1700. With such a numerical supremacy the English should have overwhelmed their enemies. They did not do so because they failed to learn the value of unity in the face of the enemy.
William Penn introduced a scheme for closer cooperation of the colonies in 1697 but this was met by great political inertia on both sides of the Atlantic. It is true that New Jersey and the Carolinas were subjected to royal control by the early eighteenth century and it was written into the charter granted to Georgia in 1732 that she should revert to the crown after twenty one years in the hands of the trustees but Maryland, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Rhode Island remained as proprietary colonies. The English simply did not learn to cooperate amongst themselves.
West country entrepreneurs worked to keep settlers away from the New England fishing grounds. Virginia and Maryland haggled over boundaries and jurisdictional matters as did Connecticut and New Haven and the New English Confederation denied membership to Rhode Island. There were disputes even within individual colonies themselves, particularly in Maryland, Barbados and the Leeward Islands. There was a proliferation of institutions ranging from vestries in Virginia, county courts in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, the city governments of Philadelphia and New York and the colonial assemblies. Later there were to be religious and ethnic rifts. Many of the old proprietary regions had been adopted from older precedents and could not easily be reconciled with American realities and the heterogenous population.
In conclusion Englishmen had learnt only a limited lesson by 1732. Misconceptions about geography, agriculture, and mineral resources, expectations of exploitation and living conditions had all been modified along with utopian ideas. The Indians continued to be a worry and according to K.O. Kupperman were not underestimated as they had first been. The Dutch, French and Spanish had been only partially beaten by 1732. But by that date there still remained much to be learnt both by individual settlers and the government in England. Overwhelming military success would have to wait for the Seven Years’ War and unity of the colonies was still an issue during the Revolution.
Dr Simon Harding
www.chronosconsulting.com
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