Richard Sutch

Why the Settlers Soared: The Dynamics of Immigration and Economic Growth in the “Golden Age” for Settler Societies

Settler societies are created by migration. The major settler societies were initially founded by people who established economic, political, and social structures conducive to economic growth. This chapter argues that they were beneficiaries of the massive waves of emigration from Europe in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The “golden age” for settler societies was the mass migration of peoples and the massive flows of investment out of Europe and into the Settlers. The chapter suggests that mass immigration boosted settler societies rate of economic growth and helped to sustain their high levels of per capita income in spite of the large increase in population they helped to generate. Four factors made settler economies attractive to immigrants: natural resource abundance, favorable institutions, growth-oriented government policy, and universal education. The reorganization of the world economic order following World War I brought an end to a “veritable golden age for world farmers.”. Keywords:economic growth; immigration; mass migration; per capita income; settler economies; settler societies

One Kind of Freedom: The trap of debt peonage

More evils have come to the farmers of the State on account of the mortgage and lien bond system than from any other, and indeed from every other source. It has proved a worse curse to North Carolina than drouths, floods, cyclones, storms, rust, caterpillars, and every other evil that attends the farmer. W. N. Jones, Commissioner, Bureau of Labor Statistics, North Carolina, First Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (Raleigh: Josephus Daniels, 1887), p. 76. Contemporary critics insisted that the monopoly power of the merchant was used not only to exploit southern farmers but to control southern agriculture. The specific charge was made that the merchant forced the farmer into excessive production of cotton by refusing credit to those who sought to diversify production. Charles Otken, one of the most strident critics of the Souths merchandising system, insisted that: For years a class of merchants encouraged their credit customers to raise cotton exclusively, or very largely. They reasoned very naturally and very logically, that, the more goods sold to farmers, the greater their sales and the greater their aggregate profits…. The debts of the farmer bound him to cotton. He was powerless. Otken quoted Henry Grady, who, writing in 1889, had bluntly described how this was done: “When he [the farmer] saw the wisdom of raising his own corn, bacon, grasses, and stock, he WAS NOTIFIED that reducing his cotton acreage was reducing his line of credit .”