Peregrine White 1620-1704, first child born to English parents in New England. He was born on the Mayflower as she lay at anchor in Cape Cod Bay on Nov. 20. He became a citizen of Marshfield, Mass., and held minor offices.

peregrine falcon Crow-sized, grey, black and white bird of prey. It inhabits craggy open country or rocky coastlines and marshes or estuaries. The largest breeding falcon in Britain, it flies swiftly with prolonged glides. Length: to 48cm (19in). Family Falconidae; species Falco peregrinus.

Colonial Era. Perceptions of the “Colonial Era of the United States” are often Anglo‐centric and teleological. The most usual periodization—from 1607 to either 1763 or 1775—enshrines an English (after 1707, British) frame of reference: the first permanent settlement at Jamestown, the Proclamation of 1763 securing British hegemony over eastern North America, and the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. This perspective is defensible, since the polities that coalesced into the United States had all been provinces of the British empire, but it understates the roles other European nations played: from a Spanish standpoint, for example, the era might date from 1565, the year St. Augustine was founded, to 1821, when the future American Southwest won its independence from Spain as part of Mexico. Moreover, restricting the story only to components of the American republic‐to‐be implies that its formation was preordained, whereas in the mid–eighteenth century, Britain's thirteen North American colonies were not collectively distinguishable from its other imperial jurisdictions, and their future identity was in no way predictable. The Colonial Era, in short, should be understood on its own terms and not as the preface to a national historical narrative.

Interpretations of the era have changed markedly since nineteenth‐century patriots viewed the colonies as nascent states built by refugees from a tyrannical homeland to secure their liberty and property. As the twentieth century opened, scholars like Charles Andrews adopted a “scientific” methodology that substituted “objectivity” for nationalist apologetics, propounding that Britain had ruled the colonies benignly, encouraging commerce and representative government. At midcentury, Perry Miller's declension thesis—that the unraveling of New England Puritanism under the pressure of adapting to the New World was paradigmatic for understanding the fundamental theme of American history—dominated the literature. The next generation of students, attuned to social scientific theory and benefiting from advances in quantification and computer technology, criticized Miller for limiting his sources to texts published by an educated elite and assuming that theological polemics accurately mirrored social realities. Aggregating court records, wills, and vital statistics, they reconstructed the mundane doings of individuals, families, and communities, contending that the southern or Mid‐Atlantic colonies forecast social developments in the United States far more closely than did New England. Meanwhile, contemporary movements for minority rights, highlighting Anglo‐America's ethnic and racial heterogeneity, focused historians' attention on African slaves, Amerindians, and non‐English migrants. Tracking their movements reinvigorated transatlantic analyses. By the end of the twentieth century, connections between Britain and the colonies were again in favor, but the spotlight shone on consumption patterns, the cult of gentility, and evangelical communications instead of political institutions. Historians knew far more about colonial Anglo‐America than they did a century ago, but greater knowledge had lessened confidence that a single comprehensive synthesis was possible.

Beginnings of Settlement.

Anglo‐America was planted where the Spanish did not reach and where competing European powers, notably France and the Netherlands, trod lightly. England could not contemplate colonization until the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603), when the national faith and the resolution of long‐standing agitations over the dynastic succession afforded the requisite internal stability, and the emergence of an outward‐looking merchant class supplied the necessary capital. By then Spain had explored the Gulf of Mexico's rim and the French the St. Lawrence Valley, leaving England to contest the mainland between roughly 32° and 45° north latitude, an expanse whose fertile soils and temperate climate could sustain high agricultural productivity. North America attracted the English Crown as a forward base to attack Spain's possessions, and the Church of England fitfully heeded biblical imperatives to proselytize the heathen. But private, not public, parties underwrote English ventures, and personal motives for migration—obtaining land and/or worshiping God as conscience dictated—predominated.

The colonies were molded by the continuing encounter with the Eastern Woodland aborigines, whose villages usually contained a few hundred members. Individual bands were extremely autonomous, and supertribal entities like the Five Nations of the Iroquois exceptional. Amerindians could facilitate or threaten a colony's survival: In Virginia, for example, the Powhatans taught planters how to grow tobacco, but in 1622 they attempted to annihilate the plantation, killing a quarter of the inhabitants. Interaction between them and the English was not uniformly hostile: They showed colonists how to survive in the wilderness and exchanged furs for textiles, pots, guns, and alcohol; occasionally they slept with European lovers or worshiped the Christian God. Inexorably, however, as colonists intruded on native lands, relations worsened. For most of the seventeenth century conflicts involved only particular colonies and bands, as in the Pequot War and King Philip's War, but as English claims collided with those of France and Spain, Amerindians were inextricably drawn into imperial wars, although their own objectives always dictated how, when, and with whom they fought. The native impact on colonial life was immense: As producers and consumers, they expanded markets; as healers, farmers, hunters, and pharmacists, they offered specialized knowledge; as allies to reward or enemies to placate, they engendered political debate; as darkly imagined presences, they embodied a putative savagery against which Europeans could pronounce their own civility; and as woodland warriors, they contributed to the militarization of a colonial society in which virtually all adults knew how to handle a gun.

Hoping to profit from commerce (and privateering), the Virginia Company of London inaugurated English colonization in 1607. The first years proved disastrous: Political factionalism, class conflict, native hostility, drought, and lack of a salable export stunted the colony until experiments with tobacco gave planters a merchandisable good, and the company's concession to let settlers own land gave them incentive to grow it. Tobacco proceeds encouraged inhabitants to regard Virginia as home, not as a field of dreams, and slowly the colony evolved from an outpost of transients into a settled society with a representative assembly and an established church. In 1634, the Old Dominion gained a neighbor on the Chesapeake. George and Cecilius Calvert, first and second Lords Baltimore, founded Maryland to advance the family fortune and erect a haven for Roman Catholics. The effort to encourage a mixed polity of Catholics and Protestants, purposefully articulated by the Act Concerning Religion (1649) allowing liberty of conscience for Christian Trinitarians, made Maryland unique in the Western Hemisphere.

Religious forces were likewise instrumental in forming New England. Within the Anglican church, a Puritan minority complained about the lack of moral discipline and the retention of Catholic “superstitions.” When the Crown and bishops stymied protest, handfuls of Separatists, who denied that the church was a true body of Christ, fled to the Netherlands. Dissatisfied with life under the Dutch and fearing renewed warfare with Spain, the Pilgrims, a fragment of one congregation, settled Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620. The so‐called Great Migration, singular among seventeenth‐century English folk‐wanderings for the high percentage of family groups involved, commenced a decade later, composed of Puritans like John Winthrop who perceived ecclesiastical corruptions, moral decay, social dislocation, economic slowdowns, and the king's personal rule as providential warnings to escape God's wrath against England. Expressing through theMay flower Compact their hope of erecting a godly society in Massachusetts, they yoked church and state as separate but coordinate agencies to uphold religious orthodoxy and good behavior. Political disputes, doctrinal disagreements, and personal ambitions caused malcontents to “hive out”: Connecticut was founded by townsfolk who thought the Massachusetts church‐state complex a bit too strict and their lands inadequate, New Haven by a circle who thought the Bay Colony too lax and its prime commercial sites taken, and Rhode Island by Roger Williams and other religious dissidents expelled by the orthodox. Rhode Island never erected a church establishment, but with that exception the New England colonies were cut from the same cultural cloth, modeling their governments on those of English trading companies, marketing their crops and fish around the Atlantic, and promoting Calvinist brands of moralism. The speedy erection of political and religious institutions, a demographic regime that facilitated family formation, an economy that allowed most households a competence, and a shared ethical system enabled New England to achieve political and social stability more quickly than the Chesapeake.

The English Civil Wars, which erupted in 1642, ended the Great Migration and the initial phase of colonization. No new settlements were chartered until after Charles II assumed the throne in 1660. By that date, the Chesapeake and New England colonies had become embryonic regions, internally similar and externally distinctive. Their existence secured England's claim to North America.

Integration into the Empire.

Colonization after Charles II's Restoration in 1660 took place under the Crown's watchful eye. With mercantile companies no longer inclined to wager large sums for uncertain returns, leadership passed to prominent nobles and gentry on whom the king bestowed generous proprietary grants. Such gifts provided a cheap way for the king to liquidate his political debts while extending England's occupation of the North Atlantic littoral, although they risked diluting royal control by giving powerful men nearly complete control over their domains. One proprietorship resulted from the capture of New Netherland, originally chartered by the Dutch West India Company in 1624. Primarily a trading outpost, New Netherland featured a polyglot populace of merchants and farmers when the English seized it in 1664 and Charles II transferred it to his brother, James, Duke of York. Almost immediately the duke passed holdings west of the Hudson onto two lords. Wrangles over titles dragged on for decades, until the Crown united the properties as New Jersey in 1702. Grandiose schemes of social engineering, reminiscent of Lord Baltimore's plan to erect feudal baronies, propelled two other proprietorships. Devising Pennsylvania as simultaneously a sanctuary for the Society of Friends (Quakers) and a commercial center, William Penn provided his “holy experiment” with a popularly elected assembly while expecting residents to acquiesce in laws he drew up. To attract an ideal balance of large and small property holders, the lords of Carolina dreamed of introducing a hereditary nobility while soliciting small freeholders and guaranteeing liberty of conscience. Neither experiment worked as planned: Pennsylvania's Quaker‐dominated assembly in Philadelphia challenged Penn's policies and authority, while the Carolinians never conferred a single title. Nonetheless, both colonies prospered, Pennsylvania challenging New York's provision trade, and Carolina exporting timber, foodstuffs, naval stores, and deerskins.

The abundance of land forced entrepreneurs to utilize bound labor, since most freemen preferred to own a homestead rather than hire themselves out. Virginians pioneered indentured servitude, by which persons deeded their labor in return for passage to America. Because servants contracted for only a limited number of years, however, masters had constantly to replace them, and when competition from English and other colonial labor markets cut the available supply, Virginians turned to importing African slaves, who could be held in perpetuity. The English first fully exploited slavery on Barbados, where by 1660 planters had transformed forests into cane fields and built immensely profitable sugar refineries. The conversion to slave labor was not accomplished blithely, for many English regarded Africans as brutish, heathen, and ignorant outlanders, a characterization that helped rationalize enslaving them but raised concerns about how to assimilate them. Nevertheless, the profitability of harnessing a permanently bound labor force won out. Between 1685 and 1720, Virginia converted to a slave‐labor system, and as early as 1708 South Carolina, many of whose founders brought slaves with them from Barbados, had a black majority. While slaves labored in every mainland colony, 80 percent of them were in the South.

For half a century, England lacked both a coherent colonial program and the bureaucracy to implement one. Kings chartered plantations according to circumstances, not plans, and the distance to North America hindered communication. As a result, the Crown exercised little effective oversight. During the interregnum following the beheading of Charles I in 1649, Parliament forced the submission of governments that supported the displaced Stuart monarchy. After the Restoration in 1660, England's realization that its control over its possessions was tenuous and that losing them would compromise national security stimulated efforts to integrate the colonies into the empire. Imperial policy was designed to benefit the British metropolis principally and its subordinate provinces secondarily. Parliament regulated colonial currencies, inhibited crafts that might compete with metropolitan industries, and passed Navigation Acts to make England the imperial hub, exclude foreign trade, guarantee stocks of military stores, and secure colonial markets. The Crown attempted to standardize political forms and royalize colonial governments by attacking charters and buying out proprietors. In the most radical effort, James II in 1686 collected the provinces from New Hampshire to New Jersey into the Dominion of New England under a single governor‐general and eliminated their assemblies. The colonists, fearful that closer imperial oversight would curtail their trade and liberties, sought to hold officials at arm's length. When the Glorious Revolution deposed James in 1689, rebellions in Massachusetts and New York overthrew the Dominion of New England and unseated the proprietary government in Maryland. Over time, however, England's imperial policies took hold. Trade flowed substantially according to the Navigation Acts, with little damage to merchants' pocketbooks, as it turned out. Political structures were never completely standardized, but by the early eighteenth century eight of the twelve extant colonies had a royal governor, assemblies convened annually in every province, and a stable imperial polity had crystallized. There would be no further armed revolts against an imperial governor until the American Revolution.

A Complex Social Order.

By around 1715, all of the colonies had also achieved substantial communal stability: family‐formation had reached levels that allowed for self‐sustaining growth, and ruling elites had cohered. Over the next fifty years, burgeoning size would catalyze increasingly complex social orders. Enjoying ample harvests, adequate fuel supplies, and a favorable disease environment, colonial populations multiplied at nearly the maximum possible rate of natural increase. Their density in some coastal areas reduced the size of landholdings, cutting family income, but the availability of land limited the extent of overcrowding. Regional patterns of agriculture and agricultural exports intensified. The South specialized in staples cultivated mainly by slaves: tobacco (the mainland's leading export in 1770) from the Chesapeake, rice (the third most important commodity) from the Carolina‐Georgia tidewater, and indigo (the fifth) from the Carolina piedmont. Family members supplied the bulk of labor in the North, which evolved a more mixed agricultural regime. Mid‐Atlantic farmers grew wheat, which in raw or processed forms comprised the second leading export in 1770. With horticulture constrained by rocky soils, New Englanders exported fish (the Northern colonies' third most valuable commodity) and whale products along with foodstuffs, livestock, and rum. Southern commodities, valued as reexports or military necessities, fell under British control. The Navigation Acts mandated shipping them to England, and British merchants owned the ships enlisted. Northern goods were less vital, hence less regulated and carried more often in colonial hulls. Long before 1775, the South and North were following different developmental trajectories. Southerners reinvested their profits in land and slaves without diversifying their holdings; northerners invested in various enterprises, triggering economic differentiation.

As wealth accumulated, social class structures became more articulated, with the greatest stratification in coastal and riverine areas linked to transatlantic markets. Slaves comprised the lowest social rank, their manumission a virtual impossibility. In the South, they frequently lived in gangs of twenty or more; in the North, they more often worked as individuals who staffed the elite's townhouses, advertising a family's wealth rather than generating it. Perhaps one in five Euramericans resided at or close to the subsistence level, but the majority resided in yeomen or artisan families that earned a competent livelihood. As their disposable income rose and ocean transportation improved, middling households bought British consumer goods. Upper‐class whites, who owned the most lucrative plantations or counting houses, held more than half the total value of property. Aspiring to the status and power of the British upper classes, they purchased metropolitan luxuries and manuals of gentility to distinguish themselves from the lower orders materially and morally. Eighteenth‐century American society increasingly resembled Britain's, but with significant differences: Mobility was greater, property‐holding more widespread, and, elite pretensions notwithstanding, the patronage networks that governed social advancement in Britain virtually nonexistent. The population was also more ethnically and racially heterogeneous. Fleeing poverty, war, and religious persecution, most voluntary migrants came from Germany, Scotland, Ireland, and (by way of England) France. By 1775, 20 percent of the colonies' 2.5 million non‐Indian people were African or African American, and half of the inhabitants south of New England were not ethnically English.

The religious structure differed markedly as well, most notably in its denominational diversity and in the Church of England's failure to become a universally exclusive establishment. Dissenters occupied many colonies before the church gained a foothold. The Church of England never ordained an American bishop, and even in the South it neither monopolized ecclesiastical tax revenues nor limited political officeholding to its members. The Congregationalists gained hegemony over New England, while in the Mid‐Atlantic colonies Presbyterians, Dutch and German Reformed, Lutherans, Mennonites and other German sectarians, Catholics, and Jews joined Quakers, who held meetings throughout the colonies, and Baptists, who gained converts in the South after 1750. Pluralism diluted the power of religious establishments, facilitated the growth of religious liberty, and, combined with settlers' tendency to move beyond clerical oversight, exploded the presumption that everyone in a vicinity had to (or would) join a particular church. In the face of voluntary church membership, ministers engineered revivals to recruit congregants. One type of revival, typified by Jonathan Edwards's ministry in Northampton, Massachusetts, emerged from Congregationalist attempts to regenerate the piety of their ancient communities. A second issued from the peregrinations of George Whitefield, an Anglican minister who touched off the so‐calledGreat Awakening (1739–1745), accelerating the number of church admissions while fracturing the Congregationalists and Presbyterians. The awakening's immediate impact can be exaggerated—rates of conversion soon declined to previous levels—but the process of organizing new churches with believers who had experienced a spiritual new birth became the centerpiece of nineteenth‐century American evangelicalism.

The conditions of colonial society encouraged a politically active citizenry. Widespread property holding allowed most white adult males—certainly a far greater percentage than in Britain—to meet suffrage requirements, and relatively unrestrictive religious tests barred few from voting or from holding office. Convinced that their property gave them a stake in political decisions, and quick to voice opinions shaped by weekly newspapers and gossip, householders regarded their legislators as agents for promoting local interests. Instructed by engaged constituents and claiming that provincial assemblies were miniature Houses of Commons, representatives repeatedly faced off against the governor and his council, gaining power to initiate revenue bills, determine the salaries of imperial officials, control their own internal organization, and, on occasion, exercise executive prerogatives. Legislative battles frequently involved allocating military expenses, since between 1689 and 1763 the colonies participated in four worldwide struggles for empire among Britain, France, and Spain. The first two (King William's War, 1689–1697; Queen Anne's War, 1702–1713) had little long‐term impact on them except for the communities disrupted—mainly in New England—and the individuals killed, but the second pair (King George's War, 1739–1748; the French and Indian War, 1754–1763) eventuated in Britain's making good its claims to the Ohio Valley and expelling France from the North American mainland.

Conclusion.

By 1763, characteristic patterns distinguished colonial regions from each other. New England's town meetings, Congregational establishment, and ethnocentrism earned it a reputation for egalitarianism, moralism, and xenophobia. The Mid‐Atlantic colonies remained the most ethnically and religiously heterogeneous, their diverse interest groups forcing the appearance of long‐term partisan political blocs in Pennsylvania and New York earlier than elsewhere. In the South, monoculture, slave labor, and guaranteed British markets supported the largest population, the highest per‐capita income, and the wealthiest, most powerful mainland elite. From all regions, families moved into the interior, less a distinctive cultural enclave than a transient zone in which migrants, having outstripped organized institutions and thrust themselves upon native tribes, concocted out of custom and exigency societies less hierarchical and more violent than coastal communities, though by no means lastingly so. At the same time, certain similarities were everywhere apparent. Habits of enterprise had erected transatlantic commercial networks yielding one of the world's highest standards of living. The European system of state churches failed to materialize, the Reformed tradition influenced worship, and, although adherents of Protestantism's different stripes competed for power and place, they united in identifying Britain as the champion of true religion against the superstition and tyranny of Roman Catholicism. Jealous of their English rights (even as, and perhaps because, they deprived slaves of them), citizens regarded their representative assemblies as bulwarks against monarchical prerogatives and as protectors of their liberties. Triumph over France fired colonists' pride in the empire and themselves.

None of these conditions made the American Revolution inevitable. Some historians have argued that the prevalence of ecclesiastical schisms, class conflicts, and sectional antagonisms amounted to a “crisis” that propelled rebellion, but confrontations were ordinarily resolved without resort to violence, and in any case how or why such tensions might have been displaced onto British authorities is not clear. The Colonial Era's legacy was one of finite contingencies, framed by the elaborated cultural rules of England and adorned by those of northwest Europe, from which the future of Anglo‐America would emerge. In creating the United States, the American Revolution actualized one possibility out of many.
See also African Americans; Agriculture; Albany Congress; Bacon's Rebellion; Bay Psalm Book; Bible, The; Boston; Byrd, William, II; Captivity Narratives, Indian; Columbian Exchange; Economic Development; Exploration, Conquest, and Settlement, Era of European; French Settlements in North America; Fur Trade; German Americans; Half‐way Covenant; Hutchinson, Anne; Immigration; Indian History and Culture: From 1500 to 1800; Indian Wars; Iroquois Confederacy; Literacy; Literature: Colonial Era; Mather, Increase and Cotton; Medicine: Colonial Era; New York City; Pocahontas; Powhatan; Religion; Revolution and Constitution, Era of; Salem Witchcraft; Science: Colonial Era; Seven Years' War; Smith, John; Spanish Settlements in North America; Tobacco Industry; Zenger Trial.

Bibliography

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Wesley Frank Craven , The Colonies in Transition 1660–1713, 1968.
Winthrop Jordan , White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro 1550–1812, 1968.
Edmund Morgan , American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, 1975.
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Jack P. Greene , Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture, 1988.
Edmund S. Morgan , Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America, 1988.
David Hackett Fischer , Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, 1989.

Charles L. Cohen