In 1650, Massachusetts and Virginia were both English, both Protestant, and founded within a generation of each other (1630 and 1607), yet a visitor would have found two different worlds. In Massachusetts, families lived in compact towns around a meetinghouse, and a man who reached adulthood could expect to see his grandchildren. In Virginia, young single men worked tobacco on scattered plantations along the rivers, and many died within a few years of landing. Explaining why colonies that started from the same country grew so differently, and why the colonies of different empires differed even more, takes evidence that is specific and that you tie to the claim.
What a comparison needs
A comparison on the AP exam has three parts:
- A claim about similarity, difference, or both. "New England and the Chesapeake differed in their labor systems."
- Specific evidence for each side. Names, dates, laws, numbers, places: "New England farms relied on family labor; Chesapeake planters relied first on indentured servants and, after about 1680, increasingly on enslaved Africans."
- An explanation of why. The reason for the similarity or difference is what turns a description into an argument: "because New England's short growing season and rocky soil supported no large export crop, while tobacco rewarded planters who could gather many workers."
The third part is where most answers fall short. Two lists of facts side by side are not yet a comparison. A useful way to find the "why" is to sort your evidence into categories: the empire's goals, the environment, the colonists' religion and origins, the labor system, relations with Native peoples. Differences in one category (environment, goals) usually explain differences in another (labor, settlement).
Evidence that supports an argument (the skill for this topic) has two features. It is specific: "the Pueblo Revolt of 1680" rather than "Native resistance," "Virginia's 1662 law" rather than "slave laws." And it is explained: you say how the fact proves your claim. A specific fact dropped into a paragraph without that link earns less than you think.
Comparing the empires
Every European empire in North America wanted profit and power, and every one competed with the others and with Native nations for land and trade (Topic 2.2). They differed in what they wanted from the land and from Native people, and those goals shaped the societies they built.
| Spanish | French | Dutch | British | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Main goals | Converts, tribute and labor; buffer for the silver mines of Mexico | Furs and converts | Trade profits for the Dutch West India Company | Land for farms and export crops; for some, religious refuge |
| Settlers in North America | Few in the borderlands (Santa Fe 1610, St. Augustine 1565) | Few: about 60,000 by the 1750s | About 9,000 when the English took New Netherland in 1664 | Over a million by 1750, many arriving as families |
| Labor | Native labor through encomienda and missions | Native trading partners; some enslaved Africans in Louisiana | Fur trade; some enslaved Africans in New Amsterdam | Indentured servants, then enslaved Africans; family labor in the North |
| Relations with Native peoples | Conversion and forced labor, softened after the Pueblo Revolt | Alliance, trade, intermarriage, gift diplomacy | Trade alliance with the Haudenosaunee; wars with the Lenape and others near Manhattan | Displacement and war over land: 1622, Pequot War, Metacom's War, Yamasee War |
| Social mixing | Some intermarriage; a system of ranks (castas) by ancestry | Frequent intermarriage with Native women | Diverse European population, Jewish settlers from 1654 | Little intermarriage; laws drew sharp racial lines (Topic 2.6) |
The pattern underneath the table is a single causal chain. Empires that wanted trade (France, the Netherlands) needed Native partners and few settlers, so they accommodated Native nations. An empire that wanted land for many settlers (Britain) pushed Native nations off it and fought more wars over it. Spain, which wanted Native souls and labor, built societies in which Native people lived inside the colony as subjects, mixed with the colonists, and were exploited by them, until the Pueblo Revolt forced a compromise.
That chain also explains a difference in political development. Spanish and French colonies were governed from above by royal officials, with no elected assemblies. The British colonies, settled by many self-financing families and companies, developed elected assemblies (Virginia's House of Burgesses, 1619) and New England town meetings, and grew used to governing themselves.
Comparing the British regions
Within British North America, environment, the settlers' backgrounds, and the export economy combined differently in each region (Topic 2.3 covers each one in detail).
New England was settled in the Great Migration of the 1630s by about 20,000 Puritans, mostly in family groups with the money to pay their own way. The cool climate limited disease, so people lived long and families were large; the population grew mainly by natural increase. Thin soil and long winters ruled out a plantation crop, so families farmed for themselves and sold fish, timber and ships. Settlement in towns around a Congregational church, plus a Massachusetts law of 1647 requiring towns to keep schools, produced high literacy and strong local self-government in town meetings.
The Chesapeake (Virginia, Maryland) was settled mainly by young, unmarried men who came as indentured servants; for decades men far outnumbered women. Malaria and typhoid killed many newcomers, so families were small and often broken by death. Tobacco shaped everything: plantations spread out along rivers so ships could load at each wharf, there were few towns, and planters' demand for workers drove the shift from servants to enslaved Africans. A small planter elite dominated the House of Burgesses and the Anglican vestries (the boards of leading men that ran each parish, hired its minister and collected its taxes).
The middle colonies (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware) had fertile land and a longer growing season, and exported wheat and flour through Philadelphia and New York. They were the most ethnically and religiously diverse region: Dutch, English, Germans, Scots-Irish, Quakers, Lutherans, Jews. Pennsylvania's toleration attracted them, while New York's great Hudson Valley estates kept many farmers as tenants.
The Lower South (the Carolinas, Georgia) was founded late. Barbadian planters made South Carolina a rice colony with an enslaved Black majority within forty years of its founding in 1670. By the 1770s the free colonists of the Charleston district held more wealth per person than those of any other part of British North America, by a wide margin, according to the economic historian Alice Hanson Jones's study of probate records (the wills and inventories of property filed when a person died). Georgia (1732) was created as a buffer against Spanish Florida and a refuge for the English poor, and began with slavery banned before planters' pressure reversed that in 1751.
Compared side by side, the regions show how one variable led to another. A plantation crop (tobacco, rice, sugar) pulled in bound labor, produced scattered settlement and a sharp hierarchy, and made slavery central. Its absence (New England) left family farms, towns and a broader distribution of property. The middle colonies, with commercial grain farming but no plantation crop, fell between the two.
Similarities worth noticing
Comparison means similarities too, and the strongest essays use them to show complexity. By the mid-1750s, all British regions shared English law, elected assemblies (Georgia, run by trustees, was the last to get a lawmaking one, as a royal colony in 1755), Protestant majorities, a growing print culture and the pull of the Atlantic economy (Topics 2.4 and 2.7). Slavery was legal in every colony once Georgia lifted its ban in 1751, and New England's merchants profited from Caribbean plantations even though few enslaved people lived in New England. Across empires, every European power armed Native allies against its rivals, and every one depended on African or Native coerced labor somewhere in its American holdings. A thesis that says "New England and the Chesapeake differed in labor and settlement but shared English political institutions and dependence on Atlantic trade" is more defensible, and earns more, than one that sees only difference.
Worked examples
A student writes: "The French got along better with Native Americans than the English did because they were nicer to them." Rewrite this as an argument supported by specific, explained evidence.
Show solution
Rewrite. French colonists generally maintained more cooperative relations with Native nations than English colonists did, because the French goal was trade, not land. New France had only about 60,000 colonists by the 1750s, and its fur trade depended on Native hunters and allies, so French traders married into Native communities and officials took part in Native gift-giving and diplomacy. English colonists, numbering over a million by 1750, wanted land for farms, which led to wars such as Metacom's War (1675 to 1676) when settlement pressed onto Wampanoag land.
Why this works. "Nicer" is a judgment about character with no evidence. The rewrite replaces it with a cause (goals: trade versus land), specific evidence for each side (population figures, intermarriage and diplomacy, a named war), and an explanation linking the evidence to the claim.
a. Briefly describe ONE similarity between Spanish colonization in New Mexico and British colonization in the Chesapeake in the period 1600 to 1700.
b. Briefly describe ONE difference between them.
c. Briefly explain ONE reason for the difference you described in (b).
Show solution
a. Both colonies depended on unfree labor: Spanish colonists in New Mexico took labor and tribute from Pueblo people through the encomienda, and Chesapeake planters relied on bound workers, first indentured servants and later enslaved Africans.
b. The Spanish made Native people part of colonial society as laborers and converts, living in their own pueblos under Spanish rule, while the English in the Chesapeake pushed the Powhatans off their land and confined them to reserved lands after the war that ended in 1646.
c. Spain's goals in New Mexico were converts, tribute and a frontier buffer, which required keeping the Pueblo population in place and working. English colonists wanted land to grow tobacco and brought their own workers, so Native people stood in the way of what the colony needed rather than providing it.
Why these earn the points. Each part names specific evidence for both colonies. Part (c) explains the difference by goals, which connects (b) to a cause rather than restating it.
Evaluate the extent of difference between the development of the New England colonies and the Chesapeake colonies from 1607 to 1700.
Write a thesis, a sentence of context, and an outline of the body.
Show solution
Thesis: New England and the Chesapeake differed to a great extent in their demography, labor systems and patterns of settlement, because of their different environments and the different people who settled them; however, both developed English-style representative government and both displaced Native nations through war.
Context: England founded both regions in the early 1600s through private ventures, the Virginia Company at Jamestown in 1607 and Puritan groups in Plymouth (1620) and Massachusetts Bay (1630), at a time when England's growing population, religious conflict and search for profit pushed people overseas.
Body 1, people and family. Puritans came mostly as families during the Great Migration of the 1630s, and New England's healthy climate let them live long and raise large families. Chesapeake settlers were mostly young male servants, and disease kept life short and families small. Reasoning: the Chesapeake's population depended on new immigrants and bound labor, while New England's grew by itself, which shaped every other difference.
Body 2, economy and labor. Tobacco, booming after John Rolfe's crops in the 1610s, led Chesapeake planters to import indentured servants and, increasingly after 1680, enslaved Africans, whose status laws such as Virginia's 1662 act made hereditary. New England's soil and climate supported no plantation crop, so family farms, fishing and shipbuilding relied on family labor. Reasoning: the export crop explains the labor system, and the labor system explains the Chesapeake's growing inequality, which exploded in Bacon's Rebellion (1676).
Body 3, the qualification: shared English patterns. Both regions governed themselves through elected bodies, the House of Burgesses from 1619 and the Massachusetts General Court and town meetings. Both fought devastating wars over land with Native nations: Opechancanough's attacks of 1622 and 1644 in Virginia, the Pequot War and Metacom's War in New England. Reasoning: English settlers' demand for land and their English political traditions produced similar outcomes in both regions despite their differences.
Why it scores. The thesis answers "extent" (a great extent of difference) and qualifies it with similarities, which sets up the complexity point. Each paragraph uses specific evidence for both regions and ends with reasoning that explains why, using categories (people, economy, government) to organize the comparison.
Where students lose points
On the exam
Comparison can be asked in every part of the exam: a multiple-choice question can ask which development was similar between two colonies or empires, a short-answer question can ask for a similarity, a difference and a reason, and a long essay can ask you to evaluate the extent of similarity or difference between two regions or empires. In the long essay, evidence earns credit in two steps: first for naming specific, relevant examples, then for using them to support your argument by explaining how each one proves it. A separate point rewards using comparison itself (what was similar, what differed, and why) to organize the argument.
Check yourself
Question 1
Which statement best explains why New France had fewer wars over land with Native nations than the English colonies did in the 1600s?
- A
French law required colonists to buy all land from Native nations at fair prices.
- B
New France's economy rested on the fur trade with Native partners and attracted few farming settlers.
- C
French colonists settled only in the Caribbean, far from Native populations.
- D
The Catholic Church forbade French colonists to own land in North America.
Show answer
B
With few settlers and an economy built on furs supplied by Native hunters, the French needed Native allies more than Native land. The other choices are invented; French habitants did farm along the St. Lawrence, but in small numbers.
- A
Question 2
Identify one similarity between the Chesapeake and the Lower South in the period 1680 to 1750, and explain its cause.
Show answer
Both regions came to depend on enslaved African labor on plantations. The cause was an export crop that rewarded large labor forces: tobacco in the Chesapeake and rice (later also indigo) in the Lower South, combined with a shrinking supply of indentured servants.
A full answer pairs the similarity with a reason. Saying only that 'both had slavery' would not explain anything, and slavery was legal in every colony except Georgia before 1751, so the point is how central it became.
Question 3
Which piece of evidence would best support the claim that the middle colonies were more ethnically and religiously diverse than New England in the early 1700s?
- A
Massachusetts passed a law in 1647 requiring towns to maintain schools.
- B
German Lutherans, Mennonites and Moravians, Ulster Presbyterians and Quakers all settled in large numbers in Pennsylvania.
- C
Both New York and Massachusetts had elected assemblies.
- D
Philadelphia merchants exported wheat and flour to the West Indies.
Show answer
B
Only B speaks directly to diversity, naming specific groups in a middle colony. A is about education in New England, C is a similarity rather than a difference, and D is about the economy, so none of them supports the claim.
- A
Question 4
A student's thesis reads: 'Spanish and British colonies were different.' Rewrite it as a defensible, specific comparative thesis about colonial societies from 1607 to 1754.
Show answer
Spanish colonies in North America incorporated Native peoples as converts and coerced laborers, while British colonies largely pushed Native peoples off the land, because Spain sought souls and labor and Britain sought land for large numbers of settlers; yet both depended on forced labor and both waged wars against Native resistance.
A defensible thesis names a specific category of comparison, gives a reason, and can be argued with evidence. Adding a similarity sets up a more complex argument.