1. For a discussion of these issues, see Stanley L. Engerman, ‘Coerced and Free Labor: Property Rights and the Development of the Labor Force’, forthcoming (in translation) in Annales. For an excellent earlier summary discussion of contract labour, see Carter Goodrich, ‘Indenture’, in Edwin R.A. Seligman, (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Volume VII, (New York, 1932), pp. 644–648. For an important discussion of the role of sugar production in generating the intercontinental movement of labour, see the essays in Sidney Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, (Chicago, 1974). See also David W. Galenson, ‘The Rise and Fall of Indentured Labor in the Americas: An Economic Analysis’, Journal of Economic History, XLIV, (1984), pp. 1–26.
2. These advantages of higher population density were noted by many writers in the nineteenth century, in particular Henry Carey and Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and were the basis of their suggestions as to appropriate land and immigration policy. In the early stages of European settlement land was often used to subsidize migration, either by a grant to the migrant or to the landowners attracting migrants. In some cases land was provided both to the importer of contract labour and to the labourer after his contract had expired as part of his ‘freedom dues’.
3. Rice was also primarily a plantation crop during the period of the settlement of South Carolina. While it is generally presumed that only slaves could profitably be used to produce sugar under the technology of the times, because of the labour and capital requirements of large plantations, it is of interest that small-scale cane farming was introduced in the late nineteenth century when the opportunities to use slave labour were eliminated, and that in the mid-twentieth century there were examples of considerable sugar output coming from regions with relatively little plantation production. For a discussion of this, see Vladimir P. Timoshenko and Boris C. Swerling, The World’s Sugar: Progress and Policy, (Stanford, 1957), pp. 63–89, and G.B. Hagelberg, The Caribbean Sugar Industries: Constraints and Opportunities, (New Haven, 1974), pp. 63–102. Thus there may have been more flexibility in production technique than presumed in the past, although examples such as the delay in Australia’s ability to end non-white production of sugar by moving to small, white-operated, farms might indicate that the successful adoption of alternative sugar technologies to compete with plantation production was not easy. See also the discussion in Stanley L. Engerman, ‘Contract Labor, Sugar, and Technology in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Economic History, XLIII, (1983), pp. 635–659.
4. On slave labour, see, e.g., the discussions in Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross, (Boston, 1974), the sources cited there, and the subsequent debates on the economics of slavery. There were, of course, various means by which slaves did have some influence on their working conditions, since owners needed to be concerned with conditions giving rise to discontent and resistance, which would limit their economic gains.
5. See Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage, (Chapel Hill, 1947), on America, and A.G.L. Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies, (London, 1966), on Australia.