1600 to 1749 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan
England's wealth multiplies by five in a hundred and fifty years
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A memoir on commerce, reprinted for readers in Saint-Domingue in January 1767, laid out England's national wealth as a running total. In 1600 everything the country held in money, ships, houses and land was valued at 216 million pounds sterling. By 1660 the figure had more than doubled. By 1688 it had nearly tripled. By 1749 it stood at a thousand million pounds, roughly five times where it started. The dates are not neutral. The interval from 1600 to 1749 is precisely the period in which England took Barbados and Jamaica, built its sugar colonies, chartered the Royal African Company and became the largest carrier of captive Africans in the Atlantic. The accounting of the day entered no line for enslaved people, and it counted the ships that carried them and the houses their sugar paid for. Planters in Saint-Domingue read these numbers as a competitor's balance sheet. Their own colony was climbing the same curve and would soon out produce every British island.
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