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NORTH AMERICA

English interest in North America began soon after Christopher Columbus's first discoveries when John Cabot (c. 1450–c. 1499), a Venetian sailor, was commissioned by Henry VII in 1497 to find a northwest route to the East. The voyage proved ineffectual and for the next seventy years England remained on the sidelines of westward exploration, largely because of political and religious divisions at home. Interest did not really revive until the fourth quarter of the sixteenth century, when the success of the Spanish and Portuguese empires demonstrated the economic and strategic value of having colonies. Since the North American continent remained largely free of European settlement, the new advocates of colonization, notably English geographer Richard Hakluyt (c. 1552–1616), argued that the settling of these territories would allow the production of valuable tropical products like sugar, silk, olives, spices, hardwoods, and vines. These items had to be purchased from foreign rivals, resulting in a trade deficit and loss of bullion. In addition, Hakluyt argued, the possession of colonies would increase the maritime power of England, making her a force to be reckoned with among the nation-states of Europe.

FIRST SETTLEMENTS

Since the crown lacked the resources for such ventures, it was initially left to individuals like Sir Walter Raleigh (1554–1618) to fulfill these dreams. Unfortunately, Raleigh's attempt to settle Roanoke Island along the North Carolina coast between 1585 and 1587 proved unsuccessful, mainly because he lacked the necessary resources. However, the development of joint stock companies promised to solve this problem by allowing funds to be pooled on a large scale. Not that these new entities found colonization easy, as the attempts of the Plymouth and Virginia companies proved. The former failed to establish its colony of Sagadahoc in 1607 on the coast of present-day Maine, while the latter had to struggle for twenty years to ensure the success of Jamestown, England's first permanent settlement on the mainland of North America. In reality, too little was known about the Chesapeake region when the first settlers arrived in 1607, and the project came close to collapse several times.

Despite these difficulties, other schemes duly followed, though the impulse was increasingly religious rather than commercial. England, like much of Europe, was experiencing religious turmoil, and America seemingly offered a refuge to those suffering persecution at home. Accordingly, in 1620 a group of Pilgrims led by the Separatist church leader William Brewster (1567–1644) set sail in the May-flower to establish the Plymouth colony, while from 1629 to 1640 twenty thousand Puritans left England to establish the colonies of Massachusetts Bay in 1630, Rhode Island and Connecticut in 1636, and New Haven in 1637. Nor were Protestants alone in this exodus. In 1632 George Calvert, the first baron Baltimore (c. 1580–1632), obtained a charter from Charles I for a colony allowing religious toleration for Roman Catholics, which he called Maryland in honor of the queen.

Baltimore's charter differed from those granted to the Virginia and Massachusetts Bay Companies in that authority was vested in a single proprietor. Otherwise, both types of charter gave the grantees extensive powers, including authority to make local ordinances for the better government of their territories, providing such ordinances were consistent with the laws of England. The crown also retained the right to a fifth of all precious minerals found in their settlements. However, in 1618 the Virginia Company decided to establish a local assembly as a more effective way of involving the inhabitants in the success of the venture. This pattern was soon adopted in other colonies, notably Massachusetts, not least because that colony's charter, based on the joint stock model, required its officers to be elected annually by the shareholders. Even the autocratic second baron Baltimore (Cecilius Calvert, 1605–1675) found it politic to give his settlers an assembly as a means of attracting support. The qualifications for voting varied. In Maryland and Virginia it was generally restricted to freeholders (meaning males with property), but in Massachusetts the Puritan leadership quickly substituted church membership as the criterion for participation in the affairs of the colony.

SECOND WAVE

Although English settlement of North America was interrupted at the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1641, the restoration of Charles II in 1660 allowed a second wave of colonization, beginning in 1664 with the conquest of the Dutch colony of New Netherland in present-day New York. It was seized partly for economic reasons, to secure entry to the northern fur trade; partly to create a patrimony for the duke of York, the king's younger brother; and partly as a strategy: to close a dangerous gap between the New England and Chesapeake Bay settlements. But even before the seizure of the Dutch colony, another scheme was afoot to settle the area south of Virginia. Here, too, the founding of the Carolinas was partly commercial, to tap the possibilities of exotic cash crops in a subtropical climate; partly strategic, to provide a buffer between Virginia and the Spanish in Florida; and partly an attempt to endow the eight proprietors sponsoring the scheme with the privileges of semifeudal palatine princes. Not that religious considerations were entirely forgotten after 1660. In 1682 William Penn (1644–1718) secured a proprietary charter to provide a haven for the Society of Friends, or Quakers, as they were more commonly known. But as was the case with the Carolinas, the colonization of Pennsylvania had a strong economic rationale: to exploit the rich potential of the Delaware River area. It was also intended to enhance the dynastic aspirations of the proprietary family.

For much of the seventeenth century, England's control of its burgeoning empire was necessarily weak, given the distance of the colonies from England and the confused state of the mother country. Compounding the problems was the fact that there was no common system of government in the various settlements. Virginia, the oldest colony, had a governor appointed by the crown, a council appointed by the governor, and an elective assembly representing the propertied classes, and this was to be the model most favored by the crown after 1689 as its best means of maintaining control. However, the New England colonies at this time were largely self-governing commonwealths, while the Carolinas, Pennsylvania, and New York were all under proprietary control.

Even so, the period was not without some tightening of the imperial reins. In 1651 the first Navigation Act was passed to protect England's growing trade with its empire in the West Indies and mainland North America, and this was followed by several similar such laws in the next twenty-five years. Then in 1680 New Hampshire was separated from Massachusetts and made into a royal colony on the Virginia model. More grandiosely, in the mid-1680s James II attempted to merge the northern colonies into one entity, the Dominion of New England, to allow a more effective defense and use of scarce resources. That scheme proved too unpopular and was discarded during England's 1689 Glorious Revolution, which limited sovereign power and ended the concept of the divine right of kings. Nevertheless, some changes were effected. Massachusetts now had to accept a charter on the Virginia model, albeit with the concession that the lower house still helped nominate the governor's council, as had been required under the old charter of 1629. The crown also had a further success in East and West Jersey in the early 1700s, when the proprietors decided to surrender their governmental rights over the territory. Finally, in the 1720s the crown, with Parliament's help, engineered a similar outcome in the Carolinas, after the proprietary government failed to defend those colonies successfully from Spanish and Indian attacks. However, Pennsylvania and Maryland remained proprietary colonies while Connecticut and Rhode Island anomalously retained their corporate charters, which had originally been granted by Parliament during the English Civil War.

DENOMINATIONS AND DIVERSITY

During the seventeenth century the colonies' population was overwhelmingly English in origin, with only a few pockets of non-English stock, most importantly in Pennsylvania, where Penn settled a group of lower Rhineland Pietists at Germantown in 1686, and in New York, where the Dutch remained a distinct group. But already there was a growing number of African slaves, especially in the South, and this trend toward a more diverse population continued during the eighteenth century, aided by the absence of any restrictive immigration laws. In 1707 the Act of Union between England and Scotland officially opened the way to Scottish emigration, while the cessation of the War of the Spanish Succession in Europe in 1714 permitted further German emigration from the Palatinate and Rhineland areas. In addition, large numbers of Scots Irish began to arrive after 1717 following the termination of their leases in Ireland. All these European peoples came seeking a better life where land was plentiful and religious discrimination was minimal. Prior to 1715 the New England region had been uniformly Congregational, the South largely Anglican, with the Dutch Reformed and Society of Friends preeminent in the Hudson and Delaware Valleys. Now, outside New England, there were Presbyterians, Baptists, Moravians, and German Reformed and Lutheran churches, all adding to the multireligious and multicultural nature of the colonies and establishing a trend that has continued ever since.

ECONOMY

The economy of Britain's North American colonies was similarly varied, primarily as the result of differences in the climate and soil. The relatively temperate climate of the New England and Mid-Atlantic colonies allowed their inhabitants to practice European-style farming in cereals, root crops, and animal husbandry. And as in Europe, most northern farms relied on their families to meet their labor requirements. In the South, on the other hand, the longer and warmer growing season permitted the cultivation of more exotic cash crops like tobacco in the Chesapeake Bay area and Albemarle Sound region of North Carolina and rice in the lower part of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia (after 1733). Since these crops were labor-intensive, their production presented a problem, not least because most Native Americans refused to acculturate to European-style production methods and were in any case too few in number. Initially the labor problem was solved in the Chesapeake region by the system of indentured servitude. However, indentured servants served for only a few years, after which they were free to compete with their former masters. As a result, southern planters began increasingly to use African slave labor, especially when the cost of doing so dropped toward the end of the seventeenth century. The early settlers in South Carolina, in any case, deployed African slaves, being familiar with their use from their previous experience as sugar planters in Barbados.

Another difference between the northern and southern economies was the North's greater diversification. The northern colonies had no high-value commodities to export other than those obtained through the extractive pursuits of fishing and lumbering. Consequently, they had to be more self-sufficient, which led to the development of craft industries and the beginnings of manufacturing in pottery and iron ware. Shipbuilding was also widespread, and commerce generally flourished, which in turn stimulated urban growth. By the mid-eighteenth century, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia all had populations of more than ten thousand, with Philadelphia ranking as the second-largest city in the British Empire. The South, by contrast, had only one town of any consequence: Charleston in South Carolina.

By 1750 the thirteen British mainland colonies had a population around 1.5 million (including 250,000 persons of African descent) who provided a third of all British trade.

THE CAUSES OF REVOLT

Thus, although the British had been late to enter the race for overseas colonies (compared to Spain and Portugal), their settlements now constituted perhaps the most valuable possessions of any European nation. It was this realization that led Britain to attempt a strengthening of the imperial ties after the Seven Years' War (1756–1763). Among the more important initiatives were the Proclamation of 1763, which attempted to limit westward expansion; the Sugar Act of 1764, to raise revenue and strengthen the laws of trade; and the Stamp Act of 1765, to raise additional revenue for the running of the empire. But far from strengthening imperial control, these measures antagonized the colonial population and led to disputes over the sovereignty of Parliament and the rights of the colonists, especially on matters of taxation. It was failure to resolve these issues, among others, that led to the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and creation of the United States, signaling an end to the first British Empire.

See also American Independence, War of (1775–1783); Boston; Charleston; Colonialism; Commerce and Markets; Divine Right Kingship; Dutch Colonies: The Americas; Exploration; Navigation Acts; New York; Philadelphia; Puritanism; Quakers; Slavery and the Slave Trade; Taxation; Triangular Trade Pattern.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andrews, Charles M. The Colonial Period of American History. 4 vols. New Haven, 1934–1938. Reprint, vols. 1–3, 2001.

Bailyn, Bernard. The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction. New York, 1986.

Bonwick, Colin. The American Revolution. Charlottesville, Va., 1991.

Butler, Jon. Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776. Cambridge, Mass., 2000.

Egnal, Marc. New World Economies: The Growth of the Thirteen Colonies and Early Canada. New York, 1998.

Kammen, Michael. Deputyes & Libertyes: The Origins of Representative Government in Colonial America. New York, 1969.

Meinig, Donald William. The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. 3 vols. New Haven, 1986–1993. Volume one is Atlantic America, 1492–1800.

Middleton, Richard. Colonial America: A History, 1565– 1776. 3rd ed. Oxford, 2002.

Nash, Gary B. Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1974.

Vickers, Daniel. A Companion to Colonial America. Oxford, 2003.

Wood, Betty. The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English Colonies. New York, 1997.

RICHARD MIDDLETON