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      • At the start of the seventeenth century, the English had not established a permanent settlement in the Americas. Over the next century, however, they outpaced their rivals. The English encouraged emigration far more than the Spanish, French, or Dutch. They established nearly a dozen colonies, sending swarms of immigrants to populate the land.
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  2. At the start of the seventeenth century, the English had not established a permanent settlement in the Americas. Over the next century, however, they outpaced their rivals. The English encouraged emigration far more than the Spanish, French, or Dutch.

    • Overview
    • Colonization and early self-government

    The American colonies were the British colonies that were established during the 17th and early 18th centuries in what is now a part of the eastern United States. The colonies grew both geographically along the Atlantic coast and westward and numerically to 13 from the time of their founding to the American Revolution. Their settlements extended from what is now Maine in the north to the Altamaha River in Georgia when the Revolution began.

    Who established the American colonies?

    In 1606 King James I of England granted a charter to the Virginia Company of London to colonize the American coast anywhere between parallels 34° and 41° north and another charter to the Plymouth Company to settle between 38° and 45° north. In 1607 the Virginia Company crossed the ocean and established Jamestown. In 1620 the ship the Mayflower carried about 100 Pilgrim Separatists to what is now Massachusetts, where the Plymouth colony took root.

    What pushed the American colonies toward independence?

    After the French and Indian War the British government determined that the colonies should help pay for the cost of the war and the postwar garrisoning of troops. It also began imposing tighter control on colonial governments. Taxes, such as the Sugar Act (1764) and the Stamp Act (1765), aimed at raising revenue from the colonies outraged the colonists and catalyzed a reaction that eventually led to a revolt.

    When did the American colonies declare independence?

    The opening of the 17th century found three countries—France, Spain, and England—contending for dominion in North America. Of these England, the tardiest on the scene, finally took control of the beginnings of what is now the United States. The French, troubled by foreign wars and internal religious quarrels, long failed to realize the great possibilities of the new continent, and their settlements in the St. Lawrence Valley grew feebly. The Spaniards were preoccupied with South America and the lands washed by the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. But the English, after initial failures under Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh, planted firm settlements all the way from Maine to Georgia, nourished them with a steady flow of people and capital, and soon absorbed the smaller colonizing venture of the Dutch in the Hudson Valley and the tiny Swedish effort on the Delaware River. Within a century and a half the British had 13 flourishing colonies on the Atlantic coast: Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.

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    In a short time the colonists pushed from the Tidewater strip toward the Appalachians and finally crossed the mountains by the Cumberland Gap and Ohio River. Decade by decade they became less European in habit and outlook and more American—the frontier in particular setting its stamp on them. Their freedom from most of the feudal inheritances of western Europe, and the self-reliance they necessarily acquired in subduing nature, made them highly individualistic.

    • The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. The British colonization of the Americas is the history of establishment of control, settlement, and colonization of the continents of the Americas by England, Scotland and, after 1707, Great Britain. Colonization efforts began in the late 16th century with failed attempts by England to establish permanent colonies in the North.

    • English Colonial Expansion. Sixteenth-century England was a tumultuous place. Because they could make more money from selling wool than from selling food, many of the nation’s landowners were converting farmers’ fields into pastures for sheep.
    • The Tobacco Colonies. In 1606, King James I divided the Atlantic seaboard in two, giving the southern half to the London Company (later the Virginia Company) and the northern half to the Plymouth Company.
    • The New England Colonies. The first English emigrants to what would become the New England colonies were a small group of Puritan separatists, later called the Pilgrims, who arrived in Plymouth in 1620 to found Plymouth Colony.
    • The Middle Colonies. In 1664, King Charles II gave the territory between New England and Virginia, much of which was already occupied by Dutch traders and landowners called patroons, to his brother James, the Duke of York.
  4. Apr 6, 2021 · Advertisement. Early English Colonization. Unlike the colonies of New England, the Dutch colony of New Netherland followed the same model regarding religious & cultural tolerance as its mother country. England was a latecomer in the colonization of the Americas.

  5. English colonies in 17th-century North America. American colonies, also called thirteen colonies or colonial America, The 13 British colonies established during the 17th and early 18th centuries in what is now the eastern U.S.