Creating Anglo-America 1660-1750

Historia- An ancient Greek word meaning “inquiry”

• In the LHS curriculum the main essential question for this period is “To what degree did colonial settlement impact the lives of Europeans, Indians and Africans?”

• In this chapter we can put a sharper focus on that question and ask, “To what degree did the process of transforming eastern North America into an English territory succeed and how did it change the lives of not only non-English Europeans, Indians and Africans, but the English “themselves?”

The Atlantic world

English Mercantilism, the Netherlands and the Navigation Acts

• Mercantilist theory

• Favorable balance of trade

• Commerce not plunder

• Anglo-Dutch Wars

• Cromwell and Charles II

• The Navigation Acts, 1651-1696

• Triangular Trade

• What did this mean for the colonies?

As we saw in Chapter 1, the Dutch dominated overseas trade by the early 17th century. The Dutch trading empire included ports in East Asia, South America, South Africa and the Caribbean as well as a small fur trading port on the North American coast called New Amsterdam. The Dutch took advantage of the chaos in England during the Civil War (1642-1649)and extended their influence even further.

Between 1652 and 1674, the English and the Dutch fought three naval wars. Oliver Cromwell oversaw the passage of the first Navigation Act and English

privateers took this to mean that they could openly attack Dutch ships. The Dutch fought back. The latter two wars were waged by King Charles II during the

Restoration. With regard to U.S. History, the most important result was that…

Nieuw Nederland becomes New York1664

• Free African-American males lost the Dutch status of “freemen of the town” and were barred from working in many skilled trades. Generally, the Dutch treated African slaves more humanely than the English.

• Slavery became more entrenched in both New York and New Jersey.

• Under English rule, a new landed and mercantile aristocracy came into power. The Philipse, Livingston, Morris and De Lancey families would now dominate the politics of New York and New Jersey.

• Prominent Dutch families remained wealthy but less powerful politically. By the early nineteenth century, the old New Amsterdam Dutch aristocracy was seen as quaint and its members known comically as “Knickerbockers,” but it produced three U.S. presidents: Martin Van Buren, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt. As of 2015, Livingston’s representative in the U.S. House is Rodney Frelinghuysen.

• New York’s transition from Dutch to English colony was a tense and at times difficult one that would shape local politics for decades.

• The Dutch presence would be long lasting. Even though the Dutch lost control of the region in 1664, their language would be commonly spoken in the Hudson Valley and in northeastern New Jersey until the nineteenth century.

• The New York Charter of Liberties of 1683 imposed an English stamp on the meanings of citizenship and political participation. The Charter created an elected Assembly that would be one of the most “factious” in colonial America.

• Both African-Americans and women experienced a loss of both civil liberty and economic status under English rule.

• English law prohibited most widows from inheriting their husband’s property and English custom barred women from acting as independent agents in commerce.

The Dutch colony of New Netherland, at least according to the Dutch, extended from the Connecticut River in the east to the Delaware River in the west. This area included parts of modern day CT, NY and NJ. In 1666, a group of Puritan settlers drew up the plan below for a small trading port on the Passaic River in the newly created colony of New Jersey.

They eventually called the new settlement “Newark.”

The colony of New Jersey was soon partitioned into an eastern and western half that were controlled by different groups of proprietors. For most of the colonial era, the colony was referred to as “The Jerseys.” From 1702 until 1734, NJ and NY shared the same governor, Lewis Morris.