Holland, France, and England, like Spain, all ultimately vied for supremacy in the New World (see Map 2.2). English and Dutch successes represented the commercial revolution sweeping across northern and western Europe in the 1600s. Amsterdam in particular rose to preeminence in shipping, finance, and trade by midcentury. But Holland’s claim in North America was limited to New York (based economically on furs), and for the most part its interest lay more in the Far East than in the West. Moreover, the Dutch
MAP 2.2
European Colonies
European possessions and claims in America fluctuated. Shown here are those territories and the major cities toward the end of the seventeenth century.
Placed too much emphasis on the establishment of trading posts and too little on colonization to firmly establish their overseas empire.
As it turned out, France and England became the chief competitors in the centuries-long race for supremacy. From 1608, when Samuel de Champlain established Quebec, France successfully undertook explorations in America westward to the Great Lakes area and had pushed southward down the Mississippi Valley to Louisiana by the end of the century. And in the Orient, France, although a latecomer, competed successfully with the English for a time after the establishment of the French East India Company in 1664. In less than a century, however, the English defeated the French in India, as they would one day do in America. The English triumphed in both India and America because they had established the most extensive permanent settlements. It is not without significance that at the beginning of the French and Indian War in 1756, some 60,000 French had settled in Canada and the Caribbean compared with 2 million in the English North American colonies.
For our purposes, the most important feature of the expansion of Europe was the steady and persistent growth of settlements in the British colonies of North America. Why were the English such successful colonizers?
To be sure, the English, like the French and the Dutch, coveted the colonial wealth of the Spanish and the Portuguese, and English sailors and traders acted for a time as if their struggling outposts in the wilderness of North America were merely temporary. They traded in Latin America, while privateers such as Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish plundered Spanish galleons for their treasures as they sailed the Spanish Main. English venturers, probing the East for profitable outposts, gained successive footholds in India as the seventeenth century progressed. Yet, unlike the leaders of some western European countries, Englishmen such as Richard Hakluyt advocated permanent colonization and settlement in the New World, perceiving that true colonies eventually would become important markets for manufactured products from the mother country as well as sources of raw materials.
It was not enough, however, for merchants and heads of states to reap the advantages of the thriving colonies: Commoners had to be persuaded of the benefits of immigrating to the New World for themselves and their families. The greatest motivations to immigrate were the desires to own land—still the European symbol of status and economic security—and to strive for a higher standard of living than could be attained at home by any but the best-paid artisans. These economic motivations were often accompanied by a religious motivation. Given the exorbitant costs of the transatlantic voyage (more than an average person’s yearly income), the problem remained how to pay for moving people to the New World.
World History
