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.All that remained in the spectrum o f dependentlabour was chattel slavery; and, if now discarded ideologies o f legalstatus hierarchy could no longer be invoked, some other justificationhad to be found.The result was that a new ideological role wasassigned to pseudo-biological conceptions of race, which excludedcertain human beings, not simply by law but by nature, from thenormal universe of freedom and equality. 1 0 2 Empi re of Capi talThe British in AmericaEnglish colonists had for some time before Locke been operating inAmerica according to the principles he later elaborated - not least inthe sense that they pushed Indians even out o f cultivated land.Buthow the land was held and used varied greatly among colonies andregions, depending not only on the nature of the settlers and theland grants they received but also on the quality of the land and thecrops it could sustain.The logic o f Britain s domestic capitalism would not play itselfout in the same ways and degrees everywhere in North America, andwe shall concentrate here on the cases in which that logic is mostclearly visible, the colonies of the future United States.British NorthAmerica, the empire in Canada, was in some ways an anomaly.Onthe one hand, it was never particularly profitable for the imperialpower, once it became a settler colony rather than simply a massivetrading post; on the other, though a white settler colony like othersin the British Empire, it lasted quite a long time without falling preyto pressures for independence from colonial settlers.In the early days o f the Hudson Bay Company, this part o f NorthAmerica was a trading colony, not essentially different from othernon-capitalist commercial institutions.Settlement was not a priorityand was even a liability to the fur trade, which was the Company sprincipal concern.After Britain, in the eighteenth century, conqueredFrench territories in America and acquired a large territorial empirein Canada, settlement increased; but it was never entirely clear whatpurpose the colony served.Geopolitical and military considerationsseemed to predominate over economic gains, especially when thecolonies to the south gave way to an increasingly powerful independent state and a potential imperial competitor. O v e r s e a s Expansi on of Economi c Imperat i ves 1 0 3Various factors combined to keep the colony in British hands, inpart influenced by the disastrous losses south o f the border: adisproportionately large military presence in relation to a relativelysparse settler population; the colony s fundamental disunity, dividingnot only the English and the French, but the various English-speakingregions, in a colony that for a long time failed to constitute anintegrated economy; the large influx o f Loyalists from the southduring and after the Revolution; and a closer imperial rule, incontrast to the self-governing autonomy enjoyed by the colonies tothe south.The importance of the fur trade in the history o f the colony andthe long proximity to, and conflict with, the French, to say nothingo f the need for support in conflicts with the southern neighbours,also produced a somewhat more accommodating relationshipbetween the colonial power and indigenous peoples than was typicalelsewhere in the Empire.In this respect, as in others, Canada wasvery different from the thirteen colonies that gave birth to the UnitedStates and rather less responsive to the logic of the new capitalistimperialism.The connections between the thirteen colonies and the evolutiono f capitalism in the imperial homeland are much more obvious.Thefirst major colonies in Virginia and then in Maryland had been basedexplicitly on the principles o f improvement and profit based onproduction.They were never intended to serve, in the old manner ofcommercial empires, simply as trading posts.The objective was todevelop and exploit the land intensively by cultivating marketablecrops and creating industries, on the model o f commercial agriculture and textile production at home; and these colonial ventureswere regarded as profitable investments, as well as laboratories fordomestic projects in England.The original plan for a diversified commercial economy, however, 1 0 4 Empi re of Capi talfailed and was soon overtaken by the production o f a single, vastlymarketable crop, tobacco.This required not only sizeable landholdings and the dispossession o f indigenous people but an intensivelyexploited labour force.At first, this was provided by the 70 or 80 percent o f English immigrants who came to the colonies as indenturedservants - the dispossessed and unemployed o f England.But asdemand for labour increased, while that labour supply became tooexpensive later in the seventeenth century and eventually dried up asemployment opportunities grew in the imperial homeland, there wasan increasingly rapid influx of slaves, either directly from Africa orvia the Caribbean and its slave plantations.This, of course, gaveadded impetus to yet another source of commercial profit, theinfamous slave trade, which had been going on for some time underthe auspices of European empires but now dramatically accelerated
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