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The most interesting notes
The population of Foreign Europe: characteristics
The ethnic composition of the population of foreign Europe
Negroes of the USA: a brief historical sketch
Colonization of North America.
English colonies
Anterior Asia: characteristics
The population of East Asia.
Population density
The peoples of South Africa: Bushmen, Bantu, Hottentots
Anthropological types
German folk song, dance, musical instruments
Food and clothing of Chechens.
Social and family relations
Folklore of the Germans.
German folk tale, schwank
English food and clothing
The main cultivated plants of Africa
The Mediterranean race.
The Negroid race
Ethnic composition of the population of Eastern Tropical Africa
Clothing of Belarusians
The Russian language and its dialects
Uighur clothing.
Family and ritual.
Food.
Literature, art
Some features of the formation of the American nation
German folk costume
The peoples of Africa
Migration of the population of Foreign Europe in the XIX XX centuries
General characteristics of the population of modern Mexico.
National minorities of Mexico
Musical folklore of Ukrainians
The religion of the Negroes.
The Negro family
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Colonization of North America.
English colonies
Ethnography -
The peoples of America
There are many legends and more or less reliable stories about brave navigators 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 VI, VII and IX centuries.
It is also assumed that in the X century Basque fishermen fished on the Newfoundland shoals.
The most reliable, obviously, is the information about the Norwegian navigators who in the X—XIV centuries" visited North America, getting here from Iceland.
It is believed that the Norman colonies were not only in Greenland, but also in Labrador, Newfoundland, New England and even in the Great Lakes region.
However, the settlements of the Normans already fell into decline in the XIV century, leaving no noticeable traces in relation to the relations 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 XV century.
This time, the British reached North America earlier than other Europeans.
English expeditions in North America
English discoveries in America begin with the voyages of John Cabot (Giovanni Gabotto, or Cab botto) and his son Sebastian, Italians in the English service.
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 Eskimos), and also, possibly, Newfoundland, where he saw Indians painted with red ochre.
This was the first meeting of Europeans with the "redskins" of Northern Akhmerika in the XV century.
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 shoals off the coast of Newfoundland.
Whole fleets of English fishing vessels were drawn here, and their number increased every year.
Spanish Colonization of North America
If the English navigators reached North America by sea, 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 to this with stubborn resistance.
Many invaders found death on the land that they never conquered.
Ponce de Leon, who discovered Florida (1513), was mortally wounded in 1521 by Indians while landing in Tampa Bay, where he wanted to establish a colony.
In 1528, a hunter for Indian gold, 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 was enslaved, and then, after being freed, he became a merchant and a medicine man.
Finally, in 1536, he got out 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 areas lying north of Mexico, and gave an impetus to the search for fabulous cities in the south west of North America.
In 1540, the Coronado expedition set out from Mexico in a northwestern direction, consisting of a detachment of 250 horsemen and infantry, several hundred allied Indians and thousands of enslaved Indians and Negroes.
The expedition passed through the arid deserts between the Rio Grande and the Colorado rivers, capturing the "cities" of the Pueblo Indians with the usual cruelty for the Spanish colonizers; but neither the expected gold nor precious stones were found in them.
For further searches, Coronado sent detachments in different directions, and after wintering in the Rio Grande Valley, he moved north, where he met the Prairie Pawnee Indians (in the current state of Kansas) and got acquainted with their semi nomadic hunting culture.
Not finding the treasure, the disappointed Coronado turned back and.
having collected the remnants of his troops on the way, he returned to Mexico in 1542.
After this expedition, the Spaniards became aware of a significant part of the continent within the present day states of Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas and the southern parts of the states of Utah and Colorado, the Grand Canyon of Colorado was discovered, information about the Pueblo Indians and prairie tribes was obtained.
At the same time (1539-1542), the expedition of de Soto, a member of Pizarro's campaign, was equipped to the south east of North America.
As soon as the stories of Cabez de Vaca 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.
For four years, De Soto and his army wandered in search of gold across the vast territory of the present US states: Florida, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana and the southern part of Missouri, sowing death and destruction in the country of peaceful farmers.
As his contemporaries wrote about him, this ruler was fond of killing zhndeytsev as a sport.
In the north of Florida, de Soto had to deal with Indians who, since the time of the War, had vowed to fight the aliens for life and death.
It was especially difficult for the conquerors when they reached the lands of the Chickasaw Indians.
In response to the outrages and violence of the Spaniards, the Indians once set fire to the de Soto camp, destroying almost all the food and military equipment.
Only in 1542, when de Soto himself died of a fever, the pitiful remnants (about three hundred people) his once richly equipped army on makeshift ships barely made it to the shores of Mexico.
This ended the Spanish expeditions of the XVI century.
into the depths of 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 the areas that roughly corresponded to the current states of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.
But in the same XVII century.
Spain began to be pressed by France and England.
The French colonialstemissippies divided the possessions of the Spanish crown in Mexico and in Florida.
To the north of Florida, the further penetration of the Spaniards was blocked by the British.
Thus, the influence of Spanish colonization was limited to the southwest.
Soon 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 since the end of the XVI century, the decline of its military, and above all, naval power, undermined its position.
The most serious contenders for domination in the American colonies were England, Holland and France.
The founder of the first Dutch settlement in America, Henry Hudson, built huts for storing furs on Manhattan Island in 1613.
The city of New Amsterdam (later New York) soon appeared on this place, which became the center of the Dutch colony.
The Dutch colonies, half of whose population were English, soon passed into the possession of England.
The beginning of French colonization was laid by fishing entrepreneurs.
Since 1504, Breton and Norman fishermen began to visit the Newfoundland shoals; the first maps of the American coasts appeared; in 1508, an Indian was brought to France "for show".
Since 1524, the French King Francis I sent navigators to the New World for the purpose of further discoveries.
Especially noteworthy are the voyages of Jacques Cartier, a sailor from Saint Malo (Brittany), who for eight years (1534-1542) explored the vicinity of the Bay of St. St. Lawrence, ascended the river of the same name to the island, named by him Mont Royal (Royal Mountain; now, the city of Montreal), and called the land along the banks of the river New France.
We owe to him the earliest news about the Iroquois tribes of the St. Lawrence River; the sketch and description of the fortified Iroquois village (Oshelaga, or Hohelaga) and the dictionary of Indian words compiled by him are very interesting.
In 1541, Cartier founded the first agricultural colony in the Quebec region, but due to a lack of food supplies, the colonists had to be taken back to France.
This was the end of the attempts of the French colonization of North America in the XVI century.
They resumed later — a century later.
Establishment of French colonies in North America
The main driving force of French colonization for a long time was the pursuit of valuable furs, but the seizure of land did not play a significant role for the French.
The French peasants, although burdened with feudal duties, remained, unlike the landless 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 XVII 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 Lakes Huron and Ontario.
The open territories were given by the French crown to trading companies; the lion's share was captured 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, company posts were set up on the way of Indian nomads.
They turned the local tribes into "tributaries" of the company, entangling them in networks of debts and obligations.
The Indians were drunk, corrupted; they were robbed, exchanging precious furs for trinkets.
The Jesuits who appeared in Canada since 1611 diligently converted the Indians to Catholicism, preaching humility before the colonizers.
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 not a secret to anyone.
Thus, the Governor of Canada, Frontenac, informed the French government (the 70s of the XVII century) that the Jesuits would not civilize the Indians, because they wanted to keep their guardianship over them, that they cared not so much about the salvation of souls as about the extraction of all good, and their missionary activity was an empty comedy.
The beginning of English colonization and the first permanent English colonies of the XVII century.
The French colonizers of Canada very soon had competitors in the face of the British.
The British government considered Canada a natural continuation of the British crown's possessions in America, based on the fact that the Canadian coast was discovered by the English Cabot expedition long before the first voyage of Jacques Cartier.
Attempts to establish a colony in North America by the British took place as early as the XVI century, but they were all unsuccessful: the British did not find gold in the North, and the seekers of easy profit neglected agriculture.
Only at the beginning of the XVII century.
the first real agricultural English colonies appeared here.
The beginning of the mass settlement of the English colonies in the XVII century.
opened a new stage of colonization of North America.
The development of capitalism in England was associated with the success of foreign trade and the creation of monopolistic colonial trading companies.
For the colonization of North America by subscribing to shares, two trading companies were formed that had large funds: London (South.,. or Varginsky) and Plymouth (North); royal charters placed at their disposal lands between 34 and 41° S. S. and unlimited into the interior of the country, as if these lands belonged not to the Indians, but to the government of England.
The first charter for the establishment of a colony in America was received by Sir Humphrd D. Kilbert.
He conducted a preliminary expedition to Newfoundland and was wrecked on the way back.
Gilbert's rights passed to his relative, Sir Walter Raleigh, 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 " (Latin virgo — girl).
The following year, a group of colonists went to Virginia, settling on the island of Roanoke (in the current state of North Carolina).
A year later, the colonists returned to England, as the chosen place turned out to be harmful to health.
Among the colonists was the famous artist John White.
He made many sketches from the life of local Algoikin 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 revenues from this enterprise.
The company, at its own expense, delivered immigrants to Virginia, who were obliged to work out their debt for four to five years.
The place for the colony (Jamestown), founded in 1607, was chosen unsuccessfully — swampy, with a lot of mosquitoes, unhealthy.
In addition, the colonists very soon turned the Indians against them.
Diseases and skirmishes with the Indians in a few months claimed two thirds of the colonists.
Life in the colony was built in a military way.
Twice a day, the colonists were gathered by drumming and marching, 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 chief of the Powhatan tribe — "princess" Pocahontas) began to cultivate tobacco.
Since that time, tobacco has long been 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 out the cost of the way from England to America, also received an allotment, for which they made payments to the owner of the land in a firmly fixed amount.
Later, when Virginia became a royal colony (1624), and when its management passed from the company into the hands of a governor appointed by the king, with the presence of censored 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..1 In another English colony — Maryland, founded in 1634, Lord Baltimore immediately after the foundation of the colony introduced the allotment of land to colonists planters, large entrepreneurs.
Both colonies specialized in tobacco cultivation and therefore depended on imported English goods.
The main labor force on the large plantations of Virginia and Maryland were the poor people exported from England.
Throughout the XVII century.
"indentured servants," as these poor people were called, who were obliged to work out the cost of the way to America, made up the majority of immigrants to Virginia and Maryland.
Very soon, the labor of bonded servants was replaced by the slave labor of Negroes, who began to be imported to the southern colonies from the first half of the XVII century.
(the first large batch of slaves was delivered to Virginia in 1619),
Since the XVII century, free settlers appeared among the colonists.
The English Puritans — "pilgrim fathers", some of whom were sectarians who fled from religious persecution at home, went to the northern Plymouth colony.
In this party there were settlers who belonged to the Brownist sect.2 Leaving Plymouth in September 1620, the ship "May flower" ("May flower") with the 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 of them eventually not only did not die of hunger, but even paid off their debts for their passage on the ship.
The colony founded by sectarians from Plymouth was called New Plymouth.
In 1628, the Puritans, who suffered oppression during the reign of the Stuarts, founded the colony of Massachusetts in America.
The Puritan church enjoyed great power in the colony.
A colonist received the right to vote only if he belonged to the Puritan church and had good reviews of the preacher.
In this order, only one fifth of the adult male population of Massachusetts had the right to vote.
During the years of the English Revolution, aristocratic emigrants ("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 colony of Carolina was founded (later divided into Southern and Northern).
Tobacco culture, which enriched the large landowners of Virginia, spread to the neighboring colonies.
However, in the Shenandoah Valley, in western Maryland, and also south of Virginia— in the swampy areas of South Carolina — there were no conditions for growing tobacco; rice was grown there, as in Georgia.
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 are scarce in England, imported from other countries.
In 1696, the Madagascar rice variety was imported to Carolina.
Since then, its cultivation has become the main occupation of the colony for a hundred years.
Rice was grown in riverine marshes and on the seashore.
The hard work under the scorching sun in the malarial swamps was shouldered by the Negro slaves, who in 1700 made up half of the population of the colony.
In the southern part of the colony (now the state of South Carolina), slavery took root even more than in Virginia.
Large plantation slaveholders, 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, inhabited mainly by Quakers and refugees from Virginia — small farmers who were hiding from debts and excessive taxes.
There were very few large plantations and few 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.
The population of the colony of New York (formerly the Dutch colony of New Netherlands) with the city of New Amsterdam (now New York) was much more diverse.
After the capture of this colony by the British, it was received by the Duke of York, the brother of King Charles II of England.
At that time, there were no more than 10 thousand inhabitants in the colony, but they spoke 18 different languages.
Although the Dutch did not make up the majority, Dutch influence in the American colonies was great, rich Dutch families enjoyed great political weight in New York.
Traces of this influence remain to this day: Dutch words have entered the language of Americans; the Dutch architectural style has left its imprint on the appearance of American cities and towns.
The English colonization of North America was carried out on a large scale.
America seemed to the poor in Europe to be the promised land, where one could find salvation from the oppression of large landowners, from religious persecution, from debts.
Entrepreneurs recruited immigrants to America; they did not limit themselves to this, they organized real raids, their agents got people drunk in taverns and sent those recruited in a drunken state to ships.
English colonies emerged one after another.1 The population in them increased very quickly.
The agrarian revolution in England, accompanied by the mass landless settlement of the peasantry, drove out of the country a lot of robbed poor people who were looking for an opportunity to get land in the colonies.
In 1625, there were only 1980 colonists in North America, in 1641— 50 thousand immigrants from England alone.2 According to other sources, in 1641 there were only 25 thousand colonists in the English colonies.3 After 50 years, the population has grown to 200 thousand.4.
In 1760 it reached 1695 thousand. (of these, 310 thousand negroes are slaves)
5, and in five years the number of colonists has 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 "kinship" ties that connected the most powerful of the leaders of the Virginia 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 rise 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 contracts with the Indians.
For a handful of gunpowder, a bunch of beads, etc., it was possible to "buy" a huge plot of land, and the Indians, who did not know private property, usually remained unaware of the essence of the transaction 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 particularly ferocious.
The church preached that the slaughter of Indians was pleasing to the Lord God.
In the manuscripts of the XVII century.
it is reported that a certain pastor, hearing 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 on that day.
The shameful page of colonial policy in North America was represented by the awards for scalps ("scalp bounty").
As shown by historical and ethnographic studies (Georg Friederitsi), 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 familiar only to a few tribes of the eastern regions, but it was also used relatively rarely among them.
It was only with the arrival of the colonialists that the barbaric 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 the scalp (previously wooden and bone knives were used).
The colonial authorities directly and directly encouraged the spread of the custom of scalping, assigning bonuses for the scalps of enemies both Indians and whites, their rivals in colonization.
The first prize for scalps was awarded in 1641 in the Dutch colony of New Netherlands: 20 m of wampum1 for each Indian scalp (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 English pounds, in Spanish and American dollars).
Even Quaker Pennsylvania, which was famous for its relatively peaceful policy towards the Indians, in 1756 allocated 60 thousand pounds.
art.
specifically for bonuses for the scalps of Indians.
The last prize was offered in 1814 in the territory of Indiana.
Some exception to the cruel policy of exterminating the Indians was, as mentioned above, Pennsylvania a colony that was founded in 1682 by a rich Quaker, the son of an English admiral, William Penn for his like minded people who were persecuted in England.
Penn sought to maintain friendly relations with the Indians who continued to live in the colony.
However, when the wars between the English and French colonies began (1744-1748 and 1755-1763), the Indians who had formed an alliance with the French became involved in the war and were forced out of Pennsylvania.
In American historiography the colonization of America most often appears as if the Europeans colonized "vacant land", i.e. the territories, not actually populated индейцами1.
In fact, North America, and the Eastern part in particular was, in conditions of economic activity of the Indians, quite densely populated (in the XVI century on the territory of the present United States was inhabited by about 1 million Indians).
The Indians, who were engaged in hunting and slash and burn agriculture, needed large land spaces.
By driving the Indians off the land, "buying" land plots 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" (Indian name Metacom), 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 almost completely exterminated.
The relations of the colonists with the local 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 how to grow corn from captured Indians.
The Indians set fire to the forest and planted corn mixed with beans between the charred trunks, fertilizing the soil with ash.
They carefully tended the crops, hoed the sprouted corn and destroyed weeds.
Indian corn saved the colonists from starvation.
The inhabitants of New Plymouth were no less indebted to the Indians.
After spending the first difficult winter, during which half of the settlers died, in the spring of 1621 they cleared the fields left by the Indians and sowed 5 acres of English wheat and peas as an experiment, and 20 acres — under the leadership of one Indian — corn.
Wheat did not take birth, but corn sprang up, and since then, throughout the colonial period, it has been the main agricultural crop in New England.
Later, the colonists achieved good wheat harvests, but it did not displace corn.
Like the Indians, the English colonists stewed meat with grain and vegetables, fried corn kernels, and ground the grain into flour using wooden Indian knives.
_stulami.
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 of corn dishes: pone (corn tortilla), homini (hominy), maga (porridge made of corn flour), hasti pudding ("improvised" flour custard pudding), hald korn (shelled corn), sakkotash (a dish made of corn, beans and pork)2.
In addition to corn, European colonists borrowed from the Indians the culture of potatoes, groundnuts, pumpkins, zucchini, tomatoes, some varieties of cotton and beans.
Many of these plants were exported by Europeans from Central and South America in the XVII century.
to Europe, and then get to North America.
This was the case, for example, with tobacco.
The Spaniards, the first Europeans to adopt the custom of smoking tobacco from the Indians, appropriated the monopoly of its sale.
The colonists of Virginia, as soon as the problem of food was solved, began to experiment with local varieties of tobacco.
But since they were not very good, they sowed all the fertile lands in the colony free from corn and other cereals with tobacco from the island of Trinidad.
In 1618, Virginia sent tobacco to England for 20 thousand pounds, in 1629 — for 500 thousand pounds.
Tobacco in Virginia during these years served as a means of exchange: taxes and debts were paid with tobacco, the first thirty suitors of the colony paid for brides brought from Europe in the same "currency".
Three groups of English colonies
But the nature of production and the social structure of the English colonies can be divided into three groups.
Plantation slavery developed in the southern colonies (Virginia, Maryland, North and South Carolina, Georgia).
There were large plantations that belonged to the 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 slave labor of Negroes and the labor of" bonded servants " has become very widespread here.
As you know, the first Negro slaves were brought to Virginia in 1619; in 1683 there were already 3 thousand slaves and 12 thousand slaves.
"bonded servants"1.
After the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), the English government received a monopoly on the slave trade.
Since that time, the number of Negro slaves in the southern colonies has been increasing more and more.
Before the Revolutionary War, there were twice as many blacks in South Carolina 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 of Independence — about 500 thousand negro slaves.2 The southerners specialized in the cultivation of rice, wheat, indigo and, especially in the early years of colonization, tobacco.
Cotton was also known, but its production before the invention of the cotton gin (1793) played almost no role.
Tenants who rented land on the basis of sharecropping, mining or for money settled next to the planter's extensive lands.
Plantation farming required extensive land, and the seizure of new land was proceeding at an accelerated pace.
In the northern colonies, united in 1642, in the year of the outbreak of the English Civil War, in one colony — New England (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut), Puritan colonists prevailed.
The New England colonies located along the rivers and near the bays remained isolated from each other for a long time.
The settlement went along the rivers connecting the coast with the interior of the continent.
Zahv more and more large territories were being developed.
The colonists settled in small settlements organized on a communal basis, initially with periodic redistribution of arable land, then only with a general pasture.
In the northern colonies, small scale farming land ownership was formed, and slavery did not spread.
Shipbuilding, fish and timber trade were of great importance.
Maritime trade and industry developed, and the industrial bourgeoisie grew, interested in the freedom of trade restricted 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, had vegetable gardens.
In the middle colonies (New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania), a farm that produced grain crops or specialized in raising livestock developed on fertile lands.
In New York and New Jersey, large scale land ownership was more widespread than in others, and the owners of the land leased it out in sections.
In these colonies, 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 have long coexisted in the English colonies: capitalism at the manufacturing stage, closer to the English than, for example, to the Prussian or Russian of the same time; slavery as a way of manufacturing capitalism until the XIX century, and then (before the war of the North with the South) — in the form of plantation slavery in capitalist society; feudal relations in the form of remnants; patriarchal way of life in the form of small scale farming (in the mountainous western regions of the North and South), among which, although capitalist stratification occurred with less force than among the farmers of the eastern regions.
All the processes of the development of capitalism in North America took place 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, which had been inhabited for a long time, and the western one, the border strip with the Indian territories — the so called "frontier" (frontier).
The border was continuously retreating to the west.
In the XVII century.
it passed along the Alleghany Ridge, in the first quarter of the XIX century.
- already on the Mississippi River.
The inhabitants of the "border" led a life full of dangers and a difficult struggle with nature, which required great courage and cohesion.
These were "bonded servants" who had fled from the plantations, farmers who were oppressed by large landowners, urban people who were fleeing from taxes and religious intolerance of sectarians.
The unauthorized seizure of land (squatting) was a special form of class struggle in the colonies.
The discovery of Oceania.
The first voyages.
French and English expeditions of the 60-80s of the XVIII century
Papuans of New Guinea: natural conditions, history of discovery and colonization
History of the written language of the peoples of North Africa
The Colonial Partition of North Africa
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