1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [56]
Some have argued that England changed its collective mind because its American colonies were especially conducive to slavery—they had so much available real estate. Adam Smith predicted in The Wealth of Nations that laborers would see the available land around them and leave their jobs, “in order to become landlords themselves.” They would hire other workers in turn, who would “soon leave them for the same reason they left their first master.” Not for more than a century did other economists fully draw out the implications of Smith’s idea. If employers constantly lost workers to the lure of cheap land, then they would want to restrict their freedom of movement. Bondage was the inevitable end result. Paradoxically enough, America’s wide-open frontier was, from this perspective, an incitement to slavery.
On some level, this notion must be true; slavery wouldn’t exist if employers didn’t want to control workers’ movements. But it doesn’t explain why slavery was uncommon in the English colonies of New England and New York, which had abundant land, and common in the English colonies of Barbados and St. Kitts, Caribbean islands that had little. In consequence, many researchers turned to a second explanation: England’s religious civil war in the mid-seventeenth century, part of the worldwide unrest associated with the Little Ice Age and the uncertainties in the silver trade. The conflict was disastrous; between 1650 and 1680 the country’s population fell almost 10 percent. As economics would predict, the decline in the number of English workers drove up English wages, which inevitably increased the price necessary to lure indentured servants across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, the indentured servants who had finished their terms in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Carolina were establishing new plantations and seeking their own indentured servants, increasing demand, which, as one would expect, further lifted prices.
Again, this explanation must be true; any rise in the cost of indentured servants would necessarily make alternatives seem more attractive. But it doesn’t explain why colonists chose the alternative they did: captive Africans. Planters could have found labor in Scotland—and, to a lesser extent, Ireland—which in different ways also had been thrown into turmoil by the English civil war. The Little Ice Age had piled on, making the sea too cold for cod, piling up snow in the hills, and walloping the populace with a series of bad harvests. In the worst period, between 1693 and 1700, the Scottish oat harvest failed in every year but one. Desperate Scots fled their homes in huge numbers. Thousands became mercenaries in Russia, Sweden, Norway, and the German principalities; thousands more set up shop in northern Ireland, setting off a cultural collision that endures to this day. Gangs of Scottish refugees roamed London streets, begging for work and food—obvious candidates, or so it would seem, for American colonies. English farmers had employed indigent Scots for centuries. Yet at the very time the supply of desperate Scots was increasing the colonists turned to captive Africans—people who couldn’t speak the language, had no wish to cooperate, and cost more to transport. Why?
One way to examine the question would be to evaluate the fortunes of the biggest group of Scots who traveled to the Americas in those years: the Scottish colony in Panama. Organized by an ambitious huckster named William Paterson, the scheme proposed using Panama’s strategic location to break Spain’s near monopoly on the silk and silver trades. “Seated between the two vast oceans of the universe,” Paterson rhapsodized, the colony would control “at least two-thirds of what both