The people on the Mayflower were lower middle class, and largely British. Which means they were lower middle-class arrivals from a country that was very poor. As Niall Ferguson wrote in his 2004 book Empire, the England of the 17th century was far, far from the one of the 19th century.
While economic measures are powerfully flawed on their best day, it’s notable that the England of the 17th century had an economy that was a quarter of India’s. Which is quite something as most who’ve been to India modernly will attest. Though it’s liberalized quite a lot in the last thirty years, to visit India is to have an all-new perception of overwhelming poverty.
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