The North and the West: From Early to Advanced Petty Commodity Production

Abstract

We turn, finally, in our long quest, to the North and the West. We have identified above the states and territories that came to constitute these regions (see Tables 5.1 and 5.2). We have considered already the brutality with which American Indians were driven from the land, as part of the process of primitive accumulation in the North and West. We must now consider the social formations that were established in place of the original, native social formations. We have noted the particularly strong resistance of the Northern colonies to the attempts to introduce feudalism in the seventeenth century; and the failure of slavery to take root there. Neither feudalism nor slavery, we have seen, proved a solution to the problem of endemic labour shortage. Another answer to the labour question was necessary.