British North America

British North America

Italian merchant John Cabot’s 1497 voyage from England west to what is now Newfoundland, Canada, was Europe’s first contact with North America since the Vikings. Cabot’s feat intensified English attention to the New World, yet for more than a hundred years, England would trail Spain and other European nations in exploring and exploiting the hemisphere. By 1750, however, Britain, having overcome a multitude of political, religious, and economic crises, was poised to dominate North America.

Early Undertakings

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, two efforts to establish English colonies in America ended in failure and death. In 1582, Sir Humphrey Gilbert personally led a large crew across the Atlantic to reclaim Cabot’s Newfoundland for the queen. Its unfavorable climate and competition from Spanish and Portuguese fishermen dampened Gilbert’s hopes. On the voyage home less than a year later, Gilbert perished in an Azores storm.

Somewhat more successful was Sir Walter Raleigh, Gilbert’s half brother, and, for a time, a court favorite. Raleigh mounted a new colonial project in 1585, sending five ships bearing a hundred colonists to Roanoke Island, off the North Carolina coast.


When these settlers abandoned their mission in 1586, a second group was shipped to Roanoke, including the parents of Virginia Dare, who was, in 1587, the first English child born in North America. By 1590, a series of reprovisioning and rescue missions were reporting that the colony had disappeared, leaving generations of historians to argue whether Indian warfare, internal clashes, famine, disease, or some combination of these had wiped out Raleigh’s colonial ambitions.

As the 17th century dawned, England, despite its 1588 defeat of the Spanish Armada, followed by other triumphs over Spain, was still scarcely a presence in North America. At home, rapid population growth and policies that forced subsistence farmers off the land, combined with Reformation-fueled religious conflicts, were creating both crisis and opportunity.

British colonization in America emerged as a patchwork process that sent royal courtiers, London investors, religious dissident families, and the desperately poor across the Atlantic in search of profits and new hope.

Colonial “Plantation” Before 1660

Britain’s eventual dominion in eastern North America started unpromisingly in 1607 when Jamestown was founded in the region Raleigh had earlier named “Virginia” for Elizabeth I, the presumed “Virgin Queen.”

Disciplinary measures imposed by soldier-adventurer John Smith, followed by John Rolfe’s 1614 introduction of tobacco cultivation, eventually saved Jamestown, although major crises continued. Finding capable colonists in this wild and dangerous land remained difficult; Virginians turned to indentured servitude and eventually slavery for their labor needs.

As religious conflict deepened in the mother country, British dissidents of varying faiths sought refuge, influence, and livelihoods in North America. In 1632, Maryland was founded near Virginia by George Calvert, the first baron Baltimore, a recent convert to Catholicism.

He was granted a proprietary charter by King Charles I, who wife was Catholic. Together, Virginia and Maryland composed the Chesapeake region and survived with similar economies based on tobacco and coerced labor.

Meanwhile, in the Massachusetts Bay region other dissenting Englishmen deliberately sought exile from what they saw as a religiously and politically corrupt homeland. The Pilgrims, who made their way to Plymouth in 1620, and the Puritans, who began arriving in large numbers in 1630, sought to create a religious commonwealth that would serve as a “light to the world” and end the reign of the hated Stuart monarchy.

Shrewd Puritan investors managed to assemble a joint-stock company that won Crown authorization to claim New England land. By the 1640s, more than 20,000 English men and women were living there.

Although more socially stable and economically diversified than the Chesapeake, the growing Puritan religious state experienced problems that fractured Massachusetts Bay. John Winthrop’s leadership soon sparked internal religious dissent, led by Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, resulting their 1635–36 banishment to Rhode Island. Religious differences and a desire for more land led Thomas Hooker and others to relocate in 1636 to what became Connecticut.

With the end of the Cromwell Commonwealth and the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660, Britain hit its imperial stride in the New World. Between 1660 and 1732, all the colonies that would eventually break away in the American Revolution came into existence or were wrenched from European rivals. Additionally, the British made significant inroads in the Canadian Maritime regions east of New France.

In 1664, as part of a consolidation of royal power, Charles II sent a fleet of ships to seize lands along the Hudson River that had been claimed in 1609 by the Dutch West Indian Company and settled by Dutch colonists.

New Netherland, soon renamed New York, was the king’s gift to his brother James, duke of York, who became King James II in 1687. As sole proprietor of a territory that also included New Jersey and Delaware, the duke ruled autocratically, parceling out some of his holdings to favored friends.

Although he was also the duke’s personal friend, William Penn in 1681 became a very different kind of proprietor when, in payment of debts owed Penn’s late father, the king granted him an extensive holding named Pennsylvania.

To the dismay of family and his royal connections, Penn had become a member of the Society of Friends, known scornfully as “Quakers,” and his “Holy Experiment” made Pennsylvania a refuge for Friends and others fleeing religious persecution.

In 1663, Charles II rewarded eight men who had supported his return to the British throne by granting them a proprietorship that they promptly named Carolina, Latin for Charles. By 1670, Carolina was peopled mainly by Virginians, moving south for better or more expansive lands, and Englishmen from West Indian sugar plantations.

This territory became the first in North America to depend heavily on slave labor from its inception. Within 20 years, the colony was profiting from such warm-weather commodities as cotton, indigo, timber, cattle, and rice. By the early 1700s, African slaves outnumbered white settlers in this “Rice Kingdom.”

At its founding in 1732, Georgia was quite unlike other British colonies. Located between Carolina and Spanish-controlled Florida, it had a royal charter from King George II that allowed English general James Oglethorpe to fulfill his philanthropic dream of resettling poor British immigrants.

To assure the virtue of these worthy poor, this new colony’s overseers forbade alcoholic beverages and banned slavery. By 1750, however, Georgia had become a slaveholding society, much like neighboring Carolina.

Mix of Religion and Governance

Britain’s North American colonies began as a hodgepodge of religions, forms of governance, and economic systems. Clinging mainly to the continent’s eastern seaboard, colonists of different regions and settlement histories had little to do with one another.

As Britain began to consolidate its imperial power and goals in the period of political stability that followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688, its colonies experienced enormous population growth and new social and political challenges both within colonial society and in dealings with the “Mother Country.”

In 1651, during Cromwell’s regime, Parliament passed its first Navigation Act, designed to assure that growing colonial holdings, including those in North America, would produce wealth only for Britain’s benefit and not for its European rivals. Many more navigation acts would follow.

These mercantilist laws attempted to control both agricultural and manufactured goods. Many colonists, including plantation owners and New England shipbuilders, were enriched, but these laws also restricted colonial growth and trade initiatives.

As part of its aggressive commercial policy, Britain, by the 18th century, had become the world’s major trader in African slaves, surpassing the Dutch. Although the majority of slaves were destined for the sugar islands of the Caribbean, almost three hundred thousand slaves were “delivered” to the North American colonies between 1700 and the outbreak of the American Revolution.

Slave importation outstripped robust immigration of whites. No longer suffering a manpower glut, England discouraged emigration by its own people (with the exception of convicted criminals) but wooed colonists from many countries, including France, the Netherlands, and German principalities, often offering religious freedom and British citizenship.

As colonial populations increased and competed, issues of governance and home rule emerged. Many colonies had set up assemblies—Virginia’s House of Burgesses of 1619 was the first—to deal with local political problems.

These were by no means representative elected bodies, but were dominated by large landowners and other men of importance. Colonies that traced their origins to proprietors (like Calvert and the duke of York) tended to have more autocratic governments. The New England colonies generally allowed broader participation in political decision making.

Quaker Proprietor William Penn’s policies allowed more than half of Pennsylvania’s male population to have some political say. Royal governors, chosen by the king or Parliament, would often override local assemblies’ intentions. As colonial populations grew in the 1700s, so too did their thirst for effective political power.

Between the Glorious Revolution and the French and Indian War, assemblies in Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, South Carolina, and Massachusetts often contested royal prerogatives and frequently had their way. Colonial legislators asserted their rights as British citizens to participate in lawmaking.

Britain’s imperial dominance in the 18th century was closely connected to its relationships with Native American tribal groups and its use of diplomacy, or more often war, to keep Spain and France from gaining ground in the Western Hemisphere.

Colonial policies were crafted with an eye to outflanking perceived threats from the these two powerful nations, and their native allies. Fearing that an alliance between Spain and France would imperil its colonial interests, Britain entered the 1701 War of the Spanish Succession.

In the subsequent Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, Britain gained control of much of eastern Canada and wrested from Spain its remaining colonial slave trade. More conflicts flared up in succeeding years as the three powers competed for trade preferences and territorial control. Flare-ups occurred regularly between British Carolina and Georgia, and neighboring Spanish Florida.

The “War of Jenkins’ Ear” began in 1739 when Spanish customs officials stopped suspected British smugglers and perhaps cut off the English captain’s ear. By 1744, Britain was fighting both Spain and France for North American and West Indian dominance in the War of the Austrian Succession.

Wars with Indian tribes were a constant from the earliest years of British incursion in North America. In 1622, Opechancanough, the chief who succeeded his brother, Powhatan, became convinced that whites had no intention of leaving.

He and his men attacked Jamestown, killing 300 settlers. In 1675, Wampanoag chief Metacom, known to New Englanders as King Philip, launched a major but ultimately unsuccessful effort to drive out the rapidly growing white population.

Twelve towns in Massachusetts were destroyed; a thousand whites and three thousand natives perished. At almost the same time, Virginians desperate for land were killing local Indians in an uprising known as Bacon’s Rebellion.

But European powers also made alliances with tribes, hoping to recruit their military aid against other tribes allied with their rivals. The powerful Iroquois Confederacy, centered in New York and Pennsylvania, had once helped the Dutch, but later became an important British ally during King Philip’s War. The Iroquois would help British and colonial forces attack the French and their set of Indian allies in the run-up to the 1754 French and Indian War.

By 1750, although not unchallenged, Britain’s North American empire was near its zenith. Britain’s mastery of the continent would soon be enhanced by its smashing victory in the coming war with France. Yet from that victory grew the seeds of colonial rebellion that would, before the end of the century, lose Britain a major portion of North America.

Natives of North America

Natives of North America

Perhaps no other group in human history has experienced as extreme a change in its circumstances as did the indigenous inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere between 1450 and 1750.

The so-called Columbian exchange, set off by Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage from Spain, completely altered the ecology, economy, and web of social relationships among the diverse peoples that Columbus (inaccurately) named “Indians.”

The people who populated North and South America between 40,000 and 15,000 years ago crossed what was then a land bridge between Siberia and modern Alaska and gradually settled the hemisphere.


When a worldwide Ice Age ended about 10,000 years ago, the land route between Asia and the Americas disappeared. By the time of Columbus’s first voyage, historians and anthropologists have estimated that the hemispheric population stood between 10 million and 75 million, most living in Central and South America.

The peoples of North America were diverse in almost every possible way except biologically. Experts argue about the extent of North America’s precontact population—the range is 1 million to 18 million—but most agree that populations began declining several hundred years before Europeans showed up.

By 1450, some large Indian communities in the Southwest, Pacific Northwest, and middle Mississippi Valley had vanished or dispersed, abandoning sophisticated buildings and artifacts. Factors that have been proposed to explain these declines include climate change, warfare, and disease.

By 1450, there were dozens of tribal groups and alliances speaking diverse languages and following very different religious and social customs. There were some commonalities: Most Indians were animists, believing in the spiritual power of their natural surroundings.

They devised elaborate rituals to placate these spirits, especially those of animals they had killed. In many areas human burials were placed in elaborate and extensive earthen mounds. Most tribes respected shamans (healers) and believed that a Great Spirit oversaw the natural world.

Because tribes were likely to move often in search of better land or more abundant game—or to avoid other hostile tribes—property ownership in the European sense was all but unknown. Archaeologists have found abundant evidence of trade routes that spanned the continent, bringing tribes together in the process of tukar barang and exchange.

In most North American tribes, women were in charge of agricultural production, while men hunted for game. Maize (corn), first cultivated in Mexico, was by the time of contact a basic crop in much of North America.

Squash and beans were also staples of most tribes’ diets. While by no means environmentalists in any modern sense, most North American tribes were well adapted to their surroundings and were often helpful to inexperienced Europeans.

For example, natives taught French explorers how to build lightweight birchbark canoes to travel where their clunky wooden ships were useless. Others helped Europeans identify strange plants and animals, learning which were edible and which poisonous.

Most famously, Squanto, a Patuxet who had been kidnapped by an English slave trader in 1614, returned to America in time to teach the Pilgrims how to fish and grow corn, keeping them alive to hold a Thanksgiving in 1621.

Warfare was a constant among various Indian groups both before and after European contact. Early on, some tribal groups welcomed alliances with Europeans as a way to overpower their traditional rivals, in part by acquiring the foreigners’ goods and technologies, especially their superior weapons.

But as the trickle of Europeans became a flood, especially in British-claimed regions, some tribes forged alliances with traditional friends and even enemies to counter European threats to Indian survival.

For example, Algonquian chief Powhatan, head of a strong confederacy, at first welcomed Jamestown settlers, even allowing his daughter, Pocahontas, to marry Englishman John Rolfe.

But in 1622, Powhatan’s brother Opechancanough, now leader of the Powhatan Confederacy, launched a surprise attack on settlers, killing more than three hundred of them and capturing women and children. Ultimately, the Virginians rallied, using trickery and even poison to reclaim their holdings.

In this early war, as in later conflicts, tribes were responding to growing white populations. Whites were no longer perceived simply as traders who would soon move on; they had become settlers using—and claiming as their own—traditional tribal lands.

Disease did even more damage than European land grabs and weapons of war. Because Indians were genetically very similar, and because they had been isolated in the New World for many centuries, they were at the mercy of pathogens carried by the invaders.

The worst of these was smallpox, with measles and influenza also sowing death. These diseases killed Europeans, too, but ravaged the Indian population. Long before germs were known to cause disease, Europeans praised God for smiting Indian enemies, thus making it easier to colonize America.

Some Europeans “assisted” this process by purposely distributing to Indians smallpox-infected blankets and other tainted goods. Smallpox epidemics could and did change the course of battles and negotiations between natives and Europeans.

Southwest

Descendants of the Anasazi, whose complex civilization came to a puzzling end in about 1300 c.e., the Pueblo Indians, including Hopi and Zuni, for centuries had lived in settled agricultural communities in today’s southwestern United States.

The Spanish, who had already made a fortune exploiting Central and South America, in the 17th century also began aggressively exploring the southern reaches of North America, with terrible consequences for the native population. In 1598, Juan de Oñate marched four hundred soldiers, priests, and colonists into New Mexico, killing almost half the residents of the cliff city of Acoma and forcing most of the rest into slavery.

In 1680, Popé, a Pueblo religious leader who had been punished for rejecting Franciscan priests’ attempts to convert him, led the Pueblo Revolt, the most successful native retaliation in this masa of European occupation.

Indian ranks had thinned through disease and compelled labor, but they still outnumbered the Spanish colony of about three thousand. The Pueblo peoples spoke several different languages, yet they managed to unite, with the help of traditionally hostile Apache, to expel the Spaniards and destroy symbols of Catholicism.

Although internal native strife, including raids by Apache and Navajo enemies, soon resumed, and the Spanish retook New Mexico in 1692, the Pueblo were treated with greater respect, becoming one of the few tribal groupings in North America to mostly retain ancestral homelands.

Southeast and Florida

In 1513, Hernán Ponce de León invaded Florida in search of slaves, wealth, and promises of eternal youth but was repulsed by local Calusa Indians. More sustained and far-ranging efforts led by Hernando De Soto and others in the 1540s explored the Gulf coast and penetrated as far as the Great Plains. Not until 1565 did King Philip II authorize what was essentially a Florida military base to deter British, French, and Dutch piracy of Spanish gold.

In the process, the Spanish massacred a tiny colony of refugee French Huguenots and built a fort at St. Augustine, the oldest U.S. site continuously peopled by Europeans. Efforts to convert the local Guale tribe sparked an uprising in 1597. The tiny Spanish colony put down the uprising in 1602 but never attracted more than a few thousand settlers.

In other sections of the Southeast, a confederacy among four tribes—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek—preceded the European invasion. They would be tested by European incursions that forced these tribes to relocate, sometimes competing among themselves for territory.

By 1745, the Cherokee were allied with the British in their effort to contain France and Spain, focusing on lands between Florida and the recently established colony of Georgia. In this period, Creek began migrating to Florida under pressure from both Europeans and members of their own tribe. In the 19th century, they would call themselves Seminole.

British and French American Alliances

The five (later six) tribes that became the Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee) centered in what became New York State, had also, prior to European contact, initiated a Great League of Peace in response to destructive warfare among tribes.

These “people of the longhouse” included the Mohawk, Seneca, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Oneida tribes, joined in the early 1700s by Carolina’s Tuscarora. The Iroquois were not nomadic but lived in large villages. Their longhouses were wood and bark structures that might be 400 feet long and accommodated many family groups.

Skilled negotiators, the tribes individually and confederacy as a whole for a time held their own against Dutch, British, and French claims and demands. Some among the Iroquois hoped to remain neutral, but they soon were edging toward the British.

By the 1670s, the Iroquois and British had pledged mutual friendship. After a sneak attack by French forces in 1687, the Five Nations retaliated by attacking New France settlements on behalf of British objectives in what was known in North America as King William’s War.

They fought both the French and France’s Indian allies, including the Huron and Abenaki and Algonquian people of the Great Lakes region. Both groups of Indians inflicted and suffered terrible casualties; by 1701, the Iroquois were promising their people to remain neutral in future European conflicts.

By 1750, eastern and Great Lakes Indians of many tribes, displaced by white settlement, were seeking new lands in the Ohio Valley, on the frontier between British and French territorial claims and control.

The Iroquois, as well as Shawnee, Delaware, Cherokee, and Chickasaw, were all trying to use this no-man’s-land to enhance trade and perhaps prevent both the British and French from expanding even farther into the continent.

In 1749, Virginia awarded some of its favored citizens development rights to almost 8,000 square miles of the Ohio Valley. The ensuing French and Indian wars would set off a series of events that ultimately made hundreds of Native tribes—survivors of 258 years of warfare, land loss, and disease—strangers in their own land.

Tobacco in Colonial British America

Tobacco in Colonial British America

Tobacco is an herb native to the Americas. It is believed to have originated in South America. In 1535, Jacques Cartier found natives on the Canadian island of Montreal using tobacco. The root of the word tobacco comes from the native word for pipe or instrument used to consume tobacco among some native people.

Sir John Hawkins took tobacco to England about 1564 although some Englishmen may have been smoking tobacco before this. In less than two centuries, tobacco was the most important export of the English colonies in North America. It remained a main export of the United States until the addictive and destructive effects of tobacco use became widely understood in the 20th century.

Among natives of the Americas, tobacco use generally had a ceremonial aspect. There is disagreement whether tobacco was always ceremonial or was used in everyday life among indigenous Americans. Because Native Americans believed tobacco was a gift from the spiritual world, they used it as a healing herb.


Tobacco was used for toothaches and earaches and as a painkiller and antiseptic. Tobacco was an important gift item to seal commitments and social arrangements among Native Americans. In North America, a pipe was generally used in tobacco ceremonies.

Growth of Colonies

The future of the colonies in British North America, especially Virginia, grew because of the production of tobacco. Tobacco production affected the economic, social, and geographical development of much of the southern United States.

Jamestown colony in Virginia in 1612 was the first to find a means of curing tobacco so it could withstand the trip across the Atlantic to Europe. Sailors spread the habit of pipe smoking to northern Europe. When tobacco was introduced into European society, it became popular as a medicinal herb.

Sir Walter Raleigh persuaded Queen Elizabeth I to smoke tobacco in 1600. Although tobacco growing soon began in many parts of the world, including Europe, the British North American colonies soon became the primary source of tobacco for much of the world.

The English obtained tobacco by growing it in their colonies. King James I of England was one of the first to label smoking a filthy, unhealthful habit of lazy people. However, his dislike of tobacco did not prevent him from collecting taxes on the importation of tobacco into England. The Spanish Inquisition banned two other Native American drugs, coca and peyote but, as had King James I, respected the revenue tobacco brought to Spain and did not ban it.

When the Dutch discovered tobacco, they saw it as a bond with the other major Protestant country of Europe, England. Unlike the English, the Dutch sought to gain tobacco by trading for it. The Dutch focus in the New World became setting up trading posts to buy tobacco rather than establishing colonies to grow it.

The production of tobacco was highly labor intensive. At first, indentured servants from Europe labored to produce tobacco but by 1675, African slaves replaced them. Besides labor, the production of tobacco required large amounts of land.

The coastal areas of Virginia and Maryland had lost nine-tenths of their Native American population in a smallpox epidemic in 1617–19. This left land open for the cultivation of tobacco. As indentured servants won their freedom, they too became tobacco growers.

Soon the North American colonists needed more land to grow tobacco. Tobacco quickly removes the nutrients from the soil in which it is grown. Colonists traded with Native Americans for their land and forced the native population farther from the Atlantic coast.

While the tidewater colonies of Virginia and Maryland were engaged in growing tobacco, some northern colonies were forbidding the use of tobacco. In 1632, the Massachusetts Court of Assistants and General Court levied fines on persons caught “taking” tobacco.

Later the colonies of New Netherland (now New York) banned smoking. Connecticut banned the public smoking of tobacco in 1647. Some bans on smoking were more concerned with the danger of fire caused by smoking materials. The Articles of Piracy had rules controlling the smoking of an open pipe on board a pirate ship.

The Navigation Act in 1651 allowed only English ships to import tobacco into England. This angered the Dutch, the Scottish merchants, and the colonies. The Second Navigation Act of 1660 required colonists to sell tobacco only to the English.

Fully 90 percent of all tobacco imported to Europe came through England. These acts were the beginning of what the colonists in British North America would see as tyrannical treatment by the British government.

Used as Currency

The value of tobacco was so high and reliable that it was used as currency in the colonies. When inferior-quality tobacco appeared in North American exports, Virginia enacted the Inspection Act of 1730.

This regulation of export of tobacco required the product to pass through government-controlled warehouses, where it was inspected and approved for export from Virginia. The size of hogsheads, the barrels in which tobacco was packed, was also regulated. Soon Maryland enacted its own inspection acts.

Since the planting of tobacco quickly exhausted the land, land was not the measure of wealth; rather wealth resided in the number of slave laborers a family owned. Most people who owned land owned slaves. Unlike slave holders in the Caribbean, North American colonists encouraged their slaves to have children. Slaves were not viewed as an expendable commodity.

Tobacco was one reason why the culture of the southern colonies was different from that of the northern colonies. Villages were less important in tobacco-growing areas because people had to live farther apart. Landowning families often controlled the local government, unlike in the more democratic communities in New England.

New France

New France

Although arriving late to the European scramble for North America, France for a time claimed the largest portion of today’s United States and Canada, stretching from Newfoundland to Louisiana and including the Great Lakes and Mississippi Valley. However, New France failed to attract a large population and, by 1750, France was near losing much of its territory to an ascendant British North America.

In 1524, Italian explorer Giovanni di Verrazano was hired by France’s King Francis I to find a passage through North America to Asia, a route that, after many nations failed to find this “Northwest Passage,” was eventually confirmed to be mythical.

However, Verrazano did bring back information about Atlantic coastal regions from Carolina to Nova Scotia. A decade later, seeking gold and the elusive sea passage to the Orient, Jacques Cartier, who may have been part of Verrazano’s expedition, commanded three voyages.


He sailed into the St. Lawrence River, planting a cross bearing the king’s coat of arms to claim a region that included sites that became Québec and Montreal. Returning in 1541, Cartier and his crew established the tiny and short-lived colony of Charlesbourg-Royal, near Montreal, causing tension with the Iroquois and other local tribes.

Scurvy and fierce winter weather soon ended the colonial experiment. After a series of exploratory trips, Cartier returned to France carrying what he believed were gold and diamonds; his booty proved to be iron pyrite (fools’ gold) and common quartz.

Although Crown-sanctioned explorations faded after Cartiers’s inauspicious akibat voyage, fishermen from France (and many other European countries) maintained a robust presence in North America as did traders in furs who dealt with local native tribes. It was these opportunities that reawakened French interest in North America.

New France Beginnings

Samuel de Champlain was a map maker employed by a fur-trading company, not a military man, but his leadership abilities during renewed French explorations in the early 1600s made him New France’s “father” and its first governor. In 1608, Champlain and his associates chose a location on the St. Lawrence River at Québec as their fur-trading settlement.

Champlain forged alliances with many Indian tribes, including the Huron of the Great Lakes, and also championed the idea of more permanent French settlement along the St. Lawrence. In 1633, two years before his death, Champlain was appointed New France’s governor by Cardinal Richelieu, top minister to King Louis XIII.

Eastern Canada was not the only focus of French interest in North America. As fur traders penetrated deeper into the continent in search of the best pelts and cooperative native suppliers, their efforts led to further exploration and land claims.

In 1673, Canadian-born Louis Jolliet and French Jesuit missionary Père Jacques Marquette used information from natives to trace the oceanward course of the Mississippi River in hopes, soon dashed, that it flowed into the Pacific Ocean.

Father Marquette, who was a missionary to tribes in what is now Michigan, died soon after this exhausting expedition on the banks of a river later named the Père Marquette in his honor. Jolliet, who had early on given up the priesthood for fur trading, later explored Hudson Bay and mapped the Labrador coast.

Four years after this Mississippi expedition, French-born René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de LaSalle, who had relocated to New France in 1667, pushed French territorial claims yet further. Arriving at the huge river’s mouth in 1682, LaSalle claimed the vast Mississippi Valley for France, naming this territory Louisiana, for King Louis XIV.

LaSalle’s ambitions, fueled by greed and possible mental illness, did not stop there. Promising to claim Spanish Mexico for France, the adventurer ran out of supplies and was murdered in 1687 by his own hungry men.

Born into a wealthy Montreal family, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de Bienville in 1701 became acting governor of France’s new southern claims and for 40 years fought to keep his small French colony safe amid Indian, Spanish, and British hostility. In 1718, Bienville spearheaded the creation of New Orleans as an administrative center and port.

Unlike the British in their early colonial years, France did not have excess population at home and provided little incentive for its citizens to brave a stormy Atlantic and face a harsh climate and often-hostile Native population in the New World.

Early on, the tiny French presence in Canada was 80 percent male and consisted mainly of fishermen, fur traders, and Franciscan and Jesuits priests. Known by the Indians as the “Black Robes,” the priests intended to convert Indians to Catholicism.

An early religious mission, called Sainte-Marie, among the Hurons, was built in 1615. Located on Ontario’s Wye River, by 1639, it was home base for 13 priests. When fighting broke out in 1648 between the Huron and their Iroquois enemies, the priests set fire to their mission, fearing its desecration.

From 1627 to 1663, a centralized commercial company created by Cardinal Richelieu struggled to squeeze profits out of New France, succeeding only with furs. There were barely 3,000 colonists in 1663, when King Louis XIV intervened, making New France an official French province.

Troops were sent to protect settlements with fortifications, and to project French power to native tribes and European rivals. A royal shipment of 850 prospective brides, known as filles du roi, or “the king’s young women,” helped to stabilize the colony and assure natural increase in its population. By 1700, New France had 19,000 white inhabitants.

Under this new regime, St. Lawrence River estates were set aside for nobles and military officers. A near-feudal setup, it was called the seigneurial system. New France’s habitants, or ordinary settlers, mostly farmed land owned by some two hundred seigneuries granted by the Crown. This tenant farming system of rents and allotments outlasted French control (and the French monarchy), surviving into the 19th century.

Although agriculture would occupy the energies of the great majority of French Canadians, the voyageurs—fur traders who traveled to French outposts like Detroit (founded in 1701 by Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac) and Prairie du Chien (Wisconsin)—had a more romantic image.

Generally, voyageurs were licensed by the authorities; their rivals were the socalled coureurs de bois, unlicensed traders who aggressively explored the farthest reaches of French America, including New Orleans, in pursuit of valuable furs, especially beaver pelts, and markets for their animal skins and other goods.

Challenges to French

Compared to the British and Spanish in this era, French colonists treated Native Americans with great respect. Friendly relations with local Indian tribes were crucial to French success in the fur trade; colonists were also well aware that their numbers were too small to deter major attacks. From the Indian viewpoint, the fact that Frenchmen were not arriving in huge numbers assured some tribal leaders that they could coexist with these interlopers.

On the other hand, good intentions on both sides did little to spare the Indians from deadly smallpox and other European diseases. Jesuit pressure on Indians to adopt Catholicism, along with European clothing and behavior, although attracting quite a few converts, was generally met with suspicion. There was a significant level of intermarriage, mostly between French men and Indian women, creating a group known as Métis.

The Huron and other Great Lakes and eastern tribes began forging strong alliances with the French in 1615, but wars with the powerful Iroquois Confederacy, allies of Britain, punctuated the history of New France.

New France’s huge landholdings were a noose that encircled Britain’s Atlantic Seaboard colonies, leading to a number of altercations between the two European superpowers, both at home and in North America.

The 1713 Treaty of Utrecht that ended the 12-year-long War of the Spanish Succession gave Britain dominion over a large sector of eastern French Canada including the rich agricultural lands of Acadia and destroyed much of France’s overseas trade.

By the time war again broke out in 1754, the population of British North America was 20 times larger than New France’s and France’s grip on North America was near its end. When French emperor Napoleon I sold Louisiana to the new United States in 1803, New France was a memory, although its French Canadian and Cajun cultures would survive and flourish.

Race and Racism in the Americas

Race and Racism in the Americas

Beginning in the years after conquest, Latin America and the Caribbean experienced a societywide, centuries-long coming together of European, African, and indigenous American populations.

The precise nature of that coming together varied according to time, place, and circumstance, generating a complex and shifting mosaic of racial categories, boundaries, and identities. In British North America, in contrast, Native American were on the whole excluded from the dominant Anglo society, while Africans were included in that society while relegated to its lowest rung.

This latter trajectory led, over time, to a largely dichotomous conception of race—a racial universe consisting of blacks (or Negroes) and whites, along with other categories (Indians, Asians, and others) but no substantial intermediate categories (save “half-breeds” and similar epithets designating white-Indian mixes). By the 1800s, this dichotomous conception of race coalesced in the United States into the “one drop rule,” in which a single drop of “Negro blood” made a person Negro.


French North America followed a different trajectory, with French traders along the St. Lawrence River, in the Great Lakes region, and in the Mississippi River valley mixing and intermarrying with native peoples to a much greater extent than in British North America.

The resulting “mixed” racial categories, generically termed the Métis (equivalent to the Spanish term mestizo), can be taken as emblematic of the different ideas and practices of race and racism in French and British colonial North America.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, in contrast, there evolved very different cultural understandings and social practices of race that there, too, varied widely across time and space. In general, racial categories here ranged across a spectrum from dark skinned to light skinned and were defined by more than skin color.

Hair texture, nose shape, facial architecture, upbringing, social class—the latter exemplified in the popular locution “money whitens”—and many other factors combined to determine a person’s precise location in the complex and fluid grid of racial categories.

Spaniards in particular were especially concerned with maintaining their limpieza de sangre (purity of blood), a concern routinely expressed in law and custom. The irony was that such “purity of blood” never existed.

In fact Spaniards and Iberians in general around the year 1500—sometimes called the “mestizos of Europe”—could trace their genetic heritage to centuries of biogenetic mixing in consequence of Iberia’s geographic location as a land bridge between western Europe and North Africa—a population that combined northern and western European, North African, trans-Mediterranean, and sub-Saharan African “racial strains.”

Race, virtually all modern scholars agree, is a social construct, a cultural imposition that exhibits only the most tenuous connection to biology or genetics. Biogenetic diversity is a fundamental feature of the species Homo sapiens.

Yet as biologists, anthropologists, and the scientific community in general universally agree, there does not exist, “out there in the world,” an objective biogenetic reality that corresponds to historically developed, “commonsensical” conceptions of “race.”

Among the most common facts cited in support of this argument is that there exists far more biogenetic diversity within a given “race” (say, Africans or Caucasians) than between “races.” A frequently invoked distinction in this regard is between “genotype” and “phenotype.”

The latter, comprising various visible markers such as skin color, hair texture, and so on, bears no substantial relation to the former, which consists of an individual’s (or, more broadly, an organism’s) genetic makeup and heredity.

These and related contemporary understandings of “race” did not exist in the period covered in this volume. Instead there emerged across Latin America and the Caribbean highly elaborate and varied racial categories meant to pigeonhole any given individual’s racial background and characteristics.

In addition to mestizos (Indian-Spanish), mulattos and pardos (African-Spanish), and zambos (African-Indian), there emerged in Spanish America, in different times and places, hundreds of more precise categories: castizo or quadroon (mestizo-Spanish), octoroon (quadroon-Spanish), quintroon or sextroon (octoroon-Spanish), Morisco (mulatto-Spanish), cholo (mestizo-Indian), quinterona (Spanish-mulatto), and many more. Toward the end of the colonial period, such efforts to pinpoint racial categories faltered, leading to increasing use of the generic term castas to refer to mixed-race peoples generally.

In Portuguese Brazil the most salient categories were mamelucos, mestiços, and caboclos. The greater propensity for Portuguese men (and to a lesser extent, women) to mix freely and intermarry with indigenous and African populations, and with their “mixed-race” offspring, eventually led, after independence, to a Brazilian national myth of “racial democracy”—the notion that racism did not exist in Brazil.

The fallacious nature of this myth is the subject of an expansive literature. In fact, in Brazil as elsewhere in the Americas, there existed a very strong correlation between social class and social race.

Darker skin and more Indian or African phenotypes were most commonly associated with lower social class and lesser social privilege, lighter skin and more European physiognomy with higher social class and greater social privilege.

Intricate gradations of racial categories did not mean an absence of racism, but rather different forms of race and racism in different parts of the Americas—not only in Spanish, Portuguese, and British colonies, but in French and Dutch colonies as well.

In virtually every sphere, from major social indices such as employment and life expectancy, to popular media such as television and film, the legacies of those distinctive heritages of racism remain profoundly apparent to the present day.

Hudson’s Bay Company

Hudson’s Bay Company logo

It is one of the ironies of history that the British owe the beginnings of the famous Hudson’s Bay Company to their traditional enemies in North America: the French. Pierre-Esprit Radisson (who posthumously gave his name to the famed modern hotel chain) and his older brother-in-law, Médard Chouart, sieur des Groseilliers, were two of the famed French coureurs de bois, or “runners of the woods,” who began the trade in beaver skins.

In 1659, the hoard of pelts that Radisson and des Groseilliers brought to Quebec was so great it aroused the greed of the governorgeneral of New France, Pierre de Voyer, the vicomte d’Argenson. He had arrived in Quebec on July 11, 1658, to serve as the fifth governor-general of the colony.

Charles II, enjoying a fortunate beginning to his reign, was never one to miss the opportunity of seeking riches, in part because the British parliament sought to limit his power by the amount of money it voted him each year. According to Empire of the Bay, Radisson wrote, “The King gave good hope that we should have a ship ready for an expedition for the next spring. And he granted us 40 shillings a week for our maintenance.”

Queen Elizabeth I had made her mark by chartering the Honorable East India Company in 1600, and King Charles II had decided to do the same by chartering a company to trade with New France. However, before committing his limited royal funds to outright backing for what would become known as the “Empire of the Bay,” Charles II first commissioned an exploratory voyage.


On June 3, 1668, des Groseilliers and Radisson headed back to New France, this time on two English vessels, the Eaglet and the Nonsuch. The mission was so urgent that Charles sent the ships in 1668, barely a year after the end of the Second Dutch War, a naval conflict with the Netherlands.

Fierce Atlantic storms off the west coast of Ireland buffeted the ships, and the Eaglet was forced to return to England. However, the Nonsuch continued its voyage successfully to New France. To Charles II, the voyage had proved the worth of the dreams of des Groseilliers and Radisson.

The king formally chartered the Governors and Company of Adventurers Trading into Hudson’s Bay, forever known as the Hudson’s Bay Company. To oversee the company, he appointed his relative, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, who had served his father, Charles I, as a commander of cavalry in the English Civil War.

However, it would not be long before the French in New France took action against this new British threat along the remote shores of Hudson’s Bay. In 1686 and 1697, the French mounted combined land and sea assaults that effectively broke the back of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

With the British main effort in the New World fixed on protecting the colonies on the East Coast of the Americas, little could be spared for the outposts in the frozen north. Besides, the French attacking from New France had far less distance to travel to attack the forts of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The main Hudson’s Bay posts, York Factory, Rupert House, and Albany Fort, fell into the hands of the French.

Throughout the 18th century, a series of wars was fought between England and France for the control of New France and the vast wealth in fur in the interior. Called the French and Indian Wars in the United States, the conflicts saw French and English pitted in savage battles along the eastern coast of North America; both sides generally ignored the frozen north of Hudson’s Bay.

On September 13, 1759, a French army under Louis-Joseph, marquis de Montcalm, was soundly defeated outside Quebec by a British force under General James Wolfe. Both men were killed from battle wounds, but the battle marked the decisive defeat of the French in North America. Although the British later lost a battle outside Quebec, the French were finally forced to surrender at Montreal in 1760. By the terms of the Treaty of Paris in 1763, all of New France became part of the British Empire.

The leaders of the Hudson’s Bay Company felt they could exploit the great wealth of the fur trade, free from the raids of the French and their Indian allies. The French alliance against England in the American Revolution, however, brought war again to Hudson’s Bay.

The company’s first great explorer, Samuel Hearne, was forced to surrender Fort Prince of Wales to a French squadron under Jean-François de Galoup, comte de La Pérouse. After the Treaty of Paris ended the war, however, Hearne was able to return to open a new post at Churchill. But a new threat came from an unexpected corner: from within the British Empire in North America.

By the 1770s, rival fur traders began to appear to contest the monopoly of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Formally chartered in 1779 as the North West Fur Company in Montreal, the newcomers determined to wrest control of the fur trade from the Hudson’s Bay Company trappers by any means necessary.

The North West Fur Company proved much more aggressive than the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose long monopoly had bred in it a spirit of complacency that the “Nor’westers” were quick to exploit. As a result of this competition, exploration and the expansion of trade moved into the interior of the continent.

The North West Company was much more flexible than the London-based Hudson’s Bay Company; while Hudson’s Bay’s men had to defer to their distant management, the partners in the North West Company were in the field and met every summer on the Lake Superior shore to determine trapping and harvesting strategies for the coming season.

Spurred on by the enterprising spirit of the Nor’westers, the company produced two of the greatest explorers in all of North American history: David Thompson and Alexander Mackenzie. Significantly, Thompson had first signed on the roster of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1784, moving to the North West Fur Company in 1797.

During his tenure, he charted the course of the Columbia River, located the source of the Mississippi River, and explored throughout the Missouri River area. He retired in 1812, having logged nearly 55,000 miles in the wilderness by canoe and on foot.

Alexander Mackenzie would equal Thompson in the annals of North American exploration. In June 1789, Mackenzie began with a party of Indians to explore for the Arctic Sea, seeking the Northwest Passage to the Orient, which had lured English mariners since the time of Queen Elizabeth I.

On July 14, 1789, Mackenzie found the Arctic Sea. The Scotsman would crown his exploring career with a search for an overland route to the Pacific. He began this trek in May 1793 and with the aid of the Bella Coola tribe reached the Pacific on July 22.

The great explorations of Thompson and Mackenzie opened more territory to the Canadian West for the North West Company at a time when the original territory worked by the trappers of the Hudson’s Bay Company was now suffering from diminishing animal population; the hunters were trapping to the brink of extinction.

The Hudson’s Bay Company was being encircled by the new fur trading posts, and the Nor’westers were moving into the United States as well. In his 1806 expedition to claim the northern regions of the Louisiana Purchase for the United States, the U.S. army explorer Zebulon Pike staked his claim on a North West Company post by having his soldiers shoot down the British flag and raise the American one.

The climax came when Thomas Douglas, the fifth earl of Selkirk, bought a controlling interest in Hudson’s Bay Company. The company awarded the earl a massive tract of land—which was right in the middle of the western territory now being exploited by the North West Company. In 1812 Scottish immigrants arrived in what became known as the Selkirk Settlement.

Many of these were Scots dispersed during the Highland Clearances, when their own lords expelled them from their ancestral “crofter” farms to make room for the raising of sheep. Immediately, the Nor’west Company began a guerrilla war against the newcomers, its ranks filled with métis, the offspring of French Canadians and Native Americans.

The climax came at Seven Oaks, in modern-day Winnipeg, on June 19, 1816. Robert Semple, with a force of Hudson’s Bay men, met a force of Nor’wester Métis under Cuthbert Grant. In the skirmish that followed, Grant and his Nor’westers massacred Semple and the Hudson’s Bay men.

Despite this, the odds were in favor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The buccaneering tactics of the North West Company frightened off staid City of London investors, and the Hudson’s Bay Company still held the Royal Charter of 1670.

Finally, London stepped in to end the hostilities, essentially giving title of the North West Fur Company to the Hudson’s Bay Company. This gave the Hudson’s Bay Company a tract of nearly 3 million square miles—most of North America. Today, the company still operates, supplying goods and services for remote settlements in western Canada.

Stamp Act

1765 One Penny Stamp

The Stamp Act was a revenue enhancement on a multifariousness of impress material, legal documents, dice, as well as playing cards intended to heighten an estimated £60,000 to pay the costs of housing British troops stationed inwards North America to render for colonial defense.

George Grenville, First Lord of the Treasury as well as Chancellor of the Exchequer nether King George III from 1763 until 1765, called for its enactment equally business office of a larger excogitation for to a greater extent than effectively managing Great Britain’s North American territories.

Grenville announced his intention to levy a postage stamp revenue enhancement on the American colonies inwards March 1764 as well as indicated that they had i twelvemonth to shipping service their objections. Although or therefore opposed the measure, Grenville did non expression whatever variety of widespread opposition to the tax.

Consequently, Parliament passed the mensurate amongst piffling fence or opposition on 22 March 1765, but the mensurate did non become into outcome until 1 Nov 1765. Yet, from this innocuous beginning, the American colonists chop-chop interpreted Grenville’s telephone telephone for a postage stamp revenue enhancement equally business office of a vast conspiracy to deny the colonists their basic rights equally Englishmen as well as to economically enslave them.


Two events led to the passage of the Stamp Act: the debt crisis caused yesteryear the Seven Years’ War as well as a Native American uprising inwards the Great Lakes part as well as Ohio River Valley led yesteryear an Ottawa chieftain named Pontiac.

The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) was fought betwixt Great United Kingdom of Great Britain as well as Northern Ireland as well as French Republic for command of North America; this state of war led to British domination inwards North America amongst the exception of New Spain—the territory due west of the Mississippi River. The state of war left United Kingdom of Great Britain as well as Northern Ireland amongst a large debt as well as a novel North American empire to manage—both of which required additional revenues. After waging a long state of war against the French for command of the Ohio as well as Mississippi River valleys, United Kingdom of Great Britain as well as Northern Ireland had to human face upward or therefore other crisis.

Chief Pontiac as well as his followers launched a serial of strikes that led to the loss of well-nigh every fort due west of Niagara inside a few weeks. The systematic Native American elbow grease targeting British forts began tapering off inwards 1764, as well as hostilities formally ceased when Pontiac surrendered to the British inwards July 1766.

Pontiac’s rebellion highlighted the demand for to a greater extent than effective administration of the colonial settlements inwards America equally good equally the demand to bolster colonial defense; the uprising also gave an added feel of urgency to Parliament’s demand to secure additional revenue through the Stamp Act.

Grenville started to implement a comprehensive excogitation to address the emerging majestic crisis developing inwards America. To forbid hereafter Native American uprisings, Grenville sought to suit colonial boundaries inwards North America, which basically meant to carve upward the English linguistic communication colonists from Native American tribal lands.

In pursuit of this goal, the Grenville ministry building implemented the Proclamation of 1763 as well as laid the Appalachian Mountains equally the western edge of American settlement; the annunciation reserved the mass of the Ohio as well as Mississippi River valleys equally tribal lands for the Native Americans who inhabited the region.

Once the novel borders were set, they would live enforced yesteryear the structure of a string of frontier forts that would identify British troops, should in that place live or therefore other Indian uprising. The implementation of the Proclamation of 1763 necessitated the collection of additional revenues to pay for colonial defense. In the bespeak of such revenue, Grenville secured passage of the Sugar Act as well as the Stamp Act.

Many American colonists, however, did non regard Grenville’s agenda equally an elbow grease to grapple to a greater extent than effectively Britain’s novel transatlantic empire; they viewed his efforts equally business office of a vast conspiracy to redefine the human relationship betwixt crown as well as colony to their disadvantage, yesteryear stripping away their basic rights equally Englishmen.

The logic behind this fright of conspiracy stemmed from the uncomplicated reality that the taxes would convey to live paid inwards specie (i.e., golden as well as silverish coin). The work for the colonists who had to pay the taxes related to the absence of specie inwards America—they did non convey the way to pay the tax.

Yet, if they did non pay, they would live inwards violation of the law. Grenville made it clear he intended to enforce these measures as well as that all infractions would live tried inwards the vice-admiralty courts—a motion that effectively denied those who violated the police line a jury trial.

The simultaneous passage of a 4th measure, the Currency Act of 1764, fanned American fears of conspiracy because it mandated that someone debts could no longer live paid amongst newspaper currency; such debts would also convey to live paid inwards specie. The American colonists did non convey plenty money to pay their taxes, permit lone their someone debts equally well.

The combined effects of the Proclamation of 1763, the Sugar Act, the Currency Act, as well as the Stamp Act led many prominent American colonists to the determination that Grenville’s ministry building sought to enslave them economically.

Grenville’s reliance on the vice-admiralty courts to prosecute violators convinced many Americans that they did non convey whatever legal recourse to fighting these measures; consequently, those who were adamantly opposed to Grenville’s agenda took extralegal (or illegal) action. In many respects, the Stamp Act represented the in conclusion straw, as well as widespread protests against the Stamp Act ensued.

In cities throughout the colonies, radical groups, led yesteryear men such equally Samuel Adams of Massachusetts as well as Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, organized mob activity that, through violence as well as intimidation, forced the appointed postage stamp distributors to resign earlier the 1 Nov 1765 enactment date. More moderate groups inwards America voiced their opposition inwards a to a greater extent than staid manner.

In Oct 1765, a grouping of colonists convened the Stamp Act Congress, which met inwards New York. Those who attended the congress sought to orbit the same goals equally Adams as well as Lee, but without the threat of violence. The congress lasted but over 2 weeks as well as presented a listing of 14 grievances justifying the repeal of the Stamp Act.

The 9th grievance summed upward the sentiments shared yesteryear both radicals as well as moderates: “That the Duties imposed yesteryear several belatedly Acts of Parliament, from the peculiar Circumstances of these Colonies, volition live extremely Burthensome as well as Grievous; as well as from the scarcity of Specie, the Payment of them absolutely impracticable.”

The widespread colonial protests against the Stamp Act that forced the postage stamp distributors to resign nullified the mensurate earlier it genuinely went into effect. On eighteen March 1766, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, essentially acknowledging the nation of affairs inwards America.

The damage, however, was already done: the Stamp Act protests laid the musical note for the human relationship betwixt crown as well as colony until the commencement of the War for American Independence, equally radical groups intensified their opposition toward Parliament as well as moderates sought to heal the widening rift.

Colonial Administration of New Spain

Colonial Administration of New Spain

In order to administer their vast holdings in the New World, the Spanish Crown devised an exceedingly intricate bureaucratic system intended to exert royal authority, to protects its economic and political interests, to maintain order and stability, and to prevent the formation of cohesive interest groups that might challenge royal authority. In theory, all political and legal authority in Spain’s overseas holdings ultimately derived from the Crown.

This system of what has been called “Hispanic absolutism” stood in sharp contrast to the situation in British North America, where various forms of local authority, including colonial and town assemblies, mingled with and effectively limited the exercise of royal authority.

Not so in Spain’s dominions, at least in theory, although in practice there quickly emerged substantial self-rule. Nor was there any legal or functional separation of executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. While some bodies were more concerned with judicial matters, others with legislative and executive, effective distinctions among these functions did not exist.


Nor was there a clear separation between royal and ecclesiastical authority, though in theory the Crown was the supreme authority in the colonies in consequence of the Patronato Real (Royal Patronage), which derived its legal basis from papal bulls of 1501 and 1508.

Habsburg Spain’s political culture was highly legalistic and placed a premium on the generation of paperwork, demonstrated by both the quality of the paper (still crisp after more than four centuries) and its quantity, most housed in the massive Archive of the Indies in Seville.

A key characteristic of the byzantine administrative hierarchy that governed Spain’s New World holdings was the functional overlapping of jurisdictions, as discussed later.

Some have proposed that the confusion and conflicts thus generated were part of an intentional strategy of “divide and rule” on the part of the Crown, a mechanism meant to ensure that subordinate administrative bodies would squabble among themselves, thus permitting the Crown to stand above the fray and act as the ultimate arbiter whenever serious conflicts arose. If this was not an intentional strategy—and opinion is divided on this point—it nonetheless worked in practice to that effect.

Hierarchical Structure

At the pinnacle of authority stood the king. Directly subordinate to him in the royal chain of command was the Council of the Indies (Consejo de Indias), established in 1524, modeled on the Council of Castile, and exercising supreme executive, legislative, and judicial authority in the day-to-day running of the American “kingdoms.”

The Council of the Indies, which comprised a dozen or so members, drafted and issued laws, interpreted laws, and nominated appointees to secular and religious offices, all subject to the king’s tamat approval. “Its tendency was meticulous and bureaucratic. It operated through lengthy, deliberative sessions surrounded by massive quantities of reports, laws, opinions, briefs, and other types of contemporary record.”

Within the colonies, the highest royal authority was the viceroy, conceived as the direct representative of the Crown in the colony. Viceroys were responsible for enforcing law, collecting revenues, administering justice, and maintaining order—virtually everything having to do with governing the viceroyalty. The viceroyalty was the largest administrative unit.

Until 1717, all of Spain’s American holdings fell under the jurisdiction of two viceroyalties: the Viceroyalty of New Spain (created in 1535, capital Mexico City, embracing all of Southwest North America through Central America to Panama, with much of Central America under the jurisdiction of the Kingdom of Guatemala), and the Viceroyalty of Peru (or New Castile, created in 1542, capital at Lima, embracing all of South America not claimed by Portugal).

In 1717, a third viceroyalty, that of New Granada (Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador), was carved out of the Viceroyalty of Peru, and in 1776, a fourth, the Viceroyalty of La Plata (Argentina).

Partially subordinate to the viceroy were the audiencias, established before 1550 in Santo Domingo, Mexico City, Guatemala, New Galicia (in New Spain), and Panama, Lima, and Bogotá (in Peru), with more added later, and with much shifting of boundaries, jurisdictions, and status over the next 250 years. Judicially subordinate only to the Council of the Indies, the audiencias served as a kind of appellate court and legislative body, subject to royal approval.

Described as “the most durable and stable” of the many branches of colonial government, audiencias were composed of the colonies’ most prominent men: ecclesiastics, captains-general, encomenderos, merchants, landowners, and others, appointed by the council and king.

The boundaries between viceregal and audiencia authority were never clearly delineated, resulting in much disagreement between them. A similar situation obtained for local officials subordinate to the audiencias and viceroys, most notably alcaldes mayores, corregidores, and gobernadores, among whom leading authority Charles Gibson has discerned “no appreciable functional distinction.”

Each exercised administrative, judicial, and some legislative authority within its districts. Alcaldes were superior to regidores, while municipal councils (ayuntamientos and cabildos) were generally associated with corregidores.

Municipal councils were the only form of collective self-governance in the Spanish American colonies. There was nothing akin to colonial assemblies of British North America, for example. All authority was vested in individual officials and corporate bodies directly subordinate to royal authority.

The other major cor porate body charged with overseeing Spain’s New World colonies was the House of Trade (Casa de Contratación), founded in 1503 and located in Seville, which was to trade, commerce, and finance what the Council of the Indies was to politics, law, and governance.

The Crown, through its Seville-based mercantile guild (consulado), worked to maintain a royal monopoly on a wide variety of goods, from precious metals to tobacco to many other export commodities.

But despite the Crown’s efforts to maintain a relationship of mercantilism with the colonies, in everyday practice smuggling, contraband, and similar efforts to avoid royal monopolies and royal controls became very common.

Absolutist System

At no level of government did there exist any degree of democratic decision making. In theory, the system was absolutist: All authority flowed from the top down, and nothing but compliance from the bottom up.

In practice there existed a substantial degree of local self-governance by individual authorities, and considerable deviation from royal laws and decrees, most commonly expressed in the phrase obedezco pero no cumplo (“I obey but I do not fulfill”).

In other words, officials universally acknowledged the Crown’s supreme authority while very often balking at the enforcement of specific laws, usually premised on the belief that it was necessary to respond sensibly and pragmatically to realities on the ground.

Selective enforcement of the New Laws of 1542, intended to place limits on the institution of encomienda, ranks among the most prominent examples of this strong tendency to disobey or only selectively enforce royal laws and decrees.

Scholars continue to debate the consequences of this structure and style of colonial governance for postcolonial Spanish America. Key questions include the longterm implications of the institutionalization of endemic conflict among various branches of government, with the many claimants to political authority vying for supremacy, as expressed in the abundant lawsuits, appeals, and related forms of litigation that marked the entire colonial period.

Another concerns the cultural legacy bequeathed by the structural tendency toward disobedience to royal authority and the formation of a political culture in which practical deviation from the letter of the law became the norm.

Another key area of investigation focuses on the ways in which subordinate individuals and collectivities, particularly Indian communities, learned to use this elaborate legal structure to defend and advance their interests, as they did throughout the colonial period.

Some scholars argue that the Spanish American tradition of vesting local authority in individual officials, combined with the absence of substantial collective authority and democratic institutions, over time generated a political culture that emphasized executive authority far more than legislative or judicial authority, provoking sharp conflicts and diverse syntheses with republican and representative forms of governance and Enlightenment notions of citizenship in the postcolonial period, with many variations in time and space.

Epidemics in The Americas

Epidemics in The Americas

The European encounter with the Americas after 1491 set in motion a demographic catastrophe among indigenous peoples across the hemisphere, specifically epidemic and pandemic diseases against which native peoples had no biological immunities, and a crucial component of the larger Columbian exchange between the Old World and New.

The precise characteristics and magnitude of this catastrophe remain a matter of scholarly debate. Population estimates for the Americas on the eve of the encounter vary widely. The most reputable estimates fall between 40 and 100 million for the hemisphere as a whole, a population reduced by an estimated overall average of 75 to 95 percent after the first 150 years of contact, with tremendous variations in time and space.

Colonial Latin America and The Circum-Caribbean

Central Mexico is the most intensively studied region regarding the impact of European diseases on indigenous demography. Where in 1520 there lived an estimated 25 million native peoples, in 1620 there lived some 730,000—a decline of 97 percent, attributed overwhelmingly to disease.


Similar catastrophes unfolded across the hemisphere. The most precipitous decline is thought to have occurred in the Caribbean, where the precontact indigenous population of several millions had been all but exterminated by the 1550s.

Such diseases spread rapidly in all directions, preceding and accompanying military incursions, weakening indigenous polities, and facilitating the process of conquest and colonization in the Caribbean, Mexico, the Andes, Brazil, New England, and beyond. This process of demographic catastrophe, an unintended consequence of the European encounter with the Western Hemisphere, affected every aspect of the subsequent history of the Americas.

In the English-speaking world, the predominant view for centuries regarding Indian depopulation in postconquest Spanish America centered on the “Black Legend” of Spanish atrocities, a view most forcefully articulated and propagated by the Spanish bishop Bartolomé de Las Casas in the 1500s.

By the early 2000s, a scholarly consensus had emerged that the principal cause of indigenous population declines was in fact pandemic and epidemic diseases. The exact sequence and timing varied greatly from place to place. Every locale had its unique history of demographic decline, with periodic outbreaks of various pathogens: smallpox, measles, typhus, influenza, yellow fever, diphtheria, bubonic plague, malaria, and others.

Far and away the deadliest killer was smallpox, the first documented New World outbreak occurring in the Caribbean in 1518. Spanish friars, reporting to King Charles V in January 1519, estimated that the disease had already killed nearly one-third of Hispaniola’s Indians and had spread to Puerto Rico. In these earliest outbreaks, influenza probably accompanied the spread of smallpox.

By the early 1520s, three principal disease vectors, mainly of smallpox and influenza, were spreading rapidly through indigenous populations. One had entered through northern South America near the junction with the Central American isthmus, and by the late 1520s had spread far into the interior along the northern Andes.

The second had entered along the gulf coast of Mexico, from Yucatán to present-day Veracruz, and by mid-1521 was decimating the population of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. By the late 1520s, this second vector had bifurcated, spreading south into Central America and north into western and northern Mexico, where it was poised to sweep farther north.

The third disease vector was launched with the first exploratory expeditions along the Pacific coast of Central America and Peru, beginning in the early 1520s. By the late 1520s, this third vector had also bifurcated, spreading north through Nicaragua and Guatemala, and in less than a decade racing 3,000 miles south down the Andes, reaching as far as southern Bolivia.

A fourth set of vectors began spreading inland from the Brazilian coast from the beginning of permanent settlements in the early 1550s. By the late 1550s and early 1560s, the epidemics had spread along much of the Brazilian coast and were sweeping into the interior.

Widespread death from disease weakened indigenous polities, engendering profound cultural crises and facilitating processes of conquest and colonization. The most dramatic and extensively documented such instance occurred in Tenochtitlán during the conquest of Mexico, where a major smallpox outbreak coincided with the Spanish invaders’ siege of the island city.

From May to August 1521, as many as 100,000 of the city’s inhabitants succumbed to the disease. The smallpox virus typically enters the victim’s respiratory tract, where it incubates for eight to 10 days, followed by fever and general malaise, then the eruptions of papules, then vesicles, and finally large weeping pustules covering the entire body, followed soon after by death.

Scholars agree that this smallpox epidemic, occurring just as their empire and capital city were under assault by the Spanish and their Indian allies, fatally weakened the Aztec capacity to mount an effective resistance.

A similar if distinctive dynamic is thought to have unfolded before and during the conquest of Peru. Again, the timing of the Spanish invasion could not have been more propitious. Less than a decade before the incursion of Francisco Pizarro in 1532, the vast Inca Empire was in relative tranquility under a unified ruling house.

Around 1525–28, at the height of the Inca Huayna-Capac’s northern campaign against recalcitrant indigenous polities around Quito, an unknown pestilence, probably smallpox, ravaged the northern zones. During this epidemic, the Inca was struck by fever and died.

Spanish chronicler Pedro de Cieza de León recorded that the first outbreak of the disease around Quito killed more than 200,000 people. Other chroniclers offered similar descriptions of a wave of pestilence in the northern districts during this same period.

Huayna Capac’s death set in motion a crisis of dynastic succession and civil war that Pizarro deftly exploited to the Spaniards’ advantage. Contributing to the spread of the disease was the Andean tradition of venerating the mummified corpses, as thousands of indigenous Andeans came into contact with the dead Inca and those who ritually had prepared his body.

During this early period, more politically decentralized zones including the Central American isthmus, the Maya regions, northern South America, and the Brazilian coast and hinterlands were also severely stricken, facilitating Spanish and Portuguese incursions less by exacerbating elite divisions or shattering cosmologies than by the sheer magnitude of the deaths.

Almost everywhere that Europeans intruded, indigenous polities, societies, and cultures became profoundly weakened by maladies with no precedent and no cure, as emphasized repeatedly in scores of locales by a diversity of Spanish, mestizo, and indigenous chroniclers.

The second major pandemic to sweep large parts of the Americas was measles, beginning in the early 1530s. From the Caribbean islands the pathogen quickly spread to Mesoamerica, South America, and Florida, causing mortality rates estimated at 25–30 percent. Outbreaks of bubonic and pneumonic plague began erupting around the same time.

In the mid-1540s, came another series of waves of epidemics across large parts of Mesoamerica and the Andes. The precise bacterial or viral agents responsible for the “great sickness” that swept Central Mexico in the 1540s remain the subject of debate, though the evidence suggests typhus, pulmonary plague, mumps, dysentery, or combinations of these.

There is little disagreement that the death rates thus generated were extremely high, as upward of a million natives in New Spain succumbed to the collection of epidemic diseases in the 1540s. By this time, bubonic plague, typhus, and other pathogens had spread to the Pueblo Indians in the Southwest and to Florida.

The spread of epidemic diseases swept inland from Florida beginning in the 1520s and perhaps earlier. The odyssey of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and his small party of shipwreck survivors across the U.S. South and Southwest (1528–37) is thought to have introduced numerous diseases to the native inhabitants.

In particular, the expedition of Hernando De Soto from Florida through the North American Southeast to the Mississippi River Valley (1538–42) is believed to have wreaked tremendous ecological damage, introducing previously unknown pathogens across large parts of the interior.

By the time of sustained European encounters with these regions, beginning in the 1680s, the dense populations and many towns and settlements described by De Soto more than a century before had vanished, leaving behind a landscape largely denuded of its human inhabitants.

Local and regional studies show endless variations on these more general themes, with wave after wave of epidemic diseases wreaking demographic havoc for centuries after the initial encounter. In Brazil, the creation of numerous disease vectors along the coast from the 1550s to the 1650s, diseases often carried by African slaves, generated repeated epidemics of smallpox, typhus, and other pathogens that dramatically reduced populations in the interior.

The disease chronology of northwestern Mexico in the first half of the 17th century illustrates the more general pattern of repeated outbreaks, which in this case were recorded in 1601–02, 1606–07, 1612–15, 1616–17, 1619–20, 1623–25, 1636–41, 1645–47, and 1652–53.

In his classic study of the postconquest Valley of Mexico, Charles Gibson recorded major disease outbreaks every few years, with 50 major epidemics from 1521 to 1810, an average of a major epidemic every six years.

Colonial North America

The Pilgrims in Massachusetts and the first Europeans to settle on the coast of Maryland and Virginia found a nearly empty country. Almost nine-tenths of the former Native American populations had been wiped out by smallpox in an epidemic of 1618–19.

John Winthrop, the leader of colonial Massachusetts, commented in 1684: “For the native, they are neere all dead of the small Poxe, so as the Lord hathe cleared our title to what we possess.” This Puritan leader and others felt that this disease was God’s plan to make land available for Europeans by eliminating the Native Americans who had previously occupied it.

Smallpox followed the priests, explorers, traders, soldiers, and settlers from Europe into the heartland of the North American continent. The Hurons were affected in 1640, the Iroquois in 1662. In British North America, smallpox indirectly promoted the growth of institutions of higher learning. Wealthy colonial families sent their sons to England to educate them.

Many of these young men, born in North America, did not have the immunity to smallpox their fellow students in England possessed. Enough of these young men from the colonies contracted and died from smallpox while being educated in Europe that colonial North Americans founded their own colleges, including Harvard, William & Mary, and Yale.

In some cases, smallpox was spread to North American indigenous peoples intentionally, as a form of germ warfare. During the American Revolution, American troops were victims of the disease during a campaign in Quebec. George Washington successfully had the susceptible American troops inoculated. British troops, who had grown up in England and Ireland, had immunity to the disease.

By the time George Vancouver explored the Pacific coasts of what would become Washington State and the Province of British Columbia, he found entire villages of Native Americas in ruins and deserted with skeletons lying all around. By the 20th century, smallpox had wiped out as much as 90 percent of the preconquest Native American population.

In sum, the impact of hitherto unknown European diseases on indigenous societies unleashed a demographic cataclysm across the Western Hemisphere, representing one of the most important chapters in the history of the postconquest Americas, whose characteristics and impacts scholars are still grappling to comprehend.