Many reasons to cross the ocean
English settlement in North America began with Jamestown (1607), a company venture hoping for profit. It nearly failed until colonists found a cash crop, tobacco. In New England, the Pilgrims (1620) and the larger Puritan migration to Massachusetts Bay (from 1630) came mainly for religious reasons and built close-knit towns. Pennsylvania (1681), founded by the Quaker William Penn, offered religious freedom and attracted many European groups. Different motives produced different societies.
Three regions
- New England: small farms, fishing, shipbuilding and trade. Town meetings and church membership shaped public life.
- Middle colonies: fertile land, grain exports and a mix of nationalities and faiths.
- Chesapeake and the South: tobacco, and later rice and indigo, grown on large farms that needed many workers.
Labour and slavery
Planters first relied on indentured servants, who worked for a fixed term in return for passage. Enslaved Africans were first recorded in Virginia in 1619, but through most of the 1600s servants were more common. The balance shifted over time. Slavery became a hereditary, race-based system, written into colonial law, and by the 1700s it was central to Southern wealth.
Self-government and empire
Colonists elected assemblies, beginning with Virginia's House of Burgesses (1619). England passed Navigation Acts to make the colonies supply raw materials and buy English goods, but enforcement was loose. This long period of light control is called salutary neglect, and it let colonial assemblies grow used to deciding local matters. In the 1730s and 1740s the Great Awakening, a wave of emotional religious revival, spread across the colonies and encouraged people to question established authority.
Worked example: why did Virginia shift to enslaved labour?
Work through it as a chain of causes.
- Tobacco farming needed lots of cheap labour, so planters imported indentured servants.
- Servants who survived their terms wanted land, but good land near the coast was already taken.
- In Bacon's Rebellion (1676) armed former servants and poor farmers turned against the colonial elite.
- Planters concluded that a large class of free, landless, armed men was a danger.
- Enslaved workers could not leave after a term and could be held for life, so planters bought more of them, and laws made the status inherited.
The lesson: an economic need (labour) and a political fear (unrest) together explain the change. When a question asks "why", look for both.