Period 2 (1607-1754)

• Financing British colonization

  Joint stock companies - private business entities where investors pooled money and collected profits
• Jamestown colony


  • Purely a profit-seeking venture, colonists divided time between searching for gold/silver and building military force, high mortality rates in early years, saved by discovery of tobacco cultivation
• Increasing demand for tobacco land


  Led to encroachment on native lands and violence, Bacon's Rebellion as a result
• New England colonies


  • Established by Pilgrims to create a religious society, not a profit-seeking enterprise, also faced high mortality rates initially
• Cheseapeake colonies (Virginia, Maryland)

  
  

  • Grew cash crops like tobacco and sugarcane, increasing demand for African slave labor
• Middle colonies EX Pennsylvania


  
  

  • founded on religious freedom and negotiated land purchases from natives
  • Quakers and William Penn
  • "Holy Experiment" - religious refuge for Quakers and others persecuted for Puritan society
  • most tolerant of religious freedoms
  • treated Native Americans freely
• Colonial leadership established self-governing structures like the Mayflower Compact and House of Burgesses, dominated by elite classes
• Mayflower Compact


  • Pilgrims signed this before they disembarked from their ship the Mayflower, which organized their government on the model of a self-governing church congregation
• House of Burgesses in Virginia

  • A representative assembly which could levy taxes and pass laws
• Triangular trade

  A three-part journey of merchant ships: from New England carrying rum to West Africa to trade for enslaved people, then the Middle Passage to the West Indies to trade the slaves for sugar cane, then back to New England to sell the sugar cane
• Mercantilism


  An economic system where the goal was to gain as much wealth (measured by gold and silver) as possible, for your mother country. This violated natural rights of colonists
• Navigation Acts


  • Set of laws requiring merchants to engage in trade with English colonies and English-owned ships, and certain valuable trade items to pass exclusively through British ports where they could be taxed
• Between 1700 and 1808, about 3 million enslaved Africans were carried on British ships across the Middle Passage, the majority sold into the hands of planters in the British West Indies
• Every British colony participated in the slave trade mainly because of the extraordinary wealth they gained by coerced labor in the export economies dedicated to tobacco, sugar cane, and indigo
• Chattel Slavery was turned into a perpetual institution that was handed down from one generation to the next in order to keep a controlled and growing labor force
• Strategies of covert resistance by enslaved blacks


  • Secretly maintaining cultural customs and belief systems from their homeland, breaking tools, ruining stored seeds, faking illness
• Strategies of overt resistance by enslaved blacks

  • The Stono Rebellion in South Carolina in 1739, where a small group of slaves stole weapons, killed owners, and marched along the Stono River burning plantations and killing white people
• Relations between the British colonists and American Indians were not good, as seen in events like Metacom's War (King Philip's War) in 1675
• Enlightenment


  A movement in Europe that emphasized rational thinking over tradition and religious revelation, which took root in the colonies through a robust transatlantic print culture
• Great Awakening


  A massive religious revival that swept through the colonies, generating intense Christian enthusiasm and laying the groundwork for a growing American identity and rejection of British rule
• The practice of impressment, where the British seized colonial men and forced them to serve in the Royal Navy, led to growing mistrust and resistance from the colonies
• Mass Bay Colony

  
  

  • Puritans
  • John Winthrop and the "City Upon the Hill"
  • covenant with god- obligation to live righteous Puritan existence
  • Be banished if you did not comply to Puritain rules EX Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams
• Spanish Conflict with Natives

  • Native resistance to Spanish colonization efforts in North America after Pueblo War
  • led to Spanish accomodation of some aspects of Native culture in the Southwest
• New Lights v Old Lights

  • New lights - challenged spiritual authority
  • Old lights - challenged political authority
• Zenger Case


  • newspaper authors would be jailed for speaking out
  • verdict helped lead to freedom of speech and writing
• Agricultural conditions

  • New England - rocky soil, long winters, limited farming, focus on industry
  • Middle - famers from Europe, indentured servants
  • Cheseapeake - farming of tobacco, indigo, rice, shortage of indentured servants led to neccesity of slaves