Key points
Spain built the first great American empire after conquering the Aztec and Inca by the late 1530s; the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas (mediated by the pope) divided the globe between Spain and Portugal.
Spanish colonization relied on adelantados (private contractors licensed by the crown to conquer and exploit land) who became encomenderos; the crown later organized conquered lands into viceroyalties (New Spain, 1535; Peru, 1542) to rein in adelantado power.
Spain founded St. Augustine, Florida (1565) as a strategic hub to protect shipping routes and counter French/pirate threats, surrounded by Franciscan missions; an earlier Jesuit mission at Ajacan on the Chesapeake (1570) was wiped out by Indigenous people.
In New Mexico, Coronado's 1540s search for the mythic city of CÃbola found instead sedentary Pueblo peoples; Juan de Oñate's 1598 colony brutalized the Pueblos and enslaved Native people, and after no silver was found, the settlement of Santa Fe survived as a small outpost centered on Franciscan missionary efforts.
The Virginia Company of London founded Jamestown in 1607 in Algonquian-speaking Tsenacomoco, the chiefdom of Powhatan; poor site choice, disease, starvation, and conflict with Powhatan's people killed most colonists, and the 1622 attack by Opechancanough killed a quarter of the colony.
Virginia was 'salvaged' after 1612 when John Rolfe successfully grew tobacco for the English market, creating an economic boom that required massive amounts of labor.
Virginia's labor needs were met first by English indentured servants (bound by contract for 4-7 years) and, starting in 1619, by enslaved Africans; slavery's legal status was not yet clearly defined, and both servants and enslaved people faced brutal exploitation.
Puritans, inspired by Calvinist predestination and a desire to purify (not necessarily leave) the Church of England, colonized New England seeking religious purpose rather than plunder; Separatists (Pilgrims) founded Plymouth (1620) after signing the Mayflower Compact, aided by Indigenous people like Tisquantum and Massasoit.
The 'Great Migration' of the 1630s, led by John Winthrop, founded Massachusetts Bay Colony; Winthrop's 'city upon a hill' vision combined a religious covenant with an accepted social hierarchy of rich and poor, and political rights were restricted to male church members.
Puritan religious individualism produced internal dissent: Roger Williams (banished 1635, founded Providence/Rhode Island with Narragansett help) and Anne Hutchinson (banished 1637) both challenged Puritan orthodoxy and authority, Hutchinson especially by leading mixed-gender religious meetings.
Puritan expansion onto Native land, justified by the belief that Indigenous people did not properly 'improve' the land, led to violent conflict, culminating in the Pequot War (1636-1637), in which Puritan forces and Narragansett allies killed or enslaved large numbers of Pequots.
The Dutch founded New Netherland (1624) after Henry Hudson's 1609 voyage, centered on the fur trade at New Amsterdam, but a small population and better opportunities elsewhere in the Dutch empire left it vulnerable; England seized it in 1664 and renamed it New York.
William Penn secured a royal charter for Pennsylvania in 1681 as a haven for Quakers, though Penn set it up with quasi-feudal manors and baronies; Pennsylvania and the Jerseys attracted an unusually diverse mix of European settlers.
The Caribbean, especially Barbados, became a major English colonial focus once sugarcane cultivation (learned from the Dutch) took hold in the 1620s-1630s; sugar's intense labor demands shifted the workforce from white indentured servants to enslaved Africans by the 1650s.