proved insufficient to meet the sector’s requirements, and African slaves began to be imported into the region. Between 1700 and 1770, African slaves accounted for one-half of the total number of immigrants arriving in the American colonies, the bulk of whom were employed in the production of cash crops in the southern colonies.