In the early 1500s, the Spanish secured domination in the Caribbean, most of South America, and Mexico (including parts of what would later be the United States) for its gold and silver. However, Europeans soon discovered that the real wealth of the Americas lay not so much in its gold as in its fertile land. The land could be turned into private property from which the new owners could squeeze fabulous profits in sugar, “worth its weight in gold” in the growing world market, as well as tobacco, cotton, ranching, etc. Extracting either kind of wealth—from mining or agriculture—required the control of a supply of skilled (if unfree) labor. However, diseases and the brutality of Columbus, Cortez, and others had killed off up to 90 percent of the native population. While the survivors worked in Spanish gold mines, plantations, or ranches, the ruling class sought a new supply of labor, and procuring this labor became yet another lucrative business. Millions of Africans were enslaved and crammed onto slave ships for the “middle passage” to the Americas. It has been estimated that one out of six died on the way. Revolts occurred frequently. Some Africans refused to be enslaved and drowned themselves. Others attacked the crew and occasionally ships were taken over and returned to Africa. Nonetheless, the “West Indies” plantations based on slave labor flourished, and by the 1700s about one-third to one-half of all world commerce depended on the islands of the Caribbean, strategically located between Europe, the American continents, and Africa.

Initially, the Spanish were content to let the colder and goldless regions north of Florida go to whatever empire was desperate enough to seize them. The commercial empires of the Netherlands, France, and Britain competed for dominance in North America. It was the British—colonizing New England and Virginia—who pushed out all rivals: first the Dutch, eventually the French. The British empire’s search for a cash crop to rival the Caribbean’s lucrative sugar plantations ended when settlers in Virginia discovered tobacco could be sold at enormous profit in Europe. The scramble for the land began in earnest. The work was harsh and the hot climate (combined with overwork) killed most Europeans before they were thirty. But if a settler was cunning enough to obtain good crop land and a regular labor supply, he could grow rich. The colony “built on smoke” boomed. By 1660, 30,000 Europeans and 1,500 Africans or Afro-Caribbeans lived in Virginia.

Seizing the land from its native inhabitants was difficult (early wars in Virginia were bloody and sometimes went badly for the Europeans) but securing a labor supply proved just as tricky. The dominant form of labor was indentured servitude which bound impoverished European laborers to their master for a fixed period of time (between four and seven years) in exchange for a lump sum (often the price of transportation from Europe, a small parcel of forestland, and some household belongings). About two-thirds of all bound servants died before they were freed from service. At first, some African slaves were treated more or less like indentured servants, enjoying minimal legal rights and eventually being freed. Freed bondsmen (and most were men) discovered that the best land had already been taken and thus they were forced to occupy land closer to the frontier with the Indian nations. This pitted oppressed groups against each other—which often happened in American history. The poorer colonists resented that they were restricted from seizing more land from the Indians. They also resented serving as a buffer between the land of the wealthy and Indians’ territories.

In 1676, the class and race tensions of colonial Virginia exploded. The trigger came when Nathaniel Bacon, a moderately prosperous planter, organized an illegal attack on Indian settlements in order to seize more land. When he was arrested, his cause attracted the support of landless whites, European servants, and African slaves. Bacon criticized the appointed governor’s blatant favoritism toward the rich, especially in the sale of public lands and mistreatment of servants. The poor rallied to Bacon, the governor was driven from the region, and some rich plantations were looted.

By 1677, “Bacon’s Rebellion” was crushed. However, the revolt attracted the attention of the English government. Parliament enacted a series of “reforms” that intensified legal distinctions between poor whites and blacks. Landless whites weren’t permitted to vote, but they could not be abused as badly as before. African slaves lost whatever rights they had enjoyed. Racial distinctions and divisions were encouraged. Interracial marriage was criminalized, though slave owners were permitted to rape female slaves in order to increase their property. Laws were passed that protected white servants (whose numbers were dropping) while degrading blacks (whose numbers were increasing). White servants could not be whipped naked, but slaves could not only be whipped but mutilated. As historian Edmund Morgan observed, “In order to get work out of men and women who had nothing to gain except the absence of pain, you had to be willing to beat, maim and kill.”

Slavery spread throughout the colonies. In eighteenth-century New York City, about 15 percent of the population were slaves. Artisans trained slaves in their crafts and these newly skilled workers thirsted for their freedom as much as any field hand. The system of racism was still evolving and many Irish were treated with the same violence and contempt as Africans. The Irish were not yet considered to be “white” and sometimes made common cause with their African workmates—but joint rebellions of slaves and Irish servants were brutally crushed. Among the enslaved Africans in the countryside, in addition to risk-filled and (as it turned out) doomed efforts at outright rebellion, other forms of resistance became common. Various forms of disobedience, working slowly or poorly, “playing dumb,” subtly negotiating better working or living conditions, covert cultural resistance (through music, religion, etc.) were among the many strategies employed by enslaved black laborers.

Slaveowners often relied on beatings, whippings, and torture to maintain their property rights. There was great fear that the slaves would exercise the same brutality to gain their freedom as owners used to maintain their profits. This resulted—whenever slave rebellions seemed possible—in an intensification of brutality to discipline slaves. Frequently slaves would seek freedom by running away from their masters. Many were recaptured and severely punished, but many others were able to reach nonslave areas. Some were able to find refuge with the Indians.

Although slaves existed in the Northern colonies, along with an even larger number of indentured servants (at least half of all immigrants to the colonies—250,000 by 1770), it was free labor that soon became predominant in that region. Here, too, agriculture absorbed the energies of a majority of the colonists in the North (with wheat, corn, fruits, and vegetables taking the place of tobacco and cotton in these colder climates). There were landowners with huge estates, which depended on the hard work of agricultural laborers and tenant farmers. There were also more small family farms than were able to exist in the plantation-dominated South. Some of these were more or less thriving commercial farms run like small businesses, and many were simply subsistence farms on which relatively poor families would eke out a modest but independent existence. There was nothing quite so dramatic as Bacon’s Rebellion in the North. Yet growing tensions—sometimes punctuated by violent conflict—naturally developed between wealthy elites and hard-pressed majorities in the rural areas of that region. When news reached the colonies of England’s “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 (in which King James II was forced to abdicate in favor of a monarch who would accept the authority of Parliament) this stimulated revolts in New England, New York, Maryland, and the Carolinas that—while not eliminating all popular grievances—established some limits in the authority of the powerful few over the bulk of the colonists.

The absence of a plantation economy in the North contributed to the more rapid development of urbanization. A growing number of Northerners were drawn into port cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, as well as a growing network of towns. Merchants were the most successful entrepreneurs in such colonies as Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, and their commerce was dependent on the labor of those engaged in shipbuilding, as well as on the labor of sailors and longshoremen. Other laborers were also needed to sustain the growing urban communities—those engaged in the construction trades, and those engaged in making other things that urban populations might need: weavers and tailors, shoemakers, bakers, carpenters and cabinet makers, blacksmiths and silversmiths, typographical workers and printers, and more. Among those engaged in the skilled trades, the master-craftsman who owned a particular enterprise would be on top, with capable journeymen doing the bulk of the work in the middle, and young apprentices just learning the trade on the bottom. There were also many unskilled day-laborers, servants of various kinds in the homes of the well-to-do, and a variety of small shopkeepers.

The scale of “big cities” in colonial times did not exceed a population of 20,000, and the well-to-do upper classes tended to dominate much of the political and cultural life as they dominated the economy. On the other hand, these thriving commercial centers generated a growing cultural diversity—various religions, various ethnic groups, various occupations, various new ideas—which stimulated the inhabitants to think and act in ways that were different from what might be found in more stable or static rural environments. In various churches, taverns, sewing and quilting groups, and town meetings traditions and innovations were critically discussed as people sought to forge a better life for themselves and their children in the New World.

One of the key incidents leading up to the Revolution was the Boston Massacre. Although racism had been growing in the Americas, it was an interracial crowd that confronted and was fired upon by British soldiers in 1770. Boston’s artisans, craftsmen, and laboring poor—many of whom were drawn to the Sons of Liberty by radical organizer Samuel Adams—were acquainted with the pamphlets that criticized the taxes and special privileges of the imperial regime. But what triggered their anger was that British soldiers stationed in their city competed for jobs in rope shops or “ropewalks.” Soldiers fired into the rowdy demonstration and British troops shot and killed five Bostonians. All were workers. Crispus Attucks was a half-black, half-Indian sailor. Patrick Carr was an Irish-born leather worker. The others were native-born rope workers, sailors, or journeymen.

The actions of urban “mobs” proved as important to the early revolutionary cause as the eloquence of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, or others. Urban workers literally attacked the agents of the English crown and destroyed property, as in the Boston Tea Party in 1774. Throughout the Revolutionary War that raged from 1775 to 1783, farmers, laborers, and artisans made up the bulk of the revolutionary army and guerrilla bands that ultimately defeated the British army.

The leaders of the American Revolutionaries were wealthy Northern merchants such as John Hancock, well-to-do lawyers such as John Adams, rich slaveowners such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, prosperous self-made businessmen such as printer-publisher Benjamin Franklin. They opposed rule by kings and favored the independence of the colonies, although most of the “founding fathers” were also inclined to believe that people of “quality”—that is, people such as themselves—should run society in the public interest. But it was the democratic ideology expressed by the revolutionary firebrand Thomas Paine that proved capable of inspiring masses of people. Protesting against “monarchical tyranny” and “aristocratical tyranny,” and insisting that “exalting one man so greatly above the rest cannot be justified on the equal rights of nature,” Paine denounced King George III as “a royal brute” and insisted that it was “Common Sense” that there should be an independent government based on “a large and equal representation” of the people. Such notions were incorporated by Jefferson into the Declaration of Independence of 1776:

Thousands of farmers and field hands, small shopkeepers, artisans and craftsmen, skilled and unskilled laborers rallied to this cause, capturing two British armies and defeating what was then the most powerful nation on Earth before it was all over in 1783. The war for independence—and the ideals that inspired it—had a profound impact throughout the world. The American Revolution went beyond a struggle for “home rule” (independence) to become a struggle over “who would rule at home.”

In 1786, for example, impoverished and debt-ridden Massachusetts farmers—mostly Revolutionary War veterans following Daniel Shays—rose up against the state government that took the side of the rich against them. As General Henry Knox wrote to his well-to-do friend George Washington, “[T]heir creed is that the property of the United States has been protected from the confiscation of Britain by the joint exertions of all, and therefore should be the common property of all.” Knox spoke for many of his class when he concluded that “our Government must be braced, changed, or...