Colonial America

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Clark
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Old Order ◽  
Early Settlement ◽  
Different Origins

The British American colonies embodied such social, economic, and political diversity that they did not, of course, constitute a single “old order” any more than Europe did. They had evolved from different origins: English, Dutch, and Scandinavian; and under an array of influences: Native American, French, African, Irish, Scottish, German. Even the two oldest areas of English settlement, the Chesapeake region and New England, differed markedly. In New England, where early settlement involved whole families, and where sex ratios quickly achieved a rough parity, seventeenth-century settlers set patterns for longevity and demographic robustness that were sustained throughout the colonial period.

The Social Background of Seventeenth-Century Emigration to America

1979 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Salerno
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Human Migration ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Essential Questions ◽  
Basic Facts

Students of twentieth-century migration generally agree that in any analysis of human migration two essential questions must be answered: Who are the migrants? And why did they leave? The questions seem obvious, but as they relate to seventeenth-century emigration to the American colonies, they are difficult to answer with precision. The records cannot be expected to reveal much about the emigrants as persons because they were ordinary people. If they could write—and most could not—the seventeenth-century emigrants left few diaries or letters to aid those who would study their movements. In fact, it is a rather fortunate researcher who uncovers even the few basic facts of their lives in the parish registers of christenings, burials, and marriages.The task of identifying and reconstructing the thoughts and motives of such an anonymous body of people is therefore a formidable one. Those who have pursued the task, first in regard to the so-called “Puritan Hegira” of the 1630s to New England, have concerned themselves almost exclusively with the question of motivation, and have failed to consider who the emigrants were. Only in a recent study of East Anglian and Kentish emigration to Massachusetts Bay in 1637 has there been a systematic analysis of the ordinary settlers. Yet, no attempt has been made either to identify emigrants or to investigate motives behind several considerable movements to America from areas outside East Anglia and southeastern England, thereby to test the various emigration theses based exclusively on those models.

“The Hearty Hand of Friendship”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Porterfield
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Organizational Networks ◽  
Church Organization ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
The People ◽  
Commercial Enterprise ◽  
Colonial Institutions

Innovations in church organization and commercial enterprise developed together in seventeenth-century New England as leaders established congregational systems of governance and merchants exploited loopholes in British regulation to dominate intercolonial trade. A century later, new appeals to consumers of both material and spiritual goods invigorated colonial towns and challenged conservative colonial institutions. Meanwhile, slavery grew to stimulate trade but also to create problems for institutions that relied on corporate spirit and its demand for willing cooperation. Desire for American independence intensified as organizational networks anchored in corporate institutions generated practical procedures for a new government of the people, along with rhetoric condemning British efforts to enslave American colonies.

Estimates of “Invisible” Earnings in the Balance of Payments of the British North American Colonies, 1768–1772

1969 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
James F. Shepherd ◽  
Gary M. Walton
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
New England ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Commodity Trade ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Widespread Agreement ◽  
Middle Colonies ◽  
Significant Deficit ◽  
Balance Of Trade ◽  
British North American

There is widespread agreement among historians of the colonial period, as there was among contemporary observers, that a significant deficit existed in the American colonies' balance of trade with Great Britain. That a large deficit did exist in the late colonial period is shown by estimates of commodity trade given in Table 1 for the period 1768 through 1772 (for which period statistics of all legal overseas trade exist in the “American Inspector-General's Ledgers”). It is clear from Table 1 that the overall deficit in the commodity trade with the British Isles was due mainly to the deficits incurred by New England and the middle colonies. Similarly, it appears that on the average for this five-year period, the southern colonies, as well, incurred a deficit—although a small one—in their commodity trade with Great Britain.

John Cotton and Roger Williams: Their Controversy Concerning Religious Liberty

1941 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Feist Hirsch
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Satisfaction ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
United States Today ◽  
The Many ◽  
Roger Williams

Many people in the United States today feel that England is fighting a battle that is also their own. The English people, on the other hand, note with great satisfaction and gratitude the sympathy that the United States displays for their life and death struggle. A similar mutual interest existed between the American colonies of the seventeenth century and the England of the age of the Revolution. We have only to look at the many impassioned controversies on both sides of the Atlantic. They tell us a lively story of the exchange of ideas between Old and New England. Robert Baillie, Samuel Rutherford, William Twiss, three outstanding members of the Westminster Assembly, engaged in long arguments with John Cotton on various problems of doctrine and church government. John Cotton and other New England ministers in long pamphlets answered any reproaches of heresy made by the English or Scotch Presbyterians. It is safe to say, furthermore, that the controversy between John Cotton and Roger Williams, with which we are here concerned, would never have been started without Williams's participation in the debates of the Long Parliament in 1643/44.

“The Names of the Rivers”: A New Look at an Old Document

2007 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 459-487
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Martha's Vineyard ◽  
Martha’S Vineyard ◽  
New Look

Analyzing a mysterious, early-seventeenth-century description of the New England coast from Maine to Martha's Vineyard, the essay provides information about Native American sachems, suggests insights into the means by which explorers exchanged information, and offers an interpretation of Martin Pring's landing.

“Why should you be so furious?”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Bross
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
First Aid ◽  
Global English ◽  
East Indies ◽  
English Identity

Chapter 4 focuses on the representation of Anglo-Dutch relations from Asia to America in the seventeenth century. The chapter analyzes the representation of an incident in 1623 on the spice island Amboyna when Dutch traders tortured (with waterboarding) and killed their English rivals in the East Indies. Decades later, New England writers returning to this incident, treating it as news, invoked anti-English violence half a world away to lay claim to a global English identity. The chapter compares visual representation of the Amboyna incident with John Underhill’s “figure” of the Mystic Fort massacre in New England, arguing that these representations of violence are key elements of colonial fantasies that made (and make) real atrocities possible. The coda discusses Stephen Bradwell’s 1633 first-aid manual, partly inspired by the Amboyna incident, which maintains that properly trained, authorized metropolitan authorities can control the potential dangers of the remedies torture and tobacco.

“These Shall Come from Far”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Bross
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
New England ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Global Network ◽  
The World ◽  
Basket Maker

Chapter 3 analyzes English claims to a central role in a global network of indigenous and English people connected by faith around the world, claims made manifest in Of the Conversion of Five Thousand Nine Hundred Indians on the Island of Formosa, a 1650 publication by Baptist minister Henry Jessey, printed by radical bookseller Hannah Allen. It reports on Dutch missions in Taiwan, comparing them with evangelism efforts in New England. The coda considers the experiences of an Algonquian woman who is unnamed in Jessey’s tract but is identified as a basket maker, speculating on the meaning she may have encoded in her basket designs. Though we cannot “read” them directly, the fact that she made them, coupled with the provocative arguments offered by recent scholars about Native material culture in the colonial period, enables us to reconsider the print archive in which she appears.

The Common Law in Colonial America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
American Law ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
The Law ◽  
Substantive Law ◽  
The Revolution

This volume begins where volumes 2 and 3 ended. The main theme of the four-volume project is that the law of America’s thirteen colonies differed profoundly when they first were founded, but had developed into a common American law by the time of the Revolution. This fourth volume focuses on what was common to the law of Britain’s thirteen North American colonies in the mid-eighteenth century, although it also takes important differences into account. The first five chapters examine procedural and substantive law in colonies and conclude that, except in North Carolina and northern New York, the legal system functioned effectively in the interests both of Great Britain and of colonial localities. The next three chapters examine changes in law and the constitution beginning with the Zenger case in 1735—changes that ultimately culminated in independence. These chapters show how lawyers became leading figures in what gradually became a revolutionary movement. It also shows how lawyers used legal and constitutional ideology in the interests, sometimes of an economic character, of their clients. The book thereby engages prior scholarship, especially that of Bernard Bailyn and John Phillip Reid, to show how ideas and constitutional values possessed independent causal significance in leading up to the Revolution but also served to protect institutional structures and socioeconomic interests that likewise possessed causal significance.

Puritans and Race

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Bailey
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
Colonial New England ◽  
Race And Religion

In scholarly discussions about “race” in the Americas, colonial New England often receives little attention. While race-based slavery perhaps never commanded the same attention in the northern colonies as in regions farther south, “race” factored into nearly every aspect of life in New England from the outset. This chapter not only discusses how scholars have approached this conversation but also investigates some of the ways in which New Englanders made sense of themselves and the peoples of varying ethnicities, relying at times on the specific theological context of New England puritanism. Focusing on the ways in which New Englanders wrestled with the dilemma of racial thinking within their theological system brings New England fully into the discussion of the intersections between “race” and religion in colonial America.

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