In the city itself, where cheap labor was always in short supply, the economic advantages of slaveowning became harder to overlook as greater availability brought down costs. By the early eighteenth century, the price of a prime slave was roughly equivalent to the annual wages of a skilled craftsman, and direct imports began to soar. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, twenty-four hundred slaves would be legally imported into New York, with another five thousand to follow over the next fifty years (maybe six hundred or so of whom would be smuggled in):
