Spain

Spain’s overseas agenda emphasized the extraction of wealth, with secondary goals that included the relocation of armies, the conversion of indigenous peoples to Roman Catholicism, and the re-creation of the feudal social order to which the Spanish were accustomed. The first country to send large expeditions to the Americas, Spain focused its initial efforts on the conquest of the wealthy Aztec and Inca empires, which fell in 1521 and 1532, respectively. Immense quantities of precious metals were seized from these peoples and shipped to Spain; the initial influx of hard currency provided a period of fiscal relief, but the country suffered bankruptcy in the later 16th century and never fully recovered.

The conquest of the Americas also provided overseas work for the men who had fought in the Reconquista, thus limiting the damage they might have inflicted if left unemployed in Iberia. In lieu of pay or a pension, many conquistadors were provided with encomiendas, a form of vassal slavery in which a particular Indigenous population was granted to a Spaniard. The system alleviated demands on the treasury and also transplanted the Spanish social hierarchy to the colonies. Encomiendas were gradually supplanted by haciendas—landed estates or plantations. However, this legal nicety did little to change conditions for the Indigenous groups living under Spanish rule.

Having vanquished the Indigenous nations of Mexico and Peru, the conquistadors turned their attention to Northern America. In 1540 Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, the governor of Nueva Galicia (northwestern Mexico and the southwestern United States), began the exploration and conquest of the Southwest Indians, taking with him 300 troops. In the same year, Hernando de Soto was authorized to establish Spanish control of La Florida (the southeastern United States) and its residents; he rode out with more than 600 conquistadors. Both expeditions relied upon large complements of native laborers, who were forcibly impressed into service. Coronado, de Soto, and their troops destroyed communities that resisted their demands for tribute, women, supplies, and obeisance. Concerted efforts at settlement north of Mexico began in 1565 in La Florida, with the founding of St. Augustine; similar efforts in the Southwest did not begin until 1598, when Juan de Oñate led 400 settlers to a location near what is now El Paso, Texas. Although its explorers sighted the coast of California in 1542, Spain did not colonize that area until the second part of the 18th century.

Marriage between Spanish men and Indigenous women was acceptable, although concubinage was more common; intermarriage was effectively forbidden to the few Spanish women who lived in the colonies. After a few generations, a complex social order based on ancestry, land ownership, wealth, and noble titles had become entrenched in the Spanish colonies.

The Roman Catholic missionaries that accompanied Coronado and de Soto worked assiduously to Christianize the native population. Many of the priests were hearty supporters of the Inquisition, and their pastoral forays were often violent; beatings, dismemberment, and execution were all common punishments for the supposed heresies committed by Indigenous Americans.

France

France was almost constantly at war during the 15th and 16th centuries, a situation that spurred an overseas agenda focused on income generation, although territorial expansion and religious conversion were important secondary goals. France expressed an interest in the Americas as early as 1524, when the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano was commissioned to explore the Atlantic coast; in 1534 the French seaman Jacques Cartier entered the Gulf of St. Lawrence and claimed for King Francis I the region that became known as New France. The French eventually claimed dominion over most of the Northeast, Southeast, and American Subarctic peoples. France’s North American empire was, however, contested: its warm southern reaches were claimed by both France and Spain, while parts of the northern territory were claimed by both France and England. Native nations, of course, had their own claims to these territories.

Concerned about Spanish claims to the Americas, the French made a number of unsuccessful attempts at settlement in the 16th century. They built (and subsequently abandoned) a fort near present-day Quebec in 1541; they also built a fort near present-day St. Augustine, Florida, in 1564, but the Spanish soon forced them to abandon that facility as well. In 1604 the French successfully established a more permanent presence on the continent, founding Acadia in present-day Nova Scotia. They did not succeed in establishing a major settlement in the south until 1718, when they founded New Orleans.

French colonial settlements were built on major waterways in order to expedite trade and shipping; the city of Quebec was founded in 1608 at the confluence of the St. Lawrence and St. Charles rivers, and Montreal was founded in 1642 at the conjunction of the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa rivers. Although these trading centers were lively, the settlement of northern New France was slowed by several factors. Among these were the lucrative nature of the fur trade, which required a highly mobile and enterprising workforce—quite a different set of habits and skills than those required of farmers—and a cool climate, which produced thick furs but unpredictable harvests. In 1627 a group of investors formed the Company of New France, but governance of the colony reverted to the king in 1663, after the company repeatedly failed to meet the obligations of its charter.

Most of the northern locales where the French founded settlements were already occupied by various Algonquin groups or members of the Iroquoian-speaking Wendat (Wendat) confederacy, all of whom had long used the inland waterways of the heavily forested region as trade and transportation routes. These peoples quickly partnered with the French—first as fur trappers, later as middlemen in the trade, and always as a source of staples such as corn (maize). Because the Algonquin, Wendat, and French were all accustomed to using marriage as a means of joining extended families, because Indigenous warfare caused a demographic imbalance that favored women, and because few women were eager to leave France for the rough life of the colonies, unions between Native women and French men quickly became common. The attitudes of missionaries in New France varied: some simply promoted the adoption of Roman Catholic beliefs and practices, while others actively discouraged and even used force in order to end the practice of Indigenous religions.

England

England focused its conquest of North America primarily on territorial expansion, particularly along the Atlantic coast from New England to Virginia. The first explorer to reach the continent under the English flag was John Cabot, an Italian who explored the North Atlantic coast in 1497. However, England did little to follow up on Cabot’s exploits until the early 17th century. By that time, the wool trade had become the driving force in the English economy; as a source of foreign exchange, wool sales softened inflation somewhat but did not render the English immune to its effects.

England responded to the pressure of inflation in several ways that influenced Native American history. One response, the intensification of wool production, ensured that the wealthy would remain secure but greatly disrupted the domestic economy. To effect the production of more wool, the landed nobility began to practice enclosure, merging the many small fields that dotted the English countryside into larger pastures. This allowed more sheep to be raised but came at a harsh cost to the burgeoning population of commoners. The landless majority were evicted from their farms, and many had to choose between starvation and illicit activities such as theft, poaching, and prostitution. By the mid-1600s a new option arose for the dispossessed: indentured servitude, a form of contract labor in which transport to a colony and several years’ room and board were exchanged for work; petty criminals were soon disposed of through this method as well.

The English elite chartered a variety of commercial entities, such as the Virginia Company, to which King James I granted the control of large swaths of American territory. These business ventures focused especially on the extraction of resources such as tobacco, a new commodity that had proved extremely popular throughout Europe. The monarch also made land grants to religious dissidents, most notably to the Puritan shareholders of the Massachusetts Bay Company, to the Roman Catholic leader Cecilius Calvert, who established the colony of Maryland, and to the Quaker leader William Penn, who established the Pennsylvania colony. English settlements eventually stretched from the Chesapeake Bay north to present-day Massachusetts and included Jamestown (founded in 1607), Plymouth (1620), Boston (1630), St. Mary’s City (1634), New York City (formerly New Amsterdam, which England had seized from the Dutch in 1664), and Philadelphia (1681).

England was the only imperial nation in which colonial companies were successful over the long term, in large part because ordinary citizens were eventually granted clear (and thus heritable) title to land. In contrast, other countries generally reserved legal title to overseas real estate to the monarch, a situation that encouraged entrepreneurs to limit their capital investments in the colonies. In such cases it made much more financial sense to build ships than to improve settler housing or colonial infrastructure; a company could own a ship outright but was at constant risk of losing new construction to the sovereign. Because English real estate practices more or less assured entrepreneurs and colonizers that they would retain any infrastructure they built, they set about the construction of substantial settlements, farms, and transportation systems.

A tradition of enduring title also caused the English to conclude formal compacts with Native Americans, as some of the former believed (and the English courts could potentially have ruled) that Indigenous groups held common-law title to the various Northern American territories. As a result, tribes from Newfoundland (Canada) to Virginia (U.S.) engaged in early agreements with the English. However, a fundamental philosophical difference undermined many such agreements: the English held that it was possible to own land outright, while the Indigenous American peoples believed that only usufruct, or use rights, to land could be granted. The situation was further complicated by the French custom, soon adopted by the English, of providing native communities with gifts on a seasonal or annual basis. What the colonizers intended as a relatively inexpensive method for currying goodwill, the Indigenous peoples interpreted as something akin to rent.

Although mortality was high in the malarial lowlands that the English initially settled, a seemingly endless stream of indentured laborers—and, from 1619 onward, enslaved Africans—poured into the new communities throughout the 17th century. Colonial laws meant to discourage intermarriage generally prevented the children of Indigenous-English marriages from inheriting their father’s wealth. This effectively forestalled the formation of multiethnic households in areas that were under close colonial control. However, such households were considered unremarkable in Indigenous towns.

In contrast to their Spanish and French counterparts, who were invariably Roman Catholic, most English colonizers were members of the Church of England or of various Protestant sects. Evangelization was not particularly important to most of the English elite, who traveled to the Americas for commercial, territorial, or political gain, nor for most indentured servants or criminal transportees. Among those who had left in pursuit of religious freedom, however, some proselytized with zeal. Like the clergy from France, their emphases and methods ranged from the fairly benign to the overtly oppressive.

The Netherlands and Sweden

The colonial efforts of the Netherlands and Sweden were motivated primarily by commerce. Dutch businessmen formed several colonial monopolies soon after their country gained independence from Spain in the late 16th century. The Dutch West India Company took control of the New Netherland colony (comprising parts of the present-day states of Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware) in 1623. In 1624 the company founded Fort Orange (present-day Albany, New York) on the Hudson River; New Amsterdam was founded on the island of Manhattan soon after.

In 1637 a group of individuals formed the New Sweden Company. They hired Peter Minuit, a former governor of New Amsterdam, to found a new colony to the south, in what is now Delaware, U.S. In 1655 New Sweden fell to the Dutch.

Despite some local successes, the Dutch ceded their North American holdings to the English after just 40 years, preferring to turn their attention to the lucrative East Indies trade rather than defend the colony (see Dutch East India Company). The English renamed the area New York and allowed the Dutch and Swedish colonists to maintain title to the land they had settled.