The Greatest Ocean of All April 23, 2025
Posted by Dr. Robert Owens in Uncategorized.Tags: europe, History, Politics, spain, travel
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While the British and the French battled for hegemony in the woods of eastern America, another series of adventures and struggles shaped America along its Pacific coast.
Once again, it was more disinformation than information which caused some things to happen. The Spanish, ever wary of any threat to the jewel of their empire, Mexico heard rumors of Russian settlers coming down the West coast and of British fur traders tramping out of the wilds and they immediately thought of encirclement.
Russia had moved as Far East across the vastness of Asia as the western European powers had moved west across the Atlantic. They had built the largest empire in the world by conquering one tribe after another until they stood on the shores of the north Pacific. Then they took the jump across the short Bering Sea and landed in Alaska beginning their own colonization efforts.
It was a cold and barren land with few inhabitants but with a wealth of furs and fish. They soon established forts and trading posts and began to claim a large section of the northwest corner of the North American continent. The Russians came primarily seeking furs and built an empire in the north by exploiting the land and brutalizing the inhabitants. The history of Russian America was one of slow growth and slower assimilation. The Russians never seemed to befriend the Indians as the French had done, evangelize them like the Spanish or move them out of the way like the British; they merely seemed to impoverish and terrorize them.
North to California
It was in response to the Russian boasts that they would move down the West coast to California that the Spanish after centuries of neglect finally began to colonize Alta California in earnest. They had claimed the area since the fifteenth century, and they had outposts there almost as long but it was only in the eighteenth century that they began to apply the power needed to make their far-flung claims a reality.
The size and diversity of California is a wonder to behold. It stretches more than eleven hundred miles and includes more than a hundred million acres. Its climate ranges from cool and foggy to alpine mountains to broiling desert to the lowest spot on earth. And before it was forever changed by the arrival of Europeans it had the greatest cultural diversity of any place in the Americas. Hundreds of distinct language groups and cultures fit into every niche in this vast landscape.
Into this world Spain intruded and proceeded to shape the land and the people to fit their view of what a colony should look like. The land was parceled out to grand lords who kept slaves and built dynasties. The mission system was set up and soon the wild diversity of the Indians was dissolving into the Hispanic sameness found throughout the Spanish Empire.
The Last Place on Earth
The Pacific Ocean was the last place on earth that the Europeans took as their own. It took many years of sailing this broad expanse to find all the many islands that had long been settled but had also long been isolated, including the continent of Australia and New Zealand. The French and the British were once again rivals as they sent expedition after expedition to find and exploit new lands. The most famous Pacific explorer was Captain Cook who would eventually give his life in his quest to find and explore these vast expanses of ocean.
The addition of the Europeans in the Pacific basin had the same effect it had in North America, cultures had to adapt to new realities and economies changed as new sources and new technologies were introduced. The eighteenth century saw Europeans reaching the most isolated islands (Hawaii) and finally learning that there was no Northwest Passage through the North American continent.
The great centuries of discovery came to a close and the world which had been circumnavigated in the fifteenth century was by the eighteenth century being circled on a regular basis by European ships establishing and maintaining European Empires. And just as the cultures of the indigenous peoples encountered along the way had changed, so too the cultures of Europe had been indelibly changed by their contact with the rest of the world. The great Columbian Exchange had brought new foods to Europe which remain to this day mainstays of the population to this day. The gold and silver of the Americas changed the balance of power and fueled wars on land and on the seas for generations.
The colonies were planted by the Europeans, they grew until they were ready to stand on their own, then they did, from sea to shining sea.
The Middle Colonies March 5, 2025
Posted by Dr. Robert Owens in Uncategorized.Tags: canada, europe, History, Religion, travel
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Between the Chesapeake Colonies and New England there existed an expanse of coast and its associated hinterlands that would soon join the English holdings and become known collectively as the Middle Colonies. They had a better climate than New England and healthier than the Chesapeake region. They proved extremely well suited for growing grains and raising cattle. They soon boasted a large and growing population.
Initially however this population wasn’t made up of the English. They ignored the area for the first part of the Seventeenth Century finding the New England venture and the Chesapeake area enough to keep them busy. In the interim the Dutch established a flourishing New Netherland along the Hudson River and the Swedes built their New Sweden along the Delaware. The English weren’t happy about this incursion in an area they considered their own, but they did not directly confront either rival immediately for two reasons. One, they were not strong enough and two; both of their new world rivals were their Old-World friends. Both Sweden and the Netherlands were Protestant powers, and both were valuable allies in the religious wars and power diplomacy of the times.
In the latter half of the Seventeenth Century things changed. For one thing the Dutch had swallowed New Sweden and then the Dutch, who were now England’s main commercial rival in Europe and world-wide were swallowed in turn by the expanding English New Netherlands being renamed, New York in 1664.
Unlike the Spanish, French and Dutch the English crown exerted little direct power over their colonies. Following the tenants of Mercantilism to their logical conclusions, they instead sought commercial benefit through taxation and the belief that every raw material such as wood or tar that they could produce at home or in a colony made them stronger. Also, they did not fund the colonies out of the royal treasury as the other European colonizing powers did. Instead, the cash-strapped English relied upon private enterprise and entrepreneurship leading to what many think is the greatest contribution of the British Empire to economics, the limited liability corporation. This left much latitude and personal individuality to the separate colonies and also had a great influence on the future development of the United States.
Besides the commercial tradition of free enterprise this situation also had a profound impact on the political developments in the English colonies. All except New England were controlled by absentee proprietors who were thousands of miles away and often extremely short of cash. The colonists as they became firmly established and self-sufficient, following in a long line of English tradition, began to flex their economic muscle and the power of the purse to increase their political leverage. They wrested concession from the proprietors in the form of autonomous assemblies with real power to shape local events. They also sought control of courts and customs. In some cases, they even staged coups such as in Carolina declaring pseudo independence or as in Georgia where they appealed to the crown for protection from the leadership guidelines or strictures of the absentee proprietors.
A special case was New England. As stated earlier, the proprietors were wealthy Puritans who formed the Massachusetts Bay Company which actually relocated to the colonies. Having a royal charter themselves and having the principles of the company as actual participating members of the colony made them in everything but name independent and they acted as if they were in fact independent, asking no leave and taking every privilege. They developed republican forms such as their famous town meetings and looked to no one besides themselves and God for all they wanted, needed, or desired.
Gradually as the proprietors found themselves in financial problems they turned to the crown for a bail-out. The price of this help always came with strings and eventually the crown gained not only control but the title of colony after colony. The Puritans even began to fear that the royal fist was next going to aim at them. But instead, the crown was diverted by the rich prize which lay just to the south of the semi-independent New England. In 1664 a mighty fleet of English warships descended upon the future port and near perfect harbor of New Amsterdam ascending the Hudson and conquering New Netherland.
The Dutch had built an American empire that was thriving by the time it was appropriated by the English. It was anchored by the growing community of New Amsterdam located at the mouth of the Hudson River. This city was founded initially to provide a secure transport hub for the furs coming down river from Fort Orange and the extensive and valuable trade with the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederation. As time moved, on the Dutch expanded their presence building farms along the river to supply their colonists with food. These farms soon had a surplus that became a valuable export being used mainly to feed other Dutch colonists in the West Indies. The Dutch colony was prosperous and growing when it was suddenly plucked like ripe fruit by the English. It was however a small colony on the fringe of a vast worldwide empire and the overextended Dutch had to pick their battles carefully, so they did not attempt to retake the colony.
A small nation of only 1.5 million the Dutch had risen in a relatively short time from being a province of Spain to the greatest commercial empire in the world boasting the greatest navy. While the religious wars wracked Europe and while the other European powers were all united to counterbalance the overwhelming preponderance of Spain little Netherlands was safe behind its dykes and secure in the enjoyment of their wealth. However, as the religious wars subsided and as they themselves impoverished the Spaniards by stealing their treasure and conquering their outposts others began to look at the growing power of this tiny nation as a slight against them. Soon England on the high seas and France on land began to seek ways to challenge the Dutch. In the Americas this translated into the English conquest of New Netherlands.
This conquest had an ulterior motive. As a matter of fact, when the English fleet sailed there was speculation that it was headed for Boston to assert royal control over the semi-independent New England. Although the blow fell on the Dutch instead of the Puritans the lesson was not lost. The crown intended to take a more active role and the establishment of a royal colony on their southern border let the Puritans know that from then on, the representatives of the king would not be far away.
The Covenant Chain
Once the English supplanted the Dutch as the dominant European power and the traders at Fort Orange (renamed Albany) they took the place of the Dutch in their alliance with the Five Nation Iroquois Confederation. The two allies stood together against the French and swore to help each other against all other enemies. The Five Nations claimed to have conquered the western regions as far south as Ohio and as far west as the furthest reaches of the Great Lakes. These claims were more hyperbole than reality, but the English acknowledged them as true and by extension claimed that since they asserted their suzerainty over the Five Nation by extension, they said they held title to all these far-flung territories. This was a claim the French bitterly refused to acknowledge basing their competing claims on their far-ranging exploration and the many relationships they had established with the tribes who controlled the territories.
The English not only traded with the Five Nations and used their boasts to expand their claims they also used them as enforcers regarding the other smaller Indian nations in the area. This alliance came to be the lynch pin of English American diplomacy regarding the relations with the Native Americans North of the Chesapeake Colonies. It was the source and the summit of power. The guns given to the Iroquois became the tip of the English lance towards any tribe that dared try to stand against them.
New Jersey
The House of Stuart had ambitions of becoming absolute monarchs on the model of the French. But they were held back by English tradition and a lack of money. They did not have the vast estates and the power to tax by decree that the French monarch had. Instead, they had to wheel and deal with an often intractable and always jealous parliament. One place they looked to increase their riches which would increase their power was the colonies. They wanted more royal control so they could tax the continually growing commerce. After the royal conquest of New York, it appeared that they were finally on their way to establishing direct royal control but then they took a divergent course which added to the diversity of the American colonies instead of to the size of the royal treasury.
Unable to keep a strategy headed in the right direction and almost immediately after seizing New York the King’s brother the Duke of York granted a charter to two wealthy patrons for political consideration. This grant was for all the land between the Hudson and the Delaware rivers as a separate colony called New Jersey. The reduction of royal control was further diluted when these two absentee proprietors sold off their rights to two separate groups. One was headed by a Scotsman and the other group was headed by Quakers. These two groups promptly divided the colony into East and West New Jersey. The Scotts took East Jersey, and the Quakers took West Jersey.
This situation lasted until 1702 when the crown reunited the two Jerseys into the royal colony of New Jersey. The fact that the proprietors retained legal title to the land led to many disputes in East Jersey due to the exorbitant rents and demands made upon the rent holders. This led to riots and to a depressed rate of economic growth which contributed to the fact that New Jersey lagged behind its neighbors both to the North and the South for generations in development and wealth.
Pennsylvania
William Penn was a rich gentleman descended from a famous and well-connected admiral. He was also a creditor of the king. The always cashed strapped Stuart King James I settled a debt with Penn by granting him 45,000 square miles of land beyond the Delaware River. This was augmented by grants from the Duke of York. Penn, a rich and grand living Quaker founded a colony where religious tolerance and economic opportunity soon established a thriving colony filled with industrious people. The Quakers had withstood persecution in England because they refused to take part in or support the established church. Penn himself was jailed on several occasions as an unlicensed preacher. Therefore, there was a ready impetus for them to immigrate to Pennsylvania. Like the Puritans of New England many of the settlers in Pennsylvania were families with their own resources. They were tradesmen and merchants, farmers and artisans. This type of population adapted well, worked hard and soon established growing communities ever deeper into the woods, always moving west.
William Penn was a shrewd and good administrator of his colony. He treated the Indians with respect and acknowledged them as the rightful owners of the land. He did not trick them or appropriate their land he purchased it and he didn’t allow anyone to settle on any land unless he first purchased it from the Indians. This led to a more peaceful occupation of the land than in any other colony.
The harmony of the colony was disrupted by sectional rivalries which plague the commonwealth to this day. The counties to the east are pitted against the counties to the west each always striving for their own advantage. In colonial times this could deal with the perceived need for fortifications or roads, Indian relations or economic developments. The profitable colony could not keep pace with the lavish lifestyle of its proprietor and in 1707 William Penn found himself sentenced to an English debtor prison even though he personally owned a colony bigger than some European countries.
Dr. Robert Owens Chronicles the History of the Future 