Transcript for:
Chapter 3 Overview of Anglo-America (1660–1750)

welcome to chapter 3 which is titled creating Anglo America from 1660 to 1750 late 17th and early 18th century America presented a mosaic of different people and communities we have Europeans Africans and Native Americans who all are going to have to adapt to each other and changing American conditions but European nations are going to try to increase their control over their American colonies a little bit later in the 18th century and this will cause a great deal of tension within the Global European based Empires now unlike the French and the Dutch the English colonies were settled mostly by farmers who actively competed with Native people for access to land and English settlers misunderstood how Native American people used and thought about the land for most native groups the land was thought of in the same way as the air that we breathe and the water that flows in streams and in lakes and everything else essentially it belongs to everyone and everyone can use it and no one person can really own it but disputes between Native Americans and English colonists are going to arise in part because the English and the Native American people had very different ideas and practices regarding L land use now for Native families they would sometimes Times Farm on some pieces of land and hunt on other lands and then rotate between different plots of land for different seasons and over the course of generations thus many English colonists are going to consider pieces of land to be completely vacant or abandoned if there were no homes or crops actively being grown in the area but that land could actually be used to hunt or perhaps it might even be resting to help regain the soil's fertility for a future planting crop of Native American people and no native person claimed individual ownership of a specific tract of land but Europeans absolutely do do this thing and for them European people's concept of ownership meant that an individual who owned a piece of land had exclusive rights to the use of that land and this obviously is going to lead to a myriad of problems between European settlers mostly the English and Native American people that they encounter in the American colonies by the mid 1600s it was apparent to England's rulers that their North American colonies could actually generate immense amounts of wealth and so these monarchs are going to move to seize control of Atlantic Ocean based trade they want to consolidate their hold over the American continent's eastern coast and they they also are going to try to Greater regulate their entire Empires so to improve their position in transatlantic trade England adopts a policy known as mercantilism and mercantilism is a basic economic system whereby the government intervenes in the economy for the purpose of increasing overall National wealth now according to the theory of mercantilism the government regulated economic activity in an effort to promote National Power by encouraging more manufacturing and more Commerce and primarily to manipulate trade to make sure that more gold and silver actually entered into the home country than left it overall the export of goods which generated revenue from abroad should always exceed Imports which required paying foreigners and foreign Nations for their products marantal advocated for the possession of more and more colonies as places where the mother country the Home Country would be able to acquire raw materials that might not be available to them at home and it was the job of the colonies to always bottom line serve the overall interest of the mother country by producing raw materials things like Timber and basic crops for food stuffs and then it was also the job of the colonies to import manufactured goods goods and buy Goods that were made over in England itself now as a part of this mercantilist policy and according to Legal stipulations that were spelled out in the Navigation Acts of 1650 valuable Goods that were produced in the American colonies like tobacco and sugar could only be shipped from the British American colonies to other parts of the worldwide British Empire and only using British ships government legislation required only British ships to carry all forms of British trade it channeled all colonial trade ultimately through England as a hub and it provided advantages for English manufacturers as well and at every single step of this process too the British government collected taxes in one form or another and the cost of those taxes would ultimately be passed on to Consumers who bought the products and this in turn made it more expensive to buy any kind of products in the American colonies overall eventually these British trade policies ended up succeeding and the American Colonial economy actually expanded twice as fast as England's did once this policy of mercantilism was adopted and the Dutch who had up until this point ruled in the business of transatlantic trade eventually began to lose their preeminence in terms of transatlantic trade to the British with the restoration of the English Monarchy in the year 1660 under King Charles II England very much expanded its Colonial reach it soon ended up doubling the number of English colonies that existed in North America England actually took over the Dutch colony of New Netherlands as a part of an Anglo Dutch War that also resulted in the British conquest of Dutch trading posts in places like Africa as well England ended up dividing New Netherlands into proprietary colonies known as New York and New Jersey and King Charles's brother the Duke of York was given complete proprietary control over the area of New York he named New Netherlands New York and then renamed the city of New Amsterdam New York York City and England quickly transformed the previously minor military post of New Netherlands ultimately into a very important Imperial Seaport and future military base for future operations against French people that lived in Canada or New France as it was called at the time and New York's development was influenced by very generous terms made by the English two Dutch colonists who who were already living there and the promotion of more immigration to New York from England English rule over New York expanded but also in some ways constricted freedom for certain groups for example the English promised to continue with religious toleration that had been the law in New Netherlands and the English also respect promise to respect current Property Holdings but on the other hand the English eliminated some rights that were provided for married women and eliminated practices that benefited female colonists that were living in what was now New York the English also began to discriminate against free black people who had previously enjoyed all of the rights of other so-called freemen when New Netherlands was under Dutch control and English rule also for a time very much strengthened the iroy Confederacy that existed in Upstate New York in the mid 1670s New York's new British Governor a man named sir Ed Edmund Andrew formed an alliance with the iroy people that came to be known as the covenant chain this agreement expanded both English but also iroy power in the Great Lakes region and in the Ohio River Valley region completely at the expense of French colonists in Canada and the French people's native allies in those same areas at the same time though many English colonists began to complain that they were being denied access to their true English Liberties particularly the right to consent to any taxes that are collected the Dutch in New Netherlands had not had any kind of representative assembly and English rule in New York began without one either in fact until the year 1683 New York York was the only British American colony that did not have a representative assembly but then in the year 1683 the Duke of York finally agreed to call an elected assembly for New York which soon ended up drafting a document known as the charter of Liberties and privileges which affirmed and guaranteed traditional English religious and political rights for people living in the New York colony this map shows you the settlements that existed in eastern North America in the 17th and early 18th centuries as you can see the blue purpley shaded areas on this map belonged to the Dutch but then they are going to belong to the English from 1664 onwards the pink areas indicate English settlement the green strip of land in the north along the St Lawrence River and in the Great Lakes belongs to the French and then finally at the very bottom starting at the uh Southern edge of Georgia down into what is nowadays Florida we see some Spanish settlement in North America too in the 1660s a handful of English Proprietors who were awarded the right to establish a colony to the immediate north of Spanish Florida in an effort to check against further Spanish expansion in the area founded A colony which was originally known as Carolina now initially the sons of very wealthy sugar plantation owners from the island of Barbados and because many of its Founders came originally from the sugar Islands society that developed in early colonial Carolina very much resembled the Caribbean colonies in that a vast majority of the population was actually African slaves who worked on plantations and there was only a small handful of white land owners this becomes especially true after a proper cash crop was found that could be grown in Carolina but poorer settlers were forced to move into the northern portions of the Carolina colony and eventually a few years later they are going to establish their own separate Colony as North Carolina these poorer settlers in North Carolina are going to raise tobacco plants and livestock and they're also going to produce pitch tar and Timber Products for export but overall early Carolina colonists traded with the native population they sometimes employed native people in raids against the Spanish down in Florida and also raided some other native communities for a growing and burgeoning trade for just a few years in Native American slaves but in the year 1715 members of the yamasi and Creek native peoples started to become alarmed by the amount of debt that they were acing with English Traders and they also started to worry that English slave Traders raids into their territories might eventually begin to affect them and so these yamasi and Creek native peoples ended up launching a rebellion which when it ends up being brutally crushed by the British ultimately resulted in the enslavement or the expulsion down into Spanish Florida of most of the native tribes that originally lived in Carolina slavery will eventually become fundamental to overall Carolina society and made it into one of the most strictly hierarchical societies especially after rice plantation-based agriculture developed in Carolina and ultimately the people living in Carolina who own rice plantations will become by far the wealthiest of England's North American col Colonial settlers we'll come back to this in just a moment though now the very last English colony that was established in the 1600s was the colony of Pennsylvania the word Pennsylvania actually translates into pin's Woods or the woods that belong to pin named for its proprietor this guy on the slide here a man named William pin who was a well-known advocate for religious toleration and spiritual freedom and William pin intended his colony to be a space for social harmony between European migrants who might be escaping religious persecution back home and the native people who already lived there now William Pinn wanted to do this because as a very devout member of a highly persecuted religious group officially known as the Society of friends but more commonly known as the Quakers William Pinn encouraged as much Quaker settlement as he possibly could bring to Pennsylvania in the 17th and 18th centuries the Quakers were considered a very radical religious group Quakers rejected formal Theology and rejected the idea of a specially educated Ministry instead choosing to focus on the importance of every person's so-called inner light or element of God's holy spirit that dwelt within all people and this this non-traditional form of Christian worship actually ended up scaring more conservative Protestants like the Puritans and separatists who lived in New England but pin personally also helped to frame the colony's very liberal government establishment which established complete religious liberty and also created an elected assembly that ultimately allowed a very broad array of different people to vote the population of Pennsylvania as such was ethnically and religiously incredibly diverse but most Pennsylvania settlers lived on farms though the development of the city of Philadelphia as a major port city did begin quite quickly William Pinn envisioned his Colony as a sort of so-called holy experiment that he wanted to be governed ultimately based off of Quaker principles which included the complete equality of all people and when I say all people that's exactly what William pin meant he didn't just mean men he also included women black peoples and Native Americans as well and that all people would have equality under God and Pennsylvania also allowed for the Primacy of the individual conscience as well pin and his colony's Quaker population tend ended to treat the native peoples in the area of Pennsylvania with special consideration Penn actually went out of his way to make peace with the native people in the area and part of the reason for this is because Quakers as a religious group were ultimately pacifists and as such did not have militia groups and did not maintain any kind of police force and Quaker also took exceptional pains to fa to pay fair prices to all Native people whose land he began to parcel and sell off to settlers and above all William pin wanted to emphasize religious freedom which was ultimately insured and guaranteed in the year 1682 in the Pennsylvania colony's Charter of Liberty foundational document pin then formed an assembly that would be elected by all male taxpayers in the area and freemen either you were a free immigrant who owned at least 100 acres of land or if you were a former indentured servant that owned at least 50 acres of land and thus he ended up giving the right to vote to a majority of the men living in the Pennsylvania colony pin also as the proprietary owner of the Pennsylvania colony technically owned every inch of land and it was his right to sell that land off to settlers at low prices in order to encourage a very broad distribution of landed wealth and social equality in Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania's Freer ranging Freedom actually attracted migrants from all over Europe and ultimately this made the Pennsylvania colony fairly prosperous but it also managed to increase tensions with native peoples especially as Europeans who might not have been adherence to the Quaker faiths or pacifists began to eventually push into native territory without any qualms about providing a free Price or paying for that land it also fostered the growth of African slavery in the more southern colonies as more and more indentured servants chose to migrate to Pennsylvania once their term of service was over rather than sticking around in places like Maryland or Virginia where they might have served their terms of of indenture now I want to take a a moment to look at a very integral part of the British American colonies the area that we know nowadays as the Caribbean islands or as they're sometimes called the West Indies now originally Spain claimed rights to all of the Caribbean islands by the right of Christopher Columbus landing on them in the first place but despite initial Spanish claims the French Dutch and English will eventually establish colonies of their own all throughout the Caribbean island Network now all of those European nations that I just mentioned ultimately wanted to have at least one Caribbean island as a part of their empire in the hopes that they would find either gold or silver in those islands now as it turns out people found out pretty quickly that there was not actually much precious metal to be found in the Caribbean islands but it was very quickly discovered that the plant that grows sugar cane could easily be grown in the Caribbean and sugar turned out to be just as valuable as discovering gold or silver mines sugar was a very valuable commodity over in Europe sugar was used not just as a sweetener and a preservative it was actually used as a medicine and people living in Europe were willing to pay very high prices for access to sugar in fact Christopher Columbus actually brought some of the first sugar cane plants to the Caribbean islands in his second trip to the new world in 1493 and he was one of the first people to find out that the Caribbean islands were actually the perfect place to grow sugar cane plants but eventually sugar became so profitable that whole entire Islands were deforested in an effort to plant and raise even more sugar cane people living on the islands actually Stu stopped planting their own food crops and stopped raising livestock just to make that much more room available for planting one more sugar cane plant and as such people who lived in the so-called West Indies ultimately came to entirely depend upon imported food sources and imported Timber from places like the New England colonies just to be able to survive now sugar plantations in the Caribbean were at first work mostly by white European indentured servants but eventually the very harsh and unhealthy tropical environment ended up killing off most of those indentured servants from there English plantation owners then began to bring over African slaves for labor in the Caribbean because Europeans felt that African people were just better suited for difficult hard agricultural work in otherwise very tropical hot humid conditions now as it turns out many white European slave owners also noticed that African slaves were far less likely to die of diseases like malaria which was a rampant endemic disease on almost all of the Caribbean islands and to this day modern researchers believe that the reason for this resistance to malaria was most likely because of a disease known as CLE Cel anemia which could be found in some African populations now while the English like all other European colonists who claimed land in the Americas did not originally intend to rely so exclusively on African slaves as their primary labor force eventually the growing demand for labor for things like tobacco cultivation in the Chesapeake area and for sugar cultivation in the West Indies eventually LED plantation owners in those places to Tar to start to turn more and more to the transatlantic African slave trade white European owners saw a lot of advantages in using African slaves rather than using white European indentured servants as the main labor force on their plantations for a number of reasons first and foremost people born in Africa were not protected by basic English common law their terms as slaves never came to an end and African people did not ever end up becoming poor unhappy landless men as so many former indentured servants did also any children that were born to slaves were automatically considered slaves themselves and then just to make matters worse the unique skin color of people born in Africa made it that much more difficult for African people to escape to freedom and Europeans basically just assumed that African people were accustomed to difficult agricultural work in very hot harsh climates also when compared to Native American slaves African slaves were already immune and had been exposed to many European diseases which tended to completely wipe out Native American populations so while the English did not have our modern Notions of race in which humankind is is divided into different groups mostly associated with skin color and they also didn't have our modern concepts of racism which is an ideology based on the idea that some races of people are naturally or inherently Superior to others and thus entitled to rule over them the English did have the tendency to view any so-called other peoples such as the Irish or the Native Americans and people who originated in Africa as uncivilized non-Christian Pagan and thus Savage and ultimately animal-like now at the time in the 1600s and 1700s the English like Europeans did have a tendency to Dei to divide human groups into two categories either you were a civilized person or you were a barbarian you were either a Christian or you were a non-Christian yet people who originated in Africa because of their skin color their different religions and their different social practices from the English were seen by the English as particularly enslavable in a way that poor White English men were not considered enslavable now slavery as you know has existed for almost all of human history but slavery did exist in the 1600s and slavery existed earlier in the Mediterranean and on the African continent but those types of slavery were in practice very different from the plantation form of slavery that eventually is going to develop in the Americas in the Americas large numbers of enslaved people will ultimately be brought together for very demanding very difficult agricultural labor under usually One Singular owner and they will be kept as slaves and worked as slaves for their whole entire remaining lives but very quickly plantation owners realized that having large populations of slaves actually increased the dangers of slave rebellions in the colonies for example if enslaved people physically outnumbered the number of white enslaving populations in the the area what would ever stop the slaves from someday eventually physically overpowering their enslavers and escaping from their condition to white slave owners the answer to this problem was constant repeated harsh physical discipline and ultimately instilling a deep-seated fear in enslaved people of what terrible things might happen if enslaved people ever in the future tried to resist or tried to fight back also unlike slavery practice in Africa the death rate amongst slaves in European colonies in the new world was Far higher and African slaves who might manage to become free in the future would still have a unique skin color that white European people automatically associated with slavery and thus even if you were a formerly enslaved person and somehow achieved freedom you were still ultimately marked and easily recognizable as Unworthy of equality in an otherwise free European Society the African slave trade became a major International and transatlantic business only starting in the 1600s slavery developed first in the new world outside of the bounds of North America by the year 1600 Brazil which was a Portuguese Colony remember already had built gigantic sugar plantations that were worked by thousands and thousands of African slaves by the end of the 17th century the profits that could be had from growing sugar ended up transforming English Dutch French and even Danish colonies in the Caribbean from what had been pretty diverse mixed economies that only had a few slaves living there and mostly small farmers that were worked by white indentured servants into what ultimately became economies that were dominated completely dominated by very lucrative wealthy sugar plantations that were worked on exclusively by African slaves and sugar was one of the first Goods to be Mass marketed to European consumers and sugar also became the most valuable and thus the most important product of the British French and Portuguese Empires over time now compared to its pretty rapid introduction in places like Brazil and in the West Indies this type of slavery grew very very slowly in North American colonies English indentured servants cont constituted the vast majority of the labor force even in the Chesapeake plantations well into the 1680s even though it should be noted that that the very first African slaves were brought to Virginia all the way back in the year 1619 the most significant dividing line in the Chesapeake region in most of the 17th century was not between black people and white people but between Rich usually white plantation owners who completely dominated society and politics in the Chesapeake and then there was everyone else including both black and white independent small farmers indentured servants and even some slaves now make no mistake slavery and sugar made only a tiny tiny handful of white European plantation owners immensely wealthy those who were lucky enough to own the land and to own plantations often were so incredibly Rich that they lived far more elaborately and luxuriously than even some european-based aristocrats other white people living on the Caribbean islands such as formerly uh indentured servants and even a few independent small-time Farmers just struggled constantly to scrape by compared with those plantation owners often times those other white people living in the Caribbean islands found much better opportunities for themselves on the North American Mainland and thus eventually migrated to some of those colonies especially places like Carolina while Spain had relatively liberal laws which granted slaves various rights and the Catholic Church often encouraged slave owners to free their slaves at some point the legal status of slaves in the English colonies at first was pretty ambiguous and undeveloped but starting in the year 1619 small numbers of African people were ultimately brought to the Chesapeake and while while these people were almost certainly treated as slaves some of them were eventually freed after serving a term of several years but racial distinctions began to be codified into law from the very beginning in those English colonies one such early Virginia law banned black people from serving in the colony's militia in an effort to keep weapons out of the hands of black people and to deny black people any sort of basic combat train white colonists over time became convinced eventually that if black people had access to weapons or military training that black people would immediately turn those weapons and those fighting skills on the majority white colonists who treated them so brutally but in both Virginia and Maryland free black people though they were always very small in number did have access to some basic rights for example free black people in the Chesapeake could legally Sue and testify in court and some free black people even acquired their own land and even purchased white indentured servants or African slaves of their own but at the poorer levels of the working class in the Chesapeake colonies black people and white people frequently would work side by side in the Region's tobacco Fields they would also form relationships occasionally they would run away together and sometimes even formed intimate family relationships with each other even though evidence shows that slaves were being held for their entire lives as early as the 1640s it was only in the 1660s that Virginia and Maryland's laws began referring explicitly to the practice of slavery as tobacco planting spread and labor demand increased over time the conditions that faced black slaves and white indentured servants began to diverge from each other for example to encourage more white European immigration to the American colonies Colonial authorities did try to improve the status of white indentured servants in the colonies but simultaneously black people's opportunities for Freedom started to be restricted the overall shift from Europe European white indentured servants to African slaves as the main Plantation Workforce was actually sped up in the year SE 1676 by an event known as Bacon's Rebellion in Bacon's Rebellion the sort of lead up to Bacon's Rebellion Governor William Berkeley had for a very long time for years at this point ruled over the Virginia colony through a very corrupt regime that was forged in a iance with a very small Elite from the colony's wealthiest tobacco Planters in which the governor gave his supporters access to the very best growing lands especially as more European settlement began to push Inland with all of the best growing lands already snatched up by wealthy plantation owners from here an increasingly poor population of former indentured servants and migrants found it over time much much harder to acquire decent land to start their own farms and thus these poorer white settlers felt like they were being forced to settle down in Frontier areas and these poor Frontier settlers were also further disenfranchised or lost their right to vote in the year 1670 when a new law was passed which limited the right to vote which had once been given to all adult men in Virginia was then restricted to to land owners of a certain fairly large portion of land so Bacon's Rebellion actually began when these white Frontier settlers attempted to violently seize control of land that belonged to native peoples who lived on the very edges of Frontier Colonial territory the Virginia governor governor Berkeley adamantly opposed these attacks on Native settlements and the European settlers took the governor opposition as a direct attack on their rights then the angry angry Frontier settlers turned their attention to fighting against the colonial government which ended up sparking the Rebellion overall the governorship of William Berkeley was viewed by most poor European settlers as a very corrupt regime and these people felt that the government should actually do more to help poorer settlers get access to some decent farming land by going out and killing off or Exterminating local Native American tribes and then taking that land and handing it over to White Frontier settlers but Governor William Berkeley simply refused to officially exterminate local native groups and in turn the settlers who were led by a man named Nathaniel Bacon rose up in rebellion and marched towards and eventually captured and Bur burned down Virginia's capital city at Jamestown Governor Berkeley had to had to flee for his life and from there the settlers then turned on local Native American groups particularly the pow hotten people and they began to burn down entire native Villages killing scores of men women and children as a result of Bacon's Rebellion the pow hotten people lost access to their only remaining land in the area and it was only when warships arrived from England to put down the Rebellion that Bacon's Rebellion finally came to an end and Governor Berkeley was allowed to as reassume his control over Virginia but in the aftermath of Bacon's Rebellion Virginia's ruling Elite subsequently began to consolidate their rule in the area by both limiting access to democracy and expanding at the same time social opportunities for poorer white people in Virginia they reinforced property qualifications for voting and also made sure that wealthy land owners were the only people who had any kind of government control in the colony but at the same time the government also significantly reduced taxes and adopted very aggressive policies towards Native Americans in an effort to open up more Western lands to appease the poor white population out on the Frontiers but perhaps most importantly tobacco plantation owners from this point more and more began to turn down the offer of Simply renting the services of potentially rebellious white European indentured servants and began turning more and more towards buying permanent African slaves which ultimately made the Chesapeake region a society that came to be completely based on the practice of slavery overall European people were greatly pleased with the Abundant land that seemed to be available in the new world but they could not wrap their heads around the scarcity and very high cost of paying workers in the new world the reverse had actually been the truth in Europe for example in Europe there were far too many people in most European countries and there weren't nearly enough jobs for all of the people to take to earn a satisfying living over in America there were too many jobs that needed to be filled but not enough people who could or would do these jobs Colonial workers in the new world demanded even higher wages to do work because simply there were so few free workers available in the new world compared to the amount of available workers in any European country at any given time very few European colonists wanted to work for other Farmers if they were free to get started on their own farms at the same time many European settlers decided at this point that it would simply be easier and overall cheaper to rely upon slaves to do the work that they felt needed to be done on their farms in the new world in the 1700s African migration forced migration of slaves accelerated immensely but the vast majority of enslaved African people that arrived in the new world were not sent to the North American colonies they were ultimately sent for the most part to places like Brazil the West Indies and two Spanish colonies in the new world a very tiny percentage of people who were captured in Africa as slaves ended up working in the British Mainland North American colonies but slavery was present in every single British colony but it is key to note that far fewer slaves lived in Northern British colonies than in southern British colonies for a number of different reasons slaves all throughout the North American British colonies lived in horrible wretched terrible conditions where they were constantly underfed and very badly treated property Property Owners considered their slaves to be just another piece of property that they owned and sometimes slave owners would even brand their slaves like livestock and would hunt down slaves with blood hounds and other dogs whenever slaves tried to run away slaves had absolutely no legal rights anywhere in the British Empire at this time in fact by the year 1680 ideas of racial difference started to be strongly reflected in British American colonies laws despite the small the relatively small black populations in the British North American colonies in fact a series of laws known overall as the Black Codes or slave codes started to be passed mainly in the Southern and Chesapeake colonies beginning in the late 17th and early 18th century in an effort to define the status of slaves and to codify into the law the basic denial of civil rights to black people from Africa in the year 1662 Virginia's slave codes began to embed the concept of white supremacy into that colony's laws and those laws clearly defined black slaves as not human beings but as property and other elements of the Black Codes sharply limited the freedom of both free and enslaved black people people living there the living and working conditions of enslaved people got palpably worse once the slave codes ended up reducing an entire class of human beings to the simple basic status of property slavery at this point was now legally defined as a lifelong condition and other laws also said that any child born to a slave mother would automatically be born as a slave themselves now this law actually allowed for the children produced by forced or coerced sexual relationships between white European slave owners and black slave women to automatically be born as slaves themselves which ended up providing a distinct economic Advantage for white men to sexually abuse slave women in an effort to create a self-perpetuating slave population in the year 1667 another law was passed in Virginia Which prohibited Christian baptism from being used as an excuse to release or to free slaves and then in the year 1669 slave owners were given the power of life and death over their slave property in the year 1705 all of these laws were gathered together into one comprehensive Slave Code for the colony of Virginia and the Chesapeake colonies at this point in time shifted from being a society that had slaves in which so in which slavery was just one of many labor systems that was available to now Virginia and Maryland became slave Societies in which slavery was Central to the society there and to the economy there so European people Native Americans and African people alike all deathly feared enslavement slaves often times tried to escape from their condition and for those slaves who managed to speak or read English or who were familiar with European cultures they sometimes tried to contest their condition in the court system of the colonies and slaves continued to resist their owners even as legal avenues for the opportunity of Freedom began to receive seed away in the Chesapeake colonies at the beginning or sorry at the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th century a people over in England also directly affected the English colonies in the new world in the year 1688 a struggle for control over the English government between Parliament and the crown the king and queen culminated in an event that came to be known as the Glorious Revolution the Glorious Revolution ultimately was a completely bloodless event a nonviolent Revolution that ended up finally once and for all establishing parliament's Supremacy over the crown and also established a firm Protestant line of succession to the throne in the future now the reason why the Glorious Revolution happened is that under King Charles II's period of rule Parliament actually expanded its Authority and its powers but Charles's very unpopular successor to the throne his brother James II ended up alienating much of the population of England especially after King James claimed that he ruled by divine right because God had chosen him to rule and seeking religious toleration for Protestant denters as well as Catholics in England now King Charles the second ended up overall having about 20 or so illegitimate children with a variety of women to whom he was not legally married but he had exactly zero children with his wife now when Charles II died this meant that he did not have a legitimate heir to the throne and so his younger brother who was previously James the Duke of York inherited the throne and thus became King James II now James II was already pretty old when he ascended to the throne and he already had two grown married firmly Protestant daughter daughters who were still alive living in other parts of Europe at the time but James ended up bringing the ire and suspicion of the English people onto himself when he openly and publicly converted to the Catholic religion a lot of people in England were very upset that they had an English a Catholic King sitting on the English throne but at the very least James II was old it definitely wasn't good that James had converted to Catholicism but in the minds of many people in England at least King James might die pretty soon and then one of his Protestant daughters would end up taking the throne but at that point old man King James II decided that he wanted to get remarried this time to a young teenage Catholic princess from Italy now in the minds of English people this wasn't great that he remarried to a young wife but as long as she didn't get pregnant and as long as she didn't give birth to a boy who would immediately take precedence over his older sisters in line to the throne and become king if their father died things could still turn out okay but of course as many of these kinds of stories go of course the new Young Queen of England ended up getting pregnant and when the child was born wouldn't you know she ended up having a son this son was a boy who was immediately baptized into the Catholic faith himself and so at this point fearing that the English crown would soon go to his Catholic son when King James II died a group of English Aristocrats SE secretly went down to the Netherlands and personally invited William of Orange who was a Dutch nobleman and husband to Mary who was James II's eldest thoroughly Protestant daughter and invited William and Mary to come to England and take the throne in the name of protecting English Protestant Liberties in the year 1688 when James II found out that this group of Englishmen was down in the Netherlands talking to his daughter and son-in-law James II ended up fleeing and leaving England right before William's invading Army landed and as such when William and Mary ended up arriving in England they were able to peacefully and easily Ascend to the throne so overall no shots were fired and nobody ended up dying as a result of what came to be known as the Glorious Revolution which happened in England in the year 1688 Parliament very quickly thereafter enacted a Bill of Rights for the people of Britain which gave Parliament complete and total control over things like Taxation and also established various individual rights for British citizens like the right to a trial by a jury of your peers and overall this entirely peaceful coup ended up assuring the future perpetuation of of England's balanced constitutional monarchy and allowed English subjects at home and in the far-flung worldwide English colonies to celebrate both English protestantism and the unique rights and Liberties of the English people before the Glorious Revolution happened England's rulers tried to reduce growing Colonial autonomy within the British Empire but things will change in America once news of the Glorious Revolution slowly made its way across the Atlantic Ocean the Glorious Revolution ended up returning stability to the English Nation but it also had longlasting effects that are going to shape political life in both England and in the American colonies for years to come for example when Parliament made arrangements for William and Mary to become the new king and queen of England Parliament assumed compl completely equal power with the crown and also claimed full authority over the colonies now colonists over in America looked at their own local Colonial legislatures as critical to the protection of their rights and Liberties in the American colonies when observing the similarities between Parliament over in England and their own local Colonial assemblies many American colonists felt that their legislator had an important role in overall government governance but in fact Parliament had claimed complete and total control over the over the colonies and Parliament did not at all recognize Colonial assemblies as anything approaching their equals in power during the early 18th century Parliament and Royal ministers tended to confine their attention in the colonies to matters of trade and military defense and otherwise left the colonies in America on their own to do everything else as they saw fit now this type of pretty light Imperial control over colonies is sometimes referred to as salutary neglect and unfortunately after years of salutary neglect that salutary neglect ended up fueling the idea amongst American colonist that their local governments were completely on par and equal with Parliament which in reality they absolutely were not it took time for news of the events of the Glorious Revolution to make their way across the Atlantic Ocean but when news of King James II's alster finally arrived in the American colonies in the year 1689 it ended up causing rebellions in several of the British American colonies for example Boston Militia in the Massachusetts Bay Colony ended up throwing going into jail the corrupt governor of Massachusetts and a number of other Imperial British officials in the colonies and then the various New England colonies ended up trying to reestablish their old completely separate and much more independent colonial governments in New York Rebels led by a man named Jacob ller ended up seizing control of the colony but soon thereafter Protestant Rebels living in Maryland ended up overthrowing the government of that colony's mostly Catholic proprietor family uh the family of the calverts led by Lord Baltimore and the Protestants successfully revoked the Old Colonial Charter and created an entirely new Protestant dominated government for Maryland now ultimately in New York Leer's Rebellion ended up not being successful in fact Leer's rebellious government unintentionally ended up dividing the New York colony along ethnic and economic lines and ended up causing strife and animosity between the Dutch majority of the population and the small English minority of the population and also caused friction between poor Rebels and Wealthy land owners for years to come soon after the events of Leer's Rebellion Dutch merchants and prominent wealthy English colonists United together against Jacob ller and eventually convinced King William back over in England to violently suppress ller who was himself executed and his regime was destroyed the Lisa rebellion in New York and its suppression ended up polarizing New york-based Politics for decades to come now after the chaos uh that resulted from news of the Glorious Revolution and its various spin-off rebellions in the American colonies quieted down the English crown ended up restoring most colonies old original Charters but the colony of Massachusetts alone received an entirely new Colonial Charter now as a royal colony which now came to incorporate Plymouth Colony as well the new Massachusetts Charter made property ownership and not full church membership the defining qualification for being eligible to vote in elections for that colony's legislature it also made the governor now a crown appoint D and also required complete religious toleration at least for all Protestant Christian denominations throughout Massachusetts now these measures together ended up completely putting an end to the Puritans previous total control of all New England colonies it also empowered a handful of nonp Puritan nonpar separatist merchants and large land owners too and this perceived loss of control actually had the effect of increasing anxiety amongst the Protestant and separatist Settlers of Massachusetts who from this point on became ever more on the lookout for the handywork of the devil in those colonies now many Puritans like a lot of other Europeans and Colonial Americans in the 17th century very much believed in things like magic astrology Witchcraft and all kinds of other Supernatural phenomenon in fact many Puritans and other colonists often times interpreted what we would nowadays consider natural events as ultimately having religious or other worldly Supernatural meanings witchcraft for example was punishable by hanging it was an executable offense in Europe and in the American colonies and occasionally some individuals did end up being convicted of charges of Witchcraft and ended up being hanged um in places like the New England colonies most of the people who were accused of practicing witchcraft ended up being women and women who were usually Beyond childbearing age who were older and women who happen to be outspoken economically independent as estranged from their husbands or otherwise thought to violate expected gender norms for women at the time and a witch's Powers were ultimately felt by Puritans and other colonists to openly challenge the will of God and challenge the stature of men as the heads of families and rulers of society in the colonies and in the year 1691 in the town of Salem Massachusetts a small handful of initial accusations of Witchcraft by a group of young girls ended up snowballing into a full-blown crisis as more and more people ended up being accused and as the accused tried to save themselves by confessing to Witchcraft and then naming other witches that worked with them this frenzy of accusations eventually led to Legal charges being leveled against almost 150 people most of of whom were women there were a small handful of men but mostly women ultimately 19 men and women ended up being hanged for being witches and one elderly man named Giles Corey was actually pressed to death for being a witch as well being pressed to death means that you're laid down on the floor of a jail or a prison a large board is put on top of you and then weight is added to the board until finally you are squished to death your lungs can't expand you can't breathe and your bones break that's what happened to Giles Corey but eventually when news of all of this witchcraft began to spread outside of the confines of the town of Salem Massachusetts religious and Civil Authorities in the rest of the Massachusetts colony were horrified immediately the colonial government of Massachusetts dissolved the Salem Town courts and further warned that in the future no court system in Massachusetts should be able to accept testimony from any person who claimed to be possessed by the devil and they also were told not to accept the confessions or accusations of people who were facing imminent execution so the Salem Witch Trials ended up killing a lot of people but it did at the very least end up doing some good because the Salem Witchcraft craze ended up ultimately discrediting the prosecution of witches and also encouraged a much greater interest amongst prominent educated colonists to now try to find natural scientific explanations for natural events instead of just automatically assuming magical or witchcraft explanations for them although the Spanish and French Empires remained particularly powerful in the Americas well into the 18th century England's North American Mainland colonies soon began to exceed those of both France and Britain in terms of trade and population growing from just 265,000 colonists in the year 1700 to over 2.3 million English colonists in 1770 Colonial British American society in the 18th century was incredibly diverse the number of African and even non-english European arrivals began to increase greatly in the British North American colonies while the number of English migrants started to slowly decline nearly 40% of people who immigrated to the English colonies in North America did so as unfree indentured servants and an increasing number of migrants came to the British North American colonies as professionals and skilled Craftsmen which ultimately caused the English government to stop actively promoting migration to North America eventually while English authorities back at home in England worried that the American colonies might end up draining England of all of its skilled workers and professionals they also the government ended up sending thousands of convicts to work in places like the Chesapeake tobacco fields and also promoted Protestant migration from non-english areas of the British Isles and from the rest of Europe as well to the North American British colonies in fact between the years 1718 and 1775 it's estimated that about 50,000 convicts were sent over to the American British colonies about 80% of those 50,000 or so convicts ended up working in the Chesapeake region now these convicts were usually convicted of nonviolent crimes but instead had been jailed for things like owing too much debt and some convicts actually were sent to America instead of being executed for these nonviolent crimes back over in England many thousands of non-english Protestants actually moved to the American colonies from places like Scotland and Northern nor Ireland where in Northern Ireland many Scottish people who came to be known as the Scots Irish had years ago settled as part of England's massive colonization efforts of Ireland the Scots Irish population and Irish Catholics also began to start arriving in the British North American colonies sometime after the year 1718 when Irish landlords or Scots Irish landlords living in irel land started to raise their rents in Ireland to almost intolerable levels now most of the Atlantic Coastline in British North America ended up being thoroughly settled by the year 1760 which meant that all new German Scots Irish and even English immigrants to the North American colonies had no other choice but to settle in the back country areas out on the Far Western frontier of most colonies and most immigrants automatically went to locations where land was relatively cheap and where labor was in demand and these places tended to be spots like the foothills of the Appalachian mountains which stretch all the way from Western Pennsylvania down into Carolina and most of these Frontier settlers ended up living on subsistence Farms meaning they only grew enough food crops that they and their families needed to survive survive and in these Frontier areas Community Life developed very slowly since typically men arrived first in the frontier areas to develop a farm or to build a house and later on would send for their families to join them once they had created a safe space for their families to live in these Frontier areas some men even arrived completely alone without even having families to send for back in England and the Surplus male population there led to a massive delay in the formation of family units in some of these Backcountry Frontier areas but east coast-based Elites tended to think a lot less of what they perceived as the crude poor people that they thought who lived out in the frontier areas but poorer people who lived out on the Frontiers actually wanted to and dreamed to eventually become as wealthy and successful as as those East Coast Planters who look down upon them perhaps the best measure of these Frontier settlers desire to emulate Eastern Planters was the very quick spread of the pla practice of slavery in many Colonial Back Country areas and tensions grew between Backcountry settlers and older more prosperous Coastal communities especially when it came to regarding political representation in colonial legislatures tensions also started to emerge when Backcountry settlers started to encroach upon native lands as well and the Spanish and the French responded to Growing English expansion in North America by in turn expanding the size of their own territories and trying to strengthen their relations with native peoples who lived in the areas where English colonies started to bump into French and Spanish claims so as more and more settlers spread out into the frontier areas they often times ran into native groups and other European settlers who often wanted to Simply exterminate native populations and just take land away from them European immigrants flooded into America in the 17th and 18th centuries including almost 100,000 or more German Protestant immigrants Continental Europeans came to America for a number of reasons but usually they were either escaping War economic hardship or they were facing religious persecution in their Homeland most of these immigrants went to places in America where land was relatively cheap and labor was in demand particularly to the foothills of the Appalachian mountains which stretch all the way from Western Pennsyvania down into the Carolinas and the more than or around 100,000 Germans who came to America they were actually the largest group of European immigrants to America in this whole period many of these Germans were members of either the Catholic church or from small dissenting Protestant groups that were fleeing from religious persecution others migrated to escape worsening economic conditions like economic downturn in their homelands tending overall to settle in the frontier areas of New York Pennsylvania and the southern colonies Germans tended to migrate as whole entire family units instead of individuals and many Germans came over as what were known as redemptioners redemptioners were whole entire families of indentured servants who would work together as a family to pay back the cost of their passage to America in the first place while ethnic groups tended to live and worship in relatively homogeneous cookie cutter communities that were separated from each other the American colonies except for New England ended up being far more diverse than populations back in England itself this was especially evident in the overall religious makeup of people living in British North America in the year 1700 The Colony churches had been almost entirely congregational meaning Pro uh Puritan or separatist but also Anglican or Church of England but despite each colony's commitment to to supporting official churches except for in New Jersey Rhode Island and Pennsylvania de facto religious toleration increasingly came to Define religious life in America especially with the event known as the Great Awakening of the 1740s religious groups such as lutherans minites anabaptists moravians 7th Day Baptists and Presbyterians and even some Jewish people and Muslims became increasing ly free to worship however they pleased even if they still had to pay taxes to support the official Church of that colony and might have been banned from holding public or government office in those colonies too newcomers to America who equated Liberty with the secure ownership of their own land continued to threaten surviving native populations in America by the time we get to the 1700s native communities had changed dramatically already from the time of Europeans first arrival and contact and they were very much part of the overall British Empire native people traded and used European goods and Allied themselves and even fought for the British in a series of successive Imperial Wars against the French and also against the Spanish new settlers oftentimes pressured colonial governments to open up new frontier lands usually at the expense of native tribes tribes that were already living there in Pennsylvania mostly peaceful relations between the Quaker dominated government there and Native people began to disintegrate as new immigrants often fraudulently would claim that they had made purchases from or uh ended up attacking Natives and simply stole their land from them but by the time we get to the middle of the 18th century different regions of the British colonies in North America had already developed some distinct economic and social orders New England and Frontier settlements in other colonies were typically characterized by family units laboring on small family run Farms usually producing for their own subsistence or for local consumption the frontier so-called Backcountry areas rapidly grew in population at this time but over in the older so-called middle colonies or Mid-Atlantic colonies of New York New Jersey and Pennsylvania we are going to start seeing more and more Farmers producing on larger farms for commercial markets using nonam paid wage or sometimes even slave labor in the 1700s Great Britain ended up becoming the world's leading producer and Trader of inexpensively created consumer goods including colonially made Goods like coffee and tea but also manufact ufactured products like linen cloth metal wear glasswar Ceramics and even manufactured clothing and trade is the thing that knit together all of the far-flung elements of the worldwide British Empire and of course the American colonies ended up sharing in this consumer Revolution too eventually even modest farmers and Craftsmen were able to buy things like books ceramic plates metal Cutlery and tea that had previously been considered luxury goods meant only for the wealthiest Britain's Mainland North American colonies were almost entirely Rural and Agricultural and only a very small percentage of the overall population lived in a handful of very small port cities like Boston New York Philadelphia or Charleston down in South Carolina but the growth of Commerce ended up stimulating the rise of all of these sea port cities in fact by the time we get to the year 1770 the city of Philadelphia with its nowadays seemingly modest number of 30,000 inhabitants that was enough to make Philadelphia the largest city by far in British North America but these port cities ended up becoming epicenters of trade and exchange and are going to be inhabited by growing numbers of merchants Artisans skilled Craftsmen and also the poor more Artisans actually lived in colonial cities then lived in rural areas and many of these Artisans worked in trades that were directly related to overseas Commerce The urban-based Artisan population could include all kinds of different Craftsmen including furniture makers Jewelers and silver Smiths who served wealthier clientel and also lesser Artisans such as cloth Weavers blacksmiths Coopers those are people who make barrels and general con construction laborers now something you need to know about the way that Artisan craftsmanship worked at this time was that there was a hierarchical system that sort of delineated where you were in your career and sort of outlined and ruled how much you could charge for your work now the goal of any Craftsman was eventually to become a master artisan and the typical Master Artisan uh owned his own tools and worked in their own small worksh which was often times off in their house so sometimes you would have let's say a local blacksmith who would live in the back of his shop but would do work and open up to uh customers in the front of the house or the family might live upstairs but the bakery would be downstairs usually these Master Artisans and master Craftsmen would be assisted by their own uh close family members and even some young Journeymen and apprentices who came to live and work with these Master artisans to learn the trade apprentices were usually young people kids even in some cases who were sent from their families to go and live with Master Craftsman in order to learn the very basics of The Craft once you had gotten out of your apprenticeship stage you would then go out to be a journeyman a journeyman is kind of an independent Craftsman who doesn't own their own shop just yet but they wander around and do peace meal jobs from place to place until they develop a Master's level of skill but all Artisans survived by the level of their skill and it was those job skills which gave them economic independence and freedom especially when compared to unskilled or un untrained laborers and most Craftsmen in colonial America had a reasonable chance of becoming a master Craftsman at some point in their lifetime but over time the gap between the rich and the poor began to widen in colonial America which often times led to Poverty being painfully apparent in cities and poverty usually led to some usually Bare Bones relief efforts to address the problem of rampant po poverty amongst white colonists especially different American cities started to build institutions known as workhouses where poor and homeless people would be sent to quote unquote learn good work habits but usually these workhouses were simply prisons for poor people and forced them into hard labor but smaller towns and Villages would sometimes collect funds from the community for poor relief in rather large amounts to help out families from their communities when they fell on hard times but even in the worst of times economically never was it more than one out of every 10 white colonists who depended on some form of Public Assistance to survive for free black people who happen to be unemployed you would be absolutely denied any element of public relief and as such your conditions as a black person who was unemployed in colonial America were far far worse than white people's conditions however on average white colonists did have a much higher standard of living than most British residents or even European residents at the exact same time over time the Atlantic Ocean went from being not so much a barrier as it was a highway that connected and linked communities and economies within and between various worldwide far-flung Empires sugar tobacco and other agricultural products of the Americas were sold and marketed over in Europe European Bankers financed the slave trade between Africa and Portuguese Brazil and Spain spent its mountains of gold and silver importing and buying goods from other countries as a part of this worldwide trade system the core of anglo-american trade meaning British and American Trade consisted of staple crops such as sugar tobacco rice and indigo all of which were produced on plantations by slave labor but West Indian or Caribbean sugar actually brought in far far far more money than any other Colonial product sugar from the West Indies actually made up nearly 50% more than the total value of all other exported products from the British North American colonies put together but underneath sugar even though it is a distant second place tobacco that was grown in the Chesapeake colonies and Mid-Atlantic colonies were actually the second most important cash crops to come out of the British American colonies wheat exports from the Middle Colonies boomed in the 1700s now England usually had plenty of its own flour and wheat that they were able to grow back home so British people had very little need for American grown wheat but one place that very much desperately needed access to food sources were West Indian plantations down in the Caribbean where all of the space available was being used to grow sugar cane people living in the West Indies definitely needed American colonial food products just to survive and to keep their slave workforces alive and working in the fields and New England Merchants actually prospered by developing a constant consistent Transit laning trade with both England and ships that went back and forth every day between New England and the West Indies New England Merchants also ended up building and selling thousands and thousands of ships and eventually New England built ships dominated shipping and Commerce within the British Empire more than half of all New England trade however went directly down to the West Indies New England Merchants would take in return for their food products sugar and molasses molasses is a kind of syrupy byproduct from the refinement process for sugar they would take their food stuffs wheat and fish and things like that and in payment people in the West Indies would give those New England Merchants things like sugar and molasses as payment for their food crops and then back in New England that sugar and molasses would then be turned very easily into the alcoholic beverage that we know as rum and cheap rum wouldn't just be used by people who were living in New England to get drunk or to you know consume every now and then but cheap rum would then be used to purchase more slave workers over in Africa and those slaves would be brought to the West Indies usually to work on sugar plantations regenerating the whole entire transatlantic trade between Europe Africa and the Americas but back over in Britain British merchants were able to provide easy access to credit especially to wealthy American plantation owners who charge the costs of purchases and transportation sometimes against future crop profits but over time some of those plantation owners will start to rely a little bit too much on access to bank credit lines and eventually some plantation owners did end up sinking into insurmountable debt but American colonists overall very much benefited from being a part of the overall British Empire most Americans did not complain about British regulation of any trade that went through America because overall worldwide trade and commerce ended up enriching the American colonies and on top of that very lack enforcement by British officials of the Navigation Acts in America allowed for Americans to very easily get around paying import taxes and allowed for smuggling to happen quite easily and on top of that Great Britain's incredibly powerful Royal Navy was floating on the Seas all over the world and those British royal Navy ships protected American ships whenever they were out on the high ocean from attacks by the Spanish or the French or the Dutch and also from Pirates as well despite significant differences though British America in many ways over time started to become closer and closer and more and more similar to its mother country as colonial America matured an elite portion of society eventually emerged that increasingly dominated politics and society and the colonies although these Elites in the colonies were not nearly as powerful or as wealthy as England's aristocracy but in the American colonies the gap between rich and poor probably grew faster in the 1700s than in any other period of time in overall American history in the New England colonies a growing amount of trade international and domestic ended up creating a very powerful wealthy Merchant based upper class that often times happened to be linked by either family connections or business connections to some of the great trading firms that existed over in places like London another thing to consider is that there were no banks that were built in colonial America so business success in America often times very much depended on the lines of credit that business owners were able to obtain usually through personal or family connections with banking institutions over in Great Britain itself so by the time we get into into the 1750s colonies of the Chesapeake and the Lower South Carolina and Georgia which we'll talk about in a moment had become completely dominated by slave plantations that produced cash crops like tobacco rice and other staple crops and the enormously wealthy Plantation families who owned them and ruled over these colonies governments even though colonial America at no point had any kind of legally titled aristocracy or legally established social ranks like the ones that could be found over in Britain men who came from families with growing landed interests and Commercial wealth did eventually come to control much of the colony's overall political economic and social life and in this particular period the mid 1700s the different colonies were actually individually much more strongly and directly connected back to England than they word to each other in North America in a process that some historians have called anglicization these Elites in the American colonies soon started to see themselves as much more British or English than they ever did American wealthy colonists in America did everything they could to imitate what they perceived as emerging British Fashions and taste in terms of behavior consumption of goods and even architecture wealthy American colonists did quite a bit to try to cultivate very Gentile highclass manners and really tried to emulate the English aristocracy and landed gentry as part of life for the colonial Elite elaborate balls musical performances and very fancy dinner parties frequently reinforce the beliefs of wealthy American colonists who thought that they were actually becoming a better class of people than ordinary American colonists and ERS as I mentioned earlier the growth of Commerce stimulated the rise of all sea port cities in colonial America all large colonial cities in the colonial period were port cities first and foremost Boston Massachusetts Philadelphia Pennsylvania New York New York and Charleston Carolina actually rivaled a handful of British provincial towns in terms of population and sometimes ended up developing very similar Cosmopolitan characteristics but by far the wealthiest of the Mainland North American colonists that were part of the British Empire were South Carolina's plantation owners and these families usually spent most of their day-to-day life in the City of Charleston and Charleston was by far the richest city in all of British North America Elites living in Charleston lived as if they were colonial America's aristocratic class they enjoyed elegant theaters literary societies ostentatious and gudy social events and oftentimes lived lavish Lifestyles based off of the purchase of imported luxury goods and had uniformed house slaves to serve them hand and foot in their giant Colonial Mansions compared to other colonies in the Americas wealth in South Carolina particularly was high concentrated into a very small portion of the Upper Crust of society's hands and despite the fact that colonial America still at this time retained a very British way of life some influential settlers began to worry that America would always be culturally inferior playing second banana to Great Britain As Americans over time started to fear more feel more secure economically 18th century Americans began to increasingly purchase items to make their lives that much more comfortable amongst other things these Colonial Elites would start buying chairs to replace benches for seating in their homes carpets to cover wooden floors and they would start to Adorn the walls of their homes with things like mirrors and art specifically portraits other things that were sort of more part of the uh British luxury lifestyle that became very very in fashion in colonial America was the drinking of tea over the course of the 1700s tea drinking went from being something that only the very wealthiest people in colonial America could afford to becoming a common everyday item that people of all Soo strata enjoyed um colonists actually especially at the upper ends of society began to acquire more and more Goods particularly to try to advertise themselves to other people in their Community just how elegant and refined and Rich their particular lifestyle was but prosperous colonists built massive lavish houses some of these houses had rooms that had specialized uses such as private bedrooms and parlor rooms and sitting rooms and often times people who lived in these massive houses tried their hardest to imitate the English Gentry by building massive beautiful Country Estates and Tow houses and then emulating their manners Colonial Elites basically emulated what they saw as England's very balanced and stable hierarchical social order freedom for Colonial Elites was always based in their perceived power as superiors who were meant to rule over people who were deemed to be dependents those who didn't have their own independent wealth or prominence within an overall hierarchical society that was differentiated by men with either greater or lesser talents compared to each other but Society overall was held together by various webs of influence that linked patrons who were powerful and Wealthy to those who were dependent upon them clients to these patrons every single position within the overall social hierarchy carried certain special responsibilities that could be revealed in the way that a person dressed on a daily basis Their Manners their way of speaking and the kinds of possessions that they had in their homes and on their persons every day Colonial Elites in particular prided themselves on their level of refinement their elevated manners their very high level education and their knowledge of cultural events and these Elites tended to favor leisure activities over any kind of harsh demanding physical manual labor so in the minds of many Colonial Elites freedom from labor freedom from having to do a job to make money that's ultimately What defined a quote unquote Colonial gentleman and again over time the gap between rich and poor all throughout the colonies began to widen we've already talked about uh poverty relief efforts in cities and in local areas cities increasingly started to see a rise in their impoverished populations and to respond to that they started to build workhouses which were essentially prisons where poor people had to work to earn their room and board but poverty increasingly became a part of colonial life more and more across the 18th century in colonial America fewer free colonial American residents were poor when compared to the poor population back over in Great Britain over in Great Britain about 1 qu to 1 half of all people living in the country had to rely upon some kind of Public Assistance just to survive over in America the numbers of impoverished people who relied upon Public Assistance were much much smaller but even though free people living in the American colonies might have been much much better off than poor people over in Great Britain we do have to keep in mind that in the American colonies slaves absolutely did live in impoverished conditions and the number of poor people who owned no property steadily grew across the 1700s with diminishing land even being available to purchase and the growth of the practice of wage labor or doing a job for someone else in order to get paid a daily wage better off colonists though generally tended to view the poor in their areas as lazy and ultimately responsible for their own condition and poverty and while some very rural communities and even some cities actually did give out assistance to people from within their own communities these same communities would very much prevent unemployed people and poor propertyless newcomers from being able to receive any kind of Community Aid when they started to move into those areas but even in the very worst of Economic Times in the British North American colonies never was it the case that more than one out of every 10 white colonists in America depended on some kind of Public Assistance but unfortunately the case was not similar for all people for example for free black people who were unemployed you would be denied Public Relief and thus your conditions would end up being far far worse than poor white people who were given access to public aid so we've talked about the extremes of wealth the very very rich and the very very poor but in the colonial period most free Americans were actually members of what we would call the quote unquote middle ranks of society they lived somewhere between the extremes of wealth and poverty and the vast majority of these sort of middle class colonists were small farm-based families the incredibly wide distribution and availability of land in America along with the economic autonomy that owning land brought with it distinguished colonial America from Europe in many ways for example perhaps 2third of the free male population in colonial America owned their own land but over in England over on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean three fifths of England's overall population owned absolutely no property that they could call their own at any time in their life that's because there was a much smaller amount of land that was even available to claim or to purchase or to call your own over in England especially when compared with the massive land mass that exists over here in North America by the time we get to the 1700s Colonial farming families viewed land ownership as a kind of Birthright land ownership was viewed as the number one social precondition for considering yourself to be free and these middle class families strongly and deeply resented the efforts of Native American wealthy landlords or colonial governments who tried to limit their access to land ownership and these people's dislike of personal dependence on anyone else in order to live their lives and their understanding of Freedom as not having to rely on anyone else for a livelihood began to sink some very deep-seated roots in British North America and to a great extent actually reflected social reality for many white American colonists of the time but overall for people in these middle ranks the family was the center of economic life in the 18th century American household-based economy most work in middleclass farming families revolved entirely around the home and men women and children were all expected to contribute in whatever ways they could to the fam's overall well-being the small farming family's Independence depended to a great degree on the availability of work from his dependent wife and children that could be done on the Family Farm And while most farmers at first tried to focus on growing food just for themselves and their families to survive as Commerce and trade began to expand more and more in colonial America across the 18th century more and more Farmers started to grow a little bit more and began to produce a little bit more of their overall crop for sale on at the local Marketplace but women in these families were constantly at work not only were they expected to do their usual domestic duties that were assigned to women in most European uh societies such as giving birth to and raising children and then working in the home by cleaning cooking sewing and other activities women were also expected to work alongside other family members in their family's fields too and women's work actually increased across the 18th century despite the fact that the introduction of new consumer goods were starting to be offered to these women that were supposed to replace items that women were expected to make at home so instead of having to sew all of the shirts and all of the pants and all of the socks and underwear for every single member of your family with the growth of the consumer Revolution as we get further into the 1700s some middle ranking families will be able to go into local shops and buy pre-made clothing and That was supposed to free up more time for women in these families but again of course there were always new duties and new chores that ended up taking up immediately any spare time that those new manufactured products might have offered them and so overall by the time we get to the middle of the 18th century the area that would eventually become the modern-day United States of America was remarkably diverse in terms of people's cultures social organizations ranging from the Pueblo native Villages of the Spanish colonies in the American southwest to the tobacco plantations of the chesed colonies the small farming families of New England the feudal like massive landed Estates of New York's Hudson River Valley and there were also Frontier French trading fur trading outposts as well to consider while Elites in these areas tied directly to Imperial centers of power dominated most of the political and economic life of these colonies there were a growing number of American colonists who enjoyed much greater opportunities for Freedom at the time such as access to the right to vote access to land ownership the right to worship religiously however you choose and an escape from direct government persecution than they were ever offered over on the European continent free North American colonists probably enjoyed the highest per capita in inome in the world at the time and the colony's economic growth made for eventually a relatively High birth rate long life expectancy and over time expanding demand for Consumer trade goods yet we also have to consider that many American colonists experienced the partial freedom of either indentured servitude or the complete absence of Freedom as enslaved workers which made freedom and hopes for Freedom essential to the development of North America's colonies and so 18th century colonial America presented a wide ranging Mosaic of peoples and communities we have Europeans Africans and Native Americans who have all recently come into contact with each other who are now having to adapt to each other and to changing American Colonial conditions European nations are also subsequently going to try to increase their control over their American colonies as we move into the later portions of the 18th century and that is what we will discuss in our next couple of chapters