American Colonies by Alan Taylor

From my Notion template

The Book in 3 Sentences

1. A wonderful, incredibly detailed look at American history from the Big Bang to 1770 (or so). Taylor goes very, very, very deep into the particulars and surfaces a lot of hidden insight and many factors I would never have considered, like European weeds and agriculture. Slavery and disease were given their proper (i.e. enormous) importance in the telling of the story. The book would have been better as five shorter books (it is very packed with detail) but I have never come across a book that tells the complete story – by which I mean how the Native American tribes interacted with each other, how the European powers interacted with each other, how the Native Americans interacted with the Europeans better than this one.

How I Discovered It

I read American Republics by the same author.

Who Should Read It?

Anyone interested in history.

How the Book Changed Me – AKA Random Observations

• I had never thought of the impact of European weeds and livestock on the natural environment – Taylor documents this very important phenomenon very well
• The balance of disease (for lack of a better term) greatly favored the Europeans, i.e. the ones they brought were far more deadlier and numerous than the ones they got
• Seemingly Spain set it self out to be an evil villainous empire with no redeeming virtues in modern eyes
• There was a lot more religious based human sacrifice in the Americas than I would have thought.
• Slavery was instituted everywhere slavery was profitable. The Europeans found more ways to make it profitable but the institution was well entrenched before colonization.
• Many of the Indian tribes were recent creations – tribes devasted by European arms, disease and displacement formed very new tribes that I always assumed had been around forever.
• From reading the book (the author doesn’t say this anywhere, but this seems like a reasonable guess) – the Europeans caused and 80% reduction in population size of anyone they came into contact with
• Taylor does a very good job of explaining the role of time in all of these events. What before I had thought of as “Euro group X came over and drove out the Indian tribe Y and that’s why Virginia exists” turned into “Over a 120 year period there was a complex series of highly contingent events involving multiple generations of people, their leaders and incentives”
• The role of the West Indies is fully explained, including why it had such a disproportionate share of money, protection and slaves. The moral depravity and suffering was truly epic.
• My instinctive bias against South Carolina is now more reasoned
• The concept of “Native American” and “European” is about 80% modern projection. No one back then thought of that distinction was as meaningful as we do now
• The entire colonization process is Garrett Hardin’s first law of ecology “You cannot do only one thing”. The arrival of the Europeans, their diseases, livestock, crops, weeds, diseases and weapons had profound impacts on everyone, whether they interacted with the Europeans or not. Disease risk, guns, horses and balance of power somewhere affects everyone everywhere
• Too many more to list

Summary + Notes

After about 1640, the great majority of free colonists were better fed, clothed, and housed than their common contemporaries in England, where half the people lived in destitution.

Between 1492 and 1776, North America lost population, as diseases and wars killed Indians faster than colonists could replace them.

Until lumped together in colonial slavery, the African conscripts varied even more widely in their ethnic identities, languages, and cultures.

Most diverse of all were the so-called Indians. Divided into hundreds of linguistically distinct peoples, the natives did not know that they were a common category until named and treated so by the colonial invaders.

In these cultural and environmental encounters, the various peoples were not equal in power. In most (but not all) circumstances, the European colonizers possessed tremendous ecological, technological, and organizational advantages, which demanded disproportionate adjustments by the Indians in their way and the Africans in their grasp.

In the colonies, that difference grew stronger over the generations as British America developed an especially polarized conception of race in tandem with greater political power for common whites. Unlike the French and the Spanish, the British colonies relied in war primarily on local militias of common people, rather than on professional troops. That increased the political leverage of common men as it involved them in frequent conflicts with Indians and in patrolling the slave population. In those roles, the ethnically diverse militiamen found a shared identity as white men by asserting their superiority defined against Indians and Africans conveniently cast as brutish inferiors.

Once race, instead of class, became the primary marker of privilege, colonial elites had to concede greater social respect and political rights to common white men.

Reading the United States back in time and geography to frame the colonial story has the distorting effect known as “teleology”: making all events lead neatly to a determined outcome, in the colonial case to the American Revolution and its republic. Teleology costs us a sense of the true drama of the past: the “contingency” of multiple and contested possibilities in a place where, and time when, no one knew what the future would bring. As late as 1775, few British colonists expected to frame an independent country. And very few Hispanics and fewer Indians wished for incorporation within such a nation.

In fact, it would be difficult (and pointless) to make the case that either the Indians or the Europeans of the early modern era were by nature or culture more violent and “cruel” than the other. Warfare and the ritual torture and execution of enemies were commonplace in both native America and early modern Europe. Without pegging Europeans as innately more cruel and violent, we should recognize their superior power to inflict misery.

Almost all early explorers and colonizers marveled at the natural abundance they found in the Americas, a biodiversity at odds with the deforestation and extinctions that the Europeans had already wrought in most of their own continent. Colonization transformed the North American environment, which had already experienced more modest changes initiated by the native occupation.

Dental, genetic, and linguistic analysis reveals that most contemporary Native Americans are remarkably homogeneous and probably descend from a few hundred ancestors who came to North America within fifteen thousand years of the present

reaching Labrador and Greenland by about twenty-five hundred years ago.

Note From Steve: – Interesting to see if this holds up. that is very late

Through some combination of climatic change and the spread of highly skilled hunters, almost all of the largest mammals rapidly died out in the Americas. The extinctions comprised two-thirds of all New World species that weighed more than one hundred pounds at maturity—including the giant beaver, giant ground sloth, mammoth, mastodon, and horses and camels. It is ironic that horses and camels first evolved in North America and migrated westward into Asia, where they were eventually domesticated, while those that remained in the Americas became extinct. The giant bison died out, leaving its smaller cousin, the buffalo, as the largest herbivore on the Great Plains. Of the old, shaggy great beasts, only the musk oxen survived and only in the more inaccessible reaches of the arctic.

Obtaining more to eat, more reliably, they resumed their population growth. The more local and eclectic Archaic way of life could sustain about ten times as many people on a given territory as could the Paleolithic predation on herds of great beasts.

Archaic Indians also began to modify the environment to increase the yields of plants and animals that sustained them.

Gender structured work roles: men were responsible for fishing and hunting while women harvested and prepared wild plants. In general, men’s activities entailed wide-ranging travel and the endurance of greater exposure and danger, while women’s activities kept them close to the village, where they bore and raised children.

The native peoples of North America spoke at least 375 distinct languages by 1492.

The Indians of central Mexico pioneered the three great crops of North American horticulture: maize, squashes, and beans.

The new horticulture also promoted economic differentiation and social stratification as the food surplus enabled some people to specialize as craftsmen, merchants, priests, and rulers.

The skeletons of early farmers reveal a want of sufficient salt or protein, episodes of early childhood malnutrition, and an overall loss of stature. Moreover, the denser populations of horticultural villages facilitated the spread of communicable diseases, principally tuberculosis, which was less common among dispersed hunter-gatherers.

Rather than horticulture, the most significant development for these people was their adoption of the bow and arrow after about A.D. 500.

The largest pueblo, at Chaco Canyon, required thirty thousand tons of sandstone blocks, stood four stories tall, and contained at least 650 rooms.

Founded in 1300, Acoma is probably the longest continuously inhabited community within the United States. Other

Like the people of central Mexico, the Mississippians regarded the sun as their principal deity, responsible for the crops that sustained their survival; they considered their chiefs as quasi-sacred beings related to the sun; and they practiced human sacrifice. When a chief died, his wives and servants were killed for burial beside him, as companions for the afterlife.

Within a century, European diseases, supplemented by European violence, killed most of the Mississippian peoples and transformed the world of the survivors.

The urban centers tended to collapse within two centuries of their peak, which obliged their inhabitants either to relocate or to revert to a more decentralized and less hierarchical mode of life, which allowed the recovery of wild plants, animals, and soils. Because native peoples more promptly felt the negative consequences of their local abuse of nature (relative to Europeans), they more quickly shifted to alternative environmental strategies.

Lacking horses and oxen, native North Americans knew the wheel only in Mesoamerica as a toy.

Consequently, in the North America of 1492, only the Aztecs of Mexico constituted an imperial power capable of governing multiple cities and their peoples by command.

compared with Europeans, the natives of America carried a more limited and less deadly array of pathogenic microbes.

By contrast, the Europeans of 1492 were the heirs to an older and more complex array of domesticated plants and animals developed about nine thousand years ago at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. The European mode of agriculture featured domesticated mammals—sheep, pigs, cattle, and horses—endowing their owners with more fertilizer, mobility, motive power, animal protein, and shared disease microbes. Building on a long head start and the power of domesticated mammals, the Europeans had, over the centuries, developed expansionist ambitions, systems of written records and communication, the maritime and military technology that permitted global exploration and conquest, and (unwittingly) a deadly array of diseases to which they enjoyed partial immunities.

Indians understood that humans could live only by killing fish and animals and by clearing trees for fields, but they had to proceed cautiously. Natives usually showed restraint, not because they were ecologically minded in the twentieth-century sense, but because spirits, who could harm people, lurked in the animals and plants. A healthy fear of the spirits limited how the Indians dealt with other forms of life, lest they reap some supernatural counterattack. Offended spirits might hide away the animals or the fish, afflict the corn crop, or churn up a devastating windstorm. Any success in hunting, fishing, or cultivating had to be accepted with humility, in recognition that the fruits of nature were provisional gifts from temperamental spirits.

Indian animism should not be romantically distorted into a New Age creed of stable harmony. In fact, the natives regarded the spiritual world as volatile and full of tension, danger, and uncertainty. To survive and prosper, people had to live warily and opportunistically.

The logic of restraint was animist rather than ecological—but that restraint tended to preserve a nature that sustained most native communities over many generations.

The Christian alienation of spirit from nature rendered it supernaturally safe for Europeans to harvest all the resources that they wanted from nature, for they offended no spirits in doing so. In wild plants and animals, the colonizers simply saw potential commodities: items that could be harvested, processed, and sold to make a profit.

A French priest in Acadia noted of the Indians, “They are never in a hurry. Quite different from us, who can never do anything without hurry and worry; worry, I say, because our desire tyrannizes over us and banishes peace from our actions.”

By offering such moral criticism, however, Christians helped to preserve a capitalist society from consuming itself. Indeed, without some moral counterweight and some sense of a higher purpose, capitalist competition degenerates into a rapacious, violent kleptocracy. Without a God, the capitalist is simply a pirate, and markets collapse for want of a minimal trust between buyers and sellers. The seventeenth-century English minister Thomas Shepard aptly commented that self-interest was a “raging Sea which would overwhelm all if [it] have not bankes.” Shepard did not wish to abolish self-interest, merely to strengthen its restraining banks. Christianity provided the banks that permitted capitalist enterprise to persist, prosper, and expand into the Americas.

A sixteenth-century Italian physician marveled “that I was born in this century in which the whole world became known; whereas the ancients were familiar with but a little more than a third part of

During the 1550s the explorer Jean de Léry reported that America was so “different from Europe, Asia and Africa in the living habits of its people, the forms of its animals, and, in general, in that which the earth produces, that it can well be called the new world.”

But the differences began to diminish as soon as they were recognized. The invasion by European colonists, microbes, plants, and livestock eroded the biological and cultural distinctions formerly enforced by the Atlantic Ocean. Newly connected, the two “worlds,” old and new, became more alike in their natures, in their combinations of plants and animals.

The environmental revolution worked disproportionately in favor of the Europeans and to the detriment of the native peoples, who saw their numbers dwindle. Although never under the full control of the colonizers, the transformation enhanced their power by undermining the nature that indigenous communities depended upon. Colonization literally alienated the land from its native inhabitants. In particular, the colonizers accidentally introduced despised weeds, detested vermin, and deadly microbes. All three did far more damage to native peoples and their nature than to the colonists. While exporting their own blights, the European colonizers imported the most productive food plants developed by the Indians. The new crops fueled a population explosion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Part of that growth then flowed back across the Atlantic to resettle the Americas as European colonies.

The long and usually secure trade routes of the Muslim world reached from Morocco to the East Indies and from Mongolia to Senegal. Within that range, Muslim traders benefited from the far-flung prevalence of Arabic as the language of law, commerce, government, and science.

Inspired by their literary fantasies, European visionaries longed to reach the Far East to enlist their peoples and wealth for a climactic crusade against Islam. As a fabulous land that could fulfill Europeans’ dreams, eastern Asia (and especially China) rendered the intruding barrier of the Muslim world all the more frustrating.

In 1469 the marriage of Queen Isabella and Prince Ferdinand united Aragon and Castile to create “Spain.”

But, with more greed than consistency, the Iberians also enslaved Guanche who had converted to Christianity in the vain hope of living peaceably beside their invaders.

In their invasion of the small and long-isolated Canaries, the Iberians reaped the perverse advantage of their relatively large population located at a nexus of commercial exchange, which made for an especially diverse and regularly reinforced pool of diseases.

So complete was the cultural destruction that only nine sentences of the Guanche language have survived.

At first, most of the slaves were Guanche, but they inconveniently and rapidly died from the new diseases. To replace the dead, the colonists imported Africans to work the sugar plantations. West African societies had long enslaved war captives and convicted criminals for sale to Arab traders, who drove them in caravans across the Sahara to the Mediterranean. This

By turning native peoples into commodities, for sale as plantation slaves, the invaders developed a method for financing the further destruction of their resistance. In the Atlantic islands, the newcomers also pioneered the profitable combination of the plantation system and the slave trade. In the fifteenth-century Atlantic islands (and principally the Canaries), we find the training grounds for the invasion of the Americas.

For in 1492 no one in Europe had any idea that the next islands farther west lay close to two immense continents inhabited by millions of people.

In 1498 Vasco da Gama exploited that discovery to enter and cross the coveted Indian Ocean, the gateway to the trade riches of the East. The profits kept the Portuguese focused on the southern and eastward route to Asia, leaving the westward route largely unguarded for their Spanish rivals to explore by default.

Spain pioneered transatlantic voyages, thanks to the aggressive ambition, religious mysticism, and navigational prowess of the Genoese mariner Christopher Columbus. In popular histories and films, Columbus appears anachronistically as a modernist, a secular man dedicated to humanism and scientific rationalism, a pioneer who overcame medieval superstition. In fact, he was a devout and militant Catholic who drew upon the Bible for his geographic theories. He also owned, cherished, and heavily annotated a copy of The Travels of Marco Polo, which inspired his dreams of reaching the trade riches and the unconverted souls of East Asia. Columbus hoped to convert the Asians to Christianity and to recruit their bodies and their wealth to assist Europeans in a final crusade to crush Islam and reclaim Jerusalem. Such a victory would then invite Christ’s return to earth to reign over a millennium of perfect justice and harmony.

What deterred Europeans from sailing due west for Asia was not a fear of sailing off the edge of the world but, instead, their surprisingly accurate understanding that the globe was too large.

Exploiting the trade winds, he turned west into the open ocean and had clear, easy sailing, reaching a new land after just thirty-three days.

But Columbus supposed that all of the islands belonged to the East Indies and lay near the mainland of Asia. Although the native inhabitants (the Taino) were unlike any people he had ever seen or read about, Columbus insisted that they were “Indians,” a misnomer that has endured.

Thanks to the newly invented printing press, word of Columbus’s voyage and discovery spread rapidly and widely through Europe. Eagerly

With the assistance of the pope, the Spanish and the Portuguese negotiated the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, which split the world of new discoveries by drawing a north-south boundary line through the mid-Atlantic west of the Azores.

In 1495 he shipped 550 captives to Spain for sale to help pay for his expedition. Because most died during the voyage or within a year of arrival from exposure to European diseases, Columbus had to abandon the project of selling Indians in Spain. Instead, he distributed Indian captives among the colonists to work on their plantations and to serve as sex slaves.

Violent mutinies and more violent reprisals by Columbus induced the monarchs to revoke his executive authority in 1500.

Although displaced as governor, Columbus continued to serve the Spanish as a maritime explorer. In 1498 and 1502 his third and fourth transatlantic voyages revealed long stretches of the South and Central American coast. Nonetheless, to his death in 1506, Columbus stubbornly insisted that all of his discoveries lay close to the coast of Asia.

A year later, Amerigo Vespucci, a Genoese mariner who alternated between Spanish and Portuguese employ, explored enough of the coast of South America to deem it a new continent. Consequently, European map-makers began to call the new land by a variant of his first name—America.

Although Columbus had not reached Asia, he did find the substance of what he sought: a source of riches that would, in the long term, enable European Christendom to grow more powerful and wealthy than the Muslim world.

With the Canaries as their colonial model, the Spanish aggressively modified Hispaniola, introducing new crops, especially sugarcane, and new animals, including cattle, mules, sheep, horses, and pigs.

colonization rapidly destroyed the Taino people of Hispaniola. In 1494 a Spaniard reported that more than 50,000 Taino had died, “and they are falling each day, with every step, like cattle in an infected herd.” From a population of at least 300,000 in 1492, the Taino declined to about 33,000 by 1510 and to a mere 500 by 1548. The great missionary friar Bartolomé de Las Casas mourned the virtual extermination “of the immensity of the peoples that this island held, and that we have seen with our own eyes.”

In sum, the natives suffered from a deadly combination of microparasitism by disease and macroparasitism by Spanish colonizers, preying upon native labor. Although not genocidal in intent—for the Spanish preferred to keep the Taino alive and working as tributaries and slaves—the colonization of Hispaniola was genocidal in effect.

In any given locale, the first wave of epidemics afflicted almost every Indian. Within a decade of contact, about half the natives died from the new diseases. Repeated and diverse epidemics provided little opportunity for native populations to recover by reproduction. After about fifty years of contact, successive epidemics reduced a native group to about a tenth of its precontact numbers.

Most scholars now gravitate to the middle of that range: about fifty million Indians in the two American continents, with about five million of them living north of Mexico.

Apparently only one major disease, venereal syphilis, passed from the Americas into Europe with the returning explorers and sailors. If so, syphilis exacted a measure of revenge on behalf of the native women raped by the invaders.

The Europeans died in far greater numbers when they tried to colonize sub-Saharan Africa, where they did encounter relatively novel and especially virulent tropical diseases, principally falciparum malaria and yellow fever. Unwittingly, the Europeans imported those African diseases into the American tropics and subtropics with the slaves brought to work on their plantations. Those African maladies then added to the epidemics that devastated the Native Americans.

In effect, the Old World diseases benefited from a much larger pool of potential hosts. Passing to and fro, these pathogens gradually strengthened the immunities of the disease-embattled peoples of the Old World, rendering them deadly carriers when they passed into places where those diseases were not endemic.

By living in filth, urban Europeans paid a high price in steady losses to endemic disease and occasional exposure to new epidemics. But they also rendered themselves formidable carriers of diseases to distant and cleaner peoples with far less experience with so many pathogens.

North American natives domesticated only one mammal, the dog, which rarely shares diseases with its best friends.

One disease often weakened a victim for a second to kill. For example, many Indians barely survived smallpox only to succumb to measles, pneumonia, or pleurisy.

For want of healthy people to tend the sick, to fetch food and water and keep fires going, many victims died of starvation, dehydration, or exposure.

Neither sixteenth-century natives nor colonizers knew about the existence of microbes, much less that some caused disease. Instead, both assumed that the epidemics manifested some violent disruption of supernatural power. Colonists interpreted the diseases as sent by their God to punish Indians who resisted conversion to Christianity. Indians blamed the epidemics on sorcery practiced by the newcomers. When the native shamans failed to stop or cure a disease, they became discredited as ineffectual against the superior sorcery of the newcomers, who survived epidemics that slaughtered the natives.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the colonizers did not intentionally disseminate disease. Indeed, they did not yet know how to do so. Especially during the sixteenth century, the colonizers valued Indian bodies and souls even more than they coveted Indian land. They needed Indians as coerced labor to work on mines, plantations, ranches, and farms. And Christian missionaries despaired when diseases killed Indians before they could be baptized.

Prior to 1820, at least two-thirds of the twelve million emigrants from the Old to the New World were enslaved Africans rather than free Europeans. Most

From a population of 5 million in 1492, the inhabitants of Great Britain surged to 16 million by 1800, when another 5 million Britons already lived across the Atlantic. The

The demographic and colonial history of Africa offers an instructive contrast to North America. Despite inferior firepower, until the nineteenth century the Africans more than held their own against European invaders because African numbers remained formidable. Unlike the Native Americans, the Africans did not dwindle from exposure to European diseases, with which they were largely familiar. On the contrary, African tropical diseases killed European newcomers in extraordinary numbers until the development of quinine in the nineteenth century.

Native Americans had developed certain wild plants into domesticated hybrids that were more productive than their Old World counterparts. Measured as an average yield in calories per hectare (a hectare is ten thousand square meters, the equivalent of 2.5 acres), cassava (9.9 million), maize (7.3 million), and potatoes (7.5 million) all trump the traditional European crops: wheat (4.2 million), barley (5.1 million), and oats (5.5 million). By introducing the New World crops to the Old World, the colonizers dramatically expanded the food supply and their population.

In Europe, maize and potatoes endowed farmers with larger yields on smaller plots, which benefited the poorest peasants. It took at least five acres planted in grain to support a family, but potatoes could subsist three families on the same amount of land.

In effect, maize and potatoes extended the amount of land that Europeans could cultivate either to feed themselves or to produce fodder for their cattle.

During the eighteenth century, the potato first gained its close association with Ireland, and Irish numbers grew from 3 million in 1750 to 5.25 million in 1800. The Irish then became vulnerable to any blight that devastated their potato crop. When such a blight struck during the 1840s, thousands starved to death and millions fled overseas, primarily to North America.

Other European animals hitched along to the Americas despite the colonizers’ best efforts to prevent it. These included the European rats, which were larger and more aggressive than their North American counterparts. Hated parasites on crops and granaries, the rats were skilled stowaways in almost every wooden ship.

Today botanists estimate that 258 of the approximately 500 weed species in the United States originated in the Old World.

By a mix of design and accident, the newcomers triggered a cascade of processes that alienated the land, literally and figuratively, from its indigenous people.

In sum, native peoples and their nature experienced an invasion not just of foreign people but also of their associated livestock, microbes, vermin, and weeds.

To justify their own imperialism, the rival Europeans elaborated upon some very real Spanish atrocities to craft the notorious and persistent “Black Legend”: that the Spanish were uniquely cruel and far more brutal and destructive than other Europeans in their treatment of the Indians.

Alternating brutal force with shrewd diplomacy, Cortés won support from the native peoples subordinated by the Aztecs.

Every year it hosted public ritual human sacrifices of captured people, their chests cut open and their still-beating hearts held up to the sun.

The population of about 200,000 dwarfed the largest city in Spain, Seville, which had only 70,000 inhabitants. Accustomed to the din, clutter, and filth of European cities, Spaniards marveled at the relative cleanliness and order of the Aztec metropolis.

The conquistadores certainly benefited from the technological superiority of Spanish weaponry. Because sixteenth-century guns, known as arquebuses, were crude, heavy, inaccurate, and slow to reload, only a few conquistadores carried them (Cortés’s force of six hundred men had only thirteen guns). Instead, most relied on steel-edged swords and pikes and crossbows. Although essentially late-medieval, this steel weaponry was far more durable and deadly than the stone-edged swords, axes, and arrows of the natives. And

Spanish military technology also exploited horses and war dogs (mastiffs), both of which were new and stunning to Indians. Although most conquistadores fought on foot, the few with horses proved especially dreadful to the natives,

The conquistador expeditions were private enterprises led by independent military contractors in pursuit of profit. The commander ordinarily obtained a license from the crown, which reserved a fifth of the plunder and claimed sovereign jurisdiction over any conquered lands. Known as an adelantado, the holder of a crown license recruited and financed his own expedition, with the help of investors who expected shares in the plunder. Developed in the course of the reconquista and applied to the Canaries, the adelantado system reflected the crown’s chronic shortage of men and money.

Greed was a prerequisite for pursuing the hard life of a conquistador. Cortés meant to be disingenuous when he assured the Aztecs, “I and my companions suffer from a disease of the heart which can be cured only with gold.” Of course, he was more profoundly right than he realized.

After all, the conquistadores scrupulously adhered to the Spanish law of conquest by reading the requerimiento, which ordered defiant Indians immediately to accept Spanish rule and Christian conversion. If the Indians ignored this order, they deserved the harsh punishments of a “just war.” The requerimiento announced, “The resultant deaths and damages shall be your fault, and not the monarch’s or mine or the soldiers.” Attending witnesses and a notary certified in writing that the requerimiento had been read and ignored, justifying all the deaths and destruction that followed. The cruel absurdity of reading the requerimiento in a language alien to Indians was apparent to many Spanish priests if not to the conquistadores.

During the 1530s the leading conquistadores either died fighting one another over the spoils of conquest, as did Pizarro in Peru, or were forced into retirement by the crown, which was the fate of Cortés in 1535.

Hungry, overworked, and dislocated, the natives of Mexico were especially vulnerable to disease. The native population dwindled from a pre-conquest ten million natives to about one million by 1620.

By the 1570s the number of emigrant women had increased but remained less than a third of the total. As a result, the male emigrants usually took wives and concubines among the Indians, producing mixed offspring known as mestizos.

One investigative report on a viceroy of Peru ran to 49,555 pages.

Unfortunately, any colonial request for crown instructions required at least a year for an answer, given the slow pace of transatlantic shipping and the bureaucratic inertia in Spain. One despairing viceroy complained, “If death came from Madrid, we should all live to a very old age.”

Between 1500 and 1650 the Spanish shipped from America to Europe about 181 tons of gold and 16,000 tons of silver.

After the relative price stability of the fifteenth century, Europeans experienced a fivefold rise in prices during the sixteenth century. Laboring people especially suffered from the inflation, because the cost of living rose faster than their wages.

In 1523 much of the gold stolen by Cortés from the Aztecs and shipped homeward was restolen by French pirates in the Atlantic. During

Because conquistadores lived as parasites off the native produce of the invaded regions, they could not linger where the Indians did not practice horticulture. Fields of maize attracted conquistadores, and their absence deterred them.

He and his companions had trekked across much of North America, from the swamps of Florida to the coast of Texas and then through the deserts, mountains, and valleys of northern Mexico. Along the way, Cabeza de Vaca endured a searing double transformation, first from conquistador to slave, and then from slave to sacred healer.

The passage of nearly five centuries has rendered the sixteenth-century peoples even more culturally alien from us than they were to one another.

As their societies shrank and relocated, they became less complex, diminishing the power of the chiefs. In most places there were simply no longer enough people to raise the agricultural tribute necessary to sustain a costly and elaborate elite.

In the depopulated valleys, forests and wildlife gradually reclaimed the abandoned maize and bean fields, while the refugees farmed the less fertile but safer hills. The resurgent wildlife included bison, common in the southeast by 1700 but never sighted by Soto’s conquistadores 160 years before. Far from timeless, the southeastern forest of the eighteenth century was wrought by the destructive power of a sixteenth-century European expedition. Soto had created an illusion of a perpetual wilderness where once there had been a populous and complex civilization.

The new confederations exemplified the widespread process of colonial “ethnogenesis”—the emergence of new ethnic groups and identities from the consolidation of many peoples disrupted by the invasion of European peoples, animals, and microbes.

In fact, after 1700 most North American Indian “tribes” were relatively new composite groups formed by diverse refugees coping with the massive epidemics and collective violence introduced by colonization.

To make a vivid and intimidating example, Coronado ordered one hundred captured warriors burned to death at the stake.

In frustration and fury, the Spaniards tortured and strangled their Pueblo guide, who confessed the plot to lead the Spanish astray where they might get lost and die.

In an ironic reversal of the usual colonial process, the wrecks endowed a native people with gold, silver, and slaves, for the Calusa Indians scavenged the hulks for the shiny metals and enslaved the castaway sailors.

In 1673 the governor of Cuba confessed, “It is hard to get anyone to go to San Agustín because of the horror with which Florida is painted. Only hoodlums and the mischievous go there from Cuba.”

Conversion, however, came at a cultural cost. The priests systematically ferreted out and burned the wooden idols cherished by the natives, banned their traditional ball game, and enforced Christian morality, which required marriage, monogamy, and clothing that covered female breasts.

Conversion bought safety from Spanish muskets but not from Spanish microbes.

Caught in a double squeeze of high costs and small income, the New Mexicans had the lowest standard of living of any colonists in North America.

Never more than 1,000 during the seventeenth century, the colonists remained greatly outnumbered by the Indians, despite the epidemics that reduced Pueblo numbers from 60,000 in 1598 to 17,000 in 1680.

Because the Pueblo peoples already lived in permanent, compact horticultural villages, it was relatively easy to create a mission simply by adding a church, a priest or two, and a few soldiers.

Indeed, many Pueblo hoped that a military alliance with the Spanish would protect both from the nomadic warrior bands—Apache and Ute—of the nearby mountains and Great Plains.

The priests also stood out among the other Hispanics because they rarely raped Indian women and preferred their vow of poverty to the accumulation of gold.

In their theatricality, celibacy, endurance of pain, and readiness to face martyrdom the priests manifested an utter conviction of the truth and power of their God.

Consequently, the priests were in a state of probation as the Pueblo tried to determine whether they benefited or suffered from the Christian power over the spirit world. No matter how successful in getting a church built and hundreds baptized, every priest lived in the shadow of violent death. If the epidemics increased, natives who had seemed docile could conclude that their priests were dangerous sorcerers who must be killed. Of the approximately one hundred Franciscans who served in New Mexico during the seventeenth century, forty died as martyrs to their faith.

The missionaries also encouraged restive soldiers to imprison one governor for nine months and to assassinate a second.

Previously lacking any common language and identity, the Pueblo peoples obtained both—as Spanish became a common second language and as they developed shared grievances against a set of exploiters. Both developments improved their ability to unite against the colonizers.

Especially appealing to men outraged at the Franciscan attack on polygamy, Popé promised each warrior a new wife for every Hispanic he killed.

Popé encouraged the Pueblo to restore their native names and to reverse their baptisms by plunging into the Rio Grande in a ceremony of purification. He declared Christian marriages dissolved and polygamy restored. To replace the churches, the Indians restored their sacred kivas. Popé urged forsaking everything Hispanic, including the new crops and domesticated livestock, but most Pueblo found these too useful to relinquish. Selective in adapting Hispanic culture, the Indians were equally selective in rejecting it.

Entangled in alliances with Indians, European traders often felt compelled to assist native wars that complicated and slowed their pursuit of profit. From the Indian perspective, the French came, in the words of historian Allan Greer, “not as conquering invaders, but as a new tribe negotiating a place for itself in the diplomatic webs of Native North America.” In those webs, the Indians negotiated from a position of strength.

Because Indians voluntarily performed the hard work of hunting the animals and treating their furs, traders could immediately profit in America without the time, trouble, expense, and violence of conquering Indians to reorganize their labor in mines and plantations.

The natives also adapted alcohol to their own purposes. At first, they balked at the novel taste and disorienting effect, but eventually they developed a craving. Drinking as much and as rapidly as they could, the Indians got drunk as a short cut to the spiritual trances that had previously required prolonged fasting and exhaustion. Alcohol also offered a tempting release of aggressions, ordinarily repressed with great effort and much stress, because Indian communities demanded the consistent appearance of harmony. Regarding alcohol as an animate force, natives believed that drinkers were not responsible for their violent actions. Initially appealing and apparently liberating, alcohol became profoundly destructive once it became common and cheap. In drink, natives lashed out with knives and hatchets, killing their own people far more often than the colonial suppliers of their new drug. Fortunately, during the seventeenth century, the natives’ access to alcohol remained limited and sporadic, permitting only occasional binges.

Occasionally the more ruthless mariners interrupted trade to kidnap Indians as human commodities. Taken to Europe, they were put on profitable display as curiosities and trained to assist future voyages as interpreters. Eager for a voyage home, the captives shrewdly told their captors what they wanted to hear, promising to reveal gold and silver and friendly Indians eager for Christianity. Unfortunately, European diseases consigned most of the captives to European graves before European fantasies could take them home.

By the mid-seventeenth century, the trade goods were sufficiently common that the northeastern Algonquian peoples had forsaken their stone tools and weapons—and the craft skills needed to produce them. If cut off from trade, natives faced deprivation, hunger, and destruction by their enemies.

Although the fur trade pitted the Indians against one another in destructive competition, no people could opt out of the intertwined violence and commerce. As a matter of life and death, every native people tried to attract European traders and worked to keep them away from their Indian enemies.

Combining the talents of trader, soldier, cartographer, explorer, and diplomat, Champlain recognized that French success in Canada depended upon building an alliance with a network of native peoples.

The introduction of firearms revolutionized Indian warfare as the natives recognized the uselessness of wooden armor and the folly of massed formations. Throughout the northeast, the Indians shifted to hit-and-run raids and relied on trees for cover from gunfire.

Natives feared that their dead would linger about the village, inflicting disease and misfortune unless appeased with loud and expressive mourning. To draw the bereaved out of their agony and to encourage dead spirits to proceed to their afterlife, neighbors staged condolence rituals with feasts and presents. The best present of all was a war captive meant to replace the dead.

Captive men more often faced death by torture, especially if they had received some crippling wound. Inflicting death as slowly and painfully as possible, the Iroquois tied their victim to a stake, and villagers of both genders and all ages took turns wielding knives, torches, and red-hot pokers systematically to torment and burn him to death. The ceremony was a contest between the skills of the torturers and the stoic endurance of the victim, who manifested his own power, and that of his people, by insulting his captors and boasting of his accomplishments in war. After the victim died, the women butchered his remains, cast them into cooking kettles, and served the stew to the entire village, so that all could be bound together in absorbing the captive’s power. By practicing ceremonial torture and cannibalism, the Iroquois promoted group cohesion, hardened their adolescent boys for the cruelties of war, and dramatized their contempt for outsiders.

Although horrifying to European witnesses, the torments of northeastern torture had their counterparts in early modern Europe, where thousands of suspected heretics, witches, and rebels were publicly tortured to death: burned at the stake, slowly broken on a wheel, or pulled apart by horses. The seventeenth century was a merciless time for the defeated on either side of the Atlantic.

In these ceremonies, the chiefs presided as the kinfolk of a killer gave presents to the relatives of the victim. Delivery and acceptance restored peace and broke the cycle of revenge killings.

Seventeenth-century Europeans regarded non-Europeans as socially and culturally inferior—but not as racially incapable of equality. Lacking a biological concept of race, seventeenth-century Europeans did not yet believe that all people with a white skin were innately superior to all of another color. European elites primarily perceived peoples in terms of social rank rather than pigmentation.

Rather than compel Indians to learn French and relocate into new mission towns, the Jesuits mastered the native languages and went into their villages to build churches.

One priest returned to the Huron after having survived capture and torture by the Iroquois, losing most of his fingers. Because the Huron cherished stoicism under torture as the ultimate test of manhood, they honored this priest. One Huron remarked, “I can neither read nor write, but those fingers which I see cut off are the answer to all my doubts.”

As the Jesuits gathered a following, they demanded more cultural concessions from their Huron converts. The Jesuits denounced torture and ritual cannibalism, premarital sex, divorce, polygamy, and the traditional games, feasts, and dances. An

During the assaults, Jesuit priests hurriedly baptized all they could reach before they too were hacked or burned to death. By 1650 the Huron villages had all been destroyed

Moreover, during the mid-sixteenth century, the English were preoccupied with the conquest and colonization of Ireland.

Later in the century, success in Ireland emboldened English leaders to extend their colonial ambitions across the Atlantic to the region they called Virginia, named in honor of their queen, Elizabeth I, a supposed virgin. Between 1580 and 1620 the English applied the name to the entire mid-Atlantic coast between Florida and Acadia.

Unlike the authoritarian kings of France and Spain, Queen Elizabeth had to share national power with the aristocracy and gentry, who composed the bicameral national legislature known as Parliament.

Although a narrow system of government by our standards, the English constitution was extraordinarily open and libertarian when compared with the absolute monarchies then developing in the rest of Europe. Consequently, it mattered greatly to the later political culture of the United States that England, rather than Spain or France, eventually dominated colonization north of Florida.

Probably about half the rural peasantry lost their lands between 1530 and 1630.

Addressing propertied Englishmen, the colonial promoters announced that they had an easy solution for England’s social woes: exported to a new colony in Virginia, the idle and larcenous poor could be put to work raising commodities for transport to, and sale in, England.

Contrary to the Black Legend, the English treated the Irish no better than the Spanish treated the Guanche, and they offered no prospect of fairer play for the Indians of Virginia. Indeed, the conquest and colonization

At last, in August 1590, White returned to Roanoke with a relief expedition to find the settlement mysteriously abandoned with no signs of attack by either the Indians or the Spanish. The lone clue was carved into a tree—the word “Croatoan,” the name of a nearby island. But the fearful and impatient English mariners refused to venture through the dangerously shallow waters to Croatoan to investigate. Sailing away in pursuit of Spanish treasure ships, the mariners abandoned any surviving colonists to their still mysterious fate.

After retreating to Croatoan and failing to contact a passing ship, the surviving colonists probably headed north to Chesapeake Bay to execute their original plan. They apparently found haven in an Indian village. In 1607, when English colonists reached Chesapeake Bay, some Indians reported that white people had recently lived nearby as refugees in a native village. Unfortunately, the village had run afoul of a powerful chieftain, Powhatan, who killed all the refugees.

Neither house nor furnishings provided opportunities for the conspicuous consumption that helped determine status in England.

But the Algonquians recoiled in horror at the prospect of adopting a European way of life that would obligate their men to forsake war and, instead, adopt the female role of agricultural laborer.

One starving colonist killed and ate his wife, for which he was tried, convicted, and burned at the stake.

Between 1607 and 1622 the Virginia Company transported some 10,000 people to the colony, but only 20 percent were still alive there in 1622.

In England, birth and wealth had screened the gentlemen from manual labor, while the vagrants, for want of employment, had learned to survive by begging and stealing.

Indeed, the company adopted a “head-right system” that awarded land freely to men with the means to pay for their own passage (and that of others) across the Atlantic. Such emigrants received fifty acres apiece, and another fifty acres for every servant or relative brought at their own expense. Servants were also entitled to fifty acres each, if and when they survived their terms of indenture—which afforded them new incentive to emigrate. As private property owners, rather than company employees, the colonists showed much greater initiative and effort in cultivating the corn, squash, and beans that ensured their subsistence. But to prosper, they still needed a commercial crop to market in England.

the annual mortality rate remained about 25 percent until mid-century.

The Virginians developed the strategy, practiced in subsequent colonial wars, of waiting until just before corn harvest to attack and destroy the Indian villages and their crops, consigning the natives to a winter and spring of exposure and starvation.

During the seventeenth century, the English developed two types of colonial governments: royal and proprietary. Relatively few until the eighteenth century, the royal colonies belonged to the crown. Initially more numerous, the proprietary colonies belonged to private interests.

And, as the promoters had predicted, the Chesapeake absorbed thousands of poor laborers considered redundant and dangerous in England.

Their alliance became both easier and more essential at the turn of the century, when the great planters switched their labor force from white indentured servants to enslaved Africans. Class differences seemed less threatening as both the common and great planters became obsessed with preserving their newly shared sense of racial superiority over the African slaves.

In both Chesapeake colonies, the distant crown (for Virginia) or lord proprietor (for Maryland) had to share power with the wealthiest and most ambitious colonists. They refused to pay taxes unless authorized by their own elected representatives in a colonial assembly. Governors who defied the local elite faced obstruction and risked rebellion.

This decentralization of power stood in marked contrast to the Spanish and the French colonies, which permitted neither elected assemblies nor individual liberties.

Indeed, widows were few and their status brief in colonies where women were in such short supply and in such great demand for remarriage.

The husband also supervised and disciplined his dependents: wife, children, and servants. If a servant, child, or wife killed his or her master, the law considered the culprit guilty of “Petit Treason” as well as murder.

But the authorities also held the patriarchs responsible for the misconduct of their dependents. In 1663, a Virginia county court rebuked and punished both a maidservant, for public insolence, and her master, for failing to control her “scolding.”

The planters also needed regularly to clear new fields with axes, for after three years of cropping, the cultivated lands lost their fertility, and the planter had to clear another field to allow the old to lie fallow.

Given the short life expectancy of all Chesapeake laborers, planters wisely preferred to buy English indentured servants for four or five years rather than purchase the more expensive lifelong slaves from Africa. In 1650 enslaved Africans numbered only three hundred, a mere 2 percent of the Chesapeake population.

English servants composed at least three-quarters of the emigrants to the Chesapeake during the seventeenth century: about 90,000 of the 120,000 total.

Given that a sturdy beggar could never anticipate obtaining land in England, the colony offered an opportunity unavailable at home. Of course, that opportunity required men and women to gamble their lives in a dangerous land of hard work and deadly diseases.

Before 1640, most indentured servants endured harsh but short lives in the Chesapeake. Having staked their health in pursuit of farms, most lost their gamble, finding graves before their terms expired.

In part, health improved as many new plantations expanded upstream into locales with fresh running streams, away from the stagnant lowlands, which favored malaria, dysentery, and typhoid fever.

The “seasoned” acquired a higher level of immunity, which they passed on to their offspring.

The entry costs of tobacco planting were modest: a set of hand tools, a year’s provisions, a few head of cattle and pigs, some seed, and about fifty acres of land.

At any given time, a planter cultivated only about a tenth of his farm, leaving most of his domain heavily forested.

The common people ate with their fingers, sharing a bowl and drinking from a common tankard, both passed around the table. They usually ate a boiled porridge of corn, beans, peas, and pork, washed down with water or cider. Most colonists had plenty to eat, in contrast to their past in both England and the early years of the colony. By moving to the Chesapeake, the common colonist sacrificed comfort and life expectancy for an improved diet and the pride and autonomy of owning land.

During the 1660s, new imperial regulations worsened the tobacco glut by requiring colonists to ship their tobacco exclusively to England in English ships.

An assemblyman received 150 pounds of tobacco in pay per day in session—about five times in value what was paid to his counterpart and contemporary in colonial Massachusetts. Governor Berkeley annually collected a salary of £1,000. To put that in perspective, most emigrants mortgaged at least four years of their working lives to pay the £6 cost of a transatlantic passage, and a small planter was fortunate to clear £3 annually over and above expenses.

In pity for himself, Governor Berkeley complained, “How miserable that man is that Governes a People wher[e] six parts of seaven at least are Poore, Endebted, Discontented, and Armed.”

Determined to enjoy the perquisites and rewards of a hierarchical society, Bacon and his lieutenants intended no egalitarian revolution.

Although Bacon attacked a royal governor, he did not seek independence from England. In 1676 no Virginian imagined that independence was feasible or desirable.

In stark contrast to those of Berkeley’s day, Virginia’s eighteenth-century assemblymen cultivated popularity by conspicuously opposing taxes, infuriating a succession of royal governors with instructions to secure a revenue for imperial defense.

denounced the assemblymen for striving “to recommend themselves to the populace upon a received opinion among them, that he is the best Patriot that most violently opposes all Overtures for raising money.”

By reducing taxes, the Virginia gentry reinvented themselves and Virginia politics, transferring the odium of parasitism and tyranny to the royal governor. This dramatically reversed the role that the crown had claimed in 1677 as the putative defender of the common planter.

century Virginians both exceptionally hospitable and genial but shallow and materialistic.

by mastering the genteel public style known as “condescension”: a gentleman’s ability to treat common people affably without sacrificing his sense of superiority. More

Held at the county courthouse, the election was public, with each voter individually stepping forward to voice his vote, for recording by a clerk. By such performances, common voters showed gratitude for past favors and solicited future goodwill from their favored gentleman. Upon receiving a vote, the candidate politely thanked the voter, displaying the condescending gratitude of a true gentleman worthy of high office.

At the end of the seventeenth century, slaves became a better investment, as servants became scarcer and more expensive: £25 to £30 for a lifelong slave compared well with £15 to purchase just four years of a servant’s time.

The slave numbers surged from a mere 300 in 1650 to 13,000 by 1700, when Africans constituted 13 percent of the Chesapeake population. During the early eighteenth century, their numbers and proportion continued to grow, reaching 150,000 people and 40 percent by 1750.

The planters shifted from servants to slaves for economic reasons, but that change incidentally improved their security against another rebellion by angry freedmen.

More commonly, masters permitted slaves to acquire and manage their own property, primarily a few chickens, hogs, cattle, and small garden plots of maize and tobacco. By accumulating and selling property, dozens of early slaves purchased their freedom and obtained the tools, clothing, and land to become common planters. Because the colonial laws did not yet forbid black progress, the black freedmen and women could move as they pleased, baptize their children, procure firearms, testify in court, buy and sell property, and even vote. Some black men married white women, which was especially remarkable given their scarcity and high demand as wives for white men. A few black women took white husbands.

The most successful and conspicuous black freedman, Anthony Johnson, acquired a 250-acre tobacco plantation and at least one slave. With apparent impunity, Johnson boldly spoke his own mind to his white neighbors, telling one meddler: “I know myne owne ground and I will worke when I please and play when I please.” When white neighbors lured away his slave, Johnson went to court, winning damages and the return of his property. That the authorities supported an African against whites and upheld his right to own slaves reveals that slavery and racism had not yet become inseparably intertwined in the Chesapeake. That a black man would own a slave also indicates that getting ahead in planter society was more important to Johnson than any sense of racial solidarity with his fellow Africans in Virginia.

1680, Virginia prescribed thirty lashes on the bare back of any black slave who threatened or struck any white person, which invited poor whites to bully slaves with impunity, creating a common sense of white mastery over all blacks.

Raping a slave was not a crime but marrying her was. In 1705 the law subjected any minister who conducted an interracial marriage to a fine of ten thousand pounds of tobacco. A white man who married a free black or a white woman who slept with any black man faced six months in prison and a £10 fine.

Dreading reenslavement, the descendants of Anthony Johnson fled from Virginia, where their grandfather had been a respected freeholder able to defeat whites in lawsuits.

Where most Chesapeake settlers were poor and short-lived indentured servants, New England attracted primarily “middling sorts” who preserved their freedom because they could pay their own way across the Atlantic.

Puritan values helped the colonists prosper in a demanding land. In the process, they developed a culture that was both the most entrepreneurial and the most vociferously pious in Anglo-America. Contrary to the declension model promoted by some historians, the increasing commercialism of New England life at the end of the seventeenth century derived from Puritan values rather than manifested their decay.

Begun as an epithet, “Puritan” persists in scholarship to name the broad movement of diverse people who shared a conviction that the Protestant Reformation remained incomplete in England.

A Puritan explained, “God sent you unto this world as unto a Workhouse, not a Playhouse.”

Puritans longed to purify the churches by ousting all conspicuous sinners and by inviting members to monitor one another for consistent morality and sound theology. This zeal, however, dismayed most English people, who preferred Anglicanism and the traditional culture characterized by church ales, Sunday diversions, ceremonial services, inclusive churches, and deference to the monarch.

The first Puritan emigrants consisted of 102 Separatists, subsequently called the Pilgrims. In 1620 they crossed the Atlantic in the ship Mayflower to found a town named Plymouth on the south shore of Massachusetts Bay. Beneficiaries of a devastating epidemic that had recently decimated the coastal Indians, the Plymouth colonists occupied an abandoned village with conveniently cleared fields.

Once in Massachusetts, the company leaders established the most radical government in the European world: a republic, where the Puritan men elected their governor, deputy governor, and legislature (known as the General Court). Until his death in 1649, John Winthrop almost always won annual reelection as governor.

Because the Puritans prepared for the next world by their moral life in this one, their rhetoric yoked together material aspiration and the pursuit of salvation. It is anachronistic for us to separate the two.

Purely economic motives, however, would have dispatched few people to cold, distant, and rocky New England. English people could more cheaply, easily, and certainly improve their material circumstances by moving to the nearby and booming Netherlands, which welcomed skilled immigrants.

The Puritans understood in spiritual terms many causes that we might define as “economic.” They interpreted the wandering beggars, increased crime, cloth trade depression, and famines as divine afflictions meant to punish a guilty land that wallowed in sin.

Battling the prevailing Atlantic winds and currents, the slow-moving vessels usually took eight to twelve weeks to cross. Few of the Puritans, who were mostly artisans and farmers, or their wives and children had traveled by ship. On board the standard vessel, about one hundred passengers shared the cold, damp, and cramped hold with their property, including some noisy and rank livestock.

First, most English Puritans persisted at home, waiting to see how God would treat both the mother country and the New England experiment. Second, the New England emigration represented only 30 percent of all the English who crossed the Atlantic to the various colonies during the 1630s. Many more people emigrated to the Chesapeake and the West Indies. Third, the Great Migration was brief, for emigration declined to a trickle after 1640, amounting to only seven thousand for the rest of the century.

At mid-century, the New England sex ratio was six males for every four females, compared with four males for every female in the Chesapeake. Greater balance encouraged a more stable society and a faster population growth.

In 1700 less than 2 percent of New England’s inhabitants were slaves, compared with 13 percent for Virginia and 78 percent for the English West Indies. Compared with the rest of the empire, New England possessed an unusually homogeneous colonial population and culture: free, white, and transplanted English.

Relative to the Chesapeake, the New England environment demanded more labor and provided smaller rewards, but it also permitted longer and healthier lives. In contrast to the Chesapeake tidewater with its long, hot, and humid summers and low topography, New England was a northern and hilly land with a short growing season and faster-flowing rivers and streams, which discouraged the malaria and dysentery that afflicted southern planters. In New England, people who survived childhood could expect to live to about seventy; in the Chesapeake, only a minority survived beyond forty-five.

Because New England had the most decentralized and popularly responsive form of government in the English empire, royalists despised the region as a hotbed of “republicanism.”

days. Puritan parents rarely dictated marriage partners to their children, but they could veto choices that seemed unwise.

New England women could also more easily obtain divorce when abandoned or sexually betrayed by their husbands. Historian Cornelia Dayton concludes that the effort “to create the most God-fearing society” tended “to reduce the near-absolute power that English men by law wielded over their wives.”

In effect, seventeenth-century New England and the English West Indies developed in tandem as mutually sustaining parts of a common economic system. Each was incomplete without the other. New English freedom depended on West Indian slavery.

By 1700, Boston alone had fifteen shipyards, which produced more ships than the rest of the English colonies combined. Indeed, Boston ranked second only to London as a shipbuilding center in the empire.

Seizing upon New England’s reputation in the mother country as a den of Puritan heretics and hypocrites, English economic interests called for an end to New England’s virtual autonomy within the empire.

As God’s favored people, they considered themselves the heirs to the ancient Israelites of the Old Testament. If they honored his wishes, God would bestow health and abundance upon them in this world. But should they deviate from his will in any way, God would punish them as rebels—more severely than he chastised common pagans, like the Indians.

In 1650, Massachusetts had one minister for every 415 persons, compared with one per 3,239 persons in Virginia.

The average New English churchgoer heard about seven thousand sermons in the course of his or her lifetime. To train an orthodox Puritan ministry for so many churches, Massachusetts founded Harvard College in 1636—the first such institution in English America (the

The remaining sticklers for the old purity bolted to join the Baptists, a Separatist denomination that rejected infant baptism in favor of adult baptism as an initiation to full membership.

The most sensational cases involved male sex with animals. In 1642 the New Haven authorities suspected George Spencer of bestiality when a sow bore a piglet that carried his resemblance. He confessed and they hanged both Spencer and the unfortunate sow. New Haven also tried, convicted, and executed the unfortunately named Thomas Hogg for the same crime.

No Catholics, Anglicans, Baptists, or Quakers need come to New England (except to exceptional Rhode Island). All dissenters were given, in the words of one Massachusetts Puritan, “free Liberty to keep away from us.”

By drawing dissidents out of Massachusetts and Connecticut, the Rhode Island settlements helped to maintain orthodoxy in the two major Puritan colonies. Although the orthodox leaders of Massachusetts and Connecticut despised Rhode Island, they benefited from it as a safety valve for discontents who would otherwise fester in their midst.

The authorities pardoned witches who confessed and testified against others, but persistent denial consigned the convicted witch to public execution by hanging. Contrary to popular myth and previous European practice, the New English did not burn witches at the stake.

Witchcraft was also plausible because some colonists did dabble in the occult to tell fortunes and to cure, or inflict, ills (but there is little reason to believe that such “cunning folk” worshiped Satan). Moreover, occult beliefs are self-fulfilling. Anthropologists have repeatedly found that people

Communities and authorities disproportionately detected witchcraft in women who seemed angry and abrasive, violating the cultural norm celebrating female modesty. Women constituted both the majority of the accusers and 80 percent of the accused.

Because it was no easy matter to prove witchcraft, juries usually found innocence. The New English prosecuted ninety-three witches but executed only sixteen—until 1692, when a peculiar mania at Salem dramatically inflated the numbers.

jeremiad exhorted listeners to reclaim the lofty standards and pure morality ascribed to the founders of New England. Paradoxically, the popularity of the genre attested to the persistence, rather than the decline, of Puritan ideals in New England. Determined to live better, the laity longed for the cathartic castigation of the jeremiad. And the ministry complied with eloquence and zeal. But English Puritans often took the jeremiads at face value, confirming their unduly low estimation of New England.

In 1679 the Boston synod of ministers denounced frontier settlers who succumbed to “an insatiable desire after Land and worldly Accommodations, yea, so as to forsake Churches and Ordinances, and to live like Heathen, only that so they might have Elbow-room enough in the world.”

The squashes and pumpkins spread out along the ground, discouraging the appearance of weeds between the maize plants and preserving moisture by shielding the earth from the sun. The interwoven roots strengthened the plants against the winds, and the cornstalks provided convenient poles for the climbing bean vines. In return, beans drew nitrogen from the air for fixing in the soil, partially compensating for the maize, which was nitrogen-depleting. The combination of plants also provided a balanced diet, because the beans offered protein and an amino acid, lysine, that when eaten with corn releases the corn’s protein.

To facilitate their hunting and gathering, the Indians also set fire to the forest beyond their fields. The aboriginal fires were less intense and destructive than the American forest fires of the present day. Because our own society suppresses fire, contemporary forests accumulate, over the years, large quantities of deadwood and dry brush. When a fire does ignite and escapes control, it is explosive, spreading rapidly and destructively up into the forest canopy to consume mature trees. The seventeenth-century Indians managed more modest fires. Because their fires were kindled twice a year, in both spring and fall, they found only the limited amount of deadwood and brush that had accumulated in the interim. Such fires spared the tall and thick mature trees with a dense bark, shaping a relatively open forest of many large trees and few small ones. Noting the effect, if not always the cause, colonists marveled at their ability to ride freely between immense trees through long stretches of the forest.

With fire the Indians shaped and sustained a forest that suited their needs. Regular burning favored large hardwoods, many of which yielded edible nuts. The relatively open forest also made it easier for hunters to see and pursue game. The regular burning diminished mice, fleas, and parasites that troubled people or the game that they ate. The fires also fertilized the forest floor and opened patches of sunlight. Both effects promoted ground-hugging plants, especially grasses and berries, which sustained a larger deer herd, to the ultimate benefit of their human hunters.

Because hospitality and generosity were fundamental duties, violators reaped shame and ridicule. No one went hungry in an Indian village unless all starved. With so little to steal and so little need to, theft was virtually unknown and no one locked a wigwam.

The colonists extorted wampum from the southern New England Indians and then shipped it to Maine to procure furs for shipment to England. In great and growing English demand, the furs helped finance the New English debts.

In effect, the Puritan colonies ran a protection racket that compelled native bands to purchase peace with wampum.

Lacking a collective identity as “Indians,” the natives continued to think of themselves as members of particular bands and tribes—which rendered them all vulnerable to colonial manipulation and domination.

In 1670 the 52,000 New England colonists outnumbered the Indians of southern New England by nearly three to one.

Above all, the missionaries exhorted the Indians to adopt the Puritan pace and mode of work, which meant long days of agricultural labor. Insisting upon the gendered division of labor favored by the English, the missionaries urged the Indian men to forsake hunting and fishing in favor of farming. The Indian women were supposed to withdraw from the cornfields to tend the home and to spin and weave cloth, just as New English women did.

The New English called the bloodiest Indian war in their history King Philip’s War, after the Wampanoag sachem named Metacom but known to the New English as King Philip.

The Indians’ mastery of the flintlock deprived the colonists of the technological edge they had enjoyed in the Pequot War.

During 1675 the colonists could rarely find and attack their more mobile and elusive foes. As a result, many settlers succumbed to the temptation to attack, plunder, and kill those Indians they could easily locate: the praying town Indians.

Because about a third of the natives in southern New England assisted the colonists, King Philip’s War became a civil war among the Indians.

In the late seventeenth century, tourists did not visit Plymouth to see the now celebrated rock (which was then unidentified). Instead, they gaped at Metacom’s skull. One visitor, the famous minister Cotton Mather, angrily wrenched off and took away Metacom’s jawbone, completing his silencing.

Tried and convicted, Tift suffered a traitor’s painful death, pulled apart by horses.

Tobacco was valuable to the empire—indeed, more precious than all other mainland produce combined—but sugar was king. Sugar could bear the costs of long-distance transportation (and the purchase of slaves by the thousand) because it was in great and growing European demand to sweeten food and drink.

Lacking cities and gold but possessing a fearsome reputation, the Caribs were the sort of Indians that the Spanish had learned to avoid.

received over two-thirds of the English emigrants to the Americas between 1640 and 1660.

West Indies (44,000) than in the Chesapeake (12,000) and New England colonies (23,000) combined. The

As positive incentives decayed after 1635, masters resorted more frequently and more brutally to punishment. They contemptuously referred to their servants as “white slaves” and applied the whip to drive and punish them—language and measures unthinkable in England.

By preindustrial standards, the sugar planter ran a large and complex operation that combined agriculture and manufacturing. He needed at least one mill to crush juice out of the cane, a boiling house to clarify and evaporate the juice into brown sugar crystals, a curing house to drain out the molasses and dry the sugar, a distillery to convert the molasses into rum, and a warehouse to store the barreled sugar until he could ship it to Europe.

Because cut cane spoiled unless processed within a few hours, the harvesting, milling, and boiling required close synchronization and quick work. Field gangs cut the ripe canes by hand with curved knives and carted the stalks to the mill, for prompt grinding between rollers turned by wind or cattle. Crushed from the cane, the juice had to be boiled within a few hours, before it could ferment. Boiling in a succession of copper kettles hung over a furnace evaporated the water, leaving a golden-brown sugar known as muscovado, which the planters packed into immense thousand-pound hogshead barrels and shipped to Europe, for further refinement there into white sugar for sale to consumers. Making muscovado also generated a cheap by-product, molasses, which could be rendered more valuable by distilling it into rum. Inexpensive to make, rum became the principal alcohol sold and consumed in the English empire.

By 1660, Barbados made most of the sugar consumed in England and generated more trade and capital than all other English colonies combined.

Despite its small scale, by 1660 Barbados had 53,000 inhabitants—a density of 250 persons per square mile, which rose to 400 by the end of the century. In 1700 the human concentration on Barbados was four times greater than in England.

Because white men could more easily escape to pass as free on another island or aboard a pirate ship, planters increasingly saw an advantage in employing only permanent slaves of a distinctive color immediately and constantly identified with slavery.

By 1660, Barbados had become the first English colony with a black and enslaved majority: 27,000 compared with 26,000 whites.

The growing slave population depended on increased slave imports, for the Barbadian slaves died faster than they could reproduce. Although the planters brought 130,000 Africans into Barbados between 1640 and 1700, only 50,000 remained alive there at the dawn of the new century.

Invariably, some reckless, frightened, or greedy slave alerted a master to the impending danger. Such reports kept the planters on edge and produced brutal retribution upon the suspected. In the first major alarm, in 1675, the planters executed thirty-five suspects; at least six of them were burned alive at the stake. The slave woman who revealed the conspiracy received her freedom from the colonial government, which compensated her master.

This English refusal to convert slaves diverged sharply from the practice of French, Spanish, and Portuguese masters, who felt religiously and legally bound to promote the Catholic initiation of every soul, while they exploited the body. Only the Quaker minority challenged the ban at Barbados on converting the slaves. For this, they were considered dangerous radicals, and the government fined them about £7,000, executed one, and ordered their meetinghouse nailed shut.

Once a land of apparent promise for common tobacco planters, Barbados had become the domain of sugar grandees and their African slaves.

During the 1640s, they had increased their exposure to deadly diseases by importing slaves bearing new pathogens from Africa: principally yellow fever and malaria, which became the greatest killers of Barbadians, free and slave. The Africans also introduced and shared hookworm, yaws, guinea worm, leprosy, and elephantiasis.

Fewer than fifteen hundred Spanish colonists and their slaves occupied part of the south coast in 1655, when their weakness attracted an English invasion and occupation.

When buccaneers blew into town after a successful raid, Port Royal earned its reputation as the wickedest place in the English-speaking world: the Sodom of the West Indies. But paradoxical Port Royal also astonished visitors by hosting four churches (Anglican, Presbyterian, Quaker, and Catholic) and a synagogue for the more pious colonists. With 2,900 inhabitants in 1680, Port Royal was the third-largest town in English America, behind only Bridgetown on Barbados and Boston in New England.

During the 1690s the crown dispatched a new governor with instructions to oust the buccaneers from Jamaica, which proved easier to accomplish in the wake of Sir Henry Morgan’s death in 1688. Suffering from cirrhosis of the liver, the heavy-drinking Sir Henry sought relief from an African folk doctor. But his treatments—injections of urine and an all-body plaster of moist clay—only hastened Morgan’s death.

In 1660, Jamaica had seemed big enough for both small and great planters, but by the end of the century it became the English colony most dominated by great planters and their slaves. By

At the end of the seventeenth century, white emigrants from the West Indies, particularly Barbados, carried the seeds of that society to the southern mainland by founding the new colony of Carolina.

THE 1670s, West Indian planters established a new colony on the Atlantic seaboard north of Florida but south of the Chesapeake. Called Carolina to honor King Charles II, the new colony included present-day North and South Carolina and Georgia.

In their treaties with native peoples, the colonists insisted upon the return of all fugitive slaves as the price of peace and trade. As a further incentive, Carolina paid bounties to Indians who captured and returned runaways, at the rate of a gun and three blankets for each.

To secure Carolina from Spanish attack and accelerate its economic development, the Lords Proprietor needed to attract more colonists quickly. The Lords offered the incentives most alluring to English settlers of the late seventeenth century: religious toleration, political representation in an assembly with power over public taxation and expenditures, a long exemption from quitrents, and large grants of land. The Lords Proprietor assured religious tolerance to everyone but atheists (who hardly existed anywhere in the seventeenth century), promising even Jews the liberty to practice their faith. To discourage violent religious disputes, the Lords forbade “any reproachful, reviling, or abusive Language” against the faith of another.

that the average Carolina freedman accumulated more than 350 acres of land before death.

a detached cluster of settlements on Albemarle Sound, near Virginia. Founded by Virginians during the 1650s, these settlements resented their inclusion in Carolina and resisted, sometimes violently, the collection of quitrents and customs duties by proprietary officials. In 1691 the Lords Proprietor mollified the Albemarle Sound colonists by establishing “North Carolina” as a distinct government with its own assembly and deputy governor.

The division left Charles Town the capital of “South Carolina,” which the Goose Creek Men dominated. Arrogant and Anglican, the Goose Creek Men stifled the policy of religious toleration. In 1702, the assembly barred non-Anglicans from holding political office and established the Church of England as the colony’s official, tax-supported church. The Lords Proprietor accepted the restrictive new legislation, abandoning their principal supporters in the colony, the religious dissenters.

As in the Chesapeake, the common and the great planters of Carolina established a white racial solidarity that, in politics, trumped their considerable differences in wealth and power.

Carolina’s early leaders concluded that the key to managing the local Indians was to recruit them as slave catchers by offering guns and ammunition as incentive.

The Carolina trader benefited from the native custom of providing wives to welcome newcomers.

Consequently, the Carolinians exported most of the Indian captives to the West Indies, especially Barbados, trading them for Africans, who were then brought back to work the Carolina plantations. The exchange rate of two Carolina Indian slaves for one African reflected the shorter life expectancy of the enslaved native.

Florida’s Indian population collapsed from about 16,000 in 1685 to 3,700 in 1715, and the missions shrank to a few in the immediate vicinity and partial security of San Agústin.

perfected on a grand scale in the American West, including cattle branding, annual roundups, cow pens, and cattle drives from the interior to the market in Charles Town.

In Carolina the black herdsmen became known as “cowboys”—apparently the origin of that famous term.

The colony rewarded with freedom any black who killed an enemy in time of war.

Enjoying a protected market within the empire for both rice and indigo, Carolina planters became the wealthiest colonial elite on the Atlantic seaboard—and second only to the West Indians within the empire.

even more gracious, polite, genteel, and lavish than the gentlemen of Virginia. Competing for status, the Carolina planters vied to serve the best wines, to display fine silverware and furniture, to appear in silk clothing, and to muster servants dressed in livery.

An elite Carolinian conceded, “We eat, we drink, we play, and shall continue to until everlasting flames surprise us.”

working conditions and the disease-ridden lowland environment produced a slave mortality in excess of the birthrate.

bear firearms to church, to deter the blacks from rebelling on a Sunday.

The authorities employed torture to obtain confessions, which led to executions, sometimes by hanging but usually by burning at the stake.

merchants, landed gentry, and Anglican ministers. They hoped to alleviate English urban poverty by shipping “miserable wretches” and “drones” to a new southern colony, where hard work on their own farms would cure indolence. By this moral alchemy, people who drained English charity would become productive subjects working both to improve themselves and to defend the empire on a colonial frontier.

Farther upriver he located the town of Ebenezer, as a haven for German Lutherans recently evicted from a Catholic principality.

Moreover, black slavery made manual labor seem degrading to free men, which discouraged exertion by common whites, who aspired, instead, to acquire their own slaves to do the dirty work.

willing to labor and capable of bearing arms, the Georgia Trustees wanted many compact farms worked by free families, instead of larger but fewer plantations dependent upon enslaved Africans. To mandate their vision, the founders restricted most new settlers to fifty-acre tracts—about an eighth of the size of a Carolina plantation—and the trustees forbade the importation or possession of slaves.

reject the slave system so fundamental and profitable to the rest of the empire. Driven by concerns for military security and white moral uplift, the antislavery policy expressed neither a principled empathy for enslaved Africans nor an ambition to emancipate slaves elsewhere.

To discourage litigation and agitation, the founders also banned lawyers from practicing in the new colony.

During the late 1730s and early 1740s, the trustees lifted the bans on lawyers, liquor, and large landholdings—but held firm against slavery and an assembly.

The Georgia dissidents rallied behind the revealing slogan “Liberty and Property without restrictions”—which explicitly linked the liberty of white men to their right to hold blacks as property. Until they could own slaves, the white Georgians considered themselves unfree. Such reasoning made sense in an eighteenth-century empire where liberty was a privileged status that almost always depended upon the power to subordinate someone else.

in 1751 the trustees capitulated, permitting slavery and surrendering Georgia to the crown.

From about 3,000 whites and 600 blacks in 1752, Georgia’s population surged to 18,000 whites and 15,000 blacks in 1775.

More fertile and temperate than New England, but far healthier than the Chesapeake, the mid-Atlantic region was especially promising for cultivating grain, raising livestock, and reproducing people.

The acquisition of New Netherland (which had swallowed up New Sweden) would also close the gap between the Chesapeake and New England, promoting their mutual defense against other empires and the Indians.

By virtue of their especially indulgent charters, the New England colonies were virtually independent of crown authority. Answering to no external proprietors, the New English developed republican regimes where the propertied men elected their governors and councils, as well as their assemblies, and where much decision-making was dispersed to the many small towns.

the colonial arrangement seemed designed for many separate surrenders rather than for collective defense. In

During the early seventeenth century, the Netherlands emerged as an economic and military giant, out of all proportion to its confined geography and small population of 1.5 million (compared with 5 million English and 20 million French).

While the other European states were developing authoritarian and centralized monarchies, the Dutch opted for a decentralized republic dominated by wealthy merchants and rural aristocrats.

European intellectuals also gravitated to Amsterdam because the Dutch allowed greater latitude to new ideas. The great seventeenth-century philosophers René Descartes, John Locke, and Benedict de Spinoza all emigrated to escape intolerance in their own countries.

After 1640 most of the slaves sent to the Americas went in Dutch rather than Portuguese vessels, enriching the merchants of Amsterdam rather than those of Lisbon.

a Dutch flotilla intercepted and captured the entire Spanish treasure fleet homeward bound from the Caribbean in 1628. The loss of the ships and 200,000 pounds of silver virtually bankrupted the Spanish crown and enormously enriched the Dutch investors in the attacking fleet.

Beginning with Henry Hudson in 1609, Dutch merchants annually sent ships across the Atlantic and up the Hudson River to trade for furs with the Indians. Seventeenth-century ships could ascend the river 160 miles, as far as the future Albany, a greater distance than was possible on any other river on the Atlantic seaboard.

In 1625, the Dutch founded the fortified town of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island at the mouth of the river. Possessing the finest harbor on the Atlantic seaboard, New Amsterdam served as the colony’s largest town, major seaport, and government headquarters.

Colonists’ roving pigs and cattle invaded cornfields, provoking the natives to kill and eat the livestock—which, of course, outraged the settlers.

Some were Swedes, but most came from Finland, then under Swedish rule. Skilled at pioneer farming in heavily forested Sweden and Finland, the colonists adapted quickly to the New World and introduced many frontier techniques that eventually became classically “American,” including the construction of log cabins.

A zealous Calvinist, Governor Stuyvesant joined the Dutch Reformed clergy in urging a new policy meant to keep Jews as well as other Protestants out of New Netherland. But the Dutch West India Company consistently defended tolerance as best for business, reminding Stuyvesant of “the large amount of capital which [Jews] still have invested in the shares of this company.” The Jews remained, enjoying more freedom in New Netherland than in any other colony.

As in New England, the emigrants were primarily family groups of modest means and farmer or artisan status, rather than the indentured, unmarried, and young men who prevailed in the early Chesapeake and West Indies.

In New Netherland, women also enjoyed greater legal rights and economic opportunities than did their sisters in the English colonies. In contrast to English women, Dutch wives kept their maiden names, which reflected their more autonomous identity by law. Unlike the “coverture” of English common law, the Dutch legal code (derived from Roman law) did not deprive married women of their legal identity and their rights to own property. If a wife survived her husband, she received half of the property, while the other half went to their heirs—significantly better than the one-third allowed widows by English law.

Between 1661 and 1664, 383 women conducted or faced lawsuits in the courts at New Amsterdam.

But if religious conflict and economic misery sufficed to push colonial emigration, the French would have triumphed over both the English and the Dutch. The further difference was that, unlike France, England permitted its discontented freer access to its overseas colonies and greater incentives for settling there.

Begun in 1651 and strengthened in 1660 and 1663, the Navigation Acts had three fundamental principles. First, only English ships could trade with any English colony. The acts defined as English any ship built within the empire, owned and captained by an English subject, and sailed by a crew at least three-quarters English.

Confronting and overcoming more resistance there, the English plundered indiscriminately and sold the captured Dutch garrison into servitude in Virginia.

the king agreed in 1680 to grant the younger Penn 45,000 square miles west of the Delaware River as the colony of Pennsylvania (“Penn’s Woods”).

But as a young man and against his father’s wishes, Penn had converted to Quakerism, then an especially mystical, radical, and persecuted form of Protestantism.

Renouncing formal prayers, sermons, and ceremony of any sort, Quakers met together as spiritual equals and sat silently until the divine spirit inspired someone, anyone, to speak. Although they rejected a specially educated and salaried ministry, certain especially devout and articulate laymen (and women) served as “Public-Friends,” itinerant preachers supported by voluntary contributions.

In contrast to the Puritan emphasis on sacred scripture, Quakers primarily relied on mystical experience to find and know God. The Quakers sought an “Inner Light” to understand the Bible, which they read allegorically rather than literally. More than a distant divinity or an ancient person, their Jesus Christ was fundamentally here and now and eternal: the Holy Spirit potentially dwelling within every person. Anyone truly awakened by that Spirit could thereafter live in sanctity.

Penn was both a devout Quaker and an ingrained elitist, both highly principled and habitually condescending. A tireless crusader for religious toleration, Penn traveled widely as a preacher, in Germany and Holland as well as Great Britain.

Penn’s financial interest also argued for hastening development by welcoming every productive emigrant. In founding a colony, Penn meant to enhance rather than to sacrifice his fortune. In promising a “Free Colony,” he did not offer free land, for he meant to profit by selling real estate and by collecting annual quitrents. He explained, “Though I desire to extend religious freedom, yet I want some recompense for my trouble.”

Pennsylvania commenced after the local natives had plunged in numbers and power from multiple epidemics, prolonged exposure to the alcohol of Dutch and Swede traders, and destructive raids by both the Iroquois Five Nations and the Chesapeake colonists.

During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, many native peoples fled from mistreatment in other colonies to settle in Pennsylvania. Penn’s government welcomed Shawnees from South Carolina, the Nanticoke and Conoy of Maryland, the Tutelo from Virginia, and some Mahicans from New York. One refugee explained to the Quakers, “The People of Maryland do not treat the Indians as you & others do, for they make slaves of them & sell their Children for Money.”

Penn consented to their division in 1704 into the distinct colonies of Pennsylvania and Delaware, with separate legislatures but a common governor appointed by their proprietor.

Living beyond his means and donating generously to support Quaker meetings and Public Friends, Penn accumulated the debts that would consign him to an English debtors’ prison in 1707.

Neither any single ethnic group nor any particular religious denomination enjoyed a majority in any middle colony.

In the mid-eighteenth century, a German immigrant reported, “They have a saying here: Pennsylvania is heaven for farmers, paradise for artisans, and hell for officials and preachers.”

James II regarded the American colonies as cash cows meant to fund a more authoritarian crown. Endowed with a larger colonial revenue, the crown could dispense with Parliament, which was constitutionally necessary to levy taxes within England.

Although routine in southern colonies (but poorly collected), quitrents were novel and provocative in New England. Because English folk regarded secure real estate as fundamental to their liberty, status, and prosperity, the colonists felt horrified by the sweeping and expensive challenge to their land titles.

In a bold and desperate gamble, William invaded England as a preemptive strike to capture that realm for a Dutch alliance. Aided by collusion in the disaffected English army and navy, William crossed the Channel and landed without resistance in November.

Whigs, called the transfer of power a “Glorious Revolution,” which they creatively depicted as a spontaneous uprising by a united English people. In fact, the revolution was fundamentally a coup spearheaded by a foreign army and navy.

In all of its reforms, the crown favored the local oligarchies of great planters and merchants, rather than any colonial longing for democracy (which was not evident).

By 1694 the English sustained an army of 48,000 subjects plus 21,000 German mercenaries.

Formerly the bulwark against unpopular taxes and crown power, Parliament became the great collection agency for the new monarch, a Protestant succession, and a transatlantic empire. Formerly the lightest-taxed people in Europe, the English joined the French and the Dutch as the most heavily taxed.

In stark contrast to France, England built a fiscal-military state without submitting to the despotism of an absolutist monarchy.

Despite their numerical superiority, the English colonists suffered repeated defeats as New France mustered small but effective combinations of royal troops, Canadian militia, and Indians to raid and destroy frontier settlements in New York and New England. In response, the English tried to invade Canada both by land from Albany via Lake Champlain and by sea via the St. Lawrence River, but both invasions were expensive and humiliating failures.

Neutrality did not bring a universal peace to Iroquoia. On the contrary, peace to the north and west obliged the Iroquois to find enemies elsewhere, for they remained committed to mourning wars to sustain their numbers, their spiritual power, and their warrior ethos. A colonist noted that “if you go to persuade them to live peaceably” the Iroquois “will answer you, that they cannot live without war.” After

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

Pirates took a special pride in their ability to eat, drink, dance, gamble, and whore with abandon, in a style that they called “living well.” Although unstable and dangerous, piracy proved intoxicating and addictive. The

In a colonial world divided between masters and servants, the pirates defined freedom as their own opportunity to prey upon others.

By 1716 colonial authorities estimated that at least two thousand Anglo-American pirates were operating in the West Indies and along the Atlantic seaboard. They found havens on the unsettled islands of the Bahamas and in the secluded inlets of the Carolinas.

In 1688 the crown captured about 3 percent of the national income as taxes; by 1715 that had tripled to 9 percent of an enlarged economy.

Viewing the French as an “other,” the British characterized them as economically backward, religiously superstitious, culturally decadent, aggressively militarist, and broken to despotic rule. By inverse definition, the British saw themselves as especially enlightened by commerce, individual liberties, the rule of law, and a Protestant faith.

Despite the proliferation of British shipping, the overall number of emigrants declined in the early eighteenth century from its seventeenth-century peak.

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.

Formerly the great colonial entrepôt, Boston slipped to third, behind Philadelphia and New York, by 1760.

a modest increase in productivity per capita, of at least 0.3 and perhaps 0.5 percent annually. Although not much by the standards of our time, this growth rate was impressive for a preindustrial economy. 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.

Indeed, the wealth of colonial regions varied directly and positively with the number of slaves. The West Indian planters lived in the greatest luxury because they conducted the harshest labor system with the greatest number of slaves. Next, in both wealth and slavery, came South Carolina, followed by the Chesapeake and the middle colonies. At the other extreme of the imperial spectrum, New England had the lowest standard of living and the fewest slaves. 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 muster rolls for colonial military regiments recorded heights, revealing that the average colonial man stood two or three inches taller than his English counterpart. Stature depends upon nutrition, and especially protein, so the superior height of free colonists attested to their better diet, especially rich in meat and milk. On average, the tallest colonists were southern planters—those who profited most from African slavery and Indian land.

Because appearances mattered so much in regulating status and credit, colonists wished to see themselves, and to be seen by others, as something more than rude rustics.

The genteel performed constantly for one another, ever watching and ever watched for the proper manners, conversation, dress, furnishings, and home. Every action, every statement, every object was on display and subject to applause or censure.

Of course, the common folk could never fully match the consumption and taste of the colonial elite of great planters, merchants, and lawyers. Indeed, the common emulation constantly drove the gentility to reiterate their superior status by cultivating more expensive tastes in the most current fashions.

In addition to goods, the swelling volume of British shipping carried emigrants across the Atlantic. 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. But push prevailed over pull factors in colonial emigration.

In England, crime surged with every peace as thousands of unemployed and desperate people stole to live. The inefficient but grim justice of eighteenth-century England imposed the death penalty for 160 crimes, including grand larceny, which was loosely defined as stealing anything worth more than a mere shilling.

Between 1718 and 1775, the empire transported about fifty thousand felons, more than half of all English emigrants to America during that period. The transported were overwhelmingly young, unmarried men with little or no economic skill: the cannon fodder of war and the jail fodder of peace. About 80 percent of the convicts went to Virginia and Maryland, riding in the English ships of the tobacco trade. Convicts provided a profitable sideline for the tobacco shippers, who had plenty of empty cargo space on the outbound voyage from England. At about a third of the £35 price of an African male slave, the convict appealed to some planters as a better investment.

Once in the colonies, the Ulster Scots gravitated to the frontier, where land was cheaper, enabling large groups to settle together. Their clannishness helped the emigrants cope with their new setting, but it also generated frictions with the English colonists. Feeling superior to the Catholic Irish, the Ulster Scots bitterly resented that so many colonists lumped all the Irish together. In 1720 some Ulster Scots in New Hampshire bristled that they were “termed Irish people, when we so frequently ventured our all, for the British crown and liberties against the Irish Papists.” As a compromise, they became known in America as the Scotch-Irish.

Outnumbering the English emigrants, the 100,000 Germans were second only to the Scots as eighteenth-century immigrants to British America.

The average Pennsylvania farm of 125 acres was six times larger than a typical peasant holding in southwestern Germany, and the colonial soil was more fertile, yielding three times as much wheat per acre. Lacking princes and aristocrats or an established church, Pennsylvania demanded almost no taxes, and none to support someone else’s religion. And Pennsylvania did not conscript its inhabitants for war.

The German emigrant trade developed a relatively attractive form of indentured servitude adapted to the needs of families. Known as “redemptioners,” the Germans contracted to serve for about four to five years. Unlike other indentured servants, the redemptioner families had to be kept together by their employers and not divided for sale. Most contracts also gave the emigrant family a grace period of two weeks, upon arrival in Pennsylvania, to find a relative or acquaintance who would purchase their labor contract. Often arranged by prior correspondence, these deals afforded the emigrants some confidence in their destination and employer. If the two-week period passed, the redemption

But he exaggerated a tad, for the overall death rate for the voyage was only about 3 percent, a bit better than the 4 percent rate for convicts and far better than the 10 to 20 percent suffered by enslaved Africans. Germans probably risked more by staying at home in the path of the next European war.

Highly literate, the Pennsylvania Germans also sustained a vibrant press that produced German-language almanacs, books, and a newspaper.

Swiss emigrant Esther Werndtlin denounced her new home, Pennsylvania: “Here are religions and nationalities without number; this land is an asylum for banished sects, a sanctuary for all evil-doers from Europe, a confused Babel, a receptacle for all unclean spirits, an abode of the devil, a first world, a Sodom, which is deplorable.”

With German votes, the Quaker party retained control over the Pennsylvania assembly, to the dismay of the Scotch-Irish, who felt ignored and maligned by the new coalition. Clustered on the frontier, the Scotch-Irish especially resented the refusal of the Quakers and Germans, who dwelled safely and prosperously around Philadelphia, to fund a frontier militia to attack the Indians. Feeling abandoned by the Pennsylvania government, the Scotch-Irish resolved to fight the natives on their own harsh terms. In killing Indians, the Scotch-Irish could vent their political resentments without overtly confronting the Germans and the Quakers.

In 1737, Thomas Penn and James Logan conducted the “Walking Purchase,” perhaps the most notorious land swindle in colonial history—which is saying a great deal. Unable to stop invading squatters, the local Lenni Lenape band agreed to relinquish a tract that would be bounded by what a man could walk around in thirty-six hours. Of course, the Lenni Lenape expected to lose only a modest parcel, but Logan and Penn had made elaborate preparations to maximize their purchase. They employed scouts to blaze a trail, and they trained three runners. On the appointed September day, the runners astonished and infuriated the Lenni Lenape by racing around a tract of nearly twelve hundred square miles, including most of their homeland.

During the eighteenth century, the British colonies imported 1.5 million slaves—more than three times the number of free immigrants.

The slave trade diminished the inhabitants of West Africa, who declined from 25 million in 1700 to 20 million in 1820. At least two million people died in slave-raiding wars and another six million captives went to the New World as slaves. That demographic loss hampered economic development, rendering West Africa vulnerable to European domination during the nineteenth century.

During the eighteenth century, the British seized a commanding lead in the transatlantic slave trade, carrying about 2.5 million slaves, compared with the 1.8 million borne by the second-place Portuguese (primarily to Brazil) and the 1.2 million transported by the third-place French.

During the eighteenth century at least one-third of the slaves died within three years of their arrival on the island of Barbados.

On the coast of West Africa, the sojourning Britons suffered from the dank humidity, fierce heat, and frequent torrential rains. They also died by the hundreds from tropical diseases, for Africa reversed the immunological advantage that Europeans enjoyed as colonizers in more temperate climes.

Popular myth has it that the Europeans obtained their slaves by attacking and seizing Africans. In fact, the shippers almost always bought their slaves from African middlemen, generally the leading merchants and chiefs of the coastal kingdoms. Determined to profit from the trade, the African traders and chiefs did not tolerate Europeans who foolishly bypassed them to seize slaves on their own initiative. And during the eighteenth century the Africans had the power to defeat Europeans who failed to cooperate. Contrary to the stereotype of shrewd Europeans cheating weak and gullible natives, the European traders had to pay premium, and rising, prices to African chiefs and traders, who drove a hard bargain. During the 1760s, traders paid about £20 per slave, compared with £17 during the 1710s.

The Europeans exploited and expanded the slavery long practiced by Africans. Some slaves were starving children sold by their impoverished parents. Others were debtors or criminals sentenced to slavery. But most were captives taken in wars between kingdoms or simply kidnapped by armed gangs.

Although they did not directly seize slaves, the European traders indirectly promoted the wars and kidnapping gangs by offering premium prices for captives.

neighbors. As guns became essential for defense, a people had to procure them by raiding on behalf of their suppliers, lest they instead participate in the slave trade as victims. By the end of the century, the British alone were annually exporting nearly 300,000 guns to West Africa.

About a quarter of the captives died along the way from some combination of disease, hunger, exhaustion, beatings, and suicide.

Once the ship set sail, the slaves entered the notorious “middle passage” across the Atlantic to colonial America.

The European crews exposed the slaves to smallpox, measles, gonorrhea, and syphilis. And the Africans brought along their own diseases to exchange with the crew: yellow fever, dengue fever, malaria, yaws, and especially a bacillary dysentery (a gastrointestinal disorder) known as the “bloody flux.”

The greatest uprising racked Jamaica in 1760, killing ninety whites. Ruthless repression then killed four hundred blacks; most were burned at the stake, belying the eighteenth century’s reputation as an “Age of Enlightenment.”

But, in an effort to sustain their own cultural space, northern blacks developed an annual ritual festival known as “Negro election day,” when they gathered to drink, feast, play, and dance. The festivities culminated with the raucous election of local kings, governors, and judges, who acted throughout the next year as arbitrators of disputes within the black community.

On the sugar islands, slaves outnumbered whites by more than three to one.

Often the urban, skilled, and favored slaves were lighter-skinned mulattoes, the offspring of white masters and their female slaves. Adopting colonial words, ways, and clothes, the urban slaves usually felt little solidarity with the more numerous and African-born field hands of the rice and indigo plantations. But when frustrated in their aspirations for still greater freedom and privilege, the urban slaves could become especially formidable plotters against their masters.

Chesapeake slaves also lived in sufficient concentrations to find marriage partners and bear children, in contrast to many northern slaves. Consequently, natural increase swelled the Chesapeake slave population, which enabled the planters to reduce their African imports after 1750. Thereafter, creole slaves predominated in the Chesapeake.

In 1780 the black population in British America was less than half the total number of African emigrants received during the preceding century, while the white population exceeded its emigrant source by three to one, thanks especially to the healthy conditions in New England and the middle colonies.

And although some English dissenters, principally the Quakers, did seek in America a general religious freedom, many more emigrants wanted their own denomination to dominate, to the prejudice of all others. Indeed, at the end of the seventeenth century, most colonies offered less religious toleration than did the mother country.

And unlike other colonial regions, New England had plenty of official clergyman to fill the many pulpits. Most were graduates of Harvard (founded in 1636) or Yale (1701). Indeed, New England struck visitors as the most conspicuously devout and religiously homogeneous region in British North America. The New English towns enforced a Sabbath that restricted activity to the home and church, imposing arrests and fines on people who worked, played, or traveled on Sunday. An English visitor found the New England Sabbath “the strictest kept that ever I saw.”

As Kay so unpleasantly learned, an establishment tended to increase the power of colonial elites over the church rather than the power of the church over the colonists.

In addition to the many denominational divisions, colonial churches were developing an internal rift between evangelicals and rationalists.

Favoring critical and empirical inquiry, the rationalists slighted the traditional foundations of Christian faith: scriptural revelation and spiritual experience. The rationalists instead found guidance in the science that depicted nature as the orderly and predictable operation of fundamental and discernible “laws,” such as Isaac Newton’s explication of gravity. Christian rationalism held that God created the natural universe and thereafter never interfered with its laws. God seemed less terrifying as learned people reinterpreted epidemics, earthquakes, and thunderbolts as “natural” rather than as direct interventions of divine anger. The Reverend Andrew Eliot, a New England Congregationalist, explained, “There is nothing in Christianity that is contrary to reason. God never did, He never can, authorize a religion opposite to it, because this would be to contradict himself.”

Discarding the Calvinist notion of an arbitrary and punishing God, the rationalists worshiped a benign, predictable, forgiving, and consistent deity who rewarded good behavior with salvation, but who expected common people to defer to the learned and authoritative men at the top of the social hierarchy.

During his 1739–41 tour from Maine to Georgia, Whitefield furthered transatlantic and intercolonial integration by becoming the first celebrity seen and heard by a majority of the colonists.

Whitefield stirred controversy by blaming rationalist ministers for neglecting their duty to seek, experience, and preach conversion. He charged, “The generality of preachers talk of an unknown and unfelt Christ. The reason why congregations have been dead is, because they had dead men preaching to them.” Such rebukes divided the ministry, inspiring some to adopt Whitefield’s spontaneous, impassioned, evangelical style while hardening others in opposition.

“It was a very frequent thing to see an house full of outcries, faintings, convulsions and such like, both with distress, and also with admiration and joy.” The Old Lights called the outbursts “enthusiasm,” then a pejorative term that meant human madness, at best, or Satan’s manipulation, at worst. The Reverend Ezra Stiles commented that “multitudes were seriously, soberly and solemnly out of their wits.”

Where the New Lights championed the uninhibited and disruptive flow of divine grace by inspired itinerants, the Old Lights regarded Christianity as a stable faith that needed barricades against intrusive innovations.

In defying the established authority of minister and magistrate, the radical evangelicals championed individualism, a concept then considered divisive and anarchic.

The radical evangelicals sought to include every person in conversion, regardless of gender, race, and status, but they worked to exclude from church membership anyone they deemed unconverted by the New Birth.

Governor William Gooch denounced the itinerants for seeking “not liberty of conscience but freedom of speech.” His distinction was important and revealing. Gooch and other elitists accepted “liberty of conscience” as the passive persistence of longstanding denominational loyalties, but they dreaded “freedom of speech” for inviting people to rethink their allegiances, which seemed likely to disrupt social harmony. By this reasoning, Presbyterian preachers should limit their preaching to their traditional constituencies in Scots and Scotch-Irish settlements, rather than roam into other parishes to recruit Anglican defectors.

Used to reading character from external appearances, the Virginia Anglicans regarded the Baptists as somber and melancholy people, for they wore dark and plain clothing, cut their hair short, and wove their faith into every conversation. But their external sobriety and austerity covered a more emotional, intimate, and supportive community for worship. Gathered together, they shared their despair and ecstasy in a manner discouraged by ridicule in the highly competitive and gentry-dominated society of Anglican Virginia. Addressing one another as “brother” and “sister,” the Baptists conducted an egalitarian worship that contrasted with the hierarchical seating and service of the Anglican churches. The Baptists even welcomed slaves into their worship as “brothers” and “sisters,” and encouraged some to become preachers. To break down worldly pride and build solidarity, Baptist services included extensive physical contact: laying on of hands, the exchange of the “kiss of charity,” and ritual foot-washing. A visceral distaste for such intimate contact with ordinary people discouraged gentlemen and ladies from becoming Baptists. Appealing primarily to common planters and some slaves, the Baptists drew them together while drawing them away from the gentry.

By calling upon converts to desert their Anglican churches, the Baptists threatened a foundation of Virginia society: the expectation that everyone in a parish would worship together in the established church supervised by the county gentry. Baptists also discouraged the public amusements that had long demonstrated the gentry’s leadership as the finest dancers and the owners of the best racehorses and gamecocks. Landon Carter bitterly complained that the Baptists were “quite destroying pleasure in the Country; for they encourage ardent Prayer; strong & constant faith, & an intire Banishment of Gaming, Dancing, & Sabbath-Day Diversions.” The withdrawal of common evangelicals from public diversions and Anglican services implicitly rebuked the gentry and parsons for leading worldly lives.

Rigorously enforcing the laws against itineracy, Anglican magistrates whipped and jailed dozens of unlicensed preachers. Far from avoiding or resisting confrontation, the Baptists welcomed opportunities to endure persecution conspicuously for their faith. In 1771 a county sheriff and a posse of gentry tried to break up a Baptist meeting by pulling the preacher, John Waller, from the stage to inflict twenty lashes with a horsewhip. In Waller’s words, the congregation gathered around the whipping to sing psalms “so that he Could Scarcely feel the Stripes.” Released, Waller “Went Back singing praise to God, mounted the Stage & preached with a Great Deal of Liberty.” For evangelicals, to preach with “Liberty” meant to channel the Holy Spirit… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

In 1758 the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting also barred Quaker slaveholders from church leadership, and in 1776 it disowned them from membership. In colonies premised on slavery, the Quakers became the lone denomination to seek abolition systematically.

Conversion on their own terms brought them a new source of discipline to resist the worst vices of the dominant society. In particular, converted Indians reduced the alcohol consumption that rendered enclave Indians so poor, indebted, and exploited by their colonial neighbors. By creating their own local congregations, enclave Indians also limited the cultural control of outsiders.

In sum, the Great Awakening accelerated a religious dialectic that pulled seekers and their congregations between the spiritual hunger to transcend the world and the social longing for respect in

In 1627, after nearly two decades of colonization, Quebec still had only eighty-five French colonists.

Most of the female emigrants came from an orphanage in Paris and were known as filles du roi (“daughters of the king”). In addition to paying their passage, the crown provided a cash marriage dowry: an alluring incentive for orphan girls lacking family money.

This growth was too little too late to compete with the swelling number of English colonists, who numbered 234,000 whites plus 31,000 enslaved Africans by 1700.

That restrictive policy deprived Canada of an especially promising set of colonists, the Protestant minority known as Huguenots, who resembled the English Puritans in their Calvinist faith and middling status as artisans, shopkeepers, and merchants.

A visitor commented that a Canadian needed glass eyes, a brass body, and brandy for blood to endure the bitter cold. When winter at last receded, warm weather unleashed tormenting clouds of mosquitoes and blackflies—denser and fiercer than any in Europe.

Habitants took pride in their regular consumption of meat and white bread, which few French peasants could afford. Thanks to small, tight houses and plentiful firewood, the New French also kept warmer in the winter, despite its rigors and duration. And in contrast to their French relatives, the New French could afford horses, another cherished mark of higher status among peasants. Finally, the Canadian habitant enjoyed privileges of hunting and fishing—both of which were environmentally and legally denied to the peasants in crowded, depleted, and hierarchical France, where the aristocrats monopolized the limited supply of game.

Adapting to the cold, the habitants transformed winter into a cherished season of festive visiting, facilitated by horse-drawn sleighs, known as carioles.

At death, the widow inherited half the assets (and debts), while the children obtained the other half—a better split than the one-third that English widows ordinarily received.

Because each novice had to pay a substantial dowry to enter a convent, most came from seigneurial or mercantile families. By paying convent dowries to place some daughters, parents could vest most of the family estate in fewer heirs, especially an elder son.

To govern New France, the crown appointed three rival officials: a military governor-general, a civil administrator known as the intendant, and a Catholic bishop. The three were supposed to cooperate to enforce crown orders while competing for crown favor by jealously watching one another for corruption, heresy, and disloyalty.

But the number of army commissions, civil offices, and fur trade licenses lagged behind the proliferating children of seigneurial families. Inhibited from entering trade by their code of nobility, growing numbers dwelled in genteel indolence and poverty. In 1737 a priest reported that many seigneurial families were “as poor as artists and as vain as peacocks.” Charlevoix noted, “There is a great fondness for keeping up one’s position, and nearly no one amuses himself by thrift. Good cheer is supplied, if its provision leaves means enough to be well clothed; if not, one cuts down on the table in order to be well dressed.” Appearances mattered in New France.

After 1700, hard labor, rapid reproduction, and peace with the Iroquois brought greater security, prosperity, and development to the valley. From 15,000 in 1700, the population grew to 52,000 by 1750. The amount of cleared and cultivated land, the size of the wheat harvest, and the number of mills all tripled.

Far more readily than their English or Dutch competitors, the French traders married native women, which proved critical to their persistent predominance in the fur trade of the Great Lakes country. Indian women overcame their initial dislike of the pale and bearded French as ugly. Owing to war losses, Indian men had become relatively scarce, and the coureurs de bois offered their wives and Indian kin privileged access to the coveted trade goods of Europe. Over the generations, these relationships produced a distinctive mixed-blood people known as the métis, who spoke multiple languages, lived in their own villages, and acted as intermediaries between their French and Indian relatives.

The Indians accepted the terminology only because they understood it very differently, for they did not have patriarchal families. In their matrilineal kinship systems, mothers and uncles had far more authority than did fathers. The natives happily called the French their “fathers” in the expectation that they would behave like Indian fathers: indulgent, generous, and weak. Among Indians, a father gave much more than he received.

From Carolina’s success and Florida’s failure, the French concluded that a commerce in guns better secured native support than did missionaries. Determined to compete with the Carolina traders, the French in Louisiana wooed the Indians with trade goods, especially firearms.

Because few French volunteered to colonize distant and alien Louisiana, the company relied on military conscripts and convicted criminals (a mix of vagrants, blasphemers, thieves, smugglers, tax evaders, political prisoners, and prostitutes). To a far greater degree than in Canada, the French used Louisiana as a penal colony, which further undermined its reputation. In 1720 a colonial official complained, “What can one expect from a bunch of vagabonds and wrong-doers in a country where it is harder to repress licentiousness than in Europe?”

To sow antipathies, the French conspicuously employed especially trusted blacks in their militias sent to fight the Indians. A few particularly courageous black soldiers won their freedom as a reward. On the other hand, colonial leaders periodically punished rebel slaves by turning them over to Indians for burning to death. A French priest said that the executions “inspired all the Negroes with a new horror of the Savages, … which will have a beneficial effect in securing the safety of the Colony.”

To maintain the racial divisions essential to Louisiana’s security, the officers relied on Indians and blacks to track down and punish deserters. Military tribunals often specified that insubordinate soldiers be flogged by a black man.

By contrast, the British colonists reserved such treatment exclusively for their African property. To execute convicted whites, Louisiana employed a black man, Louis Congo, who drove a hard bargain for his services as executionor: freedom for himself and his wife, a plot of land, a steady supply of alcohol, and generous fees levied in pounds of tobacco—ten for a flogging or branding, thirty for a hanging, and forty for breaking on the wheel or burning alive.

The Natchez people preserved substantial elements of the Mississippian culture, including ceremonial mounds, painted and carved temples, and powerful chiefs who, in death, were honored with the human sacrifice of their servants.

Harsh experience had taught them that any people cut off from the gun trade faced destruction by their native enemies. Consequently, they considered any cessation of trade or escalation of prices to be acts of hostility, demanding war.

By combining Hispanic horses with French guns, many native bands reinvented themselves as buffalo-hunting nomads, which brought them unprecedented prosperity and power.

For want of sufficient water and because of the prevailing high winds, only a few species of trees, primarily cottonwood and willow, grew on the Great Plains, and only along the narrow, sheltered margins beside the permanent rivers. Instead of trees, hardy and drought-resistant grasses covered most of the Great Plains. On

The bison flesh abounded in protein with relatively little fat, and the internal organs supplied many vitamins and minerals. Cut into thin strips and dried in the hot summer sun, the meat could be preserved for months and even years.

The dried dung, known as “buffalo chips,” served as fuel on the treeless plains.

Those ties rendered band membership highly fluid, as the dissatisfied could readily shift into another band where they had relatives.

By conscripting the Pueblo to raid the nomads, the Hispanics further alienated them from one another. The raids procured the one paying commodity in New Mexico: slaves.

Today the predominant image of the American Indian is a warrior and buffalo hunter, wearing an eagle-feather bonnet and riding across the Great Plains. We imagine that the mounted warrior defended a timeless, deeply rooted way of life, independent of the European invasion of America. In fact, the association of Great Plains Indians with the horse is relatively recent and depended upon the colonial intrusion. Although horses first evolved in North America, before spreading eastward into Asia and Europe about twelve thousand years ago, they had become extinct in this continent by about ten thousand years ago. During the sixteenth century, the horse returned to North America as a domesticated animal kept by the Hispanic colonists.

The great material benefits fed into a new psychology, a sense of liberation from old limits into an intoxicating sense of speed, power, and range—an offering of both security and immense, open possibility.

There was a conspicuous exception to the general pattern: on the upper Missouri River some Hidatsa bands broke away westward, abandoning horticulture to become nomads, assuming a new identity as the Crow.

Especially numerous, the Lakota totaled some 25,000 people in 1790. Their own word lakota means “allies,” but their foes, including the French, called them the Sioux, which meant “enemies.”

In sum, most of the Indian peoples we now associate with the Great Plains were relative newcomers who arrived during the eighteenth century.

In 1800 a trader on the northern plains marveled at the abundant buffalo and remarked, “This is a delightful country, and were it not for perpetual wars, the natives might be the happiest people on earth.”

Once an advantage, the concentration in villages became a deadly liability as the villagers suffered disproportionately from the contagious epidemics. As their numbers dwindled, the horticulturalists could no longer effectively defend many of their villages, much less their claim to the surrounding buffalo herds. Because the more mobile and dispersed nomads suffered smaller losses to the epidemics they grew in relative power as the villagers waned.

The greater rewards of successful manhood came at a high price, for Great Plains warriors led shorter lives of increased violence. Because so many males died in their youth or prime, women outnumbered men, which encouraged polygamy by the most successful warriors.

In 1760 only about 1,200 colonists lived in Texas, nearly half of them (580) at San Antonio. The

As they became distinctive from the other Apaches, these composite and increasingly prosperous western bands became known to the Hispanics as the Apache de Navihu, which soon became shortened to Navajo.

In 1769, Galvez cracked under the strain of a formidable rebellion by the Seri and Pima Indians in Sonora (which included southern Arizona). One morning he bolted from his tent to announce a plan to “destroy the Indians in three days simply by bringing 600 monkeys from Guatemala, dressing them like soldiers, and sending them against Cerro Prieto,” a Seri stronghold. Galvez proceeded to assume the identity of Moctezuma, the king of Sweden, Saint Joseph, and finally God. The concerned viceroy of New Spain recalled Galvez to Mexico City, where he slowly recovered his mental health; sent home, he later rose to higher office in Spain.

Usually locked by ice, Hudson Bay was accessible by ships only during two months in the summer. But

Like most fur-trading enterprises, the Hudson’s Bay Company preferred to provide guns rather than missionaries, from a conviction that Christianity ruined hunters.

But the British colonists dissipated their numerical advantage by their division into fourteen distinct mainland colonies (Nova Scotia was the fourteenth, neglected by historians who speak of only thirteen).

Making a virtue of their small colonial population, the French usually kept their promises not to intrude new settlements on Indian lands.

In sum, by 1750 the Indians faced a greater threat of settler invasion and environmental transformation from the numerous and aggressive English than from the few and more generous French.

Embarked on his first command, Washington promptly displayed his inexperience. Although superior French numbers were building Fort Duquesne, Washington foolishly attacked and destroyed a small French patrol. Understandably upset, the main French force and their Indian allies surrounded Washington’s camp, a crude stockade that he had built in a swamp surrounded by high ground. When it began to rain heavily, his soldiers wallowed in water as the French and Indians fired on them from the hills. Compelled to surrender on July 4,

Although politically expedient, Pitt’s policy was financially reckless: by augmenting the monstrous public debt, Pitt saddled the colonists and Britons with a burden that would violently disrupt the empire after the war.

The conquest of Canada cost the British empire about £4 million, more than ten times what the French spent to defend it.

The collapse of New France was dreadful news to the Indians of the interior. No longer could they play the French and the British off against one another to maintain their own independence, maximize their presents, and ensure trade competition.

reckless Carolina settlers invaded Cherokee lands and poached their deer. Some especially ruthless frontiersmen killed Cherokee to procure scalps to collect the large bounties offered by the colony of Virginia. It was impossible to tell a Cherokee scalp from that of a hostile Shawnee—and far easier to kill an unsuspecting people than one prepared for war. The £50 bounty for an adult scalp allured settlers who rarely could make that much in a year. They rationalized that all Indians were their enemies, if not immediately, then inevitably.

The natives also felt a new commonality as Indians, above and beyond their traditional tribal and village identities. This Pan-Indian sensibility emerged from the teaching of a new set of religious prophets, led by a Lenni Lenape named Neolin. Adapting Christian ideas selectively to update native traditions, the prophets proclaimed a double creation: one for all Indians, the others for whites. In defense of their own divinely ordained way of life, Indians were supposed to resist colonial innovations, especially the consumption of alcohol and the cession of lands.

Although spared from massacre, a third of the Indian refugees died of smallpox contracted while crowded in their Philadelphia barracks.

That shocking conflict between the colonies and the mother country developed from strains initiated by winning the Seven Years War.

in 1763 imperial taxation averaged twenty-six shillings per person in Britain, where most subjects were struggling, compared with only one shilling per person in the colonies, where most free people were prospering.

Paradoxically, by protesting British taxation, the colonists affirmed their cherished identity as liberty-loving Britons, as they rallied behind the most cherished proposition of their shared political culture: that a free man paid no tax unless levied by his own representatives.

Colonists were quick to speak of “slavery” because they knew from their own practice on Africans where unchecked domination ultimately led. The conspicuous presence of slavery rendered liberty the more dear to the colonial owners of human property.

The free colonists intently defended their property rights because property alone made men truly independent and free.

European leaders increasingly concluded that wealth and power accrued to nations that discovered and analyzed new information.

The traders primarily sought sable, the premier fur-bearing mammal of Siberia. At first, the Russians marketed their furs in western Europe, but in 1689 they opened an even more lucrative trade with China, via the Siberian border town of Kaikhta, where the Russians obtained, in return, Chinese porcelains, teas, and silks.

As the French depended upon Indian hunters to harvest beaver, the Russians relied on Siberian tribal peoples to kill sable. Living in many bands of highly mobile hunter-gatherers with animist beliefs, the native Siberians resembled their distant kin the Inuit and the Indians of subarctic Canada.

In their reliance on tribute rather than trade to capture native labor, the Russians resembled the Spanish conquistadores of Mexico rather than the French traders in Canada.

When they submitted, the Siberians became exposed to deadly new diseases and a debilitating new dependency on alcohol, a combination that devastated their population.

Like the French and the English, leading Russians longed to believe that they could easily establish an American empire by appearing before the Indians as kinder and gentler colonizers. Subscribing to the “Black Legend” of peculiar Spanish brutality, the Russians predicted that the American Indians would welcome them as liberators.

Instead of welcoming the Russians as liberators, the local Tlingit Indians ambushed and destroyed two small boats filled with fifteen men sent to probe the shallow waters. In alarm, Chirikov promptly sailed back to Kamchatka, bearing neither hostages nor tribute.

The naturalist Georg Steller kept alive and busy observing, killing, dissecting, and naming wildlife previously unknown to Europeans, including Steller’s eagle, Steller’s jay, Steller’s white raven, and Steller’s sea cow, the last an immense northern manatee unique to the western Aleutians. Steller’s sea cows were, when mature, thirty-five feet long and exceeded four tons. Steller and the other survivors endured by hunting sea cows and sea otters and by grubbing for roots with sufficient vitamin C to ease their scurvy.

To accumulate sufficient furs for a profit, the voyages were long: at least two years and as many as six.

The Aleut divided into castes of chiefs, commoners, and slaves (principally war captives). The chiefs enjoyed larger dwellings and more prominent burials, with executed slaves as their companions in the afterworld.

the victors held the native women and children for ransom, while releasing the Aleut men to fill a large quota of furs (which took months). Once the furs were delivered, the promyshlenniki released the children and the women. In the interim, the Russians exploited the Aleut women as sex slaves. Upon departing, the traders left behind venereal diseases and some trade goods—wool, beads, knives, and hatchets—in token payment for the sea otter pelts.

From a contact population of about 20,000, the Aleut dwindled to only 2,000 by 1800.

As a precaution, the Spanish crown ordered the colonization of California to secure the unguarded northwestern door to precious Mexico. The Spanish divided California into southern “Baja California” (now in Mexico) and northern “Alta California” (approximately the present state of California).

Much larger and more complex than Baja, Alta California extended eleven hundred miles, contained about 100 million acres, and included the most spectacular topography and greatest environmental range of any region in North America.

In 1768 about 300,000 natives dwelled in Alta California: an especially impressive number given that only a few practiced horticulture.

In sum, much of the California landscape was subtly anthropogenic (human influenced) long before colonizers arrived with their own even more demanding system of manipulating nature, which they called civilization.

These human-tended landscapes sustained larger numbers of plants and animals and were healthier than today’s forests in California. Indeed, for lack of regular fires, contemporary forests are crowded with small trees, cluttered with deadwood, infested with pests, and vulnerable to destruction by huge and catastrophic fires.

Because the land belonged collectively to the villagers rather than to individuals, there was no market in land, no buying and selling of real estate.

Like most native cultures, the California Indians had powerful shamans but weak chiefs.

Although greatly outnumbered, the Hispanics possessed an intimidating monopoly of horses and guns, as well as a formal command structure.

proved surprisingly successful as economic enterprises, becoming self-sustaining in food by 1778. In 1775 the missions had only 427 head of cattle, but these grew phenomenally to at least 95,000 by 1805.

In 1769 the California coast between San Diego and San Francisco had a native population of 72,000, which declined to just 18,000 by 1821.

Cook’s reconnaissance facilitated subsequent British colonization of Australia, which began with the arrival of 723 convicts at Botany Bay in early 1788.

Lacking metallurgy, the natives exercised their ingenuity in crafting tools and weapons from wood and stone. They did occasionally recover bits of iron, mostly nails, from driftwood that apparently originated with Japanese and, perhaps, Spanish wrecks. Cherishing this metal, they longed to obtain more.

Dependent upon a bountiful but volatile nature, the Hawaiians maintained their harmony with the supernatural by worshiping an array of divine spirits, each manifesting some aspect of their environment. In particular, Lono dispensed the nourishing rain, while Ku had to be propitiated with human sacrifice to secure victory in war.

men and women ate different foods and ate apart from one another. Only men could eat pig and only chiefs could eat dog.

Other taboos prohibited women from fishing and forbade menstruating woman even to enter a river.

The well-fed natives also had the leisure time to compete violently for prestige. The victors in their endemic warfare collected numerous slaves and the skulls of the dead for prominent display in their villages.

Experienced traders and devoted to property, the raincoast peoples belied the classic stereotype of naive natives easily cheated by European traders bearing a few beads. Although eager to get metal knives, chisels, and arrowheads, the Moachat drove a hard bargain for their pelts and salmon. An expedition scientist noted that the raincoast natives were “very keen traders, getting as much as they could for everything they had; always asking for more, give them what you would.” The expedition artist John Webber had to pay for the right to draw the interior of a Nootka house.

Attentive to ancient tradition as well as new technology, Kamehameha ritually sacrificed defeated chiefs to Ku.

By investing in children’s souls instead of the sea otter trade, the Spanish ensured their own long-term irrelevance in the north Pacific.