Questions

Questions

Question 1

From the starting of European settlement in what became the United States, labor markets were characterized by the scarcity of labor in relative to abundant land and natural resources. Labor scarcity raised labor productivity and endowed commonplace Americans to relish a higher standard of dwelling than comparable Europeans. Counterbalancing these inducements to migration, although, were the high costs of journey across the Atlantic and the significant risks posed by settlement in opportunity regions. Over time, technological changes let down the costs of communication and transportation. But exploiting these advantages needed the aligned development of new labor market institutions. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a kind of labor market institutions evolved to facilitate the action of labor in response to the opportunities created by American factor proportions. While some immigrants migrated on their own, the most of immigrants were either indentured servants or African slaves.(Buel,1972)

Although facts and numbers on immigration for the colonial time span are scattered and incomplete several scholars have estimated that between half and three quarters of European immigrants reaching in the colonies came as indentured or redemptioner servants. Using facts and numbers for the end of the colonial time span William (1972) discovered that close to three-quarters of English immigrants to Pennsylvania and almost 60 percent of German immigrants reached as servants.

A number of scholars have analyzed the terms of indenture and redemptioner contracts in some minutia .They find that consistent with the existence of a well-functioning market, the terms of service diverse in response to differences in one-by-one productivity, paid work conditions, and the balance of supply and demand in distinct locations.

The other foremost source of labor for the colonies was the forced migration of African slaves. Slavery had been introduced in the West Indies at an early designated day, but it was not until the late seventeenth century that significant numbers of slaves started to be imported into the mainland colonies. From 1700 to 1780 the percentage of blacks in the Chesapeake district increased from 13 percent to round 40 percent. In South Carolina and Georgia, the black share of the community climbed from 18 percent to 41 percent in the same time span. Adams (1969) explains the transition from indentured European to enslaved African labor as the result of shifts in supply and demand conditions in England and the trans-Atlantic slave market. Conditions in Europe advanced after 1650, reducing the supply of indentured ...