Time Period #2 [1607-1754]

Europeans and American Indians maneuvered and fought for dominance, control, and security in North America, and distinctive colonial and native societies emerged.

Unlike the Spanish and French, the English learned after 1607 that by establishing agricultural settlements as well as commercial outposts, they could generate greater profits. They gave up almost entirely on converting the native peoples to Christianity. They focused on moving the native peoples off the land they coveted and encouraging immigration from the mother country to populate the land and expand production of staple crops, ships and naval stores. The English colonists’ desire for land was only the most important source of repeated conflict. European conceptions of private property and gender roles, especially whether males or females should be responsible for agricultural labor, were also significant sources of intercultural conflict with American Indians. Spanish colonizing efforts in North America, particularly after the Pueblo Revolt, saw an accommodation with some aspects of American Indian culture; by contrast, conflict with American Indians tended to reinforce English colonists’ worldviews on land and gender roles.

By the end of the 17^th century the English colonies of North America had begun to evolve into two distinct types of societies: a communal society of small freeholders in New England, settled primarily by Puritans seeking religious freedom and economic betterment, and a plantation society from the Chesapeake southward, based on commercial agriculture and in the midst of a transition from a labor force of white indentured servants to one of African slaves. By the mid-18^th century the demographically, religiously, and ethnically diverse middle colonies supported a flourishing export economy based on cereal crops, while the Chesapeake colonies and North Carolina continued to rely on the cultivation of tobacco. The colonies along the southernmost Atlantic coast and the British islands in the West Indies (where sugar predominated) took advantage of long growing seasons by using slave labor to develop economies based on staple crops (rice and indigo in South Carolina); in some cases, enslaved Africans constituted the majority of the population.

Unlike Spanish, French, and Dutch colonies, which accepted intermarriage and cross-racial sexual unions with native peoples (and, in Spain’s case, with enslaved Africans), the English colonies attracted both males and females who rarely intermarried with either native peoples or Africans, leading to the development of a rigid racial hierarchy. The presence of slavery and the impact of colonial wars stimulated the growth of ideas on race in this Atlantic system, leading to the emergence of racial stereotyping and the development of strict racial categories among British colonists, which contrasted with Spanish and French acceptance of racial gradations. Reinforced by a strong belief in British racial and cultural superiority, the British system enslaved black people in perpetuity, altered African gender and kinship relationships in the colonies, and was one factor that led the British colonists into violent confrontations with native peoples. Nevertheless, Africans developed both overt and covert means to resist the dehumanizing aspects of slavery.

From the turn of the eighteenth century to the 1750s, the English Colonies of North America expanded geographically, developed economically and became more ethnically diverse while their inhabitants grew accustomed to economic and political autonomy. Britain’s desire to maintain a viable North American empire in the face of growing internal challenges and external competition inspired efforts to strengthen its imperial control, stimulating increasing resistance from colonists who had grown accustomed to a large measure of autonomy. At the same time, regional distinctiveness among the British colonies diminished over time, and they developed largely similar patterns of culture, laws, institutions, and governance within the context of the British imperial system. As for the structure of colonial society itself, it remained hierarchical, characterized by a clearly defined social order and dominated by a native-born elite of merchants and planters rather than a hereditary aristocracy.