Seeking the Main point 29

E

ngland and France began to challenge Spanish dominance of the Western

Hemisphere in the early seventeenth century. Although these three king-

doms struggled with one another militarily, economically, and socially,

each also consolidated power on the North American continent. Each

engaged in shifting patterns of cooperation and competition with native

populations in ways that reflected their cultural, social, religious, and economic

interests.

For example, the French steadily established trade networks with native

peoples in Canada, and the Spanish in the Southwest sought to convert natives

to Catholicism while at the same time exploiting their labor. The English col-

ony at Jamestown tried to replicate the success of the Spanish in finding easy

profits in gold and silver mines, but the climate and geography of Virginia were

radically different from the Central American regions that Hernán Cortés con-

quered nearly a hundred years before. The early Jamestown settlers were techni-

cally under the control of the Crown, but they built a colony that differed from

the ordered and authoritarian encomienda system of the Spanish, where native

peoples worked under close Spanish supervision. Instead, a labor system where

English-born indentured servants agreed to a set time of labor in return for

passage to the English colony gave way to a racial caste system where enslaved

Africans made up the bulk of the labor force on large cash-crop plantations. In

the western backcountry regions of Virginia, the majority of the population was

made up of independent, semisubsistence farmers, many of whom were former

DOcumEnT

AP® KE y

cOncEPTs PAgE

Topic III: Slavery in the British Colonies

2.12 Richard Ligon, Map of Barbados 2.1 III C 44

2.13 Virginia Slave Laws 2.1 II A 45

2.14 Enslaved Africans to the Western Hemisphere (table) 2.1 II B 46

2.15 George Cato, “Account of the Stono Rebellion” 2.1 II D 47

2.16 South Carolina Slave Code 2.1 II D 48

Applying AP® Historical Thinking Skills

Review: Historical Causation

New Skill: Contextualization

Thinking Skill 1.1,

Thinking Skill 2.5

49

28 ChApTer 2 | Colonial north aMeriCa | period two 16 07–175 4

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