Comparison 1607-1754

Similarities between the European colonizers

The primary European colonizing powers, England, France, and Spain, pursued largely similar goals when colonizing the western hemisphere: expansion of the total territorial size of the empire; extraction of agricultural, mineral and resource wealth; and religious conversion of indigenous peoples. England and Spain both relied heavily on enslaved labor in North America; France, due to its more limited settler populations and emphasis on the fur trade, rather than on mining and plantation agriculture, did not rely on enslaved labor in today’s United States and Canada, but they relied almost exclusively on enslaved labor in their vital Caribbean sugar producing colony, San Domingue, today’s Haiti. As will be detailed below, the primary differences were in the methods they employed at achieving these goals.

Differences between the European colonizers

One important difference that has already been noted above is that the British and Spanish relied heavily on enslaved African labor in many of their colonies whereas the French relied on enslaved African labor primarily in San Domingue (Haiti), but not in eastern Canada nor along the Mississippi River in today’s United States. English colonies in North America initially sought to rely on a mix of indentured and enslaved labor, but as economic and political conditions improved in Great Britain at the end of the 17th century, fewer British people sought passage to North America, particularly as indentured servants, and British demand for enslaved African labor increased.

These empires differed significantly in their approaches to and treatment of indigenous societies in the Americas. Spain immediately sought to subjugate and enslave the indigenous populations they encountered throughout the Americas; when confronted with catastrophic indigenous population declines due to the brutality of these conditions and the calamitous toll of newly introduced diseases, Spanish authorities forcibly imported several million enslaved Africans to toil in the fields and the mines. England, or Great Britain after the 1707 Act of Union, primarily sought to remove and/or eradicate indigenous societies within their North American colonies; with the notable exception of the New England “praying towns,” English colonists did not emphasize religious conversion of the indigenous peoples of North America. France, primarily because of its comparatively small colonizer population in North America, relied upon developing more extensive trading networks with indigenous peoples, while also seeking to convert indigenous peoples to Catholicism.

In terms of territorial expansion in North America, the different European empires sought to expand their imperial footprints, but faced varying sets of constraints and demands that often hindered their abilities, and even their willingness, to annex and/or conquer new territories. Spain declined in relative economic and political terms compared to France and Britain in the 18th century; the Spanish navy could not prevent significant British colonization in the Caribbean and along the Atlantic coast of today’s United States, and focused primarily on controlling its vast empire in Central and South America, the Caribbean, and its important Asian colony of the Philippines. France embroiled itself in a series of costly global wars, primarily with Great Britain, and increasingly sought to extract greater sugar wealth from San Domingue. Great Britain, after concluding its own series of civil war and external wars, including conquering Scotland, began extracting greater wealth from its North American colonies, but also sought greater resource wealth in India which would over time become the crown jewel of the British empire.

Emerging colonial identities and conflicts

As the 18th century unfolded, the different European empires and their colonial settlements confronted new challenges: emerging distinctive colonial identities in the British and Spanish North American colonies; and increased potential for armed conflicts as these empires and their colonial settlers encroached more frequently on their respective boundaries and borders. As the British colony of Georgia expanded to the south and west from the Atlantic, conflict with Spanish Florida as well as a variety of indigenous nations became increasingly likely. Simultaneously, British colonial expansion into the Ohio River valley and other areas west of the Appalachians intensified the pressures on a host of indigenous communities as well as the French colonial settlements in eastern Canada and in today’s midwestern United States.

As more colonists were born in the colonies and fewer either visited or returned to Great Britain, British North American colonists increasingly saw themselves as fundamentally different from their British counterparts. In the Spanish colonies, the criollos became increasingly restive, chafing against the Spanish imperial racial caste hierarchy that always privileged the peninsulares. These tensions would culminate in wars for independence, first in the British North American colonies in the 1770s, and later in the Spanish western hemisphere colonies beginning in the early 1800s. The Haitian Revolution, or war for independence from France, was unique in that it was led by the enslaved African population.