Plantation

Hawkins’s voyages were early ventures; the much larger trade developed alongside the expansion of plantation colonies.

Much land was divided into large plantations growing tobacco or rice. Buying such an estate was expensive, so ownership was concentrated among a relatively small group of wealthy landowners. Much of the population consisted of servants and enslaved people, although smaller farms also existed.

Sugar plantations, for example, depended on people undertaking difficult and dangerous work harvesting sugar cane. Colonial wealth therefore depended not just on possessing land, but on controlling the labour needed to make that land profitable.

Sugar and tobacco produced in the Americas were sold in Europe for large profits. These profits were closely connected with exploitation: Britain participated in the transatlantic slave trade, through which African people were forcibly transported to the Americas and made to work on plantations.