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The Role of Exports in the Economy of Colonial North America: New Estimates for the Middle Colonies

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Author Info
Peter Mancall
Joshua Rosenbloom
Thomas J. Weiss
Abstract

Economic historians of the eighteenth-century British mainland North American colonies have given considerable weight to the role of exports as a stimulus for economic growth. Yet their analyses have been handicapped by reliance on one or two time series to serve as indicators of broader changes rather than considering the export sector as a whole. Here we construct comprehensive export measures for the middle colonies. We find that aggregate exports did grow quickly but that this expansion failed to keep pace with population growth during much of the period under consideration. We argue this result challenges the export staples model on the role of foreign demand as a stimulus for economic growth. Instead, these results emphasize the impact of resource abundance and labor and capital scarcity as the defining characteristics of colonial economic growth.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 14334.

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Date of creation: Sep 2008
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14334

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
N11 - Economic History - - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Growth and Fluctuations - - - U.S.; Canada: Pre-1913
N21 - Economic History - - Financial Markets and Institutions - - - U.S.; Canada: Pre-1913
N7 - Economic History - - Economic History: Transport, International and Domestic Trade, Energy, and Other Services
N71 - Economic History - - Economic History: Transport, International and Domestic Trade, Energy, and Other Services - - - U.S.; Canada: Pre-1913

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This page was last updated on 2009-12-8.

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