Chapter 3 The British Empire in America 1660–1750 Teaching Resources governed by a small number of powerful nobles. 5. Poor families in North Carolina refused to Chapter Instructional Objectives work on large manors and chose to live on After you have taught this chapter, your students modest farms. should be able to answer the following questions: 6. South Carolinians imposed their own design of government and attacked Indian 1. How and why did Europeans bring Africans to settlements to acquire slaves for trade. the American colonies as slaves? 7. South Carolina remained an ill-governed 2. How did African American communities in and violence-ridden frontier settlement America respond to and resist their condition? until the 1720s. 8. Pennsylvania, designed as a refuge for 3. What was the structure of colonial government? Quakers persecuted in England, developed How did it operate? Why did Englishmen and a pacifistic policy toward the Native colonial citizens view the role of assemblies dif- Americans and became prosperous. ferently? 9. Quakers believed that people were imbued 4. What was the role of the colonies within the by God with an inner light of grace and British mercantilist system? How did economic understanding that opened salvation to considerations affect political decision making in everyone. both England and North America? 10. Penn’s Frame of Government (1681) guar- anteed religious freedom for all Christians and allowed all property-owning men to Chapter Annotated Outline vote and hold office. I. The Politics of Empire, 1660–1713 11. Ethnic diversity, pacifism, and freedom of A. The Great Aristocratic Land Grab conscience made Pennsylvania the most 1. Charles II gave the Carolinas to his aristo- open and democratic of the Restoration cratic friends and gave his brother James, colonies. the Duke of York, the land between the B. From Mercantilism to Imperial Dominion Delaware and Connecticut Rivers. 1. In the 1650s the English government 2. James took possession of New Netherland imposed mercantilism, via the Navigation and named it New York; the adjacent land Acts, which regulated colonial commerce was established as New Jersey. and manufacturing. 3. The proprietors of the new colonies 2. The Revenue Act of 1673 imposed a sought to create a traditional social order “plantation duty” on sugar and tobacco with a gentry class and an established exports and created a staff of customs Church of England. officials to enforce the mercantilist laws. 4. The Fundamental Constitutions of 3. In commercial wars between 1652 and Carolina (1669) prescribed a manorial 1674, the English ended Dutch supremacy system with nobility and serfs that were in the West African slave trade. The 41 42 Chapter 3: The British Empire in America, 1660–1750 English also dominated North Atlantic 8. In 1689, Andros was shipped back to commerce. England, and the new monarchs broke up 4. Many Americans resisted the mercantilist the Dominion of New England. laws as burdensome and intrusive. To 9. The monarchs did not restore Puritan- enforce the laws, the Lords of Trade pur- dominated government; instead they cre- sued a punitive legal strategy: in 1679, ated a new royal colony of Massachusetts they denied the claim of Massachusetts to whose new charter granted religious free- New Hampshire’s territory, instead creat- dom to members of the Church of ing New Hampshire as a separate colony. England and gave the vote to all male In 1684, they annulled Massachusetts’s property owners instead of Puritans only. charter. 10. The uprising in Maryland had both politi- 5. When James II succeeded to the throne, cal and religious causes; Protestants his insistence on the “divine right” of resented rising taxes and high fees kings prompted English officials to create imposed by wealthy, primarily Catholic a centralized imperial system in America. proprietary officials. 6. In 1686 the Connecticut and Rhode Island 11. In New York the rebellion against the colonies were merged with those of Mass- Dominion of New England began a achusetts Bay and Plymouth to form the decade of violent political conflict. Dominion of New England, a royal 12. The uprisings in Boston and New York province. toppled the authoritarian Dominion of 7. Two years later, New York and New Jersey New England and won the restoration of were added to the Dominion. internal self-government. 8. Sir Edmund Andros, governor of the 13. In England the new constitutional mon- Dominion, was empowered to abolish archs promoted an empire based on com- existing legislative assemblies and rule by merce; Parliament created a new Board of decree. Trade (1696) to supervise the American 9. Andros advocated worship in the Church settlements, bit it had little success. The of England, banned town meetings, and overall result was a period of lax adminis- challenged land titles. tration. C. The Glorious Revolution in England and D. Imperial Wars and Native Peoples America 1. Between 1689 and 1815, Britain and 1. In 1688, James’s Catholic wife gave birth France fought wars for dominance of to a son, raising the prospect of a Catholic Western Europe. heir to the throne. 2. As the wars spread to the Americas, they 2. To forestall such an event, Protestant Par- involved a number of Native American liamentary leaders carried out a bloodless warriors armed with European weapons. coup known as the “Glorious Revolution.” 3. The War of the Spanish Succession 3. Mary, James’s Protestant daughter by his (1702–1713) pitted Britain against France first wife, and her husband, William of and Spain and prompted English settlers Orange, were enthroned. in the Carolinas to attack Spanish Florida. 4. Queen Mary II and William III agreed to 4. So that they might help to protect their rule as constitutional monarchs loyal to English settlement, whites in the Carolinas “the Protestant reformed religion” and armed the Creek peoples to fend off accepted a bill of rights that limited royal French and Spanish attacks. prerogatives and increased personal liber- 5. The Creeks took this opportunity to ties and parliamentary powers. become the dominant tribe in the region. 5. Parliamentary leaders relied on John 6. Native Americans also played a central Locke’s Two Treatises on Government role in the fighting in the Northeast; aided (1690) to justify their coup. Locke rejected by the French, the Abenakis and Mohawks divine-right theories of monarchical rule. took revenge on the Puritans, attacking 6. Locke’s celebration of individual rights settlements in Maine and Massachusetts. and representative government had a last- New Englanders responded by joining ing influence in America. British forces in attacks on French strong- 7. The Glorious Revolution sparked colonial holds in Nova Scotia and Quebec. rebellions against royal governments in 7. The New York frontier remained quiet Massachusetts, Maryland, and New York. because of the fur trade and the Iroquois’ Chapter 3: The British Empire in America, 1660–1750 43 policy of “aggressive neutrality”: trading 3. In many African societies, class divisions with the British and the French but refus- hardened as people of noble birth ing to fight for either side. enslaved and sold those of lesser status. 8. Britain used victories in Europe to win 4. The imbalance of the sexes that resulted territorial and commercial concessions in from slave trading allowed some African the Americas in the Treaty of Utrecht men to take several wives, changing the (1713). Britain obtained Newfoundland, nature of marriage. Acadia, and the Hudson Bay region of 5. The Atlantic trade prompted harsher northern Canada from France, and access forms of slavery in Africa, eroding the dig- to the western Indian trade. The treaty nity of human life there and in the West- solidified Britain’s supremacy and brought ern Hemisphere. peace to North America. 6. African slaves who were forced to endure II. The Imperial Slave Economy the Middle Passage, the ship journey A. The South Atlantic System from Africa to the Americas, suffered 1. The South Atlantic system had its center the bleakest fate; many were literally in Brazil and the West Indies; sugar was its worked to death after reaching the sugar main product. plantations. 2. European merchants, investors, and C. Slavery in the Chesapeake and South planters ran the system in that they pro- Carolina vided the organizational skill, ships, and 1. Planters in Virginia and Maryland took money needed to grow and process sugar- advantage of the increased British trade in cane, carry the refined sugar to market, slaves, importing thousands of slaves and and supply the plantations with European creating a “slave society.” tools and equipment. 2. Slavery was increasingly defined in racial 3. To provide labor for the sugar plantations, terms; in Virginia virtually all resident the British and French developed African- Africans were declared slaves. run slave-catching systems that extended 3. Living and working conditions in Mary- far into the interior of Africa. They trans- land and Virginia allowed slaves to live ported about 10,000 Africans per year to relatively long lives. the Americas. 4. Some tobacco planters tried to increase 4. Beginning in the 1620s, Dutch merchants their workforce through reproduction, introduced the sugar cultivation to purchasing female slaves and encouraging English and French settlements in the large families. West Indies, and a “sugar revolution” 5. By the middle of the 1700s, slaves consti- quickly transformed their economies. tuted over 30 percent of the Chesapeake 5. Sugar was the most profitable crop in population, and over three-quarters of Europe and America. them were American born. 6. As a result of the Navigation Acts, by 1750 6. South Carolina slaves were much more re-exports of American sugar and tobacco oppressed. Growing rice required work accounted for half of all British exports.