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Front Page  Titles (by Subject) Of the cultivation by slaves. - Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence Vol. 5 Lectures On Jurisprudence
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Of the cultivation by slaves. - Adam Smith, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence Vol. 5 Lectures On Jurisprudence [1762]Edition used:Lectures On Jurisprudence, ed. R.. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael and P. G. Stein, vol. V of the Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982).
Part of: The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, 7 vols.
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Of the cultivation by slaves.That land can never be cultivated to the best | advantage by slaves, the work which is done by slaves always coming dearer than that which is done by freemen. Of the scanty produce and great expence of the slave cultivation among the antient Greeks and Romans. Of villenage as it took place among our Saxon and Norman ancestors; of the adscripti glebae in Germany and Poland, and the rustici in Russia, and those who work in the coal and salt works of Scotland. That the high cultivation of Barbadoes, and of some other sugar and tobacco colonies, notwithstanding that in them the labour is performed almost entirely by slaves, is owing to this circumstance, that the cultivation of tobacco and sugar is engrossed, the one almost entirely by the English, the other by the English and French, who thus enjoying a sort of monopoly against all the rest of the world, indemnify themselves by the exorbitancy of their profites for their expensive and thriftless method of cultivation. The great expence of slave cultivation in the sugar plantations. The yet more exorbitant profites of the planter. That the planters in the more northern colonies, cultivating chiefly wheat and Indian corn, by which they can expect no such exorbitant returns, find it not for their interest to employ many slaves, and yet Pensilvania, the Jerseys, and some of the provinces of New England are much richer and more populous than Virginia, notwithstanding that tobacco is by its ordinary high price a more profitable cultivation. |
