The end of the fifteenth century marked the beginning of modern America, as explorers from Europe encountered the inhabitants of the Americas and Africa. Spurred by crises in their own societies, European rulers, adventurers, and merchants commenced a frenetic search for new sources of wealth, and Christian rulers sent missionaries to convert the Native peoples their countrymen encountered.  They created a vast new system of expropriation and trade across the Atlantic, linking together and dramatically transforming Africa, the Americas, and Europe itself. The quest for riches, and the accompanying search for souls to convert to Christianity, prompted both creativity and destruction.

The settlement and growth of European societies in the Americas was part of a broader process of empire building. The colonies made possible a massive accumulation of wealth for the elites of Europe and for some of the colonists themselves. It underlay in both North America and Europe the development of capitalism—a new economic system based on private ownership and free trade that redefined social classes and fostered distinctive political ideologies and societal values. Many of the peoples who were caught up in the overseas expansion of European empires, however, saw their own worlds crumble as a result of disease, death, and intrusion. Colonists violently seized land from the Native inhabitants of the Americas and forcibly enslaved millions of Africans to provide labor for their New World settlements. Even the white people who crewed trading vessels and slave ships or labored in the fields and towns of the New World faced hardship, danger, and premature death.

Spain, France, Holland, and England all staked claims in North America as they sought to expand their Atlantic-based empires, establishing trading ports, missions, plantations, and settlements in varying stages of permanence. From the mid-seventeenth century onward, however, England’s Chesapeake Bay and New England colonies attracted the most settlers, achieved the fastest population growth, and destroyed or disrupted Native American groups that stood in the way of their expanding settlements. The English also settled in the Carolinas, captured land claimed by the Dutch, and continued their expansion into the mid-Atlantic region, from New York to Pennsylvania. During the eighteenth century, the success of their colonies helped Britain achieve a dominant position over France and Spain in North America.

Colonies developed according to the varied objectives of their investors and settlers. The South proved attractive to those who sought a profit from the land itself; its favorable soils and climate fostered the emergence of plantation agriculture sustained by the labor first of indentured servants and then of enslaved Africans. Indentured servants, enslaved workers, and wage workers toiled in the North as well, but the aims of northern colonists—many seeking religious ideals and independent land ownership unattainable in Britain—led to the creation of smaller-scale farming and craft economies based primarily on family labor. Distinct labor systems—free and unfree—increasingly defined the ways of life of the two regions.

All the American colonies, however, faced political, economic, religious, and racial conflicts. Colonists’ expansion meant increasing conflict with Native nations whose land they sought, periodically inciting full-scale wars. Slaveholders struggled with enslaved Africans, who proved unwilling laborers. Colonists also struggled with each other over who would own the land, who would govern society, and how to conduct religious life. For the many less wealthy European settlers in America, their own aspirations for economic independence and liberty from oppression led them to clash with wealthier colonists who sought to exploit or control them. Just as the enslaved people tried to resist their enslavement, ordinary colonists adopted methods of protest and political organization to assert what they saw as their natural rights. British settlers and their descendants especially, influenced by the radical ideologies of the English Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century, claimed political rights as “freeborn Englishmen” and nurtured a belief in social equality.

By the 1760s, internal conflicts had merged with the larger issue of the colonies’ continuing relationship with their “mother country.” Colonial activists took steps to secure their rights as subjects of the British empire. When their protests led to war with Britain in the 1770s, they found themselves pursuing complete independence from British rule. A broad coalition of Americans—rich, middling, and poor; northern and southern; men and women—supported independence and finally secured it in 1783, achieving the first successful New World colonial revolution.

People of the newly independent United States sought to establish a system of government based on republican principles, avoiding the formal social inequalities and hierarchies of European societies. However, particularly when determining what shape their national government would take, Americans disagreed as to who was best fitted to govern in a postrevolutionary society. Advocates of both elite and popular rule disputed this issue well into the nineteenth century. What was made clear, however, was that political rights would extend only to certain Americans. Women, enslaved African Americanss, and even many free men of color found themselves partly or wholly excluded from the benefits of citizenship in the new republic.

Throughout the colonial and revolutionary periods, then, a tension existed in America between those with full access to economic and political rights and those who had those rights denied them. This tension and the aspirations of laboring Americans shaped America’s early history and defined its emergence as an independent nation. Famous political leaders did not always control events. They were constantly challenged, and events themselves profoundly influenced, by the aspirations and experiences of the ordinary men and women of all cultures who built America.

Atlantic World History