The American Yawp — Chapter Four: British North America
Abridged for Intermediate-High Learners

In the 1600s, the English population in the Americas grew quickly. By 1700, about 260,000 English people lived in the colonies, far more than the 15,000 colonists of New France. During this century, a new system of racial slavery became central to England's empire.

At first, English planters relied on indentured servants: poor English workers who labored for four or five years in exchange for passage across the Atlantic. In the second half of the century, however, planters turned increasingly to enslaved Africans. The English also enslaved Native Americans captured in wars. Historians estimate that between 1670 and 1715, about 24,000 to 51,000 Native Americans were forced into slavery in the southern colonies.

The journey of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic was called the Middle Passage. In total, between 11 and 12 million Africans were forced across the ocean between the 1500s and 1800s, and about 2 million died at sea. Conditions on the slave ships were horrific. Disease spread quickly, and captives were chained in small, crowded spaces below deck.

Events in England shaped the colonies. In the 1640s, civil war broke out between King Charles I and Parliament. Charles was defeated and executed in 1649, and Oliver Cromwell ruled England as a republic. To control colonial trade, Parliament passed the Navigation Act of 1651, which required goods to be shipped to England on English ships.

The monarchy returned in 1660, when Charles II took the throne. After his death in 1685, his Catholic brother James II became king and tried to rule as an absolute monarch. In 1688, Parliament invited the Protestant William and Mary to take the throne, an event known as the Glorious Revolution. The 1689 Bill of Rights then established a constitutional monarchy and protected the rights of English subjects. Colonists celebrated, believing they belonged to a Protestant empire opposed to Catholic France.

Meanwhile, new colonies grew along the coast. Maryland was founded in 1632 by Cecilius Calvert as a refuge for Catholics. Rhode Island was founded in 1636 by Roger Williams, who believed in religious freedom. In 1664, England seized New Netherland from the Dutch and renamed it New York. Carolina was granted to eight Lords Proprietors in 1663. Settlers from Barbados brought enslaved Africans who grew rice and indigo on a large plantation. By the 1710s, South Carolina had a majority Black population. The last proprietary colony, Pennsylvania, was founded in 1681 by William Penn, a Quaker. Penn promised religious toleration and peaceful relations with Native peoples, and his colony attracted settlers from across Europe.

Violence was common in the colonies. In 1675, King Philip's War broke out in New England when the Wampanoag leader Metacom, called King Philip by the English, resisted colonial expansion. The war ended Native power in the region. In 1676, poor farmers and former servants in Virginia rebelled against the colonial governor in Bacon's Rebellion, burning Jamestown before the revolt collapsed. In 1680, the Pueblo people of New Mexico, led by Pope, revolted against Spanish rule and drove the Spanish out of the region for twelve years.

By 1700, England controlled a long stretch of the Atlantic coast. Its empire rested on the labor of enslaved people and the loss of Native lands, tensions that would shape American history for centuries. The fight over who would control this growing empire had only just begun.