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222 PERIOD 2 • The Early Modern World, 1450–1750

independent farmers working their own land, although elite families, especially
in urban areas, sometimes employed enslaved people as household servants. These
were almost entirely European settler colonies, for they lacked the substantial
presence of Indigenous, African, and multiracial people who were so prominent
elsewhere.
®
AP Other differences likewise emerged. A largely Protestant England was far
COMPARISON less interested in spreading Christianity among the remaining native peoples
How was the role of than were the large and well-funded missionary societies of Catholic Spain.
religion different in the Although religion loomed large in the North American colonies, the church and
colonization of Latin colonial state were not so intimately connected as they were in Latin America.
America than in the
colonization of North The Protestant emphasis on reading the Bible for oneself led to a much greater
America? mass literacy than in Latin America, where three centuries of church education
still left some 95 percent of the population illiterate at independence. By contrast,
well over 75 percent of white males in British North America were literate by the
1770s, although women’s literacy rates were somewhat lower. Furthermore, British
settler colonies evolved traditions of local self-government more extensively than
in Latin America. Preferring to rely on joint stock companies or wealthy individ-
uals operating under a royal charter, Britain had nothing resembling the elaborate
imperial bureaucracy that governed Spanish colonies. For much of the seventeenth
century, a prolonged power struggle between the English king and Parliament
meant that the British government paid little attention to the internal affairs of the
colonies. Therefore, elected colonial assemblies, seeing themselves as little parlia-
ments defending “the rights of Englishmen,” vigorously contested the prerogatives
of royal governors sent to administer their affairs.
The grand irony of the modern history of the Americas lay in the reversal of
long-established relationships between the northern and southern continents. For
thousands of years, the major centers of wealth, power, commerce, and innova-
tion lay in Mesoamerica and the Andes. That pattern continued for much of the
colonial era, as the Spanish and Portuguese colonies seemed far more prosperous
and successful than their British or French counterparts in North America. In the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, the balance shifted. What had once
been the “dregs” of the colonial world became the United States, more politically
stable, more democratic, more economically successful, and more internationally
powerful than a divided, unstable, and much less prosperous Latin America.

Empire Building in Russia and China

Finding the Main Point: What were the unique strategies and the larger impact of
the expanding Russian and Chinese empires during this period?
Even as Western Europeans were building their empires in the Americas, other impe-
rial projects were likewise under way in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Unlike
Europe’s overseas empires, all of them were contiguous land-based territories. The
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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