Southern Colonies Economy: Factors Influencing the Development of Colonial Regions

"To what extent did the environmental and geographic factors contribute to regional differences regarding the development of the colonial regions?" The environmental and geographic factors such as climate, forced the southern and northern colonies into two completely economic paths. These different economic paths resulted in the North and the South developing regional differences.

The Southern colonies had the nicest climate out of all the colonies. The land was very fertile and the weather was warm for the majority of the calendar year, making it ideal conditions to grow just about anything. The South was packed with plantations of every kind of plant; sugarcane, tobacco, indigo, tropical fruits, tobacco, and rice. The economy of the southern colonies revolved around agriculture. Tobacco production in Virginia and Maryland expanded very rapidly in the seventeenth century, with exports reaching twenty-five million pounds annually during the 1680s.

When stagnation hit the tobacco market from the mid 1680s until about 1715, the planters responded by diversifying their crops. They shifted some of their tobacco fields to grain, hemp, and flax. Southern planter landowners were essentially agrarian businessmen. They spent their days obtaining credit, dealing land and slaves, scheduling planting and harvesting routines, conferring with overseers, disciplining slaves, and arranging leases with tenants. Some plants were much harder to cultivate than others. Tobacco unlike some other plants needed attention throughout the entire year because it went through many stages of the growing/planting process.

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In the eighteenth century the plantation economy of the lower south rested on the production of rice. Rice exports surpassed 1.5 million pounds per year by 1710 and 80 million by the revolution. Tobacco grew in the higher south where the land was flat but rice grew in the swampy coastal low lands. In the radiating rice industry thousands of slaves were being sent to harvest the rice. After all of the crops were harvested in the South whether it would be rice, tobacco, indigo, etc. the crops were then sold to other colonies or to England to make a sizeable profit. The Southern economy took advantage of the warm climate and ideal farming conditions to succeed.

The economy of the Northern colonies was more centered on trade than agriculture. They didn't have an ideal climate like the south for cash crops. The winters were usually harsh and the autumn seasons were usually fairly cold. The northern soil was very thin, rocky, hilly, and fairly infertile so the amount of farms in the north were quickly diminishing. Due to the obvious the North abandoned agriculture for the most part and became a region with a commercial economy, making merchants and artisans the new farmers so to speak. In the half-century after 1690, many New England/Northern cities such as Boston and New York blossomed from urban villages into thriving commercial centers.

As a result seaports grew and the cities became massive trade centers. Through them flowed all of the colonial staples such as tobacco, rice, wheat, and imported goods (examples of the south selling goods to the north). The imports included manufactured and luxury goods from England such as glass, paper, iron, implements, and cloth; wine, spices, coffee, tea, and sugar from other parts of the world; and human cargo to fill the labor gap. In these seaports the pivotal figure was the merchant.

Merchants were frequently involved in both retail and wholesale trade, the merchants also acted as moneylenders for banks did not exist, they were shipbuilders, insurance agents, land developers, and often coordinators of artisan production. By the eighteenth century the American economy was integrated into an Atlantic basin trading system that connected Great Britain, Western Europe, Africa, the West Indies, and Newfoundland. This trading system greatly improved profits coming in to the north colonies.

Although England practiced mercantilism on the colonies it wasn't such a bad thing; it ensured that they would always have a market to sell to. Merchants stood first in wealth and prestige in the colonial towns, but artisans were far more numerous. About two-thirds of urban adult males labored at handicrafts. Handicraft specialization increased as the cities matured, but every artisan worked with hand tools usually in in small shops.

I focused on how the climates and geographical features of the north and south dictated their economic structures and why they differed. The South had warm weather, extremely fertile soil and had flat and wetlands which are ideal for cash crops. For these reasons it is not surprising that the South's economy was agriculturally based. The North did not have an ideal growing climate, the soil wasn't very fertile, and the land was very rocky and hilly. The North thought had access to many ports so it is not surprising that the North developed a commercial economy.

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