As the 17th<\/sup> century progressed, the map of the United States was becoming more and more complete as people from all over Europe came to the New World to settle the land. Out of all these countries, England emerged as the dominant colonizing force. Starting with the colonization of Roanoke in 1585, the English gradually took control of the majority of the eastern United States by the end of the 17th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n Chapter 7 and 11 of Alan Taylor\u2019s American Colonies<\/i> discusses the English colonization of Chesapeake Bay, the Carolinas and Georgia. The chapters almost read like a coming-of-age story for English settlers, who finally learned how to effectively and efficiently settle American land. The ultimate testament to this is how Taylor discusses the settlement of Georgia, the final colony discovered by the English. He uses three pages at the end of discussing the settlement of the Carolinas, not even giving the colony its own chapter. This is due to the fact that colonization there was significantly less arduous than at other locations, where there was no major quarrel with the local Indians or disastrous experiments in running the local economy. Taylor describes James Oglethrope and the Georgia Trustees as \u201cpowerful and distant elites (242)\u201d and even \u201cdictatorial (242)\u201d in their approach to successful management. Initially after reading the chapter I felt unsatisfied with Taylor\u2019s overview of Georgia\u2019s founding, but when Georgia students in the class spoke of how dry the history of their own state was, I felt fulfilled.<\/p>\n In reading Taylor\u2019s work, it is interesting to see how each colony makes use of its unique environment to create an agricultural-based economy, and the Carolinas were no different. As a Canadian and being inexperienced with American history, while I was aware of the Virginia tobacco plantations, I was unaware of the significance that rice played in the economy of the Carolinas. Taylor writes how rice \u201cthrived in the wet lowlands of Carolina (237)\u201d and that annual exports reached 43 million pounds in 1740, \u201ccomprising over 60% of the total exports from Carolina (237).\u201d While their economy was dependent on a different resource than other colonies, the means by which the Carolinians exploited the available rice was through the same method of other settlements: slavery. As echoed in the blog posts made by JANEWTOWN and ROMANGONE, and in Taylor\u2019s own words, the treatment of slaves in Carolina was among the worst on the entire continent. \u201cDesperate to suppress the rebellion (240),\u201d Taylor writes, the Carolinians clearly took no chances with their slaves.<\/p>\n One aspects of the reading on Chesapeake Bay that stuck with me was Taylor\u2019s description of the social hierarchy that mirrored the traditional English model of king, provincial government, court and household. For a group of settlers that were desperate to escape from the overpopulation and underemployed English cities, they still retained many of the same elements of society they left with.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As the 17th century progressed, the map of the United States was becoming more and more complete as people from all over Europe came to the New World to settle the land. Out of all these countries, England emerged as the dominant colonizing force. Starting with the colonization of Roanoke in 1585, the English gradually … <\/p>\n