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The Middle Colonies had much fertile soil, which allowed the area to become a major exporter of wheat and other grains. The lumber and shipbuilding industries were also successful in the Middle Colonies because of the abundant forests, and Pennsylvania was moderately successful in the textile and iron industries.
Thus, by mid-century, most colonial farming was a commercial venture, although subsistence agriculture continued to exist in New England and the middle colonies. Some immigrants who just arrived purchased farms and shared in this export wealth, but many poor German and Irish immigrants were forced to work as agricultural wage laborers.
Most large population centers in colonial America were located in New England or the Middle Colonies. In the Chesapeake Bay area cities included only Baltimore, Maryland, and Richmond, Virginia. Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia. served as major seaports for the Southern colonies in their trade with Europe, Africa, and the ...
The most populous emigration of the 17th century was that of the English, who after a series of wars with the Dutch and French came to dominate the Thirteen Colonies on the eastern coast of the present-day United States and other colonies such as Newfoundland and Rupert's Land in what is now Canada.
In the Southern Colonies, which relied most heavily on slave labor, the slaves supported vast plantation economies lorded over by increasingly wealthy elites. [77] By 1775, slaves made up one-fifth of the population of the Thirteen Colonies but less than ten percent of the population of the Middle Colonies and New England Colonies. [78]
Although colonies existed in classical antiquity, especially amongst the Phoenicians and the ancient Greeks who settled many islands and coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, these colonies were politically independent from the city-states they originated from, and thus did not constitute a colonial empire. [3]
The American colonies were a major component of the transatlantic triangular trade, being the location of the second leg of the voyage where the Africans were sold to owners of slave plantations. Occasionally, slave ships from the American colonies would travel to Africa carrying manufactured goods made in the Americas, skipping the necessity ...
In the middle of the 18th century, New France accounted for 60,000 people while the British colonies had more than one million people. This placed the colony at a great military disadvantage against the British. The war between the colonies resumed in 1744, lasting until 1748. A final and decisive war began in 1754.