The Rise of England^197
The English arrive in what would become Virginia.
Unlike that of the Spanish Empires colonies in the Americas, the absorp
tion of the emerging colonies of North America into what became an English
and then a British Empire (following England’s formal union with Scotland
as Great Britain in 1707) proceeded at a much slower and unpredictable
pace, following the vicissitudes of trans-Atlantic trade instead of conquest
and tight incorporation into England. The number of ships that went back
and forth between England and the American colonies doubled to more than
1,000 per year between the 1680s and the 1730s, a round-trip voyage of 100
days under the best of circumstances. There was no English equivalent of
the Council of the Indies, which oversaw the Spanish Empire in the Ameri
cas. In England’s North American colonies, administrative institutions, rep
resentative assemblies—eight of which had been established by 1640—and
judicial systems developed at their own pace without a phalanx of royal
officials. The local administration of the English colonies continued to be
influenced by regional differences, without the centralized distribution of
resources that characterized the Spanish Empire. A sense of political partic
ipation developed in the English colonies, at least among men of property.
With this went the growing sense that the colonies were a place of liberty, as
many colonists arrived seeking religious freedom. Tensions were almost
inevitable between the colonies, with their emerging sense of liberty and
separateness, and Britain, which tried to extract more revenues from the
colonies (see Chapter 11).