Romantic mythology often miscasts the common colonists as self-sufficient yeomen who produced all that they needed or wanted. There is a germ of truth to this. Most colonists lived on farm households that produced most of their own food, fuel, and homespun cloth. In the mainland colonies (but not the trade-driven West Indies), about 90 percent of economic production remained within a colony for home consumption or local trade; only about 10 percent was exported.
