ABSTRACT
The Atlantic seaboard, where English colonization in North America began, was home to scores of indigenous nations in which land was held in common and women exercised significant political influence. Europeans had engaged in comparable ventures in the Middle East, known as the Crusades, where they contended with non-Christians over access to sacred sites and promoted European commerce. Some Spanish colonizers, such as Bartolome de las Casas, were appalled by their countrymen’s practices and condemned their brutal treatment of Native Americans. By the middle of that century, Spanish colonizers had secured control of the Americas’ principal population centers outside of Brazil, sometimes by killing thousands of Indians. Decimation of the indigenous peoples was not unwelcome to English colonizers, who showed little concern to convert Native Americans to Christianity, although their charters imposed that commitment. French settlements in North America were initially limited to trading posts along the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, beginning with Quebec in 1608.
