thesis about english colonization

The Linguistic Colonialism of English

Some argue that the historical and current bloodshed of Western imperialism has transformed the English language into a universal tool of communication. Through centuries of colonialism, neocolonialism, Cold War expansionism, and, most recently, globalization, the West has spread its preferred systems of capitalism, democracy, and moral values. The British, until the beginning of the 20th century, and more recently the Americans, have emerged as the major sources of foreign influence throughout the globe. As a result of this, contemporary English is detached from any specific cultural identity; it is a tool which links different societies in an increasingly smaller world.

The first population to speak English was the British. About five hundred years ago, between five and seven million people spoke the language; today, about 1.8 billion people do. Processes of violent imperialism have paved the way for the cultural pandemic originating in the West. Until the 19th century, the British were the major superpower, and their method of colonization included establishing schools which taught English language and Western culture to locals who needed to be “modernized.” Most former British colonies now use English as their official language (e.g. Ghana and South Africa). Ever since the US colonized Puerto Rico after winning the Spanish-American war (note the absence of Puerto Rico, or Cuba, in the name of the war), the official languages on the island became Spanish and, of course, English.

Today, English is the third most spoken language in the world and tops the list of second languages. English is a necessity for studying at the most prestigious institutions of higher learning, a ticket to working almost anywhere in the world, and an instrument enabling a livelihood in the wealthiest nations. It has become the norm for non-native English speakers to communicate with other non-native English speakers in English if they do not share a native language. For example, Amsterdam is now populated by a large foreign community; most Italian, Spanish, and Chinese nationals who work there use English in the office to communicate amongst themselves and Dutch locals.

This phenomenon feeds into the growth of social inequality linked to globalization. The majority of the time, English learned as a second language in public schools does not create a proficiency level adequate for working, studying, or relying on the language in daily life. Private language courses, summer exchange programs abroad and access to international schools are expensive and limited to a privileged minority. As is common, this kind of globalization seems to only benefit the rich.

As English becomes the new global norm for large-scale business, innovation, and science, indigenous languages rich in cultural heritage and history often get put to the side. For example, in Puerto Rico, international trade and a Western econo-political system undermine small businesses and local traditions. As Rafael Trelles, a member of the Puerto Rican Independentista Party claims, “ Colonialism has destroyed the working culture of the most poor sectors of our population and created a culture of dependence.” People dedicate their time and resources to learning and perfecting their understanding and knowledge of English, rather than preserving their own customs and culture.

The process of globalization leads people to visualize an array of opportunities and an exponentially better future linked to the English language. A language is not only an instrument of communication, however. It is also the tool of a society, made up of its culture, traditions, and sets of religious and ideological beliefs. Each language has nuances which represent its origin. Replacing indigenous Kenyan Kiembu with English is comparable with marginalization of the that particular culture. Okoth Okombo, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nairobi, summarises this: “The death of a language is like the burning of a library.” According to UNESCO , about 231 languages have gone extinct in the world, 37 of which originated in Sub-Saharan Africa. These indigenous languages were replaced by Western ones imposed by colonizers.

English has also become the main language used in science. Doctors around the world use English to communicate their findings. Most research papers are written in English as a way to facilitate international scientific cooperation. Although this may seem like a necessity to promote scientific discovery, the resulting gap is problematic. The researchers who have not had the chance to learn English are at a disadvantage. The triumph of English in science is just one example; the language has infiltrated the most influential aspects of society around the world. The consequence is a more divided world: Those who can speak English and have access to innovation versus those who do not have the means to learn the language and, therefore, lag behind.

These processes suggest a disconcerting implication – globalization is simply a more “socially acceptable” means of imperialism, without violence. While the Western language, and therefore culture, penetrates Third World communities especially, the West has increasingly more economic and political influence over these countries.

Should this development only be seen as negative? Globalization and the expansion of the English language have resulted in oppression and inequality. But the creation of this widespread, unintentional, tool can also be put to positive use. If accessible to everyone, it can be used to avoid cultural misunderstandings, conflict, and promote coexisting diversity. If the preservation of other cultures is given the same importance and value as spreading English is currently receiving, the language can be an addition, not a replacement, to a naturally evolving culture’s array of nuances.

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Anna Corradi '20 is the Associate Section Manager for the Culture Section of the Brown Political Review. Anna can be reached at [email protected]

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Colonization of English America

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Colonization of English America by Trevor Burnard LAST REVIEWED: 25 May 2023 LAST MODIFIED: 10 March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199730414-0013

England was a latecomer in the colonization of the Americas. It drew heavily on the example of Spain for its early colonization efforts in North America and the West Indies. It also drew on its experience in subduing the inhabitants of the Celtic peripheries of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland in shaping relations with Native Americans. The advent of Atlantic history has been decisive in considering 17th-century colonization in comparative context. More effort is deployed now than previously to see English settlement as an encounter with peoples of an Old World rather than as a discovery of a New World by Englishmen and Englishwomen. English America refers to those areas settled by the English on the eastern seaboard of mainland North America (extending from Newfoundland in the north to the Carolinas in the south) and in the West Indies (including islands in the Lesser Antilles, such as Barbados and the Leeward Islands, and Jamaica in the Greater Antilles).

The best general survey, with an excellent bibliography up until 1988, is Greene 1988 , supplemented by the comparative analysis of Elliott 2006 and the essays in Canny 1998 . Armitage and Braddick 2002 is especially suggestive as to how English America fits into Atlantic history. A major problem for all historians is that before 1776 and certainly before 1700 there was no geographical construct known as English America. Another issue is that a multitude of teleological accounts that pre-suppose English America becoming the United States provide support to an ideology of American exceptionalism that Atlantic history is intended to undermine. For the historical geography of the English Atlantic world, the first chapters in Meinig 1986 are stimulating, but see also Hornsby 2004 for a different idea of how regions in early America should be grouped. Classic works that are still useful are Andrews 1934 and Miller 1971 .

Andrews, Charles McLean. The Colonial Period of American History . Vol. 1, The Settlements . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1934.

Volume one of three. A classic general treatment of the field, winner of the 1935 Pulitzer Prize in History.

Armitage, David, and Michael J. Braddick, eds. The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

First-rate collection of thematic essays on British America and the Atlantic world. Armitage’s essay provides an excellent explanatory scheme for Atlantic histories.

Canny, Nicholas, ed. The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century. Vol. 1 of Oxford University History of the British Empire . Edited by William Roger Lewis. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Part of an important series summarizing and reevaluating Britain’s imperial past. Contains excellent essays by leading practitioners on all aspects of Britain’s 17th-century empire.

Elliott, J. H. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.

Magisterial survey of the development of and interactions between two major empires in the Atlantic world that shows the extent to which the English Atlantic world grew out of the earlier example of the Spanish Atlantic empire.

Greene, Jack P. Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

A masterly survey, emphasizing works in economic and social history, that sees divergence and variation in patterns of social development in the 17th century coalescing around Anglicization in the late 17th century to create convergent colonial cultures. Organized by regions. Dated but essential.

Hornsby, Stephen J. British Atlantic, American Frontier: Spaces of Power in Early Modern British America . Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2004.

Uses staple thesis theory to devise a regional grouping of early North American and West Indian regions that is economically rather than geographically derived.

Meinig, D. W. The Shaping of America. Vol. 1, Atlantic America, 1492–1800 . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986.

Superb, pioneering historical geography of English and British America that did much to introduce the concept of the Atlantic world into historical discourse.

Miller, Perry. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.

Intellectual historiography focusing on Puritanism.

Pestana, Carla. The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Important study of how the British Civil War played itself out in the English Atlantic. Makes the significant point that a vacuum in imperial authority in the 1640s allowed English America to develop its political and social institutions outside imperial oversight.

Steele, Ian. The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community . New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Pioneering study in Atlantic history that deals with how communications increasingly linked the Atlantic world so that by the early 18th century it could be legitimately thought of as a single entity.

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3.3 English Settlements in America

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Identify the first English settlements in America
Describe the differences between the Chesapeake Bay colonies and the New England colonies
Compare and contrast the wars between Native inhabitants and English colonists in both the Chesapeake Bay and New England colonies
Explain the role of Bacon’s Rebellion in the rise of chattel slavery in Virginia

At the start of the seventeenth century, the English had not established a permanent settlement in the Americas. Over the next century, however, they outpaced their rivals. The English encouraged emigration far more than the Spanish, French, or Dutch. They established nearly a dozen colonies, sending swarms of immigrants to populate the land. England had experienced a dramatic rise in population in the sixteenth century, and the colonies appeared a welcoming place for those who faced overcrowding and grinding poverty at home. Thousands of English migrants arrived in the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Virginia and Maryland to work in the tobacco fields. Another stream, this one of pious Puritan families, sought to live as they believed scripture demanded and established the Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, New Haven, Connecticut, and Rhode Island colonies of New England ( Figure 3.8 ).

THE DIVERGING CULTURES OF THE NEW ENGLAND AND CHESAPEAKE COLONIES

Promoters of English colonization in North America, many of whom never ventured across the Atlantic, wrote about the bounty the English would find there. These boosters of colonization hoped to turn a profit—whether by importing raw resources or providing new markets for English goods—and spread Protestantism. The English migrants who actually made the journey, however, had different goals. In Chesapeake Bay, English migrants established Virginia and Maryland with a decidedly commercial orientation. Though the early Virginians at Jamestown hoped to find gold, they and the settlers in Maryland quickly discovered that growing tobacco was the only sure means of making money. Thousands of unmarried, unemployed, and impatient young Englishmen, along with a few Englishwomen, pinned their hopes for a better life on the tobacco fields of these two colonies.

A very different group of English men and women flocked to the cold climate and rocky soil of New England, spurred by religious motives. Many of the Puritans crossing the Atlantic were people who brought families and children. Often they were following their ministers in a migration “beyond the seas,” envisioning a new English Israel where reformed Protestantism would grow and thrive, providing a model for the rest of the Christian world and a counter to what they saw as the Catholic menace. While the English in Virginia and Maryland worked on expanding their profitable tobacco fields, the English in New England built towns focused on the church, where each congregation decided what was best for itself. The Congregational Church is the result of the Puritan enterprise in America. Many historians believe the fault lines separating what later became the North and South in the United States originated in the profound differences between the Chesapeake and New England colonies.

The source of those differences lay in England’s domestic problems. Increasingly in the early 1600s, the English state church—the Church of England, established in the 1530s—demanded conformity, or compliance with its practices, but Puritans pushed for greater reforms. By the 1620s, the Church of England began to see leading Puritan ministers and their followers as outlaws, a national security threat because of their opposition to its power. As the noose of conformity tightened around them, many Puritans decided to remove to New England. By 1640, New England had a population of twenty-five thousand. Meanwhile, many loyal members of the Church of England, who ridiculed and mocked Puritans both at home and in New England, flocked to Virginia for economic opportunity.

The troubles in England escalated in the 1640s when civil war broke out, pitting Royalist supporters of King Charles I and the Church of England against Parliamentarians, the Puritan reformers and their supporters in Parliament. In 1649, the Parliamentarians gained the upper hand and, in an unprecedented move, executed Charles I. In the 1650s, therefore, England became a republic, a state without a king. English colonists in America closely followed these events. Indeed, many Puritans left New England and returned home to take part in the struggle against the king and the national church. Other English men and women in the Chesapeake colonies and elsewhere in the English Atlantic World looked on in horror at the mayhem the Parliamentarians, led by the Puritan insurgents, appeared to unleash in England. The turmoil in England made the administration and imperial oversight of the Chesapeake and New England colonies difficult, and the two regions developed divergent cultures.

THE CHESAPEAKE COLONIES: VIRGINIA AND MARYLAND

The Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland served a vital purpose in the developing seventeenth-century English empire by providing tobacco, a cash crop. However, the early history of Jamestown did not suggest the English outpost would survive. From the outset, its settlers struggled both with each other and with the Native inhabitants, the powerful Powhatan, who controlled the area. Jealousies and infighting among the English destabilized the colony. One member, John Smith, whose famous map begins this chapter, took control and exercised near-dictatorial powers, which furthered aggravated the squabbling. The settlers’ inability to grow their own food compounded this unstable situation. They were essentially employees of the Virginia Company of London, an English joint-stock company, in which investors provided the capital and assumed the risk in order to reap the profit, and they had to make a profit for their shareholders as well as for themselves. Most initially devoted themselves to finding gold and silver instead of finding ways to grow their own food.

Early Struggles and the Development of the Tobacco Economy

Poor health, lack of food, and fighting with Native peoples took the lives of many of the original Jamestown settlers. The winter of 1609–1610, which became known as “the starving time,” came close to annihilating the colony. By June 1610, the few remaining settlers had decided to abandon the area; only the last-minute arrival of a supply ship from England prevented another failed colonization effort. The supply ship brought new settlers, but only twelve hundred of the seventy-five hundred who came to Virginia between 1607 and 1624 survived.

George Percy on “The Starving Time”

Now all of us at James Town, beginning to feel that sharp prick of hunger which no man truly describe but he which has tasted the bitterness thereof, a world of miseries ensued as the sequel will express unto you, in so much that some to satisfy their hunger have robbed the store for the which I caused them to be executed. Then having fed upon horses and other beasts as long as they lasted, we were glad to make shift with vermin as dogs, cats, rats, and mice. All was fish that came to net to satisfy cruel hunger as to eat boots, shoes, or any other leather some could come by, and, those being spent and devoured, some were enforced to search the woods and to feed upon serpents and snakes and to dig the earth for wild and unknown roots, where many of our men were cut off of and slain by the savages. And now famine beginning to look ghastly and pale in every face that nothing was spared to maintain life and to do those things which seem incredible as to dig up dead corpses out of graves and to eat them, and some have licked up the blood which has fallen from their weak fellows. George Percy, the youngest son of an English nobleman, was in the first group of settlers at the Jamestown Colony. He kept a journal describing their experiences; in the excerpt below, he reports on the privations of the colonists’ third winter. —George Percy, “A True Relation of the Proceedings and Occurances of Moment which have happened in Virginia from the Time Sir Thomas Gates shipwrecked upon the Bermudes anno 1609 until my departure out of the Country which was in anno Domini 1612,” London 1624

What is your reaction to George Percy’s story? How do you think Jamestown managed to survive after such an experience? What do you think the Jamestown colonists learned?

By the 1620s, Virginia had weathered the worst and gained a degree of permanence. Political stability came slowly, but by 1619, the fledgling colony was operating under the leadership of a governor, a council, and a House of Burgesses. Economic stability came from the lucrative cultivation of tobacco. Smoking tobacco was a long-standing practice among native peoples, and English and other European consumers soon adopted it. In 1614, the Virginia colony began exporting tobacco back to England, which earned it a sizable profit and saved the colony from ruin. A second tobacco colony, Maryland, was formed in 1634, when King Charles I granted its charter to the Calvert family for their loyal service to England. Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, conceived of Maryland as a refuge for English Catholics.

Growing tobacco proved very labor-intensive ( Figure 3.9 ), and the Chesapeake colonists needed a steady workforce to do the hard work of clearing the land and caring for the tender young plants. The mature leaf of the plant then had to be cured (dried), which necessitated the construction of drying barns. Once cured, the tobacco had to be packaged in hogsheads (large wooden barrels) and loaded aboard ship, which also required considerable labor.

To meet these labor demands, early Virginians relied on indentured servants. An indenture is a labor contract that young, impoverished, and often illiterate Englishmen and occasionally Englishwomen signed in England, pledging to work for a number of years (usually between five and seven) growing tobacco in the Chesapeake colonies. In return, indentured servants received paid passage to America and food, clothing, and lodging. At the end of their indenture, servants received “freedom dues,” usually food and other provisions, including, in some cases, land provided by the colony. The promise of a new life in America was a strong attraction for members of England’s underclass, who had few if any options at home. In the 1600s, some 100,000 indentured servants traveled to the Chesapeake Bay. Most were poor young men in their early twenties.

Life in the colonies proved harsh, however. Indentured servants could not marry, and they were subject to the will of the tobacco planters who bought their labor contracts. Treated much like property, the contracted servants could be essentially sold or traded among those with means to purchase them. Some contract holders did not feed or house their servants well. If an indentured servant committed a crime or disobeyed those who held their contracts, they found their terms of service lengthened, often by several years. Female indentured servants faced special dangers in what was essentially a bachelor colony. Many were exploited by unscrupulous tobacco planters who seduced them with promises of marriage. If the women became pregnant, the planters would then sell them to other tobacco planters to avoid the costs of raising a child.

Nonetheless, those indentured servants who completed their term of service often began new lives as tobacco planters. To entice even more migrants to the New World, the Virginia Company also implemented the headright system , in which those who paid their own passage to Virginia received fifty acres plus an additional fifty for each servant or family member they brought with them. The headright system and the promise of a new life for servants acted as powerful incentives for English migrants to hazard the journey to the New World.

Click and Explore

Visit Virtual Jamestown to access a database of contracts of indentured servants. Search it by name to find an ancestor or browse by occupation, destination, or county of origin.

The Anglo-Powhatan Wars

By choosing to settle along the rivers on the banks of the Chesapeake, the English unknowingly placed themselves at the center of the Powhatan Empire, a powerful Algonquian confederacy of thirty native groups with perhaps as many as twenty-two thousand people. The territory of the equally impressive Susquehannock people also bordered English settlements at the north end of the Chesapeake Bay.

Tensions ran high between the English and the Powhatan, and near-constant war prevailed. The First Anglo-Powhatan War (1609–1614) resulted not only from the English colonists’ intrusion onto Powhatan land, but also from their refusal to follow cultural protocol by giving gifts. English actions infuriated and insulted the Powhatan. In 1613, the settlers captured Pocahontas (also called Matoaka), the daughter of a Powhatan headman named Wahunsonacook, and gave her in marriage to Englishman John Rolfe. Their union, and her choice to remain with the English, helped quell the war in 1614. Pocahontas converted to Christianity, changing her name to Rebecca, and sailed with her husband and several other Powhatan to England where she was introduced to King James I ( Figure 3.10 ). Promoters of colonization publicized Pocahontas as an example of the good work of converting the Powhatan to Christianity.

Explore the interactive exhibit Changing Images of Pocahontas on PBS’s website to see the many ways artists have portrayed Pocahontas over the centuries.

Peace in Virginia did not last long. The Second Anglo-Powhatan War (1620s) broke out because of the expansion of the English settlement nearly one hundred miles into the interior, and because of the continued insults and friction caused by English activities. The Powhatan attacked in 1622 and succeeded in killing almost 350 English, about a third of the settlers. The English responded by annihilating every Powhatan village around Jamestown and from then on became even more intolerant. The Third Anglo-Powhatan War (1644–1646) began with a surprise attack in which the Powhatan killed around five hundred English colonists. However, their ultimate defeat in this conflict forced the Powhatan to acknowledge King Charles I as their sovereign. The Anglo-Powhatan Wars, spanning nearly forty years, illustrate the degree of native resistance that resulted from English intrusion into the Powhatan confederacy.

The Rise of Slavery in the Chesapeake Bay Colonies

The transition from indentured servitude to slavery as the main labor source for some English colonies happened first in the West Indies. On the small island of Barbados, colonized in the 1620s, English planters first grew tobacco as their main export crop, but in the 1640s, they converted to sugarcane and began increasingly to rely on African enslaved people. In 1655, England wrestled control of Jamaica from the Spanish and quickly turned it into a lucrative sugar island, run on forced labor, for its expanding empire. While slavery was slower to take hold in the Chesapeake colonies, by the end of the seventeenth century, both Virginia and Maryland had also adopted chattel slavery—which legally defined Africans as property and not people—as the dominant form of labor to grow tobacco. Chesapeake colonists also enslaved Native people.

When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, slavery—which did not exist in England—had not yet become an institution in colonial America. Many Africans worked as servants and, like their White counterparts, could acquire land of their own. Some Africans who converted to Christianity became free landowners with White servants. The change in the status of Africans in the Chesapeake to that of enslaved people occurred in the last decades of the seventeenth century.

Bacon’s Rebellion, an uprising of both White people and Black people who believed that the Virginia government was impeding their access to land and wealth and seemed to do little to clear the land of Native Americans, hastened the transition to African slavery in the Chesapeake colonies. The rebellion takes its name from Nathaniel Bacon, a wealthy young Englishman who arrived in Virginia in 1674. Despite an early friendship with Virginia’s royal governor, William Berkeley, Bacon found himself excluded from the governor’s circle of influential friends and councilors. He wanted land on the Virginia frontier, but the governor, fearing war with neighboring tribes, forbade further expansion. Bacon marshaled others, especially former indentured servants who believed the governor was limiting their economic opportunities and denying them the right to own tobacco farms. Bacon’s followers believed Berkeley’s frontier policy didn’t protect English settlers enough. Worse still in their eyes, Governor Berkeley tried to keep peace in Virginia by signing treaties with various local Native peoples. Bacon and his followers, who saw all Native peoples as an obstacle to their access to land, pursued a policy of extermination.

Tensions between the English and the Native peoples in the Chesapeake colonies led to open conflict. In 1675, war broke out when Susquehannock warriors attacked settlements on Virginia’s frontier, killing English planters and destroying English plantations, including one owned by Bacon. In 1676, Bacon and other Virginians attacked the Susquehannock without the governor’s approval. When Berkeley ordered Bacon’s arrest, Bacon led his followers to Jamestown, forced the governor to flee to the safety of Virginia’s eastern shore, and then burned the city. The civil war known as Bacon’s Rebellion, a vicious struggle between supporters of the governor and those who supported Bacon, ensued. Reports of the rebellion traveled back to England, leading Charles II to dispatch both royal troops and English commissioners to restore order in the tobacco colonies. By the end of 1676, Virginians loyal to the governor gained the upper hand, executing several leaders of the rebellion. Bacon escaped the hangman’s noose, instead dying of dysentery. The rebellion fizzled in 1676, but Virginians remained divided as supporters of Bacon continued to harbor grievances over access to Native land.

Bacon’s Rebellion helped to catalyze the creation of a system of racial slavery in the Chesapeake colonies. At the time of the rebellion, indentured servants made up the majority of laborers in the region. Wealthy White people worried over the presence of this large class of laborers and the relative freedom they enjoyed, as well as the alliance that Black and White servants had forged in the course of the rebellion. Replacing indentured servitude with Black slavery diminished these risks, alleviating the reliance on White indentured servants, who were often dissatisfied and troublesome, and creating a caste of racially defined laborers whose movements were strictly controlled. It also lessened the possibility of further alliances between Black and White workers. Racial slavery even served to heal some of the divisions between wealthy and poor White people, who could now unite as members of a “superior” racial group.

While colonial laws in the tobacco colonies had made slavery a legal institution before Bacon’s Rebellion, new laws passed in the wake of the rebellion severely curtailed Black freedom and laid the foundation for racial slavery. Virginia passed a law in 1680 prohibiting free Black people and enslaved people from bearing arms, banning Black people from congregating in large numbers, and establishing harsh punishments for enslaved people who assaulted Christians or sought freedom. Two years later, another Virginia law stipulated that all Africans brought to the colony would be enslaved for life. Thus, the increasing reliance on enslaved people in the tobacco colonies—and the draconian laws instituted to control them—not only helped planters meet labor demands, but also served to assuage English fears of further uprisings and alleviate class tensions between rich and poor White people.

Defining American

Robert beverley on servants and enslaved people.

Robert Beverley was a wealthy Jamestown planter and enslaver. This excerpt from his History and Present State of Virginia , published in 1705, clearly illustrates the contrast between White servants and enslaved Black people.

Their Servants, they distinguish by the Names of Slaves for Life, and Servants for a time. Slaves are the Negroes, and their Posterity, following the condition of the Mother, according to the Maxim, partus sequitur ventrem [status follows the womb]. They are call’d Slaves, in respect of the time of their Servitude, because it is for Life. Servants, are those which serve only for a few years, according to the time of their Indenture, or the Custom of the Country. The Custom of the Country takes place upon such as have no Indentures. The Law in this case is, that if such Servants be under Nineteen years of Age, they must be brought into Court, to have their Age adjudged; and from the Age they are judg’d to be of, they must serve until they reach four and twenty: But if they be adjudged upwards of Nineteen, they are then only to be Servants for the term of five Years. The Male-Servants, and Slaves of both Sexes, are employed together in Tilling and Manuring the Ground, in Sowing and Planting Tobacco, Corn, &c. Some Distinction indeed is made between them in their Cloaths, and Food; but the Work of both, is no other than what the Overseers, the Freemen, and the Planters themselves do. Sufficient Distinction is also made between the Female-Servants, and Slaves; for a White Woman is rarely or never put to work in the Ground, if she be good for any thing else: And to Discourage all Planters from using any Women so, their Law imposes the heaviest Taxes upon Female Servants working in the Ground, while it suffers all other White Women to be absolutely exempted: Whereas on the other hand, it is a common thing to work a Woman Slave out of Doors; nor does the Law make any Distinction in her Taxes, whether her Work be Abroad, or at Home.

According to Robert Beverley, what are the differences between the servants and the enslaved? What protections did servants have that enslaved people did not?

PURITAN NEW ENGLAND

The second major area to be colonized by the English in the first half of the seventeenth century, New England, differed markedly in its founding principles from the commercially oriented Chesapeake tobacco colonies. Settled largely by waves of Puritan families in the 1630s, New England had a religious orientation from the start. In England, reform-minded men and women had been calling for greater changes to the English national church since the 1580s. These reformers, who followed the teachings of John Calvin and other Protestant reformers, were called Puritans because of their insistence on “purifying” the Church of England of what they believed to be un-scriptural, especially Catholic elements that lingered in its institutions and practices.

Many who provided leadership in early New England were learned ministers who had studied at Cambridge or Oxford but who, because they had questioned the practices of the Church of England, had been deprived of careers by the king and his officials in an effort to silence all dissenting voices. Other Puritan leaders, such as the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, came from the privileged class of English gentry. These well-to-do Puritans and many thousands more left their English homes not to establish a land of religious freedom, but to practice their own religion without persecution. Puritan New England offered them the opportunity to live as they believed the Bible demanded. In their “New” England, they set out to create a model of reformed Protestantism, a new English Israel.

The conflict generated by Puritanism had divided English society, because the Puritans demanded reforms that undermined the traditional festive culture. For example, they denounced popular pastimes like bear-baiting—letting dogs attack a chained bear—which were often conducted on Sundays when people had a few leisure hours. In the culture where William Shakespeare had produced his masterpieces, Puritans called for an end to the theater, censuring playhouses as places of decadence. Indeed, the Bible itself became part of the struggle between Puritans and James I, who headed the Church of England. Soon after ascending the throne, James commissioned a new version of the Bible in an effort to stifle Puritan reliance on the Geneva Bible, which followed the teachings of John Calvin and placed God’s authority above the monarch’s. The King James Version, published in 1611, instead emphasized the majesty of kings.

During the 1620s and 1630s, the conflict escalated to the point where the state church prohibited Puritan ministers from preaching. In the Church’s view, Puritans represented a national security threat, because their demands for cultural, social, and religious reforms undermined the king’s authority. Unwilling to conform to the Church of England, many Puritans found refuge in the New World. Yet those who emigrated to the Americas were not united. Some called for a complete break with the Church of England, while others remained committed to reforming the national church.

Plymouth: The First Puritan Colony

The first group of Puritans to make their way across the Atlantic was a small contingent known as the Pilgrims. Unlike other Puritans, they insisted on a complete separation from the Church of England and had first migrated to the Dutch Republic in Europe seeking religious freedom. Although they found they could worship without hindrance there, they grew concerned that they were losing their Englishness as they saw their children begin to learn the Dutch language and adopt Dutch ways. In addition, the English Pilgrims (and others in Europe) feared another attack on the Dutch Republic by Spain. Therefore, in 1620, they moved on to found the Plymouth Colony in present-day Massachusetts. The governor of Plymouth, William Bradford, was a Separatist, a proponent of complete separation from the English state church. Bradford and the other Pilgrim Separatists represented a major challenge to the prevailing vision of a unified English national church and empire. On board the Mayflower , which was bound for Virginia but landed on the tip of Cape Cod, Bradford and forty other adult men signed the Mayflower Compact ( Figure 3.11 ), which presented a religious (rather than an economic) rationale for colonization. The compact expressed a community ideal of working together. When a larger exodus of Puritans established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s, the Pilgrims at Plymouth welcomed them and the two colonies cooperated with each other.

The Mayflower Compact and Its Religious Rationale

The Mayflower Compact, which forty-one Pilgrim men signed on board the Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor, has been called the first American governing document, predating the U.S. Constitution by over 150 years. But was the Mayflower Compact a constitution? How much authority did it convey, and to whom?

In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, defender of the Faith, etc. Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic; for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod the 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, 1620

Different labor systems also distinguished early Puritan New England from the Chesapeake colonies. Puritans expected young people to work diligently at their calling, and all members of their large families, including children, did the bulk of the work necessary to run homes, farms, and businesses. Very few migrants came to New England as laborers; in fact, New England towns protected their disciplined homegrown workforce by refusing to allow outsiders in, assuring their sons and daughters of steady employment. New England’s labor system produced remarkable results, notably a powerful maritime-based economy with scores of oceangoing ships and the crews necessary to sail them. New England mariners sailing New England–made ships transported Virginian tobacco and West Indian sugar throughout the Atlantic World.

“A City upon a Hill”

A much larger group of English Puritans left England in the 1630s, establishing the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the New Haven Colony, the Connecticut Colony, and Rhode Island. Unlike the exodus of young males to the Chesapeake colonies, these migrants were families with young children and their university-trained ministers. Their aim, according to John Winthrop ( Figure 3.12 ), the first governor of Massachusetts Bay, was to create a model of reformed Protestantism—a “city upon a hill,” a new English Israel. The idea of a “city upon a hill” made clear the religious orientation of the New England settlement, and the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony stated as a goal that the colony’s people “may be soe religiously, peaceablie, and civilly governed, as their good Life and orderlie Conversacon, maie wynn and incite the Natives of Country, to the Knowledg and Obedience of the onlie true God and Saulor of Mankinde, and the Christian Fayth.” To illustrate this, the seal of the Massachusetts Bay Company ( Figure 3.12 ) shows a Native American who entreats more of the English to “come over and help us.”

Puritan New England differed in many ways from both England and the rest of Europe. Protestants emphasized literacy so that everyone could read the Bible. This attitude was in stark contrast to that of Catholics, who refused to tolerate private ownership of Bibles in the vernacular. The Puritans, for their part, placed a special emphasis on reading scripture, and their commitment to literacy led to the establishment of the first printing press in English America in 1636. Four years later, in 1640, they published the first book in North America, the Bay Psalm Book. As Calvinists, Puritans adhered to the doctrine of predestination, whereby a few “elect” would be saved and all others damned. No one could be sure whether they were predestined for salvation, but through introspection, guided by scripture, Puritans hoped to find a glimmer of redemptive grace. Church membership was restricted to those Puritans who were willing to provide a conversion narrative telling how they came to understand their spiritual estate by hearing sermons and studying the Bible.

Although many people assume Puritans escaped England to establish religious freedom, they proved to be just as intolerant as the English state church. When dissenters, including Puritan minister Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, challenged Governor Winthrop in Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s, they were banished. Roger Williams questioned the Puritans’ taking of Native land. Williams also argued for a complete separation from the Church of England, a position other Puritans in Massachusetts rejected, as well as the idea that the state could not punish individuals for their beliefs. Although he did accept that nonbelievers were destined for eternal damnation, Williams did not think the state could compel true orthodoxy. Puritan authorities found him guilty of spreading dangerous ideas, but he went on to found Rhode Island as a colony that sheltered dissenting Puritans from their brethren in Massachusetts. In Rhode Island, Williams wrote favorably about native peoples, contrasting their virtues with Puritan New England’s intolerance.

Anne Hutchinson also ran afoul of Puritan authorities for her criticism of the evolving religious practices in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In particular, she held that Puritan ministers in New England taught a shallow version of Protestantism emphasizing hierarchy and actions—a “covenant of works” rather than a “covenant of grace.” Literate Puritan women like Hutchinson presented a challenge to the male ministers’ authority. Indeed, her major offense was her claim of direct religious revelation, a type of spiritual experience that negated the role of ministers. Because of Hutchinson’s beliefs and her defiance of authority in the colony, especially that of Governor Winthrop, Puritan authorities tried and convicted her of holding false beliefs. In 1638, she was excommunicated and banished from the colony. She went to Rhode Island and later, in 1642, sought safety among the Dutch in New Netherland. The following year, Algonquian warriors killed Hutchinson and her family. In Massachusetts, Governor Winthrop noted her death as the righteous judgment of God against a heretic.

Like many other Europeans, the Puritans believed in the supernatural. Every event appeared to be a sign of God’s mercy or judgment, and people believed that witches allied themselves with the Devil to carry out evil deeds and deliberate harm such as the sickness or death of children, the loss of cattle, and other catastrophes. Hundreds were accused of witchcraft in Puritan New England, including townspeople whose habits or appearance bothered their neighbors or who appeared threatening for any reason. Women, seen as more susceptible to the Devil because of their supposedly weaker constitutions, made up the vast majority of suspects and those who were executed. The most notorious cases occurred in Salem Village in 1692. Many of the accusers who prosecuted the suspected witches had been traumatized by the Native wars on the frontier and by unprecedented political and cultural changes in New England. Relying on their belief in witchcraft to help make sense of their changing world, Puritan authorities executed nineteen people and caused the deaths of several others.

Explore the Salem Witchcraft Trials to learn more about the prosecution of witchcraft in seventeenth-century New England.

Puritan Relationships with Native Peoples

Like their Spanish and French Catholic rivals, English Puritans in America took steps to convert native peoples to their version of Christianity. John Eliot, the leading Puritan missionary in New England, urged natives in Massachusetts to live in “praying towns” established by English authorities for converted Native Americans, and to adopt the Puritan emphasis on the centrality of the Bible. In keeping with the Protestant emphasis on reading scripture, he translated the Bible into the local Algonquian language and published his work in 1663. Eliot hoped that as a result of his efforts, some of New England’s native inhabitants would become preachers.

Tensions had existed from the beginning between the Puritans and the native people who controlled southern New England ( Figure 3.13 ). Relationships deteriorated as the Puritans continued to expand their settlements aggressively and as European ways increasingly disrupted native life. These strains led to King Philip’s War (1675–1676), a massive regional conflict that was nearly successful in pushing the English out of New England.

When the Puritans began to arrive in the 1620s and 1630s, local Algonquian peoples had viewed them as potential allies in the conflicts already simmering between rival Native groups. In 1621, the Wampanoag, led by Massasoit, concluded a peace treaty with the Pilgrims at Plymouth. In the 1630s, the Puritans in Massachusetts and Plymouth allied themselves with the Narragansett and Mohegan people against the Pequot, who had recently expanded their claims into southern New England. In May 1637, the Puritans attacked a large group of several hundred Pequot along the Mystic River in Connecticut. To the horror of their Native allies, the Puritans massacred all but a handful of the men, women, and children they found.

By the mid-seventeenth century, the Puritans had pushed their way further into the interior of New England, establishing outposts along the Connecticut River Valley. There seemed no end to their expansion. Wampanoag leader Metacom or Metacomet, also known as King Philip among the English, was determined to stop the encroachment. The Wampanoag, along with the Nipmuck, Pocumtuck, and Narragansett, took up arms to drive the English from the land. In the ensuing conflict, called King Philip’s War, Native forces succeeded in destroying half of the frontier Puritan towns; however, in the end, the English (aided by Mohegans and Christian Native Americans) prevailed and sold many captives into slavery in the West Indies. (The severed head of King Philip was publicly displayed in Plymouth.) The war also forever changed the English perception of Native peoples; from then on, Puritan writers took great pains to vilify the Native people as bloodthirsty savages. A new type of racial hatred became a defining feature of Native-English relationships in the Northeast.

Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative

Mary Rowlandson was a Puritan woman whom Native tribes captured and imprisoned for several weeks during King Philip’s War. After her release, she wrote The Narrative of the Captivity and the Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson , which was published in 1682 ( Figure 3.14 ). The book was an immediate sensation that was reissued in multiple editions for over a century.

But now, the next morning, I must turn my back upon the town, and travel with them into the vast and desolate wilderness, I knew not whither. It is not my tongue, or pen, can express the sorrows of my heart, and bitterness of my spirit that I had at this departure: but God was with me in a wonderful manner, carrying me along, and bearing up my spirit, that it did not quite fail. One of the Indians carried my poor wounded babe upon a horse; it went moaning all along, “I shall die, I shall die.” I went on foot after it, with sorrow that cannot be expressed. At length I took it off the horse, and carried it in my arms till my strength failed, and I fell down with it. Then they set me upon a horse with my wounded child in my lap, and there being no furniture upon the horse’s back, as we were going down a steep hill we both fell over the horse’s head, at which they, like inhumane creatures, laughed, and rejoiced to see it, though I thought we should there have ended our days, as overcome with so many difficulties. But the Lord renewed my strength still, and carried me along, that I might see more of His power; yea, so much that I could never have thought of, had I not experienced it.

What sustains Rowlandson her during her ordeal? How does she characterize her captors? What do you think made her narrative so compelling to readers?

Access the entire text of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative at the Gutenberg Project.

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Authors: P. Scott Corbett, Volker Janssen, John M. Lund, Todd Pfannestiel, Sylvie Waskiewicz, Paul Vickery
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Book title: U.S. History
Publication date: Dec 30, 2014
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Causes of English colonization in America, 1550-1640.

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Gilmore, Robert Creighton.
Adair, A. (Supervisor)
One of the factors which runs like a thread through the whole fabric of history is manfs inborn desire to seek the unknown, whether it be new fields of knowledge or a virgin land where never before the foot of man has trod. Abram felt the call in that distant time and in compliance with his God's request, set Jewry upon the long and arduous journey which was to lead it to the Promised Land. Down through the years, succeeding generations have also heeded the impulse that has impelled them to seek out the green, exotic fields which would guarantee them a better existence. To this endless ebb and flow of humanity, we apply the term emigration; and when these emigrants set up a community separate from the parent state, common usage has come to denote it as a colony. [...]
United States -- Colonization.
Canada -- Colonization.
Great Britain -- Colonies -- America.
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'Englishmen Transplanted': The English Colonization of Barbados 1627-1660

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This book challenges the notion that the 17th-century English planters of Barbados were architects of a social disaster. These planters were not simply profligate, immoral, and grasping capitalists who exploited their servants and slaves in a quest for quick riches in the cultivation of sugar. To be sure, they quickly transformed the island's economy from one of semi-subsistence to the most successful plantation economy in the seventeenth-century English empire. Yet, they, like English emigrants to other regions in the empire, transplanted many familiar governmental, religious, and legal institutions; eagerly started families; sought to abide by traditional views about the social order; and resisted compromises in their diet, apparel, and housing, despite their tropical setting. In short, they were more than rapacious entrepreneurs. Seldom becoming absentee planters, these Englishmen developed an extraordinary attraction to Barbados, where they saw themselves, as one group of planters explained in a petition, as ‘being Englishmen transplanted’. The book draws heavily upon material from the Public Record Office and the Barbados Archives.

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Piratical Colonization: Piracy's Role in the First English Colonies, 1550-1600

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3.4: The Impact of Colonization

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As Europeans moved beyond exploration and into colonization of the Americas, they brought changes to virtually every aspect of the land and its people, from trade and hunting to warfare and personal property. European goods, ideas, and diseases shaped the changing continent.

As Europeans established their colonies, their societies also became segmented and divided along religious and racial lines. Most people in these societies were not free; they labored as servants or slaves, doing the work required to produce wealth for others. By 1700, the American continent had become a place of stark contrasts between slavery and freedom, between the haves and the have-nots.

THE INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY

Everywhere in the American colonies, a crushing demand for labor existed to grow New World cash crops, especially sugar and tobacco. This need led Europeans to rely increasingly on Africans, and after 1600, the movement of Africans across the Atlantic accelerated. The English crown chartered the Royal African Company in 1672, giving the company a monopoly over the transport of African slaves to the English colonies. Over the next four decades, the company transported around 350,000 Africans from their homelands. By 1700, the tiny English sugar island of Barbados had a population of fifty thousand slaves, and the English had encoded the institution of chattel slavery into colonial law.

This new system of African slavery came slowly to the English colonists, who did not have slavery at home and preferred to use servant labor. Nevertheless, by the end of the seventeenth century, the English everywhere in America—and particularly in the Chesapeake Bay colonies—had come to rely on African slaves. While Africans had long practiced slavery among their own people, it had not been based on race. Africans enslaved other Africans as war captives, for crimes, and to settle debts; they generally used their slaves for domestic and small-scale agricultural work, not for growing cash crops on large plantations. Additionally, African slavery was often a temporary condition rather than a lifelong sentence, and, unlike New World slavery, it was typically not heritable (passed from a slave mother to her children).

The growing slave trade with Europeans had a profound impact on the people of West Africa, giving prominence to local chieftains and merchants who traded slaves for European textiles, alcohol, guns, tobacco, and food. Africans also charged Europeans for the right to trade in slaves and imposed taxes on slave purchases. Different African groups and kingdoms even staged large-scale raids on each other to meet the demand for slaves.

Once sold to traders, all slaves sent to America endured the hellish Middle Passage, the transatlantic crossing, which took one to two months. By 1625, more than 325,800 Africans had been shipped to the New World, though many thousands perished during the voyage. An astonishing number, some four million, were transported to the Caribbean between 1501 and 1830. When they reached their destination in America, Africans found themselves trapped in shockingly brutal slave societies. In the Chesapeake colonies, they faced a lifetime of harvesting and processing tobacco.

Everywhere, Africans resisted slavery, and running away was common. In Jamaica and elsewhere, runaway slaves created maroon communities, groups that resisted recapture and eked a living from the land, rebuilding their communities as best they could. When possible, they adhered to traditional ways, following spiritual leaders such as Vodun priests.

CHANGES TO INDIAN LIFE

While the Americas remained firmly under the control of native peoples in the first decades of European settlement, conflict increased as colonization spread and Europeans placed greater demands upon the native populations, including expecting them to convert to Christianity (either Catholicism or Protestantism). Throughout the seventeenth century, the still-powerful native peoples and confederacies that retained control of the land waged war against the invading Europeans, achieving a degree of success in their effort to drive the newcomers from the continent.

At the same time, European goods had begun to change Indian life radically. In the 1500s, some of the earliest objects Europeans introduced to Indians were glass beads, copper kettles, and metal utensils. Native people often adapted these items for their own use. For example, some cut up copper kettles and refashioned the metal for other uses, including jewelry that conferred status on the wearer, who was seen as connected to the new European source of raw materials.

As European settlements grew throughout the 1600s, European goods flooded native communities. Soon native people were using these items for the same purposes as the Europeans. For example, many native inhabitants abandoned their animal-skin clothing in favor of European textiles. Similarly, clay cookware gave way to metal cooking implements, and Indians found that European flint and steel made starting fires much easier (Figure 3.4.1).

A 1681 painting depicts Niantic-Narragansett chief Ninigret. He wears what appear to be animal-skin footwear and loincloth, along with a patterned fabric headband, a fabric cloak, and a necklace that includes a round metallic piece.

The abundance of European goods gave rise to new artistic objects. For example, iron awls made the creation of shell beads among the native people of the Eastern Woodlands much easier, and the result was an astonishing increase in the production of wampum, shell beads used in ceremonies and as jewelry and currency. Native peoples had always placed goods in the graves of their departed, and this practice escalated with the arrival of European goods. Archaeologists have found enormous caches of European trade goods in the graves of Indians on the East Coast.

Native weapons changed dramatically as well, creating an arms race among the peoples living in European colonization zones. Indians refashioned European brassware into arrow points and turned axes used for chopping wood into weapons. The most prized piece of European weaponry to obtain was a musket, or light, long-barreled European gun. In order to trade with Europeans for these, native peoples intensified their harvesting of beaver, commercializing their traditional practice.

The influx of European materials made warfare more lethal and changed traditional patterns of authority among tribes. Formerly weaker groups, if they had access to European metal and weapons, suddenly gained the upper hand against once-dominant groups. The Algonquian, for instance, traded with the French for muskets and gained power against their enemies, the Iroquois. Eventually, native peoples also used their new weapons against the European colonizers who had provided them.

Click and Explore:

Explore the complexity of Indian-European relationships in the series of primary source documents on the National Humanities Center site.

ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGES

The European presence in America spurred countless changes in the environment, setting into motion chains of events that affected native animals as well as people. The popularity of beaver-trimmed hats in Europe, coupled with Indians’ desire for European weapons, led to the overhunting of beaver in the Northeast. Soon, beavers were extinct in New England, New York, and other areas. With their loss came the loss of beaver ponds, which had served as habitats for fish as well as water sources for deer, moose, and other animals. Furthermore, Europeans introduced pigs, which they allowed to forage in forests and other wildlands. Pigs consumed the foods on which deer and other indigenous species depended, resulting in scarcity of the game native peoples had traditionally hunted.

European ideas about owning land as private property clashed with natives’ understanding of land use. Native peoples did not believe in private ownership of land; instead, they viewed land as a resource to be held in common for the benefit of the group. The European idea of usufruct—the right to common land use and enjoyment—comes close to the native understanding, but colonists did not practice usufruct widely in America. Colonizers established fields, fences, and other means of demarcating private property. Native peoples who moved seasonally to take advantage of natural resources now found areas off limits, claimed by colonizers because of their insistence on private-property rights.

The Introduction of Disease

Perhaps European colonization’s single greatest impact on the North American environment was the introduction of disease. Microbes to which native inhabitants had no immunity led to death everywhere Europeans settled. Along the New England coast between 1616 and 1618, epidemics claimed the lives of 75 percent of the native people. In the 1630s, half the Huron and Iroquois around the Great Lakes died of smallpox. As is often the case with disease, the very young and the very old were the most vulnerable and had the highest mortality rates. The loss of the older generation meant the loss of knowledge and tradition, while the death of children only compounded the trauma, creating devastating implications for future generations.

Some native peoples perceived disease as a weapon used by hostile spiritual forces, and they went to war to exorcise the disease from their midst. These “mourning wars” in eastern North America were designed to gain captives who would either be adopted (“requickened” as a replacement for a deceased loved one) or ritually tortured and executed to assuage the anger and grief caused by loss.

The Cultivation of Plants

European expansion in the Americas led to an unprecedented movement of plants across the Atlantic. A prime example is tobacco, which became a valuable export as the habit of smoking, previously unknown in Europe, took hold (Figure 3.4.2). Another example is sugar. Columbus brought sugarcane to the Caribbean on his second voyage in 1494, and thereafter a wide variety of other herbs, flowers, seeds, and roots made the transatlantic voyage.

A 1646 Dutch painting depicts a man seated at a table smoking a long white clay pipe with evident enjoyment.

Just as pharmaceutical companies today scour the natural world for new drugs, Europeans traveled to America to discover new medicines. The task of cataloging the new plants found there helped give birth to the science of botany. Early botanists included the English naturalist Sir Hans Sloane, who traveled to Jamaica in 1687 and there recorded hundreds of new plants (Figure 3.4.3). Sloane also helped popularize the drinking of chocolate, made from the cacao bean, in England.

The cover of Sir Hans Sloane’s catalog of the flora of the New World is shown. The title begins, “Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbadoes, Nieves, St. Christophers, and Jamaica; with the Natural History of the Herbs and Trees, Four-footed Beasts, Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles, &c., Of the last of those Islands.”

Indians, who possessed a vast understanding of local New World plants and their properties, would have been a rich source of information for those European botanists seeking to find and catalog potentially useful plants. Enslaved Africans, who had a tradition of the use of medicinal plants in their native land, adapted to their new surroundings by learning the use of New World plants through experimentation or from the native inhabitants. Native peoples and Africans employed their knowledge effectively within their own communities. One notable example was the use of the peacock flower to induce abortions: Indian and enslaved African women living in oppressive colonial regimes are said to have used this herb to prevent the birth of children into slavery. Europeans distrusted medical knowledge that came from African or native sources, however, and thus lost the benefit of this source of information.

Section Summary

The development of the Atlantic slave trade forever changed the course of European settlement in the Americas. Other transatlantic travelers, including diseases, goods, plants, animals, and even ideas like the concept of private land ownership, further influenced life in America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The exchange of pelts for European goods including copper kettles, knives, and guns played a significant role in changing the material cultures of native peoples. During the seventeenth century, native peoples grew increasingly dependent on European trade items. At the same time, many native inhabitants died of European diseases, while survivors adopted new ways of living with their new neighbors.

Review Questions

What was the Middle Passage?

the fabled sea route from Europe to the Far East

the land route from Europe to Africa

the transatlantic journey that African slaves made to America

the line between the northern and southern colonies

Which of the following is not an item Europeans introduced to Indians?

glass beads

copper kettles

metal tools

How did European muskets change life for native peoples in the Americas?

European guns started an arms race among Indian groups. Tribes with ties to Europeans had a distinct advantage in wars with other tribes because muskets were so much more effective than bows and arrows. Guns changed the balance of power among different groups and tribes and made combat more deadly.

Compare and contrast European and Indian views on property.

Indians didn’t have any concept of owning personal property and believed that land should be held in common, for use by a group. They used land as they needed, often moving from area to area to follow food sources at different times of year. Europeans saw land as something individuals could own, and they used fences and other markers to define their property.

Critical Thinking Questions

Compare and contrast life in the Spanish, French, Dutch, and English colonies, differentiating between the Chesapeake Bay and New England colonies. Who were the colonizers? What were their purposes in being there? How did they interact with their environments and the native inhabitants of the lands on which they settled?

Describe the attempts of the various European colonists to convert native peoples to their belief systems. How did these attempts compare to one another? What were the results of each effort?

How did chattel slavery differ from indentured servitude? How did the former system come to replace the latter? What were the results of this shift?

What impact did Europeans have on their New World environments—native peoples and their communities as well as land, plants, and animals? Conversely, what impact did the New World’s native inhabitants, land, plants, and animals have on Europeans? How did the interaction of European and Indian societies, together, shape a world that was truly “new”?

Spanish vs. English Colonization Essay

Introduction.

Bibliography

In their efforts to colonize the Americas, the Spanish and the British opted for polarly different approaches, with the methods of the latter showing to be more effective and prosperous in the long-run. While the Spanish focused on capturing the wealth offered by the new lands, the English run their colonies as tools for sustaining their living, working, and finding new ways in which they can become a prosperous society.

Since the discovery of the new land by Christopher Columbus, the Spanish came to colonize territories seeking wealth and gold. Hernán Cortés, a Spanish Conquistador, came to the Americas in the hopes to gain hereditary power for his family and initiated the conquest for capturing the lands of the Aztec Empire, the wealth of which astonished the Spanish. Besides the thirst of the Spanish for land and gold, they were adamant about changing over the native population of the Americas to Catholicism, which went against the beliefs of the Indians and Aztecs 1 . In the vision of colonial society by the Spanish, everyone would know their place, patriarchy would prevail, while Conquistadors would be at the top of the social hierarchy, with the native Americans and Africans beneath them. The majority of ventures undertaken by them were short-term, with the Spanish bringing devastating diseases, which lead to the loss of life among the natives.

The English did not adopt the Spanish model of the colonial rule because their goals of coming to the Americas were different. The majority of colonists from England cam as households in the search for work and avoiding spiritual persecution. Among them were Puritan families who sought life according to the demands of the scripture, “envisioning a new English Israel where reformed Protestantism would grow and thrive, providing a model for the rest of the Christian world and a counter to what they saw as the Catholic menace.” 2 This led to the English having much larger populations in their colonies compared to the Spanish who run their territories while the majority of their occupants were natives. A larger population in the colonies meant greater opportunities for human power and the subsequent increase in wealth development. The use of indentured servants at tobacco plants in English colonies showed to have a complexly positive impact on economy sustainability – the servants received freedom after their indenture and could become independent tobacco planters themselves.

Both Spanish and English colonists came to the Americas in the search for new opportunities for expansion. Also, both of them placed great importance on religion and the role of social structures. The English, however, were more effective in their efforts to prosper because they brought more people to the new land and facilitated a rapid expansion of the economy, which the Spanish had failed to do.

Corbett, Scott, Janssen, Volker, Lund, John, Pfannestiel, Todd, and Paul Vickery. U.S. History . Houston, TX: Open Stax, 2017.

Scott Corbett, Volker Janssen, John Lund, Todd Pfannestiel, and Paul Vickery, U.S. History, (Houston, TX: Open Stax, 2017), 64.
Scott Corbett, Volker Janssen, John Lund, Todd Pfannestiel, and Paul Vickery, U.S. History, 73.
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Spanish vs English Colonization
Scott Corbett, Volker Janssen, John Lund, Todd Pfannestiel, and Paul Vickery, U.S. History, 73. This essay, "Spanish vs. English Colonization" is published exclusively on IvyPanda's free essay examples database. You can use it for research and reference purposes to write your own paper. However, you must cite it accordingly .