Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/270

 CHAPTER XV

MANUFACTURED SUPPLIES: FOREIGN

I.

preceding chapters I have referred in detail to the different supplies which were needed for use or consumption by people of all classes in the seventeenth century. Where and how were these supplies obtained? When not mere natural products, to what extent had they been manufactured at home or abroad? The most common varieties of food were in most cases of the growth of the soil of the Colony. We have seen that the main subsistence of the slave, the servant, and the master was principally drawn from the plantation itself; the meats, the vegetables, the flour, the meal, and, in large measure, the fermented liquors which were so freely indulged in, were produced in Virginia. A considerable proportion of the articles of food to be found on the tables of persons of wealth was not secured from their own estates, but had been imported from abroad. This was still more the case with the innumerable articles which made up the household goods of the individual planter, and, in a lesser degree, of the implements employed in tilling the ground. Many of these articles were manufactured, as will be hereafter shown, in the Colony, but the greater number had been brought in by local or foreign merchants, or by the landowners at their own expense.