The setting that surrounds a group of people directly correlates to how they interact with each other and with outside groups. Their environment affects their religion, education, conflicts, and culture. The type of crops that can be grown, the resources that are available, and the conflicts that they engage in are all dependent on the environment surrounding them. Since survival is dependent on the environment, certain qualities are searched for by people who wish to settle there. This will inevitably lead to conflict. A new environment has lots of natural resources that can be traded and sold for profit. Trade in the New World led to competition, such as when France tried to grab naval supremacy from England in order to control trade routes and colonies. This led to a conflict between the English and French and they entered into a struggle for control of the colonies, the domination of trade routes, and commercial sources. …show more content…
Agriculture was also greatly influenced by the environment.
Settlers in the New England colonies had a harder time growing crops in their area due to the kind of soil. The harsh and bitterly cold winters also made it difficult. However, due to their location on the coast they were able to fish, which was essentially a staple in their economy. The middle colonies were known as the “breadbasket” because their main crops were wheat, barley, oats, rye, and corn. The southern colonies were known for growing indigo, cotton, and rice, but their primary crop was unquestionably tobacco. Tobacco was in such high demand, not only in Europe but in the colonies as well, that it became known as a cash crop and was the main source of their
revenue. Though the environment throughout the colonies were different, some factors were held constant. Most of the colonists considered themselves to be Christians, though they did practice different variations of the religion. Education was also the same. Upper class children were privately taught in small schoolhouses. Middle class children were taught the basics at home and the poor didn’t receive any formal education and instead took on apprenticeships to learn their craft.
The New England and the Southern colonial settlements were united in several areas that created the opportunity for each group of colonies to grow. However, these groups of colonies took divergent paths when it came to the founders’ motives to settle the New World, the importance of religious and social orientation, economic approaches and political developments. These different approaches were ultimately successful beyond the early founders’ expectations.
The four groups of colonies were distinct from one another in the labor systems that they used. In New England, there were small farms that allowed a much bigger manufacturing and merchant class to arise. This was very different even from the middle colonies, where larger family farms and indentured servitude were prefered. In the Chesapeake and southern colonies, plantations were the most profitable economic choices. However, in the Chesapeake colonies these plantations were smaller and relied more on indentured servants than the slave heavy large
The Chesapeake and New England regions were settled by people of English descent, but by 1700, they had become two distinctly different societies. They had evolved so differently, mainly because of the way that the settlers followed their religion, their way of conducting politics and demographics in the colonies. Even though the settlers came from the same homeland: England, each group had its own reasons for coming to the New World and different ideas planned for the colonies.
After the discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus in 1492, the powerful Old World scrambled to colonize it. The three major nations involved in this were Spain, France, and England. Spain took more to the south in the Central American and Mexico areas while France went north in the Canada region. The English came to America and settled in both the New England and Chesapeake area. Although the people in these regions originated from the same area, the regions as a whole evolved into different societies because of the settlers’ purpose for coming to America and the obstacles faced in both nature and with the natives.
In the 17th century, the British colonies still identified themselves as European, but as the colonies expanded and grew more populous, they developed differing geographic, social, and economic systems. This difference between New England, and Chesapeake, is caused by the motivations for settlement between the two regions. While the New England colonies were mainly settled for religious motivations, most notably by the Puritans, the Chesapeake colonies were settled for economic prosperity. Also, while the Chesapeake colonies were mainly settled by individual young men seeking a profit, the New England colonies were settled by families hoping to settle and expand.
During the 1600's, many people in the American colonies led very many different lives, some better than others. While life was hard for some groups, other colonists were healthy and happy. Two groups that display such a difference are the colonists of New England and Chesapeake Bay. New Englanders enjoyed a much higher standard of living. This high standard of New England's was due to many factors, including a healthier environment, better family situation, and a high rate of reproduction.
The New England colonies developed a close-knit homogeneous society and a thriving mixed economy of agriculture and commerce. They developed this by creating a group called the New England Confederation. This focused on the protection of the people in the colony in the event of enemies trying to attack them. On page 49, it says “The primary purpose of the confederation was defense against foes or potential foes, notably the Indians, the French, and the Dutch.” They created this as a safety net for the New England colonies. Every part of the New England colonies had two votes, it didn’t matter on the size of the colonies. The ran it as their own because the king of the time didn’t care much for the colonies.
During the late 16th century and into the 17th century, European nations rapidly colonized the newly discovered Americas. England in particular sent out numerous groups to the eastern coast of North America to two regions. These two regions were known as the Chesapeake and the New England areas. Later, in the late 1700's, these two areas would bond to become one nation. Yet from the very beginnings, both had very separate and unique identities. These differences, though very numerous, spurred from one major factor: the very reason the settlers came to the New World. This affected the colonies in literally every way, including economically, socially, and politically.
Q 1. The American colonies were divided into three distinct regions and these regions were different from each other in their origins, populations, economics and agriculture, religious makeup, and connection to England .write an essay comparing and contrasting the New England, middle, and southern colonies with specific examples.
The characteristics that came to shape the life in New England were the rocky, barren soil, the extreme climate and the rich waters. Although there was farming in New England , colonists looked to other means of survival. They looked to the rich waters for fishing and trade. The coastline of New England was very fertile with sealife. So, fishing became a way of commerce and trade providing a steady economy to New England. Because of the rocky soil and extreme climate, the colonists were forced to plant many different crops on a small pa...
To the south of New England were the middle colonies. There the soil was fertile, and the weather more acclimated to farming (Sarcelle, 1965). Rivers flowed west toward the frontier, enabling transportation. The middle colonies, as opposed to the relatively Puritan dominated New England, were very diverse in people. A mixture of Dutch, German, Swedes, English and other smaller groups were present in middle colonial cities such as New York (Higginbotham, 1996).
The excerpt “A Description of New England” by: John Smith is a very interesting and descriptive work about life in the New England colony. The way John Smith describes what most people in the colony try to do, which includes converting non believers to Christians and how he himself had experienced the good days and bad days of life in the colony. John Smith’s description of what life was like when the colony was first founded is astonishing, because with very little to start out with, the people of the colony made it their dusty to convert the non believers to believers, and how they would strive to discover new things, and to build the settlement even bigger. John Smith was very detailed in how the people would make the colony better by erecting
Agriculture was tremendously valuable to the lives of early Americans and the development of the country. It was among one of the top two most important aspects of American life, but was not quite as primary as the social and economic life. Some of the main crops grown by the earlier settlers included wheat, peas, corn, and tobacco. Farms were developed first in the Chesapeake region. Due to the abundant land and numerous streams in this region, the farm soil was richer and more ideal for farming. Farms in the northern colonies, especially New England, tended to be smaller due to smaller amounts of fields and land. Southern colonies were able to have much larger plantations and areas to plant crops. White indentured servants were sometimes hired in the earlier part of the 17th century, but black slaves became a common use of labor in the later decades of the 1600s. The New England and middle colonies in opposition, rarely hired slaves. The most abundant and common crop in every region was corn. “Every...
The different forms of slavery in the North American colonies greatly depended on the economy of that colony and the type of commodity that it was capable of producing. In the British Chesapeakean colonies of Virginia and Massachusetts, tobacco was the main cash crop. Since it required extensive hand labor and skill, slaves were needed for it's development and that meant slaves had to work the harsh conditions of the tobacco plantations. In the Georgia and South Carolina colonies, slaves were used for indigo and rice cultivation. Slave labor was preferred over Indian labor in this colony because slaves were thought to be better rice workers due to their agricultural experience in Africa (Out of Many, 90).
Someone’s environment has an effect on one person and his or her state of mind. In a simple example, when one is in the dessert they are bound to be more irritable due to the heat and are more likely to snap and lash out at anything