9. The Tobacco Lords created a near-monopoly on American tobacco
In 1710 the French Crown granted the Scottish city of Glasgow sole rights to import tobacco to French territories, and France itself. Glasgow’s advantages of having a sheltered, deepwater port on the west coast of the British Isles gave it ready access to tobacco ships driven by the prevailing westerly winds from the British colonies in America. Glaswegian merchants entered an economic expansion which lasted for most of the 18th century, importing tobacco and other products from America. The merchants also entered the transatlantic slave trade and vast fortunes were acquired by several Glaswegians. The most successful became known as the Tobacco Lords. It was they who determined the prices paid for the American planters’ crops, and in what in a later day would be called collusion they controlled the economics of the tobacco trade.
The most successful American planters acquired vast fortunes in terms of land and chattel slaves, but hard money in the colonies was scarce. Even the most successful of the planters, with names such as Washington, Lee, Fairfax, Custis, Randolph, Mason, Jefferson, and others all had to borrow money from the merchants in Scotland and England to purchase the items needed to plant their crops and furnish their estates. In return, they sent their crops to the merchants for sale on consignment. With the merchants controlling the ultimate price they paid the planters, many of the latter found themselves in debt, year after year. By the 1750s, with little hard currency, Virginia and North Carolina planters used their tobacco to settle local debts, for the purchase of land or slaves for example. Virginia planters began to petition Parliament for redress with little success.