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What Changes Took Place in the American Colonies in the 17th Century?
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British Empire – Britain and its American Colonies, 1660-1713
This course examines the evolution of British colonial rule in America from 1660 to 1713, focusing on: (i) the political instability in Britain, including the Civil War, Cromwell's republic, and the Glorious Revolution, influencing colonial governance; (ii) the diverse colonial structures—chartered, proprietary, and covenanted—each with distinct political arrangements; (iii) Britain’s shift from exploiting colonies for wealth to centralizing control, particularly under Cromwell and later Charles II; (iv) the role of colonial governance, the doctrine of discovery, and the tension between imperial and local authority; (v) the causes and effects of colonial rebellions like Bacon's Rebellion and Leisler’s Rebellion, which resisted royal authority; (vi) the impact of European wars, such as King William's War, on colonial conflicts, with Native American alliances playing a critical role; and (vii) the transformation of European politics, driven by the global nature of empires and the rise of professional bureaucracies.
What Changes Took Place in the American Colonies in the 17th Century?
In this lecture, we examine Britain and its American colonies in the early 17th century, focusing on key developments, including: (i) the political instability in Britain, shaped by the civil war, Cromwell’s republic, and the Glorious Revolution; (ii) the colonies' complex context, surrounded by European powers and indigenous peoples; (iii) the different colony types—chartered, proprietary, and covenanted—each with unique governance; (iv) Britain's shift from using colonies for wealth to centralizing control, especially under Cromwell; and (v) the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, leading to efforts at uniform colonial governance, including the creation of New York and the short-lived Dominion of New England.
Hi. I'm Charles Prior.
00:00:06I'm a professor of history at the University of Hull.
00:00:07My specialty is British, political,
00:00:10and constitutional history and also the history of the British colonies.
00:00:13And I'm just finishing a book called Treaty Ground,
00:00:17which examines diplomatic relationships between the
00:00:19colonies and the Native American peoples that were their neighbors.
00:00:22What I'm gonna talk about today is the paper Britain and its
00:00:27American colonies between sixteen sixty and seventeen thirteen.
00:00:31In order to talk about that,
00:00:35I'm gonna talk a little bit about some events that happened
00:00:36before sixteen sixty.
00:00:39But before I begin,
00:00:41there's a couple of points that I wanna make to sort of set up
00:00:42what I'm going to say because they're very important,
00:00:45and they have a lot to do with a number of the things that
00:00:47I'll be saying in the course of of this talk.
00:00:50The first is that the British state through this period,
00:00:53through sixteen sixty,
00:00:56through the beginning of the eighteenth century,
00:00:57is extraordinarily unstable in terms of its constitution,
00:01:00and that's because it endures a period of civil war,
00:01:04in the middle of the seventeenth century.
00:01:08And then in the latter part of the seventeenth century,
00:01:10even though the monarchy is restored,
00:01:13it's extraordinarily destabilized.
00:01:15And then in sixteen eighty eight,
00:01:17there's another civil war of a kind called the Glorious
00:01:19Revolution.
00:01:22The second thing to to bear in mind is that when we're
00:01:23talking about British colonies,
00:01:27we tend to think of places that are on their own way off on the
00:01:29Atlantic seaboard somewhere.
00:01:33It's important to put those colonies into the context that
00:01:35they belong in, and that is colonies are surrounded.
00:01:38They are not alone.
00:01:41First of all, big European powers,
00:01:43the French, the Dutch, and the Spanish,
00:01:46have colonial outposts of their own dotted around the edges of
00:01:49the continent and reaching sometimes into its interior.
00:01:52And most importantly,
00:01:56and this is the part of this history that I'll be emphasizing,
00:01:57is that this is a continent that belongs to other people
00:02:01whose history precedes that of Americans.
00:02:04It's an indigenous continent.
00:02:07And for the entire period that I'm gonna be talking about,
00:02:09Europeans are actually the weaker minority of people on this continent.
00:02:13And so the politics that we're gonna be looking at is always,
00:02:18always influenced by that set of circumstances.
00:02:23Historians generally have emphasized the first thing,
00:02:26and that is how Britain's constitutional and political
00:02:30and religious history crosses the Atlantic,
00:02:33and just stirs up trouble there in that form.
00:02:36But I'll be talking about that,
00:02:38but I'm also gonna be putting that together with a different sort of context.
00:02:40So where do we begin? What is a colony?
00:02:44Well, there are a colony is essentially a territory
00:02:46established by a state outside of its own borders,
00:02:49and Britain had and and England had a long history of
00:02:52colonial experience, particularly with Ireland,
00:02:55reaching back some time.
00:02:59So when it came to the new world,
00:03:02they had a set of sort of practices in place,
00:03:05but the new world colonies took a completely different form.
00:03:08The the types of colonies,
00:03:12there were there were essentially three kinds.
00:03:14First were colonies that were established by a charter.
00:03:16That's a license granted by the crown.
00:03:19The second is what's called a proprietary colony.
00:03:22That's one that is owned by specific people,
00:03:24usually a family.
00:03:27Examples of a proprietary colony would be Maryland or
00:03:28Pennsylvania.
00:03:32And the third kind is a is a weird one.
00:03:33These are chartered colonies that have their own sort of
00:03:36covenant or a proto constitution.
00:03:39And here we're talking about the Plymouth Colony and the
00:03:42Massachusetts Bay Colony that gather under a covenant.
00:03:45Something called the Mayflower Compact is is a famous example of this.
00:03:49And it's it's a statement by the people of what it is that
00:03:53they think they're doing and the values that they wanna have.
00:03:55And really, these covenanted colonies are really about religious freedom.
00:03:58In terms of, why and what the attitudes to,
00:04:04colonies were on the part of the British state, well,
00:04:09they were there for a specific reason, and that was money.
00:04:11Colonies were offshoots of the state,
00:04:15and they were planted outside of its borders.
00:04:17And the idea was to add to the wealth of the state.
00:04:19The British economy or the English economy at the end of
00:04:22the sixteenth century was in a terrible sort of state,
00:04:25and there was a great need for money.
00:04:27And there was their colonies were places where people came
00:04:29up with schemes to make money,
00:04:32but also in a more tangible sense to export resources back here.
00:04:34The The second thing that colonies were useful for was it
00:04:39was a good place to send opponents of the state.
00:04:42And what happens in the early seventeenth century is that
00:04:44people who are critical of England's,
00:04:47monarchical and religious establishment are sent there.
00:04:50And so there it's sort of that's how it colonies have
00:04:54figured in history is sort of places where opponents of the
00:04:57state are sent.
00:05:00So, essentially, colonies begin to be established in in the early
00:05:02seventeenth century.
00:05:06Virginia is chartered in sixteen o nine.
00:05:07Plymouth is chartered in sixteen twenty.
00:05:09But by sixteen thirty eight,
00:05:11the British state is being torn apart by civil war.
00:05:13And in this period from sixteen thirty eight to sixteen forty
00:05:17nine when Charles the first is executed,
00:05:21the colonies are left very much to themselves.
00:05:23Each colony, and it when it's chartered,
00:05:26has the sort of the architecture of government,
00:05:28and one of the things that each colony has is a legislature.
00:05:30And in this period, colonies,
00:05:34essentially rule themselves and create their own law.
00:05:37After the civil war,
00:05:41the British state was placed in the hands of Oliver Cromwell.
00:05:43It had a period of eleven years when it was a republic.
00:05:46The Cromwellian
00:05:50state was very interested in reform,
00:05:52and it's in this period that England seeks to place its
00:05:54colonies under much more centralized control.
00:05:58The first thing it does is passes what are called
00:06:02navigation acts,
00:06:04and those acts essentially control the seaborne trade
00:06:05between England and the colonies and insist that it's
00:06:09only carried in British ships.
00:06:11But the second thing is much more interesting,
00:06:13to me at least, and that's called the Plantations Act.
00:06:16It's essentially an act that's passed that punishes those
00:06:18colonies that openly sided with the crown during the civil war.
00:06:22And it points out that the colonies were planted by and
00:06:26are governed by the people.
00:06:30In other words, that earlier idea of colonies being chartered or proprietary
00:06:32or covenanted is swept away for a bit of time,
00:06:36and they become things that are owned by the people of the state.
00:06:40That will come back, later on.
00:06:44So, essentially, colonies at this point are defined as dominions of the crown.
00:06:47And, in that sense, they are directly under the rule of the
00:06:54crown as opposed to that of parliament.
00:06:58During Cromwell's reign also,
00:07:01there was a period of of expansion.
00:07:03Cromwell, liked religious warfare.
00:07:07The the English had a long and antagonistic relationship with
00:07:09the Spanish because they were Catholic.
00:07:13And in the middle of the sixteen fifties,
00:07:16England decided it was going to go to the Caribbean and drive the Spanish out.
00:07:18This was sixteen fifty four, sixteen fifty five.
00:07:22It was known as the Western design. This failed.
00:07:25And that was sort of the end of Cromwell's overseas colonial adventures.
00:07:28In sixteen sixty, the crown was restored to the
00:07:33son of Charles the first.
00:07:37He was called Charles the second.
00:07:38Immediately, Charles the second takes a very active interest in his colonial
00:07:41portfolio in the British Atlantic.
00:07:46They send royal commissioners to the colonies to examine how
00:07:49they are governed.
00:07:52They examine them very carefully with the idea of
00:07:53bringing them into a much more uniform and top down
00:07:56mode of governance,
00:08:00trying to wipe out the Cromwellian idea that they were
00:08:01dominions ruled by the people.
00:08:04They extended religious toleration in the colonies.
00:08:07Colonies, as I mentioned before,
00:08:09were places where religious opponents of the state tended to go.
00:08:11And what, happened was that they became places where
00:08:15certain people could not practice their religion freely.
00:08:19The British state tried to stop that.
00:08:22And the third thing is that they created a new sort of
00:08:24supercolony, which we now know is New York,
00:08:27but in those days was known as the Duke's province.
00:08:30It was the it was the actual possession of the Duke of York,
00:08:32the brother of the crown,
00:08:35and it had its own set of
00:08:37laws.
00:08:40In the restoration period,
00:08:40royalism dominated the colonial world in the British Atlantic.
00:08:42New York was the core, royal colony in,
00:08:47the British Atlantic, and it was ruled by a very,
00:08:51very strict royalist governor called Edmund Andros.
00:08:54Andros came along and took away all of the charters
00:08:58that underpinned the New England colonies,
00:09:02which they saw as constitutions that made them free.
00:09:04He took them away and created a brand new thing called the
00:09:08Dominion of New England,
00:09:12which essentially combined all of Britain's colonies into one big supercolony,
00:09:13ruled like the Spanish ruled a viceroyalty
00:09:18in in what is now South America.
00:09:22This was very, very unpopular,
00:09:25but it was an attempt to introduce centralized control.
00:09:28Then, in the Glorious Revolution in sixteen eighty eight,
00:09:33when James the second is suspected of being a Catholic
00:09:38and is deposed for William the third, of Holland,
00:09:41the Dominion of New England falls,
00:09:46and the charters are restored.
00:09:49And the colonies rejoice because they accept the new
00:09:51constitutional order that comes out of the glorious revolution
00:09:54in England, and that is the bill of rights.
00:09:58And that forms a sort of a continuity between sixteen
00:10:01eighty nine and,
00:10:04the constitutional settlement in the United States because
00:10:06the amendments of the constitution are also called
00:10:09the Bill of Rights.
00:10:12So from this point,
00:10:13at the end of the seventeenth century with a a Dutch monarch
00:10:15on the English throne, the colonies essentially expand.
00:10:20Huge numbers of people migrate there.
00:10:25Economic opportunity is free and open.
00:10:28A lot of the political conflicts that had helped the
00:10:31colonies back go away, and colonies are promoted as places
00:10:33for a new life and great prosperity.
00:10:38
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Prior, C. (2024, November 13). British Empire – Britain and its American Colonies, 1660-1713 - What Changes Took Place in the American Colonies in the 17th Century? [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/british-empire-britain-and-its-american-colonies
MLA style
Prior, C. "British Empire – Britain and its American Colonies, 1660-1713 – What Changes Took Place in the American Colonies in the 17th Century?." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 13 Nov 2024, https://massolit.io/courses/british-empire-britain-and-its-american-colonies