A Work in Progress Do Not Quote Comments Welcome The Unimportance of Exports to Economic Growth in Colonial North America:

One of the most enduring features of the economic history of colonial British North America is that exports were the key to economic success. Whether one looks at the literature about the colonies taken as a whole, or that for any of the major regions, exports loom as the sine qua non of economic growth. Enterprising Europeans arrived in North America and, through hard work and the availability of land, created a prosperous economy based on the export of agricultural staples. On the face of it there is an appealing intuition to this argument. After all trade was why England wanted these colonies in the first place, and the Crown duly recorded the details of that trade and adopted policies aimed at shaping the composition, direction and growth of the colonies ' exports as well as imports. One does not need to look much below the surface of that intuition to have serious doubts. For one thing, we do not know how successful the colonial economy was. Until recently scholars were confident that output per capita had increased and they put the rate of increase anywhere between 0.3 and 1.0 percent per year, with 0.5 percent per year being a handy benchmark.1 Those estimates, however, were not based on much statistical evidence for the simple reason that there is not much available; the colonial period of American history has been seen as a statistical dark age