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The Standard of Living in Colonial Massachusetts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Gloria L. Main
Gloria L. Main
Affiliation:
Visiting Scholar at Colonial Williamsburg and the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia 23185
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Abstract

Based on findings in Massachusetts probate records, 1650–1753, this paper argues that the average value of consumer goods among farmers and other rural inhabitants in that colony did not decline over the course of the colonial period but fluctuated around an average value little different from that for an equivalent segment of the population at risk in Maryland at the turn of the eighteenth century. Similar findings by Jackson Turner Main for.colonial Connecticut extend this absence of trend to a wider area of New England and to the years immediately preceding the American Revolution.

Type
Papers Presented at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , March 1983 , pp. 101 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1983

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References

1 These were years of relatively high prices in Maryland but were relatively “normal” times in Massachusetts. The six counties mentioned are Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Calvert, Charles, Kent, and Somerset.Google Scholar

2 My book, Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland (forthcoming) provides detailed descriptions of the value and composition of personal wealth of many segments of Maryland society.Google Scholar

3 The periods of years are of varying length so that the degree of slope cannot measure average annual change. For the 19 periods in the table, 1650–66 to 1751–53, the slope measured +0.27, with intercept £30.33, and an R of +0.22. Removal of the last period, 1751–53, flattened the slope still further to +0.085, raised the intercept to £31.62, and reduced R to +0.07.Google Scholar

4 For all 19 periods, the mean of the standard errors was £0.85, the standard deviation £0.11, the slope +0.001, and R only +0.04. Removing 1751–53 changed the mean standard error to 0.83, the standard deviation of £0.13, the slope to −0.006, R to −0.24, and raised the intercept to £0.89.Google Scholar

5 The slope of the line fitted to these geometric means measured +0.00072, the intercept £0.14, and R +0.12.Google Scholar