When 104 English men and boys landed at Jamestown in May 1607, Spain had been running an American empire for more than a century, and its silver mines at Potosí had been shipping bullion to Seville for sixty years. England, France and the Dutch Republic were latecomers. Explaining Period 2 (1607 to 1754) starts with two questions: why did these powers move into North America when they did, and why did their colonies turn out so differently from Spain's and from one another?
What contextualization means on the exam
Contextualization is placing a development inside the larger setting that helps explain it: what happened before it, and what was happening at the same time somewhere else. Both essays on the exam, the document-based question (DBQ) and the long essay, give one point for it. To earn the point you describe a broader development relevant to the prompt and connect it to the prompt's topic, in at least a few sentences with specific evidence. A single phrase such as "During the age of exploration" does not earn it.
You can build context in two directions:
- Back in time. What earlier development changed or continued into this one? For Period 2, that usually means the Period 1 legacies covered below.
- Across space. What was happening at the same time in another place? For English colonization, that means Europe's religious wars, England's crowded countryside, and the rival French, Dutch and Spanish projects in America.
Context is a cause or a setting, never the thing the prompt asks about. If the prompt is about why the Chesapeake grew tobacco, tobacco itself is not context; England's search for a profitable colony after Spain's success is.
What Period 1 handed to the colonizers
Three developments from before 1607 shaped everything that followed.
Spain showed what an American colony could pay. Silver strikes at Potosí (1545) and Zacatecas (1546) made the Spanish crown the richest in Europe and financed its armies. Rivals concluded that colonies meant power. English privateers such as Francis Drake raided Spanish treasure ships and ports in the 1570s and 1580s, and the first English colonial charters still hoped for the same prize. The 1606 charter of the Virginia Company let the colonists mine gold, silver and copper as long as the king received a fifth of the precious metals. There was no gold in Virginia, and that disappointment forced the English to find other ways to profit (Topic 2.3).
The Columbian Exchange had already remade the continent. Old World diseases reached North American peoples ahead of most colonists. Between about 1616 and 1619 an epidemic killed a large share of the coastal peoples of New England; the Pilgrims built Plymouth in 1620 on the cleared fields of Patuxet, a Wampanoag village emptied by that disease. Horses, pigs and cattle spread across the land, and European goods were already moving inland through trade (Topic 2.4).
Unfree labor was already part of the Atlantic system. Spain had built its colonies on the encomienda and on enslaved Africans, and Portuguese traders had carried Africans across the Atlantic since the early 1500s. The English did not invent plantation slavery. They adopted it over the 1600s, first in Barbados and then on the mainland (Topic 2.6).
Why the latecomers came after 1600
Each push came from Europe, and each explains a different kind of colony.
Religious conflict. The Protestant Reformation split Europe into rival camps, and colonization became part of the struggle. Protestant England and the Dutch Republic, which had revolted against Spanish rule in 1568, saw Catholic Spain as their great enemy. England defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, and once peace came with the Treaty of London (1604), English investors could put money into colonies rather than war. Religious conflict inside England mattered just as much. Separatists who had left the Church of England founded Plymouth in 1620. When Charles I and Archbishop William Laud pressed Puritans to conform in the 1630s, around 20,000 of them left for Massachusetts in roughly a decade, a movement called the Great Migration. English Catholics got Maryland (1634) as a refuge.
New ways to raise money. No monarch paid for these colonies. Joint-stock companies sold shares to many investors, spreading the risk of a venture that might fail and the profits if it worked. The Dutch East India Company (1602), the Virginia Company (1606), the Dutch West India Company (1621) and the Massachusetts Bay Company (1629) were all of this type. Investors wanted returns, so colonies had to produce something Europe would buy. The economic theory behind them, mercantilism, held that a nation grew strong by exporting more than it imported, with colonies supplying raw materials and buying the mother country's manufactures. Topic 2.4 follows how England turned that theory into law.
People to send. England's population grew from roughly 3 million in 1550 to about 4 million by 1600. Landlords were enclosing common fields to raise sheep for the wool trade, which pushed tenant farmers off the land, while wages fell and prices rose. Promoters such as Richard Hakluyt argued that colonies would put England's "idle" poor to work. This surplus of young, poor, landless men is why about 100,000 indentured servants could be shipped to the Chesapeake in the 1600s. France and the Netherlands had no comparable push. Dutch workers were well paid at home, and after 1627 France barred its Protestants (Huguenots) from settling in New France. Those differences in who would emigrate, more than any difference in ambition, explain why New France held around 60,000 colonists by the 1750s while the British mainland colonies held about 1.2 million in 1750.
What the period's developments are, and how historians frame them
From 1607 to 1754, Europeans built colonies with different goals, labor systems and relationships with American Indians. Spain extracted wealth through forced labor and missions, France and the Netherlands traded for furs through alliances with Native peoples, and England sent large numbers of settlers who took land for farms (Topic 2.2). Within British America, environment and settlers' aims produced distinct regions: tobacco in the Chesapeake, towns and mixed farming in New England, grain and diversity in the middle colonies, and rice, sugar and slave majorities in the far South and the West Indies (Topic 2.3). An Atlantic trading system tied them to Europe and Africa (Topic 2.4). The period ends in 1754, when competition between Britain and France for the Ohio Valley set off the Seven Years' War (Topic 3.2).
Historians disagree about which frame best fits these developments. An older tradition told the story of the thirteen colonies as the seedbed of the United States. Bernard Bailyn and others built the field of Atlantic history, which treats the colonies as one part of a system linking Europe, Africa and the Americas, so that a sugar boom in Barbados or a famine in Ireland explains events in Carolina or Pennsylvania. Alan Taylor's American Colonies (2001) widened the frame across the continent, giving Spanish New Mexico, French Louisiana and Native nations as much attention as Massachusetts. Each frame gives you a different kind of context: the Atlantic frame points across the ocean, the continental frame across the land.
Worked examples
Prompt: "Evaluate the extent to which economic motives drove English colonization of North America from 1607 to 1700." Which of these is the strongest start to a contextualization paragraph, and what is wrong with the others?
- "Throughout history, people have moved in search of a better life."
- "In the 1500s, Spanish silver from Potosí made Spain Europe's strongest power, and English privateers and promoters such as Richard Hakluyt urged England to win American wealth of its own."
- "The colonists in Virginia began growing tobacco in 1612."
- "After 1763, Britain began taxing the colonies to pay for the Seven Years' War."
Show solution
Choice 2 is the strongest. It names a specific earlier development (Spanish silver), specific people (privateers, Hakluyt), and connects directly to the prompt's subject, English economic motives for colonizing. It sets up the essay because it explains why investors in 1606 expected a colony to pay.
Choice 1 is a generalization that could introduce any essay about migration, so it describes no historical development at all. Choice 3 is evidence for the argument, since tobacco is one of the economic motives the prompt asks you to weigh; context sits outside the thing being argued. Choice 4 is a real development but comes after the prompt's period and does not explain the start of colonization, so it is irrelevant to this prompt.
To finish the paragraph, add the religious context (the Reformation rivalry with Spain and Puritan dissent) and the social context (population growth and enclosure), then end with a sentence that ties them to the prompt: these pressures made colonization attractive both to investors seeking profit and to migrants seeking land or religious freedom.
We, greatly commending, and graciously accepting of, their Desires for the Furtherance of so noble a Work, which may, by the Providence of Almighty God, hereafter tend to the Glory of his Divine Majesty, in propagating of Christian Religion to such People, as yet live in Darkness and miserable Ignorance of the true Knowledge and Worship of God, and may in time bring the Infidels and Savages, living in those parts, to human Civility, and to a settled and quiet Government . . .
King James I, First Charter of Virginia, 1606
a. Briefly describe ONE goal for English colonization expressed in the excerpt.
b. Briefly explain ONE development in Europe that provides context for the goal expressed in the excerpt.
c. Briefly explain ONE way the development of the Virginia colony between 1607 and 1700 differed from the goals expressed in the excerpt.
Show solution
a. The charter states that colonization would spread Christianity to Native Americans and bring them under what the English considered civilized, orderly government.
b. The Protestant Reformation had made religion a matter of international rivalry. Catholic Spain justified its empire partly by converting Native peoples, and Protestant England, which had fought Spain and defeated the Armada in 1588, wanted to plant Protestant Christianity in America to compete with Spanish Catholicism.
c. Virginia became a tobacco colony focused on profit rather than conversion. After John Rolfe's tobacco began selling in England around 1614, planters expanded onto Powhatan land, provoking wars in 1622 and 1644, and the colony made few serious efforts to convert Native people.
Why these earn the points. Part (a) describes the goal in your own words instead of copying the charter's language. Part (b) names a specific European development and explains the link to the goal (religious competition with Spain), which is what makes it context rather than a loose fact. Part (c) answers "differed" with specific evidence (tobacco, Rolfe, the wars) that shows a contrast, not just a description of Virginia.
Prompt: "Evaluate the extent to which religion shaped the development of the British North American colonies from 1607 to 1754." Write the contextualization paragraph only.
Show solution
In the century before Jamestown, the Protestant Reformation had split Europe, and religion had become a cause of war and a reason for empire. Catholic Spain claimed its American conquests as a mission to convert Native peoples, while Protestant England and the Dutch Republic fought Spain and saw colonies as a way to check Catholic power. Inside England, the established church persecuted dissenters: Separatists fled to the Netherlands and then to Plymouth in 1620, and when Charles I and Archbishop Laud cracked down on Puritans in the 1630s, about 20,000 left for Massachusetts Bay. At the same time, population growth and enclosure were driving poor English men and women off the land, creating migrants whose motives were economic rather than religious. These pressures meant English colonists arrived with mixed purposes, which is why religion shaped some colonies far more than others.
Why it works. It reaches back (the Reformation, Spanish missions) and across (England's persecution of dissenters, enclosure) with names, numbers and dates. It stays before and at the start of the prompt's period. Its last sentence connects the context to the prompt and even sets up the thesis, which is how the point is earned: the reader sees why the context matters for this question, not just that you know some earlier history.
Where students lose points
On the exam
Unit 2 is 6 to 8 percent of the multiple-choice section. Contextualization is one point on each essay, and a prompt about Period 2 needs Period 1 or European context, as in the examples above. Multiple-choice and short-answer questions often ask which development "provides context" for a source; the right answer is usually a broad process from before or during the source's date that helps explain why it was written.
Check yourself
Question 1
Which development most directly explains why England, unlike France and the Dutch Republic, could send large numbers of settlers to North America in the 1600s?
- A
The defeat of the Spanish Armada, which gave England control of the Atlantic sea lanes
- B
Population growth and the enclosure of common lands, which left many English people without land or steady work
- C
The Catholic Church's support for English missionary work among American Indians
- D
The discovery of large silver deposits in Virginia, which drew miners from across England
Show answer
B
Colonies need emigrants, and England had a surplus of poor, landless people willing to sign indentures or move as families, while Dutch workers were well paid at home and France kept its Protestants out of New France. Choice A is tempting, but 1588 did not give England control of the seas, and a navy does not produce settlers. Virginia had no silver, which rules out D.
- A
Question 2
A student's essay on the founding of Massachusetts Bay opens its contextualization with: "In 1765, the colonists protested the Stamp Act." Explain why this cannot earn the contextualization point, and name a development that could.
Show answer
The Stamp Act came more than a century after Massachusetts Bay was founded in 1630, so it cannot help explain the founding. A relevant context is the Protestant Reformation and the persecution of Puritans in England under Charles I and Archbishop Laud in the 1630s, which drove about 20,000 Puritans to New England.
Context must explain the setting of the prompt's development, which means something before it or happening at the same time. A later event can only be context when the prompt asks about consequences.
Question 3
Which statement best describes the role of joint-stock companies in early English colonization?
- A
They let many investors share the cost and risk of a colony, which meant colonies were expected to produce profitable exports.
- B
They were run by the English crown, which paid colonists' wages from royal taxes.
- C
They were religious congregations that held land in common and banned private trade.
- D
They were Spanish trading firms that England licensed to supply its colonies.
Show answer
A
The Virginia Company and Massachusetts Bay Company raised money by selling shares, so the crown risked nothing and investors expected returns, which pushed colonies toward cash crops and trade. Choice B is the common mix-up: the crown chartered these companies but did not fund them.
- A
Question 4
Atlantic history and the continental approach of historians such as Alan Taylor offer different frames for Period 2. Describe the difference in one or two sentences.
Show answer
Atlantic history explains colonial developments through the ocean-wide system connecting Europe, Africa and the Americas, such as the slave trade and European markets. The continental approach looks across North America, treating Spanish, French and Native societies as central to the story rather than only the thirteen English colonies.
Both reject the older view of the thirteen colonies as simply the beginning of the United States. They differ in the direction they look for context: across the ocean or across the land.