Colonial America
Introduction:
A colony is a place that's settled by a group of people outside their home country and it's ruled by or belongs to that home country.
The rebellion of the colonies that the United Kingdom possessed in North America constituted the first revolution of a liberal and bourgeois political character.
Precedent
Besides being the precedent of revolutions as important as the French Revolution of 1789.
Importance
Its importance lies in the fact that, for the first time, a liberal political organization was put into practice, based on the Enlightenment.
What are the American colonies?
The American colonies were the 13 British colonies that were established during the 17th and 18th centuries in what is now a part of the eastern United States.
The colonies grew both geographically along the Atlantic coast and westward and numerically to 13 from the time of their founding to the American Revolution.
It occurred between 1775 and 1783, ending with the British defeat at the Battle of Yorktown and the signing of the Treaty of Paris.
How it all started?
16th Century
It all started in the 16th, when mercantilism and extremely competitive economic philosophy was booming.
Because of that, European nations wanted to acquire all the territory they could, so the English colonies in North America were business ventures. Money was their primary purpose.
The First Colony
The first English settlement in North America was established in 1587, The Roanoke Colony.
The Roanoke colony
Nearly 20 years before the Tobacco colonies, a group of colonists led bi Sir Walter Raleigh settled on Roanoke Island. The group was formed by:
91 men
17 women
9 children
But, mysteriously, around 1590, the Roanoke colony disappeared completely. Currently, historians don't know what happened to the inhabitants.
The Tobacco Colonies
In 1606, King James I divided the Atlantic seaboard in two, giving:
The northern half to the Plymouth Company.
The southern half to the London Company.
Until 1616, people could barely feed themselves because they were busy searching for resources.
But luckily, people learned how to grow tobacco and they survived.
Jamestown
Few months after James I issued its charter, the London Company sent 144 men to Virginia on three ships:
The Godspeed
The Discovery
The Susan Constant
They reached Chesapeake Bay in 1607 and they built a settlement that they called Jamestown.
These colonies all had some things in common but they can be divided into three groups. Each group had its own way of life.
The first English emigrants to what would become the New England colonies were the Pilgrims, a group of Puritan separatists who came to Plymouth in 1620 to found the colony.
Ten years later, the Massachusetts Bay Company sent a large group of Puritans to create another settlement.
In 1664, King Charles II gave the territory between New England and Virginia to James, the Duke of York. Later it will be called New York.
In 1680, the king granted 45,000 square miles of land west of the Delaware River to William Penn.
Carolina colony, was much less cosmopolitan. In its northern half, farmers eked out a living. In its southern half, planters presided over vast estates that produced corn, lumber, beef, pork...
These Carolinians had close ties to the English planter colony of Barbados, which relied heavily on African slave labor. Slavery played an important role in the development of the Carolina colony.
In 1732, James Oglethorpe established the Georgia colony.
The Revolutionary War
The Revolutionary War was an insurrection by American Patriots in the 13 colonies to British rule, which resulted in American independence.
The Begginning
The Revolutionary War began with the growing tension between the residents of the 13 North American colonies and the colonial government. Troubles between British troops and colonial militiamen at Lexington and Concord in April 1775 sparked armed conflict.
By the following year the rebels were fighting for their independence.
France
France entered the American Revolution in 1778, siding with the colonists, turning what was a civil war into an international conflict.
After France helped the Continental Army force the British to surrender in 1781, the Americans effectively achieved their independence.
The Causes
In the year 1700, there would be around 250 thousand slaves, both African and European settlers in the colonies.
By 1775 it was estimated that there were 2.5 million.
The colonists didn't have many similarities, but they were able to unite and fight for their independence.
The Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence, dated July 4, 1776, listed the reasons why the Founding Fathers were forced to break with the rule of King George III to start a new nation.
In September, the Continental Congress declared the "United States of America."
The Treaty of Paris
The Treaty of Paris of 1783 formally ended the American Revolutionary War.
American statesmen
Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and John Jay negotiated the peace treaty with representatives of King George III of Great Britain.
United States recognition
British Crown formally recognized American independence and ceded most of its territory east of the Mississippi River to the United States.
Imilce Molina García