(see Chapter 9, note 54)
The population of England and Wales, which had grown by one-third in the first half of the seventeenth century, grew by only one-tenth in the second half.1 In this last half of the century, the expansion of industrial production was based primarily on the increase in the mass of labor employed rather than on improved technology.2 In consequence of the expansion of industrial employment, the “surplussed” agricultural workers found employment more easily than they had prior to the English Revolution.3 The English military demand for manpower experienced two great surges at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. England, traditionally a land without a large standing army, conscripted scores of thousands of men for military and naval duty in the War of the League of Augsburg (1689–97) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13). Between 1698 and 1708, for instance, the number of English-speaking troops under arms was increased nearly fourfold, and the naval forces were nearly tripled.4 Thus sectors of the population that had been a ready supply of plantation bond-laborers in England were needed elsewhere, as is made clear by Trevelyan’s description of the methods employed to draft recruits for the continental armies of the Duke of Marlborough in the earliest years of the eighteenth century:
… armed raids of the press-gang [descended] on the folk of the port towns and neighboring villages.… Criminal gangs were drafted wholesale; bounties sometime amounting to four pounds for each recruit tempted the needy to enlist.… [Since] the country was prosperous and work abundant … the naval press was abused for the purposes of the land service.… Parish constables were to be given ten shillings for every person suitable for the press gang whom they produced before the authorities. Magistrates were instructed to hand over to recruiting officers persons who could show no means of supporting themselves.5
Already in 1667, a member of the House of Commons, Mr Garroway, had warned that emigration to Virginia would “in time drain us of people and will endanger our ruin.”6 In 1673, the author of The Grand Concern of England Explained believed that the drain of emigrants from England had been made even more critical by the “two last great Plagues, the Civil War at Home, and the several wars with Holland, Spain and France [which] have destroyed several hundred thousands of men which lived among us.”7 Roger Coke argued that the drain of bond-laborers and other emigrant workers to the American plantations was seriously weakening England. His treatise, published in 1671, warned, “… we have opened a wide gap, and by all encouragement excited all the growing youth and industry of England which might preserve the trades we had herein, to betake them to those of the Plantations.”8 One of the most eminent voices cautioning against too much emigration of English labor was that of Sir William Petty. The “remote governments” of the American plantation colonies, according to Petty, “instead of being additions are really diminutions” of the national wealth of England. Far from favoring increased English emigration to America, Petty would have had the New England Pilgrims come home. “[A]s for the People of New England,” he wrote, “I can but wish they were transplanted into Old England or Ireland.”9