The start of the European colonization of the Americas is typically dated to 1492, although there was at least one earlier colonization effort. The first known Europeans The European peoples are the various nations and ethnic groups of Europe. European ethnology is the field of anthropology focusing on Europe to reach the Americas The Americas, or America, are lands in the Western hemisphere, also known as the New World, comprising the continents of North America and South America with their associated islands and regions. America may be ambiguous in English, as it is more commonly used to refer to the United States of America. The Americas cover 8.3% of the Earth's total were the Vikings The term Viking is customarily used to refer to the Norse (Scandinavian) explorers, warriors, merchants, and pirates who raided, traded, and settled in wide areas of Europe and the North Atlantic islands from the late eighth to the mid-eleventh century. These Norsemen used their famed longships to travel as far east as Constantinople and the Volga (Norse Norsemen is used to refer to the group of people as a whole who speak one of the North Germanic languages as their native language) during the 11th century, who established several colonies The Norse colonization of the Americas began as early as the 10th century, when Norse sailors explored and settled areas of the North Atlantic, including the northeastern fringes of North America in Greenland b. ^ Greenland, the Faeroes and Iceland were formally Norwegian possessions until 1814 despite 400 years of Danish monarchy beforehand and one short-lived settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows L'Anse aux Meadows is an archaeological site on the northernmost tip of the island of Newfoundland in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Discovered in 1960, it is the only known site of a Norse village in North America outside of Greenland. The site remains the only widely-accepted instance of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact, (51°N) in the area the Norse called Vinland There is a consensus among scholars that the Vikings did reach North America, approximately five centuries prior to the voyages of Christopher Columbus. In 1960 archaeological evidence of the only known Norse settlement in North America was found at L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of the island of Newfoundland, in what is now the Canadian, present day Newfoundland Newfoundland (pronounced /ˈnjuːfənlænd/ ( listen); French: Terre-Neuve, Irish: Talamh an Éisc) is a large Canadian island 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) off the east coast of North America, and the most populous part of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Settlements in Greenland The history of Greenland is the history of life under extreme Arctic conditions: an ice cap currently covers about 80 percent of the island, largely restricting human activity to the coasts survived for several centuries, during which time the Greenland Norse and the Inuit The Inuit are a group of culturally similar indigenous peoples inhabiting the Arctic regions of Canada, Denmark, Russia and the United States. The Inuit language is grouped under Eskimo-Aleut languages. An Inuk is an Inuit man or person people experienced mostly hostile contact. By the end of the 15th century, the Norse Greenland settlements had collapsed[1].

In 1492, a Spanish expedition headed by Christopher Columbus Christopher Columbus was an Italian navigator, colonizer, and explorer whose voyages across the Atlantic Ocean led to general European awareness of the American continents in the Western Hemisphere. With his four voyages of exploration and several attempts at establishing a settlement on the island of Hispaniola, all funded by Isabella I of reached the Americas, after which European exploration and colonization rapidly expanded, at first through much of the Caribbean Sea The Caribbean Sea is a sea of the Atlantic Ocean situated in the tropics of the Western hemisphere. It is bounded to the southwest by the Central American countries of Panama, to the west by Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico, to the north by The Greater Antilles , and to the east by the Lesser Antilles region (including the islands of Hispaniola Hispaniola is a major island in the Caribbean, containing the two sovereign states of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The island is located between the islands of Cuba to the west, and Puerto Rico to the east, directly within the hurricane belt. Hispaniola is perhaps most famous as the site of the first European colonies in the New World,, Puerto Rico Puerto Rico , officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (Spanish: "Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico" — literally Associated Free State of Puerto Rico), is an unincorporated territory of the United States, located in the northeastern Caribbean Sea, east of the Dominican Republic and west of the Virgin Islands and Cuba The Republic of Cuba (pronounced /ˈkjuːbə/ ; Spanish: República de Cuba, pronounced [reˈpuβlika ðe ˈkuβa] ( listen)) is an island country in the Caribbean. It consists of the island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second) and, since the early 16th century, through the mainlands of both North North America is the northern continent of the Americas, situated in the Earth's northern hemisphere and in the western hemisphere. It is bordered on the north by the Arctic Ocean, on the east by the North Atlantic Ocean, on the southeast by the Caribbean Sea, and on the west by the North Pacific Ocean; South America lies to the southeast and South South America is the southern continent of America, situated in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east by the Atlantic Ocean; North America and the Caribbean Sea lie to the northwest America. In 1497, John Cabot Giovanni Caboto was an Italian navigator and explorer whose 1497 discovery of North America is commonly held to be the first European voyage to the continent since Norse exploration of the Americas in the early eleventh century. The official position of the Canadian and United Kingdom governments is that he landed on the island of Newfoundland was the first European to land in North America. A year later, Columbus reached the South American mainland. Eventually, the entire Western Hemisphere The Western Hemisphere, also Western hemisphere or western hemisphere, is a geographical term for the half of the Earth that lies west of the Prime Meridian , the other half being the eastern hemisphere. It is also used to specifically refer to the Americas (or the New World) and adjacent waters, while excluding other territories that lie would come under the domination of European nations, leading to profound changes to its landscape, population, and plant and animal life. In the 19th century alone over 50 million people left Europe for the Americas.[2] The post-1492 era is known as the period of the Columbian Exchange The Columbian Exchange was a dramatically widespread exchange of animal, plants, culture , communicable diseases, and ideas between the Eastern and Western hemispheres. It was one of the most significant events concerning ecology, agriculture, and culture in all of human history. Christopher Columbus' first voyage to the Americas in 1492 launched.

Contents

Early conquests, claims, and colonies

Territories in the Americas colonized or claimed by a European great power A great power is a nation or state that has the ability to exert its influence on a global scale. Great powers characteristically possess economic, military, diplomatic, and cultural strength, which may cause other smaller nations to consider the opinions of great powers before taking actions of their own. International relations theorists have in 1750.
Animated Maps: North America territorial sovereignty 1750-present Central America & Caribbean sovereignty 1700-present. South America territorial sovereignty 1700-present.

The first conquests were made by the Spanish Territories of the Portuguese empire during the Iberian Union . Territories lost before or due to the Treaties of Utrecht-Baden (1713–1714). Territories lost before or during the Spanish American wars of independence (1811–1828). Territories lost following the Spanish-American War (1898–1899). Territories granted independence during the and the Portuguese It was also the longest-lived of the modern European colonial empires, spanning almost six centuries, from the capture of Ceuta in 1415 to the handover of Macau in 1999. In the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas The Treaty of Tordesillas , signed at Tordesillas (now in Valladolid province, Spain), 7 June 1494, divided the newly discovered lands outside Europe between Spain and Portugal along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands (off the west coast of Africa). This line of demarcation was about halfway between the Cape Verde Islands (, ratified by the Pope The pope (from Latin: papa; from Greek: πάππας , an affectionate word for father) is the Bishop of Rome, a position that makes him the leader of the worldwide Catholic Church (that is, the Latin Rite and the Eastern Catholic Churches in full communion with the see of Rome). The current office-holder is Pope Benedict XVI, who was elected in a, these two kingdoms divided the entire non-European world between themselves, with a line drawn through South America. Based on this Treaty, and the claims by Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa to all lands touching the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish rapidly conquered territory, with Hernan Cortes Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro, 1st Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca was a Spanish conquistador who led an expedition that caused the fall of the Aztec empire and brought large portions of mainland Mexico under the King of Castile, in the early 16th century. Cortés was part of the generation of Spanish colonizers that began the first phase of overthrowing the Aztec The Aztec people were certain ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those groups who spoke the Nahuatl language and who dominated large parts of Mesoamerica in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, a period referred to as the late post-classic period in Mesoamerican chronology and Francisco Pizarro Francisco Pizarro González, 1st Marqués de los Atabillos was a Spanish conquistador, conqueror of the Incan Empire and founder of Lima, the modern-day capital of Peru. Pizarro was born in Trujillo, Extremadura, modern Spain. Sources differ in the birth year they assign to him: 1471, 1475–1478, or unknown. He was an illegitimate son of Gonzalo conquering the Inca Empire The Inca Empire, or Inka Empire, was the largest empire in pre-Columbian America. The administrative, political and military center of the empire was located in Cusco in modern-day Peru. The Inca civilization arose from the highlands of Peru sometime in the early 13th century. From 1438 to 1533, the Incas used a variety of methods, from conquest. As a result, they gained control of much of western South America, Central America and Mexico by the mid-16th century, in addition to its earlier Caribbean conquests. Over this same timeframe, Portugal conquered much of eastern South America, naming it Brazil Brazil (pronounced /brəˈzɪl/ ; Portuguese: Brasil, IPA: [bɾaˈziw]), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: República Federativa do Brasil, listen (help·info)), is the largest country in South America and the only Portuguese-speaking country in the Americas. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical.

Other European nations soon disputed the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas, which they had not negotiated. England The Kingdom of England was, from 927 to 1707, a sovereign state to the northwest of continental Europe. At its height, the Kingdom of England spanned the southern two-thirds of the island of Great Britain and several smaller outlying islands; what today comprises the legal jurisdiction of England and Wales. It had a land border with the Kingdom of and France The Ancien Régime, a French term rendered in English as “Old Rule,” “Old Kingdom,” or simply “Old Regime,” refers primarily to the aristocratic, social and political system established in France from the 15th century to the 18th century under the late Valois and Bourbon dynasties. The administrative and social structures of the Ancien attempted to plant colonies in the Americas in the 16th century, but these met with failure. However, in the following century, the two kingdoms, along with the Dutch Republic The Dutch Republic — officially known as the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands , the Republic of the United Netherlands, or the Republic of the Seven United Provinces (Republiek der Zeven Verenigde Provinciën) — was a republic in Europe existing from 1581 to 1795, preceding the modern Kingdom of the Netherlands. Alternative names, succeeded in establishing permanent colonies. Some of these were on Caribbean islands, which had often already been conquered by the Spanish or depopulated by disease, while others were in eastern North America, which had not been colonized by Spain north of Florida.

Early European possessions in North America included Spanish Florida Spanish Florida refers to the Spanish colony of Florida, a province of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Originally extending over what is now the southeastern United States, but with no defined boundaries, la Florida was a minor component of the Spanish Empire. Wide-ranging expeditions were mounted into the hinterland during the 16th century, but, the English colonies of Virginia The Colony of Virginia was the English colony in British America that existed briefly during the 16th century, and then continuously from 1607 until the American Revolution (as a British colony after 1707). The name Virginia was first applied by Sir Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth I in 1584. After the English Civil War in the mid 17th century, (with its North Atlantic Categories: Lists of islands | Islands of the Atlantic Ocean off-shoot, The Somers Isles Bermuda is a British overseas territory in the North Atlantic Ocean. Located off the east coast of the United States, its nearest landmass is Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, about 1,030 kilometres (640 mi) to the west-northwest. It is about 1,373 kilometres (853 mi) south of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and 1,770 kilometres (1,100 mi) northeast of) and New England The New England Colonies of British America included colonies of Massachusetts Bay Colony, Connecticut Colony, Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations and Province of New Hampshire. They were part of the Thirteen Colonies including the Middle Colonies and the Southern Colonies. These were early colonies of what would later be the states, the French colonies of Acadia Acadia was the name given to lands in a portion of the French colonial empire in northeastern North America that included parts of eastern Quebec, the Maritime provinces, and modern-day New England, stretching as far south as Philadelphia. People living in Acadia, and sometimes former residents and their descendants, are called Acadians and Canada Canada was the name of the French colony that once stretched along the St. Lawrence River; the other colonies of New France were Acadia, Louisiana and Newfoundland. Canada, the most developed colony of New France, was divided into three districts, each with its own government: Québec, Trois-Rivières, and Montréal. The governor of the district, the Swedish colony of New Sweden New Sweden was a Swedish colony along the Delaware River on the Mid-Atlantic coast of North America from 1638 to 1655. Fort Christina, now in Wilmington, Delaware, was the first settlement. New Sweden included parts of the present-day American states of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Along with Swedes and Finns, a number of the, and the Dutch New Netherland New Netherland, or Nieuw-Nederland in Dutch, was the seventeenth-century colonial province on the East Coast of North America of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. The claimed territories were the lands from the Delmarva Peninsula to extreme southwestern Cape Cod. The settled areas are now part of the Mid-Atlantic States of New York,. In the 18th century, Denmark–Norway revived its former colonies in Greenland, while the Russian Empire The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia, and the predecessor of the Soviet Union. It was the second largest contiguous empire in world history, surpassed only by the Mongol Empire, and the third largest empire behind the British Empire and the Mongol gained a foothold in Alaska.

As more nations gained an interest in the colonization of the Americas, competition for territory became increasingly fierce. Colonists often faced the threat of attacks from neighboring colonies, as well as from indigenous tribes and pirates The era of piracy in the Caribbean Sea began in the 16th century and died out in the 1720s after the navies of the nations of Western Europe with colonies in the Caribbean began combating pirates. The period during which pirates were most successful was from the 1690s until the 1730s. Piracy flourished in the Caribbean because of British seaports.

Early state-sponsored colonists

Further information: Portugal in the Age of Discovery Portuguese long shoreline, with many harbours and rivers flowing westward to the Atlantic ocean was the ideal environment to raise generations of adventurous seamen. As a seafaring people in the south-westernmost region of Europe, the Portuguese became natural leaders of exploration during the Middle Ages. Faced with the options of either, Spanish colonization of the Americas Beginning with the 1492 arrival of Christopher Columbus, over nearly four centuries the Spanish Empire would expand across: most of present day Central America, the Caribbean islands, and Mexico; much of the rest of North America including the Southwestern, Southern coastal, and California Pacific Coast regions of the United States; and though, and First European colonization wave (15th century–19th century)

The first phase of European activity in the Americas began with the Atlantic Ocean crossings of Christopher Columbus (1492–1504), sponsored by Spain, whose original attempt was to find a new route to India and China, known as "the Indies The Indies is a term that has been used to describe the lands of South and Southeast Asia, occupying all of the present India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and also Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Brunei, Singapore, the Philippines, East Timor, Malaysia and Indonesia. In a more restricted sense, the Indies can." He was followed by other explorers such as John Cabot Giovanni Caboto was an Italian navigator and explorer whose 1497 discovery of North America is commonly held to be the first European voyage to the continent since Norse exploration of the Americas in the early eleventh century. The official position of the Canadian and United Kingdom governments is that he landed on the island of Newfoundland, who reached Newfoundland and was sponsored by England. Pedro Álvares Cabral Pedro Álvares Cabral (ca. 1468 – ca. 1520; Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈpeðɾʊ ˈaɫvɐɾɨʃ kɐˈβɾaɫ] or [ˈpedɾu ˈawvaɾiʃ kaˈbɾaw] (Brazilian)) was a Portuguese navigator and explorer. Cabral is generally regarded as the European discoverer of Brazil reached Brazil and claimed it for Portugal. Amerigo Vespucci, working for Portugal in voyages from 1497 to 1513, established that Columbus had reached a new set of continents. Cartographers still use a Latinized version of his first name, America, for the two continents. Other explorers included Giovanni da Verrazzano, sponsored by France; the Portuguese João Vaz Corte-Real in Newfoundland; and Samuel de Champlain (1567–1635) who explored Canada. In 1513, Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and led the first European expedition to see the Pacific Ocean from the west coast of the New World. In an action with enduring historical import, Balboa claimed the Pacific Ocean and all the lands adjoining it for the Spanish Crown. It was 1517 before another expedition from Cuba visited Central America, landing on the coast of Yucatán in search of slaves.

Spanish and Portuguese Empires in the period of their personal union (1581-1640).

These explorations were followed, notably in the case of Spain, by a phase of conquest: The Spaniards, having just finished the Reconquista of Spain from Muslim rule, were the first to colonize the Americas, applying the same model of governing to the former Al-Andalus as to their territories of the New World. Ten years after Columbus's discovery, the administration of Hispaniola was given to Nicolás de Ovando of the Order of Alcántara, founded during the Reconquista. As in the Iberian Peninsula, the inhabitants of Hispaniola were given new landmasters, while religious orders handled the local administration. Progressively the encomienda system, which granted land to European settlers, was set in place.

A relatively small number of conquistadores conquered vast territories, aided by disease epidemics and divisions among native ethnic groups. Mexico was conquered by Hernán Cortés in 1519-1521, while the conquest of the Inca, by Francisco Pizarro, occurred from 1532-35.

Over the first century and a half after Columbus's voyages, the native population of the Americas plummeted by an estimated 80% (from around 50 million in 1492 to eight million in 1650[3]), mostly by outbreaks of Old World diseases but also by several massacres and forced labour (the mita was re-established in the old Inca Empire, and the tequitl – equivalent of the mita – in the Aztec Empire). The conquistadores replaced the native American oligarchies, in part through miscegenation with the local elites. In 1532, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor imposed a vice-king to Mexico, Antonio de Mendoza, in order to prevent Cortes' independantist drives, who definitively returned to Spain in 1540. Two years later, Charles V signed the New Laws (which replaced the Laws of Burgos of 1512) prohibiting slavery and the repartimientos, but also claiming as his own all the American lands and all of the autochthonous people as his own subjects.

When in May 1493, the Pope Alexander VI enacted the Inter caetera bull granting the new lands to the Kingdom of Spain, he requested in exchange an evangelization of the people. Thus, during Columbus's second voyage, Benedictine friars accompanied him, along with twelve other priests. As slavery was prohibited between Christians, and could only be imposed in non-Christian prisoners of war or on men already sold as slaves, the debate on Christianization was particularly acute during the 16th century. In 1537, the papal bull Sublimis Deus recognized that Native Americans possessed souls, thus prohibiting their enslavement, without putting an end to the debate. Some claimed that a native who had rebelled and then been captured could be enslaved nonetheless. Later, the Valladolid controversy opposed the Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas to another Dominican philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, the first one arguing that Native Americans were beings doted with souls, as all other human beings, while the latter argued to the contrary and justified their enslavement. The process of Christianization was at first violent: when the first Franciscans arrived in Mexico in 1524, they burned the places dedicated to pagan cult, alienating much of the local population[4]. In the 1530s, they began to adapt Christian practices to local customs, including the building of new churches on the sites of ancient places of worship, leading to a mix of Old World Christianity with local religions[4]. The Spanish Roman Catholic Church, needing the natives' labor and cooperation, evangelized in Quechua, Nahuatl, Guarani and other Native American languages, contributing to the expansion of these indigenous languages and equipping some of them with writing systems. One of the first primitive schools for Native Americans was founded by Fray Pedro de Gante in 1523.

To reward their troops, the Conquistadores often allotted Indian towns to their troops and officers. Black African slaves were introduced to substitute for Native American labor in some locations - most notably the West Indies, where the indigenous population was nearing extinction on many islands.

During this time, the Portuguese gradually switched from an initial plan of establishing trading posts to extensive colonization of what is now Brazil. They imported millions of slaves to run their plantations.

The Portuguese and Spanish royal governments expected to rule these settlements and collect at least 20% of all treasure found (the Quinto Real collected by the Casa de Contratación), in addition to collecting all the taxes they could. By the late 16th century American silver accounted for one-fifth of Spain's total budget.[5] In the 16th century perhaps 240,000 Europeans entered American ports.[6][7]

Economic immigrants

Inspired by the Spanish riches from colonies founded upon the conquest of the Aztecs, Incas, and other large Native American populations in the sixteenth century, the first Englishmen to settle permanently in America hoped for some of the same rich discoveries when they established their first permanent settlement in Jamestown, Virginia. They were sponsored by common stock companies such as the chartered Virginia Company (and its off-shoot, the Somers Isles Company) financed by wealthy Englishmen who understood the economic potential of this new land. The main purpose of this colony was the hope of finding gold or the possibility (or impossibility) of finding a passage through the Americas to the Indies. It took strong leaders, like John Smith, to convince the colonists of Jamestown that searching for gold was not taking care of their immediate needs for food and shelter and that "he who shall not work shall not eat." (A direction based on text from the New Testament.) The extremely high mortality rate was quite distressing and cause for despair among the colonists. Tobacco later became a cash crop, with the work of John Rolfe and others, for export and the sustaining economic driver of Virginia and nearby colonies like Maryland.

From the beginning of Virginia's settlements in 1587 until the 1680s, the main source of labour and a large portion of the immigrants were indentured servants looking for new life in the overseas colonies. During the 17th century, indentured servants constituted three-quarters of all European immigrants to the Chesapeake region. Most of the indentured servants were English farmers who had been pushed off their lands due to the expansion of livestock raising, the enclosure of land, and overcrowding in the countryside. This unfortunate turn of events served as a push for thousands of people (mostly single men) away from their situation in England. There was hope, however, as American landowners were in need of labourers and were willing to pay for a labourer’s passage to America if they served them for several years. By selling passage for five to seven years worth of work they could hope to start out on their own in America.

In the French colonial regions, the focus of economy was the fur trade with the natives. Farming was set up primarily to provide subsistence only, although cod and other fish of the Grand Banks were a major export and source of income for the French and many other European nations. The fur trade was also practiced by the Russians on the northwest coast of North America. After the French and Indian War, the British were ceded all French possessions in North America east of the Mississippi River, aside from the tiny islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon.

After 1840, the Irish arrived in large numbers, in part because of the famines of the 1840s. Mortality rates of 30% aboard the coffin ships were common.[8]

Religious immigration

Roman Catholics were the first major religious group to immigrate to the New World, as settlers in the colonies of Portugal and Spain (and later, France) were required to belong to that faith. English and Dutch colonies, on the other hand, tended to be more religiously diverse. Settlers to these colonies included Anglicans, Dutch Calvinists, English Puritans, English Catholics, Scottish Presbyterians, French Huguenots, German and Swedish Lutherans, as well as Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, Moravians and Jews of various nationalities.

Many groups of colonists came to the Americas searching for the right to practice their religion without persecution. The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century broke the unity of Western Christendom and led to the formation of numerous new religious sects, which often faced persecution by governmental authorities. In England, many people came to question the organization of the Church of England by the end of the sixteenth century. One of the primary manifestations of this was the Puritan movement, which sought to "purify" the existing Church of England of its many residual Catholic rites that they believed had no mention in the Bible.

A strong believer in the notion of rule by divine right, England's Charles I persecuted religious dissenters. Waves of repression led to the migration of about 20,000 Puritans to New England between 1629 and 1642, where they founded multiple colonies. Later in the century, the new Pennsylvania colony was given to William Penn in settlement of a debt the king owed his father. Its government was set up by William Penn in about 1682 to become primarily a refuge for persecuted English Quakers; but others were welcomed. Baptists, Quakers and German and Swiss Protestants flocked to Pennsylvania.

The lure of cheap land, religious freedom and the right to improve themselves with their own hand was very attractive to those who wished to escape from persecution and poverty.

Forced immigration

Main article: Atlantic slave trade

Slavery existed in the Americas, prior to the presence of Europeans, as the Natives often captured and held other tribes' members as captives.[9] Some of these captives were even forced to undergo human sacrifice under some tribes, such as the Aztecs. The Spanish followed with the enslavement of local aborigines in the Caribbean. As the native populations declined (mostly from European diseases, but also and significantly from forced exploitation and careless murder), they were often replaced by Africans imported through a large commercial slave trade. By the 18th century, the overwhelming number of black slaves was such that Native American slavery was less commonly used. Africans, who were taken aboard slave ships to the Americas, were primarily obtained from their African homelands by coastal tribes who captured and sold them. The high incidence of disease nearly always fatal to Europeans kept nearly all the slave capture activities confined to native African tribes. Rum, guns and gun powder were some of the major trade items exchanged for slaves. In all, approximately three to four hundred thousand black slaves streamed into the ports of Charleston, South Carolina and Newport, Rhode Island until about 1810. The total slave trade to islands in the Caribbean, Brazil, Mexico and to the United States is estimated to have involved 12 million Africans.[10][11] Of these, 5.4% (645,000) were brought to what is now the United States.[12] In addition to African slaves, poor Europeans were brought over in substantial numbers as indentured servants, particularly in the British Thirteen colonies.[13][14]

Disease and indigenous population loss

See also: Disease in colonial America

The European and Asian lifestyle included a long history of sharing close quarters with domesticated animals such as cows, pigs, sheep, goats, horses, and various domesticated fowl, which had resulted in epidemic diseases unknown in the Americas. Thus the large-scale contact with Europeans after 1492 introduced novel germs to the indigenous people of the Americas. Epidemics of smallpox (1518, 1521, 1525, 1558, 1589), typhus (1546), influenza (1558), diphtheria (1614) and measles (1618) swept ahead of initial European contact,[15][16] killing between 10 million and 20 million[17] people, up to 95% of the indigenous population of the Americas.[18][19][20] The cultural and political instability attending these losses appears to have been of substantial aid in the efforts of various colonists to seize the great wealth in land and resources of which indigenous societies had customarily made use.[21]

Such diseases yielded human mortality of an unquestionably enormous gravity and scale – and this has profoundly confused efforts to determine its full extent with any true precision. Estimates of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas vary tremendously.

Others have argued that significant variations in population size over pre-Columbian history are reason to view higher-end estimates with caution. Such estimates may reflect historical population maxima, while indigenous populations may have been at a level somewhat below these maxima or in a moment of decline in the period just prior to contact with Europeans. Indigenous populations hit their ultimate lows in most areas of the Americas in the early twentieth century; in a number of cases, growth has returned.[22]

The Requerimiento: The proclamation set by Spain to the Native Americans:

"We ask and require you to acknowledge the church as the ruler and superior of the whole world and the high priest called pope and in his name the king of Spain as lords of this land. If you submit we shall receive you in all love and charity and shall leave you, your wives and children and your lands free without servitude, but if you do not submit we shall powerfully enter into your country and shall make war against you, we shall take you and your wives and your children and shall make slaves of them and we shall take away your goods and shall do you all the harm and damage we can."

List of European colonies in the Americas

This section requires expansion.
British
Courland
Danish
Dutch
French (1655–1763)
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Kirsten Seaver,The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America, C.A.D.1000-1500, chapter Nine, Greenland 1450-1500, ISBN 978-0804731614
  2. ^ David Eltis Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic slave trade
  3. ^ "La catastrophe démographique" (The Demographic Catastrophe) in L'Histoire n°322, July-August 2007, p.17
  4. ^ a b "Espagnols-Indiens: le choc des civilisations", in L'Histoire n°322, July-August 2007, pp.14- 21 (interview with Christian Duverger, teacher at the EHESS)
  5. ^ "Conquest in the Americas". Archived from the original on 2009-10-31. http://www.webcitation.org/query?id=1257013228023117.
  6. ^ "The Columbian Mosaic in Colonial America" by James Axtell
  7. ^ The Spanish Colonial System, 1550-1800. Population Development
  8. ^
  9. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica's Guide to Black History
  10. ^ Ronald Segal (1995). The Black Diaspora: Five Centuries of the Black Experience Outside Africa. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. pp. 4. ISBN 0-374-11396-3. "It is now estimated that 11,863,000 slaves were shipped across the Atlantic. [Note in original: Paul E. Lovejoy, "The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Africa: A Review of the Literature," in Journal of African History 30 (1989), p. 368.] ... It is widely conceded that further revisions are more likely to be upward than downward."
  11. ^ "Quick guide: The slave trade". bbc.co.uk. March 15, 2007. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/6445941.stm. Retrieved 2007-11-23.
  12. ^ Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and David Eltis, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research, Harvard University. Based on "records for 27,233 voyages that set out to obtain slaves for the Americas". Stephen Behrendt (1999). "Transatlantic Slave Trade". Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. New York: Basic Civitas Books. ISBN 0-465-00071-1.
  13. ^ Indentured Servitude in Colonial America
  14. ^ The curse of Cromwell
  15. ^ ,American Indian Epidemics
  16. ^ Smallpox: Eradicating the Scourge
  17. ^ Mann, Charles C. (2005). 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Knopf. ISBN 1400032059. .
  18. ^ Smallpox's history in the world
  19. ^ The Story Of... Smallpox
  20. ^ Smallpox: The Disease That Destroyed Two Empires
  21. ^ 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (ISBN 1-4000-4006-X), Charles C. Mann, Knopf, 2005.
  22. ^ Thornton, p. xvii, 36.

References

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Categories: Colonization of the Americas | History of the Americas | History of colonialism | Colonialism | Native American genocide | History of the Thirteen Colonies

 

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A lot has been written lately on the intellectual roots of the European colonization of the Americas much at a high level of generality In this short and engaging book Ken MacMillan takes a close up view of a thin slice of the subject He limits his attention to England we hear of other parts of Europe only as competitors for control of the New World He ends

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