he northern Atlantic powers, for understandable reasons, acquired no permanent overseas possessions before 1600. The United Provinces of the Netherlands spent the final decades of the 16th century winning independence from Spain; France had constant European involvements and wars of religion; England, matrimonially allied with Spain as late as 1558, was undergoing its Protestant Reformation and long was unwilling to challenge predominant Spain openly in any manner.

The English

There is evidence that Bristol seamen reached Newfoundland before 1497, but John Cabot’s Atlantic crossing in that year is the first recorded English exploration. After the death of Henry VII in 1509, England lost interest in discovery and did not resume it until 1553 and the formation of the Muscovy Company, which tried to find a Northeast Passage to Asia, discovered the island of Novaya Zemlya, and opened a small trade with Russia. The English also searched for a Northwest Passage, and Martin Frobisher sailed to Greenland, Baffin Island, and the adjacent mainland.

England’s American colonies

The English West Indies for many years exceeded North America in economic importance. The Lesser Antilles, earlier passed over by Spain in favour of the larger islands, lay open to any colonizer, though their ferocious Carib inhabitants sometimes gave trouble. The Leeward Islands of Antigua, St. Kitts, Nevis, and Barbados, as well as the Bermudas, were settled by Englishmen between 1609 and 1632. Barbados, at first the most important, owed its prosperity to the introduction of sugar culture about 1637. The size of landholdings increased in all the islands, and the white populations accordingly diminished as slavery came to furnish most of the raw labour. When an expedition sent by Oliver Cromwell took Spanish Jamaica in 1655, that island became the English West Indian centre. Settlement of Belize (later British Honduras) by buccaneers and log cutters began in 1636, although more than a century elapsed before Spain acknowledged that the English indeed had the right to be there.

The English islanders, to the envy of their Dutch and French neighbours, enjoyed such constitutional privileges as the right to elect semipopular assemblies. Barbados once hoped to have two representatives in Parliament, and some Barbadians, during the English (Glorious) Revolution (1688–89), thought of making their island an independent state, but nothing came of this.

The original English mainland colonies—Virginia (founded 1607), Plymouth (1620), and Massachusetts Bay (1630)—were founded by joint-stock companies. The later New England settlements—New Hampshire, New Haven, Connecticut, and Rhode Island—began as offshoots of Massachusetts, which acquired jurisdiction over the Maine territory. The New England colonies were first peopled partly by religious dissenters, but except for the separatist Plymouth Pilgrims they did not formally secede from the Church of England for the time being.