English Colonial Empire

At a glance

When did England's empire begin?

With a claim nobody enforced. Sir Humphrey Gilbert sailed into St John's harbour in Newfoundland on 3 August 1583 with a fleet of 36 ships, and on 5 August he performed a ceremony of possession — a rod and turf handed over, a claim staked for Elizabeth I over a 200-league radius. It was a legal fiction with a fishing fleet attached, and Newfoundland "remained a formality until 1610". England had claimed a continent and settled a harbour.

The first real attempt was Walter Raleigh's, and it failed twice. A reconnaissance fleet reached the Outer Banks of North Carolina in 1584 and named the country Virginia. A military colony followed in 1585 under Ralph Lane, and was evacuated the next year with the settlers' supplies running out and the local Roanoke people hostile. The second attempt, in 1587, left about 115 colonists under John White, who sailed back to England for supplies and could not return until 1590, because every English ship was requisitioned for the war with Spain. He found the settlement dismantled, the houses taken down, and the word "CROATOAN" carved on a post. The Lost Colony is not a mystery in the way it is usually told: the colonists almost certainly went to live with the Croatoan, as White himself concluded. What was lost was the English colony — and with it, any English presence in North America for twenty years.

Jamestown and the arithmetic of death

The Virginia Company was chartered in April 1606 and its fleet sailed that December: 104 settlers under instructions to build a secure settlement, find gold, and look for a water route to the Pacific. They landed on 14 May 1607, sixty miles up a river they named the James, on a low island with no fresh water and a Powhatan population that had every reason to resent them.

The first years were catastrophic in a way that numbers make plain. The winter of 1609–10 — the Starving Time — came after a hurricane scattered the supply fleet and wrecked the Sea Venture on Bermuda. About 300 colonists were crowded into the fort that winter; 60 were alive in the spring. George Percy, in charge, wrote that the Indians killed "as fast without [the fort] as Famine and Pestilence did within", and that after eating horses and "other beasts as long as they lasted, we were glad to make shift with vermin, as dogs, cats and mice". Archaeologists in 2012 found the first forensic evidence of survival cannibalism in an English colony in North America: a 14-year-old girl's skull cut and crushed in the pattern of butchery.

The larger toll is the one usually left out. Virginia's population in 1619 was about 700. In the next three years 3,570 people arrived. After the 1622 attack killed 347, only 1,240 remained. The company's own critics asked what had happened to the other 2,683; the answer is disease, mostly typhoid and dysentery from the brackish water, in what Virginians called the "summer seasoning" — the first summer, which killed most newcomers.

What saved the colony was not gold but a weed. John Rolfe tried tobacco in 1612 with seed probably from Trinidad; tasters found it "smoked pleasant, sweete and strong". Exports went from 20,000 pounds in 1617 to about 1.5 million pounds in 1629. Before that, the colonists had tried silk, glass, lumber, sassafras, pitch, tar and soap ash, all without profit. Tobacco worked, and it worked because it was labour-intensive, which created the demand for land and servants that shaped everything that followed.

The company did not survive its own failures. A royal commission investigated after 1622, and on 24 May 1624 the Crown revoked the charter and took direct control. Virginia became a crown colony, and the company's experiment in corporate colonisation was over.

Why did Plymouth matter?

Because it made a government out of a navigational error. The Mayflower left Plymouth in September 1620 with 102 passengers — Separatists from Leiden and a larger group of strangers — and made landfall at Cape Cod on 11 November, well north of the Hudson valley where their patent allowed them to settle. With no legal authority where they were, 41 adult men signed a compact before landing:

"Covenant and Combine ourselves together in a Civil Body Politic, for our better ordering and preservation … and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute and frame such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices … unto which we promise all due submission and obedience."

The original does not survive; it first appeared in Mourt's Relation, and the signatory list was added by Nathaniel Morton in 1669. The famous document exists because of a mistake about where the ship was. That is not a debunking — it is the point: English colonial government began as an emergency improvisation by people who had lost their charter.

Roughly half the passengers died that first winter, of "a general sickness" of colds, coughs and fevers. They lived aboard ship into the spring, rowing ashore to build by day, and the Mayflower left for England in April 1621.

What was Massachusetts Bay?

A corporate charter that behaved like a state. The Massachusetts Bay Company received its charter in 1629, and its leaders made the decisive move of carrying the charter itself to New England, so that the company's general court became the colony's legislature and the company's governor its governor. John Winthrop, elected governor, preached aboard ship — probably, though not certainly, the Arbella — that the community would be "as a Citty vpon a Hill", with the eyes of the world upon it. That line is usually quoted as a boast. In the sermon it is a warning: if the community broke its covenant with God, the failure would be public and shameful.

The Great Migration of 1630–40 carried perhaps 20,000 people to New England, most of them in family groups, which is why New England's population grew naturally while the Chesapeake's died and was replaced. The contrast mattered: by 1700 New England had a home-grown population, and the Chesapeake still depended on immigration.

Which were the thirteen colonies?

They were founded over 125 years, under three different legal models, and for different reasons.

The types mattered. A royal colony was governed by a governor appointed by the Crown, with an elected assembly and a council. A proprietary colony was granted to a lord or a family, who appointed the governor and kept the quitrents; Maryland and Pennsylvania were the great examples. A corporate colony governed itself under a charter held by a company or, in Rhode Island's and Connecticut's case, by the settlers themselves. Every one of them had an assembly, and every assembly claimed the "rights of Englishmen" — the phrase that would eventually undo the empire.

Who came, and who was brought?

The Chesapeake was settled by young men under contract. The headright system, described in the company's Great Charter of 1618, gave 50 acres to anyone who paid to transport a new immigrant, and 100 acres to planters already in the colony. The mechanism aligned three interests: the planter got land and labour, the merchant got a saleable contract, and the company shed the cost. Headrights were bought and sold like shares.

Between 1630 and 1680 about 75,000 people emigrated to the Chesapeake, and about 50,000 of them were indentured servants — two-thirds, not the "three-quarters" that one Encyclopedia Virginia page also says. They served four to seven years, children longer, and they died in extraordinary numbers: David Pieterson DeVries, a Dutch visitor in 1633, said immigrants died "like cats and dogs". Among servants in the 1630s the sex ratio was six men to one woman.

Africans were first recorded in Virginia in 1619. Their legal status took decades to harden, and the decisive step was a statute: the Virginia assembly's Act XII of 1662, which provided that children inherited the condition of their mother — so that a child of an enslaved woman was born enslaved, whatever the father's status. That single clause converted a labour system into a hereditary caste, and it was copied across the English Atlantic.

How did the colonies make money?

Four regional economies, each shaped by soil and climate.

New England had thin soil and a short season. Its farms fed their own families and little more; the money came from the sea — cod and mackerel, whale oil, and above all shipping. New England built and sailed the ships that carried other colonies' tobacco and sugar, which is why the Navigation Acts' clause admitting colonial-built vessels mattered so much to Massachusetts. The region also exported timber, potash and, increasingly, provisions to the Caribbean.

The middle colonies — New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware — grew wheat, rye and barley on better land and became the breadbasket of the Atlantic system, shipping flour to the West Indies and southern Europe. Philadelphia and New York grew as ports on that trade.

The Chesapeake grew tobacco and almost nothing else. Tobacco exhausted soil in three or four crops, which pushed planters inland onto Indigenous land and created the endless demand for fresh land and fresh labour. Maryland and Virginia together shipped tens of millions of pounds a year by the 1700s.

The Carolinas and Georgia grew rice on the coastal lowlands, a crop that required large gangs of enslaved workers and a knowledge of water control that West African captives brought with them. Rice was established by 1690 but became the major export only after 1700; before 1720, naval stores — tar, pitch and turpentine — and the Indian slave trade paid better. Indigo followed in the 1740s.

How were the colonies governed?

By charter, and then increasingly by department. A charter was a royal grant that created a corporation with defined territory and powers; early Virginia's two-council structure, Maryland's palatinate powers and Massachusetts's self-governing corporation were all variations on the same legal instrument.

The first representative assembly in English North America met at Jamestown from 30 July to 4 August 1619. It rested not on the 1612 charter — whose "Court and Assembly" was the company's London court — but on the company's instructions of 3 December 1618 to establish "one equal and uniform government over all Virginia". That distinction matters because the company's own charter did not create a colonial legislature; the instructions did.

Crown control grew in stages. The 1624 revocation destroyed the Virginia Company. The Dominion of New England (1686–89) tried to consolidate the northern colonies under a single governor, Edmund Andros, and collapsed in a Boston rising in April 1689. After 1689 the apparatus became permanent: a Board of Trade from 1696, royal governors with written instructions, and the Privy Council's review of colonial laws. The empire was not administered by a ministry but by a patchwork of departments, governors and interest groups — which is why enforcement was always the weak point.

How did the empire treat Catholics and dissenters?

Badly in England, unevenly in America — and the unevenness is one of the colonies' most important features.

Maryland was founded in 1634 by Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, as a proprietary colony where Catholics could worship without persecution, and its Toleration Act of 1649 guaranteed freedom of worship to all Christians who believed in the Trinity. It was a real protection and a narrow one: it did not extend to Jews or Unitarians, and it was repealed after the Glorious Revolution, when Maryland's Catholics lost the right to hold office.

Rhode Island was the most radical experiment. Roger Williams, expelled from Massachusetts in 1635 over the relationship between church and state, founded Providence in 1636 on the principle that the civil magistrate had no authority over conscience. Its 1663 charter guaranteed "full liberty in religious concernments" — the first English colonial charter to do so.

Pennsylvania went further in practice. William Penn's 1681 grant was a proprietary colony built as a "holy experiment" for the Society of Friends, and its Frame of Government provided for an elected assembly, trial by jury, and freedom of worship for all who believed in God. Quakers, Mennonites, Lutherans, Presbyterians and Jews settled there in numbers.

Massachusetts was the counter-case: a Puritan commonwealth that banished Baptists, Quakers and Anglicans, and executed four Quakers between 1659 and 1661. The colony's 1691 charter, imposed by the Crown, replaced the corporate charter with a royal one and required toleration — a punishment disguised as a constitutional settlement.

What did the Navigation Acts do?

They turned the colonies into a captive market and a captive supplier, in four statutes and one enforcement act.

The 1651 ordinance, passed by the Commonwealth, required that goods from Asia, Africa or America — "as well of the English Plantations as others" — be carried in English or colonial ships with English masters and crews. It was aimed at the Dutch carrying trade, and it put the colonies inside the system from the start.

The 1660 Act was the charter of the commercial empire. Its shipping rule admitted not only English ships but "such as are of the built of, and belonging to any of the said Lands Islands Plantations" — so colonial-built, colonial-owned ships qualified, which is why New England shipbuilding boomed under the Acts. Its enumeration clause (section XVIII, in force 1 April 1661) listed sugar, tobacco, cotton wool, indigo, ginger, fustic and other dyeing woods, which had to be shipped to England or to another English plantation. Its bond clause (section XIX) required a bond of £1,000 or £2,000 that enumerated goods would be landed in England.

The 1663 Staple Act (section IV, in force 25 March 1664) closed the other direction: European goods bound for the colonies had to be shipped from England, which made London the entrepôt for colonial consumption. The chapter opens with corn, which is why careless summaries quote the wrong clauses.

The 1673 Act closed the inter-colonial loophole. Since 1660, enumerated goods could legally travel from one plantation to another; 1673 imposed a duty payable in the colony on any such cargo for which no bond had been given. That is the act that put a customs service inside America.

The 1696 enforcement statute required proprietary governors to be approved by the Crown and created Vice-Admiralty courts that tried trade cases without a jury — the detail that mattered, because colonial juries would not convict.

And "salutary neglect"? The phrase is Edmund Burke's, in his 1775 speech on conciliation: the colonies grew "through a wise and salutary neglect". He was describing the past, in an argument for conciliation, and the documents show the opposite of neglect in principle. What was neglected was enforcement — at three thousand miles, against juries, assemblies and governors who were the colonists' neighbours.

What did ordinary life look like?

For most colonists, short and rural. Nine in ten lived on farms or in villages of a few hundred people, in houses of timber frame with wattle-and-daub or clapboard walls, a thatched or shingled roof, a central hearth, and few rooms. Brick and stone came later, and only in the Chesapeake and the towns. Furniture was a table, benches, a chest and beds of straw; pewter and earthenware rather than porcelain.

The diet was maize, pork, beef, fish, cider and beer, with wheat bread in the middle colonies and rice in the Carolinas. New Englanders ate more meat and less bread than the English poor; Chesapeake settlers ate maize porridge and salted pork, and drank cider and rum. Everyone drank alcohol because water was unsafe.

Health was the great divide. New England's cold climate and dispersed settlement made it the healthiest region in the English Atlantic: families were large, life expectancy was long, and the population grew without immigration. The Chesapeake was the opposite — the "seasoning" killed newcomers, and a man who survived to thirty might still bury two wives. In the Caribbean, as Richard Dunn showed, deaths exceeded baptisms among every social group, which is why Barbados needed a constant supply of new people.

Literacy followed religion and geography. New England, where every town was required to support a school and reading the Bible was the point of literacy, had the highest rates in the English world; the Chesapeake and the Caribbean had the lowest, and women's literacy lagged everywhere. There were no hospitals, few doctors trained in medicine, and no police; order came from the parish, the county court, the militia and the church.

What did the empire cost the Powhatan?

Everything. The Virginia colony sat inside the paramount chiefdom of Wahunsenacawh, whose authority ran across some 8,000 square miles and 30 communities with nearly 15,000 people. The first war (1609–14) ended with Pocahontas's capture and her marriage to Rolfe in April 1614, which bought "some years of peace and prosperity". She died at Gravesend in 1617.

On 22 March 1622 Opechancanough struck. The Company's own account, published the same year by its secretary Edward Waterhouse, ends its roll of the dead: "The whole number is 347." Against a population of about 1,240 that is 28 per cent — nearer a third than the quarter some modern accounts give. The attacks were not random: twenty of the twenty-four fell on the upriver settlements that had most directly intruded on the core Powhatan nations.

Waterhouse's response is the empire's logic of dispossession in its own words:

"our hands which before were tied with gentleness and fair usage, are now set at liberty by the treacherous violence of the Savages … we … may now by right of Warre, and law of Nations, invade the Country, and destroy them who sought to destroy us: whereby we shall enjoy their cultivated places, turning the laborious Mattocke into the victorious Sword … and enjoying the fruits of others labours."

A ten-year war of attrition followed, aimed at food supplies. Opechancanough attacked again in April 1644, killing perhaps 400 — but against 8,000 settlers, that was 5 per cent, not 28. He was captured in 1646 and shot in the back at Jamestown by a guard, against orders.

The treaty of October 1646 is the foundation of Virginia Indian law, and it is worth reading closely. Necotowance acknowledged that he held his kingdom "from the King's Ma'tie of England", with successors confirmed by the governor, and paid "twenty beaver skins att the goeing away of Geese yearely" as tribute. Indians might hunt north of the York; they must "leave free that tract of land betweene Yorke river and James river … to the English to inhabitt on", on pain of death for any Indian who came within it — "and it shall be lawfull for any person to kill any such Indian". Messengers had to wear a coat of striped cloth as a badge. Article 6 made it a felony, without benefit of clergy, for an English person to shelter an Indian inside the line. "Treaty" in Virginia meant subordination, not agreement between equals.

How did the colonies take Indigenous land?

By paperwork as much as by war. The headright system turned the importation of a servant into a claim on 50 acres, and because the claim was staked wherever the surveyor could reach, it pushed settlement inland into precisely the country the Powhatan and the Wampanoag used. A patent did not need to be honest to be legal.

The 1677 Treaty of Middle Plantation shows both faces of the system. Negotiated after Bacon's Rebellion by the royal commissioners with the Pamunkey queen Cockacoeske, it confirmed the Indian kings' and queens' lands "by Patent under the Seal of this His Majesties Colony", which in practice created the first reservations; it required no English settlement within three miles of an Indian town; and its preamble blamed the recent war on "the Violent Intrusions of divers English into their Lands". It also made those rulers subject to the Crown, required the annual tribute of twenty beaver skins, and recorded the signatures as given "upon their Knees".

Both things were true at once. Middle Plantation protected Native land in law and subjected Native polity to English sovereignty, and the three-mile rule was widely ignored. The treaty's annual tribute is still presented to the governor of Virginia by Mattaponi and Pamunkey representatives — one of the oldest continuously observed obligations in American public life.

What happened in New England?

Two wars that broke Indigenous power and sold the survivors.

The Pequot War (1636–38) turned on a single morning. On 26 May 1637 an allied force of about 77 English, 100 Mohegans and River Indians and some 300 Narragansett and Niantic attacked the fortified village at Mistick. The English companies stormed the two entrances and fired the fort; Mason's 22 men took nearly 50 per cent casualties in fifteen or twenty minutes, and the English then "indiscriminately killed all fleeing Natives". The Pequot lost 400 dead at the fort and 400–500 across the campaign — perhaps half their fighting men. The English lost two dead and twenty wounded.

What followed is usually left out. About 250 captives were distributed to Connecticut and Massachusetts towns as servants; seventeen women and children were shipped from Boston to the Atlantic islands; the Pequot Museum records survivors sold into slavery in Nevis, Bermuda and Providence Island. The 1638 Tripartite Treaty made the English "sachems" of the region and assigned remaining captives to the Mohegan and Narragansett. Kill, divide, enslave, inherit: that sequence became the template.

King Philip's War (1675–76) was worse. It began with the hanging of three Wampanoag men and the attack on Swansea, and it spread across New England. In December 1675 a force of about 1,000 from Massachusetts, Plymouth and Hartford invaded Rhode Island — violating its charter — and attacked the Narragansett winter settlement in the Great Swamp Fight, killing almost 700 men, women and children. Metacom was killed in August 1676; the war continued in the north to 1678.

The casualty figures are disputed, and one common version is arithmetically impossible. Jill Lepore's estimate is that the English lost "one out of every ten"; Robert Cray's is more than 2,500 dead, but his accompanying "perhaps 30%" cannot be right against a population of about 50,000. What can be said safely is that the war killed a larger share of New England's population than any other war in its history, and that Native losses were far higher — perhaps 10 to 25 per cent of the Native population, with hundreds or thousands enslaved.

Deer Island is the episode that shows the war was also a policy of removal. Five months in, the colonists interned 500 to 1,100 Christianised Indians on an island in Boston harbour; "very few survived" starvation and exposure, and an unknown number were smuggled off and sold in the West Indies or Tangier.

What was Bacon's Rebellion?

The moment the Chesapeake's labour system showed its political teeth. In 1676 Nathaniel Bacon, a recent immigrant and council member, raised a force against the Virginian government over its Indian policy — demanding a war of extermination against all Indians, friendly or not, and blaming Governor Berkeley for protecting them. Bacon's men burned Jamestown in September. Bacon died of dysentery in October, and the rebellion collapsed.

Its consequences were structural. The rebellion had been made by poor white freedmen and servants as much as by Bacon's ambition, and the planter elite drew the lesson: a labour force of armed white men with expired indenture contracts was dangerous. Over the next decades the Chesapeake shifted to enslaved Africans, whose condition was hereditary and who could be policed by law rather than by political concession. Bacon's Rebellion is one of the reasons American racial slavery took the form it did.

Did the colonies run on slavery?

Yes, and not only in the South. The English Atlantic was a slavery system with colonies attached.

Barbados is the clearest case. Its black population rose from about 1,000 in 1645 to over 33,000 by the early 1670s, as sugar replaced tobacco and smallholders gave way to plantations. Its 1661 slave code was the founding code of the Anglo-Atlantic world: twenty-three clauses, copied in South Carolina, Jamaica, St Kitts, St Lucia, St Vincent and Antigua. Its preamble called enslaved Africans "an heathenish brutish & an unsertain dangerous kind of people" while claiming the law protected them from "the Arbitrary cruel and outrageous wills of every evil disposed person" — dehumanise and protect in the same breath. Under clause 20, a person who killed a slave "under punishment of his Master" was not accountable to any law; a wilful killing carried a fine of 3,000 pounds of muscovado sugar. It was a property offence, not a homicide.

Providence Island shows that this was not a southern peculiarity. The same Puritan network that founded Massachusetts Bay founded a colony off Nicaragua in 1630, expecting a model godly society; within a decade it was running large-scale slavery and privateering, and the Spanish destroyed it in 1641.

And the mainland's fastest-growing slave economy was built on Native people. Historians estimate that 30,000 to 50,000 Native Americans were taken as slaves out of the South between 1670 and 1715, with perhaps 40,000 shipped from Charles Town alone between 1680 and 1720 — roughly 700 to 1,100 people a year for four decades. The trade consumed its own partners: the Westo in 1680, the Yaddo in 1704, the Yamasee in 1715. By the 1720s the colony had shifted to African labour, not from morality but because African supply was more reliable and Native resistance had become dangerous.

When did "English" become "British"?

On 1 May 1707, when the Acts of Union joined England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain. The union's Article IV opened English trade and navigation to Scottish ships and subjects, which mattered commercially: Scotland had been outside the definition of "English" shipping since 1660, and Scottish merchants had been trading with the colonies in defiance of the Acts. After 1707 there was no English empire in law — only a British one.

The colonies noticed. Their charters and assemblies continued, but the sovereign who granted them was now the monarch of Great Britain, and the commercial system they operated under was administered from London as a British system. The thirteen colonies that declared independence in 1776 were the legal descendants of English charters, governing themselves in a British empire.

Common myths about the English colonies

Timeline of the English colonies

What the map shows next

At 1700 on the map the English colonies run from Maine to the Carolinas, New France holds the St Lawrence and the Mississippi, and the Haudenosaunee dominate the interior.

At 1782 on the map the thirteen colonies are the United States of America, and the empire that began at St John's in 1583 has been divided by the war that its own assemblies' claims made possible.