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Chapter 4 • Political Transformations, 1450–1750 221

with them, many of the British settlers — Puritans in Massachusetts and Quakers in
Pennsylvania, for example — sought to escape aspects of an old European society
rather than to re-create it, as was the case for most Spanish and Portuguese colo-
nists. The easy availability of land and the outsider status of many British settlers
made it even more difficult to follow the Spanish or Portuguese colonial pattern of
sharp class hierarchies, large rural estates, and dependent laborers.
Thus men in Puritan New England became independent heads of family farms,
a world away from Old England, where most land was owned by nobles and gen-
try and worked by servants, tenants, and paid laborers. But if men escaped the class
restrictions of the old country, women were less able to avoid its gender limitations.
While Puritan Christianity extolled the family and a woman’s role as wife and
mother, it reinforced largely unlimited male authority. “Since he is thy Husband,”
declared Boston minister Benjamin Wadsworth in 1712 to the colony’s women,
“God has made him the Head and set him above thee.” 17
Furthermore, British settlers were far more numerous than their Spanish coun- AP ® EXAM TIP
terparts, outnumbering them five to one by 1750. By the time of the American Notice organizational
Revolution, some 90 percent or more of the population in the New England features of this
and middle Atlantic colonies were Europeans. Devastating diseases and a highly paragraph that can help
you improve your essays,
aggressive military policy had largely cleared the colonies of Native Americans, and such as the many
their numbers, which were far smaller to start with, did not rebound in subsequent specific examples, the
centuries as they did in the lands of the Aztecs and the Incas. Moreover, slave labor direct comparisons, and
was not needed in an agricultural economy dominated by numerous small-scale the ranking of evidence.

AP ®
COMPARISON
How were the
organization and class
structures of settler
communities different
from those of sugar
colonies? What evidence
of those differences do
you find in this image?

Settler Farms In this eighteenth-century engraving, men work clearing the land for agriculture
while a woman in the foreground collects water from a well. Unlike other regions of the Americas,
the New England and middle Atlantic colonies were dominated by European immigrants who
created small family farms. (Sarin Images/Granger, NYC — All rights reserved)
Uncorrected proofs have been used in this sample.
Copyright © Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.

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