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Contextualizing MODULE

Period 2 2.1
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ngland and France began to challenge Spanish dominance of the Western Hemi-
sphere in the early seventeenth century. As these three kingdoms struggled with
Strictly for use with its products. NOT FOR REDISTRIBUTION.
Eone another militarily, economically, and socially, each also consolidated power on
the North American continent.
These nations engaged in shifting patterns of cooperation and competition with
native populations in ways that reflected their cultural, social, religious, and economic
interests. The French steadily established trade networks with native peoples in Canada.
The Spanish in the Southwest sought to convert American Indians to Catholicism while
at the same time exploiting their labor. The English colony at Jamestown tried to rep-
licate the success of the Spanish, hoping to find easy profits in gold and silver mines,
but the climate and geography of Virginia differed greatly from the Central American
regions that the Spanish had begun to exploit nearly a hundred years before.
Thus, the early Jamestown settlers built a colony that differed from the ordered and
authoritarian encomienda system of the Spanish, where native peoples worked under
close Spanish supervision. Instead, a labor system in which English-born indentured
servants traded several years of hard work in return for passage to the English colony
provided much of the labor in the colony during the early seventeenth century. How-
ever, this arrangement gave way to a racial caste system in which enslaved Africans
made up the bulk of the labor force on large cash-crop plantations in the southern colo-
nies by the turn of the eighteenth century.
In the western backcountry regions of Virginia, the majority of the population
was made up of independent farmers, many of whom were former indentured servants
themselves. These backcountry settlers negotiated — and often violated — a shifting
borderland of conflict and trade with American Indians.
As the seventeenth century progressed, growing European settlements in the New
World led to the development of a transatlantic world in which Europeans, American
Indians, and Africans traded, competed, and interacted with each other along net-
works that stretched from the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains to the cities of
London, Paris, and Madrid to the villages of West Africa and back to the islands of the
Caribbean.
Great Britain’s colonies in North America formed an integral part of this transat-
lantic world. Beginning in the early 1650s, Britain pursued economic policies designed
to monopolize trade with its colonies and protect British economic interests. This strat-
®
egy proved successful. Starting in the late seventeenth century, the British fought a AP EXAM TIP
series of colonial wars with other European powers, most often the French, to establish Know how to compare and
English cultural, ideological, and economic dominance in the North Atlantic and the contrast European colonization
North American interior. While these wars were costly on many levels, repeated victo- efforts. Narrow your focus
ries cemented Great Britain’s dominance of the North American Atlantic seaboard from by concentrating on how
cultural and economic factors
the late 1600s and well into the 1700s. affected the development of
By the 1700s, colonists used European models to shape a distinctly British North the French and Dutch colonies
American culture. For example, the Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement in the New World. Strong
that embraced science and reason as the hallmarks of human progress, gained popu- comparisons move from broad
larity among elites. Likewise, the First Great Awakening, a wave of renewed religious categories such as cultural and
enthusiasm, swept North America during the 1740s with a spiritual intensity that economic to more specific
historical evidence such as
touched colonists throughout the continent and challenged England’s tradition of strict intermarriage and the fur
class differentiation. trade.
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