European colonization of the Americas

The first known Europeans to contact the Americas were the Vikings ("Norse"), who established several colonies in the Americas. Leif Erikson established a short-lived settlement in Vinland, present day Newfoundland. Settlements in Greenland survived for several centuries, during which the Greenland Norse and the Inuit people experienced a mostly hostile contact. By the 15th century the Norse Greenland settlements had collapsed.

In 1492 Christopher Columbus reached the Americas, after which European exploration and colonization rapidly expanded. The post-1492 era is known as the Columbian Exchange period.

The European lifestyle included a long history of sharing close quarters with domesticated animals such as cows, pigs, sheep, goats, horses, and various domesticated fowl, which had resulted in epidemic diseases unknown in the Americas. Thus the large-scale contact after 1492 introduced novel germs to the indigenous people of the Americas. Smallpox (1525, 1558, 1589), typhus (1546), influenza (1558), diphtheria (1614) and measles (1618) epidemics swept ahead of initial European contact killing between 10 million and 112 million people, about 95% to 98% of the indigenous population. The population loss and the cultural chaos and political collapses it caused greatly facilitated both colonization of the land and conquest of the native civilizations.^[1]

The first conquests were made by the Spanish, who quickly conquered most of South and Central America and large parts of North America. The Portuguese took Brazil. The British, French and Dutch conquered islands in the Caribbean Sea, many of which had already been conquered by the Spanish or depopulated by disease. Early European colonies in North America include Spanish Florida, the British settlements in Virginia and New England, French settlements in Quebec and Louisiana, and Dutch settlements in New Netherlands.

Denmark-Norway revived its former colonies in Greenland from the 18th until the 20th century, and also colonised a few of the Virgin Islands.

While the early colonies were mostly the efforts of national governments and corporations, later immigration was often individuals fleeing poverty and religious persecution.

Early state-sponsored colonists

The first phase of European activity in the Americas began with the Atlantic Ocean crossings of Christopher Columbus (1492-1500), sponsored by Spain, whose original attempt was to find a new route to India and China, known as "the Indies". He was followed by other explorers such as John Cabot, who discovered Newfoundland and was sponsored by England. Pedro Alvares Cabral discovered Brazil for Portugal. Amerigo Vespucci, who in voyages from 1497 to 1513 sailing for Spain and Portugal, established that Columbus had discovered a new set of continents. Map makers still use his name, America, for two continents. Other explorers included Giovanni da Verrazzano, sponsored by France, the Portuguese João Vaz Corte-Real in Newfoundland and Samuel de Champlain (1567-1635) who explored Canada.

These explorations were followed, notably in the case of Spain, by a phase of conquest: The Spaniards, having just finished a war driving the Muslims out of the Iberian peninsula, were the first to try colonization. Helped immensely by outbreaks of Old World diseases, which killed millions of natives, and their own resistance to them, they replaced the native American oligarchies and imposed a new religion, Christianity, on the people. To reward their troops they often allotted Indian towns etc. to their troops and officers. Black African slaves were introduced to substitute for native American labor in some locations. The Spaniards, needing the natives' labor and cooperation, allowed the Roman Catholic Church to evangelize in the Quechua, Nahuatl and Guarani languages, contributing to the expansion of these indigenous American languages and equipping them with writing systems. One of the first primitive schools for Americans was founded by Fray Pedro de Gante in 1523.

The Portuguese switched from an initial plan of establishing trading posts to extensive colonization of what is now Brazil. They imported millions of slaves to run their plantations.

The French, Spanish and Portuguese royal governments all expected to rule these settlements and to collect at least 20% of all treasure found plus collect all the taxes they could.

See also

• Conquistador
• Francisco Vasquez de Coronado
• Hernán Cortés
• Francisco Pizarro
• Martin de Arguelles
• Spanish Conquest of Yucatan
• Treaty of Tordesillas
• Treaty of Alcaçovas

Religious immigration

Other groups of colonists came to America searching for the right to practice their religion without persecution. After the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, King Henry VIII's renunciation of the Catholic Church, and the publication of the Bible in English, many began to question the organization of the existing Church of England. One of the primary manifestations of this was the "Puritan" movement, which wanted to "purify" the existing Church of England of its many residual Catholic rites that they believed had no mention in the Bible.

As the English monarch, Charles I tried to impose his belief in the right of "Divine Right of Kings" to do as he pleased. Ministers and many people in England had a strong feeling of persecution. Crackdowns by the English Church led to the migration of about 20,000 Puritans to New England from about 1629 to 1642. One other manifestation was the English Civil War (1642-1650) that led to Charles I's capture and beheading under Puritan Oliver Cromwell. Pennsylvania was given to William Penn in settlement of a debt the king owed his father. Its government was set up by William Penn in about 1682 to become primarily a refuge for persecuted English Quakers; but others were welcomed. Baptists, Quakers and German and Swiss Protestants flocked to Pennsylvania.

The lure of cheap land, religious freedom and the right to improve themselves with their own hand was very attractive to those who wished to escape from persecution and poverty. In America, all these groups gradually worked out a way to live together peacefully and cooperatively in the roughly 150 years preceding the American Revolution.

Major religious groups immigrating to the New World included:

• Pilgrims, 1620
• Puritans,1630
• Quakers, 1682
• Lutherans, 1682
• Catholics, from the 1840s or since 1492

Economic immigrants

Many immigrants to the American colonies came for reasons that were economic. Inspired by the Spanish riches from colonies founded upon the conquest of the Aztecs, Incas, and other large Native American populations in the sixteenth century, the first Englishmen to settle in America hoped for some of the same rich discoveries when they first established a settlement in Jamestown, Virginia. They were sponsored by common stock companies such as the Virginia Charter Company financed by wealthy Englishmen who understood the economic potential of this new land. The main purpose of this colony was the hope of finding gold or the possibility (or impossibility) of finding a passage through the Americas to the Indies. It took strong leaders, like John Smith, to convince the colonists of Jamestown that searching for gold was not taking care of their immediate needs for food and shelter and that "he who shall not work shall not eat." (A direction based on text from the King James Version of the New Testament.) The extremely high mortality rate was quite distressing and cause for despair among the colonists. Tobacco quickly became a cash crop for export and the sustaining economic driver of Virginia and nearby colonies like Maryland.

From the beginning of Virginia's settlements until the 1680s, the main source of labour and a large portion of the immigrants were indentured servants looking for new life in the overseas colonies. During the 17th century, indentured servants constituted three-quarters of all European immigrants to the Chesapeake region. Most of the indentured servants were English farmers who had been pushed off their lands due to the expansion of livestock raising, the enclosure of land, and overcrowding in the countryside. This unfortunate turn of events served as a push for thousands of people (mostly single men) away from their situation in England. There was hope, however, as American landowners were in need of labourers and were willing to pay for a labourer’s passage to America if they served them for several years. By selling passage for five to seven years worth of work they could hope to start out on their own in America.

In the French colonial regions, the focus of economy was the fur trade with the natives. Farming was set up primarily to provide subsistence only, although cod and other fish of the Grand Banks were a major export and source of income for the French and many other European nations. The fur trade was also practiced by the Russians on the northwest coast of North America. After the French and Indian War, the English captured virtually all French possessions in North America, leaving only a few fishing isles to France.

Forced immigration

Slavery existed in America, prior to the presence of Europeans, as the Natives often captured and held other tribe's members as captives. Some of these captives were even forced to undergo human sacrifice under some tribes, such as the Aztecs. The Spanish followed with the enslavement of local aborigines in the Caribbean. As the native populations declined from mostly disease, and significantly from forced exploitation and careless murder, they were often replaced by Africans imported through a large commercial slave trade. By the 18th century, the overwhelming number of black slaves was such that Native American slavery was less common. Africans, who were taken aboard slave ships to the Americas, were primarily obtained from their African homelands by coastal tribes who captured and sold them. The high incidence of nearly always fatal disease, to Europeans, kept nearly all slave capture activities confined to native African tribes. Rum, guns and gun powder were some of the major trade items traded for slaves. Approximately three to four hundred thousand in all, black slaves kept streaming into the ports of Charleston, South Carolina and Newport, Rhode Island until about 1810. The total slave trade to islands in the Caribbean, Brazil, Mexico and to the United States is estimated to have been between twenty and a hundred million slaves. In addition to African slaves, poor European slaves were brought over as well with a promise of freedom that never was fullfilled.

See also

• Atlantic world
• Colonialism
• Columbian Exchange
• Immigration to the United States
• Indigenous peoples of the Americas
• Population history of American indigenous peoples
• History of the west coast of North America
• List of North American cities founded in chronological order

References

1. ^ 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (ISBN 1-4000-4006-X), Charles C. Mann, Knopf, 2005.

Further reading

• Peter De Roo, History of America before Columbus : according to documents and approved authors, Philadelphia : J.B. Lippincott, 1900, vol. 1: American Aboriginies vol. 2: European Immigrants – Google Books

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