Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-jr42d Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T18:57:48.572Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Standards of Living and the Life Cycle in Colonial Connecticut

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Jackson Turner Main
Jackson Turner Main
Affiliation:
James Pinckney Harrison Professor of History at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia 23185
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Requirements for a subsistence standard of living and for higher levels in the colonial period changed with marital status. A man's income, his personal wealth, his consumption goods, and for farmers their land, had to increase with marriage and as children multiplied, though the old man might end as he began, dependent on other members of the family. In order to judge the proportion of men at different levels of wealth, and to measure inequality, the historian must construct a series of tables using all available measures of wealth for each stage in the life cycle.

Type
Papers Presented at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , March 1983 , pp. 159 - 165
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1983

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 The major source for this paper consists of about ten thousand estate inventories in Connecticut, supplemented by 35 scattered tax lists, all from the colonial period.Google Scholar

2 The category of non-members, the out-group, included the occasional free Negro or Indian identified in the records.Google Scholar

3 Historians are beginning to work out the consumption articles needed and desired by families. This section depends particularly upon the research of Main, Gloria L. in her Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland 1650–1720 (Princeton, 1982). She uses values in sterling, whereas I use the standard called in Connecticut “cash” or “money,” in which the Spanish dollar equalled 6 s. instead of 4 s. 6 d., as in sterling.Google Scholar

4 Connecticut State Library, Hartford. Almost all of my research was done in that remarkable collection.Google Scholar

5 Improved land only within the town, evaluated at a flat rate per acre for each type of land (such as meadow or pasture).Google Scholar

6 After 1720 the inflation, which had begun earlier, becomes more difficult to deal with. Moreover, that decade saw a rapid economic expansion with abnormally high levels of wealth, whereas the years chosen, while good ones on the whole, were closer to the norm. Hartford district contained a variety of towns. At this time about three-quarters of the estates entered probate. No wealth bias developed until the late colonial period.Google Scholar