Search Results

This chapter begins with a discussion of the protests unleashed by the decision of the Earl of Bute, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Francis Dashwood, to seek revenue via an Act designed to raise the excise duty payable upon cider and perry. It then discusses tax and the Colonies, focusing on the issue of ‘no taxation without representation’.

This chapter focuses on the years after the Pequot War and Kieft's War. During this period, villages began rising across the shoreline, some on the exact places where Indian towns had been recently destroyed. Before the fighting started almost a hundred miles separated the nearest English and Dutch communities; by 1650 they stood as close as ten miles apart. The overseeing bodies of these overlapping colonies, the United Colonies of New England and the Dutch West India Company, regularly bickered over boundaries. But until the 1650s they had preferred to keep their disputes on paper, only rarely making direct threats over small trespasses. The Dutch Republic and English Commonwealth went to war for the first time in 1652. The relationships between the Indians, English, and Dutch also changed. The threat of violence from all directions made cross-cultural partnerships all the more vital. Algonquians sought colonists to serve as their scribes, arms dealers, and engineers, while Europeans continued to hire Natives as spies, couriers, pilots, and translators. Indians were finding that the foreigners' suspicions could be put to use in winning campaigns against their Native neighbors, as these local conflicts concerned them more than colonial affairs.

Among the principal regions of extensive English settlement in North America during the seventeenth century, that which became the Middle Colonies was the last to experience a concerted effort at English settlement. While New England, the Chesapeake, and several West Indian islands all attracted substantial immigration before 1660, and Carolina a decade after that, England only asserted its rights to the mid-Atlantic coastline in 1664; its first significant settlement commenced more than a decade later. The fact of late settlement within an already well-established English colonial world was of major significance in the development of the region. Moreover, the existence of neighbouring English settlements gave the region a well-defined role within the English colonial system and affected the character of mid-Atlantic society.

This chapter traces the historical developments that led to the emergence of British North America. It suggests British North America started to take shape following the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783 and that it was not a mere incidental creation of the rebellion of the British Empire's Thirteen Colonies. Its origins can be traced in the global processes set in motion by European expansion during the 16th and 17th centuries and its foundations were established by commerce rather than colonization.

The Adventurers for Irish land applied their English war profits to colonial development and commandeered England’s great trading companies, the East India Company, Levant Company and Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers. They strengthened their grip on state finance and targeted their colonial profits towards specific loans to finance the parliamentary army, which resulted in further trading concessions. Firmly allied to the War Party in parliament, the Adventurers navigated their way through the political upheavals in England, 1647–49, and although quietly opposed to the execution of Charles I they made no attempt to oppose it.

The introduction explains how, taken together, the essays in this volume bring to light new evidence of the ways in which the modern South—like so many other parts of the post-colonial world—is built upon the wreckage of imperial collapse. Many of the social, economic, political, and environmental pathologies of today’s South took root in failed efforts of Europeans centuries ago to reshape the New World in their own image.

As Civil War raged across England and rebellion consumed Ireland, English revolutionaries called an assembly at Westminster to discuss church reform. Allying with the Scots in the Solemn League and Covenant, they finally defeated the royalists. As royalists and Catholics lost power overseas, Parliament stepped into the vacuum and developed a new colonial religious policy. While endorsing the autonomy of the colonies loyal to its cause, it interfered with New England Congregationalist aspirations for regional hegemony by recognizing Rhode Island. The colony benefited from Roger Williams' friendship with leading revolutionaries and the religious and political divisions preventing England from taking a unified stand on religious policy. Religiously, the majority favored a presbyterian religious establishment and a conservative peace with the king. An influential minority of "Independents" insisted on tolerance for their differences of opinion, sparking a major debate over the merits of toleration. Independents also favored a more radical victory, which they finally achieved with a reformed army. That army became another important advocate for religious toleration. While all of New England outside of Rhode Island united in an alliance to shore up the hegemony of their church establishment, England was turning against its ideal of strict religious uniformity.

This chapter focuses on Charles Sanders Peirce's sojourn in England in the 1870s. It also shows the influence on his work of three philosophers from the British Isles—John Duns Scotus, William Whewell, and Alexander Bain. These three were chosen not only because of their impact on Peirce's pragmatism, but also because their influence on him is less well known than that of John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume—Peirce's so-called “British Connection.” Even so, the chapter shows how Peirce is not simply a British philosopher who happened to grow up in the Colonies. His pragmatism has a distinctively American spirit about it. That spirit, put roughly, was that ideas, if they are to merit serious attention, must be practical.

In order to assess the impact of the delivery and drainage of water on the urban pattern in the ancient Greek world, it is necessary to have clear ideas of what forms their cities took. Thus a brief discussion of urban patterns will be useful. Traditional descriptions of ancient Greek cities characterize them by typical street patterns, usually two major types: the Hippodamean grid of Miletus of the fifth century, and the terraces like the blades of a fan found at Pergamon of the late third and second centuries, called “scenographic urbanism.” Yet a more careful examination of the evidence suggests that for different centuries B.C., there are many more urban types than two. Examples standing for both the repertory of physical patterns and the changes in those patterns over time that we may cite are: 1. 7th century B.C.—Akragas (frontispiece): irregular hill-top site of the archaic period 2. 6th century—Paestum (Fig. 5.IB): “bar and stripes” 3. 5th century—Athens (Fig. 5.1A): organic, focused on central acropolis and agora, similar to Akragas pattern 4. 5th century—Morgantina (Fig. 5.1C): typical West Greek pattern of two flat hills with residential quarters grid platted and lower agora between them 5. 4th and 3rd centuries—Priene (Fig. 51.D): based on prototype grid at Miletus (early 5th century—Fig. 22.4) and refinement of grid as used at Rhodes (mid to late 5th century—Fig. 8.3), an adaption of Hippodamean regularity to a small plateau 6. 3rd and 2nd centuries—Pergamon (Fig. 5.1E): scenographic urbanism, with wedge-shaped terraces It is difficult to classify urban plans solely by pattern or by century. This is because the changes did not go together in any simple fashion. Inspection of the street patterns of ancient Greek cities, and the relation of those patterns to the sites, allows them to be classified into five basic types, which for easy remembrance I name after representative cities of each type: 1. Athens-type. A general rule for cities of a[n ancient] culture states that “the capital city is unlike the others in form.” Athens, a seemingly formless, organic city, is quite unlike the well-regulated cities (many of them colonies) of the other types.

Although religious turmoil enveloped the colonies at the outset of the Revolution, only in New England did these conflicts spark radical reformation-inspired, constitutional revolutions against prerogative forms of civil government. Outrunning the pace of political change set by the “honest party” in England, settlers in Connecticut and Rhode Island established republican governments to preserve the people’s political and spiritual sovereignty in a reformed commonwealth. Roger Williams and Samuel Gorton returned to London to defend Rhode Island’s religiously tolerant, radical reformation experiment from violent annexation by their magisterial enemies in Massachusetts and the United Colonies. Despite the best efforts of New England and Old England’s most talented heresiographers, the pair convinced Parliament’s Committee for Foreign Plantations that the Bay Colony’s persecution of antinomians and Indians had forestalled the progress of the Reformation on the American strand. In this way, colonial emissaries in revolutionary London made the Parliamentary-sanctioned founding of a democratic commonwealth contingent upon a concept of liberty of conscience that encompassed the civil and spiritual sovereignty of native Americans and colonists alike. Coleman Streeters dominated this history, both on New England’s southwestern frontier and in Massachusetts, where Richard Saltonstall became a leader of radical reformation opposition and an exponent of republican structures of colonial government.

Between the 1690s and 1721, the East India Company, English woolen and silk spinners and weavers, English Atlantic pirates operating out of colonial ports, and Parliament debated the implications of Indian calicoes, leading to new developments in the imperial structure. The government eventually united behind the Calico Acts, legal compromises which traded a prohibition on dyed, stained, and printed cottons in the domestic British market for a regulatory and enforcement system that expanded and entrenched the East India Company’s monopoly over the supply of Asian goods for the British Atlantic. The acts shifted the emphasis away from American colonists as cultivators of Indian raw materials such as silk and cotton wool and towards colonists as consumers of Indian goods.

The regulations over India goods were contested by smugglers and consumers but generally enforced through policing and the vigorous efforts of merchants and the East India Company to encourage Indian producers and Company servants to supply high-quality, fashionable, and affordable goods. British revenue in India itself was not yet substantial, and although per capita consumption rates of Indian fabrics were higher in American markets than in Europe, the markets themselves and the duty revenues were smaller than those in and from Europe. The purpose of India goods in the trade to Africa for enslaved laborers was clear. To what imperial end such goods should be consumed in the American colonies, however, remained the topic of interest and debate in the imperial government.

In this essay Mayra Rosario Urrutia explains how policy toward Puerto Rico became part of a regional approach, not only militarily but also in economic and social policies. During the tumultuous decade of the 1930s, colonial possessions in the Caribbean posed political, economic, and military demands to the United States and Great Britain. The response formulated by both metropolitan governments regarding these needs was shaped by their colonial policies, the effects of the Great Depression, the newly configured strategic and military importance of the Caribbean during the Second World War, and the grievances voiced throughout the islands in the form of uprisings and public protests.