4. The Chesapeake Colonies

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we explore the Chesapeake Colonies of Virginia and Maryland. The Chesapeake Colonies grew prosperous exporting tobacco, a labor-intensive product initially cultivated by white farmers. Planters in the region originally used mostly male indentured servants to cultivate this crop but from the 1670s onwards they increasingly turned to use enslaved Africans as a labour force.

Course

In this course, Professor Alan Taylor (University of Virginia) explores the regions of the British colonies in North America. This course will explain how and why environmental and other factors shaped the development and expansion of various British colonies that developed and expanded from 1607 to 1754. The first two modules will examine the other major European colonies in North America and how these developed in the 17th and 18th centuries. We will then turn to look at the British colonies, looking at reach region individually. These regions were: (i) the West Indian and Southern Colonies; (ii) the Chesapeake Colonies; (iii) the Middle Colonies; (iv) the New England Colonies; and (v) the Northern Colonies. Finally we shall take a look at how ideas of freedom and slavery developed differently within the British colonies than in their Spanish and French equivalents.

Lecturer

Alan Taylor is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He is a specialist in the early history of the United States and has written extensively about the colonial history of the United States, the American Revolution and the early American Republic. Taylor has received two Pulitzer Prizes and the Bancroft Prize, and was also a finalist for the National Book Award for non-fiction.