Chapter in Perspective

The utopian hopes that had inspired some 16th-century English promoters of colonization – Gilbert, Raleigh, and Hakluyt – faltered and quickly failed during the first century of English settlement. This failure was most starkly evident in the southern colonies; that is, in the Chesapeake, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean. Instead of becoming havens for the English poor and unemployed or models of interracial harmony, the southern colonies in the 1600s were weakened by disease, wracked by recurring conflicts with native Americans, and disrupted by the exploitation of poor whites and blacks alike by the masters of tobacco, sugar, and rice plantations. Many of the tragedies of Spanish colonization and England's conquest of Ireland were repeated in the British Caribbean and southern mainland.