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Estimating the Wealth of Americans on the Eve of the Revolution
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2009
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- Copyright © The Economic History Association 1981
References
1 Jones, Alice Hanson, Wealth of a Nation To Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1980).Google Scholar Earlier versions of this work appeared as Jones, Alice Hanson, “Wealth Estimates for the American Middle Colonies, 1774,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, 18, Pt. 2 (07 1970), 1–172;Google ScholarJones, Alice Hanson, “Wealth Estimates for the New England Colonies about 1770,” this JOURNAL, 32 (03 1972), 98–127.Google Scholar
2 Jones, Alice Hanson, American Colonial Wealik Documents and Methods, 2 ed. (New York, 1977). The second edition of these documents was necessitated by the decision to reduce the weight of the Charleston District in the South because of the exceptionally high wealth in slaves held by the inhabitants of that area. As a result, the wealth estimates for the South and the thirteen colonies as a whole in the first edition have been revised.Google Scholar
3 A folder for each of the 919 cases containing copies of the probate documents in the original handwriting as well as additional genealogical data have also been deposited at the Newberry Library in Chicago.Google Scholar
4 Initially, it was expected that the sample would be self-weighting, but when the target numbers of the probate records from each cluster were not always attained, it was also necessary to weight the data by county weights. Jones, Wealth of a Nation To Be, pp. 346–47.Google Scholar
5 Suggestions along these lines were made at a special session on Jones's, Alice Hanson work at the Social Science History Association Meeting at Rochester, New York, Fall 1980.Google Scholar
6 It is possible, however, to obtain more detailed demographic data for certain areas of colonial America. Perhaps more effort should have been made to make sure that the demographic assumptions used in this study are consistent with the fragmentary data we have from the earlier period. For a good review of existing colonial censuses, see Wells, Robert V., The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of Census Data (Princeton, 1975).Google Scholar
7 Jones assumed that the proportion of children in 1800 was too high for 1774 since births delayed by the Revolutionary War were likely to have occurred and because some of the single young immigrants of the 1760s were likely to have had children by 1800. Jones, American Colonial Wealth, vol. 3, pp. 1801–02. It is not clear, however, that this is the case since the decline in fertility, particularly in the Northeast, in the second half of the eighteenth century would have lowered the proportion of children by 1800.Google Scholar For a discussion of the decline in fertility in early America, see Vinovskis, Mans A., Fertility in Massachusetts from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York, forthcoming).Google Scholar
8 The estimate of the proportion of children and youths under 21 in New England in 1800 does not include data from Vermont because it was not regarded by Jones as part of that region in 1774. Jones, , American Colonial Wealth, vol. 3, p. 1801.Google Scholar
9 Calculated from the Federal Census of 1800. U.S. State Department, Return of the Whole Number of Persons within the Several Districts of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1801).Google Scholar
10 Ibid.
11 Jones, Wealth of a Nation To Be, pp. 352–62.Google Scholar
12 These data are now conveniently available in Pruitt, Bettye Hobbs, ed., The Massachusetts Tax Valuation List of 1771 (Boston, 1978).Google Scholar
13 Jones, , American Colonial Wealth, vol. 3, p. 1869.Google Scholar
14 On death rates in Boston during these years, see Blake, John B., Public Health in the Town of Boston, 1630–1822 (Cambridge, MA, 1959).Google Scholar See also Vinovskis, Maris A., “The 1789 Life Table of Edward Wigglesworth,” this Journal, 31 (09 1971), 570–90.Google Scholar
15 For a summary of these early studies as well as a discussion of the rural-urban differences in colonial New England mortality, see Vinovskis, Maris A., “Mortality Rates and Trends in Massachusetts before 1860,” this Journal, 32 (03 1972), 184–213.Google ScholarPubMed
16 For example, see Rutman, Darrett B. and Rutman, Anita H., “Of Agues and Fevers: Malaria in the Early Chesapeake,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 33 (1976), 31–60;Google ScholarSmith, Daniel Blake, Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Society (Ithaca, 1980).Google Scholar
17 For a collection of some of the key essays on American historical demography, see Vinovskis, Maris A., ed., Studies in American Historical Demography (New York, 1979).Google Scholar
18 Jones, Wealth of a Nation To Be, pp. 348–50.Google Scholar
19 Auwers, Linda, “History from the Mean—Up, Down, and Around: A Review Essay,” Historical Methods, 12 (Winter 1979), 39–45.Google Scholar
20 For example, see Main, Gloria L., “Inequality in Early America: The Evidence from Probate Records of Massachusetts and Maryland,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 7 (Spring 1977), 559–81;Google ScholarMain, Gloria L., “Probate Records as a Source for Early American History,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 32 (01 1975), 89–99;Google ScholarSmith, Daniel Scott, “Underregistration and Bias in Probate Records: An Analysis of Data from Eighteenth-Century Hingham, Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 32 (01 1975), 100–10.Google Scholar
21 Jones, Wealth of a Nation To Be, pp. 195–257.Google Scholar
22 Increasingly historians are beginning to use multiple classification analysis. For a good, readable introduction to multiple classification analysis, see Andrews, Frank M., Morgan, James N., Sonquist, John A.. and Klem, Laura, Multiple Classification Analysis, Institute for Social Research, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor, 1973).Google Scholar For an example of its use in historical literature, see Kaestle, Carl F. and Vinovskis, Mans A., Education and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, 1980).Google Scholar
23 Shammas, Carole, “The Determinants of Personal Wealth in Seventeenth-Century England and America,” this Journal, 37 (09 1977), 657–89.Google Scholar
24 Jones, Wealth of a Nation To Be, p. 198.Google Scholar