The Regions of the BRITISH COLONIES [APUSH Review Unit 2 Topic 3] 2.3

hey there and welcome back to heinrich's history now we've been going through unit two of the ap us history curriculum and what we've been talking about is european colonization in the americas generally but now we're going to zero in on the british colonies of north america so if you're ready to get them brain cows milked let's get to it okay so the big question we've got to consider in this video is not just british colonization in general but specifically how and why did these british colonies develop into distinct societies like yes they were all british

but from region to region the colonies were very different and why was that let's just choose a region to get started in our comparison and just for poops and giggles let's start with the chesapeake colonies you know i have to be honest it's not just for poops and googles that we're starting here we're starting here because they were first so the first north american colony established by the british was jamestown in 1607 and the establishment of jamestown was financed by a new economic model of funding called a joint stock company this is kind of a

big deal so let me explain now in the last unit we dealt mainly with spanish colonization and that venture was funded by the spanish crown and that was the case for a great deal of the european explorers but a joint stock company was more of a private thing and less of a state-sponsored thing in order to pay for the exploration a group of investors pooled their money together and shared the financial risk so if the venture profited so did they if it failed then no one lost everything since they all shared in it to begin

with so anyway that's how the founding of jamestown was funded and that should give you some idea as to what the purpose of the colony actually was which is to say profit those investors wanted to make some scratch and so in line with those motives when the colonists actually did show up they basically divided their time between digging for gold and silver and constructing a military fort to protect said gold and silver now unfortunately no one told them that they could not eat their gold and so famine killed nearly half of them in the first

two years not to mention disease and it got bad enough that they did in fact resort to cannibalism this is kenny this tastes like kenny anyway who knows how many of them would have passed through their fellow colonists digestive tracts if it weren't for the discovery of a miracle in 1612 namely the cultivation of tobacco one of the colonists named john rolfe began to experiment with tobacco planting and once that took hold back in england this one crop saved them now most of the labor in this colony was done by indentured servants and these were

folks who couldn't afford the passage across the atlantic and so they signed a seven-year labor contract in which they basically worked to pay off their settlement fees and then they went free now the consequence of this increased demand for tobacco was that the farmers needed more land on which to plant it and the only way they were going to get more land is to further encroach on the land of the native americans which as you can imagine led to some increasing tension between the two groups and not surprisingly this encroachment on their land led the

natives to retaliate violently and raid the farmers settlements and when the columnist called on their governor william berkeley he decided that their cause was not worth his effort and that snub leads us to bacon's rebellion so nathaniel bacon was one of those angry farmers who turned out to be saltier than the breakfast meat that bears his name resentful of indian violence and berkeley's neglect he led other poor farmers and endangered servants in an attack on the indians and then turned their destructive power on the plantations owned by berkeley himself now it wasn't long before this

rebellion was squashed but the consequence of it was exceedingly important the elite planters looked around and saw the great populations of indentured servants working in their fields and they began to fear that more uprisings might occur and so it was at that point that they began to seek a new source of labor for their plantation and it just so happened that enslaved people from africa fit that bill and i'll have much more to say about that in another video but for now we'll just leave that there okay so that was jamestown if we move a

little further north to the new england colonies you can really ask for a starker contrast in colonial society these colonies were settled by pilgrims in 1620 and that paved the way for an influx of puritan settlers and these were protestants who were unhappy with the theology and the strictures of the church of england and therefore sought to emigrate in order to live by their own conscience now side note ask anyone on the street why the pilgrims showed up to live in america and nine times out of ten they're going to tell you religious freedom and

i'm here to tell you that the pilgrims did not primarily come to america for religious freedom scandalous no when they first left england many of them settled in holland whose policies on religious tolerance meant that the puritans had all the religious freedom that they could ever want but the problem is that as farmers they had trouble making a living in an urban area and so they left and came to america so it was primarily for economic reasons that they arrived on the american shores but i digress anyway unlike the jamestown settlers who migrated without any

familial connections the new england colonists migrated largely as family groups which is to say they didn't come for profit they came to establish a society and create family economies as farmers even so just like their southern counterparts their life was rough the first couple of years like fever and disease killed nearly half of the original settlers but after a couple of years they were able to establish a thriving society and economy that centered on agriculture and commerce okay now let's have a look at the colonies in the british west indies and the southern atlantic coast

in the 1620s the british established their first permanent colonies in the caribbean on islands like saint christopher and barbados and nevis if you've ever been to those places you will know that they are warm for most of the year and that means long growing seasons and just like in jamestown tobacco became the primary cash crop grown here but by the 1630s and all together more profitable crop had taken its place sugarcane now the growth and production of sugar is very labor intensive so this created a spike in demand for african enslaved people and by 1660

that demand had grown so much that the majority of the population on barbados for example was black and because of this growing population of blacks the planter elites enacted harsh slave codes which strictly regulated their behavior and formally defined enslaved people as property or to use a term for it chattel now up on the atlantic coast south carolina colonists were inspired by such practices in the british west indies and basically tried to replicate such a society on the mainland okay and finally we need to do a little talking about the middle colonies first new york

and new jersey these colonies were situated by the sea and were shot through with lots of rivers and streams and therefore they developed an export economy based on cereal crop additionally these colonies had a diverse population that over time became increasingly unequal due to an emerging elite class and basically society was structured thusly the wealthy urban merchants were up on top next came the middle class artisans and shopkeepers and then below them you have the unskilled laborers orphans widows and the unemployed and bottom of all you had a significant population of enslaved africans another of

the middle colonies worth mentioning is pennsylvania which was founded by william penn who was a quaker and a pacifist and the colony that bore his name also exhibited his values in pennsylvania religious freedom was recognized for all and when they sought to expand their land holdings they mostly negotiated with the indians who held it contrary to the new england and chesapeake colonists okay so that's a flavor of all the british colonies during this period and while they were all british they developed into some very distinct societies but there was one thing that was pretty similar

throughout all these colonies and that was their unusually democratic systems of governance you see one of the practical effects of mama britain being all the dang way across the atlantic is that it was difficult to govern these colonies and so they kind of just let the colonies figure out their own systems of governance and when they did they were largely models of democratic self-governance for example in virginia you had the house of burgesses which was a representative assembly which could levy taxes on the population and pass laws in new england the pilgrims signed and bound

themselves to the mayflower compact which organized their government on the model of a self-governing church congregation and to this end they concentrated power into participatory town meetings the middle and southern colonies also had representative bodies and it'll be important for you to know that they were dominated by the elite of those societies in the middle colonies elite merchants ran the legislature and in the south elite planters all right that's what you need to know about unit two topic three of ap us history if you want an a in your class and a five in your

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