British Colonial Expansion in North America
British Colonial Expansion
- The English began exploring and settling the New World in the late Tudor/early Stuart periods.
- Joint-stock companies, legalized by the Crown, undertook colonization as commercial enterprises.
- Early motivations included the search for precious metals and a sea passage to Asia.
- Further motivations included planting and trading, escaping poverty, and seeking religious freedom.
The Southern Plantation Colonies
- 1607: The Virginia Company of London founded the first permanent settlement at Jamestown, Virginia.
- This set three precedents:
- Private ownership of land (headright system)
- ‘Democratic’ assembly
- Economic rationale (tobacco)
- By the 1630s, Maryland joined the tobacco boom, primarily using white indentured servants from England.
- In the 1660s, North and South Carolina were established, with rice and indigo as their cash crops.
- Africans were first imported as indentured servants in 1619. By the 1660s, they were brought over in increasing numbers as hereditary slaves.
- By 1740, black slaves outnumbered free whites by 2 to 1 in South Carolina, the only English colony with an African majority. The condition of black slaves progressively worsened (e.g., Virginia Slave Codes of 1705).
- Georgia, the last of the 13 British colonies, was founded in 1732 by James Oglethorpe. It was established as a colony for debtors and paupers and served as a defensive buffer with Spanish Florida.
- Initially, the colony banned slavery, alcohol, and large land holdings.
- However, due to labor scarcity, settlers petitioned for ‘liberty and property without restrictions’. By the 1750s, Georgia became a plantation society with a wealthy slave-owning elite, similar to other southern colonies.
Religious Freedom in New England
- 1620: 102 radical separatists from the Church of England, the Pilgrim Fathers, founded the first northern colony at Plymouth, Massachusetts. Thanksgiving Day (fourth Thursday in November) commemorates their first harvest in 1621. By 1630 there were still only 1,500 settlers.
- In the 1630s, over 15,000 mostly middle-class Puritans emigrated to the new Massachusetts Bay Colony, north of Plymouth. The first Governor, John Winthrop, believed that only fellow Puritans should have political rights.
Samoset was the first Native American to make contact with the English Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony (19th-century engraving).
- These new colonies were a sanctuary for radical Protestants during religious turmoil in Europe and the ‘corruption and evil’ of Charles I’s reign.
- The founders of Connecticut (Thomas Hooker) and Rhode Island (Roger Williams) disagreed with Winthrop, advocating for the full separation of church and state and equal suffrage for all landowners.
- The New England colonies initially excluded Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritan ‘enthusiasts’. After the Glorious Revolution of 1689, they were forced to accept freedom of worship for all Protestants and a system of Royal Governorship. They flourished through agriculture and forestry, becoming merchants for all of British America.