The Southern colonies end up focusing on tobacco, cotton, rice
in the Carolinas. To work these huge plantations, they eventually
begin importing African slaves. Tobacco becomes all the rage in
Europe from the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and Virginia has a
virtual monopoly on the product for centuries. Just as important are the British possessions in the Caribbean. In the
1650s, they steal Jamaica from the Spanish. The native population,
having been completely wiped out by European diseases, is
replaced with African slaves, who are put to work on English sugar
plantations. Sugar—as well as a by-product of the manufacturing
process, rum—now becomes a major article of trade for the English.
Down the road, they end up with many more possessions, including
Barbados, the Virgin Islands, and Bermuda. There’s also the ragtag colony of New England, which in the 1630s
begins to fi ll up with all sorts of bizarre religious exiles. In the 17th
century, these colonies are pretty much left to themselves; they have
their own governments, issue their own money, and tax their own
citizens. They’re cut off from England politically, but economically,
they’re still closely tied. It’s only when the British try to draw them
more closely into the empire that there’s trouble. The French get some of their own Caribbean colonies, including
Martinique and a few others, but they also obtain Quebec and a huge
swathe of North America that stretches down the Mississippi river
all the way to Louisiana (named after Louis XIV). Economically,
this is quite different from many of the other colonies because it is
mostly fur trappers that settle here.Colonial Products
Sugar started out being an exclusive luxury item that was consumed
only by the wealthiest of people, and even after it began to be
produced in the New World, there were still elite people using it
for sugar sculptures and in their foods. Around the mid-17th century,
that all begins to change. Once the Spanish-Portuguese monopoly
was broken, there were British and Dutch manufacturers importing