Lecture: Colonization & Empire
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 2
Opening
Think of a business major reading the fine print on an investment, a future teacher joining a school that runs on agreed rules, or someone whose community's land was written about by strangers. Each of them is asking the same thing. What did this paper promise? And whom did it leave out?
That's the question for this whole lecture. In Week 1 you learned what history is and the four moves for reading a source: sourcing, contextualization, close reading, and corroboration. You used them on the first meetings between the Americas and Europe, up to the edge of 1607. This week we cross that edge. I'll give you three words that frame everything: empire, colony, and charter. Then we'll compare four empires and read two real documents, a king's charter for Virginia and the Mayflower Compact. I'll show you how to tell a claim a document supports from one that reaches past it. We'll finish with trade, alliance, and war between colonists and Native nations. After this, in Week 3, Colonial Society & the Origins of Slavery, the course turns to labor and to the laws that built slavery in the colonies.
1. Empire, colony, and charter
Picture a coffee chain opening a shop in a city far from its headquarters. The shop has its own manager, but its menu and its rules come from the main office. The business reaches well past its home town.
Empires worked like that, with far higher stakes. Here are the three words. An empire is a state that rules lands and peoples beyond its own borders. A colony is a settlement planted on distant land and governed, at least at first, from the home country that sponsored it. A charter is a written grant of rights from a ruler, stating who may settle where and with what powers.
Now here's where my coffee shop breaks down, and I want you to notice it. A coffee shop rents its space. A colony took land that other people already lived on and governed. Historians have a word for that: dispossession, the taking of a people's land from them, by force, pressure, or bargains made on unequal terms.
And remember, Spain got here first. In 1565 Spain founded St. Augustine, in Florida, on Timucua land. You met it in Week 1.
Pause and try this. Is a charter a settlement, or a piece of paper?
Think about which comes first.
Here's the answer. It's a piece of paper, a written grant of rights, and the settlement comes after it.
2. Four empires: missions, furs, and farms
Imagine three businesses opening branches in the same faraway place. One wants to win members for its organization. One wants to buy a local product and ship it home. One wants to move its own workers in for good. Each one is going to treat the people already living there differently.
That's the comparison historians make among four European powers, in words. Spain built around missions and mines. A mission is a religious settlement where priests worked to convert Native people to Christianity, and Spanish mines were worked by forced Native labor. France and the Dutch Republic built around the fur trade, the exchange of furs trapped by Native hunters for European goods such as metal tools, kettles, cloth, and beads. England built around settler farms and towns.
Here's the key. A fur post can't run without Native hunters, so the French and the Dutch needed Native nations as partners and allies. The furs that reached the Dutch post at Fort Orange came through Mohawk country. A farming colony needs something else. It needs the land.
So you can sort them by what each one needed. Spain needed Native labor and conversion. France and the Dutch needed Native hunters and allies. England needed Native land. Each pattern harmed Native nations in its own way, and none of them asked first.
Pause and try this. Which of the four empires needed Native land more than Native trade?
Think about farms and fur posts.
Here's the answer. England did, because settler farms and towns took the land itself, while the French and Dutch fur trade depended on Native partners.
3. The First Charter of Virginia
Think about the paperwork for a new business. Before anyone opens the door, someone writes down who owns it, what it may do, and what it hopes to earn. That paper tells you what the owners wanted before the first customer walked in.
England's first lasting colony started with that kind of paper. In 1606 King James I granted the First Charter of Virginia to a group of investors. The charter calls those investors adventurers, which then meant people who risked money on a venture.
Let's source it, one question at a time. Who made it? King James I. What is it? A royal charter. When? Its own last lines date it to the tenth day of April in the fourth year of the king's reign, which is 10 April 1606. Where do you read it? The Avalon Project keeps the text. And whom was it for? Investors in England, not anyone living in Virginia.
Now close reading. The charter states its religious motive in a phrase you'll see all week: "in propagating of Christian Religion to such People, as yet live in Darkness". That's the charter's view of the people of Virginia, not their own account of themselves. In the lines right after it, the charter calls them by insulting words of its time. I'm not going to repeat those words, and this course never adopts them.
There's a second motive in the same charter. In paraphrase, another clause lets the colonists dig for gold, silver, and copper, and it keeps a fifth of the gold and silver for the Crown. So religion and profit sit side by side. Religious freedom doesn't appear at all.
Here's the reading in one plain sentence. The charter shows the aims of the king and his investors, religion and profit; it's not evidence of what the people on that land wanted.
Pause and try this. Does the First Charter of Virginia name religious freedom as a motive?
Think about the two motives you heard.
Here's the answer. No. It names spreading Christianity and digging for gold and silver, so the common story that every colony was founded for religious freedom doesn't fit Virginia.
4. From charter to Jamestown
Picture two towns that each put up a sign claiming to be the oldest. The only fair way to settle it is to check the founding records, year against year.
The charter turned into a settlement fast. In 1607, through the Virginia Company, a joint venture company of investors, England established Jamestown, its first permanent colony in North America. That's one year after the charter, because 1607 minus 1606 is 1. And St. Augustine is older. Take 1607 minus 1565, and you get 42 years.
The English built their fort on the hunting land of the Powhatan Indians. That land belonged to the Powhatan paramount chiefdom, the chiefdom of more than 30 tribes in the Virginia tidewater ruled by the paramount chief Wahunsenacawh, whom the English called Powhatan. The Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation's museums count between 30 and 35 tribes under his rule. The National Park Service reports that the Pamunkey were the largest tribe in that chiefdom in 1607. The Pamunkey are a federally recognized tribe now, and they're still in Virginia.
The region around Jamestown, the Chesapeake, grew tobacco for sale in England. At first that work was done by servants bound to labor for a set number of years. Over time the colony relied more and more on enslaved Africans. How colonial law made that slavery a status passed from parent to child is next week's subject, so I'll name it here and stop.
Pause and try this. Which settlement is older, Jamestown or St. Augustine, and by how many years?
Take your time with the subtraction.
Here's the answer. St. Augustine is older by 42 years, since 1607 minus 1565 is 42.
5. The Mayflower Compact
Imagine the people in a brand-new apartment building meeting in the lobby before anyone has a key. There's no landlord on site. They agree on quiet hours and on how they'll settle arguments. They sign a sheet and tape it by the mailboxes.
That sheet isn't the law of the land. It's a promise among neighbors. The Mayflower Compact was a promise of that kind: the covenant that settlers bound for the northern parts of Virginia signed at Cape Cod in 1620, agreeing to form a civil body politic and obey the laws they would make. A covenant is a solemn agreement in which people bind themselves to one another to keep promises they have made together.
This is the week's Primary Source Workshop document, so let's take the four moves. Sourcing: settlers signed it at Cape Cod, and its own text dates it to the eleventh of November 1620. It's a covenant, and the Avalon Project keeps the text. Contextualization: their ship had landed north of Virginia, outside the area their permission covered, and the Pilgrim Hall Museum explains that some passengers questioned their leaders' authority. Close reading: the signers agree to "covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation". A civil body politic is a group of people who have agreed to form a government for themselves. That's self-government, people making and obeying their own laws.
Corroboration is my favorite part here. The Pilgrim Hall Museum prints the same agreement in modern spelling. It says the original document is lost, so its wording comes to us through William Bradford's writings. And it gives a second date, 21 November 1620, marked New Style, the calendar England later adopted. Two hosts, two dates, one day. Old spellings and two calendars slow everyone down, so be supportive of yourself when a document's date looks odd at first.
The settlers founded Plymouth on the homeland of the Wampanoag. The Pilgrim Hall Museum notes that Wampanoag communities, Mashpee and Aquinnah among them, live in the region now.
Pause and try this. Was the Mayflower Compact a constitution for a nation?
Think about the lobby sheet.
Here's the answer. No. It's a short covenant for local self-government among one group of settlers, made to govern one new town.
6. What a source shows, and what goes beyond it
Think of a receipt from a café. It shows that someone bought two coffees at a certain time. It doesn't show why they bought them or who drank them. A receipt is strong evidence of the purchase and weak evidence of anything else.
You can draw that same line with every document. A claim shows what a source says when the source itself supports it. A claim goes beyond the source when it reaches past what a document actually says, such as a claim about causes.
The course has an illustrative set for practicing this, the evidence-claims set: eight statements this course wrote about four real documents. Two of them are about the Compact. Item 3 says the Mayflower Compact says its signers combined into a civil body politic. That one shows, because the text says exactly that. Item 4 says the Mayflower Compact created American democracy. That one goes beyond, because the text records one agreement and says nothing about what caused later governments. So you've got 1 claim that shows and 1 that goes beyond, which is 2 sorted.
Here's my caveat. A claim that goes beyond a source isn't always false. It may be a good question. It needs more evidence, and one document rarely settles a cause.
Pause and try this. A classmate says that because the Compact came before later self-government, it caused it. Shows, or goes beyond?
Ask whether the document itself says so.
Here's the answer. It goes beyond, because coming first isn't the same as causing, and the Compact says nothing about later governments.
7. Three regions, not one colonial society
Picture three neighborhoods in one city. In one, families walk to the same church. In another, people come from many places and faiths. In the third, big farms sit far apart along a river. They share a mayor, but daily life is very different.
The English colonies grew into distinct regions like that. New England is the northern region, settled largely by families in religious communities. The Middle Colonies sat between New England and the Chesapeake, more mixed in religion and in their settlers' origins. And the Chesapeake, around the bay, was a tobacco economy of scattered farms.
One more correction while we're here. Even in New England, a religious community didn't mean freedom of worship for everyone. Those towns expected members to share one faith. Freedom to worship as you chose wasn't the founding promise of any region.
Pause and try this. Which region was the most mixed in religion and origin?
Picture the second neighborhood.
Here's the answer. The Middle Colonies, which drew settlers of many faiths and origins, unlike the more uniform religious towns of New England.
8. Trade, alliance, and war
Imagine a new neighbor who borrows your tools and trades vegetables over the fence. Then the neighbor starts building a shed on your side of the property line. The friendship was real. The dispute is real too. What decides it is the land.
Relations between colonists and Native nations followed that pattern, on a far larger and far more violent scale. Native nations acted on their own interests. They traded furs and food for metal tools and cloth. They made alliances when an alliance served them. And they fought when colonists pressed onto their land.
At Jamestown, the National Park Service reports, the Powhatan Indians sent food in the first hard years, and relations soured as the English demanded more. In 1622 Opechancanough, then the Powhatan paramount chief, planned a coordinated attack on the English settlements because of English encroachment on Powhatan lands. Fighting followed for about ten years. I'll say it plainly. Colonization took Native land, and Native nations resisted.
Let's put the week's four years in order. 1565, St. Augustine. 1606, the First Charter of Virginia. 1607, Jamestown. 1620, the Mayflower Compact. From Jamestown to the Compact is 13 years. From the charter to the Compact is 14 years, which matches 1 plus 13. And from St. Augustine to the Compact is 55 years, which matches 42 plus 13.
Pause and try this. How many years separate the First Charter of Virginia from the Mayflower Compact?
Subtract the earlier year from the later one.
Here's the answer. 14 years, because 1620 minus 1606 is 14.
Closing
Let me pull it together. An empire rules lands beyond its borders, a colony is its distant settlement, and a charter grants the rights, and every colony sat on Native land. Spain built around missions and mines, France and the Dutch around furs, and England around farms that needed land. The First Charter of Virginia names religion and profit, not religious freedom. Jamestown, in 1607, was England's first permanent colony, on Powhatan land, and St. Augustine is 42 years older. The Mayflower Compact is a covenant for local self-government, not a constitution. A claim either shows what a source says or goes beyond it. New England, the Middle Colonies, and the Chesapeake were different places. And Native nations traded, allied, and fought on their own terms.
Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings and Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz. Then, in Week 3, Colonial Society & the Origins of Slavery, you'll look at labor in the colonies and at how colonial law made slavery inherited.
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