It took the Virginia Company twelve years to learn its first lesson that what had worked for the Spanish in Mexico and in Central and South America would not work in the north. The rest of the seventeenth century saw a long series of struggles over the second lesson: that the only option for an economically viable colony was to create institutions that gave the colonists incentives to invest and to work hard. As North America developed, English elites tried time and time again to set up institutions that would heavily restrict the economic and political rights for all but a privileged few of
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good lesson learned
