Differences in Each of the European Colonies in America
The French, English, and Dutch were not as fortunate as the Spanish and Portuguese about the lands they found to colonize. The territory they controlled did not have the mineral resources or the temperate climate that the Spanish and Portuguese colonies had. This required the Northern colonies to diversify economically. They could not rely on mining or cash crops to make their colonies profitable. This influenced the economic as well as the political and cultural structures of these colonies.
The French set up extensive fur trading operations with the help of the native Indians. They needed the natives’ knowledge, so they had to work with them, instead of trying to control them. In contrast, the English wanted nothing to do with the natives. They either worked their tracts of land themselves or imported slaves, as the Spanish had done in their colonies. The English, however, imported many more of there own people than the Spanish did. Eventually, this would make the colonies stronger and more independent than the colonies that had very small European population. The Dutch failed to colonize like some of the other major powers, but made money in shipping colonists and supplies for other countries. Their economy in the New World was geared toward providing services that allowed others to make money.
In the New World, Europeans had the military and technological power to impose their cultures, including their religions, on the people they encountered. Jesuits, for example, were better able to convert Native Americans to Catholicism than they had been Indians, Muslims, and Chinese who had civilizations of comparable technology. As had been the case when Christianity was imposed on the Roman world, however, this imposition invariable produced a hybrid, not orthodox, form of Christianity when the Native Americans accepted it at all. The native culture was simply changed a little bit to make it more Christian.
This hybrid culture was made even more probable by the simple lack of women in the New World. Most of the European colonists were men and many of them, understandably, intermarried with the native population. Only the English imported enough women to the New World to make intermarriage in their colonies socially taboo. In other ways, American culture usually mirrored that of the Old World. Although among certain European colonies, American born Europeans were considered socially inferior to their European born counterparts, the wealthy and educated held essentially the same beliefs and admired the same writers.
In sum, culture and social structures in American colonies differed from those in Europe and in other American colonies as economic circumstances influenced patterns of settlement. These differences become of great significance as the 13 English colonies that became the United States grew far more powerful than any of the other New World colonies. This was a direct result of their relatively large population which can be attributed to their particular style of settlement.
