In 1700 the English mainland colonies held about 250,000 people of European and African descent. New France, which claimed a far larger territory stretching from the St. Lawrence down the Mississippi, held about 15,000. That gap in numbers explains more about colonial North America than almost anything else. Each European power came for something different, and what it came for decided how many Europeans it needed, what work they would do, and whether American Indians would be its laborers, its trading partners, or obstacles to be pushed off the land.
Spain: extraction, conversion and incorporation
Spain's empire was built in Period 1 around a simple aim: take wealth from American land using Native labor. Topic 1.5 covers the encomienda, the grant of an Indian community's labor and tribute to a Spanish colonist, and the casta system that ranked people by ancestry. In Period 2, Spain extended those institutions northward into its borderlands, mostly to guard the silver mines of Mexico from rival empires.
Florida and New Mexico. St. Augustine (1565) is the oldest continuously occupied European-founded city in the continental United States; it existed to protect the treasure fleets sailing past Florida. In 1598 Juan de Oñate led settlers into New Mexico. When the people of Acoma Pueblo resisted in 1599, his soldiers killed several hundred of them, and Oñate sentenced surviving men over 25 to have one foot cut off and to twenty years of servitude. Santa Fe became the capital in 1610. New Mexico had no silver, so its value to Spain was religious and strategic. Franciscan friars built missions in the pueblos, demanded that converts give up their ceremonies, and relied on Pueblo labor. Spanish colonists collected tribute in corn and cotton cloth through encomiendas and drafted Pueblo workers through the repartimiento, a system of compulsory, nominally paid labor rotations that replaced the encomienda across much of New Spain. These pressures led to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, covered in Topic 2.5.
Incorporation. Spain did not try to keep Native and African people outside its society; it tried to fold them in at the bottom. Converts were baptized, given Spanish names, and placed in a legal hierarchy. In New Mexico, genízaros were Native people captured in wars among Apache, Comanche, Navajo and other nations, ransomed or bought by Spanish colonists, baptized, and raised as servants in Hispanic households. As adults many were settled in frontier towns such as Abiquiú, which received a land grant in 1754, where they served as a buffer against raids. Africans, enslaved and free, were part of the system too. In 1693 the Spanish crown offered freedom to enslaved people who escaped from English Carolina to Florida and accepted Catholicism, and in 1738 Florida's governor founded Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, a town of free Black militiamen and their families just north of St. Augustine. The policy was a weapon against the English as much as an act of faith: it drained Carolina of workers and gave Spain soldiers.
France and the Netherlands: few settlers, many partners
France and the Dutch Republic wanted a commodity, beaver fur, whose fine underhair made the felt for Europe's fashionable hats. Fur came from Native hunters, so these colonies needed Native partners far more than European settlers.
New France. Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec in 1608 as a trading post. To keep his Wendat (Huron) and Algonquin trading partners, he joined them against their enemies in 1609, which made the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy an enemy of New France for most of the century. When Louis XIV made New France a royal colony in 1663, it had only about 3,000 colonists. The crown paid passage for about 800 young women, the filles du roi, between 1663 and 1673 to marry settlers, and farm families spread along the St. Lawrence. Still, few French people wanted to emigrate, and Huguenots were barred.
The French traded on Native terms. Licensed traders and unlicensed coureurs de bois ("runners of the woods") paddled into the Great Lakes, learned Native languages, and often married Native women, which gave a trader kin and therefore trust in his wife's community. Their children, later called Métis, formed a mixed population in the fur country. Trade came wrapped in diplomacy: French governors presented annual gifts of cloth, guns, kettles and gunpowder, took the role of "father" to allied nations, and mediated their quarrels. Jesuit missionaries lived in Native villages, learned their languages, and reported back in the annual Jesuit Relations. The system peaked in the Great Peace of Montreal (1701), where delegates from roughly forty Native nations, including the Haudenosaunee, made peace with New France and with one another. France claimed the whole Mississippi Valley after La Salle's voyage in 1682 and founded New Orleans in 1718, but its colonies remained thin.
New Netherland. Henry Hudson's 1609 voyage gave the Dutch a claim to the Hudson River, and the Dutch West India Company, chartered in 1621, ran the colony for profit. It built Fort Orange (later Albany) in 1624 to trade with the Mohawk, and New Amsterdam on Manhattan to ship furs home. The company's agent in Amsterdam reported in 1626:
They have purchased the island Manhattes from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders; 'tis 11,000 morgens in size. . . . The cargo of the aforesaid ship is: 7246 beaver skins, . . . 48 mink skins, 36 wildcat skins, 33 minks, 34 rat skins, considerable oak, timber and hickory.
Peter Schagen, letter to the States General of the Netherlands, November 5, 1626
The company tried to attract farmers with patroonships (1629): an investor who brought 50 adult settlers within four years received a huge estate with manorial rights over the tenants. Only Kiliaen van Rensselaer's Rensselaerswyck, around Fort Orange, succeeded. Dutch traders paid for furs in guns, cloth and wampum, shell beads that Native peoples valued for ceremony and diplomacy and that the colony used as currency. New Netherland was small, about 9,000 people by 1664, but famously mixed: Dutch, Walloons, Germans, Scandinavians, enslaved and free Africans, and, from 1654, Jewish refugees from Brazil, whom the company let stay over director Peter Stuyvesant's objections. In 1664 an English fleet took the colony without a fight, and it became New York.
Historians have argued over what these partnerships meant. Richard White's The Middle Ground (1991) argued that in the Great Lakes, because neither the French nor their Algonquian allies could force their will on the other, they built a shared world of rituals, gift exchange and misunderstandings both sides found useful. Later historians such as Brett Rushforth (Bonds of Alliance, 2012) stressed its harder side: the French bought Native captives as slaves from their allies, and alliance often meant joining Native wars. The partnership was real, but it rested on French weakness in numbers, not on French kindness.
England: many settlers seeking land
English colonization looked different because England sent people, lots of them. Roughly 350,000 English people crossed the Atlantic in the 1600s, most to the Caribbean and the Chesapeake, and in the 1700s they were joined by Germans, Scots-Irish, Scots and French Huguenots (Topic 2.3 follows where each group settled). Topic 2.1 explains the push behind this: a growing, land-hungry population at home.
They came for several reasons, often mixed together:
- Land and social mobility. Under Virginia's headright system, anyone who paid a migrant's passage received 50 acres, and indentured servants worked four to seven years in exchange for passage, hoping to own land afterward. In England, land meant status; in America, ordinary men could hope to get it.
- Religious freedom for their own group. Puritans founded Massachusetts Bay (1630) to build a godly commonwealth, Catholics got Maryland (1634), and Quakers got Pennsylvania (1681). "Freedom" usually meant freedom for that group, not toleration of all: Massachusetts banished Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson in the 1630s.
- Better living conditions. Cheap land, high wages for scarce labor, and, in New England, a healthier climate let migrants live better than they could at home.
Women came too, in larger numbers than to French or Spanish colonies. Puritan migration was mostly families. The Chesapeake was lopsided, with men outnumbering women by about six to one in the 1620s and 1630s, but women kept arriving as servants and the imbalance narrowed over the century.
English colonists were farmers, and farms need land, so the English took Native land and lived apart from the people who had held it. After the Powhatan attack of 1622 killed about 350 colonists, Virginia waged war to clear land, and the 1646 treaty ending the third Anglo-Powhatan war set a boundary that Native people could not cross without permission. Intermarriage was rare and grew rarer; John Rolfe's 1614 marriage to Pocahontas was a diplomatic exception, and in 1691 Virginia banned marriage between white colonists and anyone Native or of African descent. Missionary projects, such as John Eliot's "praying towns" for Christian Indians in Massachusetts, were small and also kept converts in separate settlements. The contrast with France is a contrast in needs: a fur trader wants the hunter to stay in the forest; a tobacco planter or a wheat farmer wants the forest cleared.
Worked examples
Explain why French colonists in North America depended on alliances with American Indians more than English colonists did.
Show solution
Answer. New France's economy rested on the fur trade, and furs came from Native hunters who trapped and processed beaver across the Great Lakes. With only about 3,000 colonists in 1663 and around 15,000 in 1700, the French could neither seize the interior nor defend it alone, so they secured trade and military help by giving annual gifts, marrying into Native communities, and mediating among allied nations, as in the Great Peace of Montreal of 1701. English colonists, by contrast, came in large numbers to farm. Tobacco planters in Virginia and farm families in New England needed land rather than trading partners, so they pushed Native peoples off it and lived apart from them.
Why this works. "Explain why" asks for a cause, not a description. The answer names the cause (the fur economy and small numbers), gives specific evidence (population figures, gifts, intermarriage, 1701), and finishes the comparison with the English case, because a claim that the French depended "more" is only proved by showing the other side.
They have purchased the island Manhattes from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders; 'tis 11,000 morgens in size. . . . The cargo of the aforesaid ship is: 7246 beaver skins, . . . 48 mink skins, 36 wildcat skins, 33 minks, 34 rat skins, considerable oak, timber and hickory.
Peter Schagen, Dutch West India Company representative, letter to the States General, 1626
a. Briefly describe ONE economic goal of Dutch colonization shown in the excerpt.
b. Briefly explain ONE way Dutch relations with American Indians in the 1600s differed from those of English colonists.
c. Briefly explain ONE reason New Netherland's European population remained small before 1664.
Show solution
a. The Dutch colonized to profit from the fur trade. The cargo list, led by more than 7,000 beaver skins, shows that the colony's main export was furs obtained from Native hunters and shipped to Amsterdam for the West India Company.
b. The Dutch relied on trade alliances with Native peoples such as the Mohawk, exchanging guns, cloth and wampum for furs at Fort Orange, so they needed Native hunters to stay on their lands. English colonists in Virginia and New England, who wanted farmland, took Native land and lived separately, fighting wars such as the Anglo-Powhatan wars to clear it.
c. The Netherlands was prosperous and paid good wages, so few Dutch people wanted to emigrate, and the West India Company cared more about trade than settlement. Its patroonship plan of 1629, which required investors to bring 50 settlers, mostly failed; only Rensselaerswyck succeeded.
Why these earn the points. Part (a) uses the source as evidence for a goal instead of repeating it. Part (b) gives a specific Dutch practice and a specific English one, because a difference needs both sides. Part (c) names a cause and a supporting fact.
Evaluate the extent to which economic goals shaped relations between European colonizers and American Indians from 1607 to 1754.
Write a thesis and an outline of the body.
Show solution
Thesis: Economic goals largely determined how each colonial power treated American Indians, since extraction led Spain to subjugate Native peoples, the fur trade led France and the Netherlands into alliances, and farming led the English to take land; however, religious aims and military competition among the empires also shaped those relations, especially in the Spanish missions and in French diplomacy.
Body 1, Spain. Spain sought wealth and labor. In New Mexico, colonists drew tribute through the encomienda and forced labor through the repartimiento, and Franciscan missions demanded Pueblo conversion. Reasoning: a colony built on Native labor had to control Native people, which produced subjugation and, in 1680, revolt.
Body 2, France and the Netherlands. Fur required Native hunters. The French built alliances through gifts, intermarriage by coureurs de bois, and the 1701 Great Peace of Montreal; the Dutch traded guns and wampum to the Mohawk at Fort Orange. Reasoning: when profit depends on partners, colonizers negotiate.
Body 3, England. Tobacco in the Chesapeake and family farms in New England required land. Virginia's wars with the Powhatan (1622, 1644) and the 1646 boundary treaty show the English separating from Native peoples rather than incorporating them. Reasoning: a settler economy turns Native people into obstacles.
Body 4, the qualification. Economics does not explain everything. Spanish friars pursued conversion in New Mexico even though it had no silver, and France's alliances served its military rivalry with England and the Haudenosaunee as much as trade. Reasoning: religion and imperial competition modified what economic goals set in motion.
Why it scores. The thesis answers "to what extent" with a clear position and a qualification. Each body paragraph has specific evidence and a reasoning sentence that ties it to the thesis, and the final paragraph's counterargument shows the complex understanding graders reward.
Where students lose points
On the exam
Questions on this topic usually ask you to explain why colonies differed or what caused a colony's relationship with Native peoples. The strongest answers explain differences through goals and numbers, as in the table, and back them with specific evidence. Topic 2.5 covers the conflicts these relationships produced (the Pueblo Revolt, King Philip's War, the Beaver Wars), and Topic 2.8 practices comparing the colonies as an essay skill.
Check yourself
Question 1
Which factor best explains why New Netherland and New France developed trade alliances with American Indians rather than taking their land for farms?
- A
Both colonies were founded by religious dissenters who opposed taking Native land.
- B
Their profits came from furs that only Native hunters could supply in quantity, and they had too few colonists to dominate the interior.
- C
Their home governments banned colonists from farming in North America.
- D
American Indians in the Northeast had no interest in European farmland.
Show answer
B
A fur economy needs hunters in the forest, and small colonial populations could not force their will on powerful Native nations, so trade and diplomacy were the profitable path. Choice A is tempting because of Dutch religious diversity, but neither colony was founded by dissenters; both were commercial and royal or company ventures.
- A
Question 2
In New Mexico, who were genízaros, and what does their history show about Spanish colonization?
Show answer
Genízaros were Native people taken captive in wars among Plains and Southwestern nations, ransomed or bought by Spanish colonists, baptized, and raised as servants in Hispanic households; many were later settled in frontier towns such as Abiquiú. Their history shows that Spain incorporated Native people into colonial society at its bottom ranks rather than living apart from them.
Spanish colonization sought to control Native labor and convert Native people, which meant bringing them inside a hierarchy. English colonists, who wanted land, mostly excluded Native people instead.
Question 3
Which statement about English colonization in the 1600s is most accurate?
- A
Most English migrants were Puritans seeking religious freedom.
- B
English colonists commonly married into Native communities to secure trade.
- C
Large numbers of English men and women migrated, many as indentured servants, and settled on farms on land taken from American Indians.
- D
English colonies relied mainly on forced Native labor drafts modeled on the Spanish repartimiento.
Show answer
C
England sent far more settlers than France or the Netherlands, most of them seeking land or work, and their farms required Native land. Choice A describes only New England's founders, while most English migrants went to the Chesapeake and Caribbean; B describes French fur traders; D describes Spain.
- A
Question 4
Why did Spain offer freedom to enslaved people who escaped from Carolina to Florida after 1693?
Show answer
To weaken English Carolina and strengthen Spanish Florida: the policy drained Carolina of laborers and supplied Spain with Catholic subjects and militiamen, such as the free Black settlers of Fort Mose (1738).
The offer required conversion to Catholicism, so it combined Spain's religious aims with its imperial rivalry with England. It shows Spain incorporating Africans into its society while still holding enslaved people of its own.