Contextualizing US History 1607-1754
Expansion of European colonial settlements in North America
Throughout the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth centuries, European imperial powers expanded their North American colonial empires. The British founded their first continuously occupied permanent North American colonial settlement at Jamestown Virginia in 1607 while the Spanish and French moved further into the interior of what are now Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Increased colonial settlement led to frequent armed conflict with indigenous societies and the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade.
In chapter 3, there will be 7 lessons, rather than the 8 listed in the AP US History syllabus; lessons 1 & 2 have been condensed in this format.
*** Image 009/ European colonial empires in North America 1700 ***
European political developments and their impacts on North America
European colonial settlements in North America were established primarily to provide greater resource wealth for the European imperial powers overseeing and/or controlling them, but the degree to which these empires oversaw and/or controlled their colonial settlements varied enormously based upon internal political, religious and economic developments in Europe. Great Britain experienced a long series of violent clashes, including the English Civil War, officially fought from 1642-1651, culminating in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. With this context of nearly perpetual civil war in England throughout the 17th century, British colonial oversight and governance was frequently quite limited, unintentionally allowing British North American colonists considerable autonomy during the 17th and much of the 18th centuries. Later termed **salutary neglect **by the Irish-born British writer and parliamentarian Edmund Burke, this unofficial British policy of allowing the North American colonies greater autonomy for approximately 150 years would be cited as a major cause of the late 18th century American Revolution.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, British colonists established all of the original 13 colonies, later US states, beginning with Virginia in 1607 and ending with Georgia in 1732. As more colonists arrived and their populations also increased naturally, they moved further inland, engaging in frequent warfare with indigenous societies, with the Powhatan War and Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia and the Pequot War and Metacom’s War in New England being the most prominent of these wars. Beginning in 1619, British colonists began importing enslaved Africans to supplement the initial workforce of indentured servants, British men and women too poor to afford the passage to the colonies and who paid for this sponsored passage by working for periods lasting typically from 4-7 years. Unlike enslaved peoples, indentured servants were generally supposed to receive land grants at the end of their contracts, albeit land that was often occupied by indigenous societies. As will be expanded upon in subsequent lessons, colonial landlords and governments would seek to prevent potential alliances between different laboring classes and races/ethnicities through laws and policies that increasingly emphasized racial dimensions.
The British founding of the Jamestown colony (1607) would quickly be followed by the arrival of the “Pilgrims,” religious dissenters from the Church of England. The people that we now call “Pilgrims” referred to themselves as “Separatists” because they wanted to break away completely from the Church of England; they would later be rechristened as the “Pilgrims.” Today, most Americans remember the Pilgrims primarily for the drafting of the** Mayflower Compact** and stories about the first Thanksgiving, for the purposes of AP US History, we need to consider their contributions to and impacts on the Plymouth Bay colony, the indigenous peoples living nearby, the land and later patterns of colonial settlement.
Within a few years of the Pilgrims/Separatists arriving, another religious dissident group focused on “purifying” the Church of England settled near modern Boston. These Puritans, English Calvinists, became the dominant settler population in the Massachusetts Bay colony, imposing strict rules on the settlement. Soon, other colonies in New England would be founded by people fleeing Puritan rule, specifically Connecticut and Rhode Island.
During this time period (1607-1754), the different British North American colonies developed distinctive, and not always complementary, economic foundations, based upon their respective climatological and resource characteristics. These distinctive geographic and cultural colonial regions also frequently featured religious differences, including the founding of new faiths and denominations; the founding of the Massachusetts (1620), Connecticut (1636), Rhode Island (1636), and Pennsylvania (1682) colonies were all based upon religious distinctions and desires, while Maryland would be the first British North American colony to specifically protect Catholics (1649).
Spanish colonial settlements in North America would be expanded into much of the desert southwest, provoking broader conflicts with indigenous societies, most notably the **Pueblo Revolt **of the 1680s. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Spanish colonial authorities sought to enslave indigenous peoples as their primary workforce in their colonies. While Spain would forcibly import thousands of enslaved Africans into their Caribbean and Central and South American colonies, Spain imported relatively few enslaved Africans into the desert southwest and into Florida. Notwithstanding the creation of British and French empires in the Americas, Spain controlled much of what would become the American south, southwest, and California until the early 19th century. Spain also ruled over Mexico, Central America, much of South America, and several islands in the Caribbean until the early 1800s, and in the cases of Cuba and Puerto Rico, until the end of the 19th century.
French colonial expansion in North America continued primarily in the Mississippi River basin as well as in Quebec in eastern Canada. As was discussed in Chapter 2, French colonialism, with its lighter footprint, depended upon much greater cooperation with indigenous societies for trade. French trading and alliances with indigenous societies in North America posed a significant challenge to further British colonial expansion in North America, a challenge that the British would directly confront in the 1750s.
Other European powers, including Netherlands and Sweden, that colonized what is now the eastern United States lost their North American colonies by the late 17th century, leaving the British in a dominant position from what is now Maine through Savannah and contemporary eastern and central Georgia. Spain’s control over Florida served as a continuing irritant and obstacle to British control over all of the Atlantic coast of today’s United States.
As mentioned above, these increased contacts between European empires occurred not only within North America but throughout Europe and Asia, too. For the purposes of AP US History, these global conflicts between European empires will be analyzed primarily through their impacts on and in North America, but students should be familiar with the overall pattern of imperial rivalries, alliances and confrontations; these imperial rivalries and alliances would exhibit more profound impacts on colonial developments in the 18th and 19th centuries.