Creating New Social Orders: Colonial Societies, 1500–1700

This is Unit Three, part one, covering the years from fifteen hundred to seventeen hundred — the century in which four European empires built permanent societies in North America, each one differently. Part one takes Spain, the Dutch, France and the Chesapeake. Part two takes New England. By the end you will be able to explain how Spain established Florida and New Mexico, and what happened to the peoples already living there. You will be able to give the causes of the Pueblo Revolt and state what the Pueblo said was at stake. You will be able to compare New Netherland and New France by what each depended on. You will be able to trace Virginia from near-collapse to a tobacco economy, and say why its labour system carried the seed of its own replacement. And you will be able to account for the Anglo-Powhatan wars as sustained resistance rather than scattered incidents.

Spain first, and in Florida the pattern is compressed into three entries: a claim, a massacre that served two purposes at once, and a collapse.

The claim, and how little followed it.

USH1 0301 Ponce de León and Florida

Ponce de León claimed the Florida area in fifteen thirteen and named it for the Feast of Flowers, the nearest religious observance. No permanent settlement followed. Spain moved only when French and English privateers began using Florida as a base against treasure ships.

What Spain did when it finally moved, and what that one action accomplished.

USH1 0302 St Augustine, 1565

French Huguenots built Fort Caroline in fifteen sixty-two. Pedro Menéndez destroyed it, killed most of the colonists, and founded St Augustine in fifteen sixty-five on the Timucua town of Seloy. One action both reduced privateering and eliminated a French claim.

And what became of the people whose town it was built on.

USH1 0303 The Timucua Collapse

The Timucua numbered about two hundred thousand before contact, fifty thousand by fifteen ninety, one thousand by seventeen hundred. European diseases caused those losses far more than Spanish military action. Catholic priests then forced the demoralised survivors to convert.

West now, to the other Spanish colony on this continent, and to the sustained pressure that would produce the only successful revolt in this unit.

What Spain hoped to find in the south-west, and what it founded instead.

USH1 0304 Santa Fe and New Mexico

Oñate explored in the late fifteen nineties. Spain hoped for gold and silver and found little. Settlers founded Santa Fe in sixteen ten, where Pueblo villages already stood, and it became the Kingdom of New Mexico.

The religious programme, and the specific tactic that made it intolerable.

USH1 0305 The Franciscans and Spiritual Conquest

Franciscans pursued spiritual conquest. Pueblo peoples at first adopted the Catholic elements compatible with their own worldview, until priests demanded complete abandonment of indigenous practice and targeted the young, removing them from parental influence.

The labour system, and how the course wants the reform read.

USH1 0306 Encomienda and Repartimiento

Repartimiento eventually replaced the encomienda, requiring Native towns to supply a pool of labour. The course frames that change as a shift in the mechanism of exploitation rather than genuine reform.

The social order Spain imposed, and one word the course chooses carefully.

USH1 0307 The Spanish Social Order

Patriarchy shaped the Spanish colonial world and women occupied a lower status, with the Spanish at the apex and Native peoples and Africans beneath. The course notes both groups contested those claims to dominance rather than accepting them.

Which brings us to sixteen eighty, and to the entry where all that pressure produces the outcome Spain did not expect.

The revolt, and the explanation the Pueblo gave for their own losses.

USH1 0308 The Pueblo Revolt, 1680

Popé demanded a return to native ways, and the Pueblo held that when Jesus came, the Corn Mothers went away — linking the Spanish directly to disaster. A coordinated rebellion killed over four hundred Spaniards and drove about two thousand settlers south. Spain returned in sixteen ninety-two.

East now, to the Dutch, whose colony was a business before it was anything else — and whose tolerance had a boundary worth naming.

What the colony was for, and the number that limited it.

USH1 0309 New Netherland

Stuyvesant expanded to Long Island and up the Hudson and conquered New Sweden in sixteen fifty-five. The Dutch West India Company controlled all commerce and the colony worked primarily as a fur-trading post. By sixteen sixty-four only nine thousand people lived there.

The scheme meant to fix that, and what it built into the society.

USH1 0310 Patroonships

A patroonship granted large tracts and the right to govern the tenants on them, to investors who promised passage for at least thirty Dutch farmers. The system created a yawning gap in wealth and status between tenants and patroons.

The tolerance the colony is remembered for, and the fact that sits beside it.

USH1 0311 Dutch Tolerance and Its Limits

New Netherland welcomed Protestants from Germany, Sweden, Denmark and England, and from the sixteen fifties permitted Jewish residents — an observer claimed eighteen languages on the streets of New Amsterdam. The same company brought about four hundred fifty enslaved Africans and had captured Elmina.

North to New France: the smallest of these colonies, the most dependent on its neighbours, and the one that left the best record of them.

How small it actually was, and who kept it alive.

USH1 0312 New France

By sixteen forty fewer than four hundred settlers lived in Canada, eking out an existence along the St Lawrence while France's claims to the interior remained firmly under the dominion of native peoples. Colonists depended on the Algonquian; the course says without them the French would have perished.

Why the Algonquian tolerated them, and what European weapons did to an existing war.

USH1 0313 The Beaver Wars

The Algonquian tolerated the French because the colonists supplied firearms for their war with the Iroquois, who obtained weapons from Dutch partners. The conflict turned on the beaver pelt trade and spread through the Great Lakes.

The missionaries, and the reason their reports are worth reading.

USH1 0314 The Jesuits and the Relations

Jesuits arrived in the sixteen twenties and never exceeded forty priests. Their annual Relations document Native responses as well as Jesuit perspectives, which is what makes them usable — including lacrosse ordered as a cure for fever, whole villages contending and betting beaver robes.

And one convert, whose treatment shows the limit of French regard.

USH1 0315 Kateri Tekakwitha

Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk convert, impressed the priests with her piety and Chauchetière sought her canonisation. Church leaders refused to elevate a savage to such status. She was canonised in twenty twelve.

Back to Virginia, where the story of this unit is survival first and prosperity second — and the margin was thinner than the founding suggests.

The winter that nearly finished the colony, in a survivor's words.

USH1 0316 The Starving Time

George Percy recorded a sharp prick of hunger no man can describe but he who has tasted it. Survivors ate horses, dogs, cats, rats and mice, leather and serpents. Of seventy-five hundred arrivals between sixteen oh seven and sixteen twenty-four, twelve hundred survived.

And the crop that changed the arithmetic.

USH1 0317 Tobacco Saves the Colony

Virginia stabilised on tobacco, exported from sixteen fourteen, which the course says saved the colony from ruin. Clearing, planting, curing and packing were all labour-intensive. The crop did not reward capital so much as labour, and the colony had almost none of it.

That last line sets up the three entries this part builds toward. Tobacco needed hands, and how Virginia got them shaped everything after.

The system Virginia used first, and the flaw the course wants you to notice.

USH1 0318 Indentured Servitude

About one hundred thousand indentured servants came to the Chesapeake in the sixteen hundreds, signing five to seven years for passage and freedom dues. They could not marry, could be sold or traded, and had terms extended for disobedience. Those who finished often became planters themselves.

The land system that ran alongside it, and what it concentrated.

USH1 0319 The Headright System

The headright system granted fifty acres to anyone paying their own passage, and fifty more for every servant or family member brought. A planter's landholding grew in proportion to the people he imported, which put land and labour into the same hands.

And the year that carried two firsts, one of which was not yet what it became.

USH1 0320 1619: Two Firsts

By sixteen nineteen Virginia had a governor, a council and the House of Burgesses. The first Africans arrived that same year, and slavery had not yet become institutionalised — some worked as servants comparable to White counterparts and became free landowners. The transformation came in the century's last decades.

None of this happened on empty land. Three entries on the Powhatan, and the course's point is that they belong together as one sequence.

The first war, and why the course insists the cause was not trivial.

USH1 0321 The First Anglo-Powhatan War

The Powhatan Confederacy was an Algonquian alliance of thirty groups, about twenty-two thousand people. The first war ran from sixteen oh nine to sixteen fourteen, caused by English intrusion and the colonists' refusal to follow diplomatic gift-giving protocols.

The person that war is usually remembered through.

USH1 0322 Pocahontas

Settlers captured Pocahontas in sixteen thirteen, and her marriage to John Rolfe helped end the first war. Promoters publicised her conversion as proof of successful missionary work. She was a diplomatic asset before she was a symbol.

And the two wars that followed, with the numbers that show the scale.

USH1 0323 The Second and Third Wars

English expansion nearly one hundred miles inland reignited conflict. In sixteen twenty-two Powhatan warriors killed about three hundred fifty settlers, roughly a third of the colonial population, and a third war opened in sixteen forty-four killing about five hundred.

Two entries to close, one founding a colony out of England's religious quarrels and one opening the quarrel that part two picks up.

A colony granted for service, and conceived as a refuge.

USH1 0324 Maryland

Charles the First chartered Maryland in sixteen thirty-four to the Calvert family for loyal service, and Cecilius Calvert conceived it as a refuge for English Catholics — a proprietary colony rather than a company one. England's domestic religious conflicts are visible in its colonies' founding documents.

And the two men whose falling-out sets up what follows.

USH1 0325 Bacon and Berkeley

Bacon arrived in sixteen seventy-four, befriended Governor Berkeley, then felt excluded. He wanted frontier land and Berkeley forbade expansion. Bacon drew support especially from former indentured servants who believed Berkeley limited their chance to own tobacco farms, and they advocated extermination.

Look back at what you can now do. You can explain how Spain established Florida and New Mexico — a claim, a massacre serving two ends, a population falling from two hundred thousand to one thousand, and a capital planted among Pueblo villages. You can give the causes of the Pueblo Revolt, and state what the Pueblo said: that when Jesus came, the Corn Mothers went away. You can compare the Dutch and the French — one a trading post with too few people and a patroon system that built inequality into the grant, the other so small it could not have survived without the Algonquian. You can trace Virginia from a winter that left twelve hundred of seventy-five hundred alive, through the crop that rewarded labour, to a servant system whose graduates became competitors for land. And you can read the Anglo-Powhatan wars as four decades of sustained resistance.