Helen Hornbeck Tanner, The Settling of North America: The Atlas of the Great Migrations into North America from the Ice Age to the Present (1995).
Colin McEvedy, The Penguin Atlas of North American History to 1870 (1988).
Mark C. Carnes, Historical Atlas of the United States (2002).
Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (2001).
Donald W. Meinig, The Shaping of America Vol. 1: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (1988).
David Buisseret, Historic Illinois from the Air (1990).
Today's topic is comparative colonialisms and comparative imperialisms. The period we'll be trying to cover in this session is a staggering 250 years of North American history. Most of what we've talked about thus far in class follows after the period we'll be talking about today. Another way of saying this is that there is as much "American History" that precedes the American Revolution as there is history that follows it.
We'll look today at several major European empires, and think about how those empires organized their systems of colonization in North America, with a particular focus on landscape. How can we recognize in the palimpsest that is the North American landscape the features that originated during the Spanish colonial, French colonial, British colonial, and U.S. colonial periods?
We'll start today with the Spanish Empire, and especially the history of Europe's Iberian Peninsula (what today you would know as Spain and Portugal). These are central to the stories of the colonies and empires that most strongly shaped North America (to say nothing of Central and South America) during the earliest centuries of European colonization of the Western Hemisphere. From Columbus's 1492 journey through the next 250 years, Spain would set the model for other European imperial powers wanting to expand into North America. It's important to remember that the story of Spanish imperialism is itself part of a much older story. When you think of Cortés (Cortez), Coronado, and other Spanish conquistadors in North America, remember that the strategies they used for seeking wealth, land, and labor were part of traditions that emerged during the reconquest of Iberia by Christians battling Muslim forces and the Ottoman empire. In Spanish, this is known as the reconquista, which you can survey here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconquista.
This should remind us that the colonizing of North American is itself part of a much, much older set of events and patterns than we typically think. What we think of as ranching in the American West got its start in Spanish ranching, which had its start in livestock-raising practices on the Iberian Peninsula. Cowboys in the American West, which many Americans today regard as iconic figures in U.S. history and folklore, were part of a vaquero tradition that migrated north out of Mexico and South America, and originated in the Iberrian Peninsula:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaquero
Likewise, the English colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America were a continuation of "plantations" that the English had first initiated in Ireland during the 16th and 17th centuries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantations_of_Ireland
To study colonies and empires in early American history is to recognize the much deeper continuities that connect the American past with histories in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Remember all those invasions of the British Isles that have left their marks on the language we now speak? Colonies and empires were hardly invented for the New World.
Start on the Iberian Peninsula. With the establishment of coastal stations in West Africa (1480s) and further on in India (1490s, 1500s), Portugal became linked globally to a network of trade. At the start of the 16th century, the schism between Protestantism and Catholicism had not yet happened: Martin Luther would not nail his 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg until 1517. So it was the Catholic Pope who had much authority over where different empires could participate in trade. With the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), the Pope declared that Portugal had dominion over all lands east of a line running through the heart of the Atlantic Ocean, 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands (though you can imagine the challenge of defining the precise location of that line when the problem of longitude hadn't yet been solved). Land west of that line—including much of the Americas except for the territory that would become Brazil—was declared Spanish territority.
Thus began a series of Spanish expeditions into Central and North America in the 1510s and 1520s. Hernán Cortés laid siege to the Aztec capitol Tenochtitlán and the city fell to Spanish forces in 1520, toppling Aztec dominance of the region. One crucial factor in explaining Spanish military success were the devastating epidemics to which European explorers were immune but native peoples in the Americas were not. Measles, mumps, and especially smallpox decimated Native American populations that may have numbered as many as 50 to 100 million people in the western hemisphere in 1500 but were eventually reduced by as much as 90% over the next few centuries. The movement of microbes across oceans helps explain why the Aztecs and others had difficulty resisting Spanish military invasions (a story I tell in greater detail in 460).
Extraordinarily rich silver mines in Mexico and Bolivia meant that enormous amounts of wealth returned to the European economy and also helped open trade between Europe, China, and the Americas. Silver and gold from the Americas was the wealth that opened up the China trade for Europeans, linking the Americas to networks of trade that were truly global in scale. In addition to precious metals, the Spanish colonial system was based on the extraction of wealth by colonizing large tracts of land and forcing peasant labor to work that land. It was a highly regulated system that looked to the Spanish Crown for its organization. The Laws of Burgos (1512) and the New Laws (1542) were examples of monarchical decrees that specified everything from rules governing the treatment of native slaves to city planning:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_Burgos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Laws
Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar, called attention to the abuse of native peoples in his classic 1542 work A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. Notice the centrality of faith in all of these efforts. One of the justifications for conquering and exploiting natives was their lack of Christian faith; if left unconverted and unbaptised, they would be eternally damned in the afterlife--so European Christians believed. A striking feature of New Spain was a set of institutions meant to Christianize native peoples, bring them under the legal rule of civil society, settle them into sedentary communities, and put them to work. This would have implications that we'll discuss at length for American landscapes.
For example: the Laws of Burgos institutionalized the notion that a central town square should be built around a church, with a grid of twelve streets emanating from that square and centralized military power guarding and imposing order on each town. Monastic orders were responsible for missionizing to the natives to whom they brought the word of God (and from whom they extracted labor to sustain and grow the missions), while the Spanish Crown provided military support for this enterprise. We can see evidence of this connection between faith, military power, and disciplining native peoples built into the town of St. Augustine, Florida, established in 1565. It is the oldest continuously-inhabited Spanish settlement in the present-day U.S., and began as a military fortification.
Like his predecessor Hernán Cortés, Hernando De Soto's 1539-1542 explorations of the American Southeast also sent the Spanish conquistador looking (unsuccessfully) for gold and native peoples to enslave. His expedition into the interior of the North American continent produced a map—as we've seen in this class before—the focused closely on the locations of rivers. De Soto traveled through the mound-building communities we encountered in the previous lecture, bringing with him a veritable menagerie of horses, cattle, sheep, and other livestock as he wandered in search of fortune.
Other Spanish expeditions expanded European knowledge of North America. Francisco Vázquez de Coronado had heard to somewhere to the north of the Rio Grande were Seven Cities of Cíbola with streets paved in gold. He headed north out of Mexico, capturing several Pueblo villages, and eventually made his way out to what we'd today call the Great Plains. His expedition lasted from 1540-1542, during which one of his men, García López de Cárdenas became the first European to visit the Grand Canyon. Notice: it was not until more than three centuries later that a Euroamerican would successfully navigate the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1869. His name, as you know, was John Wesley Powell.
Notice that the centers of power for New Spain were all to the south of the present-day U.S. The northern frontier of New Spain, in what is today the southern tier of the United States, come into being for defensive reasons: out of fear that other European colonial powers would begin seizing land there. So areas of Spanish occupation—regions of Florida and east Texas, as well as the large number of missions from southern California to San Francisco and linked together by the El Camino Real, "the Royal Road"—were marked by military as well as religious buildings.
Spanish colonization efforts sometimes met with significant native resistance. The most dramatic example in what is today the United States took place in 1680, when the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico organized a large-scale revolt, rising up against the Spanish and forcing them out until 1692, when Diego de Vargas's brutal reconquest began.
Spanish colonization relied on three institutions: missions (for promoting Christian faith), pueblos (sedentary communities of Christianized natives), and presidios (fortified military garrisons).
What were the footprints of these institutions? How did they reshape the landscape?
We'll use the Franciscan Mission San Juan Capistrano in San Antonio, Texas, as an example. The following links will give provide useful overviews:
Google Maps satellite view:
https://goo.gl/maps/RtDgJcf9ZiB2
https://www.nps.gov/saan/planyourvisit/upload/SAANmap1.pdf
https://www.nps.gov/saan/index.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_missions_in_Texas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_San_Juan_Capistrano_(Texas)
Notice the following in these aerial photographs:
Confusingly, there's also a Franciscan Mission San Juan Capistrano in southern California that has an excellent Wikipedia entry with even better illustrations than the San Antonio mission; you may find it helpful as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_San_Juan_Capistrano
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_missions_in_California
To conclude: here is a map of the Spanish empire at its greatest extent, in 1790:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SpanishEmpire1790.svg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Empire
For two centuries and more, Spain's was the empire that every monarch in Europe with imperial ambitions hoped to emulate.
Samuel de Champlain's map from 1632 shows us the first of the great French colonies in North America, along the St. Lawrence River:
http://data2.archives.ca/e/e428/e010694118.pdf
https://thediscoverblog.com/2013/10/17/samuel-de-champlains-general-maps-of-new-france/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_de_Champlain
Notice the ecology of Canada: agricultural settlement had to occur right along the St. Lawrence river because it was such a challenge to cultivate crops and animals in much of the rest of the country, especially to the north. The Canadian Shield, a very large territory centered on Hudson Bay of exposed Precambrian igneous and metamorphic rocks covered by only a thin layer of soil, set limits on colonial enterprises: they couldn't rely on self-sufficient agricultural production because of poor growing conditions relating not just to the northern climate but to the poor, thin soils.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield
This meant that most French colonial settlement occurred close to the present-day border with the United States (unlike French activity in the fur trade, which reached much farther north and much deeper into the interior of the continent).
One feature of the French that was striking compared to the Spanish was a much greater degree of mixing with native populations: intermarriage, trading, and cross-fertilization of cultural practices, in part because of the centrality of the fur trade to the French colonial economy and its dependence on native economic, cultural, and political networks.
At the beginning of the 18th century, present-day Biloxi, Mississippi, and New Orleans, Louisiana were established as seats of French settlement and trade on the Gulf of Mexico. Unlike the Spanish, who sought to "civilize" and turn native peoples into laborers, the French were less aggressive in their efforts at missionary conversion. The same was true in the Pays d'en Haut, the region of the Upper Great Lakes (including Wisconsin), where the French were nowhere near as dominant as the Spanish and much more dependent on alliances with native groups.
Let's return to landscape: what kinds of footprints did the French leave on the North American landscape? Their modifications of the landscape were less prominent than those of the Spanish for several reasons. French military forces were less interested than their Spanish counterparts in trying to "civilize" native peoples by concentrating them into centralized locations to extract labor from them. The fur trade necessarily involved wide-ranging travels across hundreds of miles, so there wasn't nearly so much incentive for sedentary settlement. Furthermore, the preferred French building material was wood rather than stone, and wood decomposes much more rapidly than stone, especially in the more humid climates that typified New France as compared with New Spain.
So what do we see on the North American landscape that survives to today from the French colonial era? We see remnant military infrastructure, for example the remains of Fort de Chartres in Illinois (built 1760).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_de_Chartres
http://www.fortdechartres.us
Vertical boards (contrasted with the more familiar horizontal logs of traditional log cabins, which originated on Chesapeake Bay in New Sweden), as seen in Cahokia's Holy Family Church
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_Holy_Family_(Cahokia,_Illinois)
are also vestiges of French building practices. Large houses on an open plain that are ringed by a porch around the entire structure are also characteristically French: you can visit an example of this today at Villa Louis in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_Louis
What has survived longest are the ways the French divided and sold land. They frequently used a "long lot:" not the checkerboard squares we see on much of the North American landscape, but lots that are long and skinny, all fronting on the Mississippi or St. Lawrence or other rivers that served as the chief corridors of transportation in New France and Louisiana. Long lots fronting on rivers maximized access to water transportation for all the resulting properties. Furthermore, the long linear tracts facilitated plowing by reducing the number of times farmers had to turn their teams of horses.
Because property boundaries are among the longest surviving features of any landscape, you can see examples of these French long lots by doing satellite image searches in areas where the French initially settled. See, for instance, this view near Baton Rouge:
https://goo.gl/maps/YzBsHBb552y (definitely worth clicking to see!)
or anywhere along the St. Lawrence River in the vicinity of Montreal:
https://goo.gl/maps/GQPBXC1a1b42
One additional remnant are the French place names that are so numerous in Quebec, Louisiana, and some parts of Missouri and even Wisconsin. The word "Cajun" to describe French-heritage residents of modern-day Louisiana comes from the 1755-78 expulsion of Arcadians ('Cadians —> Cajuns) from Nova Scotia in the Canadian Maritimes (originally called Acadia) to other parts of North America, especially the bayou country of the Mississippi Delta. French-speaking populations are of course still active in Francophone Canada—most notably Montreal and Quebec—and in New Orleans today.
Wikipedia has a page listing prominent French place-names in the United States, organized by state:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_place_names_of_French_origin_in_the_United_States
For comparison, here's the corresponding page for places with Spanish names:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_place_names_of_Spanish_origin_in_the_United_States
For an extensive survey of the colony of New France in North America, including some very helpful maps, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_France
In the final section of today's lecture, we turn from the Spanish and French in North America to focus on the British colonies on the Atlantic eastern seaboard. We will encounter the legacies of these colonies multiple times in this course, so don't be misled by their brief treatment here. Let's focus on the differences between the British and the other colonial powers, and on some of the landscape consequences British colonial practices in North America.
1607: Jamestown, on the James River, on the eastern seaboard of what is today Virginia, was the oldest sustained English settlement in North America (though Sir Walter Raleigh's failed "Lost Colony" on Roanoke in 1585, which we've already encountered in John White's paintings, obviously predated it). Jamestown is often contrasted with the settlements that began in New England, an area of intense Calvinist religiosity, with migrants seeking to escape the influence of the Church of England. Settlements from this religious exodus included Plymouth (est. 1620), the Massachusetts Bay Colony (est. 1628-1634), Rhode Island (est. 1636), and Connecticut (1636). Congregationalism was the dominant religious tradition in New England for at least the next two centuries.
There were other colonies in what is today the eastern United States whose origins predated British settlement: New Holland, which would become New York and whose New Amsterdam would become New York City; and New Sweden, along the Delaware River in the area that is today Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. These would become part of the "middle colonies." Unlike New England, colonies to the south would be less Calvinist in orientation: e.g., Pennsylvania (1681), a Quaker colony founded by William Penn, whose religious tolerance would attract a very diverse array of immigrants from many religious traditions; and Maryland, the only Catholic colony, granted to George Calvert, 1st Baron of Baltimore, in 1632.
Notice one attribute exemplified by these English colonies: that the English crown did not seek to exercise anything like the same degree of control as the Spanish crown did over its empire. As a result, the English colonies were remarkably diverse in their political governance, religious identity, economic activities, and land use. The Crown typically granted territory to an individual proprietor (e.g., William Penn in Pennsylvania or George Calvert in Maryland) or joint stock company (e.g., the Virginia Company for Jamestown or the Massachusetts Bay Company for the area west of Boston that became Massachusetts), and the terms of the royal charter then shaped what happened on that land. Individual colonies wound up having quite different agendas and traditions as a result.
For an overview of the original thirteen colonies with good maps showing their locations and relationship to other colonial territories, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteen_Colonies
One other feature you should notice: unlike the French and Spanish colonies, large numbers of English citizens moved to North America because they were fleeing what they saw as a corrupt church (whether that church was Catholic or the Church of England). The English colonies were very much caught up in the various European conflicts associated with the Protestant Reformation, which was less true of the Spanish and French empires, with their much closer affiliation with the Catholic Church. Recurring religious conflicts in Great Britain and on the Continent had the effect of encouraging new waves of migration to the English colonies. Whereas military and financial interests motivated Spanish colonial activity, religious schisms helped to create the demographic pressures for large-scale British settlement in North America.
This meant that migrations of British subjects to North America played a much larger role in the English colonies, which were correspondingly less dependent on Native American workforces than was true in New Spain. That said, the forced migration of enslaved African would play a crucial role in the English colonies as was also true in other European colonial systems, a topic we'll explore in an upcoming lecture.
Grants made by the British Crown had contested boundaries and virtually no western limits other than (hypothetically) the Pacific Ocean. They thus ignored the fact that native peoples were prior occupants who might have territorial rights to it. Legend has it that William Penn signed a treaty with Indians in Pennsylvania in 1683, though no historical documents survive to confirm that event; it is nonetheless often described as the first example of a formal effort to transfer property rights legally from native groups to a British citizen. Most English land grants ignored native rights altogether, and the fact that many went virtually all the way west across the continent would create problems in the future, including for the new United States. We will return to the challenges created by such land grants in future lectures.
The laissez-faire nature of English colonial development, and the different religious and economic orientations of the different colonies, produced important differences in settlement patterns that had signifiant impacts on the evolving landscape. New England's strong Calvinist orientation meant that the majority of settlers there came from England. Significant numbers of Dutch settlers populated the Hudson Valley because of the initial location there of New Netherlands. The religious tolerance of Pennsylvania led many Germans and Scots-Irish to settle there, as they did also in the back country of Virginia and the Carolinas. African slavery (about which we'll learn more in an upcoming lecture) initially concentrated in the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland as well as the Carolinas and Georgia, though there were in fact enslaved people in all the colonies.
The British also had colonial settlements that didn't didn't depend principally on agriculture. As with the French, the fur trade had its own geography, which for the British concentrated on upstate New York and especially on Hudson Bay in the north. With the French loss of New France to Britain in 1763, British controlled the St. Lawrence and the trade of the Great Lakes, though many of those who worked the trade in that region were of French, Native, and métis descent. In coastal areas, especially in New England, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, offshore fisheries played crucial roles in the colonial economy.
Key exports from the English colonies included wheat, rice, tobacco, furs, fish, and timber products; key imports included textiles from Great Britain and sugar, rum, and molasses from the Caribbean. Enslaved Africans, mainly from coastal and interior areas of West Africa, played increasingly important roles in the labor force especially of the southern colonial plantations. Again, this is a story we'll track more fully in an upcoming lecture.
The North American colonies of Spain, France, and Great Britain all participated in dynastic wars of succession relating to complex European geopolitics that I won't try to track in this course. By 1750, the British dominated territory east of the Appalachians in what is today the United States and the Canadian Maritime provinces, as well as the fur-trading territory centered on Hudson Bay; the French controlled the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi Valley; the Spanish controlled Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. These boundaries shifted with the Treaty of Paris in 1763, in which France ceded its lands east of the Mississippi to Great Britain and its lands west of the Mississippi (Louisiana) to Spain. The Treaty of Paris ended French colonial presence in North America (though not in the Caribbean).
With the American Revolution, the thirteen colonies south of Nova Scotia became the new United States, and the Treaty of Paris ending the war in 1783 left the new nation in control of lands extending to the Mississippi, save for Florida and contested portions of what is today Alabama and Mississippi. Napoleon's decision to sell Louisiana to the United States in 1803 (after he gained control of that former Spanish colony) extended formal U.S. control all the way to the Rocky Mountains and set the stage for the Lewis & Clark Expedition that we've learned about in earlier lectures.
Click on this map to follow the geographical summary in this paragraph:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_North_America_since_1763#/media/File:Non-Native_Nations_Claim_over_NAFTA_countries_1803.png
At the start of the 19th century, then, the United States extended from the Atlantic Ocean to the Rocky Mountains north of Texas. France was gone from North America as a colonial power, though many of the continent's inhabitants were of French descent and French colonies in the Caribbean continued to be important. Spain controlled Texas and southwestern lands extending to California. Britain controlled the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Valley, and Hudson Bay, with an emerging presence in Oregon that would gradually produce increasing conflict with the United States in the Pacific Northwest.
This excellent Wikipedia page and animated map will give you a good overview of these shifting territorial alignments:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_North_America_since_1763
Their implications for the gradual territorial expansion of the United States is represented on this map:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UnitedStatesExpansion.png
as well as on this more detailed series of maps from the 1970 National Atlas:
https://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/maps/national_atlas_1970/ca000103_large.jpg