New World Economies: The Growth of the Thirteen Colonies and Early Canada (review)

New World Economies: The Growth of the Thirteen Colonies and Early Canada. By Marc Egnal (New York, Oxford University Press, 1998) 236 pp. $49.95

This book represents a brief but ambitious attempt to summarize the growth of British and French colonies in North America from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century until the end of the colonial experience (1760 for New France and 1775 for the thirteen mainland British colonies). Although the coverage is broad, and the volume's principal contribution lies in the comparison between the French and English colonies, it is limited by excluding Newfoundland and the French settlement in what is now Canada's maritime provinces. The cod fishery was a key part of the colonial Atlantic economies. The colonial experience is placed within a framework of the French and British Atlantic Empires and the growth of the metropolitan economies. As Egnal states in his introductory chapter, "the central argument of this work may be simply stated: the pace of economic development in the colonies reflected the rate of growth in the mother country" (3).

In his presentation, Egnal relies heavily on statistical series, primarily of prices and trade. The series, compiled mainly from other sources, are presented in about 100 graphs that occupy approximately half the text. They provide a quick impression of the quantitative dimensions of the story, but they cannot serve as a source of data even though they are fully annotated. Egnal includes, almost parenthetically in five appendices, as well as in the text, several new and potentially useful series on prices extracted from merchant ledgers: (1) textile prices in Philadelphia from 1747 to 1775; (2) corresponding English prices from the same period; (3) Montreal dry goods prices from 1715 to 1745; (4) Maritime insurance prices from 1744 to 1771; and (5) Antigua prices for flour, sugar, rum, and exchange, monthly from 1751 to 1756. This is useful new information, but having attempted to trace textile prices from merchant invoices myself, I am worried that the goods may have varied in character over time. Eighteenth-century textiles comprised a bewildering array of fabrics that differed from one another in subtle ways. Unfortunately, Egnal does not provide such details.

The analysis of the book is informal. The familiar staple thesis--that the course of colonial growth depended on the exports of principal commodities--supplies the general platform for the narrative, to the extent that the issues of demography and internal market development that many scholars of the British colonies have found important are largely put aside. Egnal places the staple thesis in the context of regional "long-swings that were shaped primarily by changes in the terms of trade and capital flows" (7).

Most of the book describes the various regional long swings, starting with summaries of the growth experience in the metropolitan economies that Egnal sees as the driving forces in colonial development. However, he starts with a summary of British eighteenth-century growth that rests primarily on Deane and Cole's early 1960s estimates of growth, and largely ignores recent research that has substantially altered our understanding of British growth. ¹ Crafts' revised, and widely accepted (at least in general), estimates of eighteenth-century growth are mentioned and dismissed in a lengthy footnote. ² Given the book's general hypothesis, this is a discouraging beginning. The subsequent discussions of the American colonies, broken into three regions--northern colonies, upper south, and lower south--amount to competent discussions of the export sectors without providing significant new information.

The narrative rests on a large amount of quantitative data, but, to its detriment, all of its analysis is informal. No attempt has been made to use even elementary statistical inference. Several times, I found myself unconvinced that what Egnal identified as a long swing was not simply the result of the impact of war on prices and trade flows...