*diff anon* Also, taking in disgraced members of aristocratic families was an additional source of profit, not a main one. I highly doubt there were many of them. Half a dozen at most. It’s not like aristocratic families were staging deaths of their family members on regular basis. Everyone else are convicts from British prisons, so nobody pays for them. And from what we’ve seen it’s a huge plantation with vast sugar cane fields. Lots of work.

diff anon, let’s not forget that Oglethorpe solicits convicts from prisons in England and I do not think anyone pays for them, I am wrong?

You are not wrong, Anon. Oglethorpe does in fact solicit convicts from English prisons – Max says as much. He still might get paid for them, but it would be a much smaller fee given that it would be the English court system essentially thanking him for taking them off their hands and saving them the cost of feeding, housing, and eventually burying them. It’s far more likely, though, that Oglethorpe is essentially buying men from England and transporting them to the New World to work on his farm, and to continue doing that, he’d have to make much more profit than he’d make off the disgraced relatives of the nobility when they actually had someone to dispose of.

Edit: As a related note – there were about a billion crimes that you could be imprisoned for in English law at the time which is to say that their prison system was just as much legalized slavery as the American one is today. Even were those men all convicted murderers, though, no one deserves to be enslaved. Ever.