rare in the South, in their 1739 "Petition of the Inhabitants of New Inverness". By 1750 Georgia authorized slavery in the colony because it had been unable to secure enough indentured servants as laborers. As economic conditions in England began to improve in the first half of the 18th century, workers had no reason to leave, especially to face the risks in the colonies. Slavery in British colonies During most of the British colonial period, slavery existed in all the colonies. People enslaved in the North typically worked as house servants, artisans, laborers and craftsmen, with the greater number in cities. Many men worked on the docks and in shipping. In 1703, more than 42% of New York City households enslaved people, the second-highest proportion of any city in the colonies, behind only Charleston, South Carolina. But enslaved people were also used as agricultural workers in farm communities, especially in the South, but also including in areas of upstate New York and Long Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey. By 1770, there were 397,924 blacks in a population of 2.17 million. They were unevenly distributed: There were 14,867 in New England, where they were 3% of the population; 34,679 in the mid-Atlantic colonies, where they were 6% of the population (19,000 were in New York or 11%); and 347,378 in the five Southern Colonies, where they were 31% of the population The South developed an agricultural economy dependent on commodity crops. Its planters rapidly acquired a significantly higher number and proportion of enslaved people in the population overall, as its commodity crops were labor-intensive. Early on, enslaved people in the South worked primarily on farms and plantations growing indigo, rice and tobacco; cotton did not become a major crop until after the 1790s. Before then long-staple cotton was cultivated primarily on the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 enabled the cultivation of short-staple cotton in a wide variety of mainland areas, leading to the development of large areas of the Deep South as cotton country in the 19th century. Rice and tobacco cultivation were very labor-intensive. In 1720, about 65% of South Carolina's population was enslaved. Planters (defined by historians in the Upper South as those who held 20 or more slaves) used enslaved workers to cultivate commodity crops. They also worked in the artisanal trades on large plantations and in many