Practice questions: Transatlantic Trade

Answer: (C) They paid more for European goods that had to come by way of England.

1. The Navigation Acts counted colonial-built ships as English, which is why New England's shipyards prospered under them.
2. The act routed European goods through England in English or colonial ships, which shut out Dutch carriers.
3. Goods from France, Spain or the Netherlands had to be landed in England first, so colonists paid for the extra voyage and English merchants' profits.
4. Sugar and tobacco were enumerated goods that had to go to England or another English colony, so the acts guaranteed English sales.

Answer: (A) Chesapeake planters who shipped their tobacco to England

1. English law banned tobacco farming at home so that Virginia and Maryland tobacco, and the customs duties it paid, held the English market.
2. Shipbuilders gained from the rule that counted colonial-built ships as English, not from a ban on growing tobacco in England.
3. Barbados had turned from tobacco to sugar by the 1650s, so a ban on English tobacco did nothing for its planters.
4. Middle-colony grain went mainly to the West Indies and gained nothing from a ban on tobacco growing in England.

Answer: (D) had been sent by the Crown to report on the colony's defiance.

1. Randolph was a royal agent from England whose job was to find and report trade violations, not to profit from them.
2. Randolph wrote in September 1676, three months after the meeting and eight years before the charter was cancelled.
3. The General Court sent its own agents to London to defend the charter, while Randolph worked against it.
4. Charles II sent Randolph to Boston in 1676 to investigate the colony, and his reports built the Crown's case against its charter.

Answer: (B) Sugar planters' reliance on imported food, timber and horses

1. Large grain exports from the middle colonies grew after Pennsylvania's founding in 1681 and went mostly to the West Indies, not England.
2. Barbados and the other sugar islands planted their land in cane and bought fish, provisions, horses and barrel staves from New England.
3. The company lost its monopoly in 1698, more than twenty years after Randolph's report.
4. Sugar was an enumerated good when Randolph wrote, and Boston could carry it because shipments to another English colony were allowed.

Answer: (D) European demand for sugar, tobacco and rice grown on plantations

1. The supply of English servants fell in the late 1600s, and that shortage pushed Chesapeake planters toward enslaved Africans.
2. Parliament ended the company's monopoly in 1698, and the open trade that followed carried more captives.
3. Virginia ruled in 1667 that baptism did not free an enslaved person, which protected owners' claims instead of ending them.
4. Planters bought more enslaved Africans to grow more of the crops Europeans wanted, so rising demand for those crops drove the trade.

Answer: (A) Its merchants sold fish, wood and food in many Atlantic markets.

1. Without a single cash crop, New England merchants sent fish, timber and provisions wherever buyers could be found, from Barbados to Spain.
2. One staple crop sold in England describes Chesapeake tobacco; New England's thin soils supported mixed family farms instead.
3. Furs were a minor export by the 1670s, and New England's main buyers were Caribbean planters and European merchants.
4. Fish and timber were not enumerated goods in 1676, so New England ships could carry them straight to Spain and Portugal.

Answer: (C) Its colonists elected their own governor under a royal charter.

1. A royal appointee governed Massachusetts only from 1686 under Andros, and the King named its governors after the 1691 charter.
2. Proprietors governed colonies such as Maryland and Carolina; Massachusetts was a charter colony run by its own elected officials.
3. The 1629 charter let the colony's freemen elect their governor and General Court, so Massachusetts acted with little oversight from London.
4. No colony elected members of Parliament, a fact the General Court itself cited in 1678 to reject Parliament's trade laws.

Answer: (B) Colonial protests in 1765 against taxes passed by a Parliament they did not elect

1. The Albany Plan sought a colonial council to manage defense and Native relations, and it did not deny Parliament's authority.
2. In 1765 the Stamp Act Congress declared that only the colonists' own assemblies could tax them, because they elected no members of Parliament.
3. Great Awakening preachers challenged church authority, not Parliament's power over colonial trade or taxes.
4. Loyalists defended Parliament's authority over the colonies, the opposite of the General Court's position.

Answer: (D) An English court's cancellation of the Massachusetts charter

1. Parliament tightened the trade laws in 1696 rather than opening direct trade with France, England's enemy in two wars after 1689.
2. Metacom's War began in 1675 over land and Native sovereignty, before Randolph wrote, and customs played no part in it.
3. Rhode Island received its royal charter in 1663, more than a decade before Randolph first arrived in Boston.
4. London cited Massachusetts's defiance of the trade laws when an English court cancelled the colony's charter in 1684.

Answer: (A) French and English traders competed for their furs and alliance.

1. Because New France and New York both wanted Haudenosaunee furs and military support, the five nations could play one empire against the other.
2. New France was expanding its posts on the Great Lakes in the 1680s, which is why its governor demanded that English traders stay out.
3. Epidemics killed many Haudenosaunee, but the five nations stayed central to the fur trade and fought wars to control it.
4. New York's governor claimed the Haudenosaunee as English subjects in 1684, but they rejected dependence on New York as firmly as on New France.

Answer: (C) Governing the colonies through officials appointed by the Crown

1. The Dominion replaced the charter governments, and elected government returned only after Bostonians overthrew it in 1689.
2. The Dominion was meant to enforce the Navigation Acts more strictly, and Randolph served as its secretary.
3. James II put New England under Andros and an appointed council that taxed without an elected assembly and punished towns that objected.
4. Andros and his council, not Parliament, levied the Dominion's taxes, which is why Ipswich protested taxation without an assembly.

Answer: (B) Colonial juries often acquitted merchants accused of smuggling.

1. Sugar, tobacco and the other enumerated goods had been listed since the Navigation Act of 1660.
2. Vice-admiralty judges appointed by the Crown decided cases without juries, the remedy Randolph had sought since Boston juries cleared seven of the ten ships he seized.
3. Colonial-built ships had counted as English since the first Navigation Acts, which helped New England's shipyards grow.
4. The act let officers choose between the courts at Westminster and the new colonial admiralty courts, adding a court near the offense.

Answer: (A) counted enslaved workers' deaths as losses to their owners.

1. The author listed dead mill workers among the costs of making sugar to argue that the duties ruined owners, so the passage gives an owner's view.
2. The pamphlet came from a sugar planter, and accounts written by enslaved workers in 1680s Barbados rarely survive.
3. Organized British campaigns against the slave trade began in the 1780s, a century later, and this author was a planter who owned enslaved people.
4. Barbados was still one of England's richest sugar colonies in 1689, which is why its planters fought the sugar duties.

Answer: (D) A new charter with an elected assembly and a royal governor

1. The trade laws stayed in force, and Parliament tightened them with a new Navigation Act in 1696.
2. William III did not restore the old charter; under the new one the Crown, not the voters, chose the governor.
3. Uniting those colonies under one governor was the Dominion of New England, which the uprising overthrew.
4. The 1691 charter restored an elected assembly but let the King appoint the governor, a compromise between self-rule and royal control.

Answer: (C) Distance, war and bribable officials weakened British enforcement.

1. The 1733 Molasses Act stayed on the books until the Sugar Act replaced it in 1764, so merchants evaded the duty rather than escaping it legally.
2. The Navigation Acts shut foreign ships out of British colonial ports, so colonial captains went to Dutch islands such as St. Eustatius to trade.
3. An ocean away and busy with wars against Spain and France, London rarely enforced the trade laws, and customs officers often took bribes.
4. Vice-admiralty courts set up under the 1696 act kept sitting in the colonies through the 1700s.

Answer: (B) It did not shift colonial purchases to British sugar islands.

1. Treasury accounts show molasses duties averaged about £259 a year from 1734 to 1755, far too little to pay for defense.
2. Thirty years after the act, more than four-fifths of the colony's molasses still came from foreign islands, because merchants smuggled or bribed instead of paying sixpence a gallon.
3. Rhode Island's distilleries kept running, and the same petition described that trade as central to the colony's commerce.
4. French islands kept selling cheap molasses to New England, which is why Parliament had taxed it to protect British planters.

Answer: (D) Its merchants profited from slavery outside their own region.

1. New England's family farms used little enslaved labor, and enslaved people were a small share of the region's population.
2. Caribbean trade was legal and central for New England ships, which carried provisions to the islands and brought back sugar and molasses.
3. Slavery remained legal in Massachusetts until court rulings in the 1780s.
4. Hancock told his captain to buy enslaved people and sell them in Central America, so a Boston merchant earned money from slavery far from home.

Answer: (A) press the colony for a steady supply of goods on fair terms.

1. Cherokee leaders pressed Carolina for reliable traders and fair prices, and stressing their need for English goods strengthened that request.
2. The Cherokee needed the deerskin trade to obtain the cloth, guns and ammunition the speech describes.
3. Cherokee towns governed themselves, and their headmen bargained with the colony as leaders of a separate nation.
4. Cherokee hunters used English guns and ammunition to kill the deer whose skins paid for imported goods.

Answer: (C) More mobile buffalo hunting and warfare across the Plains

1. Horses pulled the other way: some peoples, such as the Cheyenne, later left farming villages to hunt buffalo on horseback.
2. Settlers from the colonies did not reach the northern Plains until the 1800s; horses spread north from Spanish New Mexico.
3. Horses let Plains peoples follow the buffalo herds, carry larger loads and raid at a distance, which reshaped hunting, travel and war.
4. Horses increased raiding among Plains nations, who fought over herds and hunting grounds.

Answer: (B) Colonists bought French molasses but paid little of the 1733 duty.

1. The admiralty courts of 1696 were an effort to tighten enforcement, the watchful government Burke said the colonies had escaped.
2. The Molasses Act stayed on the books while officials let smuggled French molasses through, so colonial trade grew under loose enforcement.
3. The Dominion of New England was a strict attempt at royal control, and it collapsed in 1689.
4. Banning English tobacco was an active policy that protected colonial planters, so it shows imperial management rather than neglect.

Answer: (D) Colonists valued imperial protection but evaded rules that cost them.

1. Before 1754 colonial merchants wanted looser enforcement within the empire, not independence, and many were proud to be British.
2. Merchants smuggled and bribed officials to avoid the trade laws; royal officials like Randolph were the ones demanding stricter enforcement.
3. Slavery stayed legal across the northern colonies through this period; the first gradual emancipation law came in Pennsylvania in 1780.
4. Colonists welcomed the Royal Navy and protected markets while smuggling foreign molasses and freeing seized ships through local juries.