Restrictions on Manufacturing.

The vast majority of colonists worked in the agricultural sector as farmers and planters, yet they were familiar with a wide array of manufactured goods. The colonists themselves had no large factories for manufacturing many of the products they used every day. British regulations forbade most manufactures in the colonies because the authorities wanted to prevent any competition with English industries. But there were other obstacles too, and in the end these probably were more significant. For one, manufacturing required a large labor force. Compared to agriculture, it also demanded a large amount of capital. Both of these factors of production, as economists call them, were relatively scarce and expensive in the colonies. Besides, the colonists could not protect their domestic industries by imposing tariffs on British goods, so the colonial-made products would have had to compete with affordable, well-made...