TOWARDS AMERICA

In the last post in this series I covered European discoveries and colonisations up to the first empire with the Spaniards. Now it is time to look at the second phase of European colonisation.
From 1602 the Dutch began to trade with great success in the Malay archipelago, provisioning the first settlement on the Cape in southern Africa to aid communication in 1562.

THE EAST

The English East India Company – formed in 1600 – principally engaged itself in cotton trading with India and began trading in tea with China from 1685, where they soon found themselves in competition with the French. Naval confrontations ensued between the powers, Portugul faring rather badly in the east.
Trading with the Persian Gulf also commenced about this time. The Dutch then began moving against the Portuguese slaving stations in West Africa and against Brazil, but the Portuguese fared better here than in the east, soon driving them out.

THE WEST

The Dutch then turned their attention to an offensive against Spanish shipping in the Caribbean, the action becoming a smokescreen as the English and French began to form settlements in the Lesser Antilles.
By the end of the century they had a string of settlements along the American seaboard from Barbados to Quebec. Many of these colonists were non-conformists, intent on building new societies in the New World, beginning with the Pilgrim Fathers, who sailed in the Mayflower in 1620.
The 18th century saw the Spaniards pushing north of Mexico and colonising much of south west America, including Texas and California by 1767, while the French moved through Nova Scotia to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi area founding New Orleans in 1718.
The British had first begun development of the eastern seaboard with the founding of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 and Massachusetts in 1620, and had taken New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664, changing its name to New York.

THE THIRTEEN COLONIES

By 1773 the 13 ‘continental colonies’ in America had a prosperous economy with the beginnings of manufacturing industry, and towards the end of the 18th century had a third the population of Britain itself, whilst the French were much more sparse.
The odd clash for continental supremacy had taken place between these two nations as early as 1629, but the troubles heightened with the English fur traders operating around Hudson Bay in the 1670s, resulting in every European war having a parallel in America. The Seven Year’s War spilt over to America in a big way and cost France virtually all of her American possessions.

WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

By now the British colonisers were so well formed that when Britain refused to recognise a number of grievances, the American War of Independence became inevitable.
Fighting began at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, in 1775, the Continental Congress forming an army under George Washington. Soon defeated, the army regrouped and began a campaign culminating in victory at Saratoga in 1777. A Franco-American alliance the following year brought French troops and ships into the war, forcing the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781.
In 1783 the resulting Treaty of Paris brought into existence the newly born United States of America, the US Constitution coming into force in 1789, and George Washington being unanimously elected the first President.

© Anthony North, November 2007

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