English Colonization

5 Key excerpts on "English Colonization"

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  Language and Migration

  • Tony Capstick(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2 Empires, colonialism, and English Introduction In this chapter we begin with an overview of some of the empires the world has known. We look at how these empires grew, what the cultural effect was of their expansion, and how they changed the shape of the societies that were conquered. We begin exploring the meaning of colonization by returning to our case study of Polynesian migration across the Pacific. Tracing how these pioneers travelled, conquered, and settled helps us to understand how human beings have always sought to move and extend their influence beyond their immediate surroundings, whether this is to increase opportunities for trade or to seek new lands for agriculture – there is something within the human spirit that takes us out into the world. But how do these motivations shape the forms of colonialism that we know today? When does the desire for trade turn into a desire for political domination? Which institutions are responsible for these decisions and how is language an important aspect of extending a country’s political reach? To answer these questions, we will be looking at the massive migrations that took place around the world when European colonizers slowly but steadily gained control of great swaths of territory beyond their original borders from the sixteenth century onwards, forming powerful colonial empires. We will primarily focus on these European colonies, in particular the British empire in India and the history of the East India Company, which grew from a small trading company into a powerful institution responsible for the official governance of territories spanning South Asia, and the linguistic outcomes for the language contact that occurred in these colonies. But first, let us return to the colonization of the Pacific region by Polynesian seafarers to consider the difference between colonization and colonialism.

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  Colonial America

  • Jerome R Reich, Jerome Reich(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8 The Control and Completion of Colonization

  One of the first steps taken by King Charles II after his restoration in 1660 was to systematize colonial administration. His purpose was to make “these dominions [colonies] useful to England and . . . to bring the several colonies into a more uniform type of government.” The colonies founded after this date as well as those established earlier, as this chapter indicates, were to experience the effects of this increase in imperial control.

  The Colonies Under the Commonwealth

  The Puritan merchants who dominated the English government during the Commonwealth were ardent mercantilists who were eager to derive full advantage from the already-existing colonies. Specifically, they were determined to break the virtual monopoly of the maritime carrying trade which the Dutch, because of their lower freight rates, had developed. The Anglo-Dutch War of 1652–1654 was fought for this purpose. A more effective weapon against the Dutch monopoly was the Navigation Act of 1651. This act provided that all goods brought from Asia, Africa, or America to England or to its possessions had to be carried in British (including Irish and colonial) ships. Goods produced in European nations might be carried to the colonies in the ships of the nation which produced them as well as in British ships. The first Navigation Act had relatively little effect on the colonies, since the English government had not yet developed the machinery to enforce it. However, it served as a model for its successors.

  During the period of the Interregnum, the colonies showed their economic independence in many other ways. Even New England (which, of course, sympathized with the English Puritan regime) placed its own interests first. Beginning in 1651 Massachusetts coined its own money, the famous pine tree shilling, and New England fishermen took control of the American fishing waters when the English fishing industry was paralyzed by the civil war.

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  Managing the Environment, Managing Ourselves

  A History of American Environmental Policy, Second Edition

  • Richard N. L. Andrews(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  These images produced a powerful and widespread belief in American ‘‘exceptional-ism’’: a belief that for better or worse America was a radically di√erent environment—and ultimately, society—from the ‘‘Old World’’ of Europe (Greene 1993, 5–7). Colonization, then, was among other things an environmental policy. In the broadest sense, it was a policy of expanding the accessible environment of each empire—its physical resources as well as its economic and political control—to a larger and larger portion of the world. More precisely, it was an environmental policy to benefit the ruling political and economic classes of each empire. It provided them with natural resources they desired Historical Context 19 Figure 1. European global exploration and trade routes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. [From Leften Stavrianos, The World Since 1500: A Global History, 7th edition, ∫ 1995, p. 411. Reprinted by permis-sion of Pearson Education, Inc., Upper Saddle River, N.J.] on more favorable terms than previously, it relieved them of the urban concentrations of poor people displaced from the land by agricultural commercialization, and it gave them the financial prosperity they needed to maintain large standing armies. European exploration and colonization also had unanticipated consequences that caused vast changes in the world’s ecosystems. Living species previously limited to par-ticular regions were disseminated worldwide. European stockyard animals (horses, cows, sheep, pigs), grain crops (wheat, rye, oats, barley), and fruits were transplanted to the colonies, and American vegetables—corn, potatoes, tomatoes, cassava, avocados, pea-nuts, and squashes—were brought to Europe and elsewhere, as were tobacco, cotton, sugar, drugs such as coca and curare (for anesthetics), and other products.

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  The Long Process of Development

  Building Markets and States in Pre-industrial England, Spain and their Colonies

  • Jerry F. Hough, Robin Grier(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  243 7 The English Colonies It is difficult for modern Americans to develop a complex understanding of the English colonies. The first problem is generic to the history of all former colonies: historians naturally want to study the colonial antecedents of the independent country as it emerged from the empire. Yet the British did not even speak of the American colonies collectively until the 1730s, and then they had in mind all of their American colonies, not just those that became the United States. Indeed, in the 1600s the Caribbean colonies were economically and strategically far more valuable to England than the mainland colonies. Moreover, the Caribbean colonies were actually more integrated with the mainland colonies than the mainland colonies (or at least regions) were with each other. A free-market trade economy was created in New England and then in New York and Pennsylvania in order to supply food and materi- als to the slaves of Barbados and Jamaica. A second problem in understanding the colonies is that the elite of a post-independence country is naturally more interested in legitimating the new country than in exploring embarrassing aspects of the colonial past. Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in the New World, 13 years before Plymouth, and it was vastly more important to London than Plymouth. Yet the Thanksgiving holiday focused on Plymouth because acknowledging, let alone celebrating, the real reason for colonization – the introduction of slave-produced tobacco –would have been awkward. Other distortions in colonial history were introduced for more specific political reasons. During the first half of the 20th century, the European Americans called themselves “races,” and they could feel as strongly about American policy toward their homelands as modern Cuban Americans feel about policy toward Cuba. This had a disastrous impact on American foreign policy and domestic politics in World War I, the interwar period,

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  Studies in Settler Colonialism

  Politics, Identity and Culture

  • F. Bateman, L. Pilkington, F. Bateman, L. Pilkington(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  I suppose it is a considerable historical irony that India, the home of postcolonial theory, was not itself considered to be a colony. This official understanding of colonization determined, in large measure, the relationship between the imperial centre and the colonies, between the colonists and indigenous peoples, and the whole question of colonial self-government. A colony was a group of, say, British people who abandoned their home for, in effect, the Greek notion of a colony as ‘a home away from home’. Indeed, according to Merivale, ‘The fundamental idea of the older British colonial policy appears to have been, that wherever a man went he carried with him the rights of an Englishman, whatever these were supposed to be’ (Merivale 1861, p. 103). Contrasting the English love of home with French sociability, Samuel Smiles (of Self-Help fame) had a running headline in his book Character which read, ‘Shyness and Colonization’ (Smiles 1913 [1871], p. 282). Here he saw the sociability of the French, and indeed the Irish, as seriously debilitating for colonial enterprises, whereas ‘the comparatively unsociable Germans, English, and Americans’, were ‘spreading over the earth’ (Smiles 1913 [1871], p. 281). According to Smiles: Give the Englishman a home, and he is comparatively indifferent to society. For the sake of a holding which he can call his own, he will cross the seas, plant himself on the prairie or amidst the primeval forest, and make for himself a home. The solitude of the wilderness has no fears for him; the society of his wife and family is sufficient, and he cares for no other. (Smiles 1913 [1871], p. 280) The Englishman left home but did so in order to ‘find’ or ‘make’ a home, in the words of Rupert Brooke, ‘some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England’. In a sense, the colonists, unlike mere emigrants ‘defining themselves’ as settlers (as against the supposed nomadism of indigenous peoples) never left home.

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