This book has been a good many years in the making, and many people have helped me to write it. Helen M. Morgan, as always, has helped much more than anyone else. She has worked with me from the beginning, and every draft of every chapter has had the benefit of her critical scrutiny. If the final result has any clarity of thought or expression, it is because of her patience and perception.
Parts of the book, in a different form, were delivered as the Commonwealth Lectures at the University of London in 1970. Part of chapter 3 appeared in the American Historical Review in 1971 as “The Labor Problem at Jamestown, 1607–18” parts of chapters 5 and 6 appeared in the same year in the William and Mary Quarterly as “The First American Boom, Virginia 1618 to 1630”; and I tried out some of the ideas in chapter 18 in “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” in the Journal of American History in 1972. In these preliminary formulations I was able to benefit from the criticism of several colleagues and friends. F. J. Fisher, Jack Hexter, Peter Laslett, Lawrence Stone, and Joan Thirsk helped me to avoid some errors in what I have to say about English history. And I have profited in a variety of ways from discussions with Charles Boxer, John M. Blum, David B. Davis, William N. Parker, the late David Potter, and C. Vann Woodward.
For help in avoiding some of the pitfalls in compiling the statistical tables (I surely have not avoided all of them), I am grateful to a number of people: to John McCarthy and to Robert Luft for programming information for computer analysis, and to Lois Carr, Gloria Main, and Russell Menard, who read the first draft of the Appendix and gave valuable advice about it. I also wish to thank E. J. Hundert, John McCusker, and Robert V. Wells for suggestions offered by correspondence on matters of common interest. At W. W. Norton and Company, James L. Mairs and George Brock-way have given the kind of editorial assistance that every author hopes for.
I owe many institutional debts. Initial research for the book was begun during a sabbatical leave from Yale University in the year 1962–63, with assistance from the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. Subsequently Yale’s policy of triennial leaves of absence gave me two more semesters of leave, and I enjoyed a third as Johnson Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin.
Many libraries and many librarians have helped me. The Virginia State Library not only made their collections of manuscripts available but provided microfilms of the most valuable county court records. At Colonial Williamsburg Edward Riley has made the Research Library the most effective working library of Virginia history that I know of. His hospitality went far beyond the call of duty. The staff of the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond and of the Alderman Library in Charlottesville were uniformly helpful. But most of the research and writing were done in the Yale Library and the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California, which has become a home away from home for many scholars besides myself. It would be hard to measure the benefits of conversations there with old friends and new. A historian could scarcely ask for better places to work than I have enjoyed, and I am deeply grateful to those who have made them so.
January, 1975 E. S. M.