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Emigration and the Standard of Living: The Seventeenth Century Chesapeake

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Lois Green Carr
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Abstract

Seventeenth-century English immigrants to the Chesapeake and their children experienced a trade-off. They died early and raised few children who survived to adulthood, most worked harder than in England at more boring tasks, and, except for food, they had a material standard of living inferior to what the homeland could offer at equivalent levels of wealth; but people ate well, there was work for all, and until late in the century the poor who lived long enough found opportunities not available in England to exercise control of their lives—opportunities to acquire land and the economic independence and community standing that it brought.

Type
Papers Presented at the Fifty-First Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , June 1992 , pp. 271 - 291
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1992

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