land totaling 2 million acres, which had been in his family for generations, to a group of
Portsmouth businessmen for a planned settlement of new towns. This was merely the largest
single item in a continuing process of buying and selling farms, estates, and virgin soil, which
had already made British America the biggest theater in land-speculation in human history.
Everyone engaged in it if they could-a foreshadowing of the eagerness with which Americans
would take to stock-market speculation in the next century.
Four years later in 1750, the population of the mainland colonies passed the million mark too.
The British authorities of course saw North America as a whole, and missed the significance of
this figure. But whereas at mid-century Barbados had a population of 75,000 and Bermuda-
Bahamas 12,000 and Canada, Hudson Bay, Acadia, and Nova Scotia, plus Newfoundland, had a
further 73,000, Massachusetts and Maine together were approaching a quarter-million,
Connecticut had 100,000, Rhode Island and New Hampshire had 35,000 each, there were 34,000
in East Jersey, 36,000 in West Jersey, 75,000 in New York, 1165,000 in Pennsylvania and the
Lower Counties, 130,000 in Maryland, 135,000 in the Carolinas-plus 4,000 in infant Georgia-
and a massive 260,000 in Virginia. Greater New England had 400,000, Greater Virginia 390,000,
Greater Pennsylvania 230,000, and Greater Carolina nearly 100,000. These four major self-
sustaining growth-centres were the main engines of demographic increase, attracting thousands
of immigrants every year but also ensuring high domestic birth-rates with a large proportion of
children born reaching adulthood, in a healthy, well-fed, well-housed family system.
Noting all these facts, Benjamin Franklin, writing his Observations Concerning the Increase
of Making, Peopling of Countries etc (1755), felt that the country had doubled in population
since his childhood and calculated it would double again in the next twenty years, which it did-
and more. In attracting yet more people, to keep up the impetus of growth, local authorities did
not worry too much about boundaries, an early indication of how the whole territory was
beginning to meld together. Thus in 1732 Maryland invited Pennsylvanian Germans to take up
cheap 200-acre plots in the difficult country between the Susquehanna and Patapsco, which
became an inland district for the new and soon flourishing town of Baltimore. Equally, in the
1750s there was a large movement from Pennsylvania at the invitation of the Virginia
government into the western region of the colony, where large blocks in the Shenandoah Valley
were offered at low prices. This created, from an old Indian tract, the famous Great Philadelphia
Waggon Trail, which became a major commercial route too. Thus Greater Pennsylvania merged
into Greater Virginia, creating yet more movement and dynamism. As settlement expanded
inland from the tidewaters, colonies lost their original distinctive characteristics and became
simply American.
The historian gets the impression, surveying developments in the first half of the century, that
so many things were happening in America, at such speed, that the authorities simply lost touch.
Their information, such as it was, quickly got out of date and they could not keep up. Strictly
speaking, in an economic sense, the colonies were supposed to exist entirely for the home
country's benefit. A report to the Board of Trade sent by Lord Cornbury, governor of New York
1702-8, reveals that all governors were instructed `To discourage all Manufactures, and to give
accurate accounts of any Indications of the Same,' with a view to their suppression. One member
of the Board of Trade stated flatly in 1726, that certain developments in a colony were eo ipso
unlawful whether or not there was a specific statute forbidding them:
Every act of a dependent provincial government ought to terminate to the advantage of the Mother
State unto whom it owes its being and protection in all valuable privileges. Hence it follows that all
advantageous projects or commercial gains in any colony which are truly prejudicial to and