The Economic Growth of the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Colonies

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Abstract
The Chesapeake economy failed to grow during the first half of the eighteenth century, but experienced rapid development during the third quarter of the century. Economic stagnation before 1750 resulted from the inability of tobacco planters either to increase productivity or to reduce costs of production, whereas an increase in grain exports and rising amounts of Scottish credit to planters explain growth during the pre-Revolutionary decades. Nonetheless, whites were able to purchase increasing quantities of consumer goods by exploiting the labor of the increasing numbers of black slaves who produced most of the region's tobacco.

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