Why did colonial Americans suffer from a shortage of human labor? What are the various ways that they tried to make up for this shortage?
What will be an ideal response?
A. Shortage of human labor
1. even before native numbers thinned, the colonial Americas suffered
from shortages of useful labor
a. inexperienced in, and therefore ill suited to, the kind of work
Europeans wanted done, such as plantation labor, domestic
service, and specialist skills in mining and sugar refining
b. North American colonies could not rely on native population
levels to keep them viable
B. Ways colonists tried to make up for shortage
1. immigrants
a. Europe was unsatisfactory as an alternative labor source
b. Spanish laborers failed in the sixteenth century
c. Dutch encountered similar failure in the seventeenth
d. North America proved particularly hard to populate
2. forced labor
a. Virginia was farmed mainly with forced labor from England
1. "indentured" poor, escapees from social exclusion at
home, who contracted with masters to serve for years at
a time, on subsistence wages or payments in kind, with
no hope of release
2. there were never enough of them
3. African slaves
a. enslaved Africans replaced forced labor, as black slaves became
increasingly available to buyers in English colonies
b. with the adoption of slavery, the English copied, as so often, a
model of exploitation found in Spanish, Portuguese, and
Dutch colonies to the south
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