Originally, the thirteen colonies were like thirteen separate sovereign entities. Broadly speaking, New England states concentrated on trade and commerce, and southern cities on agricultural development and plantation slave labor. The Mid-Atlantic states stood somewhere in between, and the frontier was anyone's guess--it was a wild, untamed place dotted with French trading posts and log cabins. Native peoples still lived on the East Coast, and terrible violence was possible--see, for example, the scalping of Anne Hutchinson and her children.
Over the course of the 1600s, Great Britain sort of %26quot;neglected%26quot; her colonies, letting them grow independently and granting them a great deal of popular sovereignty. Taxing the colonists was very difficult--they complained that because they were not represented in the British government, they should not have to be taxed. American cities grew in size and power, and Northern merchants and southern plantation owners began to become extremely wealthy and powerful.
The struggles went under the radar for a while until the French and Indian War made in very expensive for Britain to maintain the colonies, and the taxes got high and serious. By the 1750s, tensions were getting more intense, and the colonists were starting to get a sense of unity against British oppression--a young nation was being born.What are the key ways in which colonial America changed between its founding and the mid 1700s?Much had changed between the founding of the individual colonies and the beginning of the revolutionary period (1763). First, the early settlements of huts grew into the colonial anchor cities of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, where their original inhabitants of Puritans, Dutch traders and Quaker dissenters were quickly overrun by an influx of settlers mainly from the British isles, Germany and Central Europe. In the process, the early colonial governments, which varied from colonial charters with joint-stock companies to proprietary land grants, developed independent and functional assemblies which facilitated, and often openly challenged, the everyday function of the British colonial system.
The biggest change, in my opinion, occurred in the 1740's. The Great Awakening was a religious revival movement that stirred common people to belief in God and to question royal authority and colonial systems. It created huge breaks in the predominant denominations of the period (Congregationalists, Anglicans, Presbyterians) that opened the way to other sects such as the Baptists, the Methodists and others.
