BRITISH COLONIZATION AFFECTED ECONOMY British Colonization Affected the American Economy

British Colonization Affected the American Economy

Introduction

British colonization of the Americas (including colonization by both the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland before the Acts of Union which created the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707) began in 1607 in Jamestown, Virginia and reached its peak when colonies had been established throughout the Americas. The English, and later the British, were among the most important colonizers of the Americas, and their American empire came to rival the Spanish American colonies in military and economic might.

The Atlantic Seaboard colonies gradually emerged during the seventeenth century as part of an English empire, which became “British” in 1707 with the formal union of Scotland and England. This union opened the colonies to Scottish emigrants; prior to it, the majority of the colonial emigrants came from England (including Wales), settling in the West Indies and the Chesapeake, rather than in New England. Indeed, the New England emigrants represented only 30 percent of all the English who crossed the Atlantic to the various colonies during the 1630s. (Kathleen, 1996)

By colonial standards, New England attracted an unusual set of emigrants: they were the sort of skilled and prosperous people who ordinarily might have stayed at home rather than risk the rigors of a transatlantic crossing and the uncertainties of colonial life. The majority of seventeenth-century English emigrants were poor, young, single men, lacking good prospects in the mother country, gambling their lives as indentured servants in the Chesapeake or West Indies, where the warmer climate permitted plantation crops that demanded—and generated the profits that permitted—the importation of laborers. In sharp contrast, most of the New England colonists could pay their own way and emigrated as family groups. They also enjoyed a more even balance between the sexes. At mid-century, the New England sex ratio was six males for every four females, compared to four men for every woman in the Chesapeake. This more even balance encouraged a more stable society and faster population growth. (DeJohn, 1991)

Contrary Arguments

New England's healthier population sustained a rapid growth through natural increase, while in the Chesapeake and West Indies, population growth depended on human imports. During the seventeenth century, New England received only 21,000 emigrants—a fraction of the 120,000 transported to the Chesapeake or the 190,000 who colonized the West Indies. Yet in 1700 New England's colonial population of 91,000 exceeded the 85,000 whites in the Chesapeake and the 33,000 white residents in the West Indies. (McCusker & Menard, 2004)

During the eighteenth century, the British navy and its merchant marine dominated the Atlantic, to the benefit of the British colonies along the Atlantic seaboard of North America. A swelling volume of British shipping carried information, goods, and people across the Atlantic. The annual transatlantic crossings tripled from about 500 during the 1670s to 1,500 by the late 1730s. Increased shipping, accompanied by a decline in piracy, reduced insurance costs and freight charges, encouraging the shipment of greater ...