Chesapeake Bay Colonies

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When the Chesapeake Bay first colony got established, it did not live to the what the people expected it to be. It got a very slow start at first by having no economic gain and people dying in constantly because of starvation and disease. The Chesapeake Bay seemed to be going nowhere, but the economy and the society of the Chesapeake Bay changed as time went by. When the Chesapeake Bay started planting and exporting tobacco their economy changed and with it the society changed too. As it shows in “Tobacco Imported by England from Virginia and Maryland (in thousands of pounds) and Maryland Tobacco Prices (in pence sterling/pound), 1620-1770” table that the exportation of tobacco increases by thousands of pounds every couple of years which …show more content…

The unequal wealth distribution continues throughout the 1600s and the 1700s as the tables show because the poor are not getting the opportunity to expand their business and make more money. This unequal wealth distribution problem led the poor people to actually leave somewhere else because they can’t the wealthy is taking over their farming lands and expanding to where they cannot make any money to live. On the “Virginia population West of Blue Ridge Mountains, 1745-1790” table shows that the population growth of this colony increased dramatically in those years. The population was “10,200” in 1745 and by 1790 the population grew to “74,767” which is a really big grow in just 45 years. This population growth was probably caused by the poor people who were getting almost nothing of the wealth of the colony decided to leave or sell their farming land to find something new in another place where the wealthy are not getting most of the wealth and leaving other people nothing. The tobacco economy in the Chesapeake Bay changed their society marginally over the year. It changed the people to have some kind of skill to make money out of, but tobacco changed the colony’s distribution of wealth that made the wealthy people take all the wealth to themselves and left