Colonising North America
Looking West After 1453
When the Hundred Years’ War ended in 1453, Englishmen who had thought of empire as a stretch of land across the Channel had to look elsewhere. Over the next 200 years, looking west — first to the Caribbean (Lesson 6) and then across the Atlantic to mainland North America — came to define a new English ambition. Walter Raleigh launched the first attempt at Roanoke (1585); Jamestown (1607) was the first permanent settlement; the Mayflower’s Pilgrim Fathers (1620) added a religious dimension; and over the next century and a half thirteen British colonies stretched along the Atlantic coast. The story ends with the loss of those colonies in 1783 — a defeat that paradoxically pushed Britain towards the very different empire of nineteenth-century India and Africa.
Sir Walter Raleigh promoted the failed Roanoke colony in 1585. Jamestown, founded by the Virginia Company in 1607, was the first permanent English settlement in North America. The Mayflower’s Pilgrim Fathers reached Plymouth in 1620.
Raleigh and Roanoke: A False Start
Sir Walter Raleigh never set foot on the colony he sponsored. In 1585 he fitted out an expedition under his cousin Sir Richard Grenville to settle Roanoke Island (in modern North Carolina). The first settlers quarrelled with the local Algonquian peoples and sailed home with Francis Drake in 1586. A second group under John White landed in 1587, but the 1588 Armada war swallowed the shipping that should have supplied them. The 1590 relief mission found the settlement empty, with the word CROATOAN carved into a post — the so-called ‘lost colony’ mystery. Raleigh’s pattern of enthusiasm without follow-through would be repeated in dozens of early English Atlantic ventures.
Jamestown 1607: The First Permanent Colony
In 1607 the Virginia Company sent 105 men to a marshy peninsula on the James River. Two-thirds were dead within a year, mostly from dysentery, malaria and starvation. The colony only survived because of the leadership of John Smith, the corn supplied (and sometimes withheld) by the Powhatan Confederacy under Wahunsenacawh, and the introduction of tobacco by John Rolfe around 1614. Tobacco changed everything. By the 1620s Virginia had a profitable export crop, and the colony shifted from a quasi-military outpost into a plantation society. The 1619 arrival of around 20 Africans from a Portuguese slave ship at Point Comfort marks the first recorded enslaved African presence in English North America — the long shadow of the trade that would define the southern colonies.
Most early settlers were not enslaved Africans — they were indentured servants from England, Scotland and Ireland. Around 200,000 indentured servants crossed the Atlantic in the 17th century. They signed contracts (indentures) committing them to four to seven years of unpaid labour in exchange for their passage. About four in ten died before completing their term. Survivors received a small grant of land and a few tools at the end — the so-called ‘freedom dues’. As tobacco profits rose and African slavery scaled up, planters increasingly preferred enslaved labour, which came with no contract and no end-date. By 1700, indentured servitude was in decline; chattel slavery had taken its place.
The Pilgrim Fathers: Religion as a Push Factor
The 1620 voyage of the Mayflower brought a different kind of migrant. Around 35 of the 102 passengers were Separatists — Puritan dissenters who had already fled to Leiden in the Netherlands and now hoped to build a godly community in the New World. The Pilgrim Fathers signed the Mayflower Compact, agreeing to govern themselves by majority vote — an early model of self-government in the colonies. The early winter at Plymouth killed half the settlers, but the colony survived on supplies provided by the Wampanoag people under Massasoit. Larger Puritan migration followed: the ‘Great Migration’ of 1630-1640 brought around 20,000 Puritans to Massachusetts, starting with John Winthrop’s fleet of about 700 settlers in 1630. Winthrop promised a ‘city upon a hill’. Religion was the dominant push factor for New England in a way it never was for Virginia.
Contact with Indigenous Peoples
English settlement was only possible because of Indigenous knowledge — the Powhatan in Virginia, the Wampanoag and Massachusett in New England. Settlers learned to plant maize, dig clams and tap maple sap from people whose ancestors had farmed the same land for thousands of years. Relations broke down quickly. Smallpox, measles and influenza, brought by Europeans, killed an estimated 90% of the Indigenous population of the Atlantic seaboard between 1500 and 1700 — one of the worst demographic catastrophes in human history. The 1622 Powhatan rising killed around 350 settlers; the English response wiped out Powhatan villages and seized their land. King Philip’s War (1675-76), led by the Wampanoag chief Metacom against the New England colonies, killed around 800 settlers and at least 3,000 Indigenous people, ending most Indigenous resistance east of the Connecticut River.
The Loss of America, 1763-1783
By 1763 the British had won the Seven Years’ War against France and gained Canada. London tried to cover the war debt by taxing the thirteen American colonies (Stamp Act 1765, Townshend duties 1767, Tea Act 1773). Colonists who had grown used to almost a century of light-touch ‘salutary neglect’ called the new taxes tyranny. The 1773 Boston Tea Party, in which colonists tipped East India Company tea into Boston Harbour, hardened British policy. Fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord in April 1775. The 4 July 1776 Declaration of Independence committed the colonies to break with Britain. After French intervention from 1778 the British surrendered at Yorktown in 1781; the 1783 Treaty of Paris recognised the United States. Britain had lost thirteen colonies, around two million colonists and the most populous part of its empire.
The defeat in 1783 looks like the end of empire, but it was not. With the United States lost, British attention shifted to Asia (the East India Company, Lesson 9), Australia (a convict colony from 1788, once the American colonies would no longer take transported prisoners), and eventually Africa (Lesson 10). The ‘second British Empire’ of 1783-1914 was very different from the first — less about white settlement, more about commerce and military rule over non-white populations. The 1783 defeat also produced the Black Loyalists: around 3,000 formerly enslaved people who had fought for the British in exchange for freedom, and were resettled in Nova Scotia and (later) Sierra Leone — an early example of empire reshaping the British Black population.
The Boston Tea Party (1773), Declaration of Independence (1776) and Treaty of Paris (1783) marked the loss of the thirteen American colonies. Britain’s response was to push the ‘second empire’ into India, Australia and (later) Africa.