Colonial America

7 Key excerpts on "Colonial America"

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  History of American Economy

  • Gary Walton, Hugh Rockoff(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Walton, Gary M. “Sources of Productivity Change in American Colonial Shipping.” Economic History Review 20 (April 1967): 67–78. Williamson, Jeffrey G., and Peter H. Lindert. American Inequality: A Macroeconomic History . New York, N.Y.: Academic Press, 1980. Copyright 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-300 90 CHAPTER THEME At the close of the French and Indian War (also called the Seven Years’ War), when the French were eliminated as a rival power in North America, Britain’s mainland colonies were on the brink of another wave of economic growth and rising prosperity. In accordance with British practices of colonization, the colonists remained as English citizens with all rights due to the king’s subjects under the laws of England. For financial, administrative, and political reasons, the Crown and Parliament in 1763 launched a “new order.” Misguided policies, mismanagement, and ill timing from England added political will to the economic circumstances of the colonies to steer an independent course. The American Revolution was the outcome. THE OLD COLONIAL POLICY Being part of the British Empire, and in accord with English laws and institutions, colo-nial governments were patterned after England’s governmental organization. Although originally there were corporate colonies (Connecticut and Rhode Island) and proprietary colonies (Pennsylvania and Maryland), most eventually became Crown colonies, and all had similar governing organizations. For example, after 1625, Virginia was a characteristic Crown colony, and both its governor and council (the upper house) were appointed by the Crown. But only the lower house could initiate fiscal legislation, and this body was elected by the propertied adult males within the colony.

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  America's Religions

  From Their Origins to the Twenty-first Century

  • Peter W. Williams(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • University of Illinois Press

    (Publisher)

  PART II

  EARLY AMERICA: EUROPEANS, COLONIALS, AND TRADITIONAL PEOPLES BEFORE THE REVOLUTION

  The American colonies were from their beginnings one of the most elaborate laboratories ever devised for the intermixing of peoples, cultures, religions, and social patterns. Native Americans were themselves a highly complex blend of peoples who had already changed and developed over the centuries through continual interaction. Their exposure to hostile colonists and (more or less) benevolent missionaries forced their adjustment to yet another set of cultures—English Protestant and French and Spanish Catholic—which resulted in a wide variety of responses, few if any of which were very successful in the long run. African slaves, who were also the bearers of traditional oral cultures, underwent even more forcible contact with European traditions. These slaves and their free descendants, however, eventually developed a highly creative and long-lasting synthesis of old and new, the story of which will be dealt with as a whole in the next section.

  The original European settlers of what would eventually become the United States reflected every possible variation of relationships between religion and society, or church and state, that had emerged in the Old World during the Reformation era. English Anglicans, French and Spanish Catholics, Dutch Reformed, and Swedish Lutherans all represented state-supported, “established” churches, usually involved in their governments’ imperial ambitions. British Puritans and Quakers and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians were highly vocal English-speaking minorities who attained considerable power once transplanted to American shores. The fragmented nature of the colonies and the weak hold that England and its established church maintained during the seventeenth century made it possible for a wide variety of patterns of relationships between religion and society to develop. This would provide an important context for the ultimate settlement that had to be forged after independence. Also, it worked subtle, or not-so-subtle, changes in the character of the colonial religious communities. New England Puritanism, for example, changed, in Perry Miller's memorable phrase, from a reformation into an administration.

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  The Routledge Handbook to the History and Society of the Americas

  • Olaf Kaltmeier, Josef Raab, Mike Foley, Alice Nash, Stefan Rinke, Mario Rufer, Olaf Kaltmeier, Josef Raab, Mike Foley, Alice Nash, Stefan Rinke, Mario Rufer(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  who they were: a predominantly white population of English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish origin, who mixed very little with the indigenous population (→ Whiteness, I/46). The slave population also kept growing, primarily in the south, where the plantation economy (first cotton and tobacco, then rice and indigo) reached a significant level of development. The absence of a landed elite facilitated a certain degree of equality among the proprietors, who became the leading political and economic agents of the new colonial society.

  By the mid-17th century, the colonial economy no longer belonged to the two Iberian imperial powers. Rather, America had become a part of the multilateral, international web of exchange that stretched between the shores of the Atlantic.

  A look into the American interior

  Yet how did the American colonial economy evolve in this context? This requires looking at the other side of the equation: the generative, inwardly oriented economy, with its robust domestic markets, a feature of the Iberian (and particularly the Spanish) colonial economies that distinguished them from the settlement and plantation economies.

  The discovery of resources in this part of the American world gave rise to regional specialization. For that reason, zones devoted to mining and metal production can be seen (plants for mining and refining); zones with the high population needed to perform this work (mining towns); production zones to meet the needs of those populations; and zones in which the products, raw materials, and metals were bought and sold. At the same time, it was necessary to establish fixed ports to gather the metals and merchandise, and to hold annual trade fairs. Distinct commercial zones were set up for this purpose (Havana, Cartagena, Veracruz, Lima), with warehouses equipped to store the merchandise, customs to regulate it, residences for traders to stay in, and headquarters and compounds to keep guard over the merchandise and also to determine the best routes through which to distribute these colonial products to the places where they would be used. Cities were founded (Potosí, Minas Gerais), connecting the routes on which metals, merchandise, and slaves were transported from the ports to the mining towns.

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  The Britannica Guide to Explorers and Explorations That Changed the Modern World

  • Britannica Educational Publishing, Kenneth Pletcher(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Britannica Educational Publishing

    (Publisher)

  C hapter 3:Colonial Exploration of the New World

  T he age of modern colonialism began about 1500, following the European discoveries of a sea route around Africa’s southern coast (1488) and of America (1492). With these events sea power shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and to the countries that developed their maritime power. By discovery, conquest, and settlement, these nations expanded and colonized throughout the world, spreading European institutions and culture.

  SPAIN: THE CONQUESTS

  Only gradually did the Spaniards realize the possibilities of America. They had completed the occupation of the larger West Indian islands by 1512, though they largely ignored the smaller ones, to their ultimate regret. Thus far they had found lands nearly empty of treasure, populated by inhabitants who died off rapidly on contact with Europeans. In 1508 an expedition did leave Hispaniola to colonize the mainland, and, after hardship and decimation, the remnant settled at Darién on the Isthmus of Panama, from which in 1513 Vasco Núñez de Balboa made his famous march to the Pacific. On the Isthmus the Spaniards heard garbled reports of the wealth and splendour of Inca Peru. Balboa was succeeded (and judicially murdered) by Pedrarias Dávila, who turned his attention to Central America and founded Nicaragua.

  Expeditions sent by Diego Velázquez, governor of Cuba, made contact with the decayed Mayan civilization of Yucatán and brought news of the cities and precious metals of Aztec Mexico. Hernán Cortés entered Mexico from Cuba in 1519 and spent two years overthrowing the Aztec confederation, which dominated Mexico’s civilized heartland. The Spaniards used firearms effectively but did most of their fighting with pikes and blades, aided by numerous Indian allies who hated the dominant Aztecs. The conquest of Aztec Mexico led directly to that of Guatemala and about half of Yucatán, whose geography and warlike inhabitants slowed Spanish progress.

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  A Companion to Colonial America

  • Daniel Vickers(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  A focus on slavery need not limit inves-tigations to the South; recent studies point to the extent to which northern economic lives in New York and Rhode Island were embedded in the slave trade and related commercial activities. In addition, as scholars tackle studies of individual industries, households, and communities, the paucity of quantitative data will gradually become less of a handicap. It may soon become possible to create the kinds of benchmark sets that will allow historians and economists to formulate new paradigms of colonial Ameri-can economic growth and development. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bailyn, Bernard: The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986). Boorstin, Daniel J.: Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York: Vintage Press, 1958). Breen, Timothy H.: “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690– 1776,” Journal of British Studies 25 (1986), 467–99. Bushman, Richard L.: The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). Carr, Lois Green and Walsh, Lorena S., “Economic Diversification and Labor Organization in the Chesapeake, 1650–1820.” In Stephen Innes, ed., Work and Labor in Early America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 145–88. Carr, Lois Green, Walsh, Lorena S., and Menard, Russell R.: Robert Cole’s World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). MARGARET NEWELL 190 Carson, Cary: “The Consumer Revolution in Colonial British America: Why Demand?” In Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds., Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia). Child, Josiah: A New Discourse of Trade (London, 1804 [1693]). Clark, Christopher: The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).

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  Edmund Burke as Historian

  War, Order and Civilisation

  • Sora Sato(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  wars among the European nations. This, after all, meant a general, if not full, endorsement of the processes of the history of the Americas as part of the imperial history of modern Europe.

  2 British Colonies

  The British colonies in America were an outcome of the European progress to the New World following the age of Columbus, but their history was, for British intellectuals and politicians, more significant than the history of the other European colonies, as it was directly linked to the British imperial politics of the late eighteenth century. For Burke, the history of British North America chiefly meant two things: the spread of British systems to the new continent and the rise of a distinct society there that rapidly emerged during recent history without the loss of ancient manners. To tackle American affairs in the 1760s and the 1770s, it was, in his view, significant to recognise both elements, which could provide a framework for the problems of these periods of time.

  Burke’s recognition of the uniqueness of the colonists could be traced back to the Account , where the authors also took for granted their inheritance of ‘Englishness’. Among their uniqueness was the large number of independent yeomen, their prominent republican spirit,51 the absence of a hereditary aristocracy and various forms of government,52 as well as a distinct natural environment and the production of particular commodities.

  As regards forms of government, the Burkes examined three distinct types of government in British North America : royal, proprietary and charter. Royal government arose in the first English colony in North America, that is, the settlement of Virginia. Initially, this colony was governed by a president and a council appointed by the crown. When the colony became more populous, however, it was considered as inappropriate to govern the colony in a very dissimilar way to the mode practised at home. A type of legislature resembling the House of Commons in England was created and called the lower house of assembly. Another branch of legislature, sometimes called the upper house of assembly, was also formed, which was, to a certain extent, the counterpart of the House of Lords

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  The Handy History Answer Book

  From the Stone Age to the Digital Age

  • Stephen A. Werner(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Visible Ink Press

    (Publisher)

  EUROPEAN COLONIES AND THE EARLY UNITED STATES COLONIALISM Where were the European colonies in North America?

  By the 1600s, the French had taken the land north of the British colonies. The French controlled Canada, the land around the Great Lakes, and Louisiana. The British claimed the land on the Atlantic coast of what today is Maine down to Georgia. The Spanish controlled Florida, Mexico, and the Caribbean.

  How did the British come to control much of North America during colonial times?

  British and French explorers laid claim to many parts of what is now the United States. During the late 1600s and into the mid-1700s, the two European powers fought a series of four wars in their struggle for control of territory in North America. Three of the wars broke out in Europe before they spread to America, where British and French colonists fought King William’s War (1689–1697), Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713), and King George’s War (1744–1748). King William’s War saw no gains for either side. After Queen Anne’s War, however, both sides signed the Treaty of Utrecht, in which France ceded Newfoundland, Acadia, and the Hudson Bay territory to Britain.

  The struggle between England and France was not settled until a fourth war, the French and Indian War (1754–1763), from which Britain emerged the victor. What was the religion of British colonies?

  The British would establish colonies along the Eastern Seaboard from Georgia in the South to Massachusetts in the North, which included the land that would eventually become Maine. Since most of the immigrants from Britain were Protestants, most of the colonies were Protestant. For example, the Anglican Church was the official religion in Virginia. Maryland, an exception, was established as a Catholic colony. However, Protestants eventually took control and took away the religious freedom of Catholics. The colony of Pennsylvania was set up by a Quaker, William Penn.

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