The Old and New Worlds Meet
The beginnings of British North America
Spain and Portugal
● Columbus reached Hispaniola believing he landed in East Indies
● Aggressive Spanish and Portuguese colonialism
● Search for gold and silver → The golden city of ‘El Dorado’
● Catholic missionaries → claiming the new world under catholicism
● By the end of C16 Spanish and portuguese had stable colonies with gold and
sugar
British North America
● England rose as a naval power under Elizabeth I
● Links between the events of the Old World and New World
- English rural people displaced from their land due to it being closed off
for private use, instead they were hired as labourers
- Over half lost their land 1530-1630
- Growing unemployment
+ Send them to the new world to remove the threat of uprisal to give the
unemployed jobs
+ New market for trade
Ulster Plantation (1558)
★ An attempt at Irish settlement and agricultural exploitation (failed)
★ Outlined the colonisation of the Americas
★ In the New World, the English would treat Native Americans in much the
same way as they had treated the Irish where they “learned to consider
resisting peoples as dirty, lazy, treacherous, murderous, and pagan savages.”
Roanoke
Walter Raleigh, Richard Grenville, Humphry Gilbert
First Settled in 1585, another party came in 1587. The colony was abandoned and all
of its inhabitants missing in 1590.
Virginia (Chesapeake)
● Location of the first British colony of Roanoke (failed)
● Main + first colony was Jamestown
- Established in 1607
- Would be part of the Colony of Virginia
- Transported around 10,000 people but only 20% of colonists alive in
1622
● A colonial venture backed by a group of London merchants who had Queen
Elizabeth’s blessing
● In 1624 Virginia was taken over as a Crown colony
, ● 1616 → Tobacco plantations are founded creating explosive growth in
population, territory, and wealth with tobacco cultivation became the engine
of the area’s colonial transformation
● Private ownership of land and local self-government
● Single white men white in indentured servitude (a pronounced gender
imbalance)
● This would change over time as the colony grew (slaves inc brought in and
more women to help the colony reproduce)
● Near constant tension and fighting with local indigenous peoples
● That expansion escalated to a crisis of confrontation between the English
colonists and the Algonquian Indians
● Unlike the Spanish + French, the English did not send missionaries to convert
the Indians of Virginia. Instead they aimed to Christianize the Indians by first
‘absorbing' them as economic subordinates + then through regular church
service
Pocahontas
1630 settlers had kidnaped her from her family and converted to protestantism, a
“civilised savage”,
The “headright” system of indentured servitude
★ Extension of existing English practice of indentured
servitude which was a form of master/apprentice
relationship usually lasting for contracts of one year
★ The Virginia Company introduced longer contracts,
namely of 6 or 7 years. Under this system of indentured
servitude, planters would recruit multiple servants in
England, pay their passage to the New World, secure the additional headright
land, house and feed the servant labourer, and after six or seven years, free the
servant with a land grant of his own.
★ Overtime this becomes a problem as at some point the servants will leave
★ Authorities sought to improve the status of white servants, hoping to
counteract the widespread impression in England that Virginia was a death
trap
★ In 1667, the Virginia House of Burgesses decreed that religious conversion did
not release a slave from bondage (Foner)
Massachusetts (New England)
● William Bradford and company arrived at Plymouth on the Mayflower and
founded Plymouth Colony in December 1620
● John Winthrop and company arrive in 1630 and found the Massachusetts Bay
Colony
● Migrating in order to escape persecution and set an example of religious
observance for the world to follow
, ● Attracted family group settlers leaving for religious freedom (Pilgrims),
usually middle class ‘middling’ (in comparison to the poor young men of
Virginia)
● More equal gender balance
● Children sustained the colony, a woman was pregnant every years
● Migrating in family groups helped Puritan colonies develop at a fast pace
when compared with early Virginia where the vast majority of colonists were
poor young men
● Highly literate + already established
● established institutions of education immediately (for boys and girls) as well
as the first higher education institutions
● Purity + discipline → puritans against swearing, gambling, drunkenness, God
would select who to save for good behaviour
● Catholics and Angelicans were banned
● English ways + English names remained the norm
● To be a City on the hill → the perfect society, blessed by God
● New England colonists also benefited from the cooler climate, similar to
european temperatures, with good soil better for farming,
● Relative lack of tropical diseases in comparison to Chesapeake, VA
● Free colony
● The New England Colonies depended on British West Indies slavery
● Tobacco, Sugar + (later on) Cotton are important crops
An Atlantic History approach to early and colonial American history
“Atlantic” History
1) The dominant approach today which frames the history of British North
America within post-1492 developments, not just from 1607
2) Considers the transformation of the relationship between Europeans and
the Atlantic Ocean as fundamental
3) Is concerned with the development of a vast and elaborate network of
exchange between the Old and New Worlds
The network of exchange between old and new worlds
★ Between Native peoples and settlers (pathogenic, food stuffs, flora and fauna)
- Trade of fur and animal hide (particularly French and British)
- Upsurge in immigration and population
★ Extraction of mineral wealth (gold, silver) and the production of agricultural
commodities
- Foodstuffs (both ways) rice, potato, sugar
★ Need for labour force to maximise production and profit
- Demands for labour creates racial slavery
★ Old World Power’s expansionism all part of ongoing imperial rivalries
between the big European nation states
