Costs and Wages
Wages were low in Britain in the 18th century because of a surplus of labor. The average was about 50 shillings (£2.5) a year for a plowman, and 40 shillings (£2) a year for an ordinary unskilled worker. Ship captains negotiated prices for transporting and feeding a passenger on the seven or eight week journey across the ocean, averaging about £5 to £7, the equivalent of four or five years of work back in England.
Read more about this topic: Indentured Servant
Famous quotes containing the words costs and/or wages:
“When over Catholics the ocean rolls,
They must wait several weeks before a mass
Takes off one peck of purgatorial coals,
Because, till people know what’s come to pass,
They won’t lay out their money on the dead—
It costs three francs for every mass that’s said.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on,—s’pose you’d a done right and give Jim up; would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I’d feel bad—I’d feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what’s the use you learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)