Contextualizing Period 2, 1607-1754

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Explain why Period 2 is conventionally bounded by 1607 (the founding of Jamestown) and 1754 (the outbreak of the French and Indian War).
• Identify the four major historical developments that organize Unit 2: the multi-European colonization of North America, the rise of distinct British regional societies, the maturing transatlantic trade economy, and the entrenchment of chattel slavery in the southern colonies.
• Describe how environment, religion, and labor demand together produced four sharply different British colonial regions: the Chesapeake, New England, the Middle colonies, and the southern Atlantic and West Indies.
• Use Skill 4 (Contextualization) to situate at least one Period 2 development inside its broader Atlantic, Indigenous, and global setting.
• Account for the continuities that connect the Spanish colonial order of Period 1 to the multi-European colonization of Period 2, and the shifts that distinguish Period 2 from Period 3 (the era of revolution and constitution making).

Period 2 picks up where Period 1 left off. In 1607, English colonists landed at Jamestown on the Chesapeake Bay and built the first permanent English settlement in North America. By 1754, on the eve of the French and Indian War, the Atlantic seaboard from Maine to Georgia had been remade. Twelve British colonies (with Georgia, founded in 1732, as the thirteenth) ran along the coast. French traders and Jesuit missionaries followed the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi. Dutch settlers held the Hudson Valley until 1664, then ceded it to England as New York. Spanish missions persisted in Florida and across the desert Southwest. Africans, carried in chains across the Middle Passage, made up a majority of the population in South Carolina and a sizable minority across the southern colonies. Two unit-level Key Concepts organize this story: the patterns of colonization, regional differentiation, and conflict that built the colonies (KC-2.1), and the political, social, cultural, and economic exchanges that bound the British colonies to Britain and to one another (KC-2.2).

The first major development was the shift from Spanish dominance to multi-European colonization. The CED groups colonization patterns by empire (KC-2.1.I). Spanish colonies in Florida and the Southwest continued the encomienda-mission template that Period 1 produced, building institutions that rested on the subjugation and Christianization of native populations and incorporated enslaved and free Africans into colonial society (KC-2.1.I.A). French and Dutch ventures, by contrast, drew comparatively few European migrants and depended on trade alliances and intermarriage with Indigenous nations to obtain furs and other goods bound for Europe (KC-2.1.I.B). English colonization drew the largest flow of European migrants, including a significant number of women, who came in search of land, religious freedom, social mobility, and better living conditions; English settlers concentrated on agriculture and lived largely apart from the Indigenous nations whose land they took (KC-2.1.I.C). The point that ties these patterns together is the Period 2 theme of migration: each empire moved different kinds of people, in different numbers, for different reasons (Theme MIG).

The second major development was the emergence of distinct British colonial regions during the seventeenth century (KC-2.1.II). The Chesapeake and North Carolina colonies built their economies on the export of tobacco, a labor-intensive crop initially worked by mostly male white indentured servants attracted by the headright system and later, after about 1680, by enslaved Africans (KC-2.1.II.A). The New England colonies, founded by Puritans who arrived in family groups during the Great Migration of the 1630s, organized themselves around small town meetings and family farms, and developed a thriving mixed economy of agriculture, fishing, shipbuilding, and commerce (KC-2.1.II.B). The Middle colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware sustained a thriving export economy in cereal crops and drew a wide range of European migrants (English Quakers, German Lutherans and Pietists, Scots-Irish Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, French Huguenots), producing societies marked by greater cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity and tolerance than anywhere else on the continent (KC-2.1.II.C). The southern Atlantic coast colonies (South Carolina and, by 1732, Georgia) and the British West Indies took advantage of long growing seasons to build plantation economies centered on rice, indigo, and sugar exports, and depended on the labor of enslaved Africans, who often made up the majority of the population (KC-2.1.II.D). Across all four regions, British distance and a policy of salutary neglect allowed colonial assemblies, town meetings, and elected legislatures to build self-governing institutions that were unusually democratic for the eighteenth century (KC-2.1.II.E, Theme GEO).

The third major development was the maturing transatlantic trade economy that linked Europe, Africa, and the Americas (KC-2.1.III). Ships carrying English manufactured goods sailed to the West African coast, exchanged those goods for captives bought from coastal traders, carried the captives across the Middle Passage to Caribbean and mainland plantations, and returned to Europe loaded with sugar, tobacco, rice, and indigo (KC-2.1.III.A). Continued trade with Europeans pulled metal tools, firearms, textiles, and alcohol into Indigenous communities, prompting cultural and economic change and spreading the same epidemic diseases that had devastated central Mexico in the previous century (KC-2.1.III.B). The British Crown, increasingly aware of how much wealth this Atlantic system was generating, imposed mercantilist regulations, the Navigation Acts, beginning in 1651 and tightening over the next century, that funneled colonial trade through British ports and into British ships (KC-2.2.I.C, Theme WXT). Enforcement was uneven, however, and the gap between the imperial ambition of London and the practical reality of colonial trading networks would become one of the central tensions of the eighteenth century.

The fourth major development was the entrenchment of chattel slavery in the southern British colonies between roughly 1660 and 1750 (KC-2.2.II). Early Chesapeake Virginia, in the decades after Jamestown, depended overwhelmingly on white indentured servitude rather than slavery; the boundary between bound European laborers and enslaved Africans was legally and culturally fluid in the first generation. After Bacon's Rebellion of 1676, after the supply of English servants began to dry up, and after the Royal African Company lost its slave-trading monopoly in 1698, planters across the Chesapeake and the southern Atlantic colonies turned increasingly to enslaved Africans (KC-2.2.II.A). Colonial assemblies wrote new slave codes that decreed slavery to be lifelong, hereditary through the mother, and tied to African ancestry; interracial marriage was outlawed in colony after colony, and the descendants of African American mothers were classified as Black and enslaved in perpetuity (KC-2.2.II.B). Africans in the colonies built family networks, preserved religious and musical traditions, and resisted the dehumanizing system through both visible revolts (the Stono Rebellion of 1739 was the largest in the British mainland colonies before the American Revolution) and the daily, less visible refusals of work, escape, and self-organization that filled colonial court records (KC-2.2.II.C, Theme SOC).

Six themes will recur across the next seven lessons. The MIG theme tracks the differing patterns of European and African movement into North America that produced four British colonial regions and a multi-imperial continent. The GEO theme follows how soil, climate, and access to navigable rivers shaped each of those regions. The WXT theme traces the maturing Atlantic economy and the Navigation Acts that tried to channel it. The WOR theme follows the diplomatic and military interactions among European empires and Indigenous nations. The SOC theme covers the racial codes that hardened slavery into a hereditary condition and the family economies of New England towns. The ARC and NAT themes, paired in Topic 2.7, cover the religious cultures of the colonies (Puritan, Anglican, Quaker, Catholic, and the First Great Awakening that would sweep across them in the 1730s and 1740s) and the gradual divergence between London and the colonial assemblies. Topics 2.1 and 2.8 are unit-synthesis lessons rather than thematic lessons; the CED page assigns them no single Thematic Focus, and the canonical map preserves that distinction.

A contextualizing lesson works best when it samples sources that span the period. The three excerpts below mark the legal, the political, and the geographic bookends of Period 2.

1. (Continuity and Change) Compare North America in 1607 with North America in 1754. Identify two continuities and two significant shifts. Which set is more historically consequential, and on what grounds?
2. (Causation) Trace the causal chain from English motives for colonization to the entrenchment of chattel slavery in the southern colonies. At which step in the chain do you think a different decision could have produced a different outcome, and why?
3. (Comparison) Compare two of the four British colonial regions described in the lesson (Chesapeake, New England, Middle, or southern Atlantic and West Indies). What does the comparison reveal about the relationship between environment, religion, and labor system?
4. (Continuity and Change) The Atlantic economy moved goods, people, and ideas in multiple directions. Identify one transfer that primarily benefited British merchants and one that primarily harmed enslaved Africans. Explain how each transfer reshaped daily life on the receiving side.
5. (Causation) Account for the imperial setting that shaped the British colonial order. How did Spanish colonization in Period 1, the rivalry with France in Canada and the Mississippi Valley, and Dutch competition in the Hudson Valley between 1450 and 1700 shape what was possible inside the empire Britain built along the Atlantic seaboard?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.