The thirteen Colonies

The thirteen colonies that joined together to become the United States of America were but a part of the first British Empire. They were the product of a broad and dramatic expansion of England that began with the establishment of “plantations” in Ireland during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and reached a peak with the conquest of Canada and the extension of British influence over India during the 1760s. In the New World alone at the time of the American Revolution Britain had close to two dozen colonies, most in the Caribbean, apart from the thirteen rebellious ones. As was the case for other colonizing nations, this expansion was driven by a variety of factors, including religion, nationalism, and economics—often categorized as God, Glory, and Gold. Specific colonies typically combined more than one of these objectives. The Roanoke colony of 1585, for example, was intended to serve as a privateer base that would undermine Spain’s Catholic empire in America, advance the interests of England, and enrich those who would actually capture Spanish possessions.

Unlike the overseas expansion of European powers such as Spain and France, English colonization was rarely the result of government initiatives. Instead, the Crown granted charters authorizing overseas ventures to individuals and commercial corporations. Exceptions to this were colonies acquired by conquest, as when, in 1664, an English expedition seized the sprawling Dutch colony of New Netherland (which the English divided into New York and New Jersey), and when Canada joined the empire as a result of the Treaty of Paris of 1763 that ended the Seven Years’ War. Colonial charters specified the land that an individual or corporation had the right to settle. In the case of the New World, the English government, like its European counterparts, dismissed the rights of the Native American inhabitants and claimed title as the Christian discoverers of the lands. An imprecise awareness of the actual geography of