Chapter 3: Creating Anglo-America, 1660–1750

The English mercantile system, enforced through Navigation Acts, channeled colonial commerce toward the mother country while stimulating regional economies like New England's shipbuilding industry. The conquest of New Netherland and its transformation into New York redistributed land ownership, altered the legal status of women and free African inhabitants, and established the Covenant Chain as a crucial diplomatic alliance with Iroquois nations. Carolina's development centered on rice plantation agriculture and Indian enslavement, creating a wealthy planter class modeled on Barbadian sugar elites, while Pennsylvania under William Penn offered a contrasting vision of religious tolerance, equitable land distribution, and peaceful Native American relations through Quaker principles. The institutionalization of racial slavery emerged gradually in the Chesapeake as tobacco planters faced labor shortages, declining mortality rates, and legal transformations that bound African laborers and their descendants to perpetual servitude, culminating in Virginia's comprehensive 1705 slave code. Bacon's Rebellion exposed fissures between colonial elites and marginalized populations of freed servants and frontier settlers, inadvertently accelerating the turn toward African slavery as planters sought to prevent interracial rebellion. Multiple crises including King Philip's War, the Glorious Revolution's American reverberations, the Dominion of New England experiment, Leisler's Rebellion, and the Salem witch trials reflected anxieties about land rights, religious authority, and political legitimacy across disparate colonies. Population growth brought waves of German and Scots-Irish migrants seeking economic opportunity, while colonial cities like Philadelphia emerged as commercial centers fostering consumer culture and religious diversity. By mid-eighteenth century, colonial society had stratified into distinct classes marked by wealth concentration among Anglicized elites imitating English gentry culture, while enslaved people and impoverished settlers occupied subordinate positions, and women's economic roles increasingly narrowed to domestic management within growing households.