- [Instructor] The first
long-term English colony
in North America was established
at Jamestown in 1607.
No one expected that it
would last very long.
It was intended to be a get rich
quick scheme for its investors,
who hoped they would find gold
in the swamps of Virginia.
They didn't, but they did
find that they could grow
a valuable cash crop in tobacco.
Over the next century more and more
English settlements began
haphazardly popping up
along the Atlantic
seaboard of North America.
Some founded as religious refuges,
some as proprietary colonies,
some as joint stock companies.
Compared to the Spanish
Empire in the New World,
which had clear goals and
unified colonial systems,
the English Empire was
pretty disorganized.
Internal strife like the English Civil War
and the Glorious Revolution,
meant that the government
kept changing hands,
and some monarchs took
a more hands on approach
towards the colonies than others.
This benign neglect of
the American colonies
left them to develop self-government
and a sense of independence.
But even in the early 1770s
most American colonist
thought of themselves as English citizens
who were part of the British Empire.
They read the same books,
spoke the same language,
drank the same tea, and
fought the same enemies
as their counterparts
on the British Isles.
Nevertheless, there was
something clearly different
about the 13 colonies in North America.
After all, there were more
than 30 British colonies
in the Caribbean and
North America by 1776.
So why did those 13 in
particular unite and rebel?
So that leaves us with a question.
During this period of
colonial development,
how British were the American colonists?
What aspects of society brought them
closer with the mother country,
and what aspects brought on
resistance to Britain's control?
Let's take a look at the major political,
social and economic
exchanges that took place
between the British Empire
and the 13 colonies,
and compare whether they either brought
the colonies in the mother
country closer together
or created resentment that
drove them further apart.
Okay, first let's look at
the political exchanges
between the colonies and England.
One thing that they shared
was a political culture.
A shared sense that all citizens,
both at home and in the colonies,
enjoyed the rights of Englishmen.
So I would say that the political
culture that the colonies,
and later the United States,
inherited from England
was a factor that united them with Empire.
But because the colonies were far away
from the mother country and because
the mother country was
often too distracted
by its own problems to take an
active role in managing them,
the colonies also developed their own
local representative governments.
This led to a tradition of
self-rule and self-taxation,
and the colonists were irate any time
the British colonial governors attempted
to interfere with their
representative bodies.
So I would say this tended to divide
the colonies from England.
What else happened politically?
Well, during this time
period there was also
a lot of warfare against competing
colonial powers in North America,
particularly France and Spain,
who were supported by
Native American allies.
For the colonists warfare
against a common enemy
strengthened their sense that they
belonged to the British Empire.
But they also felt
frustrated when they didn't
receive enough help
defending their settlements
or when British regulars
insulted their colonial militias.
So these conflicts were probably both
a source of unity and division between
the colonists and the British Government.
Next, let's look at some of the social
and cultural exchanges that happened
between the colonies and
England during this period.
A big area of cultural
exchange was in religion.
America became the destination
of choice for religious dissenters
since most of the colonies
were fairly tolerant
of a broad range of religions.
The established Church of England
was pretty weak in the colonies.
So religion in general
didn't tie the colonies
together with the mother country.
But in the early 1700s both
England and the colonies
experienced a shared religious
revival with the Great Awakening.
One of the most popular
preachers throughout the colonies
was the English parson George Whitefield.
So we might put religion down as
something that both united and divided
the colonies from Great Britain.
Another shared cultural
experience was the Enlightenment,
which spread ideas about
reason and self-government
through books and pamphlets that
were read all over the Atlantic world.
Ben Franklin, the American
printer and scientist,
was as famous in England
as he was in the colonies.
So the shared ideas of the Enlightenment
brought the Empire together,
at least at this point.
Another aspect of cultural exchange
was fashion and consumer goods.
The elite American colonists dressed
like the English gentry, built
homes in the English style,
imported luxury goods from England,
and drank tea like the
fashionable British.
So these cultural exchanges
definitely were a force
uniting the colonies
with the mother country.
Last, let's examine economic exchanges.
One thing that the colonies had in common
with the rest of the British Empire was
their dependence on slave
labor to produce cash crops.
British investors and
the owners of slave ships
and plantations in the Caribbean
were deeply involved in
the system of slavery.
And so were the 13 American colonies,
which produced food for enslaved laborers,
turned slave produced molasses into rum,
and shipped enslaved
people across the Atlantic,
not to mention the American
slave owners in the South.
Slavery was central to the united
economic prosperity of the British Empire.
Another central aspect of the
British Empire's economy was mercantilism,
an economic philosophy that championed
using colonies as sources of raw materials
and as markets for finished goods.
Mercantilism both helped and
hindered the American colonies
by making sure that their raw materials
got preferential treatment in England,
but also by preventing them from
developing industries of their own.
So I would say that mercantilism both
united and divided the
colonies from the Empire.
Along with mercantilism
came the Navigation Acts,
a series of laws passed by Parliament
that attempted to prevent
the American colonies
from trading with other countries.
Basically a way to
enforce that the benefits
of mercantilism went to England alone.
But there were two major problems
with the Navigation Acts.
First, the British Government
rarely enforced them,
especially when it was
occupied with other matters.
The other problem was that even when
efforts were made to
enforce the Navigation Acts,
American merchants responded by
smuggling and bribing officials,
not by obeying the law.
So the Navigation Acts worked to
divide the colonies from the Empire,
both because they didn't work and because
they hampered American's
belief in free trade.
Taking a look at these
three categories as a whole,
you can see that the
colonists had mixed feelings
about their role in the British Empire.
In terms of social and cultural exchanges
it seems like the colonies were tied into
a greater world of ideas that
spanned across the Atlantic.
But both politically and economically
there were developments
that bonded the colonies
closer together with Great Britain
and developments that had the colonies
tugging at their leashes
and trying to run free.
These mixed feelings might help
to explain why in 1754 the colonies
had not yet pursued their independence.
But are there some things
that I've identified here
as promoting unity that might
not be so unifying by 1776?
What changed between this
point and the signing
of the Declaration of Independence
that pushed the colonists off
the fence and into revolution?
