2.2: European Colonies
2.2: Explain how and why various European colonies developed and expanded from 1607 to 1754.
Unit 2 of AP United States History starts off from 1607 and stretches until 1754 and so as a result, we will be looking at the main event in the Americas during this time: the development and expansion of European colonies. While during the last period, we focused on Spanish colonialism, it was mainly during this period that all of the other Western European states got involved in colonialism such as the British, the French, the Portuguese, and the Dutch, but there will be less focus on the Portuguese because they were mostly only involved in Brazil.
To recap the last period, when the Spanish established colonies in the Americas, their main goal was to extract wealth by mining gold and silver and through agriculture, but instead of using their own labor, they used native labor instead and eventually replaced it with slavery from Africa when the first system failed. Additionally, they introduced the Casta System into the Americas that changed the social hierarchy all throughout the land to being one based on racial ancestry, and they also attempted to convert natives to Christianity which had some successes and some failures, such as the Pueblo Revolt. So now let’s focus on how the other European states fared in their colonization of the Americas.
French
The French started exploring the Americas in 1524 to find a water route to Asia that would bypass the Indian Ocean and Africa. However, they didn't colonize right away because they were preoccupied with European wars and persecuting Protestants after the Protestant Reformation. Once it became clear that a water-based passage through the Americas did not exist, the French began settling in the Americas. Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec, the first permanent French settlement in the Americas, in 1608. The French were more interested in trade, especially the fur trade, than in conquering land like the Spanish. As a result, they established trading posts and settlements throughout the Americas rather than taking over large territories. Some French traders even married Native American women to gain access to trading networks. For instance, the French traded iron cookware, farming tools, and cloth to the Ojibwe Indians for their beaver pelts.
Dutch
The Dutch, similar to the French, initially sought a water route to Asia through the Americas and sent Henry Hudson as an explorer. However, he did not discover the passage, but instead sailed up the Hudson River, which he claimed for the Dutch. In 1625, this area became the Dutch colony known as New Amsterdam. The Dutch were primarily interested in wealth and commerce, rather than gold and agriculture. This led to New Amsterdam becoming a trading center that drew in traders, merchants, fishermen, and farmers from other colonies. Unlike the Spanish, the Dutch were Protestant and had no desire to convert the natives. Their main focus was solely making money.
England
After wars with France, the conquest of Ireland, and the English Enclosure Movement which took open land out of the control of local English villages, England was struggling. As a result, people began looking for new economic opportunities and new land. Additionally, some people sought religious freedom and better living conditions outside of England. And so for all of these reasons, many set out to the Americas in family groups to establish new homes. Unlike the French and Dutch, they did not come for trade or wealth. Unlike the Spanish, they did not come to conquer the native populations. Instead, they were coming to find new homes and coexist with the natives. However, after a few years, this quickly turned into violence as settlers began encroaching on native lands and taking them. But instead of conquering them, the English expelled the natives from their lands. In areas where the English settled, many of the emigrants were single young males coming as indentured servants. Indentured servants were people who agreed to serve a master for a certain number of years as a worker in exchange for free passage across the Atlantic.
Jamestown
Now let’s talk about the first British colony in the Americas: Jamestown
This colony was established by the British in 1607. Unlike the Spanish colonies that were funded by the crown, this colony was funded by a joint-stock company. A joint-stock company was a private company in which investors pooled their money together and shared both the profits and the losses of the investment. This meant investors were protected from bankruptcy because if the company failed, they would all share the losses and no one would lose everything.
Because Jamestown was funded by a joint stock company for profit, its purpose was also to make a profit. So at first, most of what the colony did was dig for gold and silver and construct a fort to protect the gold and silver. Many of the colonists were selfish and only cared about making money. This led to famine and disease killing roughly half of the colonists within the first two years. It got to the point where many began to resort to cannibalism. But then in 1612, a man named John Rolfe learned about tobacco planting and because tobacco was valuable, this saved the colony from starvation because they now had a way to make money.
Later on, Jamestown established that any colonists who covered their own transportation to America would be given a headright (50 acre lot) and the more indentured servants they brought with them, the more headrights they could get, leading to a record number of people coming to Jamestown. After that, most of the labor in the colony began to be done by indentured servants. But as more people arrived and as demand for tobacco increased, farmers needed more land to plant it and that meant they needed to encroach on native land. This led to increased tension between the two groups and later, the natives retaliated and began raiding the farmers’ settlements in the 1670s. In 1676, when the colonists called on their governor, William Berkeley, to help them, he refused to drive the Native Americans out of their Virginia colony, and this led to Bacon’s Rebellion.
Bacon’s Rebellion
Many farmers were resentful of violence from the natives and being raided by them, one of which being Nathaniel Bacon. After William Berkeley decided that driving out the natives wasn’t important, Bacon led his fellow farmers and indentured servants in an attack on the natives and after they were done with that, they turned to Berkeley’s plantations and began attacking them. While the rebellion was quickly stopped, the elite planters and plantation owners realized the danger of having indentured servants working in their fields by the hundreds and thousands, and began to fear that more uprisings would occur. So they looked for an alternative and replaced the indentured servants with enslaved people from Africa that were less likely to rebel.
