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Labor in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies became scarce. European diseases and forced labor began killing the indigenous people in insurmountable numbers. Therefore, slaves were seen only as a business venture due to the labor shortages. These slaves were forced to work in jobs such as agriculture and mining.
In the British and French colonies, most colonists arrived after 1700. They cleared land, built houses and outbuildings, and worked on the large plantations that dominated export agriculture. Many were involved in the labor-intensive cultivation of tobacco, the first cash crop of Virginia.
The original colonies along the Connecticut River and in New Haven were established by separatist Puritans who were connected with the Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies. They held Calvinist religious beliefs similar to the English Puritans, but they maintained that their congregations needed to be separated from the English state church.
Against a prevailing view that 18th-century Americans had not perpetuated the first settlers' passionate commitment to their faith, scholars now identify a high level of religious energy in colonies after 1700. According to one expert, Judeo-Christian faith was in the "ascension rather than the declension"; another sees a "rising vitality in ...
The colonists at Jamestown faced extreme adversity, and by 1617 there were only 351 survivors out of the 1700 colonists who had been transported to Jamestown. [17] After the Virginians discovered the profitability of growing tobacco, the settlement's population boomed from 400 settlers in 1617 to 1240 settlers in 1622.
The colonies were independent of one other before 1774; indeed, all the colonies began as separate and unique settlements or plantations. Further, efforts had failed to form a colonial union through the Albany Congress of 1754 led by Benjamin Franklin .
There were at least a dozen European countries involved in the colonization of the Americas. The following list indicates those countries and the Western Hemisphere territories they worked to control. [98] Mayflower, the ship that carried a colony of English Puritans to North America.
The Spanish were the first of the future European countries to colonize North and South America. They came into the region predominantly through Cuba and Puerto Rico and into Florida. [21] The Spaniards were committed, by Vatican decree, to convert their New World indigenous subjects to Catholicism. However, often initial efforts (both docile ...