How were The Americas Colonized? – The Entire History

Why did the Europeans colonize the Americas? What drove Europe’s powers to cross a vast ocean, carve out new territories, and compete until nearly the entire continent was claimed? Why did each empire focus on certain regions? And how did so few take so much so fast? To understand the entire story of the colonization of the Americas from the first Spanish ship landing in the Caribbeans to the late 18th century, we have to go back to the very beginning. In the late 15th century, an ambitious sailor approached the king of Portugal with an impassioned offer to find new lands and riches to the west. His proposal was dismissed as being far too fanciful and way too costly. Undeterred, this determined sailor, a man by the name of Christopher Columbus, tried his luck with Spain. It was 1492, and his timing couldn’t have been better. The Spanish had just seen off the last of the daunting occupying Muslim forces and were now keen to expand in their own name. There was money in the coffers, and Spain liked Columbus’ confidence. Columbus set sail across the Atlantic in August 1492. Just 2 months later, he landed in the Bahamas, making the first significant European contact with the Americas. The world was about to change forever. Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the Americas signaled the start of the European colonization of the American lands. It gave birth to new nations and made some European powers incredibly rich. It also took a devastating toll on the native populations from which they never recovered. All of this from what was intended to be a search for another passage to the Far East or the Indies as the East was simply known. What led to this huge push for European expansion? And how were the first 100 years in the Americas? To begin, it helps to understand why the European powers were compelled to seek routes to the west. For centuries, Europe had been dependent on the Silk Road for trade with the East. The Silk Road enabled trade between European countries, India, and China. Everything from tea, silk, spices, cotton, ivory, and precious metals were traded until the Ottoman Empire put a stop to it all. When the Ottomans claimed Constantinople in 1453, today’s Istanbul, it meant they effectively controlled the western end of the Silk Road. This meant big tax hikes on anything that was traded along the famous route, and this more or less forced Europe to look for alternate routes to the east. At the time, the Portuguese were world leaders in sea navigation and favored sending ships around Africa into the Indian Ocean. This was their plan until a fellow named Christopher Columbus walked onto a beach in the Bahamas archipelago. Suddenly, there was another option. In 1493, Columbus made his second voyage to the Americas, but this time it was far more purposeful. On his first voyage, Columbus had set out with just three ships. The second time around comprised a fleet of 17 ships, which included colonists, priests, and soldiers. They even took a pack of fearsome looking mastiff dogs to further intimidate the natives. Not that Columbus was particularly concerned about any native resistance. However, in a revealing extract from his 1492 diary, Columbus wrote that the Caribbean people should be good servants and would easily be made into Christians. He also noted that the natives seemed to be unarmed or were at least unfamiliar with iron weapons such as swords. This was immensely encouraging to the powers back in Spain and Columbus was sent again in 1493 to set up a colony. History was made when Sto Domingo became the first official European settlement in the Americas. The colony was established on the Caribbean island of Hispanola, which is today split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. When word filtered back to Europe that there was a mass of land to the west, the Portuguese wanted in on the action. Spain, of course, was only too aware of Portugal’s naval strength and realized the Portuguese could prove a real obstacle to further expansion in the new world. And so, in 1494, Pope Alexander V 6th stepped in to avoid future conflicts. A demarcation line was drawn up in the Atlantic Ocean running north to south. Anything lying to the west of the line was to be Spain’s and any territory to the east were fair game for Portugal. Both countries agreed and signed the treaty of Torisilas. The demarcation line was situated roughly in the middle of the Atlantic, about 2,000 km west of the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of West Africa. The general idea was that the new lands discovered by Columbus would go to Spain, while Portugal was free to conquer Africa and southern Asia. There was just a small exception to what was pretty much all Spanish territory. A sizable chunk of land in South America was jutting out into Portugal’s side of the demarcation line. In 1500, this was unknown to the Portuguese. [Music] In 1498, Vasco Dama had successfully rounded Africa to reach India, becoming the first European to reach India by sea. Portugal was excited because access to India via the Mediterranean was blocked by Italian and Ottoman fleets. A second voyage was organized, this time with Pedro Alvarez Cabral in charge. Cabral commanded 13 ships which held over 1,000 men and supplies. Like Dama, he sailed down the African West Coast and then headed out into the western Atlantic to ride on the back of the trade winds. Unlike Dama, though, Cabral continued heading west. And in April 1500, he landed on the northeastern shores of Brazil at Bajia. Realizing that this new land lay on Portugal’s side of the demarcation line, Cabral claimed it on behalf of the crown. Although many historians have speculated that other Europeans had most likely been there before Cabral, he is generally acknowledged to be the one who officially discovered Brazil. Cabral looked around Bajia and guessed that it was in fact part of a continent. He sent a ship back to Lisbon immediately to spread the good news. The Portuguese were eager to get their hands on any precious metals that might have been in Brazil. specifically gold and silver. When it became clear that the local timber was the only real resource of any value, the Portuguese lost interest in Brazil for the next few decades. The local trees called Brazilwood were found to be useful because of the red dye that could be extracted. This was used to make textiles and clothes back in Europe. And the Portuguese had the natives clear the forests for them. They traded items such as mirrors, scissors, knives, and axes with the natives to seal the deal. Almost from the start, the Portuguese relationship with the indigenous people was markedly different from that between the Spanish and the natives in Mexico and Central America. While the Spanish colonization was based more on out-and-out conquest, there was no evidence of natural riches in Brazil. Instead of settling the new territory, Portugal initially decided to keep it as a trading base between Europe and India. Eventually though, it was decided that the best way to manage Brazil was by forming a colony. And in 1532, the first Portuguese settlement was established in Sao Vicente on the mid coast near today’s Sao Paulo. The new land was divided up into 15 captaincies which were areas of land granted to people for agriculture. The captaincy owners were nobles, merchants or ex-sailors. And it was soon evident that sugar was the go-to crop to grow. Things began to move slowly but in the right direction. And in 1549, Brazil was declared an official crown colony. The port colony Salvador Debahajia became the capital complete with a cathedral, hospital, prison, and a customs house. In the meantime, Spain had launched into a period of rapid colonization in Central and South America. Following on from settling in Hispanola, the Spanish then colonized Puerto Rico in 1508, Jamaica in 1509, and then Cuba in 1511. In 1513, Vasco de Balboa became the first European to officially set sight on the Pacific Ocean when he crossed the ismas of Panama and declared the Pacific as a Spanish territory. And then in 1519, things really took off for Spain. Hernand Cortez was an explorer stationed in Cuba and eager to discover new lands and treasures for the crown. Like others, he’d heard the rumors of the gold and silver that was waiting to be discovered over on the mainland, Mexico. He set off on an unauthorized expedition for what was then Meso America, landing on the shores of Yucatan in February 1519. The first indigenous people Cortez interacted with were from the Mayan tribes. But he soon realized that in order to gain full control of Mexico, he had to overpower these mighty Aztecs. The Aztecs were the most advanced civilization in the region at the time and were based out of their capital, Tenno Titlan, which would later become Mexico City. However, the Spanish liked their chances. They had superior firepower with steel swords and guns, plus well-organized armies with horses and dogs. The Spanish also had arguably the European’s deadliest weapon against native forces, diseases. Smallox, in particular, was a mass killer. None of the native tribes in the Americas had been exposed to the disease and had zero immunity. It didn’t take long for smallpox to exact a crushing toll on the Aztecs and aided by their superior weapons, the Spanish took control of Tennos Titlan in 1521. The Aztecs hadn’t gone down without a fight, however, and had battled fiercely to the end. But they were simply too decimated and ultimately overwhelmed by sickness and Spain’s artillery. It was estimated that the Aztecs lost over 240,000 soldiers during the fighting with more than half that number falling to disease. Most of Mexico would fall over the next few years and the Spanish then set their sights further south to the Inca controlled regions of Peru. This was no easy feat. In 1528, the Inca Empire was at the height of its powers. Its territory covered a gigantic 1,800,000 square kilometers. In 1532, Francisco Pizarro led Spanish forces into Peru, where they clashed with the Inca army in a fight to control Peru and its surrounding territories. Despite being vastly outnumbered, Pizarro and his troops took full advantage of their superior firepower had massacred thousands of Incas who had no reply to the guns and swords of the European invaders. The Spanish were further aided by the aftermath of a civil war that had erupted amongst the Inca leaders, leaving the Incan armies disorganized and unprepared for the onslaught. Emperor Atawalpa was defeated and Spain had captured not just Peru but all of the Incan territories surrounding it. This included almost all of South America with the exception of the Portuguesecontrolled Brazil and Venezuela. Spain had been in Argentina in 1516 but was underwhelmed by the lack of resources and didn’t officially settle there until 1580. In 1537, Spanish troops marched into Colombia and took over Chile. In 1841, Spain additionally began making inroads into North America. In 1559, Tristan Duna E. Arilano established a settlement in today’s Pensacola in Florida. Then in 1565, the Spanish set up a colony in St. Augustine, Florida, not far from modern-day Jacksonville. Throughout the 16th century, the Spanish gradually moved into areas of what would become the southern United States. This included Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, California, and Arizona, meaning that Spain had secured huge expanses of land across two continents. None of this activity had escaped the attention of Britain and France. The two European superpowers also knew about Spain and Portugal’s Treaty of Tortoisilius and decided to completely disregard it. After all, neither nation answered to the Pope and both firmly believed that they had every right to acquire what they could in the new world. France was the first to set up a serious quest. In 1534, Francis I sent Jacques Cartier across the Atlantic on the first of his three voyages to North America. Cartier explored the coast of New Foundland and traveled along the St. Lawrence River. In July of 1534, France became the third European country to officially land in the Americas. Cartier landed on the shores of the Gas Peninsula in Quebec and placed a cross in the sand, claiming the land for the French crown. It was to be a short-lived attempt to build New France. Cartier also tried to establish a colony in what would become Quebec City in 1541, but the project failed due to hostilities from native tribes and atrocious weather. The French then attempted to start colonies further down the North American coast at Paris Island in South Carolina in 1562 and then in present-day Jacksonville, Florida in 1564. These efforts were thwarted by Spanish attacks who had grown increasingly paranoid about the impending French colonization of North America. France made a half-hearted attempt to start a colony of convicts on Sable Island off Nova Scotia in 1598, but nothing materialized. The early attempts by the French were poorly financed and didn’t receive anywhere near the amount of support needed to successfully establish colonies. That added to constant fighting with the local tribes and harsh weather meant France had little to show for its efforts by the end of the 16th century. Big changes were taking place in England, contrarily, and it too was about to throw its hat into the ring. England already had a strong and established navy and was looking to build some serious wealth. When Queen Elizabeth took the throne in 1558, she was ready for action. Elizabeth not only gave the green light for British ships to attack and loot any Spanish ships traveling back from the Americas with booty, but she also sponsored voyages to the Caribbean. When these ventures failed because of strong reprisals from the Spanish, Elizabeth and Britain then focused their sights on the North American coast. The adventurous swashbuckler Walter Raleigh was given a charter to explore North America in 1584. The motives for giving Raleigh the go-ahad were both economical and ideological. Elizabeth realized the enormous potential that lay in colonizing parts of North America and was also keen to counter Spanish Catholicism in the region. In 1585, Raleigh set up an expedition to settle at Rowanoke Island off North Carolina. The Rowanoke colony struggled from the outset, and when a supply ship returned from England after 2 years, the settlement had been abandoned. The mystery of Rowanoke still puzzles historians today. Some believe the colonists joined the local natives. Others believe the settlers simply perished. However, Britain was far from discouraged and began making plans for another expedition to the American East Coast. Throughout the early years of European colonization, the interaction with native populations varied widely. Some settlers were able to establish relatively friendly relationships while other situations were heated from the start. On the whole, the Europeans assumed themselves to be the superior race, and their role was to civilize and educate the natives. The Spanish were quick to enslave the local population when they settled in Hispanola in the Caribbean. They continued this practice when they ventured into Mexico. Natives captured in battle were soon put to work and when disease began to take its toll on the local populations. The Spanish looked to West Africa. The British had a similar viewpoint. They were there to colonize and take what they needed. If the natives didn’t like it, that was their problem. This led to regular outbreaks of violence in the early days of colonization. While the French later demonstrated the benefits of befriending local populations, the British, Spanish, and Portuguese were primarily concerned with conquest. This meant the exchanges between the colonizers and the natives were often brutal. The colonists had the technological advantage in terms of weapons, and the natives had an edge in using the environment that they knew so well. Religion also played another major role in South and North America. The natives were expected to conform to Christianity and missionaries were deployed to convert the indigenous people. It didn’t occur to many Europeans that the native people may have had existing cultures and religious beliefs of their own. Some of the Spanish missionaries were able to spend more time with the natives than others and came to sympathize with them and understand their cause. Pope Paul III read the letters of the missionaries and warned colonists that the native people were not beasts to be killed or enslaved, but human beings with souls capable of salvation. This was quite an enlightened outlook for the time. And although it conceded that Christianity was the only true way forward, the Pope indicated that colonists should at least be mindful of the plight of the natives. Still, the physical shock alone must have been tremendous. Neither side had seen anything quite like the other, and the first contacts evoked a mass array of emotions, ranging from mild curiosity to derision and fear. Some settlers realized that befriending natives would work in their favor. The locals knew the land better than them and they could learn how to farm it and hunt on it. When the British initially settled at Rowanoke in 1585, they struck up a relationship with the local Algangquin people. The Algangquin showed them how to crop the land and where to find food. So good was this relationship that many believe the struggling settlers may have simply opted to live with the Alangquins. All of this aside, no matter what industry their colonies were based on, all the European powers needed labor. And when the job proved to be too much for the settlers and disease wiped out the enslaved natives, the colonists began bringing slaves over from West Africa. And so after the first 100 years of American colonization, Spain was the clear winner in terms of territories and riches gained. The Spanish had established colonies from Buenos Aries all the way up to Florida and Texas. However, France was about to have a massive influence and England had only gotten started. In North America, at least, massive changes were on the near horizon. At the close of the 16th century, the European colonization of the Americas was well and truly underway. Spain had emerged as the region’s superpower, conquering almost all of South America and making snaking inroads into the promising North America. The Treaty of Tortois of 1494 declares that all territories to the west of the demarcation line belongs to Spain. In theory anyway, England, France, and the Netherlands had simply laughed this off and went ahead with their plans, shaking their heads at Spain and Portugal’s naive arrogance. In 1592, the American colonies looked something like this. Portugal had colonized Brazil with settlements scattered up and down the eastern coast. The capital was Salvador in the northeastern region of Bajia where Portugal’s Pedro Cabral had first claimed Brazil in 1500. Spain had the most to show for its efforts with territories throughout the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, and the bulk of South America. For Spain, it was all about the gold and silver. The mines in the new world were producing more wealth for Spain than anything the Portuguese had ever been able to extract from Africa. In 1585, the British had attempted an early colony at Rowanoke in North Carolina, but the venture was a disaster. However, Britain was just getting started, and plans were being laid to return to North America wiser and more determined. France had also delved into Canada and up and down the east coast. Although no official settlements had been established, it seemed only a matter of time before a full fleet of colonists would be dispatched. Similarly, the Dutch were primes to send their own opportunities to exploit trade and settlement opportunities in the new world. From the turn of the century, the action really heated up. Things had started badly for the British with the abandoned colony at Rowanoke. But far from discouraged, Britain simply decided to colonize further up the American coast in Virginia. First, the British decided they needed to improve the financing of their missions. This led to the creation of joint stock companies. These stock companies functioned much like major corporations of today where investors bought shares in a trading company and received a portion of the profits. The stock companies were able to drum up much more money than the English monarchy could. And in6006, the Virginia Company sent a fleet of colonists and soldiers to the east coast. Virginia was named after Queen Elizabeth, who was known as the Virgin Queen because she never married. In6007, the first British settlement was established in America in James Town on the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia, named after King James I. Further up the eastern coast, France struggled to establish lasting colonies as harsh conditions and rival powers doomed several early efforts. In6008, Samuel de Chaplain founded the first lasting settlement at Quebec, which was mainly set up to act as a fur trading post. From here, fur traders began setting up operations along the St. Lawrence River and forming relations with the local people such as the Algangquin and Abnaki tribes. The region along the St. Lawrence River came to be known as New France or Canada. The latter coming from the native Irakcoyan word canata meaning village or settlement. Trade for furs really took off and the French were dependent on the native smooth skills with skinning animal hides. Trading relations were gradually formed albeit with occasional disputes. Not to be left out, in6009 Dutch merchants hired the English captain Henry Hudson to make the trek across the Atlantic. The Dutch originally wanted Hudson to navigate a way through the Northwest Passage, hoping to find a route connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific. Hudson found his way to the Hudson River and claimed the bay at the mouth of the river for the Netherlands. The Dutch plan was to make this colony a trading center instead of the agricultural model favored by the British. The Dutch West India Company was set up in 1621 with the main focus being on the lucrative fur trade. In 1624, Dutch settlers came over and founded New Amsterdam there on the tip of today’s Manhattan Island. The city became a thriving trade port with the Native Americans only too happy to trade fur in return for firearms, wool blankets, and metal tools. Life was tough from the get-go for the colonists. Many were from privileged families back home or were artisans and craftsmen. Few of them were used to the hard physical labor that was required to get the colony up and running. Added to this was unforgiving weather, ongoing battles with native tribes, and periods of starvation, which eventually drove some to cannibalism. Many of the James Town settlers had come to America expecting to get rich by discovering gold. When it didn’t come, many gave up. Many more simply perished. And by 1610, there was only a hundred or so left. James Town was ultimately saved by the efforts and vision of Captain John Smith and the explorer John Rolf. Smith rallied the colonists through the hard times and saw the wisdom in building relationships with the local Senakamokco tribe. The natives taught the colonists how to farm the land and where to hunt. Smith famously told the settlers that he who does not work shall not eat and convinced the Jamestown people to hang on. Their fortunes changed in 1610 when John Rolf introduced the tobacco plant from South America. Now Virginia had a crop that would bring in repeat revenue and land started being cleared for tobacco plantations. Cultivation of resources like tobacco was vital since Britain, France, and the Dutch operated in a system of mercantalism. Mercantalism held that the world’s wealth was finite and a nation only became rich at the expense of others. Therefore, imports needed to be minimized and exports maximized to achieve a positive balance of trade. Colonies allowed the colonized to produce resources without the need to import them from rival powers while selling the rest to boost their exports, creating a positive trade balance. The British and French crowns worked closely with merchants to regulate trade to achieve this goal and generally forbade their colonies from trading with rival mercantilist powers. English settlement was also taking place further up the east coast. In 1620, Puritans arrived on the Mayflower ship and settled at Plymouth in what would become Massachusetts. The Puritans were like many of the other early European settlers, driven to the Americas by religious persecution or being dissatisfied with the religious order back home. Other settlers were displaced farmers, former servants, or retired soldiers. Many were promised their own plots of land after completing an agreed upon contract of labor. Just as in Virginia, the early Puritans also struggled with famine and the environment, but were aided in the early days by native tribes. The relationship soon soured, though, when the local tribes realized the colonists were there to stay and intent on taking their land. The Europeans had originally planned to work with the natives. Many of the surviving colonists learned to live with the natives, or at least to coexist. Native tribes taught settlers how to farm the land, what crops to grow, and where to hunt. In turn, the colonists provided plenty of useful and desirable goods. Metal tools, fabrics, weapons, cooking utensils, and mirrors were readily traded, as were jewelry and alcohol. Animal skin clothes were replaced by cotton shirts and garments. Metal pots and pans proved to be better than clay utensils. and the European flint and steel made starting fires far easier. Of course, none of this could have taken place without at least some form of basic communication. Natives or settlers who immerse themselves in the other society proved to be highly valuable liaison who could speak several languages. Some natives were captured and forced to become bilingual guides while people from both sides often chose to live in the other cultures society. Relations between the settlers and natives became somewhat easier in some parts with increasing numbers of marriages. These marriages helped develop understanding between vastly different cultures and had the benefit of producing bilingual children. However, many indigenous people resisted and would have rather died than work or yield to the European invaders. Even some of those who tried to cooperate with the Europeans soon turned against them. For example, the Senakamoko initially accepted trade with the Jamestown settlers, but English ambitions and episodes of violence against native peoples led to open conflict in 1610. Only the marriage of John Rolf with a captured native woman named Pocahontas reconciled the two peoples for a short while. However, after the death of the reigning chief Pohatan in 1618, relations collapsed again. In 1622, the Senakamokco launched a brutal attack on the Virginia colony that killed over 300 settlers. This provoked retaliatory violence from the settlers and another 20 years of violence that resulted in the English seizing vast amounts of land from the outgunned Senakamokco. Similarly, the Dutch and New Amsterdam suffered a breakdown in relations with native peoples. They had claimed the Dutch introduced the natives to global trade and the Christian faith. Not surprisingly, this meant nothing to the natives, who refused to pay extra payments demanded by the Dutch. Violent battles erupted in 1655, and the Dutch had their African slaves build a protective wall around New Amsterdam in the city’s northeast. The street that ran along this wall is now the most famous in New York City, Wall Street. Meanwhile, in South America, the 17th century also saw Portugal deciding to spend more money on developing its Brazilian colonies. King John III wanted it to be done properly, so he appointed Tommy Dza as governor general of Brazil. Sa was an experienced administrator who’d served well in Portugal’s African and Asian settlements. SOA founded the colonial capital at Salvador in 1549, divided Brazil up into captaincies or land aotment regions, and set up municipal organizations modeled on those back in Portugal. By 1600, Bajia and Perumboku each had around 2,000 citizens and more than double that in slaves. It wasn’t all smooth sailing, though, for Portugal. France and the Dutch had ventured into Brazil and liked what they saw. This meant from the mid6th to 17th centuries, Portugal was constantly fighting off French and Dutch invaders. In 1624, the Dutch briefly took over the capital of Salvador, but Lisbon sent a large battalion into the city to wrangle back control. While Portugal had started to ramp up settlements in Brazil, Spain was making a fortune from its gold and silver mines. This was all overseen by the vice royalty of Peru, which was a district set up in the 16th century with its headquarters in Lima. The district controlled a massive chunk of South America, and the vast supplies of silver made Lima Spain’s second most important city after Mexico City. People back in Europe started to take keen interest in these new opportunities and settlers began arriving steadily. With so much valuable cargo traveling the sea, European powers funded privateeers, a kind of government-backed pirate, to harass and capture the ships of rival nations. No ships were safe traveling across the Atlantic and Spain resorted to forming convoys with heavily armed bodyguard type ships. Extracting the wealth from these new colonies required vast amounts of labor. Disease and conflict had sharply reduced the native population and there weren’t enough settlers to do all the needed work. So the Europeans turned to slaves. For the first half of the 17th century, the Atlantic slave trade was largely run by the Portuguese and Spanish. By far, the greatest number of African slaves were sent to Mexico, with others being shipped to Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and to Portuguese Brazil. Portugal had the greatest access to slaves because it controlled areas in West Africa such as Angola, Cape Verde, and Guinea Basau. Slaves were bought or simply seized from African tribes and shipped either directly to Brazil or to Spanish Hispanola. Thanks to the Iberian Union, Portugal and Spain were united from 1580 to 1640. The main crop in the early days was sugar. The demand for sugar was on the rise in Europe and would go through the roof in the 18th century. Farming sugar was tough work. It was a backbreaking job carried out in stifling heat. In other words, a job fit for slaves. Some slave ships were attacked by fleets from rival countries. British privateeers often raided Spanish slave ships or even slave colonies in the Caribbean. This is how the British acquired their first slaves to be used in the American colonies. In 1619, British privateeers attacked a Spanish slave ship, stole the slaves, and then sent them to Virginia to work on the tobacco plantations. As their colonies developed, the English, French, and Dutch became heavily invested in slavery. By 1625, more than 320,000 slaves had been shipped over from Africa. This number would ultimately rise to over 12 million by the 19th century. By the mid7th century, competition between European powers for land and resources in the new world was fierce. Seeking access to Caribbean sugar in 1627, the English settled in Barbados, followed by NeAs in 1628 and then Monserat and Antigua in 1632. In 1638, another European power decided to get in on the act when the colony of New Sweden was founded by the Swedish South Company. This was a joint venture of Swedish, Dutch, and German business interests who were keen to set up trade links on the east coast. New Sweden was based along the Delaware River with settlements in today’s Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Conflicts between these European powers regularly played out in the colonies. For example, Britain invaded French Canada during the 30 Years War, besieging and capturing Quebec, although they handed it back to the French in 1632. This was to be a familiar pattern over the next 100 or so years. Conflicts in Europe having a huge influence on the balance of power in America. Of course, this European expansion came at the expense of indigenous peoples. The Europeans came from cultures that lived with domesticated animals such as cows, pigs, sheep, and chickens. This brought new strains of disease that were completely foreign to these people. Smallox, influenza, typhus, yellow fever, and measles were all new to the Americas and were soon spread throughout the native populations. Weapons were readily traded with the settlers with firearms being the most sought after. This increased the level of violence between tribes as natives began using the more advanced weapons on each other. War was now more lethal as the natives became quickly proficient in the use of musketss and pistols. This easy access to deadlier weapons had another telling effect on the native population decline. It also took a serious toll on the environment. Because many natives wanted more guns, they began hunting more animals for their furs and clearing more land. Soil erosion became a problem. While wildlife habitats and species became threatened in New England, beavers were virtually extinct by the 18th century. Such was the demand for their fur. No more beavers meant no more ponds, which reduced fish numbers and watering holes for other animals such as deer and moose. Europeans introduced farm animals such as pigs, goats, and cows, which were allowed to wander around grazing freely on much of the food traditionally eaten by deer, which further reduced the hunting options. Alcohol was a real scourge on the indigenous populations. Some people quickly became addicted, leading to early deaths, broken homes, and the breakdown of tribal structures. Tribal elders naturally voiced their disapproval and did all they could to limit consumption. But many leaders themselves became addicted, compounding the problem. It’s estimated that in the 150 years that followed Columbus’s arrival, the American natives lost roughly 80% of their population. Between 1492 and 1650, the numbers had plummeted from 50 million to just 8 million. As the 17th century neared its halfway point, there had already been huge changes since Columbus first landed in the Americas. Native populations had been decimated and slavery was about to become a booming industry. Spain was still very much the dominant power, but the seemingly endless supplies of silver and gold were beginning to trickle out. Brazil was slowly building into a formidable South American country, and the Portuguese and Spanish were bonded via the Iberian Union. Meanwhile, the other two European superpowers, Britain and France, had made their intentions clear. They’d both had a taste of what North America had to offer, and they liked it a lot, and were in it for the long haul. The next 100 or so years were about to bring further changes that would completely transform the world as everyone knew it. 150 years after Columbus’s arrival, European colonization of the Americas had seen great success, the five major European colonial powers had all carved out significant chunks of the new world for themselves, forcing those already there to adapt, accept, or resist if they hadn’t already died from disease. The second half of the 17th century would only prove that the Europeans were there to stay as the new world became the arena for imported European wars, radical political and religious experiments, and lucrative industries built off the backs of servants and slaves. The story of European colonization was only getting faster and more intense. We’ll start with England, or rather New England, which by 1650 boasted 40 towns and 23,000 colonists. Conscious of their rising prosperity and shared cultures, the New England Confederation was formed in 1643 to unify the colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven in what proved to be foreshadowing for future colonial cooperation. The small outcast colony of Rhode Island was omitted from the Confederation and New Haven was annexed entirely by Connecticut in 1664. But already New England was taking a recognizable shape. Religious disscent, a frontier mentality with deep connections to the Native Americans and a proud culture of independence from the crown defined New England against the old. Economically, New England was never the most lucrative of England’s colonies. The West Indies far outclassed it in wealth generated, but the quality of life New Englanders could enjoy was high. The average family could expect to own lands to farm what they needed, and propertied men could expect a role in influencing politics that was more direct than what a typical Englishman across the Atlantic would expect. While the sugar fortunes of the Caribbean eclipsed New England’s humble economy, it benefited from good agricultural land, vast fishing stocks, and huge forests for lumber. By 1700, New England’s fishing and ship building industries was among the best in the world, and England itself was buying some of its vessels from them. Most importantly for most New Englanders, colonial life offered them the freedom to worship as they pleased. Puritanism’s dominance in New England was already fading as an even wider tapestry of religious denominations, including Baptists, congressionalists, and Quakers, flocked to the freedom of the new world. Not all was as it seemed, though. Religious toleration was defined in strict Protestant dissenter limits. Anglicans were not welcome, nor Catholics. And even the Quakers faced significant discrimination. They were banished from Massachusetts in the 1650s, and at least four Quakers were hanged for preaching their faith. Religious feeling was high in New England, and nothing showed the risks of that like the Salem witch trials of 1691 and 1692, where intense paranoia led to hundreds being accused and 19 people executed for the imagined crime of witchcraft. Relations with the indigenous people were also difficult. In 1675, New England experienced a wave of conflicts with the Algangquin natives, led by a warrior named Metacomt, but who was known to the English as King Phillip. The New Englanders had demanded Metacomt’s people surrender weapons and land to them, and Metacomt agreed at first, but as their demands grew, he knew they could either fight or lose everything. King Philip’s war led to more than half of New England’s towns being attacked and a dozen being burned to the ground and harsh reprisals against the Algangquins led to the destruction of many settlements and food stores belonging to Metaccomat’s men. The war lasted until August 1676 when Metac was shot by an Indian Christian convert and the Native Alliance collapsed without his leadership. Anger at Native Americans was intense in the wake of the war, and some Virginiaians called for the total expulsion of Native Americans from the territory. Governor William Berkeley refused, but quickly found himself with a rebellion on his hands by discontented Virginiaians. Bacon’s rebellion in 1676, named for its leader, Nathaniel Bacon, called for Berkeley’s dismissal and a total expulsion of Native Americans from Virginia. The rebellion was swiftly put down by government loyalists, but not before several loyalist settlements were attacked and over 100 Native Americans were killed. Although it lasted only a few months, Bacon’s rebellion was remarkable for two key reasons. First, it involved both white settlers and Africans, slave and non-slave, against the Native Americans. The realization that the two groups might unify caused the colonial government to draw stricter legal separation between black and white to ensure they wouldn’t rise up again, which encouraged racial division and hostility in the long term. It was also the first significant rebellion by colonists against colonial rule. It would not be the last and future historians have seen in Bacon’s Rebellion the first seeds that would sprout into the American Revolution a century later. The remaining Indians in New England scattered or were enslaved or were forced into secondass citizen status in so-called praying towns which were supposed to be the centers of Christian conversion but mostly functioned as reservations. The hostility between New Englanders and natives remained. And this attitude is best seen in the words of Massachusetts Minister Solomon Stoddard writing to the governor in 1682 who suggested dogs be trained to hunt Indians. Quote, “They act like wolves and are to be dealt with as wolves.” Moving north from New England, the Dutch in New Netherland were also eager to assert their place. The Dutch had been a competitive player in American colonization. With New Netherlands in the north, multiple islands in the Caribbean, and a valuable presence in Brazil, the Dutch had carved out a decent chunk of the colonial pie. However, the mid-7th century proved that the Dutch were overstretched. Their wide presence encroached on the interests of multiple rival powers, especially the British and the Portuguese, that provoked conflict with each. Since 1630, the Dutch had claimed a portion of northern Brazil from the Portuguese, which they had dubbed New Holland. The colony was their way to break into the sugar trade. But the relatively low number of Dutch settlers were forever outnumbered by Brazilian natives and Portuguese settlers who never accepted Dutch rule. In 1645, the Portuguese and New Holland rebelled, defeated the Dutch forces, and invited the Portuguese Empire to claim the territory. The Dutch scrambled an expeditionary force to reclaim the colony, but they were decisively defeated at the two battles of Guadapes in 1648 and 1649. The last Dutch colonists in Brazil held out in the city of Hifa until 1654 when Portugal finally kicked them out of South America. The Dutch saw similar disaster up north. The British recognized that New Netherland would be a perfect entry point to deal with the French upriver in Canada and would allow them to control the unbroken span of the eastern seabboard. England realized that the Dutch had overexerted themselves and were weak in the wake of their defeats in Brazil. So on August 27th, 1664, British ships sailed into the harbor of New Amsterdam and demanded the surrender of the entire colony. With no forces to resist, the Dutch colonial administrators surrendered. A few months later, the Second Anglo Dutch War erupted in Europe. As well as preventing any Dutch attempts to reclaim the colonies, the war gave Britain the chance to seize some of its possessions in the Caribbean too, like Tobago. The Dutch did manage to acquire Surinam from the British, but with the end of the war in 1667, the Dutch had clearly lost their place as one of the major colonial powers in the Americas. With the Dutch out of the way in North America, the English were free to expand their control of the eastern seabboard. Aside from New England, Canada, and the Carolas, the British now had to concern themselves with the middle colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. When taken from the Dutch, New Netherland was under the control of James, Duke of York, the younger brother of King Charles II, and soon to be king himself. New Amsterdam was renamed New York, but its Dutch inhabitants were mostly left alone. James instructed his appointed governors to rule with a gentle hand, but power remained firmly in his grasp. New York was given no elected assembly, and the proprietor could wield power as he pleased. James could never hope to actively govern such a large area from so far away. So in 1664 he cut off a chunk of New Netherlands to grant to his allies Lords John Berkeley and Sir John Carteret. Rather than develop this new area of New Jersey, they sold their shares to another group, the Quakers. The Quakers were heavily persecuted back in England. So the colonies offered a perfect chance to start a new. Jersey received a steady stream of new Quaker settlers to add to the existing Dutch population. But the true success of Quaker colonization was Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania was created in 1681 when King Charles II grant his proprietary rights to the Quaker financier William Penn. Penn envisioned a new society across the Atlantic where Quakers and other religious minorities could live peacefully and without persecution. In 1682, some 2,000 settlers made the trip to Pennsylvania where they founded its capital at Philadelphia, and about 6,000 more followed by 1685. Penn was happy to grant generous parcels of lands to small holders, Quaker and non-Quaker alike, to build his society. With an elected assembly and significant local and individual freedom, Pennsylvania was a thriving model for new world colonization, but not a perfect one. More staunch Quakers wanted Penn to prioritize building a religious society, while Penn was still a proprietor who was always careful to ensure profits kept climbing. This left some Quakers to leave Pennsylvania in favor of Quaker controlled New Jersey. But Penn’s work seemed to pay off anyway. By 1700, Pennsylvania was home to 18,000 colonists, and Philadelphia was rapidly becoming one of the largest, wealthiest, and best educated cities in America. Disruption came in 1685 when the newly crowned James II ordered the unification of New England with New York and New Jersey to create the crown controlled Dominion of New England. Local authority was severely limited and Anglican and even Catholic worship was to be tolerated. Alas, James proved to be an unpopular monarch and was peacefully deposed in favor of the Dutch Prince William and his wife Mary during the glorious rebellion of 1688. It took until the next few years for news to reach the colonies. The Dominion government, loyal to James II, was reluctant to give up power, but rebellions in New York and Massachusetts forced the Dominion to collapse. However, King William III was not so eager to let royal control slip. The dominion was dissolved back into separate colonies, but he imposed royal governors upon Massachusetts and New Hampshire to tighten English control and maintained a more tolerant religious policy that spells the end of Puritan dominance in New England. Beyond that, there are two other areas of English colonization worthy of attention. In 1649, King Charles I lost his head and England passed to the control of Oliver Cromwell. A staunch Puritan with an insatiable hatred of Catholics. Britain spent most of Cromwell’s reign locked in war with Catholic Spain. The main result of this being the British capture of Jamaica in 1655, giving Britain control of one of the largest and most lucrative sugar producing islands in the Caribbean. Combined with Barbados and the leeward isles like Antigua, Monserat and St. Nevice, Britain was well positioned to turn the Caribbean into a sugar producing powerhouse. While the North American colonies are better known, the 17th and early 18th century was really the age of Britain’s Caribbean Empire. Hundreds of thousands of tons of sugar sailed back across the Atlantic from Britain’s Caribbean colonies over the following decades. At first, indentured whites were the main labor force. Again, Cromwell being in power at the start had special relevance. He needed a place to put all those pesky Irish and Scots he captured, and forcing them across the Atlantic to grow sugar for him was as good a plan as any. But English and Welsh indentures were sent as well. Of the 223,000 white colonists who came to the Caribbean between 1630 and 1700, around half of them were indentured servants. Almost all of them bound for sugar production. Soon enough though, demand for labor outstripped the indentured supply and slavery came to dominate. The Caribbean was the primary destination for slaves in Britain’s transatlantic slave trading, and the numbers grew sharply between 1642 and 1700. The founding of the Royal Africa Company in 1672 ensured the smooth transportation of slaves to the Caribbean colonies. Barbados had around 5,700 African slaves in 1645, swelling to 42,000 by 1698, while Jamaica’s 1,410 slaves in 1656 had become over 41,000 in 1698. The slave population significantly outnumbered the white population who kept control with violence and aggressive legal codes that restricted slaves and defined their status as innate and inherent to their skin color. In contrast to New England with its many independent landowning families and pleasant towns, the Caribbean colonies were a place where most people lived in servitude to a narrow plantation elite who’d grown rich from the enslavement of others. By 1700, Caribbean sugar was producing some 3 million pounds of value per year at the cost of about 200,000 African slaves brought into the British Caribbean or North American ports. Plantation wealth was also key to the other great arena of British colonial efforts, Carolina. In 1663, Charles II granted land rights to eight powerful proprietors in the territory of Carolina. The first permanent settlement was laid down at Charleston in 1670. And Carolina quickly grew to be a valuable colony with a thriving slave plantation economy in the south with more independent family farming based communities in the north. The proprietors were mostly hands-off, taking little interest in the colony from their comfy homes back in England. The one exception was the Earl of Shsbury, who along with the philosopher John Lockach, attempted to craft Carolina into a perfect society. The fundamental constitutions of Carolina attempted to outline a society that blended liberal ideas of freedom and democracy with slavery and hereditary nobility. The bizarre experiment was a failure from start to finish. Carolans resented the proprietor’s outofouch attempts to remake society which they answered with resistance or just by ignoring them entirely to focus on their farms and plantations. Still, by 1700, royal power was probably the strongest it had been in the British colonies since settlement began. But this fact did not sit comfortably among the American colonists. After generations, most of them had little loyalty to the mother country. And with the soaring prosperity and stability of colonial life, many began to feel that the colonies had surpassed England. Did a distant country few of them had ever visited really deserve to rule them? That question would only grow louder as the 18th century dawned. There’s no talking about the British without addressing the French, who took the lead in colonizing Canada and the inland areas of North America. 1642 saw the French settle another new colony in Montreal, deepening their foothold in the north. France’s main concern was to establish its influence over and security in the Great Lakes region. But doing this required engaging with the great power that was already there, the Irakcoy Confederacy. The Irakcoy Confederacy was an alliance of five nations. The Kyuga, the Mohawk, the Onida, the Onundaga, and the Senica, who had joined together under the great law of peace to end fighting in the region centuries before the Europeans arrived. Naturally, the Irakcoy were wary about the newcomers, and like many Native American groups, they navigated the arrival of the Europeans with an eye to their own interests. With the French posing a bigger threat to their ancestral territory, the Urkquoy took advantage of France’s rivalry with England and the Netherlands to trade with Dutch and English merchants for weapons, which they could then use to resist French encroachment on their land. The Beaver Wars raged for most of the 17th century. As French settlers encroached on their territory, the Irakcoy resisted with violent force. In turn, they launched attacks on French settlements, traders, and explorers. Other indigenous groups like the Huron took a different approach, seeking alliances with the French. The Huron and several other indigenous groups, many with long-standing rivalries with the Irakquoy, took up arms against them. The resulting Beaver Wars were as much, if not more so, a conflict between differently aligned native peoples as it was a war between the French and the native peoples. As in every corner of the Americas, there was no single unified response to European settlement, and different groups fought, traded, ignored, integrated, and cooperated as they saw fit. Fighting rose and fell over the century. An extended period of peace between the French and Irakcoy began from 1666 as the latter turned their attention to other native groups. But war resumed in the 1680s. The nine years war between Britain and France, which began in 1688, spilled over into the Americas as King Williams war with the Irakquoy allied with the British and the Huron with the French, triggering a renewed wave of conflict that only ended with peace in 1697. By that point, the Urkoy controlled much of the New England frontier and the Ohio River Valley. Beyond Canada, France’s primary interest lay in the Mississippi River Basin. They explored the basin from the 1670s and in 1682, Renee Robert Cavalier De Lasal declared the entire river system to be the French possession of Louisiana. Louisiana was divided into upper and lower regions separated at the Arkansas River. Upper Louisiana was formed from the upper Mississippi Valley, which included today’s states of Illinois, Missouri, and Indiana, while everything to the south was lower Louisiana. French settlers from Canada moved into the area in the late 17th century. Attracted by the vast fertile farming land, the upper Louisiana region also had an abundance of animals that could be hunted for furs or food. Early settlement in lower Louisiana was hard and unsuccessful. The first permanent French colony was actually in modern Texas at Fort St. Louis. Founded in 1685, it lasted just 3 years before indigenous locals conquered it and slaughtered the population. Small villages and forts were planted across the Louisiana territory with more success, but large-scale colonization would have to wait until the 18th century. While the French weren’t having the best time of it in the second half of the 17th century, they could at least say they were doing better than the Spanish. Spain’s experiences in the New World were downstream of their troubles in the old. The second half of the 17th century was one of difficulty for the Spanish crown, which sapped attention and resources from the Americas. The rising power of France, especially during the long reign of Louis I 14th and the breakdown of the Iberian Union between Spain and Portugal left the Spanish crown weak and exhausted. Their French, Dutch, Portuguese, and English rivals were keen to capitalize on that, such as England seizing Jamaica in 1655. Spain had plenty of trouble from the Americas, too. Massive native depopulation had severely limited the labor supply and Spain was unable to muscle its way into the Atlantic slave trade. Spanish colonies struggled to find the labor needed to produce sugar or mine the gold and silver which had made the empire so wealthy. The slaves they did buy were mostly bought through their imperial rivals. Meanwhile, the native populations who remained became increasingly resistant to Spanish rule. In Peru, the native Inca launched dozens of small-scale rebellions against exploitative Spanish practices, including forced labor for the state and price gouging by Spanish officials, who forced them to buy tools and supplies from overpriced Spanish sources, then sell their produce to the Spanish at a discounted price, which the Spanish then sold on for a profit. Specific areas brought their own problems, too. Spanish settlements in Florida slowed to a trickle as a lack of exploitable resources or exploitable native labor caused interest in the region to wne with the British and French expanding even further southward. Florida became more of a buffer for the more valuable Caribbean and Central American colonies than it was a valuable holding itself. Not that Florida protected Spanish ships in the Caribbean from their real scourge, pirates. The second half of the 17th century was the golden age of piracy with European ships constantly harassed by independent pirates or privateeers backed by their rivals. The English proved especially bothersome with privateeers based out of Charles Town, modern-day Nassau in the Bahamas. A Spanish fleet successfully raided the town and burned it to the ground in 1684. But the pirate menace was far from solved. With Inca rebels in the south, pirates in the Caribbean, and rival Europeans everywhere, it is probably no surprise that Spain faced resistance in its North American territory of New Mexico, too. The Pueblo people of New Mexico had long suffered under Spanish rule. And in 1680, they launched a fullscale rebellion named for its warrior leader. Poe’s rebellion led to the expulsion of Spanish settlers from New Mexico and the killing of several hundred of them. It was one of the most successful examples of indigenous resistance in the Americas, but that success was short-lived. Poppe died in 1688 and without his leadership, the will for independence faded. When the Spanish returned in 1692, they were able to peacefully convince the majority of the Pueblo people to accept Spanish rule again. However, the Spanish no longer subjected the Pueblo to forced labor on the exploitative Encoma system and rolled back missionary work in their communities, allowing the Pueblins to retain more of their independence and culture than most Native American groups did under colonial rule. That leaves us with Portugal, who experienced more stable dominance in South America. The expulsion of the Dutch in 1654 assured Portuguese control of Brazil, and the 1668 treaty of Lisbon further secured their sphere of influence by ending hostilities with Spain. As a result, Portugal was free to expand and refine its colonial control and turn Brazil into the global powerhouse of sugar production and a slave exploitation. Portugal tightened up colonial administration with an overseas council to manage colonial affairs and the expansion of the use of colonial administrators and local elites known as the Sanhores deeno to manage local affairs. As in the Caribbean, slavery was the engine that powered Brazil. By 1700, half a million African slaves had been shipped there, and more were born into servitude from those imported slaves. The life expectancy of a fresh slave brought into Brazil was a few years at most, and most of those born there did not live to see 25. But unlike elsewhere, the Portuguese state was more permissive towards intermarriage and relations between white colonists, indigenous people, and Africans, which was already giving rise to a mysticio population. Race relations in Brazil would forever be different to those in other European colonies. As a result, while Brazil’s sugar trade grew steadily, the rapid expansion of Caribbean sugar after the 1650s ate away at Portugal’s dominance of the trade. Nevertheless, sugar and slavery continued and inevitably slaves resisted. As early as6003, escaped slaves had been gathering at Palmarees. But after the Dutch expulsion in 1654, the numbers of escaped slaves swelled. By the 1670s, this community of escaped slaves was styling itself as an independent kingdom named Angola Janga. Multiple Portuguese attempts to shut it down failed against the difficult tropical terrain and fierce resistance of the warriors. Its self-styled King Ganga Zumba commanded soldiers, regulated trade in his territory, and even built himself a palace. In 1678, the Portuguese officially recognized him as a legitimate ruler. so long as he submitted to Portuguese authority, becoming a sort of client king. Zumba agreed, but such a capitulation was not welcomed by his rivals. His nephew Zumbi launched a revolt. Gangazumba was killed and Zumbi took his place. For the next 15 years, Zumbi doggedly defended Palaris’s independence. Eventually though in January 1694 another Portuguese expedition under Domingos Gorge Vervo assaulted Zumbi’s seat of power had circa de Macakaco conquering it and capturing Zumbbe who was eventually beheaded. The suppression of Palarez was a welcome development for the Portuguese but it was a reminder of the risks of the sugar trade and its dependence on slaves. So the discovery of gold in the Miner region of Brazil by Portuguese explorers in the 1690s offered a welcome new source of wealth as Portugal entered the new century. The 18th century got off to an auspicious start when every major European nation fell into a bloody conflict over the Spanish throne. The death of Charles II of Spain in November 1700 left a secession crisis for Spain. Charles and France backs the inheritance of 17-year-old Philip of Anju, a grandson of Louis I 14th. Such a close union between France and Spain was unacceptable to the other European powers, especially Britain, the Dutch, and the Holy Roman Empire, triggering the war of Spanish secession. Most of the fighting played out in Europe. But by now any European war was also a colonial war and the American theater of conflict became known as Queen Anne’s war. The British with their native allies fought fiercely against the French and Spanish with their native allies. The most significant developments of the war saw the British capture the French province of Aadia comprising modern-day Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island in 1710. Fighting ended with the peace of Utre in 1713. Phipe kept his Spanish throne, but lost a lot of his European territory. In the Americas, the war had two major consequences. First, the permanent French laws of Aadia, Newfoundland, and Hudson Bay to the British. And second, the granting of the Asiento denigrat to Britain by Spain. The Asiento granted Britain the exclusive right to sell African slaves to the Spanish Empire. Spain kept its American empire intact, but the concession reduced Spain to humiliating dependence upon Britain for a key piece of its economy. Emerging from the war of Spanish secession, Spain had taken a beating, but Philipe V was secure on his throne. The war had demonstrated that Spain’s economy and navy had fallen far behind its rivals. Philip’s long reign was one of internal reforms to modernize and improve Spain’s government, military, and economy, which he did with mixed success. He also pushed to expand Spain’s American Empire, especially into Texas, where San Antonio was founded in 1718. Key to Spanish imperialism across the New World, were the Jesuits. This Catholic order took the lead in missionary work and education on Spain’s imperial frontier. Many of the frontier settlements and native outreach communities were run by Jesuits and they were often the main link between native subjects and colonial powers. However, due to changing attitudes in Catholicism and controversies about Jesuit power, the Jesuits fell out of favor with Catholic Europe by the mid 18th century. In 1750, as part of the Treaty of Madrid, Spain tried to exchange several Jesuit mission communities in Paraguay with Portugal for more valuable territory. The Jesuits, angry at being abandoned and with strong influence over the native Guini, incited the Guini to rebel. The Guini wars saw Portugal and Spain team up for several years to suppress the local revolt. And when all was said and done, they laid the blame firmly on the Jesuits. In 1767, they were expelled from all parts of the empire and their property seized by the crown. In the long run, this would be disastrous for Spanish native relations and would contribute to the weakening of Spanish imperial authority that would eventually allow for independence. There were other signs of weakness, too. The gold and silver mines of Peru, which had made Spanish colonization so profitable at first, were drying up by the mid 18th century. The native Inca were also restless with dozens of localized rebellions against Spanish rule that caused much anxiety and disruption. Peru’s wealth and importance declined in turn and focus shifted to other areas of colonization. As if to prove this, in 1776 the territory of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and most of Chile was split off from the declining vice royalty of Peru and reorganized into the vice royalty of Rio de la Plata. Spain also tried to compensate for its imperial decline with California which saw its first major settlements at San Diego in 1769, Los Angeles in 1771, and San Francisco in 1776. But Spanish settlement there was always an afterthought, and they never did discover the goals that would one day make the region so prosperous. Things were a bit more stable for Portugal, who avoided getting embroiled in most of the colonial wars in the Americas. Its secure position down in Brazil and lack of ambition elsewhere minimized conflicts with Britain, France, and Spain. The Treaty of Madrid in 1750 firmly recognized Portuguese and Spanish interests in South America, reducing the risk of conflict even more. As a result, Portuguese colonial affairs were relatively low-key compared to the history shaping events going on elsewhere. The discovery of gold had triggered a gold rush in the early 18th century that dominated affairs in Brazil. The discovery of diamonds in 1729 only reinforced the pivot away from sugar, the center of which had now shifted to the Caribbean in favor of mining. Reflecting this shift, the colonial capital moved from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro in 1763 to be closer to the mining areas. These mines had no less need for slaves than the plantations did. Brazil continued to be the primary destination for African slaves heading to the new world with almost 2 million of them imported to Brazil over the 18th century. This continued expansion of the African population prompted harsher racial laws to rigidly define racial hierarchy. Europeans at the top, mechisos below, Africans below that, and the indigenous peoples last of all. Portuguese attempts to forcibly subjugate this dwindling indigenous population as expressed through the digtorio dos indos laws of 1757 only further destroyed indigenous communities with violence, forced resettlement, and legal discrimination. But the pivotal events of this period would come from the north. So let’s pivot back to the British. The early 18th century was the golden age of Britain’s American Empire. But the cracks that would break it were already visible. Each British colony had different government arrangements. Each colony’s assembly and governor, if they had either, could expect different powers and privileges. While Britain tried to assert more centralized control through royal governors, realities on the ground prevented the establishment of consistent administrative structure. For example, the crown could disallow most colonial laws, but not those of Connecticut or Rhode Island. Royal governors regularly buted heads with the elected colonial assemblies, who each saw their legitimacy drawn from different sources. The former from the crown, the latter from the people. These inconsistent governing arrangements were a nuisance. Take for example the founding of Britain’s 13th American colony in Georgia in 1732. Initially controlled by a board of trustees, the state had no single governor and no right to an elected assembly. The leader of the trustees, James Ogulthorp, envisioned it as a settler colony for debtors and convicts who could be granted small parcels of land by the trustees. It was also conveniently placed to act as a buffer between South Carolina and Spanish Florida. Most settlers ended up being regular colonists, not convicts, and for some reason they weren’t happy with the prospect of being human shields for Carolina on tiny portions of land with no right to representation. The Georgia colonists complained relentlessly and frequently defied the trustees. The trustees gave up and handed over the colony to the crown to be its problem instead. Conflict with native groups was also a persistent problem. In Carolina, war with indigenous peoples, coupled with drought and local unrest raised the possibility of abandoning the territory entirely. The ruling proprietors chose to sell North Carolina back to the crown while keeping South Carolina with its valuable plantations. The South Carolinians dug in and waged their own war against local indigenous groups. With the support of the Cherokee, the South Carolinians brutally suppressed the Yami, the Creeks, and the Tuscarora, virtually purging Carolina of those groups, but at the cost of about 7% of the white population. The Tuscerora were forced to flee north, where they sought sanctuary with the Irakquay, who admitted them as the sixth nation in their confederacy. Much to the anger of the French and English who knew the Tuscerora had no love for Europeans. Regional problems aside, the picture for the American colonies was still very positive. The population was growing rapidly from about 210,000 in 1690 to 445,000 in 1720 and 1.2 million by 1750. Most of this growth was natural reproduction rather than immigration. For example, while only 19% of Chesapeake’s Bay white population had been born there in 1668, it was 90% by 1750. These growing colonies began spreading inland, too, with the first European settlers heading into Shenondoa Valley and opening the doorways for further westward settlement in the late 18th and early 19th century. Then there were the cities like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, which could support even larger populations thanks to the prosperous agriculture around them. By the mid 18th century, around 10% of Americans were city dwellers, a sharp increase from early colonial days and a number that would only keep rising. Moreover, it was a good life. The average white American settler could expect to own more lands than a European, pay less tax than a European, and have a greater say in government affairs than a European, as long as they were a white male, of course. While European cities were peacemeal evolutions stretching back centuries, American cities were modern constructs often built to a plan and integrated with modern conveniences like pavements, libraries, and large ports befitting of a modern trading nation. It is no wonder that many Americans had come to believe that life in the colonies was far superior in many measures than life in Europe. This was certainly the opinion of Benjamin Franklin, who wrote with pride that every man in New England has a vote in public affairs, lives in a tidy, warm house, and has plenty of good food and fuel. Still, he conceded that the Americans were lacking to their English brethren in matter of manners, etiquette, and virtue. This however was a problem Franklin did his fair share in addressing through the foundation of newspapers, colleges and philosophical societies in his native Philadelphia. Of course, there were plenty of slaves who would not paint such a rosy picture of American life. By 1750, there were around 250,000 slaves in the 13 North American colonies, mostly in Carolina, Georgia, Maryland, and Virginia. These slaves experienced harsh legal discrimination with slim prospects of ever buying their freedom. The small free black population was a distant aspiration for the average slave and many of those free blacks secured their status through their own participation in slave exploitation. Slave resistance was common. Attempted escapes, work avoidance, and other small-cale refusal to accept their condition was to be expected, but largecale slave revolts were rare. When they did happen, they were usually brief and bloody for everyone involved. The Stoneo Rebellion of 1739 is a perfect example of this. Several dozen slaves, mostly of Angolan origin, set out from the Stono River in South Carolina in a desperate march towards Spanish Florida, where all escaped British slaves were promised amnesty. The escaping slaves killed several dozen whites along the way before being intercepted by slave catchers at the Adisto River. Most of the rebel slaves went down fighting. The most consistently effective slave resistance was found down in the Caribbean, especially in Jamaica, where escaped slaves managed to form maroon societies in the interior, which resisted British efforts to recapture them. Between 1728 and 1740, the Jamaican maroons under Captain Kajjo in the west and Nanny in the east managed to successfully fend off British troops until the British were forced to recognize their nominal independence. The British agreed to leave the Maroons alone so long as the Maroons stopped raiding plantations or helping slaves escape. That was great news for the maroons, but meant little to the massive slave population who remained. By 1763, an estimated 1 in5 people in British controlled America was enslaved. And that number was at least as high, if not higher, when taking the Americas as a whole. The slaves in the Caribbean colonies were producing over 41,000 tons of sugar by the middle of the century, filling the pockets of their colonial masters and leaving nothing for themselves. With so much valuable trade and so many ambitious European powers, America could prove the sources of conflicts just as much as conditions back in Europe could. For example, in 1731, a Spanish Coast Guard ship in the Caribbean captured the English captain Robert Jenkins and sliced off his ear. The wounded captain took his pickled ear back to Parliament, who eventually seized upon the attack to assemble a fleet to sail against Spanish America. The War of Jenkins ear did not erupt until 1739, as the year was more of a publicity slogan to mask the real concerns over trade in the Caribbean. Still, this new wave of conflict saw tens of thousands of casualties. The most significant episode of the war was the British attack on Kardahena in Colombia in 1741. The British force, composed mostly of American colonists, suffered tremendous casualties in the campaign and lost most of their men to disease or combat. The War of Jenkins Ear dovetailed into yet another major European conflict in the war of the Austrian secession. Another chaotic inheritance dispute that managed to draw in almost every major European power. It played out in America as King George’s War. Again, colonial troops and native allies were essential to the fighting. It was a force of mostly New England volunteers who won Britain’s most important victory at the Battle of Louisbour in 1745, cutting off French access to the St. Lawrence River and indigenous allies made up the backbone of French raids into New York and Massachusetts. As much as 8% of Massachusetts male population was lost between the War of Jenkins Ear and King George’s War. The war ended with a piece of A/SA Chappella in 1748 with no major territorial changes. Louise Boore was handed back to France, much to the anger of the American colonists who had fought and died for it. But what the colonists wanted didn’t really matter to Britain, who was happy to exchange it for control of the city of Madras over in India. A good deal for the British Empire, but not one for the Americans, who founds that their sacrifices had been betrayed in the name of imperial ambition. This disconnect between colony and imperial master would only keep growing. The war was a blow for France, who had opens the 18th century with a vast American empire and everything to play for. New France stretched from Montreal to the mouth of the Mississippi, and the French consistently planted new settlements across its breadth, from Detroit in 1701 to New Orleans in 1718. While the wars of Spanish and Austrian secession shaped relations with European powers, relations with indigenous peoples proved to be just as important for the French. The French continued their efforts to ally, incite, remove, or destroy native groups as it saw fit. For example, in 1722, the French missionary Sebastian Rayal, who worked among the Wabanaki of New Hampshire, incited them to rebel against British settlers. France was angry about border disputes left over from the peace of Utrect in 1713 and realized that the Wabanaki would make a useful weapon against New England. The conflict raged for 3 years and claimed hundreds of lives. In other places, the French found themselves on the receiving end of native resistance. In November of 1729, for example, French colonists at Fort Rosalie in Mississippi were attacked by the Nachez after years of declining relations. The Nachez killed all of the men but spares the woman and slaves before burning the settlement to the ground. Believing a native revolt was imminent, French authorities in New Orleans dispatched soldiers to destroy nearby native villages, even though most had nothing to do with the attack. The Nachez were eventually scattered with many of them seeking shelter with the Chickasaw in the lower Mississippi Valley. The French continued to wage war against the Chickasaw, Nachez, and other native groups, many of whom received support from the British while using their own native allies like the Chalkaw well into the 1750s. However, the fates of French colonization in Louisiana would ultimately be decided by events far to the north. On May 28th, 1754, the governor of Virginia dispatched a young officer named George Washington to push away a French garrison from the headarters of the Ohio River. What was supposed to be a simple clearing mission descended into a skirmish which left a dozen men dead. When word spread of the encounter, both Britain and France escalated their military efforts and began preparing expeditions against each other. Washington had unintentionally triggered what would later be dubbed the French and Indian War. When another major European war broke out in 1756 over Austrian territorial claims, Britain and France merely continued their conflict. The wider 7 years war pitted Britain, Prussia and Portugal against France, Spain, Austria, Russia and Sweden among others. And naturally the war came to the Americans with the European powers and their native allies trading blows. Initially France got the better of the fighting in North America. The situation was so concerning that in June 1754, representatives from seven American colonies, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire met at Albany to discuss plans for their own defense and possible alliances with the Indians should France invade. The Albany Congress was the first time that representatives of multiple colonies had gathered together of their own initiative to direct their own affairs. This was no independence meeting, but some of its attendees, like Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Franklin, would remember how effective such a model of colonial cooperation was in years to come. Britain’s military fortunes recovered as the war continued through the late 1750s. In 1759, they went on the offensive, sailing an army up the St. Lawrence River and laying siege to Quebec City, which fell in September that year. In 1760, they marched west and rested control of Montreal from France as well. Britain’s gains in Canada and events back in Europe secured its victory in the war by 1763. The resulting treaty of Paris was the deathnell for France’s American Empire. Britain would keep all of France’s old Canadian territory and its 100,000 inhabitants. Meanwhile, French Louisiana was split. Everything west of the Mississippi went to Spain, while everything east went to Britain, including Spanish Florida. Aside from a handful of small islands, France’s American Empire, was over. However, Britain would not have too long to celebrate this victory before it too faced colonial collapse. Britain’s victory in the 7 Years War was expensive in both money and manpower. War debt sat at 161 million pounds and much of the fighting in America had been done by American colonists who felt unappreciated by the crown. Britain also now faced the cost and challenge of managing an expanded American empire. As well as dealing with an unhappily occupied French population, many would be deported from Acadia to Louisiana where they became the Cinjun. Britain also had to deal with a new waves of native resistance. conflict with the Cherokee in Carolina in the 1760s and the Great Northern Indian uprising in 1763, which saw a coalition of native groups come together to oppose Britain’s new dominance, proved that Britain was still in desperate need of money and manpower to secure its empire. King George III felt that the American colonies should pay their fair share for this. The Sugar Act of 1764 marked the first of a series of taxes and duties imposed upon the American colonists to meet this goal. However, Britain had underestimated the confidence and resistance of the colonies. The imposition of even a relatively small tax against their wishes triggered unexpectedly intense resistance from the colonists. They objected to the taxes being imposed upon them by parliament which they had no representation in. Britain ignored the initial objections and pressed on with the Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townzang duties of 1767 imposed upon a variety of goods. Altogether, the new taxes weren’t actually all that much. The typical American colonist was still taxed less and experienced less government control than virtually anyone in Europe at that time. However, a fiercely independent colonial spirit had emerged. Wealthy, stable, and confident, many of the colonists felt that they had surpassed Britain and resented the mother country imposing anything on them. Protests mounted and Britain was forced to send troops into American cities to keep order. On March 5th, 1770, this decision turns to tragedy in Boston when British troops opened fire on unarmed protesters, killing five people. Discontent was now turning to anger. The Tea Act of 1773 was designed to limit the trade of smuggled tea and boost revenue for the struggling East India Company. Instead, it convinced anti-British leaders in Boston to march aboard company ships and dump 10,000 lbs of tea into Boston Harbor. In response, Britain closed down all the ports. This had the obvious effect of angering anyone dependent upon trade and fueled anti-British feeling. By now, assemblies and elites across the colony were urging support for Boston, and calls for full-blown revolt were mounting. By 1774, a Continental Congress modeled after the Albany Conference of 1754 brought 12 of the 13 American colonies together to demand a boycott of all British goods. The imposition of more strict laws curtailing colonial freedom, known to the Americans as the intolerable acts, was the breaking point. Negotiation and peaceful protest had failed, and the militias were America’s only alternative. In April 1775, British troops met American rebels at the battles of Lexington and Concord. The first engagement of the Revolutionary War went in favor of the British, as did the second at Bunker Hill in June. But Britain’s victories only seems to unify the colonists against it. The Americans tried and failed to incite Canada to join the rebellion, losing 500 men to a disastrous Quebec expedition in December of 1775. But that did not deter the rest of the American colonies. On July 4th, 1776, the Continental Congress issued their Declaration of Independence, ushering in a new age of American history. It would take until 1783 for the United States to secure this independence through force of arms. But it would look back at 1776 as the moment the country was born. By 1776, the colonization of the Americas had resulted in the birth of a new nation that would go on to shape world history. The independence of the United States foreshadowed the collapse of most European colonial powers. Over the next few decades, most of the rest of the Americas would throw off European colonial rule and usher in a new age of American independence. Between 1492 and 1776, the Americas changed. More conflict and struggles emerged. Maps were redrawn. New cities rose. And slowly, new identities began to take shape. Huge networks of trade, culture, and power stretched across oceans. European empires expanded while Native American tribes shrunk. At the end of the 18th century, the Americas were no longer a mystery to Europe, but a land they claimed, fought, and competed over. And the way it happened set the stage for new beginnings. If you’d like to help us keep creating and get early access to our videos, behindthe-scenes content, and other perks, consider becoming a member right here on YouTube or joining us on Patreon. Every bit of support helps. And as always, thank you so much for watching. [Music]