5. The Middle Colonies and New England

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we turn to examine the Middle Colonies (Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York) and the New England Colonies (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island). The Middle Colonies supported a flourishing export economy based on cereal crops and attracted a broad range of European migrants, leading to societies with greater cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity and tolerance. The New England Colonies, initially settled by Puritans, developed around small towns with family farms and achieved a thriving mixed economy of agriculture and commerce. New England became increasingly reliant on trade with the South and the West Indies in this period as their population expanded more than anywhere else in North America.

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.