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The British colonization of the Americas is the history of establishment of control, settlement, and colonization of the continents of the Americas by England, Scotland, and, after 1707, Great Britain. Colonization efforts began in the late 16th century with failed attempts by England to establish permanent colonies in the North.
British America collectively refers to various European colonies in the Americas prior to the conclusion of the American Revolutionary War in 1783. The British monarchy of the Kingdom of England and Kingdom of Scotland—later named the Kingdom of Great Britain, of the British Isles and Western Europe—governed many colonies in the Americas beginning in 1585.
The British economy had begun to grow rapidly at the end of the 17th century and, by the mid-18th century, small factories in Britain were producing much more than the nation could consume. Britain found a market for their goods in the British colonies of North America, increasing her exports to that region by 360% between 1740 and 1770.
The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (1988) excerpt and text search; Cooke, Jacob E. Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies (3 vol 1993) Foster, Stephen, ed. British North America in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford History of the British Empire Companion) (2014) excerpt and text search; 11 essays by scholars
After European colonization of North America began in the late 15th century, wars and epidemics decimated Indigenous societies. By the 1760s, the thirteen British colonies were established. The Southern Colonies built an agricultural system on slave labor, enslaving millions from Africa.
The British American colonies became part of the global British trading network, as the value tripled for exports from America to Britain between 1700 and 1754. The colonists were restricted in trading with other European powers, but they found profitable trade partners in the other British colonies, particularly in the Caribbean.
Ferdinando Gorges had long been a promoter of English colonization of the Americas, and sought to use the success of the Plymouth Colony for his own ambitions on New England. Gorges sent a group of adventurers and indentured servants, led by Richard Wollaston and Humphrey Rastall on the ship Unity, which set sail from London on March 23, 1624. [2]
The human history of the Americas is thought to begin with people migrating to these areas from Asia during the height of an ice age. These groups are generally believed to have been isolated from the people of the " Old World " until the coming of Europeans in the 1492 with the voyages of Christopher Columbus .