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Colonial Objectives and Strategies

Overview: Colonial Strategies and Indigenous Resistance

• Spanish imposition
• English exclusion
• French integration

Other European powers...

1540, Hans Holbein the Younger

The European conquest

• significant differences in the ways the Americas were colonized

The "land rush" of the 16th century

• exploration, and attempts to hold lands for future development

Geography of Colonization from 1500-1700

• Santa Fe, Jamestown, and Quebec were all founded in the first decade of the 1600s.

Three patterns of colonization

• replaced indigenous hierarchy
• created a town-oriented, land-based, multiethnic, stratified society
• depended on indigenous labor

2. Expulsion

• Isolation and buffer zones between populations
• mono-ethnic
• land is more important than labor or other resources

3. Articulation

• cooperation is needed
• resources more important than land
• integration, because of complementary economic relationship

Spanish Objectives

• Critical resource: labor
• First objective: metals
• Territorial expansion

Spanish colonialism

• Economy was a hybrid combination of European and Indigenous foods
• Fundamentally different society, not a European transplant

The institutions of Spanish conquest

• Encomienda
• Repartamiento
• Entradas
• Mission & Presidio, schools

Early entradas

• Cortés
• Pizarro
• De Soto
• Coronado

Spanish Colonial World

"If the great symbol of the English colonist is the frontiersman clearing the land, the symbol of the Spanish colonization should be the adelantado pacing out the grids of a Spanish town."

The 16th Century

• Export economies
• Plantation agriculture
• New World slavery
• multiethnic societies
• cultural change

The Emerging English Strategy

• Adopted plantation cash-cropping strategy
• Tended not to interact with Indigenous people, but enslaved Africans
• Fought territorial wars with Europeans and Native people

English Objectives

• The critical resource was land
• Eastern Seaboard
• Caribbean

English areas

The early English settlements on the Eastern seaboard

• Nearly a disaster...
• Roanoak, 1585
• Jamestown 1607
• role of chance

Jamestown

How English Colonization was organized

• The Virginia Company
• lasted 1606-1624
• a for-profit venture
• collapse came from high mortality, bad relations with indigenous people, and unprofitability

Trade

[The Virginia Indians are] covetous of Copper, Beads, and such like trash. …They adorne themselves most with copper beads and paintings…In each eare commonly they have 3 great holes, whereat they hang chaines, bracelets, or copper. John Smith

French Colonial Strategies

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comments to Wilson or Lovata
Created 10/21/98, modified by SMW 10/21/98