[Colonial Currents]

This essay focuses on a handful of issues pertinent to studying the American colonies. The essay begins with a brief look at the three forms of British colonial government: proprietary, provincial, and royal colonies. Understanding the economic theory of mercantilism, and its "fleshing out" in the Navigation Acts, sheds light on Great Britain's relationship with her colonies and frames much colonial dissent. Emigration to the colonies is addressed, breaking the myth that Englanders emigrated to the colonies to have religious freedom (most colonies offered less religious freedom than England!) and showing how the reasons people emigrated to the colonies are many: to escape religious persecution, to evade European conflicts, and to wiggle free of European poverty. In a sense England viewed the colonies as a sort of "penal colony": England's jails were overflowing, so they began sending the unwanted and the criminals to America to labor on the plantations to turn England a profit (the "Sons of Liberty" so renown in American lore were probably comprised mostly of ex-convicts). The last part of the essay examines the emergence of the slave trade, the growth of southern slavery in the Chesapeake and "deep south," and the evolution of racism not as a cause of African slavery but, rather, as one of slavery's byproducts. 

Colonial Currents