The Caribbean is, of course, geographically part of the Atlantic, and its economy, social structure, and political situation tied it very clearly into what historians term the “Atlantic world.” By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that world also connected to the Indian Ocean, and to the lives of people far from any sea. Millions of pieces of Chinese porcelain made in the inland city of Jingdezhen were transported to Canton, carried on ships to Amsterdam and London, and then exported to Jamaica, Boston, Berlin, and Moscow. Calico cloth made by village residents in the Gujerati area of northwest India went to Europe, but also to the Senegambia in western Africa, where it was traded to African merchants for slaves and for the gum of the acacia tree. Acacia gum was used in Britain and France for papermaking and for producing calicoes that Europeans hoped might eventually compete with those of India. Calico was one of the many items promised “in perpetuity” to Native American tribes in treaties with British and later American authorities. Commerce in the Atlantic is often described as a “triangle trade” linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas, but no geometrical figure can accurately capture the many lines of interaction.
The colonies established in North America by powers other than Spain and Portugal were a key part of this Atlantic world. The earliest colonies were tiny and underfunded, often dependent on indigenous peoples for their survival. Half failed, whether through conquest by another power, disease, abandonment, economic or environmental collapse, or indigenous opposition.
English-sponsored voyages to the Americas began with those of John Cabot in 1495, but nearly a century later Hakluyt and others were still trying to encourage a first successful settlement. In 1585, the English writer, explorer, and New World promoter Sir Walter Raleigh (1554-1618) founded a small colony at Roanoke Island off what is now North Carolina, but the colonists vanished within several years. About twenty years later another group settled at Jamestown in Virginia, organized by the
Joint-stock Virginia Company, though it was several decades before the colony’s stability was assured. Colonists experimented with different cash crops as well as grain and root crops for their own use, and gradually established a system of indentured servitude to supply the needed labor. Ship captains recruited young people, mostly boys and young men, but also some young women, as indentured servants, then sold the contracts to Virginia colonists. The first Africans came to English North America in i6i9, in a ship named the Jesus; though in the early decades some Africans were indentured servants, most of them were permanent slaves. Native Americans were also enslaved in many southern colonies, but their numbers were soon dwarfed by those of Africans.
World History
