196 Ch. 5 • Rise of the Atlantic Economy: Spain and Englandextending its influence across other oceans, as well. This increasingly
brought England into competition with France, which began to colonize
Nouvelle France (now Quebec).
The development of English overseas trade allowed London to replace
Antwerp as Europe’s leading center of trade. London’s Merchant Adven
turers competed with Spanish and Portuguese rivals for spices and other
products that fetched increasingly handsome prices at home. They traded
textiles and other manufactured goods for slaves, gold, and ivory from the
African and Brazilian coasts. Above all, West Indian sugar from Barbados
entered the English domestic market in lucrative quantities. English mer
chants traded in India and Indonesia. In 1600, Queen Elizabeth chartered
the East India Company with the goal of competing with Dutch traders.
To compete with the Spanish, who already had a colonial empire that
stretched several thousand miles from what is now the southern United
States to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America, Raleigh
sought to establish a colony in Virginia between 1584 and 1587. Despite the
failure of a first settlement on Roanoke Island, a permanent colony finally
succeeded at Jamestown in Virginia, a full century after Spain took posses
sion of its colonies in Mexico and Latin America. Tobacco began to reach
England in the first decades of the seventeenth century. Tobacco was, to an
extent, the equivalent of what silver was to the Spanish Empire, because of
its great role in the economic development of the English colonies. Whereas
the Spanish arrived in the Americas as conquerors, the English came intent
on developing trade. Gradually, the English began to arrive in North America
as permanent settlers. The Virginia Company, a joint-stock company,
received in 1606 a royal charter to settle the region of Chesapeake Bay. The
Virginia Company brought the first slaves to North America ten years later,
although it was not until late in the century that a full slave system emerged.
In 1625 the English throne proclaimed Virginia part of “Our Royal Empire.”
The Puritan settlement in Plymouth followed in 1620, and the Massachu
setts Bay Company received its charter in 1629. Unlike the case of Spain,
where colonization followed the impulse of a strongly centralized state and
the Roman Catholic Church, English colonies reflected the Reformation, as
Protestants, including Protestant dissidents like the Puritans, led the way as
they sought religious freedom for themselves. In contrast to the Spanish
Empire, English America remained extremely rural, despite the slow growth
of Boston and New York (6,000 residents and 4,500, respectively, in 1692,
at a time when Mexico City already boasted more than 100,000 people).
The rising English population encouraged more emigrants to the New
World, despite the high cost of the difficult trip across the Atlantic. In the
developing colonies, settlers moved westward to take available land, pushing
Native Americans farther back. Disease, along with guns, helped them. John
Winthrop, the governor of Massachusetts, noted in 1634, “For the natives,
they are all near dead of the smallpox, so as the Lord hath cleared our title to
what we possess.”