2-3 pages (typed and double-spaced). Your essay should have a brief introduction followed by several paragraphs – one major point for each paragraph – and a short conclusion. 

Essay topic: 

 In 1610, Sir Thomas Gates and Lord La Warr went to the Virginia colony (at Jamestown) on behalf of the Virginia Company only to discover that out of 600 original settlers only 60 remained. The following year when Sir Thomas Dale arrived to check on things, he found the settlers starving – and yet they were bowling in the streets. Why were they bowling when they should have been taking care of themselves? What does this tell us about the first permanent settlers in the British mainland colonies – in terms of their expectations about what they would find; and also their relationships with the Indians? How did Dale respond to this sorry state of affairs and to why was his response ineffective? How did the first immigrants finally solve the labor problem at Jamestown?  

The Labor Problem at Jamestown, 1607-18
Author(s): Edmund S. Morgan
Reviewed work(s):
Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Jun., 1971), pp. 595-611
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the American Historical Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1851619

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The Labor Problem at Jamestown, 1607-18

EDMUND S. MORGAN

THE S-rORY OF JAMESTOWN, the first permanent English settlement in
America, has a familiar place in the history of the United States. We all
know of the tribulations that kept the colony on the point of expiring: the
shortage of supplies, the hostility of the Indians, the quarrels among the
leaders, the reckless search for gold, the pathetic search for a passage to the
Pacific, and the neglect of the crucial business of growing food to stay alive.
Through the scene moves the figure of Captain John Smith, a little larger
than life, trading for corn among the Indians and driving the feckless crew
to work. His departure in October 1609 results in near disaster. The settlers
fritter away their time and energy, squander their provisions, and starve.
Sir Thomas Gates, arriving after the settlement’s third winter, finds only
sixty men out of six hundred still alive and those sixty scarcely able to walk.

In the summer of 161o Gates and Lord La Warr get things moving again
with a new supply of men and provisions, a new absolute form of govern-
ment, and a new set of laws designed to keep everybody at work. But
when Gates and La Warr leave for a time, the settlers fall to their old ways.
Sir Thomas Dale, upon his arrival in May 161 1, finds them at “their daily
and usuall workes, bowling in the streetes.”‘ But Dale brings order out of
chaos. By enlarging and enforcing the colony’s new law code (the famous
Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall) he starts the settlers working again and
rescues them from starvation by making them plant corn. By 1618 the colony
is getting on its feet and ready to carry on without the stern regimen of a
Smith or a Dale. There are still evil days ahead, as the Virginia Company
sends over men more rapidly than the infant colony can absorb them. But
the settlers, having found in tobacco a valuable crop for export, have at
last gone to work with a will, and Virginia’s future is assured.

The story probably fits the facts insofar as they can be known. But it does

An earlier version of this paper was read at the annual meeting of the American Historical
Association on December 29, 1968. I wish to express my thanks to those who offered criticisms
at that time and also to Helen M. Morgan and to Professors J. H. Hexter, Lawrence Stone,
William N. Parker, and William B. Foltz who read the paper subsequently and made valuable
suggestions.

I Ralph Hamor, A True Discourse of the Present State of Virginia (London, 1615; Richmond,
1957), 26.

595

596 Edmund S. Mforgan

not quite explain them. The colony’s long period of starvation and failure
may well be attributed to the idleness of the first settlers, but idleness is
more an accusation than an explanation. Why did men spend their time
bowling in the streets when their lives depended on work? Were they luna-
tics, preferring to play games rather than clear and plow and plant the
crops that could have kept them alive?

The mystery only deepens if we look more closely at the efforts of Smith,
Gates, La Warr, and Dale to set things right. In 1612 john Smith described
his work program of i6o8: “the company [being] divided into tennes,
fifteenes, or as the businesse required, 4 hours each day was spent in worke,
the rest in pastimes and merry exercise.” Twelve years later Smith rewrote
this passage and changed the figure of four hours to six hours.2 But even
so, what are we to make of a six-hour day in a colony teetering on the verge
of extinction?

The program of Gates and La Warr in the summer of 161o was no more
strenuous. William Strachey described it:

it is to be understood that such as labor are not yet so taxed but that easily they
perform the same and ever by ten of the clock have done their morning’s work: at
what time they have their allowances [of food] set out ready for them, and until
it be three of the clock again they take their own pleasure, and afterward, with
the sunset, their day’s labor is finished.3

The Virginia Company offered much the same account of this period. Ac-
cording to a tract issued late in i6io, “the setled times of working (to effect
all themselves, or the Adventurers neede desire) [requires] no more pains
than from sixe of clocke in the morning untill ten, and from two of the clocke
in the afternoone till foure.”4 The long lunch period described for i6io was
also a feature of the Lawes Divine, AMorall and Martiall as enforced by
Dale. The total working hours prescribed in the Lawes amounted to roughly
five to eight hours a day in summer and three to six hours in winter.5

It is difficult, then, to escape the conclusion that there was a great deal
of unemployment or underemployment at jamestown, whether it was the
idleness of the undisciplined in the absence of strong government or the
idleness of the disciplined in the presence of strong government. How are

2 John Smith, Travels and Works, ed. Edward Arber and A. G. Bradley (Edinburgh, 1g9o),
i: 149; 2: 466.

3 L. B. Wright, ed., A Voyage to Virginia in I609 (Charlottesville, 1964), 69-70.
4 A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia (London, i6io), reprinted in

Peter Force, ed., Tracts and Other Papers (Washington, 1844), 3, no. 1: 20; Smith, Travels
and Works, 2: 502. Captain Daniel Tucker maintained a similar program in Bermuda in i6i6:
“according to the Virginia order, hee set every one [that] was with him at Saint Georges, to his
taske, to cleere grounds, fell trees, set corne, square timber, plant vines and other fruits brought
out of England. These by their taske-Masters by breake a day repaired to the wharfe, from
thence to be imployed to the place of their imployment, till nine of the clocke, and then in
the after-noone from three till Sunneset.” Ibid., 653.

5 For the Colony in Virginia Brittannia: Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall (London, 1612),
6 i-62.

The Labor Problem at Jamestown, i6o7-i8 597

we to account for this fact? By our standards the situation at Jamestown
demanded hard and continuous work. Why was the response so feeble?

One answer, given by the leaders of the colony, is that the settlers included
too many ne’er-do-wells and too many gentlemen who “never did know what
a dayes work was.”‘ Hard work had to wait until harder men were sent.
Another answer may be that the Jamestown settlers were debilitated by
hunger and disease. The victims of scurvy, malaria, typhoid, and diph-
theria may have been left without the will or the energy to work. Still
another answer, which has echoed through the pages of our history books,
attributed the difficulty to the fact that the settlement was conducted on a
communal basis: everybody worked for the Virginia Company and every-
body was fed (while supplies lasted) by the company, regardless of how
much he worked or failed to work. Once land was distributed to individuals
and men were allowed to work for themselves, they gained the familiar
incentives of private enterprise and bent their shoulders to the wheel.7
These explanations are surely all valid-they are all supported by the
testimony of contemporaries-and they go far toward explaining the lazy
pioneers of Jamestown. But they do not reach to a dimension of the prob-
lem that contemporaries would have overlooked because they would have
taken it for granted. They do not tell us what ideas and attitudes about work,
carried from England, would have led the first English settlers to expect
so little of themselves in a situation that demanded so much. The Jamestown
settlers did not leave us the kind of private papers that would enable us to
examine directly their ideas and attitudes, as we can those of the Puritans
who settled New England a few years later. But in the absence of direct
evidence we may discover among the ideas current in late sixteenth- and
early seventeenth-century England some clues to the probable state of mind
of the first Virginians, clues to the way they felt about work, whether
in the Old World or the New, clues to habits of thinking that may have
conditioned their perceptions of what confronted them at Jamestown, clues
even to the tangled web of motives that made later Virginians masters of
slaves.

ENGLISHMEN’S IDEAS about the New World at the opening of the seventeenth
century were based on a century of European exploration and settlement.
The Spanish, whose exploits surpassed all others, had not attempted to
keep their success a secret, and by the middle of the sixteenth century
Englishmen interested in America had begun translating Spanish histories

6 Smith, Travels and Works, 2: 487.
7 A much more sophisticated version of this explanation is suggested by Professor Sigmund

Diamond in his discussion of the development of social relationships in Virginia, “From Or-
ganization to Society: Virginia in the Seventeenth Century,” American Journal of Sociology, 63
(1958): 457-75; see also his “Values as an Obstacle to Economic Growth: The American Colonies,”
Journal of Economic History, 27 (1967): 561-75.

598 Edmund S. Morgan

and memoirs in an effort to rouse their countrymen to emulation.8 The land
that emerged from these writings was, except in the Arctic regions, an
Eden, teeming with gentle and generous people who, before the Spanish
conquest, had lived without labor, or with very little, from the fruits of a
bountiful nature.9 There were admittedly some unfriendly exceptions who
made a habit of eating their more attractive neighbors; but they were a
minority, confined to a few localities, and in spite of their ferocity were
scarcely a match for Europeans armed with guns.’0 Englishmen who visited
the New World confirmed the reports of natural abundance. Arthur Bar-
lowe, for example, reconnoitering the North Carolina coast for Walter
Raleigh, observed that “the earth bringeth foorth all things in aboundance,
as in the first creation, without toile or labour,” while the people were
“most gentle, loving, and faithfull, void of all guile, and treason, and such
as lived after the manner of the golden age…

English and European readers may have discounted the more extravagant
reports of American abundance, for the same authors who praised the land
often gave contradictory accounts of the hardships they had suffered in it.
But anyone who doubted that riches were waiting to be plucked from
Virginia’s trees had reason to expect that a good deal might be plucked
from the people of the land. Spanish experience had shown that Europeans
could thrive in the New World without undue effort by exploiting the
natives. With a mere handful of men the Spanish had conquered an
enormous population of Indians in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Peru and
had put them to work. In the chronicles of Peter Martyr Englishmen
learned how it was done. Apart from the fact that the Indians were
naturally gentle, their division into a multitude of kingdoms, frequently
at odds with one another, made it easy to play off one against another.
By aiding one group against its enemies the Spaniards had made them-
selves masters of both.12

The story of English plans to imitate and improve on the Spanish strategy
is a long one.13 It begins at least as early as Francis Drake’s foray in Panama
in 1572-73, when he allied with a band of runaway slaves to rob a Spanish
mule train carrying treasure from Peru across the isthmus to Nombre de

8 See especially the translation of Peter Martyr, in Richard Eden, The Decades of the new
worlde or west India (London, 1555); a useful bibliographical history is John Parker, Books to
Build an Empire (Amsterdam, 1966).

0 Gustav H. Blanke, Amerika imn Englishen Schrifttum Des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts
Beitrage Zur Englischen Philologie, 46 (Bochum-Langendreer, 1962), 98-104.

10Since Peter Martyr, the principal Spanish chronicler, identified most Indians who resisted
the Spaniards as cannibals, this became the familiar sixteenth-century epithet for unfriendly
Indians. It is doubtful that many tribes actually practiced cannibalism, though some certainly did.

11 D. B. Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages I584-I590, Works issued by the Hakluyt Society,
2d ser., 104, 105 (London, 1955), 1: io8.

12 Eden, Decades, passim. For English awareness of the Spanish example, see Smith, Travels
and Works, 2: 578-81, 6oo-03, 955-56, and Susan M. Kingsbury, ed., The Records of the
Virginia Company of London (Washington, 1906-35), 3: 558, 560-62.

13 I have dealt with this subject in a work still in progress.

The Labor Problem at Jamestown, I607-I8 599

Dios on the Caribbean.14 The idea of joining with dissident natives or slaves
either against their Spanish masters or against their wicked cannibalistic
neighbors became an important ingredient in English plans for colonizing
the New World. Martin Frobisher’s experiences with the Eskimos in Baffin
Land and Ralph Lane’s with the Indians at Roanoke15 should perhaps have
disabused the English of their expectations; but they found it difficult to
believe that any group of natives, and especially the noble savages of
North America, would fail to welcome what they called with honest pride
(and some myopia) the “gentle government” of the English.”, If the savages
first encountered by a colonizing expedition proved unfriendly, the thing
to do was to make contact with their milder neighbors and rescue them
from the tyranny of the unfriendly tribe, who must be their enemies and were
probably cannibals to boot.17

The settlers at Jamestown tried to follow the strategy, locating their
settlement as the plan called for, near the mouth of a navigable river, so
that they would have access to the interior tribes if the coastal ones were
hostile. But as luck would have it, they picked an area with a more power-
ful, more extensive, and more effective Indian government than existed
anywhere else on the Atlantic Coast. King Powhatan had his enemies, the
Monacans of the interior, but he felt no great need of English assistance
against them, and he rightly suspected that the English constituted a larger
threat to his hegemony than the Monacans did. He submitted with ill
grace and no evident comprehension to the coronation ceremony that the
Virginia Company arranged for him, and he kept his distance from James-
town. Those of his warriors who visited the settlement showed no disposition
to work for the English. The Monacans, on the other hand, lived too far
inland (beyond the falls) to serve as substitute allies, and the English were
thus deprived of their anticipated native labor.18

They did not, however, give up their expectations of getting it eventually.
In i615 Ralph Hamor still thought the Indians would come around “as
they are easily taught and may by lenitie and faire usage . . . be brought,

14 Irene A. Wright, ed., Documents concerning English Voyages to the Spanish Main 1569-
1580, Works issued by the Hakluyt Society, 2d ser., 71 (London, 1932), gives the original
sources, both English and Spanish.

15 Richard Collinson, ed., The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, Works issued by the
Hakluyt Society, 1st ser., 38 (London, 1867), 131, 141-42, 145-50, 269, 271, 280-89; Quinn,
Roanoke Voyages, 1: 275-88.

16 The phrase “gentle government” is the younger Hakluyt’s, in a proposal to make use of
Drake’s Negro allies from Panama for a colony at the Straits of Magellan. E. G. R. Taylor, ed.,
The Original Writings and Correspondence of the two Richard Hakluyts, Works issued by the
Hfakluyt Society, 2d ser., 76, 77 (London, 1935), 1: 142.

17 Ibid., 121, 2: 241-42, 246-49, 257-65, 275, 318, 342.
18 The secondary literature on the Indians of Virginia is voluminous, but see especially

Nancy 0. Lurie, “Indian Cultural Adjustment to European Civilization,” in J. M. Smith, ed.,
Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 1959), 33-60. The most helpful original sources,
on which most of our information is necessarily based, are Smith, Travels and Works, and
William Strachey, The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania (composed 1612), ed. L. B.
Wright and V. Freund, Works issued by the Hakluyt Society, 2d ser., 103 (London, 1953), 53-1i6.

6oo Edmund S. Morgan

being naturally though ingenious, yet idlely given, to be no lesse industrious,
nay to exceede our English.”‘9 Even after the massacre of 1622 Virginians
continued to dream of an Indian labor supply, though there was no longer to
be any gentleness in obtaining it. Captain John Martin thought it better to
exploit than exterminate the Indians, if only because they could be made
to work in the heat of the day, when Englishmen would not. And William
Claiborne in 1626 invented a device (whether mechanical or political is
not clear) that he claimed would make it possible to keep Indians safely
in the settlements and put them to work. The governor and council gave
him what looks like the first American patent or copyright, namely a three-
year monopoly, to “have holde and enjoy all the benefitt use and profitt of
this his project or inventione,” and they also assigned him a recently
captured Indian, “for his better experience and tryall of his inven-
tione.”20

English expectations of the New World and its inhabitants died hard.
America was supposed to be a land of abundance, peopled by natives who
would not only share that abundance with the English but increase it under
English direction. Englishmen simply did not envisage a need to work for
the mere purpose of staying alive. The problem of survival as they saw it
was at best political and at worst military.

ALTHOUGH ENGLISHMEN long remained under the illusion that the Indians
would eventually become useful English subjects, it became apparent fairly
early that Indian labor was not going to sustain the founders of Jamestown.
The company in England was convinced by 1609 that the settlers would
have to grow at least part of their own food.2′ Yet the settlers themselves
had to be driven to that life-saving task. To understand their ineffectiveness
in coping with a situation that their pioneering descendants would take in
stride, it may be helpful next to inquire into some of the attitudes toward
work that these first English pioneers took for granted. How much work
and what kind of work did Englishmen at the opening of the seventeenth
century consider normal?

The laboring population of England, by law at least, was required to
work much harder than the regimen at Jamestown might lead us to
expect. The famous Statute of Artificers of 1563 (re-enacting similar
provisions from the Statute of Laborers of 1495) required all laborers to
work from five in the morning to seven or eight at night from mid-March
to mid-September, and during the remaining months of the year from day-
break to night. Time out for eating, drinking, and rest was not to exceed

19 True Discourse, 2. See also Strachey, Historie of Travell, 91-94; Alexander Whitaker,
Good Newes from Virginia (London, 1613), 40.

20Susan M. Kingsbury, ed., The Records of the Virginia Company of London (Washington,
1906-35), 3: 705-06; H. R. Mcllwaine, ed., Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial
Virginia (Richmond, 1924), 11 1.

21 Records of the Virginia Company, 3: 17, 27.

The Labor Problem at Jamestown, I607-I8 6oi

Hard at work in old England. Woodcut from Robert, the Devil. Printed by W. de Worde
[1502?] (STC 21070, 21071). Photograph: Edward Hodnett, English Woodcuts, 1480-1535 (London,
1935).

two and a half hours a day.22 But these were injunctions not descriptions.
The Statute of Laborers of 1495 is preceded by the complaint that
laborers “waste much part of the day . . . in late coming unto their work,
early departing therefrom, long sitting at their breakfast, at their dinner and
noon-meat, and long time of sleeping after noon.”23 Whether this statute or
that of 1563 (still in effect when Jamestown was founded) corrected the
situation is doubtful.24 The records of local courts show varying efforts to
enforce other provisions of the statute of 1563, but they are almost wholly
silent about this provision,25 in spite of the often-expressed despair of
masters over their lazy and negligent laborers.26

22 R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power, eds., Tudor Economic Documents (London, 1924), 1: 342.
For some seventeenth-century prescriptions of long working hours, see Gervase Markham, A
Way to get Wealth (13th ed.; London, 1676), 115-17; Henry Best, Rural Economy in Yorkshire
in I64I, Surtees Society, Publications, 33 (Durham, 1857), 44. See also L. F. Salzman, Building
in England down to 1540 (Oxford, 1952), 61-65.

23 11 Henry 7, cap. 22, sec. 4; Douglas Knoop and G. P. Jones, The Medieval Mason (Man-
chester, 1933), 117.

24 Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, 1: 352-63.
25 A minor exception is in J. H. E. Bennett and J. C. Dewhurst, eds., Quarter Sessions Rec-

ords . . . for the County Palatine of Chester, 1559-1760, Publications of the Record Society
for the Publication of Original Documents relating to Lancashire and Cheshire, 94 (Chester,
1940), 95-96, where a master alleged that his apprentice, John Dodd, “hath negligently behaved
him selfe in his service in idleinge and sleepinge in severalle places where he hath been
comanded to work.” But sleeping (from eight in the morning till two in the afternoon and
beyond) was only one of Dodd’s offenses. On the enforcement of other provisions in the statute,
see Margaret G. Davies, The Enforcement of English Apprenticeship . . 1 I563-1642 (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1956); R. K. Kelsall, Wage Regulation under the Statute of Artificers (London,
1938); and R. H. Tawney, “The Assessment of Wages in England by Justices of the Peace,”
Vierteljahrshrift fur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, i1 (1913): 307-37, 533-64.

26 E. S. Furniss, The Position of the Laborer in a System of Nationalism (Boston, 1920), 117-

602 Edmund S. Morgan

It may be said that complaints of the laziness and irresponsibility of
workmen can be met with in any century. Were such complaints in fact
justified in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England? There is
some reason to believe that they were, that life during those years was
characterized by a large amount of idleness or underemployment.27 The
outstanding economic fact of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century
in England was a rapid and more or less steady rise in prices, followed at
some distance by a much smaller rise in wages, both in industry and in
agriculture. The price of provisions used by a laborer’s family rose faster
than wages during the whole period from 1500 to 1640.28 The government
made an effort to narrow the gap by requiring the justices in each county to
readjust maximum wages at regular intervals. But the wages established
by the justices reflected their own nostalgic notions of what a day’s work
ought to be worth in money, rather than a realistic estimate of what a man
could buy with his wages. In those counties, at least, where records survive,
the level of wages set by the justices crept upward very slowly before 1630.29

Wages were so inadequate that productivity was probably impaired by
malnutrition. From a quarter to a half of the population lived below the
level recognized at the time to constitute poverty. Few of the poor could
count on regular meals at home, and in years when the wheat crop failed,
they were close to starvation.0 It is not surprising that inen living under
these conditions showed no great energy for work and that much of the
population was, by modern standards, idle much of the time. The health
manuals of the day recognized that people normally slept after eating,
and the laws even prescribed a siesta for laborers in the summer time.3′ If
they slept longer and more often than the laws allowed or the physicians
recommended, if they loafed on the job and took unauthorized holidays,
if they worked slowly and ineffectively when they did work, it may have

34; E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present,
no. 38 (1967): 56-97-

27 D. C. Coleman, “Labour in the English Economy of the Sixteenth Century,” Economic
History Review, 2d ser., 8 (1956), reprinted in E. M. Carus Wilson, ed., Essays in Economic
History (London, 1954-62), 2: 291-308.

28 E. H. Phelps Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of Building Wages,”
Economica, 2d ser., 22 (1955): 95-206; “Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables, com-
pared with Builders’ Wage-Rates,” ibid., 2d ser., 23 (1956): 296-314; “Wage Rates and Prices:
Evidence for Population Pressure in the Sixteenth Century,” ibid., 2d ser., 24 (1957): 289-306;
H. P. R. Finberg, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 4, 1500-i640, ed. Joan
Thirsk (Cambridge, 1967), 435-57, 531, 583-695.

29 Tawney, “Assessment of Wages,” 555-64; Kelsall, Wage Regulation, 67-86. Tawnley an(d
Kelsall both argue that the enforcement of maximum wages according to the statute of 1563
(lemonstrates a shortage of labor; but except in a few isolated instances (there may well have
been local temporary shortages) the evidence comes from the period after the middle of the
seventeenth century.

30 Coleman, “Labour in the English Economy,” 295; Peter Laslett adduces figures to show
that actual starvation was probably rare among English peasants (The World We Have Lost
[Lon(lon, i965], 107-27), but there can be little doubt that they were frequently close to it an(d
chronically undernourished. See Carl Bridenbaugh, Vexed and Troubled Englishmen (New
York, 1968), 91-98.

31 Thomas Elyot, The Castel of Helthe (London, 1541), fols. 45-46; Thomas Cogan, The

The Labor Problem at Jamestown, I607-I8 603

been due at least in part to undernourishment and to the variety of chronic
diseases that undernourishment brings in its train.82

Thus low wages may have begot low productivity that in turn justified
low wages.33 The reaction of employers was to blame the trouble on defi-
ciencies, not of diet or wages, but of character. A prosperous yeoman like
Robert Loder, who kept close track of his expenses and profits, was always
bemoaning the indolence of his servants. Men who had large amounts of
land that they could either rent out or work with hired labor generally
preferred to rent because labor was so inefficient and irresponsible.34

Even the division of labor, which economists have customarily regarded
as a means of increased productivity, could be a source of idleness. Plowing,
for example, seems to have been a special skill-a plowman was paid at a
higher rate than ordinary farm workers. But the ordinary laborer’s work
might have to be synchronized with the plowman’s, and a whole crew of
men might be kept idle by a plowman’s failure to get his job done at the
appropriate time. It is difficult to say whether this type of idleness, result-
ing from failure to synchronize the performance of related tasks, was rising
or declining; but cheap, inefficient, irresponsible labor would be unlikely to
generate pressures for the careful planning of time.

The government, while seeking to discourage idleness through laws
requiring long hours of work, also passed laws that inadvertently discouraged
industry. A policy that might be characterized as the conservation of employ-
ment frustrated those who wanted to do more work than others. English
economic policy seems to have rested on the assumption that the total
amount of work for which society could pay was strictly limited and must
be rationed so that everyone could have a little,35 and those with family
responsibilities could have a little more. It was against the law for a man to
practice more than one trade or one craft.36 And although large numbers of
farmers took up some handicraft on the side, this was to be discouraged,
because “for one man to be both an husbandman and an Artificer is a
gatheringe of divers mens livinges into one mans hand. “37 So as not to take

Haven of Health (London, 1589), 231-39; The Englishmans Doctor, or The School of Salerne
(orig. pub. London, i6o8) (New York, 1920), 77.

32 E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.”
33 On the prevalence of such a vicious circle in pre-industrial countries, see W. F. Moore,

Industrialization and Labor (Ithaca, 1951), io6-13, 308. But see also E. J. Berg, “Backward-
Sloping Labor Supply Functions in Dual Economies-The Africa Case,” Qularterly Journal
of Economics, 75 (16l): 468-92. For a comparison of Tudor and Stuart England with modern
underdeveloped countries, see F. J. Fisher, “The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The
Dark Ages in English Economic History,” Economica, 2d ser., 24 (1957): 2-18.

34 G. E. Fussell, ed., Robert Loder’s Farm Accounts i61-i620, Camden Society, 3d ser.,
53 (Loncdon, 1936); Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (New York, 1965),
295-97; Thirsk, Agrarian History, ig8.

35 Compare Bert F. Hoselitz, Sociological Aspects of Economic Growth (Glencoe, 1960), 33-34.
30 37 Edward 3, c.6. A Collection in English of the Statutes now in Force (London, 1594),

fols. 22-23; Calendar of Essex Quarter Session Rolls (microfilm in the University of Wisconsin
Library), 4: 228; 17: 124.

37 Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, 1: 353.

604 Edmund S. Morgan

work away from his elders, a man could not independently practice most
trades until he had become a master through seven years of apprenticeship.
Even then, until he was thirty years old or married, he was supposed to serve
some other master of the trade. A typical example is the case of John Pike-
man of Barking, Essex, a tailor who was presented by the grand jury be-
cause he “being a singleman and not above 25 years of age, does take in
work of tailoring and works by himself to the hindrance of other poor
occupiers, contrary to the law.”38

These measures doubtless helped to maintain social stability in the face of
a rapid population increase, from under three million in i5oo to a probable
four and a half million in 1640 (an increase reflected in the gap between
wages and prices).39 But in its efforts to spread employment so that every
able-bodied person would have a means of support, the government in effect
discouraged energetic labor and nurtured the workingman’s low expecta-
tions of himself. By requiring masters to engage apprentices for seven-year
terms and servants (in agriculture and in most trades) for the whole year
rather than the day, it prevented employers from hiring labor only when
there was work to be done and prevented the diligent and effective worker
from replacing the ineffective. The intention to spread work is apparent in
the observation of the Essex justices that labor by the day caused “the great
depauperization of other labourers.’ ’40 But labor by the year meant that work
could be strung out to occupy an unnecessary amount of time, because
whether or not a master had enough work to occupy his servants they had
to stay and he had to keep them. The records show many instances of
masters attempting to turn away a servant or apprentice before the stipu-
lated term was up, only to have him sent back by the courts with orders that
the master “entertain” him for the full period.4′ We even have the extra-
ordinary spectacle of the runaway master, the man who illegally fled from
his servants and thus evaded his responsibility to employ and support them.42

In pursuit of its -policy of full employment in the face of an expanding
population, the government often had to create jobs in cases where society
offered none. Sometimes men were obliged to take on a poor boy as a servant
whether they needed him or not. The parish might lighten the burden by

38 April 1594. Calendar of Essex Quarter Sessions Rolls, i6: 165. See also the indictment
(1589) of four bachelors for taking up the trade of poulterer, which “hindreth other powre
men.” Ibid., 15: 54. While the statute seems to allow single men and women under thirty to set
up in trade unless their services are demanded by a master, the courts, in Essex County at
least (where the earliest and most extensive records are preserved), required such persons to
find themselves a master. Moreover, the court was already issuing such orders before the statute
of 1563. See ibid., i: 85, ii6.

39 See note 28.
40 Calendar of Essex Quarter Sessions Rolls, 4: 128.
41 For examples: William LeHardy, ed., Hertfordshire County Records, 5 (Hertford, 1928):

191-92, 451; E. H. Bates, ed., Quarter Sessions Records for the County of Somerset, i, Somerset
Record Society, 23 (London, 1907), 11-12, 21; B. C. Redwood, ed., Quarter Sessions Order Book
I642-I649, Sussex Record Society, 54 (1954), 34, 44, 46, 128, 145-46, i88, 1go.

42 For examples: Hertfordshire County Records, 5: 376; Quarter Sessions Records for Somerset,
i: 97, 193, 258, 325.

The Labor Problem at Jamestown, I607-I8 605

paying a fee, but it might also fine a man who refused to take a boy assigned
to him.43 To provide for men and women who could not be foisted off on
unwilling employers, the government established houses of correction in
every county, where the inmates toiled at turning wool, flax, and hemp
into thread or yarn, receiving nothing but their food and lodging for their
efforts. By all these means the government probably did succeed in spread-
ing employment. But in the long run its policy, insofar as it was effective,
tended to depress wages and to diminish the amount of work expected from
any one man.

Above and beyond the idleness and underemployment that we may
blame on the lethargy and irresponsibility of underpaid labor, on the
failure to synchronize the performance of related tasks, and on the policy
of spreading work as thinly as possible, the very nature of the jobs to be
done prevented the systematic use of time that characterizes modern in-
dustrialized economies. Men could seldom work steadily, because they could
work only at the tasks that could be done at the moment; and in sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century England the tasks to be done often depended on
forces beyond human control: on- the weather and the seasons, on the winds,
on the tides, on the maturing of crops. In the countryside work from dawn
to dusk with scarcely an intermission might be normal at harvest time, but
there were bound to be times when there was very little to do. When it
rained or snowed, most farming operations had to be stopped altogether
(and so did some of the stages of cloth manufacture). As late as 1705
John Law, imagining a typical economy established on a newly discovered
island, assumed that the persons engaged in agriculture would necessarily
be idle, for one reason or another, half the time.44

To be sure, side by side with idleness and inefficiency, England exhibited
the first signs of a rationalized economy. Professor J. U. Nef has described
the many large-scale industrial enterprises that were inaugurated in Eng-
land in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.45 And if the

development of systematic agricultural production was advancing less rap-
idly than historians once supposed, the very existence of men like Robert
Loder, the very complaints of the idleness and irresponsibility of laborers,
the very laws prescribing hours of work all testify to the beginnings of a
rationalized economy. But these were beginnings only and not widely felt.
The laborer who seemed idle or irresponsible to a Robert Loder probably
did not seem so to himself or to his peers. His England was not a machine
for producing wool or corn. His England included activities and pleasures

43 Bates, Quarter Sessions . . . Somerset, 114, 300; Redwood, Order Book (Sussex), 96, 146,
194; W. L. Sachse, ed., Minutes of the Norwich Court of Mayoralty, Norfolk Record Society,
15 (Norwich, 1942), 78, 216.

44 Coleman, “Labour in the English Economy”; E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work Discipline, and
Industrial Capitalism”; Keith Thomas, “Work and Leisure in Pre-Industrial Society,” Past
and Present, no. 29 (1964): 50-66.

45J. U. Nef, The Conquest of the Material World (Chicago, 1964), 121-328.

6o6 Edmund S. Morgan

and relationships that systematic-minded employers would resent and that
modern economists would classify as uneconomic. At the opening of the
seventeenth century, England was giving him fewer economic benefits than
she had given his grandfathers so that he was often ready to pull up stakes
and look for a better life in another county or another country.46 But a life
devoted to more and harder work than he had known at home might not
have been his idea of a better life.

PERHAPS WE MAY now view Jamestown with somewhat less surprise at the
idle and hungry people occupying the place: idleness and hunger were the
rule in much of England much of the time; they were facts of life to be taken
for granted. And if we next ask what the settlers thought they had come to
America to do, what they thought they were up to in Virginia, we can find
several English enterprises comparable to their own that may have served
as models and that would not have led them to think of hard, continuous
disciplined work as a necessary ingredient in their undertaking.

If they thought of themselves as settling a wilderness, they could look
for guidance to what was going on in the northern and western parts of
England and in the high parts of the south and east.47 Here were the regions,
mostly wooded, where wastelands still abounded, the goal of many in the
large migrant population of England. Those who had settled down were
scattered widely over the countryside in isolated hovels and hamlets and
lived by pasture farming, that is, they cultivated only small plots of ground
and ran a few sheep or cattle on the common land. Since the gardens re-
quired little attention and the cattle hardly any, they had most of their
time to themselves. Some spent their spare hours on handicrafts. In fact,
they supplied the labor for most of England’s minor industries, which
tended to locate in pasture-farming regions, where agriculture made fewer
demands on the inhabitants, than in regions devoted to market crops. But
the pasture farmers seem to have offered their labor sporadically and re-
luctantly.48 They had the reputation of being both idle and independent.
They might travel to the richer arable farming regions to pick up a few
shillings in field work at harvest time, but their own harvests were small.
They did not even grow the wheat or rye for their own bread and made
shift to live in hard times from the nuts and berries and herbs that they
gathered in the woods.

46On the geographical mobility of the English population, see E. E. Rich, “The Population
of Elizabethan England,” Economic History Review, 2d ser., 2 (1949-56): 249-65; and Peter
Laslett and John Harrison, “Clayworth and Cogenhoe,” in H. E. Bell and R. L. Ollard, eds.,
Historical Essays 1600-1750 Presented to David Ogg (New York, 1963), 157-84.

47 This paragraph and the one that follows are based on the excellent chapters by Joan
Thirsk and by Alan Everitt, in Thirsk, Agrarian History.

48 Thirsk, Agrarian History, 417-29; Joan Thirsk, “Industries in the Countryside,” in F. J.
Fisher, ed., Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England (London,
1961), 70-88. See also E. L. Jones, “Agricultural Origins of Industry,” Past and Present, no. 40
(1968): 58-71. Lawrence Stone, “An Elizabethan Coalmine,” Economic History Review, 2d ser.,
3 (1950): 97-1o6, especially 1o1-o2; Thirsk, Agrarian History, xxxv, II1.

The Labor Problem at Jamestown, I607-I8 607

Jamestown was mostly wooded, like the pasture-farming areas of England)
and Wales; and since Englishmen used the greater part of their own country
for pasture farming, that was the obvious way to use the wasteland of the
New World. If this was the Virginians’ idea of what they were about, we
should expect them to be idle much of the time and to get grain for bread
by trading rather than planting (in this case not wheat or rye but maize
from the Indians); we should even expect them to get a good deal of their
food, as they did, by scouring the woods for nuts and berries.

As the colony developed, a pasture-farming population would have been
quite in keeping with the company’s expectation of profit from a variety
of products. The Spaniards’ phenomenal success with raising cattle in
the West Indies was well known. And the proposed employment of the
.settlers of Virginia in a variety of industrial pursuits (iron works, silk
works, glass works, shipbuilding) was entirely fitting for a pasture-farming
community. The small gardens assigned for cultivation by Governor Dale
in 1614 will also make sense: three acres would have been far too small a
plot of land to occupy a farmer in the arable regions of England, where a
single man could handle thirty acres without assistance.49 But it would be
not at all inappropriate as the garden of a pasture farmer. In Virginia three
acres would produce more than enough corn to sustain a man for a year and
still leave him with time to make a profit for the company or himself at
some other job-if he could be persuaded to work.

Apart from the movement of migrant workers into wastelands, the most
obvious English analogy to the Jamestown settlement was that of a military
expedition. The settlers may have had in mind not only the expeditions
that subdued the Irish50 but also those dispatched to the European continent
in England’s wars. The Virginia Company itself seems at first to have en-
visaged the enterprise as partly military, and the Lawes Divine, Morall
and Martiall were mostly martial. But the conception carried unfortunate
implications for the company’s expectations of profit. Military expeditions
were staffed from top to bottom with men unlikely to work. The nucleus
of sixteenth-century English armies was the nobility and the gangs of
genteel ruffians they kept in their service, in wartime to accompany them
into the field (or to go in their stead), in peacetime to follow them about

49 Hamor, True Discourse, 16-17; Peter Bowden, in Thirsk, Agrarian History, 652. It is
impossible to determine whether the settlers had had direct experience in pasture farming,
but the likelihood that they were following familiar pasture-farming procedures and may
have been expected to do so by the company is indicated by the kind of cattle they brought
with them: swine, goats, neat cattle, and relatively few horses. When they proposed to set
plows going, they were to be drawn by oxen as was the custom in pasture-farming areas. In
arable farming areas it was more common to use horses. The company’s concern to establish
substantial herds is evident in the Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall in the provisions forbid-
ding slaughter without government permission.

50 See Howard M. Jones, 0 Strange New World (New York, ig64), 167-79; David B. Quinn,
“Ireland and Sixteenth Century European Expansion,” in Historical Studies, ed. T. D. Williams,
Papers Read at the Second Conference of Irish Historians (London, 1958); The Elizabethans
and the Irish (Ithaca, i966), 106-22. Professor Quinn and Professor Jones have both demon-
strated how the subjugation of Ireland served as a model for the colonization of America.
Ireland must have been in the minds of many of the settlers at Jamestown.

6o8 Edmund S. Morgan

as living insignia of their rank.51 Work was not for the nobility nor for those
who wore their livery. According to the keenest student of the aristocracy
in this period, “the rich and well-born were idle almost by definition.”
Moreover they kept “a huge labor force . . . absorbed in slothful and parasitic
personal service.” Aside from the gentlemen retainers of the nobility and
their slothful servants the military expeditions that England sent abroad
were filled out by misfits and thieves whom the local constables wished to be
rid of. It was, in fact, government policy to keep the able-bodied and upright
at home and to send the lame, the halt, the blind, and the criminal abroad.52

The combination of gentlemen and ne’er-do-wells of which the leaders
at Jamestown complained may well have been the result of the company’s
using a military model for guidance. The Virginia Company was loaded
with noblemen (32 present or future earls, 4 countesses, 3 viscounts, and
19 barons).55 Is it possible that the large number of Jamestown settlers
listed as gentlemen and captains came from among the retainers of these
lordly stockholders and that the rest of the settlers included some of the
gentlemen’s personal servants as well as a group of hapless vagabonds or
migratory farm laborers who had been either impressed or lured into the
enterprise by tales of the New World’s abundance? We are told, at least,
that persons designated in the colony’s roster as “laborers” were “for most
part footmen, and such as they that were Adventurers brought to attend
them, or such as they could perswade to goe with them, that never did know
what a dayes work was.’54

If these men thought they were engaged in a military expedition, military
precedent pointed to idleness, hunger, and death, not to the effective organi-
zation of labor. Soldiers on campaign were not expected to grow their own
food. On the other hand they were expected to go hungry often and to die
like flies even if they never saw an enemy. The casualty rates on European
expeditions resembled those at Jamestown and probably from the same
causes: disease and undernourishment.55

But the highest conception of the enterprise, often expressed by the
leaders, was that of a new commonwealth on the model of England itself.

51 W. H. Dunham, Lord Hastings’ Indentured Retainers I46I-1483, Connecticut Academy of
Arts and Sciences, Transactions, 39 (New Haven, 1955); Gladys S. Thompson, Lords Lieutenants
in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1923); Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 199-270.

52 Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 331; Lindsay Boynton, The Elizabethan Militia 1558-I638
(Toronto, 1967); Thompson, Lords Lieuttenants, 115.

53 Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 372. About fifty per cent of the other members were
gentry. See Theodore K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investmnent in
the Expansion of England 1575-I630 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967).

54 Smith, Travels and Works, 2: 486-87.
55 The expedition of the Earl of Essex in 1591 to assist Henry iv of France met with only

a few skirmishes, but only 8oo men out of 3,4oo returned. Thompson, Lords Lielutenants, iii.
Even the naval forces mustered to meet the Armada in 1588 suffered appalling losses from
disease. In ten of the largest ships, in spite of heavy replacements, only 2,195 out of the
original complement of 3,325 men were on the payroll by September. The total loss was
probably equal to the entire original number. Lawrence Stone, “The Armada Campaign of
1588,” History, 29 (1944): 120-43, especially 137-41.

The Labor Problem at Jamestown, M607-18 609

Yet this, too, while it touched the heart, was not likely to turn men toward
hard, effective, and continuous work.56 The England that Englishmen were
saddled with as a model for new commonwealths abroad was a highly
complex society in which the governing consideration in accomplishing a
particular piece of work was not how to do it efficiently but who had the
right or the duty to do it, by custom, law, or privilege. We know that the
labor shortage in the New World quickly diminished considerations of
custom, privilege, and specialization in the organization of labor. But the
English model the settlers carried with them made them think initially of
a society like the one at home, in which each of them would perform his
own special task and not encroach on the rights of other men to do other
tasks. We may grasp some of the assumptions about labor that went into the
most intelligent planning of a new commonwealth by considering Richard
Hakluyt’s recommendation that settlers include both carpenters and joiners,
tallow chandlers and wax chandlers, bowyers and fletchers, men to rough-
hew pike staffs and other men to finish them.57

If Jamestown was not actually troubled by this great an excess of special-
ization, it was not the Virginia Company’s fault. The company wanted to
establish at once an economy more complex than England’s, an economy
that would include not only all the trades that catered to ordinary domestic
needs of Englishmen but also industries that were unknown or uncommon
in England: a list of artisans the company wanted for the colony in i6i1
included such specialists as hemp planters and hemp dressers, gun makers
and gunstock mnakers, spinners of pack thread and upholsterers of feathers.58
Whatever idleness arose fromn the specialization of labor in English society
was multiplied in the New World by the presence of unneeded skills and
the absence or shortage of essential skills. Jamestown had an oversupply
of glassmakers and not enough carpenters or blacksmiths, an oversupply of
gentlemen and not enough plowmen. These were Englishmen temporarily
baffled by missing links in the economic structure of their primitive com-
munity. The later jack-of-all-trades American frontiersman was as yet un-
thought of. As late as i6i8 Governor Argall complained that they lacked
the men “to set their Ploughs on worke.” Although they had the oxen to
pull them, “they wanted men to bring them to labour, and Irons for the
Ploughs, and harnesse for the Cattell.” And the next year John Rolfe noted
that they still needed “Carpenters to build and make Carts and Ploughs,
and skilfull men that know how to use them, and traine up our cattell to
draw them; which though we indeavour to effect, yet our want of experience
brings but little to perfection but planting Tobacco.”59

56 For typical statements implying that Virginia is a new commonwealth on the English model,
see the Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall, 47-48; Robert Johnson, The New Life of Virginia,
in Force, Tracts, i, no. 7: 17-18.

57 Taylor, Writings of the two Richard Hakluyts, 2: 323, 327-38.
58 Alexander Brown, The Genesis of the United States (Boston, 1890), 1: 469-70.
59 Smith, Travels and Works, 2: 538, 541.

6io Edmund S. Morgan

TOBACCO, AS WE KNOW, Was what they kept on planting. The first shipload of
it, sent to England in 1617, brought such high prices that the Virginians
stopped bowling in the streets and planted tobacco in them. They did it
without benefit of plows, and somehow at the same time they managed to
grow corn, probably also without plows. Seventeenth-century Englishmen,
it turned out, could adapt themselves to hard and varied work if there
was sufficient incentive.

But we may well ask whether the habits and attitudes we have been ex-
amining had suddenly expired altogether. Did tobacco really solve the labor
problem in Virginia? Did the economy that developed after 1618 represent
a totally new set of social and economic attitudes? Did greater opportunities
for profit completely erase the old attitudes and furnish the incentives to
labor that were needed to make Virginia a success? The study of labor in
modern underdeveloped countries should make us pause before we say
yes. The mere opportunity to earn high wages has not always proved
adequate to recruit labor in underdeveloped countries. Something more in
the way of expanded needs or political authority or national consciousness
or ethical imperatives has been required.60 Surely Virginia, in some sense,
became a success. But how did it succeed? What kind of success did it have?
Without attempting to answer, I should like very diffidently to offer a
suggestion, a way of looking ahead at what happened in the years after the
settlement of Jamestown.

The founders of Virginia, having discovered in tobacco a substitute for
the sugar of the West Indies and the silver of Peru, still felt the lack of a
native labor force with which to exploit the new crop. At first they turned
to their own overpopulated country for labor, but English indentured ser-
vants brought with them the same haphazard habits of work as their masters.
Also like their masters, they were apt to be unruly if pressed. And when their
terms of servitude expired-if they themselves had not expired in the
“seasoning” that carried away most immigrants to Virginia-they could
be persuaded to continue working for their betters only at exorbitant rates.
Instead they struck out for themselves and joined the ranks of those demand-
ing rather than supplying labor. But there was a way out. The Spanish and
Portuguese had already demonstrated what could be done in the New
World when a local labor force became inadequate: they brought in the
natives of Africa.

For most of the seventeenth century Virginians were unable to compete
for the limited supply of slaves hauled across the ocean to man the sugar
plantations of the Americas. Sugar was a more profitable way to use slaves
than tobacco. Moreover, the heavy mortality of newcomers to Virginia

60 Moore, Industrialization and Labor, 14-47; Melville J. Herskovits, “The Problem of Adapt-
ing Societies to New Tasks,” in Bert F. Hoselitz, The Progress of Underdeveloped Areas (Chi-
cago, 1952), especially 91-92. See also William 0. Jones, “Labor and Leisure in Traditional
African Societies,” Social Science Research Council, Items, 23 (1968): i-6.

The Labor Problem at Jamestown, I607-18 61 1

made an investment in Africans bound for a lifetime more risky than the
same amount invested in a larger number of Englishmen, bound for a
term that was likely to prove longer than a Virginia lifetime.

But Virginians continued to be Englishmen: the more enterprising con-
tinued to yearn for a cheaper, more docile, more stable supply of labor,
while their servants loafed on the job, ran away, and claimed the traditional
long lunch hour. As the century wore on, punctuated in Virginia by de-
pression, discontent, and rebellion, Virginia’s position in the market for men
gradually improved: the price of sugar fell, making it less competitive
with tobacco; the heavy mortality in the colony declined, making the initial
outlay of capital on slaves less risky; and American and European traders
expanded their infamous activities in Africa. The world supply of slaves,
which had fallen off in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, rose
sharply in the third quarter and continued to rise.6′

With these developments the Virginians at last were able to acquire
substitute natives for their colony and begin, in their own English way, to
Hispanize Virginia. By the middle of the eighteenth century Africans con-
stituted the great majority of the colony’s entire labor force.62 This is not
to say that plantation slavery in Virginia or elsewhere can be understood
simply as a result of inherited attitudes toward work confronting the eco-
nomic opportunities of the New World. The forces that determined the
character of plantation slavery were complex. But perhaps an institution
so archaic and at the same time so modern as the plantation cannot be fully
understood without taking into consideration the attitudes that helped to
starve the first settlers of the colony where the southern plantation began.

61 On the last point, see Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison,
g969), 11 9. I hope to deal elsewhere with the other developments that brought slavery to Virginia.

62 In 1755 the total number of white tithables in the colony was 43,329, of black tithables
59,999. Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population before the Federal
Census of 1790 (New York, 1932), 150-51. Tithables were white men and black men and women
over sixteen. Black women were tithable because they were made to work like men.

• Article Contents

p. 595
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• Issue Table of Contents

The American Historical Review, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Jun., 1971), pp. i-x+595-964+3a-50a
Front Matter [pp. i-x]
The Labor Problem at Jamestown, 1607-18 [pp. 595-611]
The Unsuccessful Adolescence of Heinrich Himmler [pp. 612-641]
Communism and the Working Class before Marx: The Icarian Experience [pp. 642-689]
Historical Analogism, Public Policy, and Social Science in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century China [pp. 690-727]
Review: Order and Growth, Authority and Meaning in Colonial New England [pp. 728-737]
Reviews of Books
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Near East
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Africa
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Asia and the East
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Communications [pp. 856-868]
Festschriften and Miscellanies [pp. 869-870]
Other Books Received [pp. 871-881]
Recently Published Articles [pp. 882-956]
Recent Deaths [pp. 957-964]
Back Matter [pp. 3(a)-50(a)]