What type of colonies

A joint stock company was a project in which investors would buy shares of stock in building a new colony. Depending on the success of the colony, each investor would receive some of the profits in proportion to the number of shares he bought.

Charter governments were political corporations created by letters patent, giving the grantees control of the land and the powers of legislative government. The charters provided a fundamental constitution and divided powers among legislative, executive, and judicial functions, with those powers being vested in officials.

The charters of Rhode Island and Connecticut granted the colonists significantly more political liberty than other colonies. Lands to the west at that time were colonized by France and Spain. Some land to the west was also set aside for Native Americans. Mercantilism regarded government control of foreign trade as crucial for ensuring the prosperity and military security of the nation.

Under mercantilism, nations sought to establish colonies to produce goods for export as a chief means of acquiring economic strength and power. Essentially, mercantilists believed that colonies existed not for the benefit of settlers, but for the benefit of the home country. For Britain, the goal of mercantilism was to run trade surpluses to increase the flow of gold and silver pouring into London.

The government took its share through duties and taxes with the remainder going to merchants in Britain. The government spent much of its revenue on the Royal Navy, which not only protected the British colonies but threatened and sometimes seized the colonies of other European empires in the Americas.

British mercantilism mainly took the form of efforts to control trade. The colonies were captive markets for British industry; the ultimate goal was to enrich the mother country. Under British mercantilism, the government and the merchants became partners with the goal of increasing political power and private wealth, to the exclusion of other empires. The government protected its merchants—and kept others out—through trade barriers, regulations, and subsidies to domestic industries in order to maximize exports and minimize imports into the realm.

A tariff was placed on imports and a bounty given for exports, while the export of some raw materials was banned completely. The government had to fight smuggling—which became a favorite American technique in the 18th century to circumvent the restrictions against trading with the French, Spanish, or Dutch.

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the Parliament of England passed the Navigation Acts to increase the profit England derived from its colonies. Among the provisions, the Acts required that any colonial imports or exports travel only on ships registered in England. The colonies could not import anything manufactured outside of England unless the goods were first taken to England, where taxes were paid.

The colonies were forbidden to export tobacco and sugar to any nation other than England. Once under British control, regulations were imposed on the colonies that allowed the colony to produce only raw materials and to trade only with Britain.

Many colonists resented the Navigation Acts because they increased regulation and reduced their opportunities for profit, while England profited from colonial work. This led to friction between colonists and mainland England; indeed, these mercantilist policies such as forbidding trade with other empires and controls over smuggling were a major irritant that would contribute to the American Revolution. The English Navigation Acts were a series of laws restricting imports and exports in the British colonies for the ultimate profit of England.

In essence, the Acts forced colonial trade to favor England and prevented colonial trade with the Netherlands, France, and other European countries. These Acts formed the basis for British overseas trade for nearly years.

Within a few years, Dutch and Spanish merchants overwhelmed English merchants in commerce on the Iberian Peninsula, the Mediterranean, and the Levant. Even the trade with English colonies was dominated by Dutch merchants, who crowded out English direct trade with a sudden influx of commodities from the Levant, the Mediterranean, the Spanish and Portuguese empires, and the West Indies, carried in Dutch ships and ultimately increasing Dutch profit.

For the British government and its traders, the most direct solution was to seal off the British-Scottish markets to these unwanted imports. This first Act reinforced a longstanding government principle that English trade should be carried in English vessels. The Act banned foreign ships from transporting non-English goods to England or its colonies. The Act specifically targeted the Dutch, excluding the Netherlands from essentially all trade with England. In the king of England named this region Carolina.

The king later divided the region into two royal colonies. In he created South Carolina. And in he created North Carolina. South Carolina attracted settlers from many countries.

They built a seaport named Charles Towne Charleston. It soon became the most prosperous southern seaport. Settlers started rice plantations in the rich swampland along the coast. They brought in slaves to work on the plantations.

By this time tobacco planters in Maryland and Virginia were already using slave labor. Slavery became firmly established in the South. The last of the 13 colonies, Georgia, was founded by James Oglethorpe. In those days English debtors people who owed money they could not repay were sent to jail. Many remained behind bars for years. Oglethorpe knew that many prisoners were poor but honest. They could become good colonists. Oglethorpe arrived in with a group of debtors. They settled at a site they called Savannah.

Savannah became a thriving seaport. By then, the English flag flew all along the coast of North America. The colonists were building a new way of life, and they also built a new nation that would become the United States of America.

Teacher Info: About Us. A civics and media literacy resource from Scholastic Magazines. About Us. Bookmark Bookmark. Grades home. The Thirteen American Colonies. A painting of colonists building a fort at the Jamestown, Virginia, settlement. The Settlers and Why They Came. Why did these people leave their homes in the Old World?

Virginia: The First Successful Colony. The petition was the work of the more moderate members of Congress, who actually opposed the war, and its purpose was to appease King George III and prevent the conflict from escalating into a full blown war. When the petition did reach the king later that month, he refused to read it and immediately rejected it.

On October 27, , King George spoke at Parliament and stated that he intended to deal with the colonial rebellion with armed force and asked for assistance from foreign governments. McRae, circa On July 4, , the 13 colonies declared their independence from Great Britain. This declaration finally allowed for the United States to be officially recognized by friendly foreign governments, such as France, who refused to consider the possibility of an alliance without it.

Join or Die, political cartoon about the need for colonial unity during the French and Indian War, by Benjamin Franklin, circa Each section of the snake represents each region of the North American colonies. The cartoon was later re-purposed during the Revolutionary War to unite the colonies against Britain. As the war waged on, the American economy began to suffer due to a decline in the trade industry brought about by the British blockade of the American ports.

The colonies had to rely on European loans to help pay for the war effort. France, Spain and the Netherlands lent the United States over 10 million dollars. As a result, the colonies experienced severe inflation and depreciation of the Continental dollar.

On November 15, , the Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation, the first constitution of the United States, but the states did not ratify them until March 1, In its northern half, hardscrabble farmers eked out a living. In its southern half, planters presided over vast estates that produced corn, lumber, beef and pork, and—starting in the s—rice.

These Carolinians had close ties to the English planter colony on the Caribbean island of Barbados, which relied heavily on African slave labor, and many were involved in the slave trade themselves. As a result, slavery played an important role in the development of the Carolina colony. It split into North Carolina and South Carolina in In , inspired by the need to build a buffer between South Carolina and the Spanish settlements in Florida, the Englishman James Oglethorpe established the Georgia colony.

By , on the eve of revolution, there were an estimated 2. The colonists did not have much in common, but they were able to band together and fight for their independence.

The American Revolutionary War was sparked after American colonists chafed over issues like taxation without representation , embodied by laws like The Stamp Act and The Townshend Acts. The Declaration of Independence , issued on July 4, , enumerated the reasons the Founding Fathers felt compelled to break from the rule of King George III and parliament to start a new nation.

France joined the war on the side of the colonists in , helping the Continental Army conquer the British at the Battle of Yorktown in The Treaty of Paris ending the American Revolution and granting the 13 original colonies independence was signed on September 3, But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!

Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. On May 14, , a group of roughly members of a joint venture called the Virginia Company founded the first permanent English settlement in North America on the banks of the James River. Famine, disease and conflict with local Native American tribes in the first two years In September , during the reign of King James I, a group of around English men and women—many of them members of the English Separatist Church later known to history as the Pilgrims—set sail for the New World aboard the Mayflower.

Two months later, the three-masted