Can We Build National Accounts for the Colonial Period of American History?

Abstract

B EFORE considering whether national accounts can be assembled for the colonial period, we should ask: What can be learned from them? The core concepts are the national product and national income.1 The standard, modern definitions must be modified if they are to be relevant to colonial circumstances. The standard measures of national product include all of agricultural output and the value of shelter; the only other relevant outputs are those that flow through markets. Since, in colonial times, many things now produced exclusively for the market were produced in the home for home consumption, using modern concepts of income and output to construct colonial national accounts would leave much colonial output uncounted. To improve the comparability of colonial and modern measurements, the colonial concept of national product must be modified to include many nonmarketed goods, such as the value of clearing and breaking farm land; slaughtering, butchering, and preserving meats for home consumption; baking in the home; spinning, weaving, and dyeing cloth for home consumption; clothes produced in the home for domestic consumption; and the products of hunting and fishing.2 Exactly what items should be included and to what extent, if at all, positive and negative effects on others ought to be taken into account is a matter for discussion. The major point is that, if colonial aggregate product or income series are to be made, we must think carefully about the concepts to be employed; the conventional, modern concepts will not yield the most useful results. How should the colonial nation be defined? Should it include all the British American colonies combined or just those that eventually became part