Colonial Governments of the Thirteen Colonies

Colonial Governments of the Thirteen Colonies

Introduction

For the research analysis of the topic “Colonial Governments of the Thirteenth Colonies”, the main five primary sources have been analyzed to obtain information about the questions mentioned below.

The analysis paper consists of the research analysis of colonial government of the thirteenth colonies. Within this shared framework, British America's first colonial governments adopted numerous forms. The Crown placed its first successful settlement, Virginia, under the Virginia Company of London, granting it a charter whose only limitation required the joint-stock company to render laws "agreeable to the laws, statutes, government, and policy of our realm." The colonial government included proprietary, self governing, royal and democratic. The shared characteristics of the British colonial government bought many changes in politics and American society. Thirteen colonies were designed for the purpose of development and structural changes in the state and the government of the provinces. Each colony had formed its own government and legal laws (Douglas, 1973). These thirteen colonies include Virginia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, North Carolina, South Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Georgia.

Analysis of Primary Sources

Question 1: what were the main issues between British and American colonies during colonial period?

After the end of Indian and French war, tension between Britain and American colonies arises. The issues which created these issues were British taxes and the presence of British troops on the soil of America.

The 18th century witnessed a great increase in the colonial population of North America, particularly with the end of the struggle for supremacy between Britain and France in 1763. In just five years between 1769 and 1774, 152 ships from Irish ports alone brought over 44,000 new colonists. By 1774 Europeans in North America numbered two million over a quarter of Britain's population. This growth altered the nature of the colonies and the loyalty of their inhabitants. In Pennsylvania, a flood of German and Irish Protestant immigrants in the 1720s outnumbered the original English Quakers. German soldiers sent to the colonies by the Hanoverian dynasty ruling Britain further swelled the non-British populace; Scots and Irish settlers, many with Jacobite (anti-Hanoverian) sympathies, also arrived. After 1775 loyalist support was concentrated in those longer-established colonies whose inhabitants could claim English ancestry. Even though, Virginia and the Carolinas, which attracted few non-British immigrants and were developing a distinctive plantation economy based on mass importation of slaves, showed little enthusiasm for the loyalist cause (Capen, ed., 1851).

Certain reasons have raised the issues among American and British colonies such as, arrival of new immigrants, together with a rising birth-rate in the colonies, is evidence of a flourishing economy. Agriculture was by far the most important activity, but it was commerce (particularly that of New England) that caused Britain most concern.

British have resisted to colonial rule in order to decrease their ownership and at the same time, the costs that had been incurred in the war to gain control of the French colonies proved a harsh drain on ...