Rural Economy in New England 301 



France. Their possessions contained at this time about 1,000,000 

 negroes and less than 200,000 whites.^ 



We have seen that one of the reasons why the rice and cotton 

 plantations of the South Carolina-Georgia coastal plain furnished a 

 better market for the agricultural products of New England than 

 did the Chesapeake lowlands was that the distance separating the 

 plantations from the backcountry was greater in the former case 

 than in the latter. In a certain sense it might be said that in the 

 West India islands there was no back-country. That is, there was no 

 sharply defined region where the commercial products could not be 

 raised; no uplands occupied by farmers carrying on a general agri- 

 culture and selling food supplies to the planters.^ But this is far 

 from saying that the whole of the arable area was given over to the 

 cultivation of the staples. The statistics given for Jamaica in 1791 

 show that of the 1,740,000 acres in that island under cultivation, 

 only 767,000 were in sugar plantations, whereas an almost equal 

 area, 700,000 acres, was used for breeding and grazing farms and 

 350,000 acres for raising the minor staples and provisions.® In 

 Hispaniola, now called Haiti, there were in 1790, 793 sugar plant- 

 ations, 789 of cotton, 3,117 of coffee, 3,160 of indigo and 623 smaller 

 farms where yams, grain and other provisions were grown.* More 

 significant, however, for we must remember that the farms were 

 much smaller in acreage than the plantations, is the fact that even 

 on the latter, a considerable area was given over to the pasturing of 

 cattle and horses.^ 



Between the years 1790-1810 there had undoubtedly been much 

 progress in the direction of specialization, especially in Jamaica.^ 

 Edwards had written at the former date: "In most other states and 

 kingdoms, the first object of agriculture is to raise food for the support 

 of the inhabitants; but many of the rich productions of the West 



^ Perhaps the most reliable figures for the English islands are those for 1791 

 given by Edwards, History, II. 2; Whites, 65,305; blacks, 455,684. For the 

 French islands a summary of various censuses, 1776-1786, quoted by Morse, Gaz- 

 etteer, 1810, gives a total of 63,682 whites and 437,736 blacks. 



' There were highlands in the interior of many of the islands but these were 

 so heavily wooded as to be inaccessible. See Edwards, History, I. 248-249. 



»Ibid. I. 248. 



* Ibid., III. 142-143. 



5 Edwards estimates that on a plantation of 900 acres, two-thirds of the land 

 would be pasturage and woodland. Op. cit., I. 248. 



8 The negro insurrection in Haiti, 1791-1801, checked the progress of the in- 

 dustry in a large part of that island. 



