ABSTRACT
The forces that created in the course of little more than a century centres of an urban civilisation on a nearly empty continent derived from the expansion of world trade in the seventeenth century under English and Dutch leadership. The permanent settlements along the Atlantic seaboard of North America were established at a time when western Europe was beginning to throw off the shackles of a feudal economy; they took root in an era in which joint stock companies were replacing kings and merchant princes as the sponsors of largescale overseas ventures and when the credit system of modern capitalism was supplanting medieval methods of financing. Indeed, without the corporate form of business organisation to supply continuity and the financial backing of numerous shareholders, it is hard to see how such precarious undertakings could have succeeded. The beneficiaries were the English nation as a whole and the families who, in risking the very real perils of the New World, gained livelihoods and, in some cases, fortunes. The fortunes, with few exceptions, sprang from commercial enterprises centring in the young colonial towns.
