North America's economy dramatically shifted throughout the 18th century. A large part of this fluctuation can be attributed to the popularization of the growing of tobacco, but also due to the ups and downs the economy took around the sale of it. The Price of Nationhood: The American Revolution in Charles County by Jean Butenhoff Lee gives a really great description of these fluctuations by tracking the progress of a small county in Maryland (which happened to be right across the river from George Washington's Mount Vernon).

Charles County had some folks who started out growing and selling tobacco in the late 1600s, but it didn't really pick up until the early 1700s. (Here is a map of Charles County, just for some perspective. I inserted a thin red line along its lower border.) The county strongly relied on tobacco plantations for his local economy, with its largest town even being named "Port Tobacco," being named as such for obvious reasons. While some farmers did rotate out tobacco from their fields, tobacco was the staple of the economy just because it was very much in demand to Europeans. What made Tobacco such a lucrative "cash crop" is that it was desired by countries all over Europe. Lee was able to trace the sale of the tobacco from this county back to Britain, France, Holland, and other counties.

Tobacco growing is extremely physically demanding work. This also precluded most planters from being able to harvest too much because it would be too time consuming (and too costly to hire workers) to tend the fields. That's why most planters in this era, in the years leading up to the American Revolution had relatively small farms (76% of the farmers in Charles County owned 100 acres or less). But as the importation of enslaved Africans picked up through the century, which made it possible for plantation owners to start turning out a high profit at the cost of human lives. By the late 1760s, just this one small county, which had a population of just under 10,000 (including the enslaved) were turning over over 1 million pounds of tobacco per year.[Page 34].