ABSTRACT
The North American colonies were home to men and women from a myriad of different cultures and backgrounds that faced considerable environmental challenges to their continued existence. Looking back from the twenty-first century, amidst the rampant advance of globalisation, it is difficult to comprehend the unique situation of cultural exchange that was experienced by the colonists. Stirring a cocktail of different races, language, custom and religions, ‘the New World produced a kaleidoscope of human encounters’.1 The rich human tapestry of the colonists’ ambitions and motivations provided for significant diversity in the British colonies which would eventually become the United States of America. This chapter provides a survey of these colonies, their racially varied inhabitants, and the patterns of development they followed – patterns which had profound consequences for the future of America. Despite the obvious differences between the societies of the eastern seaboard, there was a tentative sense of collective separateness from Britain which eventually led to independence from the mother country. Pointers towards how this impulse emerged from the great diversity of the colonial experience will also be considered. It is important to recognise that study of the colonies has wrestled with
the issue of regionalism. How to divide up the thirteen colonies into distinct geographical areas has provoked debate. As Michael Zuckerman has argued, ‘if men of the eighteenth century could not concur on the regional alignments that characterised the country, historians and geographers who have the help of hindsight have done no better’.2 Scholarly quarrels over how many regions to subdivide the colonies into have abounded with some choosing four, some preferring five and some settling for a simple division of North and South. By focussing on the regional centres of New England, the mid-Atlantic, Chesapeake Bay and the lower South my intention is to show important differences in the shape of colonial society which had an impact on the development of an embryonic nation.
