European colonization of the Americas

European colonization of the Americas began as early as the 10th century, when Norse sailors explored and settled limited areas on the shores of present-day Greenland and Canada. According to Norse folklore, violent conflicts with the indigenous population ultimately made the Norse abandon those settlements.

Extensive European colonization began in 1492, when a Spanish expedition headed by Christopher Columbus sailed west to find a new trade route to the Far East but inadvertently found the Americas. European conquest, large-scale exploration, colonization and genocide soon followed. Columbus's first two voyages (1492–93) reached the Bahamas and various Caribbean islands, including Hispaniola, Puerto Rico and Cuba. In 1497, sailing from Bristol on behalf of England, John Cabot landed on the North American coast, and a year later, Columbus's third voyage reached the South American coast. As the sponsor of Christopher Columbus`s voyages, Spain was the first European power to settle and colonize the largest areas, from North America and the Caribbean to the southern tip of South America. Spanish cities were founded as early as 1496 with Santo Domingo in today's Dominican Republic or San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1508 or Veracruz (Mexico) and Panama City in 1519. The city of St. Augustine, Florida founded by Spain in 1565 is the oldest continuously inhabited European city in present-day United States.

Other powers such as France also founded colonies in the Americas: in eastern North America, a number of Caribbean islands, and small coastal parts of South America. Portugal colonized Brazil. This was the beginning of a dramatic territorial expansion for several European countries. Europe had been preoccupied with internal wars, and was only slowly recovering from the loss of population caused by the bubonic plague; thus the rapid rate at which it grew in wealth and power was unforeseeable in the early 1400s.

Eventually, the entire Western Hemisphere came under the control of European governments, 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. The post-1492 era is known as the period of the Columbian Exchange, a dramatically widespread exchange of animals, plants, culture, human populations (including slaves), communicable disease, and ideas between the American and Afro-Eurasian hemispheres following Columbus's voyages to the Americas.

Early conquests, claims, and colonies

Territorial evolution of North America of non-native nation states from 1750 to 2008.

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More animated maps:
Central America & Caribbean sovereignty 1700-present.
South America territorial sovereignty 1700-present.

Early explorations and conquests were made by the Spanish and the Portuguese immediately following their own final reconquest of Iberia in 1492. In the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, ratified by the Pope, these two kingdoms divided the entire non-European world into two areas of exploration and colonization, with a north to south boundary that cut through the Atlantic Ocean and the eastern part of present-day Brazil. Based on this treaty and on early claims by Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa, discoverer of the Pacific Ocean in 1513, the Spanish conquered large territories in North, Central and South America.

Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés took over the Aztec Kingdom and Francisco Pizarro conquered the Inca Empire. As a result, by the mid-16th century, the Spanish Crown had gained control of much of western South America, Central America and southern North America, in addition to its earlier Caribbean territories. Over this same timeframe, Portugal colonized much of eastern South America, naming it Brazil.

Other European nations soon disputed the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas. England and France attempted to plant colonies in the Americas in the 16th century, but these failed. England and France succeeded in establishing permanent colonies in the following century, along with the Dutch Republic. 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 New Mexico, the English colonies of Virginia (with its North Atlantic off-shoot, Bermuda) and New England, the French colonies of Acadia and Canada, the Swedish colony of New Sweden, and the Dutch New Netherland. In the 18th century, Denmark–Norway revived its former colonies in Greenland, while the Russian Empire 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.

Early state-sponsored colonists

Further information: Portugal in the Age of Discovery, Spanish colonization of the Americas, and First European colonization wave (15th century–19th century)

The first phase of well-financed 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". He was followed by other explorers such as John Cabot, who was sponsored by England and reached Newfoundland. Pedro Álvares Cabral 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 Empire under king Philip II (1598).

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 tribute (access to indigenous labor and taxation) to European settlers, was set in place.

A relatively common misconception is that a small number of conquistadores conquered vast territories, aided only by disease epidemics and their powerful caballeros. In fact, recent archaeological excavations have suggested a vast Spanish-Indian alliance numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Hernán Cortés eventually conquered Mexico and the Tlaxcala in 1519-1521, while the conquest of the Inca was carried out by some 40,000 Incan renegades led by Francisco Pizarro in between 1532 and 1535.

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), mostly by outbreaks of Old World diseases.

In 1532, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor sent a vice-king to Mexico, Antonio de Mendoza, in order to prevent Cortes' independentist 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.

A Spaniard plays with his mixed-race daughter while his Mestiza wife looks on, by Miguel Cabrera, 1763

When in May 1493, the Pope Alexander VI issued 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.

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. The Spanish Roman Catholic Church, needing the natives' labor and cooperation, evangelized in Quechua, Nahuatl, Guaraní 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—including 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. In the 16th century perhaps 240,000 Europeans entered American ports.

The search for riches

Fur traders in Canada, trading with Indians, 1777.

Inspired by the Spanish riches from colonies founded upon the conquest of the Aztecs, Incas, and other large Native American populations in the 16th 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 in 1607. They were sponsored by common stock companies such as the chartered Virginia Company financed by wealthy Englishmen who exaggerated the economic potential of this new land. The main purpose of this colony was the hope of finding gold.

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". 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 the neighboring colony of Maryland.

From the beginning of Virginia's settlements in 1587 until the 1680s, the main source of labor 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 teenagers from England with poor economic prospects at home. Their fathers signed the papers that gave them free passage to America and an unpaid job until they became of age. They were given food, clothing, housing and taught farming or household skills. 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 then start out on their own in America. Many of the migrants from England died in the first few years.

Economic advantage also prompted the Darien Scheme, an ill-fated venture by the Kingdom of Scotland to settle the Isthmus of Panama in the late 1690s. The Darien Scheme aimed to control trade through that part of the world and thereby promote Scotland into a world trading power. However, it was doomed by poor planning, short provisions, weak leadership, lack of demand for trade goods, and devastating disease. The failure of the Darien Scheme was one of the factors that led the Kingdom of Scotland into the Act of Union 1707 with the Kingdom of England creating the united Kingdom of Great Britain and giving Scotland commercial access to English, now British, colonies.

In the French colonial regions, the focus of economy was on sugar plantations in Caribbean. In Canada the fur trade with the natives was important. About 16,000 French men and women became colonizers. The great majority became subsistence farmers along the St. Lawrence River. With a favourable disease environment and plenty of land and food, their numbers grew exponentially to 65,000 by 1760. Their colony was taken over by Britain in 1760, but social, religious, legal, cultural and economic changes were few in a society that clung tightly to its recently formed traditions.

Religious immigration

Penn's Treaty with the Indians. This treaty between the pacifist Quakers and Indians was never violated.

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 went to the Americas searching for the right to practice their religion without persecution. The Protestant Reformation of the 16th 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 16th 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, Charles I, King of England and Scotland, 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.

Forced immigration

Main article: Atlantic slave trade

African slaves working in 17th-century Virginia, by an unknown artist, 1670.

Slavery existed in the Americas, prior to the arrival of Europeans, as the Natives often captured and held other tribes' members as captives. 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 gunpowder were some of the major trade items exchanged for slaves.

The great majority went to sugar colonies in the Caribbean and to Brazil, where life expectancy was short and the numbers had to be continually replenished.

The total slave trade to islands in the Caribbean, Brazil, Mexico and to the United States is estimated to have involved 12 million Africans.

Slavery

Slaves imported to American colonies

• 1619-1700.....21,000
• 1701-1760....189,000
• 1761-1770.....63,000
• 1771-1790.....56,000
• 1791-1800.....79,000
• 1801-1810....124,000
• 1810-1865.....51,000
• Total ..........597,000

About 600,000 slaves were imported into the U.S., or 5% of the 12 million slaves brought across from Africa. Life expectancy was much higher in the U.S. (because of better food, less disease, lighter work loads, and better medical care) so the numbers grew rapidly by excesses of births over deaths, reaching 4 million by the 1860 Census. From 1770 until 1860, the rate of natural growth of North American slaves was much greater than for the population of any nation in Europe, and was nearly twice as rapid as that of England.

Disease and indigenous population loss

See also: Disease in colonial America

Drawing accompanying text in Book XII of the 16th-century Florentine Codex (compiled 1540–1585), showing Nahua of conquest-era central Mexico suffering from smallpox.

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, killing between 10 million and 20 million people, up to 95% of the indigenous population of the Americas. 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.

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 20th century; in a number of cases, growth has returned.

List of European colonies in the Americas

Spanish

• Cuba (until 1898)
• New Granada (1717–1819)
  • Captaincy General of Venezuela
• New Spain (1535–1821)
  • Nueva Extremadura
  • Nueva Galicia
  • Nuevo Reino de León
  • Nuevo Santander
  • Nueva Vizcaya
  • Las Californias
  • Santa Fe de Nuevo México
• Viceroyalty of Peru (1542–1824)
  • Captaincy General of Chile
• Puerto Rico (until 1898)
• Rio de la Plata (1776–1814)
• Santo Domingo (last Spanish rule 1861-1865)

English and (after 1707) British

Further information: List of Hudson's Bay Company trading posts

• British America (1607– 1783)
  • Newfoundland (1583-1949)
  • Thirteen Colonies (1607- 1783)
  • Rupert's Land (1670-1870)
  • British Columbia (1793-1871)
  • British North America (1783 – 1907)
• British West Indies

Courland

• New Courland (Tobago) (1654–1689)

Danish

• Danish West Indies (1754–1917)
• Greenland (1814 - today)

Dutch

• New Netherland (1609–1667)
• Essequibo (1616–1815)
• Dutch Virgin Islands (1625–1680)
• Berbice (1627–1815)
• New Walcheren (1628–1677)
• Dutch Brazil (1630–1654)
• Pomeroon (1650–1689)
• Cayenne (1658–1664)
• Demerara (1745–1815)
• Suriname (1667–1954)
• Curaçao and Dependencies (1634–1954)
• Sint Eustatius and Dependencies (1636–1954)

French

Further information: List of French forts in North America

• New France (1604–1763)
  • Acadia (1604–1713)
  • Canada (1608–1763)
  • Louisiana (1699–1763, 1800–1803)
  • Newfoundland (1662–1713)
  • Île Royale (1713–1763)
• French Guiana (1763-today)
• French West Indies
• Saint-Domingue (1659–1804, now Haiti)
• Tobago
• Virgin Islands
• France Antarctique (1555–1567)
• Equinoctial France (1612–1615)

Knights of Malta

• Saint Barthélemy (1651-1665)
• Saint Christopher (1651-1665)
• Saint Croix (1651-1665)
• Saint Martin (1651-1665)

Norwegian

• Greenland (986-1814)
• Vinland (Partly in the 1000s)
• Dano-Norwegian West Indies (1754–1814)
• Sverdrup Islands (1898–1930)
• Erik the Red's Land (1931-1933)

Portuguese

• Colonial Brazil (1500–1815) became a Kingdom, United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves.
• Cisplatina (1808–1822, today Uruguay)
• Barbados (1536–1620)
• French Guiana (1809–1817)

Russian

• Russian America (Alaska), (1799–1867)

Scottish

• Nova Scotia (1622–1632)
• Darien Scheme on the Isthmus of Panama (1698–1700)
• Stuarts Town, Carolina (1684–1686)
• Darien, Georgia (from 1735)

Swedish

• New Sweden (1638–1655)
• Saint Barthélemy (1785–1878)
• Guadeloupe (1813–1815)

Exhibitions and collections

In 2007, the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History and the Virginia Historical Society (VHS) co-organized a traveling exhibition to recount the strategic alliances and violent conflict between European empires (English, Spanish, French) and the Native people living in North America. The exhibition was presented in three languages and with multiple perspectives. Artifacts on display included rare surviving Native and European artifacts, maps, documents, and ceremonial objects from museums and royal collections on both sides of the Atlantic. The exhibition opened in Richmond, Virginia on March 17, 2007, and closed at the Smithsonian International Gallery on October 31, 2009.

The related online exhibition explores the international origins of the societies of Canada and the United States and commemorates the 400th anniversary of three lasting settlements in Jamestown (1607), Québec (1608), and Santa Fe (1609). The site is accessible in three languages.

See also

• Martín de Argüelles
• Atlantic world
• Bandeirantes
• Chronology of the colonization of North America
• Colonial history of the United States
• Columbian Exchange
• Conquistador
• Hernán Cortés
• European colonization of the Southern United States
• Former colonies and territories in Canada
• History of the west coast of North America
• Indigenous peoples of the Americas

• Influx of disease in the Caribbean
• List of North American cities founded in chronological order
• Norse colonization of the Americas
• Francisco Pizarro
• Population history of American indigenous peoples
• Portuguese Empire
• Romanus Pontifex and Inter caetera
• Settler colonialism
• Spanish conquest of Yucatán
• Spanish Empire
• Thirteen Colonies, which became the United States in 1776
• Treaty of Alcáçovas
• Treaty of Tordesillas
• Francisco Vásquez de Coronado

Bibliography

• Bailyn, Bernard, ed. Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Harvard UP, 2005)
• Bannon, John Francis. History of the Americas (2 vols. 1952), older textbook
• Bolton, Herbert E. "The Epic of Greater America," American Historical Review 38, no. 3 (April 1933): 448–74 in JSTOR
• Davis, Harold E. The Americas in History (1953), older textbook
• Egerton, Douglas R. et al. The Atlantic World: A History, 1400-1888 (2007)
• Eltis, David. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (2000).
• Hinderaker, Eric; Horn, Rebecca. "Territorial Crossings: Histories and Historiographies of the Early Americas," William and Mary Quarterly, July 2010, Vol. 67 Issue 3, pp 395–432 in JSTOR
• Lockhart, James, and Stuart B. Schwartz. Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (1983).
• Merriman, Roger Bigelow. The Rise of The Spanish Empire in the Old World and in the New (4 vol. 1934)
• Morison, Samuel Eliot. The European Discovery of America: The northern voyages, A.D. 500-1600 (1971)
• Morison, Samuel Eliot. The European Discovery of America: The southern voyages, 1492-1616 (1971)
• Parry, J. H. The Age of Reconnaissance: Discovery, Exploration, and Settlement, 1450-1650 (1982)
• Sarson, Steven, and Jack P. Greene, eds. The American Colonies and the British Empire, 1607-1783 (8 vol, 2010); primary sources
• Starkey, Armstrong (1998). European-Native American Warfare, 1675-1815. University of Oklahoma Press ISBN 978-0-8061-3075-0
• Vickers, Daniel, ed. A Companion to Colonial America (2003),