Agriculture in Virginia, 1607-1699 — Background and Themes

The Opening: Trade Over Tillage

Carrier's first pages make clear that the Virginia colony was conceived as a commercial venture, not an agricultural one. The London Company financed the settlement expecting to tap into warm-weather products like those from Spain and Italy. Ordinary farm products, Carrier writes, "would not pay the cost of transportation across the ocean." The men of the first expedition, he adds, "were not farmers and took little interest in farming." This blunt assessment is supported by the catalog metadata: the book is a historical study, not a practical guide, and its early sections emphasize economic context over agronomic detail.

The opening also introduces a recurring structural pattern: Carrier presents a policy or expectation from England, then shows how it collided with Virginia's reality. The reader should note how this pattern shapes the narrative, especially in the treatment of silk and other non-tobacco crops.

Maize and the First Price Law

In the middle excerpts, Carrier turns to maize—a crop he credits with doing "more to promote the wealth and welfare of this country than all the natural resources, water-power, and forests put together." This strong claim is grounded in a specific legislative detail: the 1623 General Assembly order that "the prise shall not be stinted but it shall be free for every man to sell it as deere as he can." Carrier calls this "perhaps the first law passed in America for the direct benefit of the producers."

The passage contrasts this free-market approach with later laws that fixed prices or banned exports. The reader can observe how Carrier uses a single statute to illustrate a broader shift in colonial governance—from top-down control to local economic pragmatism. The excerpt also shows his method of weaving together legislative history, crop biology, and economic consequence.

Silk: A Case Study in Failed Expectations

Carrier devotes a section to silk culture, which he introduces with a blunt judgment: "There is very little justification for including silk culture as an enterprise in the agricultural history of the Jamestown Colony." He then explains why silk was persistently promoted despite its failure. The passage details the biological and labor constraints: silkworms required mulberry trees, which took years to grow, and the work was "objectionable to anyone not accustomed from childhood to the task." Cheap labor, available in the Orient, was not present in Virginia.

This section exemplifies Carrier's willingness to dismiss official narratives. He notes that governors Wyatt, Harvey, and Berkeley tried to comply with English instructions to produce silk, but with "extremely meager results." The reader gains insight into the gap between metropolitan directives and colonial capabilities—a theme that runs through the book.

The Shift After 1685

A later excerpt marks a turning point: until 1685, each governor was instructed to encourage silk, wine, hemp, flax, pitch, and potashes. Carrier then reveals why the clause was finally omitted: the King "was concerned about the revenue the government was deriving from tobacco and did not wish for the colonists to engage in any enterprise that might diminish the volume of leaf." This single sentence reframes the entire preceding sixty years of policy as a function of royal fiscal interest, not colonial development.

Carrier calls the omission "a new era in the relation of the colony to the Mother Country." The reader should note how this moment crystallizes the book's argument: agriculture in Virginia was always shaped by external economic forces, from the London Company's trade dreams to the Crown's tobacco tax. The excerpts do not reveal what follows this shift, but they establish a clear trajectory from English ambition to colonial adaptation.

Carrier's study is best read as a series of case studies in failed expectations and pragmatic adjustments. The opening frames agriculture as a secondary concern; the middle sections show how maize and tobacco became economic anchors despite official indifference; the later excerpts reveal the Crown's belated embrace of tobacco revenue. Readers should pay attention to the legislative details Carrier selects—they are his primary evidence for how colonial practice diverged from metropolitan theory. The book's value lies not in comprehensive coverage but in its focused argument about the primacy of economic forces over official plans.

The rain drummed on the windows while I traced Virginia’s early tobacco fields, the weary soil and stubborn settlers. That longing for permanence, for something beautiful rooted in the land, stayed with me long after I closed the book. It surfaced later, unexpectedly, while drifting through Old-Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth — Text and Context, where the same yearning found quieter, flowered ground.