Читать книгу Australian History For Dummies - Alex McDermott - Страница 75

When planning the new colony in NSW, the British Government had completely failed to provide it with any coinage or currency, expecting (vaguely) that after a year everyone would be self-sufficient, with the convicts growing enough to meet everyone’s needs.

When this failed to happen, ship captains realised that they had a wonderful captive market in NSW — an isolated outpost dependent on imports to survive. They started arriving with much needed goods but charging prohibitively extortionate prices. While convicts and soldiers could scrape together some money, the officers in the NSW Corps, paid in British pounds sterling, were the only ones who could bargain the ships’ captains down, purchasing an entire ship’s consignment at reduced prices. So they did, but then started charging their own extortionate prices through their convict and common soldier middlemen.

What had originally begun as a meeting of opportunity and necessity, quickly turned into a trade monopoly.

Taking an overseas posting, going overseas and doing everything you could to get rich was widely accepted as common military officer practice at the time. However, officers of the NSW Corps still couldn’t be seen directly involving themselves in trade. So they set up their convict servants (or convict mistresses) as retail frontmen (or women) for their retail operations.