ietary colonies, under individual entrepreneurs, began with Maryland, founded in 1634 under the Catholic direction of Cecilius and Leonard Calvert. Also proprietary was Pennsylvania, which originally included Delaware, founded by the Quaker William Penn in 1682. Maryland and Pennsylvania, except for a brief royal interlude in Maryland, continued under Calvert and Penn heirs until the American Revolution; all other colonies except Connecticut and Rhode Island ultimately had royal governments. The Carolinas, after abortive attempts at colonization, were effectively founded in 1670 and became first proprietary and, later, royal colonies. Georgia, last of the 13, began in 1732, partly as a philanthropic enterprise headed by James Oglethorpe to furnish a rehabilitation home for debtors and other underprivileged Englishmen. All the mainland colonies eventually had representative assemblies, chosen by the propertied classes, to aid and often handicap their English governors.

The original settlers, predominantly English, were later supplemented by French Huguenots, Germans, and Scots-Irish, especially in western New York, Pennsylvania, and the southern colonies. New York, acquired from the United Provinces of the Netherlands and including New Jersey, continued to have some Dutch flavour long after the Dutch had become a small minority. By the French and Indian War (1754–63, the American portion of the Seven Years’ War), the total population of the mainland colonies was estimated as 1,296,000 whites and 300,000 blacks, enormously in excess of the 55,000 whites inhabiting French Canada.

The only bond of union among the British colonies was their allegiance to the king, and in the wars with France (c. 1689–1763) it proved hard to unite them against the common enemy. All the colonies were agricultural, with New England being a region of small farms, the Middle Atlantic colonies having a larger scaled and more diversified farming, and the southern ones tending to plantations on which tobacco, rice, and indigo were raised by slaves (although slavery was legal throughout all the colonies). There was much colonial shipping, especially from New England, whose merchants and seamen traded with England, Africa, and the West Indies; Massachusetts shipbuilders had built more than 700 ships by 1675. By 1763 several towns had grown into cities, including Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston, South Carolina.

Mercantilism