W. W. Norton & Company | Inventing America, 2 ed.

Chapter 3: Empires

Topics for Research

Introduction

In the late seventeenth century, Britain, France, and Spain competed to expand their empires and turned attention to their American colonies. At the same time, a second and third generation of colonists in New England and Virginia sought to settle in areas outside the boundaries of established towns. These combined pressures led to a series of Indian wars on the Eastern seaboard. Disputes with British authorities eager to impose taxes and regulations on colonists also led to colonial rebellions -- such as Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia, the overthrow of Governor Andros in Massachusetts, and Leisler's Rebellion in New York. In New England, the sense of insecurity due to the Indian wars and colonial rebellions may have contributed to the hysteria that produced the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692, although economic and gender issues might have played a role as well. Insecurity also plagued the Iroquois Five Nations, weakened by epidemics and in competition with the French and their Native American allies for the beaver trade. When Britain and France went to war in Europe in 1689, the Iroquois aligned with the British and lost a quarter of their population in the process. Pope's Rebellion in Spanish-controlled New Mexico in 1680 paralleled events in the East. Resenting the enforced labor and tributes imposed by Spanish missionaries and reacting to a drought and attacks from neighboring Navajo and Apaches, New Mexico's Pueblo Indians led a successful revolt. However, the Spanish suppressed the Pueblos fourteen years later, and the tribe suffered a significant loss of population. Remarkably, in this atmosphere of uncertainty, colonists, in concert with Native Americans and African slave labor, built new cities and contributed to a trade system that integrated the new world with the old. Even as that integration developed, Americans increasingly were becoming distinct from their European counterparts.