WHEN the elder Hakluyt published his promotional tract for the North American colonies in 1585, he painted a picture of a thriving trade in colonial products (woad, oil, wine, hops, salt, flax, hemp, pitch, tar, clapboards, wainscot, fish, fur, meat, hides, marble, granite, sugar), exchanging for British goods (woolens, hats, bonnets, knives, fishhooks, copper kettles, beads, looking glasses, and a thousand wrought wares), lowering British unemployment, promoting manufacturing, and providing advantages to church, crown, and national security. This would require the migration of thirty-one different kinds of skilled workers to America.

If Hakluyt saw any difficulties in achieving this happy state of affairs, a propaganda tract was not the place to mention them. Certainly, Adam Smith would have seen none. Two centuries later he wrote, “The colony of a civilized nation which takes possession either of a waste country, or of one so thinly inhabited, that the natives easily give place to the new settlers, advances more rapidly to wealth and greatness than any other society.” Yet from the day Hakluyt wrote until almost the middle of the eighteenth century, economic growth and progress were barely discernible in the colonies, and the North Atlantic economy was of negligible importance. It did not develop automatically or in the manner Hakluyt and Smith envisaged.

In Section I of this chapter, I argue that firm and enduring trade links between Europe and America were not forged without and until the introduction of slavery; that the eras of privateering, chartered companies, and the early staple trades were not preludes to development, but rather unpromising beginnings leading to stagnation; and that colonial development was strongly associated with slavery.