American Colonies: The Settling of North America

by Alan Taylor

The colonists bungled their war effort primarily because of bitter political infighting both within and between colonies. Bearing the brunt of the war, Massachusetts resented the indifferent effort made by New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

In contrast to the bloody stalemate of the previous war, the English army and navy won a surprising series of victories in Europe, marking England’s emergence as a first-rank power.

By giving a new priority to overseas expansion, the English committed their empire to maritime commerce rather than to European territory—a dramatic shift that elevated their American colonies to a new importance.

In the peace treaty the French and Spanish also recognized the new English union with Scotland.

Scots pride urged political independence, but the country’s economic dependence on England argued instead for a tighter union. Many Scots wanted improved access to the English market for their commodities, principally linen and cattle. Scots merchants also longed to share in the growing commerce of the North American colonies, which the Navigation Acts reserved for English exploitation.

Scots merchants and politicians had sought their own commercial empire by forcing an entrepôt colony into the midst of Spanish America, at Darien on the strategic Isthmus of Panama, a transit point for trade between the Pacific and the Atlantic. The bold scheme attracted £400,000—nearly a quarter of all the liquid capital in Scotland—and almost all of the imperial ambitions of a small and fragile country.

In 1700, however, the Spanish destroyed Darien, with English acquiescence. The Scots colonial company collapsed ruining the investors and compounding a trade depression in Scotland. The Darien debacle also soured the investment of national hope and pride, reaffirming the Scots sense of economic inferiority to the English.

in 1705 the English threatened to close their border to trade unless the Scots negotiated a more complete union.

Adding a carrot to the stick, the English promised large payments to Scots politicians who had invested in the Darien scheme. To avert a disastrous trade war and rescue their finances, in 1707 the Scottish Parliament narrowly embraced a union that created a new composite realm “by the name of Great Britain.”

Great Britain would have a common flag, coinage, measures, treasury, navy, army, and foreign policy, but England and Scotland would retain distinct legal, educational, and church establishments.

At the price of political subordination, the Scots won access to the thriving English colonies and overseas commerce.

And after 1707, the Scots outnumbered the English as emigrants to the colonies.

In contrast to the navy or the merchant service, the pirate captain could punish no sailor without the consent of the majority. And the pirate captain enjoyed no privileged diet or berth, but had to sleep and mess with the rest of the crew.

By 1730 the campaign virtually exterminated the pirates in the Bahamas, the Carolinas, and the West Indies, bringing a new security to colonial shipping. The suppression enabled merchants to cut shipping costs by eliminating the cannon and extra sailors formerly needed to defend their ships.

By 1713 the Dutch navy was only half the size of the British.

During the early eighteenth century, London supplanted Amsterdam as Europe’s premier center for commerce and high finance. In sum, although it seemed in 1688 that the Dutch had captured England, by 1713 it was clear that the English had captured and co-opted William, and through him had subordinated the Netherlands.

The annual transatlantic crossings tripled from about five hundred during the 1670s to fifteen hundred by the late 1730s. The increasing shipping (and diminished piracy) reduced insurance costs and freight charges, which encouraged the shipment of greater cargos. More and larger ships, some dedicated to the emigrant trade, also cut in half the price of a passage from Europe to the colonies between 1720 and 1770.

Late in the seventeenth century, however, ruling opinion shifted, as the home government became more tolerant of religious diversity; English manufacturing expanded, increasing the demand for cheap labor; and the realm frequently needed additional thousands for an enlarged military. Thereafter, English emigration seemed an economic and strategic loss to the mother country.

By recruiting for colonists in Europe, imperial officials hoped to strengthen the colonies without weakening the mother country.

In 1740, Parliament passed the Plantation Act, which enabled foreign-born colonists to win British citizenship: a necessary prerequisite for legal ownership of land as well as for political rights.

The new recruitment invented America as an asylum from religious persecution and political oppression in Europe—with the important proviso that the immigrants had to be Protestants.

More than any other eighteenth-century empire, the British relied on foreign emigrants for human capital.

Even larger numbers of enslaved Africans poured across the Atlantic as the slave trade escalated, eclipsing the movement of all free emigrants to British America.

Rather than a simple, bilateral trade between the colonies and Britain, the empire developed a multilateral trading system that used bills of exchange drawn on London merchant firms to balance regional credits and debits.

The Navigation Acts locked the Chesapeake and the West Indies into shipping their tobacco and sugar directly to England, but the northern colonies produced little that Britain needed. The northern colonists primarily traded fish, provisions, and lumber to the West Indies, to procure sugar and credits on London.

During the early eighteenth century, New England no longer grew enough wheat to sustain its own people, much less for export. New England’s growing population exceeded its own agricultural capacity, as a parasite compounded the effects of the marginal climate to blight the local wheat harvest. The New English began to import wheat from the more fertile and temperate middle colonies, which escaped the blight and replaced New England as the granary of the West Indies and southern Europe. Formerly the great colonial entrepôt, Boston slipped to third, behind Philadelphia and New York, by 1760.

Indeed, the colonies grew more rapidly than any other economy in the eighteenth century, including the mother country. In 1700 the colonial gross domestic product was only 4 percent of England’s; by 1770 it had blossomed to 40 percent, as the colonies assumed a much larger place within the imperial economy. The growing economy endowed free colonists with a higher standard of living than their counterparts in Europe.

North American mainland, the free colonists probably averaged £13 annually per capita, compared with £11 in Great Britain and £6 in France. In part, that prosperity reflected the colonial exploitation of African slaves, who amounted to a fifth of the population.

In 1718 an Englishman remarked, “The labour of negroes is the principal foundation of riches from the plantations.

But even without many slaves, a common farmer or artisan lived better in New England than in the mother country. Slavery explained some, but not all, of the colonial prosperity. Access to abundant farmland accounted for the difference.

The free colonists also enjoyed a larger disposable income. Virtually exempt from imperial taxes, they paid less than a quarter of the burden borne by English taxpayers.

Surrounded by forests, the colonists paid little for lumber to build their homes and less for firewood to heat them. The relatively large farms and fertile soil enabled colonists to raise or to purchase cheaply the grains, vegetables, milk, and meat of a plentiful diet. The muster rolls for colonial military regiments recorded heights, revealing t...

The growth in urban poverty reflected the greater transatlantic integration of the British empire in three ways. First, the imperial wars swelled the numbers killed, incapacitated, or rendered alcoholic by military service.

Second, after 1763, emigration surged from Europe to the colonies, flooding the seaports with poor newcomers, depressing wages, and swelling unemployment for all. Third, the freer flow of credit, goods, and information across the Atlantic linked the colonies with the mother country in a shared market. Increasingly tied to the metropolitan economy of Britain, the colonial seaports became more vulnerable to the boom-and-bust business cycle.

During the mid-eighteenth century, colonial consumers usually had better credit than common Britons. Over time, the terms of trade shifted in favor of most colonists, especially in the middle colonies and the south, as their produce fetched higher prices while they paid essentially stable prices for English manufactures.

Between 1720 and 1770, per capita colonial imports increased by 50 percent, and the aggregate value more than tripled from about £450,000 in 1700 to more than £1.5 million in 1750. In 1700 the American colonies consumed about 10 percent of British exports; that figure rose to 37 percent by 1772.

Relatively few, however, were English: only 80,000 between 1700 and 1775, compared with 350,000 during the seventeenth century. The decline is especially striking because after 1700 the colonies became cheaper and easier to reach by sea and safer to live in.

In 1717, shortly after the military demobilization of 1713–14, Parliament began to subsidize the shipment of convicted felons to the colonies as an alternative to their execution.

Between 1718 and 1775, the empire transported about fifty thousand felons, more than half of all English emigrants to America during that period.

About 80 percent of the convicts went to Virginia and Maryland, riding in the English ships of the tobacco trade.

At about a third of the £35 price of an African male slave, the convict appealed to some planters as a better investment. Most purchasers were small planters with limited budgets. In a pinch, however, great planters, including George Washington, bought a few convicts to supplement their slaves.

planters employed the convicts as tobacco field hands, subject to the same treatment as slaves.

While English emigration to the colonies flagged, Scots emigration soared to 145,000 between 1707 and 1775. Generally poorer than the English, the Scots had greater incentives to emigrate, and the British Union of 1707 gave them legal access to all of the colonies.

Assimilated to English ways, the Lowland Scots were primarily skilled tradesmen, farmers, and professionals pulled by greater economic opportunity in America.

The Lowland Scots were especially conspicuous as colonial doctors, for more than 150 emigrated between 1707 and 1775.

More desperate than the Lowland Scots, the Highlanders responded primarily to the push of their deteriorating circumstances. In 1746 the British army brutally suppressed a rebellion in the Highlands, and Parliament outlawed many of the Highlanders’ traditions and institutions, creating much discontent.

Preferring cheap if dangerous lands, the Highland Scots clustered in frontier valleys especially along the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, the Mohawk River of New York, and the Altamaha River in Georgia. By clustering, they preserved their distinctive Gaelic language and Highland customs, in contrast with the assimilating Lowland emigrants.

Like the Highlanders, the Ulster Scots fled from deteriorating conditions. During the 1710s and 1720s they suffered from interethnic violence with the Catholic Irish as well as from a depressed market for their linen, the hunger of several poor harvests, and the increased rents charged by grasping landlords.

At first, the Ulster Scots emigrated to Boston, but some violent episodes of New English intolerance persuaded most, after 1720, to head for Philadelphia, the more welcoming seaport of the more tolerant colony of Pennsylvania.

Once in the colonies, the Ulster Scots gravitated to the frontier, where land was cheaper, enabling large groups to settle together.