Key points
The chapter's argument: in the late 1600s and early 1700s, colonial settlements became full-fledged colonial societies, larger and more stratified, with elites and institutions. They were simultaneously sources of imperial wealth and problems for the empires that ruled them, since colonial and home-country interests could diverge.
The chapter surveys four different paths colonial societies took: slave societies (Caribbean, Chesapeake, Carolina, lower Mississippi), mission-presidio societies (the Southwest), farming societies (New England and the Middle Atlantic), and equestrian Indigenous societies (the Great Plains).
The English Caribbean, not North America, was the real center of seventeenth-century colonial development. Planters learned sugar cultivation from the Dutch (who had been in Brazil) and turned islands like Barbados into sugar plantation economies.
Caribbean planters first relied on white indentured servants (about 44,000 in the Caribbean at midcentury, more than in all of North America), but as servants grew restless and land ran out, they turned to enslaved Africans. By 1660 Barbados had an enslaved Black majority (27,000 Black to 26,000 white), the first English colony to do so.
The Middle Passage, the trans-Atlantic voyage of the enslaved, had mortality rates of about 15 to 25 percent, so many of the enslaved people purchased in West Africa did not survive to be resold. Most enslaved Africans went to the Caribbean or Brazil, not mainland North America.
The Chesapeake became a slave society after Bacon's Rebellion (1676) exposed the political danger of a restless, armed white labor force, and as improving English conditions slowed the flow of indentured servants. The Royal African Company (1663) let England enter the slave trade directly.
Virginia built a slave code law by law between the 1640s and 1705: Africans were chattel (property for life), children followed the mother's status (1662), baptism no longer made a slave free (1667), and an enslaver faced no punishment if a slave died (1669). The Virginia Slave Code (1705) capped the system and at the same time eased poor whites' taxes and politics, building an early rich-poor white alliance on race.
The Chesapeake slave population went from about 300 in 1650 to more than 16,000 by 1700 (about 20 percent of the population). But Africans never formed a majority there; enslaved people were dispersed on scattered "quarters," learned English, formed families, and the Chesapeake slave population grew by natural reproduction as well as imports.
Carolina was a "colony of a colony", an extension of the Caribbean, chartered to Lords Proprietors (1663) whose "Fundamental Constitutions" John Locke helped draft. Early Carolina enslaved large numbers of Indigenous people (perhaps 30,000 to 50,000 over four decades) before turning to enslaved Africans.
Carolina's rice economy rested on the agricultural knowledge of enslaved Africans, especially women, who brought rice-cultivation techniques from West Africa (Judith Carney's Black Rice). The sickle-cell trait gave Africans resistance to malaria, letting them work mosquito-infested rice swamps where Europeans perished; the Caribbean was a "white man's grave."
By 1710 Carolina had a Black-majority population and a rice export economy. The Stono Rebellion (1739), a slave revolt near the Stono River marching toward Spanish Florida, brought the repressive 1740 Negro Act. Coastal enslaved people preserved African ways, the Gullah and Geechee culture.
The French built a slave society in the lower Mississippi Valley: La Salle claimed Louisiana (1682); the Company of the Indies (1710s) brought Europeans and enslaved Africans and founded New Orleans. The Natchez Revolt (1729) killed many settlers and nearly destroyed the French operation, leaving Louisiana an appendage of the Caribbean plantation economies.
In the Southwest, the Pueblo Revolt (1680) pushed Spanish colonialism from missions toward presidios (military bases); by 1750 the presidio was the dominant institution. The Apache (Gran Apacheria) raided Spanish holdings.
Spain extended mission-presidio society to California from 1769 (San Diego), led by the Franciscan Junipero Serra, founding a chain of coastal missions. The missions were disastrous for Indigenous "neophytes": the coastal Native population fell from about 60,000 to 35,000 and California's Native population dropped by a third (300,000 to 200,000).
New England and the Middle Atlantic were farming societies: most Europeans lived on small landowning farms that relied on household labor, not enslaved people, grew grain and orchard crops, and faced inward. Port towns (Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia) ran the triangular trade and fisheries; about half of wealthy town dwellers owned slaves.
To the British crown, New England and the Middle Atlantic were on the imperial periphery, "oddities" that produced little England needed. The Atlantic economy was "lumpy": Barbados, farther from London than Boston, was more central to the British transatlantic economy than Boston.
On the Great Plains, the Comanche built an equestrian empire, La Comancheria, larger than Western Europe, around bison hunting, horses (from the Spanish), and captive raiding. By 1775 the Comanches (perhaps 40,000, more than the Spanish and mestizo populations of Texas and New Mexico combined) were the dominant power on the Plains.
Comanche captive slavery was different from chattel slavery: captives (mostly women and children) underwent "social death and rebirth" but could be assimilated into families. The Ute-Comanche Treaty (1786) brought a lengthy peace and an integrated trading zone, the Spanish acknowledging Comanche power.