British colonization of the Americas
The British colonization of the Americas is the history of establishment of control, settlement, and colonization of the continents of the Americas by England, Scotland, and, after 1707, Great Britain. Colonization efforts began in the late 16th century with failed attempts by England to establish permanent colonies in the North. The first permanent English colony in the Americas was established in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Colonies were established in North America, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. Though most British colonies in the Americas eventually gained independence, some colonies have remained under Britain's jurisdiction as British Overseas Territories.
The first documented settlement of Europeans in the Americas was established by Norse people around 1000 AD in what is now Newfoundland, called Vinland by the Norse. Later European exploration of North America resumed with Christopher Columbus's 1492 expedition sponsored by Spain. English settlement began almost a century later. Sir Walter Raleigh established the short-lived Roanoke Colony in 1585. The 1607 settlement of the Jamestown colony grew into the Colony of Virginia. Virgineola—settled unintentionally by the shipwreck of the Virginia Company's Sea Venture in 1609, and renamed The Somers Isles—is still known by its older Spanish name, Bermuda. In 1620, a group of mostly Pilgrim religious separatists established a second permanent colony on the mainland, on the coast of Massachusetts. Several other English colonies were established in North America during the 17th and 18th centuries. With the authorization of a royal charter, the Hudson's Bay Company established the territory of Rupert's Land in the Hudson Bay drainage basin. The English also established or conquered several colonies in the Caribbean, including Barbados and Jamaica.
England captured the Dutch colony of New Netherland in the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the mid-17th century, leaving North America divided among the English, Spanish, and French empires. After decades of warring with France, Britain took control of the French colony of Canada and France's territory east of the Mississippi River, as well as several Caribbean territories, in 1763. Many of the North American colonies gained independence from Britain through victory in the American Revolutionary War, which ended in 1783. Historians refer to the British Empire after 1783 as the "Second British Empire"; this period saw Britain increasingly focus on Asia and Africa instead of the Americas, and increasingly focus on the expansion of trade rather than territorial possessions. Nonetheless, Britain continued to colonize parts of the Americas in the 19th century, taking control of British Columbia and establishing the colonies of the Falkland Islands and British Honduras. Britain also gained control of several colonies, including Trinidad and British Guiana, following the 1815 defeat of France in the Napoleonic Wars.
In the mid-19th century, Britain began the process of granting self-government to its remaining colonies in North America. Most of these colonies joined the Confederation of Canada in the 1860s or 1870s, though Newfoundland would not join Canada until 1949. Canada gained full autonomy following the passage of the Statute of Westminster 1931, though it retained various ties to Britain and still recognizes the British monarch as head of state. Following the onset of the Cold War, most of the remaining British colonies in the Americas gained independence between 1962 and 1983. Many of the former British colonies are part of the Commonwealth of Nations, a political association chiefly consisting of former colonies of the British Empire.
Background: early exploration and colonization of the Americas
Following the first voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492, Spain and Portugal established colonies in the New World, beginning the European colonization of the Americas. France and England, the two other major powers of 15th-century Western Europe, employed explorers soon after the return of Columbus's first voyage. In 1497, King Henry VII of England dispatched an expedition led by John Cabot to explore the coast of North America, but the lack of precious metals or other riches discouraged both the Spanish and English from permanently settling in North America during the early 17th century.Later explorers such as Martin Frobisher and Henry Hudson sailed to the New World in search of a Northwest Passage between the Atlantic Ocean and Asia, but were unable to find a viable route. Europeans established fisheries in the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, and traded metal, glass, and cloth for food and fur, beginning the North American fur trade. During mid-1585 Bernard Drake launched an expedition to Newfoundland which crippled the Spanish and Portuguese fishing fleets there from which they never recovered. This would have consequences in terms of English colonial expansion and settlement.
In the Caribbean Sea, English sailors defied Spanish trade restrictions and preyed on Spanish treasure ships. The English colonization of America had been based on the English colonization of Ireland, specifically the Munster Plantation, England's first colony, using the same tactics as the Plantations of Ireland. Many of the early colonists of North America had their start in colonizing Ireland, including a group known as the West Country Men. When Sir Walter Raleigh landed in Virginia, he compared the Native Americans to the wild Irish. Both Roanoke and Jamestown had been based on the Irish plantation model.
In the late sixteenth century, Protestant England became embroiled in a religious war with Catholic Spain. Seeking to weaken Spain's economic and military power, English privateers such as Francis Drake and Humphrey Gilbert harassed Spanish shipping. Gilbert proposed the colonization of North America on the Spanish model, with the goal of creating a profitable English empire that could also serve as a base for the privateers. After Gilbert's death, Walter Raleigh took up the cause of North American colonization, sponsoring an expedition of 500 men to Roanoke Island. In 1584, the colonists established the first permanent English colony in North America, but the colonists were poorly prepared for life in the New World, and by 1590, the colonists had disappeared.
There are a variety of theories as to what happened to the colonists there. The most popular theory is that the colonists left in search of a new area to settle in the Chesapeake, leaving stragglers to integrate with local Native American tribes. A separate colonization attempt in Newfoundland also failed. Despite the failure of these early colonies, the English remained interested in the colonization of North America for economic and military reasons.
Early colonization, 1607–1630
In 1606, King James I of England granted charters to both the Plymouth Company and the London Company for the purpose of establishing permanent settlements in North America. In 1607, the London Company established a permanent colony at Jamestown on the Chesapeake Bay, but the Plymouth Company's Popham Colony proved short-lived. Approximately 30,000 Algonquian peoples lived in the region at the time. The colonists at Jamestown faced extreme adversity, and by 1617 there were only 351 survivors out of the 1700 colonists who had been transported to Jamestown. After the Virginians discovered the profitability of growing tobacco, the settlement's population boomed from 400 settlers in 1617 to 1240 settlers in 1622. The London Company was bankrupted in part due to frequent warring with nearby American Indians, leading the English crown to take direct control of the Colony of Virginia, as Jamestown and its surrounding environs became known.In 1609, the Sea Venture, flagship of the English London Company, a division of the Virginia Company, bearing Admiral Sir George Somers and the new Lieutenant-Governor for Jamestown, Sir Thomas Gates, was deliberately driven onto the reef off the archipelago of Bermuda to prevent its foundering during a hurricane on the 25th of July. The 150 passengers and crew built two new ships, the Deliverance and Patience and most departed Bermuda again for Jamestown on 11 May 1610. Two men remained behind, and were joined by a third after the Patience returned again, then departed for England, ensuring that Bermuda remained settled, and in the possession of England and the London Company from 1609 to 1612, when more settlers and the first Lieutenant-Governor arrived from England following the extension of the Royal Charter of the London Company to officially add Bermuda to the territory of Virginia.
The archipelago was officially named Virgineola, though this was soon changed to The Somers Isles, which remains an official name though the archipelago had already long been infamous as Bermuda, and the older Spanish name has resisted replacement. The Lieutenant-Governor and settlers who arrived in 1612 briefly settled on Smith's Island, where the three left behind by the Sea Venture were thriving, before moving to St. George's Island where they established the town of New London, which was soon renamed to St. George's Town.
Bermuda was soon more populous, self-sufficient and prosperous than Jamestown and a second company, the Company of the City of London for the Plantacion of The Somers Isles was spun-off from the London Company in 1615, and continued to administer Bermuda after the London Company's Royal Charter was revoked in 1624. Bermuda pioneered tobacco cultivation as the engine for its economic growth, but as Virginia's tobacco agriculture outstripped it in the 1620s, and new colonies in the West Indies also emulated its tobacco industry, the price of Bermudian tobacco fell and the colony became unprofitable for many of the company's shareholders, who mostly had remained in England while managers or tenants farmed their land in Bermuda with the labour of indentured servants. Bermuda's House of Assembly held its first session in 1620, but with no landowners resident in Bermuda there was consequently no property qualification, unlike the case with the House of Commons.
As the bottom fell out of tobacco, many absentee shareholders sold their shares to the occupying managers or tenants, with the agricultural industry quickly shifting towards family farms that grew subsistence crops instead of tobacco. Bermudians soon found they could sell their excess foodstuffs in the West Indies where colonies like Barbados grew tobacco to the exclusion of subsistence crops. As the company's magazine ship would not carry their food exports to the West Indies, Bermudians began to build their own ships from Bermuda cedar, developing the speedy and nimble Bermuda sloop and the Bermuda rig.
Between the late 1610s and the American Revolution, the British shipped an estimated 50,000 to 120,000 convicts to their American colonies.
Meanwhile, the Council for New England sponsored several colonization projects, including a colony established by a group of English Puritans, known today as the Pilgrims. The Puritans embraced an intensely emotional form of Calvinist Protestantism and sought independence from the Church of England. In 1620, the Mayflower transported the Pilgrims across the Atlantic, and the Pilgrims established Plymouth Colony on Cape Cod. The Pilgrims endured an extremely hard first winter, with roughly fifty of the one hundred colonists dying. In 1621, Plymouth Colony was able to establish an alliance with the nearby Wampanoag tribe, which helped the Plymouth Colony adopt effective agricultural practices and engaged in the trade of fur and other materials. Farther north, the English also established Newfoundland Colony in 1610, which primarily focused on cod fishing.
The Caribbean would provide some of England's most important and lucrative colonies, but not before several attempts at colonization failed. An attempt to establish a colony in Guiana in 1604 lasted only two years and failed in its main objective to find gold deposits. Colonies in St Lucia and Grenada also rapidly folded. Encouraged by the success of Virginia, in 1627 King Charles I granted a charter to the Barbados Company for the settlement of the uninhabited Caribbean island of Barbados. Early settlers failed in their attempts to cultivate tobacco, but found great success in growing sugar.