Colonization of English America

• Main Author: Burnard, Trevor
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University Press 2010
• Subjects: Newfoundland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199730414-0013

England was a latecomer in the colonization of the Americas. It drew heavily on the example of Spain for its early colonization efforts in North America and the West Indies. It also drew on its experience in subduing the inhabitants of the Celtic peripheries of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland in shaping relations with Native Americans. The advent of Atlantic history has been decisive in considering 17th-century colonization in comparative context. More effort is deployed now than previously to see English settlement as an encounter with peoples of an Old World rather than as a discovery of a New World by Englishmen and Englishwomen. English America refers to those areas settled by the English on the eastern seaboard of mainland North America (extending from Newfoundland in the north to the Carolinas in the south) and in the West Indies (including islands in the Lesser Antilles, such as Barbados and the Leeward Islands, and Jamaica in the Greater Antilles).