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Seeds of Rebellion in AmericaColonies Asked to Finance European WarsDuring the 1600s European countries were warring for control of America. Colonial settlements saw their profits demanded by European governments to finance these wars.
The various settlements in America, throughout the 1600s and into the early 1700s, were like game pieces in a growing game of a Royal European board game. The players were notably the nobility of England and Spain and, for a time, Sweden, Holland and France. The name of the game was The Mercantile System, including the growing fur trade. Each individual country that had established settlements in the New World wanted their share of the wealth that was being produced in America. They wanted their share and coveted the share of other foreign-based New World settlements. Each strove to be the dominant power in America. Such greedy gluttony led to war amongst the various European countries involved. Each power fought to subdue the other, resulting in the weakening of the individual European governments and an inability to press its colonial efforts further. Small though England was, in time she began to forge ahead in that great colonial game, checking Spain's New World progress. England was even making inroads southward into Hispanic America, which is to say much due to the highly restrictive trade system Spain adhered too. It was a system that basically said that those under the rule of Spain would not trade with any other country's colonial enterprise. As strict as Spanish rule was in the New World, even its leaders found it difficult to halt its New World subjects from being influenced by new ideas that filtered into the Spanish colonies. As the European rulers continued their warring with each other expenses mounted at home. More and more these fractious rulers demanded financing from their various American colonies. Hard working colonials, from all nations, were struggling to survive. The prospect of financing European wars by handing over their profits, and more, to what was becoming to feel like foreign powers gave them their own brand of agitation. It also began to unite these people from various European nations who had begun to lump themselves, in thought if not yet in reality, under one often rebellious name-Americans. Source: Athearn, Robert G. The New World: American Heritage New Illustrated History of the United States, Volume 1. Dell Publishing Co., Inc., New York, 1963. Graphics provided by: Brodebund© ClickArt 750,000 500 Redwood Blvd Novato, CA 94947
The copyright of the article Seeds of Rebellion in America in American History is owned by Mary Trotter Kion. Permission to republish Seeds of Rebellion in America in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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