European colonization of North America. US history

As a result of the voyage of Columbus, they found much more, a whole “New World”, inhabited by numerous peoples. Having conquered these peoples with lightning speed, the Europeans began the merciless exploitation of the natural and human resources of the continent they had captured. Namely, from this moment begins a breakthrough that by the end of the 19th century made the Euro-American civilization dominant over the rest of the peoples of the planet.

The remarkable Marxist geographer James Bluth, in his groundbreaking study The Colonial Model of the World, paints a broad picture of early capitalist production in colonial South America and shows its key importance for the rise of European capitalism. It is necessary to briefly summarize his conclusions.

precious metals

Thanks to the conquest of America, by 1640, Europeans received from there at least 180 tons of gold and 17 thousand tons of silver. This is official data. In fact, these figures can be safely multiplied by two, taking into account the poor customs records and the widespread development of smuggling. The huge influx of precious metals led to a sharp expansion of the sphere of money circulation, necessary for the formation of capitalism. But, more importantly, the gold and silver that fell on them allowed European entrepreneurs to pay higher prices for goods and labor and thereby seize the dominant heights in international trade and production, ousting their competitors - the groupings of the non-European proto-bourgeoisie, especially in the Mediterranean region. Leaving aside for now the role of genocide in the extraction of precious metals, as well as other forms of capitalist economy in Columbus America, it is necessary to note Blaut's important argument that the very process of mining these metals and the economic activity necessary to ensure it were profitable.

plantations

In the 15-16 centuries. commercial and feudal sugar production developed throughout the Mediterranean and in West and East Africa, although honey was still preferred in northern Europe due to its lower cost. Even then, the sugar industry was an important part of the proto-capitalist sector in the Mediterranean economy. Then, throughout the 16th century, there is a process of rapid development of sugar plantations in America, which replaces and displaces the production of sugar in the Mediterranean. Thus, using the two traditional benefits of colonialism - "free" land and cheap labor - European proto-capitalists eliminate their competitors with their feudal and semi-feudal production. No other industry, Blauth concludes, was as important to the development of capitalism before the 19th century as the sugar plantations in Columbian America. And the data he cites is truly amazing.

So in 1600, 30,000 tons of sugar were exported from Brazil with a selling price of 2 million pounds. This is about twice the value of all British exports for that year. Recall that it is Britain and its commodity production of wool that Eurocentric historians (i.e., 99% of all historians) consider to be the main engine of capitalist development in the 17th century. That same year, Brazil's per capita income (excluding the Indians, of course) was higher than that of Britain, which only caught up with Brazil later. By the end of the 16th century, the rate of capitalist accumulation on Brazilian plantations was so high that it allowed production to double every 2 years. At the beginning of the 17th century, the Dutch capitalists, who controlled a significant part of the sugar business in Brazil, made calculations that showed that the annual rate of return in this industry was 56%, and in monetary terms, almost 1 million pounds sterling (a fantastic amount for that time). Moreover, these profits were even higher at the end of the 16th century, when the cost of production, including the purchase of slaves, was only one-fifth of the income from the sale of sugar.

Sugar plantations in America were central to the rise of the early capitalist economy in Europe. But besides sugar, there was also tobacco, there were spices, dyes, there was a huge fishing industry in Newfoundland and other places on the East Coast of North America. All this was also part of the capitalist development of Europe. The slave trade was also extremely profitable. By the end of the 16th century, up to 1 million people worked in the colonial economy of the Western Hemisphere, according to Blauth's calculations, about half of whom were employed in capitalist production. In the 1570s, the huge mining town of Potosi in the Andes had a population of 120,000, more than at that time lived in such European cities as Paris, Rome or Madrid.

Finally, about fifty new types of agricultural plants, cultivated by the agrarian genius of the peoples of the "New World", fell into the hands of Europeans, such as potatoes, corn, tomatoes, a number of pepper varieties, cocoa for chocolate production, a number of legumes, peanuts, sunflowers, etc. Of these — potatoes and corn became cheap substitutes for bread for the European masses, saving millions from devastating crop shortages, allowing Europe to double food production in fifty years from 1492 and thus provide one of the main conditions for creating a market for wage labor for capitalist production.

So, thanks to the works of Blaut and a number of other radical historians, the key role of early European colonialism in the development of capitalism and its “centering” (centratedness - neologism of J. Blaut - A.B.) is beginning to emerge in Europe, and not in other areas of world proto-capitalist development. . Vast territories, cheap slave labor of enslaved peoples, and the plunder of the natural wealth of the Americas gave the European proto-bourgeoisie a decisive superiority over its competitors in the international economic system of the 16th and 17th centuries, allowed it to rapidly accelerate the already existing tendencies of capitalist production and accumulation, and thus initiate the process of social -political transformation of feudal Europe into a bourgeois society. As the famous Caribbean Marxist historian S.R.L. James, "the slave trade and slavery became the economic basis of the French Revolution... Almost every industry that developed in France in the 18th century was based on the production of goods for the coast of Guinea or for America." (James, 47-48).

This fateful turn in world history was based on the genocide of the peoples of the Western Hemisphere. This genocide was not only the first in the history of capitalism, not only stands at its origins, it is both the largest in terms of the number of victims and the longest extermination of peoples and ethnic groups, which continues to this day.

"I have become death, the destroyer of worlds."
(Bhagavad Gita)

Robert Oppenheimer remembered these lines when he saw the first atomic explosion. With much more right, the ominous words of an ancient Sanskrit poem could be recalled by the people who were on the ships Ninya, Pinta and Santa Maria, when, 450 years before the Explosion, in the same dark early morning, they noticed a fire on the lee side of the island, subsequently named after the Saint Savior - San Salvador.

26 days after the nuclear device was tested in the New Mexico desert, the Hiroshima bomb killed at least 130,000 people, almost all of them civilians. In just 21 years after Columbus landed on the islands of the Caribbean, the largest of them, renamed by the Admiral in Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), lost almost its entire indigenous population - about 8 million people killed, died from disease, hunger, slave labor and desperation. The devastating power of this Spanish "nuclear bomb" on Hispaniola was equivalent to more than 50 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs. And that was just the beginning.

Thus, University of Hawaii historian David Stanard begins his book American Holocaust (1992) by comparing the first and “most monstrous in terms of size and consequences of genocide in world history” with the practice of genocides in the 20th century, and in this historical perspective lies, in my opinion. view, the special significance of his work, as well as the significance of Ward Churchill's follow-up book "The Minor Question of Genocide" (1997) and a number of other studies of recent years. In these works, the destruction of the indigenous population of the Americas by Europeans and Latinos appears not only as the most massive and long-lasting (up to the present day) genocide in world history, but also as an organic part of the Euro-American civilization from the late Middle Ages to Western imperialism of our days.

Stanard begins his book by describing the astounding richness and diversity of human life in the Americas until the fateful voyage of Columbus. He then takes the reader along the historical-geographic route of genocide, from the extermination of the native inhabitants of the Caribbean, Mexico, Central and South America, to the turn north and the destruction of the Indians in Florida, Virginia and New England, and finally through the Great Prairies and the Southwest to California. and the Pacific coast of the Northwest. The following part of my article is based primarily on Stanard's book, while the second part, the genocide in North America, uses Churchill's work.

Who was the victim of the most massive genocide in world history?

The human society destroyed by the Europeans in the Caribbean was in all respects superior to their own, if we take proximity to the ideal of a communist society as a measure of development. It would be more accurate to say that, thanks to a rare combination of natural conditions, the Tainos (or Arawaks) lived in a communist society. Not in the way the European Marx imagined it, but nevertheless communist. The inhabitants of the Greater Antilles have reached a high level in regulating their relations with the natural world. They learned to get everything they needed from nature, not exhausting it, but cultivating and transforming it. They had huge aqua farms, in each of which they raised up to a thousand large sea turtles (the equivalent of 100 head of cattle). They literally “collected” small fish from the sea, using plant substances that paralyzed them. Their agriculture was superior to European levels and was based on a three-tier planting system that uses a combination of different types of plants to create a favorable soil and climate regime. Their dwellings, spacious, clean and bright, would be the envy of the European masses.

The American geographer Carl Sauer comes to the following conclusion:

"The tropical idyll that we find in the descriptions of Columbus and Peter Martyr was basically true." About Tainos (Arawak): “These people did not feel the need for anything. They took care of their plants and were skilled fishermen, canoeists and swimmers. They built attractive dwellings and kept them clean. Aesthetically, they expressed themselves in wood. They had free time to play ball, dance and music. They lived in peace and friendship." (Standard, 51).

But Columbus, this typical European of the 15th and 16th centuries, had a different idea of ​​"good society." October 12, 1492, the day of "Contact", he wrote in his diary:
“These people walk in what their mother gave birth to, but they are good-natured ... they can be made free and converted to our Holy Faith. They will make good and skillful servants.”

On that day, representatives of the two continents met for the first time on an island that the locals called Guanahani. Early in the morning, under the tall pines on the sandy shore, a crowd of curious Tainos gathered. They watched as a strange boat with a fishbone-like hull and bearded strangers in it swam up to the shore and buried itself in the sand. Bearded men came out of it and pulled it higher, away from the foam of the surf. Now they were facing each other. The newcomers were swarthy and dark-haired, shaggy heads, overgrown beards, many of their faces were pitted with smallpox - one of the 60-70 deadly diseases that they would bring to the Western Hemisphere. There was a heavy smell coming from them. In Europe of the 15th century, they did not bathe. At a temperature of 30-35 degrees Celsius, the aliens were dressed from head to toe, with metal armor hanging over their clothes. In their hands they held long thin knives, daggers and sticks sparkling in the sun.

In the logbook, Columbus often notes the striking beauty of the islands and their inhabitants - friendly, happy, peaceful. And two days after the first contact, an ominous entry appears in the log: "50 soldiers are enough to subdue them all and make them do whatever we want." “The locals let us go where we want and give us everything we ask of them.” Most of all, Europeans were surprised by the incomprehensible generosity of this people for them. And this is not surprising. Columbus and his comrades sailed to these islands from a real hell, which was at that time Europe. They were the real fiends (and in many respects the dregs) of the European hell, over which the bloody dawn of the initial capitalist accumulation arose. It is necessary to tell briefly about this place.

Hell called "Europe"

A fierce class war was going on in hell Europe, frequent epidemics of smallpox, cholera and plague devastated cities, death from hunger even more often mowed down the population. But even in prosperous years, according to the historian of Spain of the 16th century, "the rich ate, and ate to satiety, while thousands of hungry eyes looked eagerly at their gargantuan dinners." So precarious was the subsistence of the masses that even in the 17th century, each "average" increase in the price of wheat or millet in France killed an equal or twice as large percentage of the population as US losses in the Civil War. Centuries after Columbus' voyage, the urban ditches of Europe still served as public toilets, the entrails of slaughtered animals and the remains of carcasses thrown out to rot in the streets. A particular problem in London was the so-called. "holes for the poor" - "large, deep, open pits, where the corpses of the dead poor people were piled, in a row, layer on layer. Only when the pit was filled to the brim, it was covered with earth. One contemporary wrote: “How disgusting is the stench that comes from these pits filled with corpses, especially in the heat and after the rain.” Little better was the smell coming from the living Europeans, most of whom were born and died without washing once. Nearly every one of them bore the marks of smallpox and other deforming diseases that left their victims half-blind, covered in pockmarks, scabs, festering chronic ulcers, lame, and so on. The average life expectancy did not reach 30 years. Half of the children died before reaching 10.

Around every corner you could lie in wait for a criminal. One of the most popular methods of robbery was to throw a stone from the window on the head of his victim and then search it, and one of the festive entertainments was to burn a dozen or two cats alive. In the famine years, the cities of Europe were shaken by riots. And the largest class war of that era, or rather a series of wars under the general name Peasants, claimed more than 100,000 lives. The fate of the rural population was not the best. The classic description of the French peasants of the 17th century, left by La Bruère and confirmed by modern historians, summarizes the existence of this most numerous class of feudal Europe:

“Gloomy animals, males and females scattered over the countryside, dirty and deathly pale, sun-scorched, chained to the ground, which they dig and shovel with invincible tenacity; they have a kind of gift of speech, and when they straighten up, you can see human faces on them, and they are really people. At night they return to their lairs, where they live on black bread, water and roots.

And what Lawrence Stone wrote about a typical English village can be applied to the rest of Europe at that time:

“It was a place full of hatred and malice, the only thing that connected its inhabitants were episodes of mass hysteria, which for a time united the majority in order to torture and burn the local witch.” There were cities in England and on the Continent in which up to a third of the population were accused of witchcraft, and where 10 out of every hundred citizens were executed on this charge in one year alone. At the end of the 16th - 17th century, in one of the regions of peaceful Switzerland, more than 3,300 people were executed for "Satanism". In the tiny village of Wiesensteig, 63 "witches" were burned in one year. In the Obermarchtal, with a population of 700, 54 people died at the stake in three years.

Poverty was such a central phenomenon in European society that in the 17th century the French language had a whole palette of words (about 20) to designate all its gradations and shades. The Dictionary of the Academy explained the meaning of the term dans un etat d'indigence absolue as follows: "one who previously had no food or necessary clothing or a roof over his head, but who has now said goodbye to a few crumpled cooking bowls and blankets that constituted the main property working families.

Slavery flourished in Christian Europe. The church welcomed and encouraged him, she herself was the largest slave trader; the significance of her policy in this area for understanding the genocide in America, I will say at the end of the essay. In the 14th and 15th centuries, most of the slaves came from Eastern Europe, especially Romania (history repeats itself in modern times). Little girls were especially valued. From a letter from a slave trader to a customer interested in this product: “When the ships from Romania arrive, there must be girls there, but keep in mind that small slave girls are as expensive as adults; none of those of any value is worth less than 50-60 florins.” Historian John Boswell observes that "between 10 and 20 percent of the women sold in Seville in the 15th century were pregnant or had babies, and these unborn children and babies were usually delivered to the buyer with the woman at no extra charge."

The rich had their own problems. They coveted gold and silver to satisfy their habits of exotic goods, habits acquired since the time of the first crusades, i.e. the first colonial expeditions of Europeans. Silks, spices, fine cotton, drugs and medicines, perfumes and jewelry required a lot of money. Thus gold became for the Europeans, in the words of one Venetian, “the veins of the whole state life ... its mind and soul. . .her essence and her very life.” But the supply of precious metals from Africa and the Middle East has been unreliable. In addition, the wars in Eastern Europe drained the European treasury. It was necessary to find a new, reliable and preferably cheaper source of gold.

What to add to this? As can be seen from the above, brutal violence was the norm of European life. But at times it took on a particularly pathological character and, as it were, foreshadowed what awaited the unsuspecting inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere. In addition to the everyday scenes of witch-hunts and campfires, in 1476 in Milan, a mob tore a man to pieces, and then his tormentors ate them. In Paris and Lyon, the Huguenots were killed and cut into pieces, which were then openly sold on the streets. Other outbreaks of sophisticated torture, murder and ritual cannibalism were not unusual either.

Finally, while Columbus was searching Europe for money for his maritime adventures, the Inquisition was raging in Spain. Here and elsewhere in Europe, suspected apostates were subjected to torture and execution in every way that the inventive imagination of Europeans was capable of. Some were hung, burned at the stake, boiled in a cauldron, or hung on a rack. Others were crushed, decapitated, skinned alive, drowned and quartered.

Such was the world that the former slave trader Christopher Columbus and his sailors left astern in August 1492. They were the typical inhabitants of this world, its deadly bacilli, whose deadly power was soon to be tested by millions of human beings who lived on the other side of the Atlantic.

Numbers

“When the white gentlemen came to our land, they brought fear and withering of the flowers. They mutilated and destroyed the color of other peoples. . . Marauders by day, criminals by night, murderers of the world." Mayan book Chilam Balam.

Stanard and Churchill devote many pages to describing the conspiracy of the Euro-American scientific establishment to withhold the true population of the American continent in the pre-Columbian era. At the head of this conspiracy was and continues to be the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. And Ward Churchill also talks in detail about the resistance, which American Zionist scientists specializing in the so-called strategic area for the ideology of modern imperialism. "Holocaust", i.e. of the Nazi genocide against European Jews, render the attempts of progressive historians to establish the real scale and world-historical significance of the genocide of the native inhabitants of America at the hands of "Western civilization". The latter question will be dealt with in the second part of this article on genocide in North America. As for the flagship of official American science, the Smithsonian Institution until very recently promoted as "scientific" estimates of the pre-Columbian population made in the 19th and early 20th centuries by racist anthropologists like James Mooney, according to which no more than 1 100,000 people. Only in the post-war period, the use of agricultural analysis methods made it possible to establish that the population density there was an order of magnitude higher, and that back in the 17th century, for example, on the island of Martha's Vinyard, now a resort place for the richest and most influential Euro-Americans, 3 thousand Indians lived. By the mid 60s. an estimate of the indigenous population north of the Rio Grande had risen to a minimum of 12.5 million by the start of the European invasion. Only in the Great Lakes region by 1492 lived up to 3.8 million, and in the Mississippi basin and the main tributaries - up to 5.25. In the 80s. new research has shown that the population of pre-Columbian North America may have been as high as 18.5 million, and the entire hemisphere as high as 112 million (Dobyns). From these studies, Cherokee demographer Russell Thornton made calculations to determine how many people did, and could not, live in North America. His conclusion: at least 9-12.5 million. Recently, many historians have taken the average between the calculations of Dobyns and Thornton as the norm, i.e. 15 million as the most likely approximate number of native North Americans. In other words, the population of this continent was about fifteen times what the Smithsonian claimed back in the 1980s, and seven and a half times what it is willing to admit today. Moreover, calculations similar to those carried out by Dobyns and Thornton were already known in the middle of the 19th century, but they were ignored as ideologically unacceptable, contradicting the central myth of the conquerors about the supposedly “primordial”, “desert” continent, which was just waiting for them to populate it. .

On the basis of modern data, it can be said that when on October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus descended on one of the islands of the continent, soon called the "New World," its population ranged from 100 to 145 million people (Standard). Two centuries later, it was reduced by 90%. To date, the most "fortunate" of the once existing peoples of both Americas have retained no more than 5% of their former numbers. In its size and duration (until today), the genocide of the indigenous population of the Western Hemisphere has no parallel in world history.

So in Hispaniola, where about 8 million Tainos flourished until 1492, by 1570 there were only two miserable villages of the indigenous inhabitants of the island, about which Columbus wrote 80 years ago that "there are no better and more affectionate people in the world."

Some statistics by region.

In the 75 years from the arrival of the first Europeans in 1519 to 1594, the population of Central Mexico, the most densely populated region of the American continent, declined by 95%, from 25 million to barely 1,300,000 people.

In the 60 years since the arrival of the Spaniards, the population of Western Nicaragua has declined by 99%, from over 1 million to less than 10,000 people.

In Western and Central Honduras, over half a century, 95% of the indigenous people were destroyed. In Cordoba, near the Gulf of Mexico, 97% in a little over a century. In the neighboring province of Jalapa, 97% of the population was also destroyed: from 180,000 in 1520 to 5,000 in 1626. And so it is everywhere in Mexico and Central America. The advent of Europeans meant the lightning-fast and almost complete disappearance of the indigenous population, who lived and flourished there for many millennia.

On the eve of the European invasion of Peru and Chile, from 9 to 14 million people lived in the homeland of the Incas ... Long before the end of the century, no more than 1 million inhabitants remained in Peru. And in a few years - only half of it. 94% of the Andean population was destroyed, from 8.5 to 13.5 million people.

Brazil was perhaps the most populated region of the Americas. According to the first Portuguese governor, Tome de Souza, the reserves of the indigenous population here were inexhaustible "even if we butchered them in a slaughterhouse." He was wrong. Already 20 years after the founding of the colony in 1549, epidemics and slave labor on plantations brought the peoples of Brazil to the brink of extinction.

By the end of the 16th century, about 200 thousand Spaniards moved to both "Indies". To Mexico, Central America and further south. By the same time, from 60 to 80 million indigenous people of these areas had been destroyed.

Genocidal methods of the Columbian era

Here we see striking parallels with Nazi methods. Already in the second expedition of Columbus (1493), the Spaniards used an analogue of the Nazi Sonderkommandos to enslave and destroy the local population. Parties of Spanish thugs with dogs trained to kill a person, instruments of torture, gallows and shackles staged regular punitive expeditions with indispensable mass executions. But it is important to emphasize the following. The connection between this early capitalist genocide and the Nazi genocide ran deeper. The Tainos people, who inhabited the Greater Antilles and were completely exterminated within a few decades, fell victim not to “medieval” cruelties, not to Christian fanaticism, and not even to the pathological greed of the European invaders. Both that, and another, and the third led to genocide, only being organized by new economic rationality. The entire population of Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica and other islands was registered as private property, which was supposed to bring profit. This methodical accounting of the huge population scattered over the world's largest islands by a handful of Europeans who have just emerged from the Middle Ages is most striking.

Columbus was the first to use mass hangings

From Spanish accountants in armor and with a cross, a direct thread stretches to the "rubber" genocide in the "Belgian" Congo, which killed 10 million Africans, and to the Nazi system of slave labor for destruction.

Columbus obliged all residents over the age of 14 to hand over to the Spaniards a thimble of golden sand or 25 pounds of cotton every three months (in areas where there was no gold). Those who fulfilled this quota were hung around their necks with a copper token indicating the date of receipt of the last tribute. The token gave its owner the right to three months of life. Caught without this token or with an expired one, the hands of both hands were cut off, they were hung around the neck of the victim and sent to die in their village. Columbus, who had previously been a slave trader along the western coast of Africa, apparently adopted this form of execution from Arab slave traders. During the governorship of Columbus, only in Hispaniola, up to 10 thousand Indians were killed in this way. It was almost impossible to fulfill the established quota. The locals had to give up growing food and everything else in order to dig for gold. Hunger has begun. Weakened and demoralized, they became easy prey for diseases introduced by the Spaniards. Such as influenza brought by pigs from the Canaries, which were brought to Hispaniola by the second expedition of Columbus. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Taínos died in this first pandemic of the American genocide. An eyewitness describes huge piles of Hispaniola residents who died of influenza, who had no one to bury. The Indians tried to run wherever their eyes looked: across the entire island, into the mountains, even to other islands. But there was no escape anywhere. Mothers killed their children before killing themselves. Entire villages resorted to mass suicide by throwing themselves off cliffs or taking poison. But even more found death in the hands of the Spaniards.

In addition to atrocities that could at least be explained by the cannibalistic rationality of systematic gain, the genocide at Atilla, and then on the continent, included seemingly irrational, unjustified forms of violence on a mass scale and pathological, sadistic forms. Sources contemporary to Columbus describe how the Spanish colonists hung, roasted on skewers, and burned the Indians at the stake. Children were cut into pieces to feed the dogs. And this despite the fact that the Tainos at first did not offer the Spaniards practically no resistance. “The Spaniards wagered who could cut a man in two with one blow or cut off his head, or they ripped open their bellies. They tore babies from their mother's breasts by the legs and smashed their heads against stones .... Other children they strung on their long swords along with their mothers and all who stood before them. No SS man on the Eastern Front could have been asked for greater zeal, Ward Churchill rightly observes. Let us add that the Spaniards established a rule that for one killed Christian, they would kill a hundred Indians. The Nazis didn't have to invent anything. All they had to do was copy.

Cuban Lidice 16th century

The evidence of the Spaniards of that era about their sadism is truly incalculable. In one oft-cited episode in Cuba, a Spanish unit of about 100 soldiers made a halt on the banks of the river and, finding whetstones in it, sharpened their swords on them. Wanting to test their sharpness, an eyewitness of this event reports, they attacked a group of men, women, children and old people (apparently specially rounded up for this) sitting on the shore, who looked in fear at the Spaniards and their horses, and began to rip open their stomachs, chop and cut until they have killed them all. Then they entered a large house standing nearby and did the same there, killing everyone they found there. Streams of blood flowed from the house, as if a herd of cows had been slaughtered there. Seeing the terrible wounds of the dead and dying was a terrible sight.

This massacre began in the village of Zukayo, whose inhabitants had prepared a lunch of cassava, fruit and fish for the conquistadors shortly before. From there it spread throughout the region. No one knows how many Indians the Spaniards killed in this outburst of sadism before their bloodlust was blunted, but Las Casas reckons well over 20,000.

The Spaniards took pleasure in inventing sophisticated cruelties and tortures. They built a gallows high enough for the hanged man to touch the ground with his toes to avoid strangulation, and thus hung thirteen Indians, one by one, in honor of Christ the Savior and his apostles. While the Indians were still alive, the Spaniards tested the sharpness and strength of their swords on them, opening their chest with one blow, so that the insides could be seen, and there were those who did worse things. Then, straw was wrapped around their cut bodies and burned alive. One soldier caught two children of two years old, pierced their throats with a dagger and threw them into the abyss.

If these descriptions seem familiar to those who have heard of the massacres in My Lai, Song Mai, and other Vietnamese villages, the similarity is made even stronger by the term "appeasement" that the Spaniards used to describe their terror. But as horrific as the massacres in Vietnam were, they are nothing compared in scale to what happened five hundred years ago on the island of Hispaniola alone. By the time Columbus arrived in 1492, the population of this island was 8 million. Four years later, from a third to a half of this number died and was destroyed. And after 1496 the rate of destruction increased even more.

Slave work

Unlike British America, where the genocide had as its immediate goal the physical extermination of the indigenous population in order to conquer "living space", the genocide in Central and South America was a by-product of the brutal exploitation of the Indians for economic purposes. Massacres and torture were not uncommon, but they served as instruments of terror to subdue and "pacify" the indigenous population. The inhabitants of America were regarded as tens of millions of gratuitous laborers of natural slaves to extract gold and silver. There were so many of them that the rational economic method for the Spaniards was not to reproduce the labor force of their slaves, but to replace them. The Indians were killed by overwork, then to be replaced with a fresh batch of slaves.

From the highlands of the Andes, they were driven to coca plantations in the lowlands of the rainforest, where their organism, unusual for such a climate, became easy prey for deadly diseases. Such as "outa", from which the nose, mouth and throat rotted and died a painful death. So high was the mortality on these plantations (up to 50% in five months) that even the Crown became worried, issuing a decree restricting coca production. Like all decrees of this kind, he remained on paper, because, as a contemporary wrote, “there is one disease on coca plantations that is worse than all others. This is the unlimited greed of the Spaniards."

But it was even worse to get into the silver mines. Workers were lowered to a depth of 250 meters with a bag of fried maize for a week-long shift. In addition to overwork, landslides, poor ventilation and the violence of overseers, Indian miners breathed poisonous fumes of arsenic, mercury, etc. “If 20 healthy Indians go down the shaft on Monday, only half can get out of it crippled on Sunday,” wrote one contemporary. Stanard calculates that the average life expectancy of coca pickers and Indian miners during the early period of the genocide was no more than three or four months, i.e. about the same as in the synthetic rubber factory in Auschwitz in 1943.

Hernán Cortes tortures Cuauhtémoc to find out where the Aztecs hid the gold

After the massacre in the Aztec capital of Tenochtetlan, Cortes declared Central Mexico the "New Spain" and established a colonial regime based on slave labor there. This is how a contemporary describes the methods of "appeasement" (hence "appeasement" as Washington's official policy during the Vietnam War) and the enslavement of Indians to work in the mines.

“Numerous testimonies of numerous witnesses tell how the Indians are led in columns to the mines. They are chained to each other with neck shackles.

Pits with stakes on which the Indians were strung

Those who fall down get their heads cut off. There are stories of children being locked up in houses and set on fire, and also stabbed to death if they walk too slowly. It is common to cut off women's breasts and tie weights to their legs before throwing them into a lake or lagoon. There are stories of babies torn from their mothers, killed and used as road signs. Fugitive or "wandering" Indians are cut off the limbs and sent to their villages, having cut off hands and noses hung around their necks. They talk about "pregnant women, children and the elderly, who are caught as much as possible" and thrown into special pits, at the bottom of which sharp stakes are dug and "leave them there until the pit is full." And many, many more." (Standard, 82-83)

Indians are burned in their houses

As a result, of the approximately 25 million inhabitants who inhabited the Mexican kingdom at the time of the arrival of the conquistadors, by 1595 only 1.3 million remained alive. The rest were mostly tortured in the mines and plantations of "New Spain".

In the Andes, where the Pizarro bands wielded swords and whips, by the end of the 16th century the population had fallen from 14 million to less than 1 million. The reasons were the same as in Mexico and Central America. As one Spaniard in Peru wrote in 1539, “The Indians here are completely destroyed and dying ... They pray with a cross that for God's sake they will be given food. But [the soldiers] kill all the llamas for nothing more than to make candles ... The Indians are not left with anything to sow, and since they have no livestock and nowhere to get it from, they can only die of hunger. (Churchill, 103)

Psychological aspect of genocide

The latest historians of the American genocide are beginning to pay more and more attention to its psychological aspect, the role of depression and stress in the destruction without a trace of tens and hundreds of peoples and ethnic groups. And here I see a number of parallels with the current situation of the peoples of the former Soviet Union.

Chronicles of the genocide have preserved numerous evidence of the mental "deployment" of the indigenous population of America. The cultural war waged by the European conquerors for centuries against the cultures of the peoples they enslaved with the open intention of destroying them had horrendous consequences on the psyche of the indigenous population of the New World. The response to this "psychic attack" ranged from alcoholism to chronic depression, mass infanticide and suicide, and even more often people just lay down and died. By-products of mental damage were a sharp drop in the birth rate and a rise in infant mortality. Even if diseases, hunger, hard labor and murder did not lead to the complete destruction of the indigenous collective, sooner and later low birth rates and infant mortality led to this. The Spanish noticed a sharp drop in the number of children and at times tried to force the Indians to have children.

Kirpatrick Sale summed up the reaction of the Taínos to their genocide thus:

“Las Casas, like others, expresses the opinion that what most struck the strange white people from the big ships of the Tainos was not their violence, not even their greed and strange attitude towards property, but rather their coldness, their spiritual callousness, their lack of love ". (Kirkpatrick Sale. The Conquest of Paradise. p. 151.)

In general, reading the history of imperialist genocide on all continents - from Hispaniola, the Andes and California to Equatorial Africa, the Indian subcontinent, China and Tasmania - one begins to understand literature like Wells' War of the Worlds or Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles differently, not to mention Hollywood alien invasions. Do these nightmares of Euro-American fiction originate from the horrors of the past repressed in the "collective unconscious", are they not designed to suppress guilt (or, conversely, prepare for new genocides) by portraying themselves as victims of "aliens" who were exterminated by your ancestors from Columbus to Churchill, Hitler and the Bushes?

Demonization of the victim

The genocide in America also had its own propagandistic support, its own “black PR”, strikingly similar to that used by the Euro-American imperialists to “demonize” their future enemy in the eyes of their population, to give war and robbery an aura of justice.

On January 16, 1493, three days after killing two Tainos while trading, Columbus turned his ships back to Europe. In his journal, he described the natives and their people killed by the Spaniards as "evil inhabitants of the island of Kariba who eat people." As proved by modern anthropologists, this was pure fiction, but it formed the basis of a kind of classification of the population of Antilles, and then of the entire New World, which became a guide to genocide. Those who welcomed and submitted to the colonialists were considered "affectionate Tainos". Those natives who resisted or were simply killed by the Spaniards fell under the rubric of cannibal savages, deserving everything that the colonialists were able to inflict on them. (In particular, in the log of November 4 and 23, 1492, we find such creations of the gloomy medieval imagination of Columbus: these "ferocious savages" "have an eye in the middle of their foreheads", they have "dog noses with which they drink the blood of their victims, which they slit the throat and castrate.")

“These islands are inhabited by the Cannibals, a savage, rebellious race that feeds on human flesh. They are properly called anthropophagi. They wage constant wars against the affectionate and timid Indians for the sake of their bodies; these are their trophies, what they are after. They ruthlessly destroy and terrorize the Indians."

This description of Coma, one of the participants in the second expedition of Columbus, says much more about Europeans than about the inhabitants of the Caribbean. The Spaniards dehumanized in advance people whom they had never seen, but who were to become their victims. And it's not a distant story; it reads like today's newspaper.

"A wild and recalcitrant race" are the keywords of Western imperialism, from Columbus to Bush. "Wild" - because she does not want to be a slave to a "civilized" invader. The Soviet communists were also recorded among the "wild" "enemies of civilization". From Columbus, who in 1493 invented Caribbean cannibals with an eye on his forehead and dog noses, there is a direct thread to the Reichsführer Himmler, who, at a meeting of SS leaders in mid-1942, explained the specifics of the war on the Eastern Front in this way:

"In all previous campaigns, Germany's enemies had enough common sense and decency to succumb to superior force, thanks to their "old and civilized ... Western European sophistication." In the Battle of France, enemy units surrendered as soon as they received a warning that "further resistance is pointless." Of course, “we SS men” came to Russia without illusions, but until the last winter too many Germans did not realize that “Russian commissars and die-hard Bolsheviks are filled with a cruel will to power and animal stubbornness, which makes them fight to the end and has nothing to do with human logic or duty ... but is an instinct inherent in all animals. The Bolsheviks were "animals" so "deprived of everything human" that "when surrounded and without food, they resorted to killing their comrades in order to hold out longer", behavior that bordered on "cannibalism". This is a "war of annihilation" between "gross matter, the primitive mass, better to say, the subhuman Untermensch waged by the commissars" and the "Germans ..." (Arno J. Mayer. Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The "Final Solution" in History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988, p. 281.)

In fact, and in strict accordance with the principle of ideological inversion, cannibalism was practiced not by the indigenous inhabitants of the New World, but by their conquerors. The second expedition of Columbus brought to the Caribbean a large batch of mastiffs and greyhounds, trained to kill people and eat their insides. Very soon the Spaniards began to feed their dogs with human flesh. Living children were considered a special delicacy. The colonizers allowed dogs to gnaw them alive, often in the presence of their parents.

Dogs eat Indians

Spaniard Feeding Hounds with Indian Children

Modern historians come to the conclusion that in the Caribbean there was a whole network of "butcher shops" where the bodies of the Indians were sold as dog food. Like everything else in the legacy of Columbus, cannibalism also developed on the mainland. A letter from one of the conquerors of the Inca empire has been preserved, in which he writes: “... when I returned from Cartagena, I met a Portuguese named Rohe Martin. On the porch of his house hung pieces of cut Indians to feed his dogs, as if they were wild beasts…” (Standard, 88)

In turn, the Spaniards often had to eat their human-fed dogs when, in search of gold and slaves, they fell into a difficult situation and suffered from hunger. This is one of the dark ironies of this genocide.

Why?

Churchill asks how to explain the fact that a group of human beings, even if such as the Spaniards of the Columbus era, collectively obsessed with the thirst for wealth and prestige, could for a long time show such boundless ferocity, such transcendent inhumanity towards other people ? The same question was raised earlier by Stanard, who traced in detail the ideological roots of genocide in America from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance. “Who are these people whose minds and souls were behind the genocides of Muslims, Africans, Indians, Jews, Gypsies and other religious, racial and ethnic groups? Who are they who continue to commit massacres today?” What kind of people could commit these heinous crimes? Christians, Stanard replies, and invites the reader to acquaint himself with ancient European Christian views on gender, race, and war. He discovers that by the end of the Middle Ages, European culture had prepared all the necessary prerequisites for a four-hundred-year-old genocide against the indigenous inhabitants of the New World.

Stanard pays special attention to the Christian imperative to suppress "carnal desires", i.e. Church-imposed repressive attitudes towards sexuality in European culture. In particular, he establishes a genetic link between the genocide in the New World and the all-European waves of terror against the "witches", in which some modern researchers see the bearers of the matriarchal pagan ideology, popular among the masses and threatening the power of the Church and the feudal elite.

Stanard also emphasizes the European origin of the concept of race and skin color.

The Church has always supported the slave trade, although in the early Middle Ages it was in principle forbidden to keep Christians in slavery. Indeed, for the Church, only a Christian was a man in the full sense of the word. The "infidels" could become human only by adopting Christianity, and this gave them the right to freedom. But in the 14th century, an ominous change took place in the politics of the Church. With the increase in the volume of the slave trade in the Mediterranean, the profits from it also increased. But these incomes were threatened by a loophole left by the clergy to reinforce the ideology of Christian exceptionalism. Earlier ideological motives came into conflict with the material interests of the Christian ruling classes. And so, in 1366, the prelates of Florence authorized the importation and sale of "infidel" slaves, explaining that by "infidel" they meant "all slaves of the wrong origin, even if by the time of their importation they became Catholics", and that "infidels by origin " means simply "from the land and race of the infidels." Thus, the Church changed the principle that justifies slavery from religious to ethnic, which was an important step towards modern genocides based on unchanging racial and ethnic characteristics (Armenian, Jewish, Gypsy, Slavic, and others).

European racial "science" did not lag behind religion either. The specificity of European feudalism was the requirement for the genetic exclusivity of the nobility. In Spain, the concept of "blood purity", limpieza de sangra, became central towards the end of the 15th and throughout the 16th century. The nobility could not be achieved either by wealth or merit. The origins of "racial science" lie in the genealogical research of the time, which was conducted by a whole army of specialists in checking pedigree lines.

Particularly important was the theory of "separate and unequal origin", put forward by the famous Swiss physician and philosopher Paracelsus by 1520. According to this theory, Africans, Indians and other non-Christian "colored" peoples did not descend from Adam and Eve, but from other and lower ancestors. The ideas of Paracelsus became widespread in Europe on the eve of the European invasion of Mexico and South America. These ideas were an early expression of the so-called. the theory of "polygenesis", which became an indispensable part of the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century. But even before the publication of the writings of Paracelsus, similar ideological justifications for genocide appeared in Spain (1512) and Scotland (1519). The Spaniard Bernardo de Mesa (later Bishop of Cuba) and the Scot Johann Major came to the same conclusion that the original inhabitants of the New World were a special race that God intended to be the slaves of European Christians. The height of the theological disputes of Spanish intellectuals about whether the Indians are people or monkeys falls on the middle of the 16th century, when millions of inhabitants of Central and South America died from terrible epidemics, brutal massacres and hard labor.

The official historian of the Indies, Fernandez de Ovieda, did not deny the atrocities against the Indians and described "countless cruel deaths, innumerable as stars." But he considered it acceptable, for "to use gunpowder against the Gentiles is to smoke incense for the Lord." And to the pleas of Las Casas to spare the inhabitants of America, the theologian Juan de Sepulveda declared: "How can one doubt that peoples so uncivilized, so barbaric and corrupted by so many sins and perversions were justly conquered." He quoted Aristotle, who wrote in his Politics that some people are "natural slaves" and "must be driven like wild beasts to make them live right". To which Las Casas replied: "Let's forget about Aristotle, because, fortunately, we have the covenant of Christ: Love your neighbor as yourself." (But even Las Casas, the most passionate and humane European defender of the Indians, felt compelled to admit, that they are "possibly complete barbarians").

But if among the church intelligentsia opinions about the nature of the native inhabitants of America could differ, among the European masses there was complete unanimity on this score. Even 15 years before the great debate between Las Casas and Sepulveda, a Spanish columnist wrote that "ordinary people" universally consider those who are convinced that the American Indians are not people, but "a special, third kind of animals between man and ape and were created God to better serve man." (Standard, 211).

Thus, in the early 16th century, a racist apology for colonialism and suprematism was formed, which in the hands of the Euro-American ruling classes would serve as a justification ("defense of civilization") for subsequent genocides (and more to come?). It is not surprising, therefore, that on the basis of his research, Stanard puts forward the thesis of a deep ideological connection between the Spanish and Anglo-Saxon genocide of the peoples of America and the Nazi genocide of Jews, Gypsies and Slavs. European colonizers, white settlers and Nazis had the same ideological roots. And that ideology, Stanard adds, remains alive today. It was on it that US interventions in Southeast Asia and the Middle East were based.

List of used literature

J. M. Blaut. The Colonizer's Model of the World. Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New York: The Giulford Press, 1993.

Ward Churchill. A Little Matter of Genocide. Holocaust and the Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present. San Francisco: City Lights, 1997.

C. L. R. James. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Arno J Mayer. Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The "Final Solution" in History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

David Stannard. American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. Oxford University Press, 1993.

Encyclopedic YouTube

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✪ The specifics of the colonization of North America. Video lesson on General History Grade 7

✪ Exploration of America by Europeans. How Whites Took Over America

✪ "Terra incognita" or Russian colonization of America

✪ US economy | How did geography help America become strong?

✪ Conquest - the conquest of the New World (Russian) New history.

Subtitles

The history of the discovery of America by Europeans

Pre-Columbian era

Currently, there are a number of theories and studies that make it highly likely that European travelers reached the shores of America long before the expeditions of Columbus. However, there is no doubt that these contacts did not lead to the creation of long-term settlements or the establishment of strong ties with the new continent, and thus did not have a significant impact on the historical and political processes in both the Old and New Worlds.

Travels of Columbus

Colonization of South and Central America in the 17th century

Chronology of the most important events:

• - Christopher Columbus lands on the island.
• - Amerigo Vespucci and Alonso de Ojeda reach the mouth of the Amazon.
• - Vespucci, after the second journey, finally comes to the conclusion that the open continent is not part of India.
• - After a 100-day trek through the jungles of Vasco Núñez de Balboa, he crosses the Isthmus of Panama and reaches the Pacific coast for the first time.
• - Juan Ponce de Leon goes in search of the legendary Fountain of Youth. Having failed in reaching the object of search, he, nevertheless, discovers deposits of gold. Names the Florida peninsula and declares it a Spanish possession.
• - Fernando Cortez enters Tenochtitlan, captures the Emperor Montezuma, thereby starting the conquest of the Aztec empire. His triumph leads to 300 years of Spanish rule in Mexico and Central America.
• - Pascual de Andogoya discovers Peru.
• - Spain establishes a permanent military base and settlement in Jamaica.
• - Francisco Pizarro invades Peru, destroys thousands of Indians and conquers the Inca Empire, the most powerful state of South American Indians. A huge number of Incas die from chickenpox brought by the Spaniards.
• - Spanish settlers found Buenos Aires, but after five years they were forced to leave the city under the onslaught of the Indians.

Colonization of North America (XVII -XVIII  centuries)

But at the same time, the balance of power in the Old World began to change: the kings spent the streams of silver and gold flowing from the colonies, and had little interest in the economy of the metropolis, which, under the weight of an inefficient, corrupt administrative apparatus, clerical dominance and lack of incentives for modernization, began to lag behind more and more. from the booming economy of England. Spain gradually lost the status of the main European superpower and mistress of the seas. Many years of war in the Netherlands, huge funds spent on the fight against the Reformation throughout Europe, the conflict with England hastened the decline of Spain. The last straw was the death of the Invincible Armada in 1588. After the English admirals, and more so in a violent storm, destroyed the largest fleet of the time, Spain fell into the shadows, never to recover from this blow.

Leadership in the "relay race" of colonization passed to England, France and Holland.

English colonies

The well-known chaplain Gakluyt acted as the ideologist of the English colonization of North America. In and 1587, Sir Walter Raleigh, by order of Queen Elizabeth I of England, made two attempts to establish a permanent settlement in North America. The reconnaissance expedition reached the American coast in 1584 and named the open coast of Virginia (eng. Virginia - "Virgin") in honor of the "Virgin Queen" Elizabeth I, who never married. Both attempts ended in failure - the first colony, based on Roanoke Island off the coast of Virginia, was on the verge of collapse due to Indian attacks and lack of supplies and was evacuated by Sir Francis Drake in April 1587. In July of the same year, a second expedition of 117 colonists landed on the island. It was planned that ships with equipment and food would arrive in the colony in the spring of 1588. However, for various reasons, the supply expedition was delayed by almost a year and a half. When she arrived at the place, all the buildings of the colonists were intact, but no traces of people, with the exception of the remains of one person, were found. The exact fate of the colonists has not been established to this day.

At the beginning of the 17th century, private capital entered the business. In 1605, two joint-stock companies received licenses from King James I to establish colonies in Virginia. It should be borne in mind that at that time the term "Virginia" denoted the entire territory of the North American continent. The first of these companies was the London Virginia Company. Virginia Company of London) - received the rights to the south, the second - the "Plymouth Company" (eng. Plymouth Company) - to the northern part of the continent. Despite the fact that both companies officially proclaimed the spread of Christianity as the main goal, the license they received granted them the right to "search and mine gold, silver and copper by all means."

On December 20, 1606, the colonists set sail aboard three ships, and after a difficult, almost five-month voyage, during which several dozen people died of starvation and disease, in May 1607 they reached Chesapeake Bay (Eng. Chesapeake Bay). Over the next month, they built a wooden fort, named after King Fort James (English pronunciation of the name Jacob). The fort was later renamed Jamestown, the first permanent British settlement in America.

The official historiography of the United States considers Jamestown the cradle of the country, the history of the settlement and its leader, Captain John Smith (Eng. John Smith of Jamestown) is covered in many serious studies and works of art. The latter, as a rule, idealize the history of the city and the pioneers who inhabited it (for example, the popular cartoon Pocahontas). In fact, the first years of the colony were extremely difficult, in the hungry winter of 1609-1610. out of 500 colonists, no more than 60 survived, and, according to some accounts, the survivors were forced to resort to cannibalism in order to survive the famine.

American stamp issued for the tercentenary of the founding of Jamestown

In subsequent years, when the issue of physical survival was no longer so acute, the two most important problems were strained relations with the indigenous population and the economic feasibility of the existence of the colony. To the disappointment of the shareholders of the Virginia Company of London, neither gold nor silver was found by the colonists, and the main commodity produced for export was ship timber. Despite the fact that this product was in some demand in the metropolis, which exhausted its forests in order, the profit, as well as from other attempts at economic activity, was minimal.

The situation changed in 1612, when the farmer and landowner John Rolfe (Eng. John Rolfe) managed to cross a local variety of tobacco grown by the Indians with varieties imported from Bermuda. The resulting hybrids were well adapted to the Virginia climate and at the same time suited the tastes of English consumers. The colony acquired a source of reliable income and for many years tobacco became the basis of the economy and exports of Virginia, and the phrases "Virginia tobacco", "Virginia blend" are used as characteristics of tobacco products to this day. Five years later, tobacco exports amounted to 20,000 pounds, a year later it was doubled, and by 1629 it reached 500,000 pounds. John Rolfe rendered another service to the colony: in 1614 he managed to negotiate peace with the local Indian chief. The peace treaty was sealed by marriage between Rolf and the leader's daughter, Pocahontas.

In 1619, two events occurred that had a significant impact on the entire subsequent history of the United States. This year Governor George Yardley George Yeardley) decided to transfer part of the power Council of Burghers(English) House of Burgesses), thus founding the first elected legislative assembly in the New World. The first meeting of the council took place on July 30, 1619. In the same year, a small group of Africans of Angolan origin was acquired by the colonists. Although formally they were not slaves, but had long-term contracts without the right to terminate, it is customary to count the history of slavery in America from this event.

In 1622, almost a quarter of the population of the colony was destroyed by the rebellious Indians. In 1624, the license of the London Company, whose affairs had fallen into decay, was revoked, and from that time Virginia became a royal colony. The governor was appointed by the king, but the colony council retained significant powers.

Settlement of New England

In 1497, several expeditions to the island of Newfoundland, associated with the names of the Cabots, laid the foundation for the claims of England to the territory of modern Canada.

In 1763, under the Treaty of Paris, New France came into the possession of Great Britain and became the province of Quebec. Rupert's Land (the area around Hudson Bay) and Prince Edward Island were also British colonies.

Florida

In 1763, Spain ceded Florida to Great Britain in exchange for control of Havana, which the British occupied during the Seven Years' War. The British divided Florida into East and West and began to attract immigrants. For this, the settlers were offered land and financial support.

In 1767, the northern boundary of West Florida was substantially moved, so that West Florida included parts of the present-day territories of the states of Alabama and Mississippi.

During the American Revolutionary War, Britain retained control of East Florida, but Spain was able to take over West Florida through an alliance with France at war with England. Under the Treaty of Versailles in 1783 between Great Britain and Spain, all of Florida was ceded to Spain.

Caribbean Islands

The first English colonies appeared in Bermuda (1612), St. Kitts (1623) and Barbados (1627) and were then used to colonize other islands. In 1655, Jamaica, taken from the Spanish Empire, was under the control of the British.

Central America

In 1630, British agents founded the Providence Company. (Providence Company), whose president was the Earl of Warwick, and the secretary was John Pym, occupied two small islands near the Mosquito Coast and established friendly relations with the locals. From 1655 to 1850, England, and then Great Britain, claimed a protectorate over the Miskito Indians, but numerous attempts to establish colonies were unsuccessful, and the protectorate was disputed by Spain, the Central American republics and the United States. The objections from the United States were caused by fears that England would gain an advantage in connection with the proposed construction of a canal between the two oceans. In 1848, the capture of the city of Greytown (now called San Juan del Norte) by the Miskito Indians, with the support of the British, caused great excitement in the United States and almost led to war. However, by signing the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850, both powers pledged not to strengthen, colonize, or dominate any part of Central American territory. In 1859, Great Britain transferred the protectorate to Honduras.

The first English colony on the banks of the Belize River was established in 1638. In the middle of the 17th century, other English settlements were established. Later, British settlers began harvesting logwood, from which a substance used in the manufacture of textile dyes was extracted, which was of great importance for the wool-spinning industry in Europe (see article Belize#History).

South America

In 1803, Britain captured the Dutch settlements in Guiana, and in 1814, under the Treaty of Vienna, officially received the lands, united in 1831 under the name of British Guiana.

In January 1765, British captain John Byron explored Saunders Island at the eastern tip of the Falkland Islands and announced that it was annexed to Great Britain. Captain Byron named the bay on Saunders Port Egmont. Here in 1766 Captain McBride founded an English settlement. In the same year, Spain acquired French possessions in the Falklands from Bougainville and, having consolidated its power here in 1767, appointed a governor. In 1770, the Spanish attacked Port Egmont and drove the British off the island. This led to the fact that the two countries were on the brink of war, but a later peace treaty allowed the British to return to Port Egmont in 1771, while neither Spain nor Great Britain abandoned their claims to the islands. In 1774, in anticipation of the impending American Revolutionary War, Great Britain unilaterally abandoned many of its overseas possessions, including Port Egmont. Leaving the Falklands in 1776, the British installed a commemorative plaque here to confirm their rights to this territory. From 1776 until 1811, a Spanish settlement remained on the islands, administered from Buenos Aires as part of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. In 1811, the Spaniards left the islands, also leaving a tablet here to prove their rights. After declaring independence in 1816, Argentina claimed the Falklands as its own. In January 1833, the British again landed in the Falklands and notified the Argentine authorities of their intention to restore their power on the islands.

Timeline of the founding of the English colonies

1. 1607 - Virginia (Jamestown)
2. 1620 - Massachusetts (Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Settlement)
3. 1626 - New York
4. 1633 - Maryland
5. 1636 - Rhode Island
6. 1636 - Connecticut
7. 1638 - Delaware
8. 1638 - New Hampshire
9. 1653 - North Carolina
10. 1663 - South Carolina
11. 1664 - New Jersey
12. 1682 - Pennsylvania
13. 1732 - Georgia

French colonies

By 1713, New France was at its largest. It included five provinces:

• Acadia (modern New Scotland and New Brunswick).
• Hudson's Bay (present-day Canada)
• Louisiana (the central part of the USA, from the Great Lakes to New Orleans), subdivided into two administrative regions: Lower Louisiana and Illinois (fr. le Pays des Illinois).

Spanish colonies

The Spanish colonization of the New World dates back to the discovery by the Spanish navigator Columbus of America in 1492, which Columbus himself recognized as the eastern part of Asia, the eastern coast of either China, or Japan, or India, therefore the name West Indies was assigned to these lands. The search for a new route to India is dictated by the development of society, industry and trade, the need to find large reserves of gold, for which demand has risen sharply. Then it was believed that in the "land of spices" it should be a lot. The geopolitical situation in the world has changed and the old eastern routes to India for Europeans, which passed through the lands now occupied by the Ottoman Empire, have become more dangerous and difficult to pass, meanwhile there was a growing need for a different trade with this rich land. Then some already had the idea that the earth was round and that India could be reached from the other side of the Earth - by sailing west from the then known world. Columbus made 4 expeditions to the region: the first - 1492-1493 - the discovery of the Sargasso Sea, the Bahamas, Haiti, Cuba, Tortuga, the foundation of the first village in which he left 39 of his sailors. He declared all the lands to be possessions of Spain; the second (1493-1496) years - the complete conquest of Haiti, the discovery

America in the modern sense of the term "United States" began to exist since 1776. In our time, the United States is a superpower with great human and intellectual resources and a huge potential for development. And this is no coincidence. Over the centuries, theoretical concepts and practical methods of state regulation of economic policy have been formed.

It is generally accepted that for the first time the news of the existence of America was brought to Europe by Christopher Columbus, who, as you know, having lost his course, accidentally discovered new lands. It happened in 1492 in the West Indies, and in 1493, making a second trip to these lands, he landed on the territory of the island of Puerto Rico, which today belongs to the United States.

The discoverers of America, according to some sources, were a certain Viking merchant Bjarni, who, during his journey in 985, from Iceland to Greenland, was carried by waves to the West to a wooded country. Fifteen years later, Leif Eirikson with a squad along the route indicated by Bjarni went to those very places. He, unlike his predecessor, examined the area, found that it was rocky. In honor of his stay, Eirikson named it Helluland - the Land of Flat Stones. The places where there was a forest were named by him Markland - Forest Country. Thus, part of the indigenous population of America came there from Greenland and existed there until the middle of the fourteenth century. Such a conclusion can be drawn on the basis of the testimony of Bishop Ivar Bordson, who in 1350, having landed on the shores of the Norman settlements, found there only empty churches, abandoned settlements, feral animals.

The end of the 15th century can be called decisive in the discovery of America, since new expeditions arrived from different parts of the globe to hitherto unknown lands, which turned the beginning of the 16th century for Europeans into the era of the “conquest of the New World”. The Spaniards should be called the first in a series of masters. This is Admiral Christopher Columbus in 1492 with an expedition to San Salvador.

The Spaniard Ferdinand Magellan in 1519-1521 rounded America from the south. The notorious Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci, in honor of whom the continent was renamed in 1507 at the suggestion of the geographer Martin Waldseemüller, went down in history as a discoverer. Following the discovery of the Florida peninsula in 1513, the city of St. Augustine was laid out in 1565 and the first permanent European Spanish colony was established.

They are followed by the British, who reached the coast of Canada in 1497-1498. led by Giovanni Cabot.

Colonization of America by the British

In the fifty years that have passed since the discovery of America by the Spaniards, they quickly settled in Florida and the southwest of the continent. After the defeat in 1588 of the Invincible Armada of the Spaniards in the battle with the English fleet, Spain lost its influence and power. Colonists rushed to America from England, Holland and France. The first colony was founded in 1607 by the British in what is now Virginia. Settlers were attracted by gold. The gold rush drove the poor, the youth, the criminals here; people who preach Puritanism were forced to move here by the persecution of the authorities. So, in 1620, in the northern part of the mainland, at Cape Cod, 102 "wandering pilgrims" landed. Later, the city of New Plymouth was built on this site.

Gradually, thirteen colonies formed on the territory of the Atlantic coast:

On the territory of the colonies lived two main tribes from among the indigenous Indians - the Algonquins and the Iroquois. They numbered about 200,000 people. They taught the colonists everything that helped them survive in unfamiliar conditions: clearing the territory for crops, growing maize and tobacco, hunting wild animals, and baking shellfish. Europeans bought furs from the natives for a penny, and the island where the central part of New York - Manhattan is located, was bought for a set of knives and beads, worth only ... 24 dollars !!!

War for independence

The English colonists tightened the exploitation of the population, introduced decrees restricting the movement of residents to the west, and did not allow the opening of new enterprises. They took every measure to strengthen the power of the king in the colonies. In 1773, the people of Boston attacked British ships in port and threw bales of taxed tea overboard. In 1774, the first meeting of the Continental Congress was held in Philadelphia. Congressmen condemned the policy of England, although they did not take decisive action to break it. Armed action was taken on April 19, 1775. Thus began the American Revolutionary War.

Mexican–American War (1846–1848)

The cause of the war was the forcible annexation by the United States of the free state of Texas, which was formed by American settlers in place of the Mexican state, in December 1845. Mexican troops had to leave the occupied territory. In addition, the United States did not manage with a simple annexation, and James Polk, who was then President of the United States, offered to buy California and New Mexico from Mexico, but the Mexican government refused to negotiate on this issue. Then in March 1846, the American General Zachariah Taylor, elected president at the end of the war, invaded the disputed territories with his army and captured Point Isabel at the mouth of the Rio Grande. The resistance of the Mexicans led to the declaration of war by the American side on May 12, 1946. As a result of two years of hostilities, the cities of Santa Fe, Los Angeles, Veracruz were conquered, in February 1847 - Buena Vista. The majority of California's population went over to the American side. The Americans stormed the fortified positions at Chapultepec, and then on September 14, 1847, occupied Mexico City without a fight.

On March 10, 1848, a peace treaty was adopted and ratified by the US Senate. California, New Mexico and a number of other border territories departed to the USA. Mexico received $15 million in compensation for the ceded territories. As a result of the war with Mexico, the United States increased its holdings in North America.

Slavery in the USA

Most of the slaves consisted of Africans and their descendants, forcibly removed from their places of residence. The poor settlers, "white slaves", appeared due to the fact that they could not pay for the road, they entered into enslaving agreements from 2 to 7 years with merchants and ship owners, who then resold them in America. These people were called "indentured servants." It was difficult to get the Indians to work. Along with the "white slaves", the importation of blacks began in 1619. Slave labor was especially widely used in the fields. Only the strong power of the colonists made it possible to maintain such a method of exploitation for two hundred years in the conditions of the simultaneous development of capitalist relations. Nevertheless, in the entire history of the existence of slavery in America, more than two hundred attempts at conspiracies and rebellions were made by slaves. In 1860, out of a population of 12 million in the 15 American states where slavery persisted, 4 million were slaves. Of the 1.5 million families living in these states, more than 390,000 families had slaves.

American Civil War

The American Civil War (War of the North and the South) of 1861-1865 was a war between the states of the North and the eleven slave states of the South to abolish slavery. By 1861, each state lived under federal laws, meaning there was minimal interaction between the states. In the North, where there was a rapid development of production, and in the South, where slavery and farming persisted, two different economic systems developed. Therefore, the Northerners, who carried out reforms and thereby improved the living conditions of citizens, posed a danger to the unconditional power of the Southerners. The beginning of the Civil War falls on April 12, 1861, when Fort Sumter was shelled, the end dates to May 26, 1865, when the remnants of the army of the southerners under the command of General C. Smith finally surrendered. The main goal of the northerners in the war was the proclamation of the safety of the Union and the integrity of the country, the southerners - the recognition of the independence and sovereignty of the Confederation. During the war there were about 2,000 battles. More US citizens have died in this war than in any other war in which the US has been involved.

US in World War I (1914–1918)

The relationship between America and Western European countries in the hostilities of 1914-1918 can be divided into three periods:

1. The period of neutrality (1914-1917), when the United States tried to act as an intermediary - a peacemaker between the conflicting parties. As long as England controlled the waters of the oceans and allowed neutral countries to trade by blocking only German ports, America remained neutral.
2. Period 1917-1918 After the sinking of the British passenger ship Lusitania in 1915, on which there were 100 American citizens, Wilson declared a violation of international law. Germany partially stopped the "underwater" war. But in 1917, after a new sinking of American ships in March, under pressure from Congress, on April 6, 1917, the American government announced its entry into the war against Germany. To participate in hostilities, it was decided to mobilize one million adults from 21 to 31 years old.
3. The period of completion of hostilities (1918-1921). For America, it was a long period of formal withdrawal from the war. It ended only in 1921, when Congress (already under the Harding administration) finally passed a joint resolution of both chambers officially announcing the end of hostilities. The League of Nations began its work without the participation of the United States.

The Great Depression

The times of the Great Depression are called the long, from 1929 to 1940, economic crisis that began in the United States and left a deep mark on the global economy. Officially ended in 1940, but in reality the US economy began to recover after World War II.

USA in World War II (1939-1945)

Remoteness from Europe and, as a result, from the theater of operations, gave the United States many advantages, including the improvement of the economy through military orders. But the country still had to participate in World War II. December 7, 1941 is considered the day the war began, when a squadron of 441 Japanese aircraft attacked the American military base at Pearl Harbor. 4 battleships, 2 cruisers and 1 mine layer were sunk by bombing. The casualties in this battle amounted to 2,403 people. Roosevelt, six hours after this bombing, announced war on Japan by radio. In November 1942, the Mediterranean theater of operations was added. In June 1944, as allies of the USSR, US troops took part on the Western Front in Europe. American troops were operating in France (in Normandy). And also in Italy, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. The total US casualties in World War II were 418,000. The most bloody battle for the American army was the Ardennes operation. After her in terms of the number of losses are the Normandy operation, the Battle of Monte Cassino, the Battle of Iwo Jima and the Battle of Okinawa.

USA during the Cold War

The period of the Cold War is considered to be the time period from March 5, 1946 to December 26, 1991. The term "Cold War" was originally used by George Orwell in the Tribune article "You and the Atomic Bomb" on October 19, 1945. This name refers to the ideological, geopolitical, economic confrontation between America and its allies and the USSR and its allies.

The main reason for the Cold War is different models of development of countries - capitalism and socialism. In his opinion, the possession of nuclear weapons made it possible to divide the world among themselves "superpowers". Remaining invincible, on the one hand, thanks to atomic bombs, these countries would be forced to maintain an unspoken agreement never to use atomic bombs against each other, while being in a state of cold war or peace, which is not peace by definition.

Recent US history

In the 90s, America entered under the leadership of President George W. Bush, who represented the Republican Party. The events that mark the modern history were multidirectional. On the one hand, the end of the Cold War with the USSR was announced, on the other hand, in January 1991, America, together with a coalition of Western countries, carried out an air action "Desert Storm" of an anti-Iraqi orientation, which intensified the policy of confrontation with the rest of the socialist camp.

There were positive developments in domestic policy. For example, in 1991 the United States adopted a law on universal literacy of the population, according to which all citizens of the country received the right to secondary education. 1992 brought victory to the Democrats, led by Clinton. The fruits of his activity: reform in the field of education and health care, measures to protect the poor, tax incentives for small businesses. The reforms allowed Clinton to win a large number of supporters and be elected to a second term. 2001 brought victory to George W. Bush. It is overshadowed by the events of 11 September.

US policy remains today a source of not only political but also economic tension in the world. The strategy of massive influence on all is the most important and most characteristic feature of modern US foreign economic policy.

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Colonization of America

How did the colonization of America take place?

European colonization of the Americas began as early as the 10th and 11th centuries, when western Scandinavian sailors explored and briefly settled small areas on the coast of modern Canada. These Scandinavians were Vikings who discovered and settled in Greenland, and then they sailed to the arctic region of North America near Greenland and down to neighboring Canada to explore and then settle. According to the Icelandic sagas, violent conflicts with the indigenous population eventually forced the Scandinavians to abandon these settlements.

Discovery of North American lands

Extensive European colonization began in 1492 when a Spanish expedition led by Christopher Columbus sailed west to find a new trade route to the Far East, but inadvertently landed in what became known to Europeans as the "New World". Moving through the northern part of Hispaniola on December 5, 1492, which was inhabited by the Taino people since the 7th century, Europeans founded their first settlement in the Americas. This was followed by European conquest, large-scale exploration, colonization and industrial development. During his first two voyages (1492-93), Columbus reached the Bahamas and other Caribbean islands, including Haiti, Puerto Rico and Cuba. In 1497, setting out from Bristol on behalf of England, John Cabot landed on the North American coast, and a year later, on his third voyage, Columbus reached the coast of South America. As a sponsor of the voyages of Christopher Columbus, Spain was the first European power to settle and colonize most of North America and the Caribbean up to the southernmost tip of South America.

Which countries colonized America

Other countries, such as France, established colonies in the Americas: in eastern North America, on a number of islands in the Caribbean, and also on small coastal parts of South America. Portugal colonized Brazil, tried to colonize the coast of modern Canada, and its representatives settled for a long period in the northwest (east bank) of the La Plata River. In the era of great geographical discoveries, the beginning of territorial expansion by some European countries was laid. Europe was occupied with internal wars, and was slowly recovering from the loss of population as a result of the bubonic plague; therefore the rapid growth of her wealth and power was unpredictable at the beginning of the 15th century.

Eventually, the entire Western Hemisphere came under the apparent control of European governments, resulting in profound changes in its landscape, population, and flora and fauna. In the 19th century, more than 50 million people left Europe alone for resettlement in North and South America. The time after 1492 is known as the period of the Columbian Exchange, a large and widespread exchange of animals, plants, culture, populations (including slaves), infectious diseases, and ideas between the American and Afro-Eurasian hemispheres, which followed Columbus's voyages to the Americas. .

Scandinavian voyages to Greenland and Canada are supported by historical and archaeological evidence. The Scandinavian colony in Greenland was established at the end of the 10th century and continued until the middle of the 15th century, with a court and parliamentary assemblies sitting in Brattalida and a bishop who was based in Sargan. The remains of a Scandinavian settlement at L'Anse-o-Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada were discovered in 1960 and have been dated around 1000 (carbon analysis showed 990-1050 AD); L'Anse-o-Meadows is the only settlement which has been widely accepted as evidence of pre-Columbian transoceanic contact. It was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978. It should also be noted that the settlement may be related to the failed Vinland colony founded by Leif Erickson around the same time, or more broadly to the West Scandinavian colonization of the Americas.

Colonial history of America

Early explorations and conquests were made by the Spanish and Portuguese immediately after their own final reconquest of Iberia in 1492. In 1494, by the Treaty of Tordesillas, ratified by the Pope, these two kingdoms divided the entire non-European world into two parts for exploration and colonization, from the northern to the southern border, cutting the Atlantic Ocean and the eastern part of modern Brazil. Based on this treaty and based on earlier claims by the Spanish explorer Núñez de Balboa, who discovered the Pacific Ocean in 1513, the Spaniards conquered large territories in North, Central and South America.

The Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortes conquered the Aztec kingdom and Francisco Pizarro conquered the Inca empire. As a result, by the mid-16th century, the Spanish crown had gained control of much of western South America, Central America, and southern North America, in addition to the early Caribbean territories it had conquered. During the same period, Portugal took over land in North America (Canada) and colonized much of the eastern region of South America, naming it Santa Cruz and Brazil.

Other European countries soon began to challenge the terms of the Tordesillas Treaty. England and France tried to establish colonies in the Americas in the 16th century, but failed. England and France succeeded in establishing permanent colonies in the next century along with the Dutch Republic. Some of these were in the Caribbean, which had already been repeatedly conquered by the Spanish, or depopulated by disease, while other colonies were in eastern North America, north of Florida, that had not been colonized by Spain.

Early European possessions in North America included Spanish Florida, Spanish New Mexico, the English colonies of Virginia (with their North Atlantic offshoot, Bermuda) and New England, the French colonies of Acadia and Canada, the Swedish colony of New Sweden, and the Dutch colony of New Netherland. In the 18th century, Denmark-Norway resurrected their former colonies in Greenland, while the Russian Empire established itself in Alaska. Denmark-Norway later made several claims to land ownership in the Caribbean starting in the 1600s.

As more countries gained interest in colonizing the Americas, the competition for territory became more and more fierce. The colonists often faced the threat of attacks from neighboring colonies, as well as native tribes and pirates.

Who paid for the expeditions of the discoverers of America?

The first phase of a well-funded European activity in the Americas began with the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by Christopher Columbus (1492-1504), funded by Spain, whose original goal was to try to find a new route to India and China, then known as the "Indies". He was followed by other explorers such as John Cabot, who was funded by England and reached Newfoundland. Pedro Alvarez Cabral reached Brazil and claimed it on behalf of Portugal.

Amerigo Vespucci, working for Portugal on voyages from 1497 to 1513, established that Columbus had reached new continents. Cartographers still use a Latinized version of their first name, America, for the two continents. Other explorers: Giovanni Verrazzano, whose voyage was financed by France in 1524; the Portuguese João Vaz Cortireal in Newfoundland; João Fernandez Lavrador, Gaspard and Miguel Corte-Real and João Alvarez Fagundes in Newfoundland, Greenland, Labrador and Nova Scotia (from 1498 to 1502, and in 1520); Jacques Cartier (1491-1557), Henry Hudson (1560-1611), and Samuel de Champlain (1567-1635) who explored Canada.

In 1513, Vasco Nunez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and led the first European expedition to view the Pacific Ocean from the western coast of the New World. In fact, sticking to the previous history of conquest, Balboa claimed that the Spanish crown laid claim to the Pacific Ocean and all adjacent lands. This was before 1517, before another expedition from Cuba visited Central America, landing on the Yucatan coast in search of slaves.

These explorations were followed, in particular by Spain, by a stage of conquest: the Spaniards, having just completed the liberation of Spain from Muslim domination, were the first to colonize the Americas, applying the same model of European administration of their territories in the New World.

colonial period

Ten years after the discovery of Columbus, the administration of Hispaniola was transferred to Nicolás de Ovando of the Order of Alcantara, founded during the Reconquista (liberation of Spain from Muslim domination). As in the Iberian Peninsula, the inhabitants of Hispaniola received new landowners-masters, while religious orders led the local administration. Gradually, the encomienda system was established there, which obliged the European settlers to pay tribute (having access to local labor and taxation).

A relatively common misconception is that a small number of conquistadors conquered vast territories, bringing only epidemics and their powerful caballeros there. In fact, recent archaeological excavations have suggested the existence of a large Spanish-Indian alliance numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Hernán Cortés eventually conquered Mexico with the help of Tlaxcala in 1519-1521, while the Inca conquest was carried out by about 40,000 traitors of the same people, led by Francisco Pizarro, between 1532 and 1535.

How did the relations between the European colonists and the Indians develop?

A century and a half after the voyages of Columbus, the number of indigenous people in the Americas decreased sharply by about 80% (from 50 million in 1492 to 8 million people in 1650), mainly due to outbreaks of diseases of the Old World.

In 1532, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, sent the Viceroy to Mexico, Antonio de Mendoza, to prevent the movement of pro-independence that arose during the reign of Cortés, who finally returned to Spain in 1540. Two years later, Charles V signed the New Laws (which replaced the Laws of Burgos of 1512) banning slavery and repartimiento, but also claiming ownership of American lands and considering all the people inhabiting these lands to be his subjects.

When in May 1493 Pope Alexander VI issued the bull "Inter caetera", according to which the new lands were transferred to the Kingdom of Spain, in exchange he demanded the evangelization of the people. So, during the second journey of Columbus, Benedictine monks accompanied him along with twelve other priests. Because slavery was forbidden among Christians, and could only be applied to prisoners of war who were not Christians, or to men already sold as slaves, the debate over Christianization was particularly heated during the 16th century. In 1537, the papal bull "Sublimis Deus" finally recognized the fact that Native Americans possessed souls, thereby forbidding their enslavement, but did not end the discussion. Some argued that the natives, who rebelled against the authorities and were captured, could still be enslaved.

Later, a debate was held in Valladolid between the Dominican priest Bartolome de las Casas and another Dominican philosopher, Juan Gines de Sepúlveda, where the former argued that Native Americans were creatures with souls, like all other human beings, while the latter argued the opposite and justified their enslavement.

Christianization of Colonial America

The Christianization process was brutal in the beginning: when the first Franciscans arrived in Mexico in 1524, they burned the places dedicated to the pagan cult, cooling off relations with much of the local population. In the 1530s they began to adapt Christian practices to local customs, including the building of new churches on the sites of ancient places of worship, which led to the mixing of Old World Christianity with local religions. The Spanish Roman Catholic Church, in need of native labor and cooperation, preached in Quechua, Nahuatl, Guarani and other Indian languages, which contributed to the expansion of the use of these indigenous languages ​​and provided some of them with writing systems. One of the first primitive schools for Native Americans was one founded by Fray Pedro de Gante in 1523.

In order to encourage their troops, the conquistadors often gave away Indian cities for the use of their troops and officers. Black African slaves replaced local labor in some places, including in the West Indies, where the native population was close to extinction on many islands.

During this time, the Portuguese gradually moved from the original plan of establishing trading posts to extensive colonization of what is now Brazil. They brought millions of slaves to work their plantations. The Portuguese and Spanish royal governments intended to manage these settlements and receive at least 20% of all treasures found (in Quinto Real, collected by the Casa de Contratación government agency), in addition to collecting any taxes they might levy. By the end of the 16th century, American silver accounted for one-fifth of Spain's total budget. In the 16th century, about 240,000 Europeans landed at American ports.

Colonization of America in search of wealth

Inspired by the wealth the Spaniards derived from their colonies based on the conquered lands of the Aztecs, Incas, and other large Indian settlements in the 16th century, the early English began to settle permanently in America and hoped for the same rich discoveries when they founded their first permanent settlement. at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. They were financed by the same joint-stock companies, such as the Virginia Freight Company, financed by wealthy Englishmen, who exaggerated the economic potential of this new land. The main purpose of this colony was the hope of finding gold.

It took strong leaders like John Smith to convince the Jamestown colonists that in their search for gold they needed to put aside their basic needs for food and shelter, and the Biblical principle "He who does not work shall not eat." to an extremely high mortality rate was very unfortunate and a cause for despair among the colonists.Many supply missions were organized to support the colony.Later, thanks to the work of John Rolfe and others, tobacco became a commercial export crop, which ensured the sustainable economic development of Virginia and the neighboring colony of Maryland .

From the very beginning of the Virginia settlements in 1587 until the 1680s, the main source of labor was a large part of the immigrants, in search of a new life, who arrived in foreign colonies to work under contract. During the 17th century, wage laborers made up three-quarters of all European immigrants in the Chesapeake region. Most of the hired workers were teenagers, originally from England, with poor economic prospects in their homeland. Their fathers signed documents that gave these teenagers the opportunity to come to America for free and get unpaid work until they reach adulthood. They were provided with food, clothing, housing and training in agricultural work or household services. American landowners needed workers and were willing to pay for their passage to America if these workers served them for several years. By exchanging a passage to America for unpaid work for five to seven years, after this period they could begin an independent life in America. Many migrants from England died within the first few years.

Economic advantage also prompted the creation of the Darien Project, the ill-fated venture of the Kingdom of Scotland to establish a colony on the Isthmus of Panama in the late 1690s. The Darien project had as its object the control of trade through that part of the world, and thereby was to assist Scotland in strengthening her strength in world trade. However, the project was doomed due to poor planning, low food supplies, poor leadership, lack of demand for trade goods, and a devastating disease. The failure of the Darien Project was one of the reasons that led the Kingdom of Scotland to enter into the Act of Union in 1707 with the Kingdom of England, creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and giving Scotland commercial access to the English, now British, colonies.

In the French colonial regions, sugar plantations in the Caribbean were the backbone of the economy. In Canada, the fur trade with the locals was very important. About 16,000 French men and women became colonizers. The vast majority became farmers, settling along the St. Lawrence River. With favorable conditions for health (no disease) and plenty of land and food, their numbers grew exponentially to 65,000 by 1760. The colony was ceded to Great Britain in 1760, but there were few social, religious, legal, cultural and economic changes in a society that remained true to the newly formed traditions.

Religious immigration to the New World

Roman Catholics were the first major religious group to immigrate to the New World, as the settlers of the colonies of Spain and Portugal (and later, France) belonged to this faith. The English and Dutch colonies, on the other hand, were more religiously diverse. The settlers of these colonies included Anglicans, Dutch Calvinists, English Puritans and other nonconformists, English Catholics, Scottish Presbyterians, French Huguenots, German and Swedish Lutherans, as well as Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, Moravians, and Jews of various ethnicities.

Many groups of colonists went to America in order to gain the right to practice their religion without persecution. The Protestant Reformation of the 16th century disrupted the unity of Western Christendom and led to the formation of numerous new religious sects, which were often persecuted by state authorities. In England, many people came to the question of the organization of the Church of England towards the end of the 16th century. One of the main manifestations of this was the Puritan movement, which sought to "purify" the existing Church of England of its many residual Catholic rites, which they believed had no mention in the Bible.

A firm believer in the principle of government based on divine right, Charles I, King of England and Scotland, persecuted religious dissenters. Waves of repression led about 20,000 Puritans to migrate to New England between 1629 and 1642, where they established several colonies. Later in the same century, the new colony of Pennsylvania was given to William Penn as a settlement of the king's debt to his father. The government of this colony was established by William Penn about 1682, primarily to provide a refuge for persecuted English Quakers; but other residents were also welcome. Baptists, Quakers, German and Swiss Protestants, Anabaptists flocked to Pennsylvania. Very attractive were the good opportunity to get cheap land, freedom of religion and the right to improve their own lives.

The peoples of the Americas before and after the start of European colonization

Slavery was a common practice in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans, as different groups of American Indians captured and held members of other tribes as slaves. Many of these captives were subjected to human sacrifice in Native American civilizations such as the Aztecs. In response to some cases of enslavement of the local population in the Caribbean during the early years of colonization, the Spanish crown passed a series of laws prohibiting slavery as early as 1512. A new, stricter set of laws was passed in 1542 called the New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Protection of the Indians, or simply the New Laws. They were created to prevent the exploitation of indigenous peoples by encomenderos or landowners by severely limiting their power and dominance. This helped to greatly reduce Indian slavery, although not completely. Later, with the arrival of other European colonial powers in the New World, the enslavement of the native population increased, as these empires did not have anti-slavery legislation for several decades. Indigenous populations declined (mainly due to European diseases, but also from forced exploitation and crime). Later, the indigenous workers were replaced by Africans brought in through the large commercial slave trade.

How were blacks brought to America?

By the 18th century, the overwhelming number of black slaves was such that Native American slavery was much rarer. The Africans who were taken on board the slave ships sailing to North and South America were mostly supplied from their African home countries by the coastal tribes, who captured them and sold them. Europeans bought slaves from local African tribes who took them prisoner in exchange for rum, weapons, gunpowder and other goods.

Slave trade in America

An estimated 12 million Africans were involved in the total slave trade in the islands of the Caribbean, Brazil, Mexico, and the United States. The vast majority of these slaves were sent to the sugar colonies in the Caribbean and Brazil, where life expectancy was short and the number of slaves had to be constantly replenished. At best, about 600,000 African slaves were imported into the US, or 5% of the 12 million slaves exported from Africa. Life expectancy was much higher in the US (because of better food, fewer diseases, easier work, and better medical care), so the number of slaves rose rapidly from birth to death, reaching 4 million by 1860 according to the census. From 1770 to 1860, the natural growth rate of North American slaves was much higher than the population of any country in Europe, and was almost twice as fast as that of England.

Slaves imported into thirteen colonies/USA in a given time period:

• 1619-1700 - 21.000
• 1701-1760 - 189.000
• 1761-1770 - 63.000
• 1771-1790 - 56.000
• 1791-1800 - 79.000
• 1801-1810 - 124.000
• 1810-1865 - 51.000
• Total - 597.000

Indigenous losses during colonization

The European way of life included a long history of direct contact with domesticated animals such as cows, pigs, sheep, goats, horses, and various domesticated birds, from which many diseases originated. Thus, unlike the indigenous peoples, the Europeans accumulated antibodies. Large-scale contact with Europeans after 1492 brought new microbes to the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Epidemics of smallpox (1518, 1521, 1525, 1558, 1589), typhoid (1546), influenza (1558), diphtheria (1614) and measles (1618) swept America after contact with Europeans, killing between 10 million and 100 million people, up to 95% of the indigenous population of North and South America. Cultural and political instability accompanied these losses, which together greatly contributed to the efforts of various colonists in New England and Massachusetts to gain control of the great wealth in land and resources commonly enjoyed by the indigenous communities.

Such diseases have added human mortality to an undeniably enormous severity and scale - and it is futile to attempt to determine its full extent with any degree of accuracy. Estimates of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas vary widely.

Others have argued that the large population differences after pre-Columbian history are the reason for treating the largest population count with caution. Such estimates may reflect historical population highs, while indigenous populations may have been at levels slightly below these highs, or at a time of decline just prior to European contact. Indigenous peoples reached their ultimate lows in most areas of the Americas in the early 20th century; and in some cases growth has returned.

List of European colonies in the Americas

Spanish colonies

• Cuba (until 1898)
• New Granada (1717-1819)
• Captaincy General of Venezuela
• New Spain (1535-1821)
• Nueva Extremadura
• Nueva Galicia
• Nuevo Reino de Leon
• Nuevo Santander
• Nueva Vizcaya
• California
• Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico
• Viceroyalty of Peru (1542-1824)
• Captaincy General of Chile
• Puerto Rico (1493-1898)
• Rio de la Plata (1776-1814)
• Hispaniola (1493-1865); the island, now included in the islands of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, was under Spanish rule in whole or in part from 1492- to 1865.

English and (after 1707) British colonies

• British America (1607- 1783)
• Thirteen Colonies (1607-1783)
• Rupert's Land (1670-1870)
• British Columbia (1793-1871)
• British North America (1783-1907)
• British West Indies
• Belize

Courland

• New Courland (Tobago) (1654-1689)

Danish colonies

• Danish West Indies (1754-1917)
• Greenland (1814-present)

Dutch colonies

• New Netherland (1609-1667)
• Essequibo (1616-1815)
• Dutch Virgin Islands (1625-1680)
• Burbice (1627-1815)
• New Walcheren (1628-1677)
• Dutch Brazil (1630-1654)
• Pomerun (1650-1689)
• Cayenne (1658-1664)
• Demerara (1745-1815)
• Suriname (1667-1954) (After independence, still part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands until 1975)
• Curaçao and Dependencies (1634-1954) (Aruba and Curaçao are still part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Bonaire; 1634-present)
• Sint Eustatius and dependencies (1636-1954) (Sint Maarten is still part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Sint Eustatius and Saba; 1636-present)

French colonies

• New France (1604-1763)
• Acadia (1604-1713)
• Canada (1608-1763)
• Louisiana (1699-1763, 1800-1803)
• Newfoundland (1662-1713)
• Ile Royale (1713-1763)
• French Guiana (1763–present)
• French West Indies
• Saint Domingo (1659-1804, now Haiti)
• Tobago
• Virgin Islands
• Antarctic France (1555-1567)
• Equatorial France (1612-1615)

Order of Malta

• Saint Barthelemy (1651-1665)
• Saint Christopher (1651-1665)
• St. Croix (1651-1665)
• Saint Martin (1651-1665)

Norwegian colonies

• Greenland (986-1814)
• Danish-Norwegian West Indies (1754-1814)
• Sverdrup Islands (1898-1930)
• Land of Eric the Red (1931-1933)

Portuguese colonies

• Colonial Brazil (1500-1815) became a Kingdom, the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves.
• Terra do Labrador (1499/1500-) claimed territory (occupied periodically, from time to time).
• Corte Real Land, also known as Terra Nova dos Bacalhaus (Land of the Cod) - Terra Nova (Newfoundland) (1501) claimed territory (settled periodically, from time to time).
• Portuguese Cove Saint Philip (1501-1696)
• Nova Scotia (1519 -1520) claimed territory (occupied periodically, from time to time).
• Barbados (1536-1620)
• Colonia del Sacramento (1680-1705 / 1714-1762 / 1763-1777 (1811-1817))
• Sisplatina (1811-1822, now Uruguay)
• French Guiana (1809-1817)

Russian colonies

• Russian America (Alaska) (1799-1867)

Scottish colonies

• Nova Scotia (1622-1632)
• Darien Project on the Isthmus of Panama (1698-1700)
• City of Stuarts, Carolina (1684-1686)

Swedish colonies

• New Sweden (1638-1655)
• St. Barthelemy (1785-1878)
• Guadeloupe (1813-1815)

American museums and exhibitions of slavery

In 2007, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History and the Virginia Historical Society (VHS) co-hosted a traveling exhibit to recount the strategic alliances and violent conflicts between European empires (English, Spanish, French) and the indigenous peoples of the American North. The exhibition was presented in three languages ​​and from different points of view. Artifacts on display included rare surviving local and European artifacts, maps, documents, and ritual objects from museums and royal collections on both sides of the Atlantic. The exhibition opened in Richmond, Virginia on March 17, 2007 and closed at the Smithsonian International Gallery on October 31, 2009.

A linked online exhibition is dedicated to the international origins of the societies of Canada and the United States, and to the 400th anniversary of the three permanent settlements at Jamestown (1607), Quebec (1608), and Santa Fe (1609). The site is available in three languages.

There are many legends and more or less reliable stories about brave sailors who visited North America long before Columbus. Among them are Chinese monks who landed in California around 458, Portuguese, Spanish and Irish travelers and missionaries who allegedly reached America in the 6th, 7th and 9th centuries.

It is also believed that in the X century. Basque fishermen fished on the Newfoundland shallows. The most reliable, obviously, is information about Norwegian navigators who visited North America in the 10th-14th centuries, getting here from Iceland. It is believed that the Norman colonies were not only in Greenland, but also on the Labrador Peninsula, Newfoundland, New England, and even in the Great Lakes region. However, the settlements of the Normans already in the XIV century. fell into disrepair, leaving no discernible traces in relation to the links between the cultures of the northern part of the American and European continents. In this sense, the discovery of North America began anew in the 15th century. This time, the British reached North America before other Europeans.

English expeditions in North America

English discoveries in America begin with the voyages of John Cabot (Giovanni Gabotto, or Cabbotto) and his son Sebastian, Italians in the service of the English. Cabot, having received two caravels from the English king, had to find a sea route to China. In 1497, he apparently reached the shores of Labrador (where he met the Eskimos), and also, possibly, Newfoundland, where he saw Indians painted with red ocher.

It was the first in the 15th century. meeting of Europeans with the "redskins" of North Akhmerica. In 1498, the expedition of John and Sebastian Cabot again reached the shores of North America.

The immediate practical result of these voyages was the discovery of the richest fish hops off the coast of Newfoundland. Entire fleets of English fishing boats were drawn here, and their number increased every year.

Spanish colonization of North America

If the English sailors reached North America by sea, then the Spaniards moved here by land from the southern regions, as well as from their island possessions in America - Cuba, Puerto Rico, San Domingo, etc.

The Spanish conquerors captured the Indians, plundered and burned their villages. The Indians responded with stubborn resistance. Many invaders have found death on land they have never conquered. Ponce de Leon, who discovered Florida (1513), was mortally wounded in 1521 by the Indians while landing in Tampa Bay, where he wanted to establish a colony. In 1528, the Indian gold hunter, Narvaez, also died. Cabeza de Vaca, the treasurer of the Narvaez expedition, wandered for nine years in the southern part of the North American continent among the Indian tribes. At first he fell into slavery, and then, freed, he became a merchant and healer. Finally, in 1536, he got to the shores of the Gulf of California, already conquered by the Spaniards. De Vaca told a lot of wonderful things, exaggerating the wealth and size of the Indian settlements, especially the "cities" of the Pueblo Indians, which he happened to visit. These stories aroused the interest of the Spanish nobility in the regions north of Mexico, and gave impetus to the search for fabulous cities in the southwest of North America. In 1540, Coronado's expedition set out from Mexico in a northwestern direction, consisting of a detachment of 250 horsemen and foot soldiers, several hundred Indian allies and thousands of Indians and Negro slaves enslaved. The expedition passed through the waterless deserts between the Rio Grande and Colorado rivers, capturing with the cruelty usual for the Spanish colonialists the "cities" of the Pueblo Indians; but neither the expected gold nor precious stones were found in them. For further searches, Coronado sent detachments in different directions, and he himself, having wintered in the Rio Grande Valley, moved north, where he met the Prairie Pawnee Indians (in the current state of Kansas) and got acquainted with their semi-nomadic hunting culture. Finding no treasure, disappointed Coronado turned back and. having collected the remnants of his troops along the way, in 1542 he returned to Mexico. After this expedition, the Spaniards became aware of a significant part of the mainland within the current states of Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas and the southern parts of the states of Utah and Colorado, discovered the Grand Canyon of Colorado, received information about the Pueblo Indians and prairie tribes.

At the same time (1539-1542), the expedition of de Soto, a member of Pizarro's campaign, was equipped in the southeast of North America. As soon as the stories of Cabez de Vac reached him, de Soto sold his property and equipped an expedition of a thousand people. In 1539 he sailed from Cuba and landed on the west coast of Florida. De Soto and his army wandered for four years in search of gold across the vast territory of the present US states: Florida, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana and southern Missouri, sowing death and destruction in the country of peaceful farmers . As his contemporaries wrote about him, this ruler was fond of killing Jews like a sport.

In northern Florida, de Soto had to deal with the Indians, who since the time of Narvaes and vowed to fight the newcomers not for life, but for death. The conquerors had a particularly difficult time when they reached the lands of the Chicasawa Indians. In response to the excesses and violence of the Spaniards, the Indians once set fire to de Soto's camp, destroying almost all food supplies and military equipment. Only in 1542, when de Soto himself died of a fever, did the miserable remnants (about three hundred people) of his once richly equipped army on makeshift ships barely reach the coast of Mexico. This ended the Spanish expeditions of the 16th century. deep into North America.

By the beginning of the XVII century. Spanish settlements occupied a fairly large territory both on the Atlantic coast of North America (in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina) and on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. In the west, they owned California and areas that roughly corresponded to the current states of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. But in the same XVII century. Spain began to push France and England. The French colonies in the Mississippi Delta separated the possessions of the Spanish crown in Mexico and Florida. To the north of Florida, further penetration of the Spaniards was blocked by the British.

Thus, the influence of Spanish colonization was limited to the southwest. Shortly after the Coronado expedition, missionaries, soldiers, and settlers appeared in the Rio Grande Valley. They forced the Indians to build forts and missions here. San Gabriel (1599) and Santa Fe (1609), where the Spanish population was concentrated, were among the first to be built.

The steady weakening of Spain, especially from the end of the 16th century, the fall of her military, and above all, naval power, undermined her position. The most serious contenders for dominance in the American colonies were England, Holland and France.

The founder of the first Dutch settlement in America, Henry Hudson, in 1613 built huts for storing furs on the island of Manhattan. The city of New Amsterdam (later New York) soon arose on this site, which became the center of the Dutch colony. The Dutch colonies, half the population of which were British, soon passed into the possession of England.

The beginning of French colonization was laid by entrepreneurs-fishermen. As early as 1504, Breton and Norman fishermen began to visit the Newfoundland shallows; the first maps of the American shores appeared; in 1508, an Indian was brought to France "for show". Since 1524, the French king Francis I sent navigators to the New World with the aim of further discoveries. Particularly noteworthy are the voyages of Jacques Cartier, a sailor from Saint-Malo (Brittany), who for eight years (1534-1542) explored the vicinity of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, climbed the river of the same name to the island, which he named Mont Royal (Royal Mountain; now , Montreal), and called the land along the banks of the river New France. We owe him the earliest news about the Iroquois tribes of the river. St. Lawrence; very interesting is the sketch and description he made of the fortified Iroquois village (Oshelaga, or Hohelaga) and the dictionary of Indian words he compiled.

In 1541, Cartier founded the first agricultural colony in the Quebec region, but due to a lack of food, the colonists had to be taken back to France. This was the end of the French colonization of North America in the 16th century. They resumed later - a century later.

Founding of French colonies in North America

The main driving force behind French colonization for a long time was the pursuit of valuable furs. The seizure of land did not play a significant role for the French. The French peasants, although burdened with feudal duties, remained, unlike the dispossessed English yeomen, landowners, and there was no mass flow of immigrants from France.

The French began to gain a foothold in Canada only at the beginning of the 17th century, when Samuel Champlain founded a small colony on the Acadia Peninsula (southwest of Newfoundland), and then the city of Quebec (1608).

By 1615, the French had already reached the lakes of Huron and Ontario. Open territories were given by the French crown to trading companies; the lion's share was taken by the Hudson's Bay Company. Having received a charter in 1670, this company monopolized the purchase of furs and fish from the Indians. Along the banks of rivers and lakes, posts of the company were set up on the path of Indian nomads. They turned the local tribes into "tributaries" of the company, entangling them in networks of debts and obligations. The Indians were soldered, corrupted; they were robbed, exchanging precious furs for trinkets. The Jesuits who appeared in Canada in 1611 diligently converted the Indians to Catholicism, preaching humility before the colonialists. But with even greater zeal, keeping up with the agents of the trading company, the Jesuits bought furs from the Indians. This activity of the order was no secret to anyone. Thus, the governor of Canada, Frontenac, informed the government of France (70s of the 17th century) that the Jesuits would not civilize the Indians, because they wished to keep their guardianship over them, that they were concerned not so much about the salvation of souls, but about the extraction of all good, missionary but their activities are an empty comedy.

The beginning of English colonization and the first permanent English colonies of the 17th century.

The French colonizers of Canada very soon had competitors in the person of the British. The British government considered Canada a natural extension of the British crown's possessions in America, based on the fact that the Canadian coast had been discovered by Cabot's English expedition long before Jacques Cartier's first voyage. Attempts to establish a colony in North America by the British took place as early as the 16th century, but all of them were unsuccessful: the British did not find gold in the North, and the seekers of easy money neglected agriculture. Only at the beginning of the XVII century. the first real agricultural English colonies arose here.

The beginning of the mass settlement of the English colonies in the XVII century. opened a new stage of the colonization of North America.

The development of capitalism in England was associated with the success of foreign trade and the creation of monopoly colonial trading companies. For the colonization of North America, by subscription to shares, two trading companies were formed, which had large funds: London (South., or Varginskaya) and Plymouth (Northern); royal charters placed at their disposal the lands between 34 and 41 ° N. sh. and unlimitedly inland, as if these lands belonged not to the Indians, but to the government of England. The first charter to found a colony in America was given to Sir Hamford D. Kilbert. He made a preliminary expedition to Newfoundland and was wrecked on the way back. Gilbert's rights passed to his relative, Sir Walter Reilly, a favorite of Queen Elizabeth. In 1584, Reilly decided to establish a colony in the area south of the Chesapeake Bay and named it Virginia in honor of the "virgin queen" (lat. virgo - girl). The following year, a group of colonists set off for Virginia, settling on Roanoke Island (in the current state of North Carolina). A year later, the colonists returned to England, as the chosen place turned out to be unhealthy. Among the colonists was the famous artist John White. He made many sketches of the life of the local Algokin Indians 1 . The fate of the second group of colonists who arrived in Virginia in 1587 is unknown.

At the beginning of the XVII century. Walter Reilly's project to create a colony in Virginia was carried out by a commercial Virginia company, which expected large profits from this enterprise. The company, at its own expense, delivered settlers to Virginia, who were obliged to work off their debt within four to five years.

The place for the colony (Jamstown), founded in 1607, was chosen unsuccessfully - swampy, with many mosquitoes, unhealthy. In addition, the colonists very soon turned the Indians against them. Disease and skirmishes with the Indians in a few months claimed two-thirds of the colonists. Life in the colony was built on a military basis. Twice a day, the colonists were collected by drumming and formation, sent to the fields to work, and every evening they also returned to Jamestown for lunch and for prayer. Since 1613, the colonist John Rolfe (who married the daughter of the leader of the Powhatan tribe - the "princess" Pocahontas) began to cultivate tobacco. From that time on, tobacco became for a long time an item of income for the colonists and, even more so, for the Virginia Company. Encouraging immigration, the company gave the colonists land plots. The poor, who worked off the cost of the journey from England to America, also received an allotment, for which they made payments to the owner of the land in a fixed amount. Later, when Virginia became a royal colony (1624), and when its administration passed from the company into the hands of a governor appointed by the king, with the presence of qualified representative institutions, this duty turned into a kind of land tax. The immigration of the poor soon increased even more. If in 1640 there were 8 thousand inhabitants in Virginia, then in 1700 there were 70 thousand of them. planters, big businessmen.

Both colonies specialized in growing tobacco and therefore depended on imported English goods. The main labor force on the large plantations of Virginia and Maryland were the poor who were taken out of England. Throughout the 17th century "indentured servants", as these poor people were called, obliged to work off the cost of the journey to America, made up the majority of immigrants to Virginia and Maryland.

Very soon, the labor of indentured servants was replaced by the slave labor of Negroes, who began to be imported into the southern colonies from the first half of the 17th century. (the first large batch of slaves was delivered to Virginia in 1619),

Since the 17th century free settlers appeared among the colonists. The English Puritans, the "Pilgrim Fathers", some of whom were sectarians who fled from religious persecution in their homeland, went to the northern, Plymouth colony. In this party there were settlers adjoining the Brownist sect 2 . Leaving Plymouth in September 1620, the May Flower ship with pilgrims arrived at Cape Cod in November. In the first winter, half of the colonists died: the settlers - mostly townspeople - did not know how to hunt, cultivate the land, or fish. With the help of the Indians, who taught the settlers how to grow corn, the rest in the end not only did not die of starvation, but even paid the debts for their passage on the ship. The colony founded by the Plymouth sectarians was called New Plymouth.

In 1628, the Puritans, who had suffered oppression during the years of the Stuarts, founded the colony of Massachusetts in America. The Puritan Church enjoyed great power in the colony. The colonist received the right to vote only if he belonged to the Puritan church and had a good reputation as a preacher. Under this arrangement, only one-fifth of the adult male population of Massachusetts had the right to vote.

During the years of the English Revolution, emigrant aristocrats (“cavaliers”) began to arrive in the American colonies, who did not want to put up with the new, revolutionary regime in their homeland. These colonists settled mainly in the southern colony (Virginia).

In 1663, eight courtiers of Charles II received a gift of land south of Virginia, where the Carolina colony was founded (subsequently divided into South and North). The culture of tobacco, which enriched the large landowners of Virginia, spread to neighboring colonies. However, in the Shenandoah Valley, in western Maryland, and also south of Virginia, in the wetlands of South Carolina, there were no conditions for growing tobacco; there, as in Georgia, they cultivated rice. The owners of Carolina made plans to make a fortune on the cultivation of sugar cane, rice, hemp, flax, the production of indigo, silk, i.e. goods that were in short supply in England and imported from other countries. In 1696, the Madagascar variety of rice was introduced into the Carolinas. Since then, its cultivation has become the main occupation of the colony for a hundred years. Rice was bred in riverine swamps and on the seashore. Hard work under the scorching sun in the malarial swamps was shouldered by black slaves, who in 1700 made up half the population of the colony. In the southern part of the colony (now the state of South Carolina), slavery took root to an even greater extent than in Virginia. Large slave planters, who owned almost all the land, had rich houses in Charleston, the administrative and cultural center of the colony. In 1719 the heirs of the first owners of the colony sold their rights to the English crown.

North Carolina was of a different character, populated mainly by Quakers and refugees from Virginia - small farmers who were hiding from debts and unbearable taxes. There were very few large plantations and Negro slaves there. North Carolina became a crown colony in 1726.

In all these colonies, the population was mainly replenished by immigrants from England, Scotland and Ireland.

Much more motley was the population of the colony of New York (formerly the Dutch colony of New Netherland) with the city of New Amsterdam (now New York). After the capture of this colony by the British, it was received by the Duke of York, brother of the English king Charles II. At that time, there were no more than 10 thousand inhabitants in the colony, who, however, spoke 18 different languages. Although the Dutch were not in the majority, Dutch influence in the American colonies was great, with wealthy Dutch families enjoying great political weight in New York. Traces of this influence remain to this day: Dutch words entered the language of the Americans; Dutch architectural style left its mark on the appearance of American cities and towns.

The English colonization of North America was carried out on a large scale. America was presented to the poor in Europe as a promised land, where they could find salvation from the oppression of large landowners, from religious persecution, from debt.

Entrepreneurs recruited immigrants to America; not limited to this, they staged real raids, their agents soldered people in taverns and sent drunk recruits to ships.

English colonies arose one after another. Their population increased very rapidly. The agrarian revolution in England, accompanied by the mass dispossession of the peasantry, drove out of the country many robbed poor people who were looking for an opportunity to get land in the colonies. In 1625, there were only 1,980 colonists in North America; in 1641, there were 50,000 immigrants from England alone 2 . According to other sources, in 1641 there were only 25,000 colonists in the English colonies 3 . In 50 years the population grew to 200,000 4 . In 1760 it reached 1,695,000 (including 310,000 Negro slaves), 5 and five years later the number of colonists almost doubled.

The colonists waged a war of extermination against the owners of the country - the Indians, taking away their land. In just a few years (1706-1722), the tribes of Virginia were almost completely exterminated, despite the "family" ties that connected the most powerful of the leaders of the Virginian Indians with the British.

In the north, in New England, the Puritans resorted to other means: they acquired land from the Indians through "trade deals." Subsequently, this gave reason to official historiographers to assert that the ancestors of the Anglo-Americans did not encroach on the freedom of the Indians and did not seize, but bought their lands, concluding agreements with the Indians. For a handful of gunpowder, a drop of beads, etc., one could "buy" a huge plot of land, and the Indians, who did not know private property, usually remained in the dark about the essence of the deal concluded with them. In the Pharisaic consciousness of their legal "rightness", the settlers expelled the Indians from their lands; if they did not agree to leave the land chosen by the colonists, they were exterminated. The religious fanatics of Massachusetts were especially ferocious.

The church preached that the beating of the Indians was pleasing to God. Manuscripts of the 17th century it is reported that a certain pastor, having heard about the destruction of a large Indian village, from the church pulpit praised God for the fact that six hundred pagan "souls" were sent to hell that day.

The shameful page of the colonial policy in North America was the scalp bounty (“scalp bounty”). As shown by historical and ethnographic studies (Georg Friderici), the philistine opinion that the custom of scalping has long been very widespread among the Indians of North America is completely wrong. This custom was previously known only to a few tribes of the eastern regions, but even among them it was used relatively rarely. It was only with the advent of the colonialists that the barbarian custom of scalping really began to spread more and more widely. The reason for this was primarily the intensification of internecine wars fomented by the colonial authorities; wars, with the introduction of firearms, became much more bloody, and the spread of iron knives made it easier to cut off the scalp (wooden and bone knives were previously used). The colonial authorities directly and directly encouraged the spread of the custom of scalping, appointing bonuses for the scalps of enemies - both Indians and whites, of their rivals in colonization.

The first prize for scalps was awarded in 1641 in the Dutch colony of New Netherland: 20 m of wampum 1 for each scalp of an Indian (a meter of wampum was equal to 5 Dutch guilders). Since then, for more than 170 years (1641-1814), the administration of individual colonies has repeatedly appointed such bonuses (expressed in British pounds, in Spanish and American dollars). Even Quaker Pennsylvania, famous for its relatively peaceful policy towards the Indians, in 1756 appropriated £60,000. Art. especially for Indian scalp prizes. The last premium was offered in 1814 in the Indiana Territory.

As mentioned above, Pennsylvania, a colony that was founded in 1682 by a wealthy Quaker, the son of an English admiral, William Penn, was some exception to the cruel policy of destroying the Indians for his like-minded people persecuted in England. Penn sought to maintain friendly relations with the Indians who continued to live in the colony. However, when wars began between the English and French colonies (1744-1748 and 1755-1763), the Indians, who had made an alliance with the French, became involved in the war and were forced out of Pennsylvania.

In American historiography, the colonization of America is most often presented as if the Europeans colonized "free lands", that is, territories that were not actually inhabited by Indians 1 . In fact, North America, and its eastern part in particular, was, according to the conditions of the economic activity of the Indians, quite densely populated (in the 16th century, about 1 million Indians lived on the territory of the present USA). The Indians, who were engaged in hunting and slash-and-burn agriculture, needed large land areas. Driving the Indians off the land, "buying" land from them, the Europeans doomed them to death. Naturally, the Indians resisted as best they could. The struggle for land was accompanied by a number of Indian uprisings, of which the so-called "war of King Philip" (the Indian name is Metakom), a talented leader of one of the coastal Algonquin tribes, is especially famous. In 1675-1676. Metacom raised many tribes of New England, and only the betrayal of a group of Indians saved the colonists. By the first quarter of the XVIII century. the coastal tribes of New England and Virginia were nearly wiped out.

The relations of the colonists with the locals - the Indians were not always hostile. Ordinary people - poor farmers very often maintained good neighborly relations with them, adopted the experience of the Indians in agriculture, learned from them to adapt to local conditions. So, in the spring of 1609, the colonists of Jamestown learned from captive Indians how to grow corn. The Indians set fire to the forest and planted corn interspersed with beans between the charred trunks, fertilizing the soil with ash. They carefully looked after crops, spudded corn and destroyed weeds. Indian corn saved the colonists from starvation.

The inhabitants of New Plymouth were no less obliged to the Indians. After spending the first hard winter, during which half of the settlers died, in the spring of 1621 they cleared the fields left by the Indians and sowed in the form of an experiment 5 acres of English wheat and peas and 20 acres - under the direction of one Indian - corn. Wheat failed, but corn sprouted, and has been the main agricultural crop in New England ever since throughout the colonial period. Later, the colonists achieved good harvests of wheat, but it did not displace corn.

Like the Indians, the English colonists stewed meat with grains and vegetables, roasted corn kernels, and ground grain into flour using Indian wooden chairs. Traces of many borrowings from Indian cuisine are reflected in the language and food of Americans. So, in the American language there are a number of names for corn dishes: poon (corn tortilla), hominy (hominy), maga (cornmeal porridge), heisty pudding (“improvised” flour custard pudding), hald korn (hulled corn), sakkotash (dish of corn, beans and pork) 2 .

In addition to corn, European colonists borrowed from the Indians the culture of potatoes, peanuts, pumpkins, marrows, tomatoes, some varieties of cotton and beans. Many of these plants were taken by Europeans from Central and South America in the 17th century. to Europe and from there to North America. So it was, for example, with tobacco.

The Spaniards, the first of the Europeans to adopt the custom of smoking tobacco from the Indians, assumed the monopoly of its sale. The colonists of Virginia, as soon as the food problem was solved, began to experiment with local varieties of tobacco. But since they were not very good, they sowed all the comfortable lands in the colony free from crops of corn and other cereals with tobacco from the island of Trinidad.

In 1618 Virginia shipped £20,000 worth of tobacco to England. Art., in 1629 - for 500 thousand. Tobacco in Virginia served as a medium of exchange during these years: taxes and debts were paid with tobacco, the first thirty suitors of the colony paid for brides brought from Europe with the same "currency".

Three groups of English colonies

But according to the nature of production and economic structure, the English colonies can be divided into three groups.

In the southern colonies (Virginia, Maryland, North and South Carolina, Georgia), plantation slavery developed. Large plantations arose here, owned by a landed aristocracy, more connected by origin and economic interests with the aristocracy of England than with the bourgeoisie of the northern colonies. Most of all goods were exported to England from the southern colonies.

The use of Negro slave labor and the labor of "indentured servants" is most widespread here. As is known, the first Negro slaves were brought to Virginia in 1619; in 1683 there were already 3,000 slaves and 12,000 "indentured servants" 1 . After the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), the British government gained a monopoly on the slave trade. Since that time, the number of Negro slaves in the southern colonies has been ever increasing. Before the Revolutionary War, South Carolina had twice as many blacks as whites. At the beginning of the XVIII century. in all the English colonies of North America there were 60 thousand, and by the beginning of the war for independence - about 500 thousand Negro slaves 2 . Southerners specialized in the cultivation of rice, wheat, indigo and, especially in the early years of colonization, tobacco. Cotton was also known, but until the invention of the cotton gin (1793), its production played almost no role.

Next to the vast lands of the planter, tenants settled, renting land on the basis of sharecropping, mining, or for money. The plantation economy demanded vast lands, and the acquisition of new lands proceeded at an accelerated pace.

In the northern colonies, united in 1642, in the year of the beginning of the civil war in England, into one colony - New England (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut), Puritan colonists prevailed.

Located along the rivers and near the bays, the New England colonies remained isolated from each other for a long time. Settlement went along the rivers connecting the coast with the interior parts of the mainland. All large territories were captured. The colonists settled in small settlements organized on a communal basis, initially with periodic redistribution of arable land, then only with a common pasture.

In the northern colonies, small-scale farming took shape, and slavery did not spread. Shipbuilding, trade in fish and timber were of great importance. Maritime trade and industry developed, the industrial bourgeoisie grew, interested in freedom of trade, constrained by England. The slave trade became widespread.

But even here, in the northern colonies, the rural population was the overwhelming majority, and the townspeople kept cattle for a long time and had vegetable gardens.

In the middle colonies (New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania), farming developed on fertile lands, producing crops or specializing in raising livestock. In New York and New Jersey, more than in others, large-scale land ownership was widespread, and land owners leased it out in plots. In these colonies, the settlements were of a mixed nature: small towns in the Hudson Valley and Albany and large land holdings in Pennsylvania and in parts of the colonies of New York and New Jersey.

Thus, several ways of life coexisted in the English colonies for a long time: capitalism in the manufacturing stage, closer to English than, for example, to Prussian or Russian of the same time; slavery as a way of manufacturing capitalism until the 19th century, and then (before the war between the North and the South) - in the form of plantation slavery in a capitalist society; feudal relations in the form of survivals; a patriarchal way of life in the form of small-owner farming (in the mountainous western regions of the North and South), among which, although with less force than among the farming of the eastern regions, capitalist stratification took place.

All processes of development of capitalism in North America proceeded in the peculiar conditions of the presence of significant masses of free farming.

In all three economic regions into which the English colonies were divided, two zones were created: the eastern one, inhabited for a long time, and the western, bordering with Indian territories, the so-called “frontier” (frontier). The frontier receded continuously to the west. In the 17th century it passed along the Allegheny Ridge, in the first quarter of the 19th century. - already on the river. Mississippi. The inhabitants of the "border" led a life full of dangers and a hard struggle with nature, which required great courage and solidarity. These were “bonded servants” and farmers who had fled from the plantations, oppressed by large landowners, urban people who were fleeing taxes and the religious intolerance of sectarians. Unauthorized seizure of land (squatterism) was a special form of class struggle in the colonies.