European Colonization in two minutes
- Spain colonized New Mexico in 1598, taking Pueblo tribute through encomienda, drafting labor through repartimiento, and sending friars to convert the Pueblo; the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 drove the Spanish out.
- France relied on trade more than settlers: in 1663 Louis XIV took direct control of New France and sent about 800 young women to marry settlers, yet the colony stayed small.
- The Dutch West India Company ran New Netherland, buying beaver at Fort Orange and using enslaved Africans at New Amsterdam, until England seized it in 1664 and renamed it New York.
- Far more English settlers came, seeking land, work, or religious freedom: Chesapeake planters used indentured servants and later enslaved Africans, and about 20,000 Puritans settled New England in the 1630s.
- Virginia and Massachusetts Bay began as joint-stock companies, and English settlers fenced fields, let livestock roam, and built towns apart from Native communities, taking land that Native families already farmed.
- By 1680 England's mainland colonies held about 150,000 colonists, free and enslaved, and New France counted fewer than 10,000 in 1681; England mostly needed land, France trading partners, and Spain labor.
- On the exam: comparison questions ask how motives, labor, religion, and relations with Native peoples differed among Spanish, French, Dutch, and English colonies, and trade versus settlement is a common contrast.
Topic 2.2 key terms
- Mercantilism
The idea that colonies existed to make the home country rich. Colonies sent raw materials like furs home, bought its goods, and traded only as its government allowed.
- Casta
The Spanish colonial system that ranked people into unequal groups, such as Spanish, Native, African and mixed. Status also depended on freedom or slavery and on wealth.
- Encomienda
A Spanish grant that let a colonist demand tribute or labor from a group of Native people. In New Mexico it was paid in corn and cotton blankets.
- Repartimiento
A Spanish labor draft that forced Native people to work for colonists, officials or missions for set periods. The law required pay, but pay often never came.
- Mission
A religious settlement where Catholic priests worked to convert Native people. Missions also controlled Native labor and tried to change how Native people lived and worshipped.
- Cash crop
A crop grown to sell, not to eat. Tobacco was the cash crop that paid for Virginia and Maryland.
- Indentured servant
A worker who agreed to labor for a set term, usually four to seven years, in return for passage to America. Unlike an enslaved person, a servant went free when the term ended.
- Atlantic slave trade
The forced shipment of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to work in the Americas. By 1700, enslaved Africans were replacing servants on Chesapeake tobacco farms.
- Puritans
English Protestants who wanted to purify the Church of England. In New England they built towns where their faith shaped the laws and daily life.
- Joint-stock company
A business in which many investors buy shares, pooling their money and sharing the risk. The Virginia Company paid for Jamestown this way.
- Pueblo Revolt (1680)
A coordinated uprising of Pueblo towns in 1680 against Spanish forced labor and religious suppression. It drove the Spanish out of New Mexico for twelve years, until 1692.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
As Long As We Have Beavers
1653–1659
In the autumn of 1653, Radisson went with a Mohawk trading party to Fort Orange, a Dutch fur post on the upper Hudson River.
Radisson · recalling Fort Orange
“Where we were very well received, or rather our castors, every one courting us.”
By castors he meant beaver pelts, the furs the Dutch had come for.
Fort Orange and New Amsterdam, at the river's mouth, belonged to New Netherland, a colony run for profit by the Dutch West India Company. Like the French, the Dutch sent few colonists and relied on Native trading partners, but fewer Dutch traders married Native women.
Radisson turned down a Dutch offer to free him, went back with the Mohawk, and later escaped to Fort Orange. The Dutch hid him in the fort and then shipped him down the river to New Amsterdam.
In New Amsterdam, the Company also owned enslaved Africans, who built its fort, cleared its land and worked its farms.
Nine years earlier, in 1644, eleven enslaved Company men petitioned for their freedom, and the Company freed them and their wives, on conditions. Each man still owed the Company a yearly payment of grain and a hog, and if he missed it, he lost his freedom.
1644 grant · English translation
“Their children at present born or yet to be born, shall be bound and obligated to serve the Honorable West India Company as Slaves.”
In 1659, Mohawk envoys came to Fort Orange with a complaint about their Dutch allies.
Mohawk proposition · through the Dutch record
“The Dutch, indeed, say we are brothers, and are joined together with chains. But that lasts only as long as we have beavers. After that, we are no longer thought of.”
The Dutch treated the alliance as a fur trade, and the Mohawk wanted a bond that outlasted the beaver.
The King's Share
New France 1659–1673 · New Spain 1600–1660
Key terms: Mercantilism, Casta, Encomienda, Repartimiento, Mission
In 1659, Radisson and his brother-in-law, the trader Groseilliers, paddled west to the Great Lakes without the governor's permission.
Radisson, recalling
“Discoverers before governors.”
Radisson, recalling
“We were Caesars, being nobody to contradict us.”
In fact, their Anishinaabe hosts, Native peoples of the upper Great Lakes, guided them, fed them and carried their baggage.
In August 1660, they came back down to Montreal with a fleet of Native canoes loaded with furs.
The governor fined them, took part of their furs and jailed Groseilliers, because they had traded without a license.
The governor was enforcing mercantilism, the idea that colonies existed to make the home country rich. Traders shipped beaver to France, brought French goods back, and needed a royal license to do it.
In 1663, King Louis XIV took direct control of New France. Over the next ten years, he sent about eight hundred young French women to marry its settlers. Even so, New France stayed small, and its fur trade still depended on Native partners.
Far to the southwest, Spain had ruled Mexico, which it called New Spain, since the 1520s. In 1598, Spanish colonists pushed north to the Rio Grande, into the farming towns of the Pueblo peoples, and called the region New Mexico. In 1600, a free woman named Isabel de Olvera prepared to follow them from Querétaro, a town in New Spain.
Before setting out, she asked a Spanish official for a sworn record of her freedom.
Isabel de Olvera
“I have reason to fear that I may be annoyed by some individual, since I am a mulatto.”
Isabel de Olvera
“I demand justice.”
Her father was African and her mother Native, and she was free, but in New Spain she still needed paper to prove it. Spanish colonial society included Native people and free and enslaved Africans, and gave them unequal standing by ancestry, legal status and wealth.
Sixty years later, New Mexico still had no silver, so its Spanish colonists lived off Pueblo farms and Pueblo workers. Under the encomienda, a colonist collected tribute from Pueblo households, paid in corn and cotton blankets. Under the repartimiento, officials drafted Pueblo men and women for weeks of work, often unpaid.
Franciscan friars ran Catholic missions in the Pueblo towns to convert the Pueblo and stamp out their religion, and they demanded Pueblo labor too.
In this mission yard, look at what the colonist, the official and the friar each took from the Pueblo.
Fences
1607–1665
Key terms: Cash crop, Indentured servant, Atlantic slave trade, Puritans, Joint-stock company
In the early 1660s, Radisson and Groseilliers took their fur-trade plan to the English in Boston, because their own governor had punished them.
The English colonies grew quickly because England's population was growing faster than its economy. In 1629, many English families had no land or work, and John Winthrop, a Puritan lawyer, wrote this in England:
John Winthrop
“This land grows weary of her inhabitants.”
English migrants came for land, a better living or the freedom to worship their own way, and in time Scots, Irish and Germans joined them.
Most English migrants to the mainland went to the Chesapeake colonies, Virginia and Maryland, where planters grew tobacco to sell in England.
Planters paid the passage of young English indentured servants, who worked four to seven years and hoped for land of their own. By the late 1600s, planters were buying more and more enslaved Africans, whom traders carried across the Atlantic by force.
Farther north, about twenty thousand Puritans sailed to New England in the 1630s, most of them in families.
They wanted towns where their faith shaped daily life and the law. Spanish Catholic missionaries set out to convert Native people, while New England Puritans mostly built churches for themselves. Both linked religion to government, and both punished people who challenged their religious authority.
Both Virginia and Massachusetts Bay began as joint-stock companies, which pooled many investors' money and shared the risk.
In that same 1629 paper, Winthrop used English ideas about property to claim a right to Native land:
John Winthrop
“They enclose no land.”
John Winthrop
“So as if we leave them sufficient for their use, we may lawfully take the rest.”
In fact, Native families already farmed that land, growing corn, beans and squash. English settlers fenced the land they took, let their cattle and hogs roam, and built their own towns apart from Native communities.
In 1642, Miantonomi, a leader of the Narragansett people of southern New England, came to Long Island to warn the Montaukett people there:
Miantonomi
“These English having gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass, and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved.”
Miantonomi
“So must we be one as they are, otherwise we shall be all gone shortly.”
English families and servants kept coming: by 1680, the English mainland colonies had about 150,000 colonists, free and enslaved. New France's census the next year found fewer than 10,000, and neither count included the Native nations around them.
Back in 1664, an English fleet seized New Netherland from the Dutch without a fight, and New Amsterdam became New York.
In 1665, Radisson and Groseilliers sailed for England to seek royal backing for their fur-trade plan.
Lords and Proprietors
1665–1692 · coda 1710
Key terms: Pueblo Revolt (1680)
In England, they took their plan to King Charles II, who paid them forty shillings a week while they waited for a ship. Instead of paddling past French posts on the St. Lawrence, English ships would sail north into Hudson Bay and trade directly with the Cree.
The lands around Hudson Bay, an inland sea far north of the Hudson River, were home to Cree hunters and traders.
In the autumn of 1666, a French army marched into Mohawk country, where Radisson had once lived as an adopted son, and burned the towns. Most Mohawk families escaped, but the soldiers burned their stored corn.
On May 2, 1670, Charles II chartered the Hudson's Bay Company and made its investors owners of all the land that drained into the bay.
A clerk of the Crown
“The true and absolute Lords and Proprietors.”
The charter left out the two Frenchmen whose idea it was, and it gave the Company no real control over the Cree who lived there.
The Company's posts on the bay depended on Cree hunters, and when French rivals offered better deals, the Company had to lower its prices. At Hudson Bay, England needed Native hunters just as France did, even though its other colonies wanted farmland.
Far to the southwest, Spain kept demanding Pueblo labor and tribute, even when drought and famine struck New Mexico in the late 1660s.
Fray Juan Bernal
“In the past year, 1668, a great many Indians perished of hunger, lying dead along the roads, in the ravines, and in their huts.”
Officials had also whipped Pueblo religious leaders for keeping their ceremonies, and in August 1680 many Pueblo towns rose up together. In the Pueblo Revolt, they killed about four hundred colonists and friars and drove the Spanish out of New Mexico for twelve years. When the Spanish returned in 1692, they eased their labor demands and tolerated more of the Pueblo religion.
Compare what Spain, France, the Dutch and England each needed from Native people.
Every empire wanted wealth, and every one claimed land that Native nations already held. From Native people, Spain needed labor and converts, France and the Dutch needed trading partners, and England mostly needed land.
Radisson switched sides twice more, from England to France and back to England. He died in London in 1710 on a Hudson's Bay Company pension. Years before, he had written this about his Mohawk family:
Radisson · remembering his refusal in 1653
“For then I began to love my new parents, that were so good and so favourable to me.”