Trade In Colonial Times Essay

622 Words3 Pages

Trade Intro Long ago, buying and selling items was very different from going to Target or ordering off Amazon today. In Colonial times, sending items to trade was expensive for those buying its passage. Trade company owners would become very wealthy, and traders became poor. A behind the scenes look at the lives of owners, traders and slaves lives to see how their lives went. Products There were many goods that people traded. Some of the the common products included rice, tobacco, and wheat. Most of those resources were much needed to survive, but chewing on tobacco was a habit for most of the people in Colonial times. Tobacco was the most popular good to trade. Some of the items were unusuale like pickled …show more content…

Most (if not all) of the shipping company’s owners were wealthy. They had to be wealthy because the owners had to buy cargo ships to to use for trade. They also had to buy slaves, and pay for crews to work on the ships. It was all worth the money, because there were over 1,000 customers who bought passages for their crops and products to sell in England, making the owners very wealthy and they were able to wear blue clothes (blue clothes were expensive at the time). People in England also bought passage for their crops and products to sell in the Colonies. The company’s headquarters were almost always near the docks where their ships were located. Moreover, when planning routes the company's workers would have to plan to avoid pirates at sea. Not only that, but most people think that shipping companies only carried products in Colonial times, but the companies also carried mail and was the closest thing to a postal service back then. The company owners almost never went on the ships they ordered to go to England, so they could make the decisions on discounts and to raise and lower prices as needed. If they went to England they would have no way of knowing if business was failing and to know if they needed to change the prices while they were gone. If farms wanted to trade with England, the owners would have to have a lot of money. If they didn’t have a lot of money, they would have had to try