WEBVTT NOTE Immigration 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.840 In today's lecture I'm going to be talking about immigration and so as an 2 00:00:03.840 --> 00:00:06.200 additional source or a source that I'm 3 00:00:06.200 --> 00:00:10.260 going to be drawing from somewhat as an article by Carr 4 00:00:10.260 --> 00:00:12.920 on the immigration and the standard of living in 5 00:00:12.920 --> 00:00:17.280 the 17th century Chesapeake Bay area. 6 00:00:17.280 --> 00:00:19.000 We'll be getting it up 7 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:23.960 and through at least that material today. 8 00:00:23.960 --> 00:00:26.880 Does anybody have any questions about what we did 9 00:00:26.880 --> 00:00:29.340 in the previous class on Arctic 10 00:00:29.340 --> 00:00:38.100 Exploration. You might want to take a look for this paper on the web. Of course, it's 11 00:00:38.100 --> 00:00:48.300 in the library, but you can at least grab the abstract that's available on the web to 12 00:00:48.300 --> 00:00:53.740 sort of look over your notes to see if you've got some of the right or some of the general 13 00:00:53.740 --> 00:01:10.740 Now, which basically we looked at the discovery, the European discoveries of the new world, 14 00:01:10.740 --> 00:01:16.060 and we also looked at the discoveries in the Arctic where we were able to compare fairly 15 00:01:16.060 --> 00:01:22.660 very clearly public exploration and private exploration 16 00:01:22.660 --> 00:01:28.300 in a more or less isolated history. 17 00:01:28.300 --> 00:01:30.580 The important exploration 18 00:01:30.580 --> 00:01:34.820 as I indicated was of a mercantilist character 19 00:01:34.820 --> 00:01:36.420 where you had 20 00:01:36.420 --> 00:01:39.640 basically private people 21 00:01:39.640 --> 00:01:40.560 backed up 22 00:01:40.560 --> 00:01:43.940 by the government or the king 23 00:01:43.940 --> 00:01:50.940 and you had public money subsidized, maybe ships, military personnel, the power of the 24 00:01:52.100 --> 00:01:59.100 king to declare land for the king, to give away land and to reap all the benefits from 25 00:02:01.020 --> 00:02:08.020 that so you had that very powerful private incentives but the power of government combined 26 00:02:08.020 --> 00:02:12.020 of government combined in mercantilist endeavors. 27 00:02:12.020 --> 00:02:19.020 And basically going about the idea of following the mercantilist philosophy of going out and getting the gold. 28 00:02:19.020 --> 00:02:27.020 Once they found out that there were other lands out there that had all this gold, 29 00:02:27.020 --> 00:02:37.020 and they didn't have very good weapons, it was a big opportunity to go out and pillage and plunder and take possession. 30 00:02:37.020 --> 00:03:04.020 Most notably by the Spanish and the Portuguese. They got the lion's share of the gold from the New World. They got the silver, they got tremendous land holdings consisting of the better parts of the western United States, Mexico, Central America and all of South America. 31 00:03:04.020 --> 00:03:12.020 But they had very difficult times actually colonizing these places. 32 00:03:12.020 --> 00:03:23.020 People really didn't want to go to the New World, except for the people who were going to be able to get the land themselves and get the gold themselves. 33 00:03:23.020 --> 00:03:33.020 The average person really didn't want to go, and so the Spanish and the Portuguese were very ineffective at actually colonizing these places, 34 00:03:33.020 --> 00:03:39.860 of bringing their civilization over and replicating it and expanding the population and actually 35 00:03:39.860 --> 00:03:49.140 taking control and using the land that they had taken. 36 00:03:49.140 --> 00:03:52.220 And Spain was very particular about it. 37 00:03:52.220 --> 00:03:57.740 They only allowed Catholics to immigrate to their territories. 38 00:03:57.740 --> 00:04:01.240 And if you wanted to go to the New World, you actually had to leave from one particular 39 00:04:01.240 --> 00:04:04.600 in Spain. 40 00:04:04.600 --> 00:04:07.040 They were very unsuccessful 41 00:04:07.040 --> 00:04:14.720 at actually colonizing these places effectively. 42 00:04:14.720 --> 00:04:16.800 One question you might 43 00:04:16.800 --> 00:04:18.500 think about 44 00:04:18.500 --> 00:04:20.840 is 45 00:04:20.840 --> 00:04:24.480 what happened to all the gold? 46 00:04:24.480 --> 00:04:30.000 I mean, they had huge ships 47 00:04:30.000 --> 00:04:35.920 to go from the old world to the new world, fill them up with gold and silver 48 00:04:35.920 --> 00:04:38.520 and then sail them back to Spain 49 00:04:38.520 --> 00:04:41.040 and you've probably seen 50 00:04:41.040 --> 00:04:43.180 uh... 51 00:04:43.180 --> 00:04:44.640 stories about 52 00:04:44.640 --> 00:04:46.140 modern-day explorers 53 00:04:46.140 --> 00:04:47.300 of the ocean 54 00:04:47.300 --> 00:04:50.640 who have found some of these Spanish galleons 55 00:04:50.640 --> 00:04:53.920 and the tons of silver 56 00:04:53.920 --> 00:04:55.140 and gold 57 00:04:55.140 --> 00:04:57.060 that they've raised up from these 58 00:04:57.060 --> 00:04:58.920 Spanish wrecks 59 00:04:58.920 --> 00:05:02.560 off the coast of Florida, for example. 60 00:05:02.560 --> 00:05:05.680 So they were just ship after ship after ship 61 00:05:05.680 --> 00:05:08.960 filled with gold and silver. 62 00:05:08.960 --> 00:05:14.320 So what did that do? 63 00:05:14.320 --> 00:05:17.080 What did that do for the Spanish 64 00:05:17.080 --> 00:05:24.080 and to a lesser extent the Portuguese? 65 00:05:24.080 --> 00:05:46.080 It made them wealthy, or at least they thought so. It made some people very wealthy. It made the king. A lot of this gold comes home taken possession by the king, queen of Spain and Portugal. 66 00:05:46.080 --> 00:06:07.080 And they were able to use it to buy luxury goods, to build huge monuments, houses, cathedrals, but it's going to cause inflation. 67 00:06:07.080 --> 00:06:15.080 That's right. They've got gold, but they don't have anything else. I mean gold, but they still have the same farmland 68 00:06:15.080 --> 00:06:31.080 They still have the same number of sheep and cattle in Spain. They still have the same number of trees. They still have the same number of workers. 69 00:06:31.080 --> 00:06:40.080 All they've got is more money. And they didn't want the money exported to other countries. So they actually passed laws that said, 70 00:06:40.080 --> 00:06:47.080 Okay, the king can spend it, right? But y'all can't take it out of the country. The king 71 00:06:47.080 --> 00:06:53.720 can spend it out of the country, but we don't want anybody else exporting this gold and 72 00:06:53.720 --> 00:07:03.720 silver. So there's a huge inflation in Spain and Portugal, and as the money does start 73 00:07:03.720 --> 00:07:26.720 What were they using as money at the time? 74 00:07:33.720 --> 00:07:47.720 You're trading in terms of gold and silver. Now the average person of this time period in Europe didn't really do a lot of exchanging with money. 75 00:07:47.720 --> 00:07:57.720 You basically were growing your own food, getting your own fuel to heat your house, making your own clothes. 76 00:07:57.720 --> 00:08:12.720 And there wasn't a lot of money left over for things like luxury goods, books, cooking utensils, things of that nature. 77 00:08:12.720 --> 00:08:17.720 So that the average person was usually in a barter economy. 78 00:08:17.720 --> 00:08:25.720 So that you would bring your crops in and exchange them with merchants at city fairs 79 00:08:25.720 --> 00:08:53.720 for things like cooking utensils, but the money of the time was gold and silver, and the little guys, the average exchange economy would be using silver coins and units of silver, and the bigger exchanges, international trade would take place using gold coins and gold bars. 80 00:08:53.720 --> 00:09:02.720 The minting process goes back a couple thousand years before that. 81 00:09:02.720 --> 00:09:10.720 The minting of gold and silver coins becomes more and more dominant, 82 00:09:10.720 --> 00:09:24.720 Just because minting coins tells us that the silver and gold is of a more or less uniform character and is of an approximate weight. 83 00:09:24.720 --> 00:09:33.720 So the minting process says, you know, if you came to my mint and I put my stamp on it, that says that I've assayed it, or essayed it, 84 00:09:33.720 --> 00:09:44.720 I've essayed it, which means I've looked at the purity of the metal, and I've weighed it, and I'm saying that this is one Mark Thornton coin. 85 00:09:44.720 --> 00:09:59.720 And then everybody starts to find out that I'm a very honest person, and everybody starts accepting and trading my coins on an equal basis instead of having to weigh them and essay them all the time. 86 00:09:59.720 --> 00:10:06.120 So I developed this great reputation, and then what do I do next? 87 00:10:06.120 --> 00:10:07.120 Start cheating. 88 00:10:07.120 --> 00:10:11.240 No, I wouldn't do that. 89 00:10:11.240 --> 00:10:20.040 So gold and silver coins are the medium of exchange from antiquity, several thousand 90 00:10:20.040 --> 00:10:25.400 years before this, until fairly recently. 91 00:10:25.400 --> 00:10:31.400 Whatever Money is a fairly recent development, and we're going to be talking a lot about that. 92 00:10:31.400 --> 00:10:35.400 Rothbard will have much to say about that. 93 00:10:35.400 --> 00:10:50.400 So we have this great inflation, two developments that come from this, one, and they're kind of indirect developments. 94 00:10:50.400 --> 00:11:07.400 The price inflation in Europe is a direct development of the money. The two indirect but very important secondary phenomenon is one, we discover the quantity theory of money. 95 00:11:07.400 --> 00:11:21.400 Okay, not surprisingly people puzzled over the fact that, let's say, a horse was equal to a half an ounce of gold. 96 00:11:21.400 --> 00:11:29.400 And it pretty much had been equal to a half an ounce of gold for as far as everybody could remember. 97 00:11:29.400 --> 00:11:43.400 And then all of a sudden, within one generation, a horse might cost an ounce or an ounce and a half or two ounces of gold, and everything else was jumping up in price too. 98 00:11:43.400 --> 00:11:52.400 Not just a little bit, but by a factor of 100 or 200 percent. 99 00:11:52.400 --> 00:12:10.400 So, not surprisingly, people would puzzle over this. It's kind of like the price of gasoline in the U.S. going from like $1.59 a gallon to $3.09 a gallon in one year, except it happened to everything. 100 00:12:10.400 --> 00:12:31.400 So the thinkers of the time eventually came up with the quantity theory of money, which basically tells us that if the quantity of money in society increases, prices are also going to increase. 101 00:12:31.400 --> 00:12:53.400 Another related effect was that Spain goes into economic decline. Spain had been a leading economic power in Europe. It was the leading military power in Europe. 102 00:12:53.400 --> 00:13:09.400 But this period of discovery, colonization, and bringing the gold back basically set the stage for the economic and military decline of Spain. 103 00:13:09.400 --> 00:13:24.580 Of course, Britain replaces Spain, and Britain was the country that didn't really have any 104 00:13:24.580 --> 00:13:32.840 local domestic gold and silver production. 105 00:13:32.840 --> 00:13:39.840 So money, if you just look at that little bit of evidence, suggests that money really 106 00:13:39.860 --> 00:13:46.860 isn't wealth. It's still just our plain old ordinary medium of exchange. 107 00:13:46.860 --> 00:13:52.860 So all the gold standards are less like a great depression in the economy? 108 00:14:16.860 --> 00:14:46.860 had a stagnating effect in their economy and also there was a drive towards the production of luxury goods in Spain and because of the mercantilist policies and that they had sort of gone away from free trade and that sort of thing, what ended up happening was the money was funneled into areas in the economy like luxury good production and away from staple production. 109 00:14:46.860 --> 00:15:16.860 Food, Clothing, and Shelter and so they were pushing their economy in the direction and of course the more you push an economy in a particular direction the less overall production you're going to get because you're putting resources there and the cost of producing additional luxury goods becomes greater and greater and greater and what are you losing? You're losing 110 00:15:16.860 --> 00:15:33.860 large quantities of staple production. So they had a very unbalanced economy and a weakening of their overall economy as a result. I wouldn't describe it as a crash and depression type of a phenomenon. That's a very good point though. 111 00:15:33.860 --> 00:15:46.860 Okay, now more to our point is what about the French and British who controlled the colonies that we now know as the United States and Canada? 112 00:15:46.860 --> 00:15:59.860 Well, they didn't have much luck colonizing either. They set up what's called a joint stock company approach, kind of a mercantilist approach, 113 00:15:59.860 --> 00:16:05.860 where the government's in the project providing land, land grants, to the companies 114 00:16:05.860 --> 00:16:15.860 and it's the company's job to find some way to get people over to the new world and start using this colony. 115 00:16:15.860 --> 00:16:23.860 It doesn't do the king any good if there's nobody over there working it. 116 00:16:23.860 --> 00:16:49.860 The Virginia Company is begun in 1606, and the Virginia Company actually consists of the London Company plus the Plymouth Company, 117 00:16:49.860 --> 00:17:01.860 which I don't think has anything really to do with the automobile. I'm not sure, but I don't think so. 118 00:17:01.860 --> 00:17:26.860 Okay, it was the London Company and was established in 1607 to establish a settlement in Jamestown, Virginia. 119 00:17:26.860 --> 00:17:34.100 Now they really didn't have very good information about the colonies and the new world. 120 00:17:34.100 --> 00:17:40.460 And so the London Company set forth some rather optimistic goals for the people who were to 121 00:17:40.460 --> 00:17:43.800 found Jamestown. 122 00:17:43.800 --> 00:17:51.820 The London Company was to establish a Northwest Passage, in other words they were supposed 123 00:17:51.820 --> 00:18:00.020 was to find that route around Northern Canada over to Asia, which, as we saw in the last 124 00:18:00.020 --> 00:18:11.220 class, ultimately it took 92 expeditions and a couple of hundred years more, or 250 125 00:18:11.220 --> 00:18:20.420 years more, to actually find that Northwest Passage. So, that first goal was a little 126 00:18:20.420 --> 00:18:30.420 The company was also supposed to find gold and silver and send it back to the company in London. 127 00:18:30.420 --> 00:18:40.420 They were also supposed to feed for themselves, fend for themselves, and send back all excess production back to London. 128 00:18:40.420 --> 00:18:45.420 So these are rather optimistic goals. 129 00:18:45.420 --> 00:19:04.260 Of the 105 people who made the initial voyage, 67 died in the first year. 130 00:19:04.260 --> 00:19:13.220 From lack of proper nutrition, hard work, disease, just about everything you would do 131 00:19:13.220 --> 00:19:20.700 do to try to kill yourself. They were trying to do, basically. Set up everything from scratch, 132 00:19:20.700 --> 00:19:26.820 which meant a lot of hard work, not a lot of access to food, because that takes a couple 133 00:19:26.820 --> 00:19:36.200 of years to get going, disease, the elements, the unknown, new sets of everything from diseases 134 00:19:36.200 --> 00:19:43.200 to animals to trees to everything was brand new, basically. The next year, 400 more people 135 00:19:43.220 --> 00:19:55.340 More people were sent from London to Jamestown, but things didn't improve at all. 136 00:19:55.340 --> 00:19:59.980 This is referred to as the starving time. 137 00:19:59.980 --> 00:20:11.460 They actually had more mouths to feed, but not a whole lot more crops to feed them. 138 00:20:11.460 --> 00:20:23.740 Of the 505 people who made that initial two voyages, within a year's time, after they 139 00:20:23.740 --> 00:20:36.020 had all arrived, there were only 60 people left, so the death rate was very high. 140 00:20:36.020 --> 00:20:43.080 Of the 505 people who made the two initial voyages, after they all had arrived, a year 141 00:20:43.080 --> 00:20:54.280 after that point, only 60 people survived. So you have 400 some odd people dying, lack 142 00:20:54.280 --> 00:21:04.980 of food and so on. Yes. So that would have been, the London Company starts in 1607, they 143 00:21:04.980 --> 00:21:22.740 They arrived in 1608, so it would be about 1611. 144 00:21:22.740 --> 00:21:26.660 Now the people who were over there were indentured servants. 145 00:21:26.660 --> 00:21:34.740 An indentured servant is somebody who signs a contract, and in general the contract specifies 146 00:21:34.740 --> 00:21:51.740 The company will pay for your voyage, they will supply you with food on the way over, and they will provide supplies like tools, some food, and some clothing to get you started. 147 00:21:51.740 --> 00:22:00.740 And then you have to work for that company for a period of several years, four, five, six, seven years depending upon the contract. 148 00:22:00.740 --> 00:22:10.740 And then you're working for the company. And then after that period of time, you're free to go. You've paid off your debt. 149 00:22:10.740 --> 00:22:25.740 So that's what an indentured servant or an indenture contract is generally all about. 150 00:22:25.740 --> 00:22:45.740 Now, the colonists were considered by the company as being lazy. They blamed initially that all of these mistakes, all of this death, was because the colonists wouldn't work. They wouldn't work enough to provide their own food and that's why they died. 151 00:22:45.740 --> 00:23:12.740 But a more economic explanation for their failure, besides just all of the risks and uncertainties, was the fact that basically the colonists were working under a system not of private initiative, of incentives and property, 152 00:23:12.740 --> 00:23:19.740 But they were working under a system that is almost better characterized as socialism. 153 00:23:19.740 --> 00:23:28.740 Okay, where everybody would work according to their ability and receive goods according to their needs. 154 00:23:28.740 --> 00:23:32.740 And so they were all working for the common good. 155 00:23:32.740 --> 00:23:44.740 But under those conditions, you needed a very motivated workforce to do that hard work, to produce those goods. 156 00:23:47.740 --> 00:23:55.740 But other than the possibility of dying, there really was no good motivation. 157 00:23:55.740 --> 00:24:10.740 In 1612, as a matter of desperation really, the colonists were given their own property to raise crops on. 158 00:24:10.740 --> 00:24:17.740 So instead of everybody working the same large farm and contributing their labor to it, 159 00:24:17.740 --> 00:24:46.740 In 1612, they decided, well, what we're going to do is instead of everybody working this large farm, what we're going to do is we're going to divide it up into individual plots, and everybody works their own plot, you get to keep what you produce, and you pay the company a fixed fee. 160 00:24:46.740 --> 00:25:09.740 And the fixed fee was something like two barrels of grain, something like that. So no matter what you produced on your individual plot, each plot owner had to give the company a fixed fee, which would pay off your debt to the company. 161 00:25:09.740 --> 00:25:34.740 Now that solution did stabilize things, but of the first 6,000 people who came over, 4,000 of them died. 162 00:25:34.740 --> 00:26:03.740 So the company's approach, this joint stock company approach, this sort of mercantilist approach to colonization really was a failure and what ended up happening was the system was created or moved in the direction of a private property system and the company was ultimately dissolved and instead of being a company it became a colony. 163 00:26:03.740 --> 00:26:10.740 of Individual Land Holders. And things stabilized and things started to grow somewhat, but the important thing here is that life in the colonies was very, very difficult. Even after they made these improvements in the indenture contracts, the company structure, so on, life was stable. 164 00:26:33.740 --> 00:26:47.740 It's still very, very difficult and emigrating from the old world to the new world was not a choice that was really relished by many people. 165 00:26:47.740 --> 00:26:58.740 You can imagine, I mean, if you were in Europe at the time, things were not so great, especially for the lower classes. 166 00:26:58.740 --> 00:27:06.820 But are you really going to think about, well, yeah, maybe I'll just leave all of this and 167 00:27:06.820 --> 00:27:18.020 go over there where there's no structure to society and you've basically got to start 168 00:27:18.020 --> 00:27:26.580 from scratch and you've got to work extremely hard and you've got all these new diseases 169 00:27:26.580 --> 00:27:41.580 The choice of going to the New World was not one that people took lightly. It wasn't like, oh yeah, let's go have a fun over there in America. 170 00:27:41.580 --> 00:27:52.580 In England at the time, beginning of the 17th century, life expectancy was about 20%. 171 00:27:52.580 --> 00:28:09.580 Life expectancy was about 28 years old. So if you were living back in the 17th century, you'd already be two-thirds the way through your average life expectancy. 172 00:28:09.580 --> 00:28:27.580 In America, in a sample from Virginia and Maryland, life expectancy was only 21 years of age. 173 00:28:27.580 --> 00:28:36.580 And given the fact that most people were coming over and not being born there, 174 00:28:36.580 --> 00:28:58.580 The death rate was very, very high. In terms of food and what we refer to as raw wages, how much food can you consume in a particular area, in America things were better than in Europe. 175 00:28:58.580 --> 00:29:24.580 After the initial phases of these initial settlements, and once the agricultural community was developed and you had planted and you had cleared land, and you were grazing crops, food production was actually quite high, so that people actually had more calories to consume in the new world than in the old world. 176 00:29:24.580 --> 00:29:34.580 So in that factor, the food factor, Americans were better off, at least in terms of quantity. 177 00:29:34.580 --> 00:29:43.580 Not necessarily in terms of quantity. In England, the average consumer would be consuming things like beer and bread. 178 00:29:43.580 --> 00:30:07.580 Your diet, the bulk of it was beer and bread, although not necessarily in that order, and you would also have other supplemental things like dairy products, meat, vegetables and things like that, but most of your calories came from grain of one form or another. 179 00:30:07.580 --> 00:30:26.580 In the New World, they relied a lot on corn for their caloric production. They could produce lots of corn per person. A farmer could easily produce more than enough for himself and have excess production. 180 00:30:26.580 --> 00:30:40.580 There was also lots of game, wild game that could be captured, and so the number of calories that people consumed in the United States was substantially above that of Europe. 181 00:30:40.580 --> 00:30:54.580 But the quality left something to be desired. The Europeans didn't like generally eating corn, corn mush, corn meal, corn bread, things of that nature. 182 00:30:54.580 --> 00:31:07.580 And they hadn't really developed, because they didn't have a lot of grains, there was no beer, which led to a lot of discontent amongst the indentured servants. 183 00:31:07.580 --> 00:31:16.580 As a matter of fact, one Virginian who was commenting or writing about the high death rate in Virginia, he said, quote, 184 00:31:16.580 --> 00:31:24.160 quote, More do die here of the disease of the minds than of the body by having this 185 00:31:24.160 --> 00:31:30.420 country over-promised unto them in England and by not knowing thou shall have to drink 186 00:31:30.420 --> 00:31:32.380 water here. 187 00:31:32.380 --> 00:31:41.580 So they were very upset about this beer problem and they overcame that problem, well you probably 188 00:31:41.580 --> 00:31:45.900 We all know how they overcame that problem. 189 00:31:45.900 --> 00:31:57.860 Celebrated myth of American history, I think it's a myth, whiskey comes along a lot later, 190 00:31:57.860 --> 00:32:07.900 the rum trade comes along later, they, Johnny Appleseed planted apples all over the place 191 00:32:07.900 --> 00:32:13.040 And they made apple cider, and then they made hard apple cider, and they drank a lot of 192 00:32:13.040 --> 00:32:22.620 apple cider that had been fermented into hard cider or apple jack. 193 00:32:22.620 --> 00:32:26.120 You worked harder and longer in the New World. 194 00:32:26.120 --> 00:32:31.720 There were no draft animals or very few draft animals, so you had to go cut your own trees 195 00:32:31.720 --> 00:32:35.280 down and plow your own fields and all that kind of stuff. 196 00:32:35.280 --> 00:32:40.140 You didn't have any draft animals to do the plowing for you. 197 00:32:40.140 --> 00:32:48.140 The upside of the New World is that if you lived long enough, you paid off your indenture 198 00:32:48.140 --> 00:32:53.800 and you could pretty easily get your own land. 199 00:32:53.800 --> 00:32:58.640 First of all, you'd start off by renting somebody else's land and you would take the excess 200 00:32:58.640 --> 00:33:05.320 Excess production from that land to buy your own land, and land was cheap. 201 00:33:05.320 --> 00:33:08.400 And then you'd start farming your own land. 202 00:33:08.400 --> 00:33:16.040 And you'd take the excess production from that, and what would you do with it? 203 00:33:16.040 --> 00:33:18.560 You'd buy more land, and then? 204 00:33:18.560 --> 00:33:24.020 Well, you couldn't afford slaves, but they would get their own indentures. 205 00:33:24.020 --> 00:33:30.020 and they would buy the contracts of their own indentured servants. 206 00:33:30.020 --> 00:33:39.020 Slavery comes along a couple decades after the first settlements. 207 00:33:39.020 --> 00:33:53.020 So the trade-off here was that the New World was hard work, low quality food, not a lot of amenities, that sort of thing. 208 00:33:53.020 --> 00:34:06.020 But, eventually, if you lived long enough and worked hard enough, you could end up owning your own land and becoming fairly well off. 209 00:34:06.020 --> 00:34:15.020 So it's a life and death struggle, and the payoff is independence in land. 210 00:34:15.020 --> 00:34:39.020 The other colony in Plymouth, the Plymouth Company started in 1607. And this is the Pilgrims, the Puritans, the English Protestants. They come over in the Mayflower in 1620, landing in Massachusetts. 211 00:34:39.020 --> 00:34:49.340 Half of them die in the first year. 212 00:34:49.340 --> 00:35:01.300 Another ship comes over in 1621 called the Fortune, but like with the Jamestown settlement, 213 00:35:01.300 --> 00:35:07.860 the additional hands, the additional people that it brought over really just intensified 214 00:35:07.860 --> 00:35:14.760 The Lack of Food and the Famine that they were experiencing. 215 00:35:14.760 --> 00:35:23.280 And they also made the mistake of organizing their venture on a socialist basis, where 216 00:35:23.280 --> 00:35:30.040 everyone works for the company themselves, plus the investors back in the New World or 217 00:35:30.040 --> 00:35:32.140 the Old World. 218 00:35:32.140 --> 00:35:40.380 Everything that is produced is put into a common storehouse and then is divided according 219 00:35:40.380 --> 00:35:41.380 to your needs. 220 00:35:41.380 --> 00:35:48.340 And so the governor of the company is going to take all the production of the lands into 221 00:35:48.340 --> 00:35:52.980 the common storehouse and then dole things out to families and individuals based on their 222 00:35:52.980 --> 00:35:54.680 individual needs. 223 00:35:54.680 --> 00:35:58.880 And then at the end of the period, at the end of the indenture period, things will get 224 00:35:58.880 --> 00:36:06.800 divided up between the remaining colonists and the investors back in London. 225 00:36:06.800 --> 00:36:13.780 So that families were supplied based on their size and composition, but work was done essentially 226 00:36:13.780 --> 00:36:19.160 on the, work on the crops at least was done essentially by the men and the single men 227 00:36:19.160 --> 00:36:26.660 were working as much as the married men and this of course did not sit too well with the 228 00:36:26.660 --> 00:36:36.660 of the Single Men because they were essentially working for the support of other people's families. 229 00:36:36.660 --> 00:36:49.660 This is kind of odd because the reason the Puritans came over to the New World is they wanted to protect their children from the influences of society. 230 00:36:49.660 --> 00:37:13.660 The whole sort of goal of this religious group was to protect the children, but actually, when they got over there, the incentive problem was based on the fact that the children were drawing rations essentially, and the work was provided equally, but the benefits were not. 231 00:37:19.660 --> 00:37:29.660 So the initial harvest feasts of these Puritans, or the Pilgrims, what we now call Thanksgiving, 232 00:37:29.660 --> 00:37:37.660 was not really so much a big festival celebrating plentiful, bountiful production. 233 00:37:37.660 --> 00:37:45.660 They weren't producing enough food to meet their needs, and people were dying because of malnutrition. 234 00:37:45.660 --> 00:38:00.660 So those initial harvest festivals were not so much a thanksgiving as they were a last big meal for condemned men, because most of them ended up dying. 235 00:38:00.660 --> 00:38:29.660 Like in Jamestown, the governor of this colony, Governor Bradford, after a couple of these disastrous years, and as a matter of desperation, also turned the Plymouth colony into a private property system, where they took the jointly held croplands from the company and divided them up into individual property lots. 236 00:38:29.660 --> 00:38:45.780 Lots. That was in 1623, so the third year that they were over there. And things turned 237 00:38:45.780 --> 00:38:52.060 around fairly quickly so that by 1627 the columnists were able to actually buy out the 238 00:38:52.060 --> 00:38:58.980 investors in the company and turn it into their own settlement. So instead of a company 239 00:38:58.980 --> 00:39:19.980 with investors, indenture, being indentured in the new world, they were able to actually produce enough to buy out the investors to have their own private property lots and become a settlement rather than a company or a colony. 240 00:39:19.980 --> 00:39:31.980 There were of course other companies and other proprietary colonies, Pennsylvania, Maryland, 241 00:39:31.980 --> 00:39:38.260 parts of the Carolinas were all settled by proprietor colony systems whereby the king 242 00:39:38.260 --> 00:39:47.160 gave some particular person the right to settle the area and the person paid the king the 243 00:39:47.160 --> 00:39:59.160 and the right for that land and then that person would bring over the colonists and sell private property lots to those colonists. 244 00:39:59.160 --> 00:40:14.360 But still the question remains, why come to America? I mean, unless you're just pretty 245 00:40:14.360 --> 00:40:21.940 well misinformed, there's a problem with going over there. I mean, things are pretty good 246 00:40:21.940 --> 00:40:28.340 in Europe and things are really, really tough in the New World. 247 00:40:28.340 --> 00:40:31.800 So who would migrate to the New World? 248 00:40:31.800 --> 00:40:36.840 Why did so few people go to the New World? 249 00:40:36.840 --> 00:40:45.420 And why did they continue to indenture themselves to the New World even after slavery became 250 00:40:45.420 --> 00:40:56.780 the dominant mode of importing labor. 251 00:40:56.780 --> 00:41:06.280 If you were an economist, what would you suspect is going on here when you've got things are 252 00:41:06.280 --> 00:41:10.660 nice in Europe and things are difficult in the new world? 253 00:41:10.660 --> 00:41:15.660 Why would you expect people to make that choice anyways? 254 00:41:15.660 --> 00:41:24.180 Well, they're stupid, they're foolish, they're defrauded, you know, those kind of reasons. 255 00:41:24.180 --> 00:41:27.780 There's great potential. 256 00:41:27.780 --> 00:41:34.060 That is true. 257 00:41:34.060 --> 00:41:36.060 Religious reasons is an important one. 258 00:41:36.060 --> 00:41:46.060 And it becomes an important reason, for sure. 259 00:41:46.060 --> 00:41:51.060 Well, the key here is whenever I ask you what should an economist think, 260 00:41:51.060 --> 00:41:57.060 one of the things you always go to is opportunity cost, right? 261 00:41:57.060 --> 00:42:04.060 Opportunity cost, it's really simple, it's really easy, it's right in the first couple pages of the principal's book. 262 00:42:04.060 --> 00:42:12.420 So whenever you get into a jam like that, just think, okay, what's the opportunity cost? 263 00:42:12.420 --> 00:42:19.760 So while things are good in general in Europe, there are going to be some people who have 264 00:42:19.760 --> 00:42:22.500 a very low opportunity cost. 265 00:42:22.500 --> 00:42:33.300 They don't have any opportunities in Europe. 266 00:42:33.300 --> 00:42:39.380 Charlie Grubb looked at some of the contracts, these indentured contracts, that were initiated 267 00:42:39.380 --> 00:42:50.060 between 1682 and 1686. There were about 3,000 indentured contracts per year, which isn't 268 00:42:50.060 --> 00:43:20.060 very much. Found that most of them were unmarried males between 15 and 25 years of age. 37 percent of the males reported on the contract that they were fatherless. 269 00:43:20.060 --> 00:43:33.180 If their fathers had died or they were orphaned or whatever, 90%, at least 90% of, did not 270 00:43:33.180 --> 00:43:46.060 report a residence or an occupation. 271 00:43:46.060 --> 00:44:04.060 All of the very young males, 11, 12, 13 years of age, reported that their fathers were deceased, or they were orphans. 272 00:44:04.060 --> 00:44:12.060 Grub concluded that fatherlessness was probably under-reported. 273 00:44:12.060 --> 00:44:18.860 In other words, it said on the contracts in 37% of the cases that they were fatherless, but 274 00:44:20.780 --> 00:44:28.060 his investigation reveals that in a lot of cases it simply wasn't reported 275 00:44:29.100 --> 00:44:38.620 whether or not they had a living father. Only 6% of these indentures had consent from their father. 276 00:44:38.620 --> 00:44:59.620 So miners, they usually try to have a signed consent form for miners to sign these contracts, and only 6% of them were signed by their father, who would have been the natural person to sign that contract, rather than a mother or an uncle or something like that. 277 00:44:59.620 --> 00:45:29.620 and so he concluded that at least fifty percent of these males were probably fatherless. They obviously couldn't pay for the voyage, so they accepted indentured contracts. Without a father in Europe, your economic possibilities were not good. The family income obviously would have been very low. 278 00:45:29.620 --> 00:45:40.700 Very little. Your employment contacts to get a job would be greatly diminished. You probably 279 00:45:40.700 --> 00:45:48.140 wouldn't have any land to work or to inherit. And without a father, the possibility of getting 280 00:45:48.140 --> 00:45:56.340 an apprenticeship was almost nil. In order to get an apprenticeship, your father usually 281 00:45:56.340 --> 00:46:06.420 We had to be an upstanding citizen who was already in a profession and had the money 282 00:46:06.420 --> 00:46:11.940 to pay for the apprenticeship and apprenticeship basically means you're a 13 year old boy, 283 00:46:11.940 --> 00:46:22.960 you're going to go work for, I don't know, a clothing maker or a mechanic or somebody 284 00:46:52.960 --> 00:47:01.640 or maybe longer. You've got to work for free, right? I'm not paying you to come to this 285 00:47:01.640 --> 00:47:11.880 class. As a matter of fact, you are paying for me. So one of the major explanations for 286 00:47:11.880 --> 00:47:16.120 a lot of these people coming over was that they were fatherlessness, that they didn't 287 00:47:16.120 --> 00:47:22.480 have opportunities, that they didn't have a way for economic enrichment in Europe and 288 00:47:22.480 --> 00:47:27.280 So they took their chances and signed the indentured contract and went to the new world.