English Revolution In The Colonies
At the beginning of the English Revolution (1642–1660), fifty thousand Englishmen inhabited some twenty colonies in the Americas. Most of the colonies were founded in the decade prior to the English Civil War with the oldest existing being the Colony of Virginia (1607). The vast majority of the adult population were first generation settlers and thousands returned to the British Isles to fight or involve themselves in the politics of the Commonwealth of England (1649–1660).
Six colonies recognized Charles II after the regicide in 1649: Antigua, Barbados, Bermuda, Virginia, Maryland, and Newfoundland. The Parliamentarians were busy subduing Royalists in Scotland, Ireland, the Isles of Scilly, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands but on 3 October 1650, the Rump Parliament restricted trade to Antigua, Barbados, Bermuda, and Virginia and assembled a fleet to take control of them. By 1652, all were brought into line by the Commonwealth.
The new government introduced mercantilism with the first of the Navigation Acts in 1651. Soon the colonies became embroiled First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654) and the Anglo-Spanish War (1654–1660). By the English Restoration, new colonies were added and the population quadrupled to over two hundred thousand due to exiles, refugees, prisoners, and the Atlantic slave trade. In all the colonies, which later became part of the United States, population growth throughout this period was vigorous, growing from a population of about 25,000 in 1640 to around 75,000 in 1660. The colonies also became more ethnically and religiously diverse. Another effect was the establishment of colonial assemblies in most of the colonies.
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“He that would the daughter win
Must with the mother first begin.”
—17th-century English proverb, collected in J. Ray, English Proverbs (1670)
“If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)
“All Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)