|
Two main factors contributed to the colonization of North America by British settlers: The trading initiative of commercial companies and the religious intolerance in the mother country, which compelled persecuted sects to find refuge in the New World.
Virginia was the first permanent colony to be founded by the English in America. Despite great hardship resulting from malaria, famine and from the hostility of the Indians, the colony gradually flourished as a result of tobacco culture and grants of land to individual colonists.
The northern Atlantic Seaboard, which was later to be known as New England, was first settled by Puritans who had been persecuted in England.
The first colony in this region was Plymouth. In 1620, 102 "Pilgrim Fathers" sailed in the Mayflower to the new World and landed on the coast of Massachusetts. Later Massachusetts was colonized by the Massachusetts Bay Company, which had been formed by groups of Puritans in England. The first settlements were Salem (1628) and Boston (1630), Economic and cultural life developed rapidly. In 1636, the first American university, Harvard, was founded in Cambridge near Boston. However, religious intolerance in the Puritan Bible commonwealth caused many settlers to leave and found new colonies. But there weren't only British colonies. Nearly all European nations have founded new colonies in America. For instance New York was originally a Dutch trading post called "New Amsterdam", which was later bought by the Duke of York. Later settlements to the south of New England were proprietary colonies granted by the English king to individuals.
The first immigrants came chiefly from Britain. Persecuted sects from Germany immigrated into Pennsylvania and even Salzburg Protestants searched a new home in Georgia.
While Northern colonies got important due to trade ports in the bigger cities, as the cradle of American democracy and also as an important industrial area, the southern states were formed by an aristocratic society which supported slave labour on the enormous large plantations.
|
