Period 2: Colonial Societies and the Atlantic World, 1607–1754
Three colonial regions
The seventeenth-century English colonies diverged by environment and labor system. Chesapeake colonies (Virginia, Maryland) built tobacco economies on the headright system and indentured servitude; high mortality, dispersed farms, and the House of Burgesses (1619) shaped a plantation society. New England's rocky soil and family migration produced towns, town meetings, and Puritan congregational control; the Mayflower Compact (1620) and 'city upon a hill' rhetoric are frequently tested. The Middle Colonies mixed grain agriculture, ethnic diversity, and religious toleration.
Labor, race, and empire
Bacon's Rebellion (1676) is the pivot: after poor white and Black servants rebelled together, planters increasingly replaced indentured servants with enslaved Africans, and laws gradually defined slavery racially. The Middle Passage and triangular trade connected colonial ports to Atlantic markets. Mercantilism shaped imperial policy through the Navigation Acts, but 'salutary neglect' left enforcement loose until the 1760s. The Great Awakening (1730s–1740s) split congregations and encouraged individual religious judgment; the Enlightenment encouraged natural-rights thinking.
Traps: Pilgrims (Plymouth, 1620) are not Puritans (Massachusetts Bay, 1630). Do not claim slavery was absent in the North or identical everywhere. Do not treat salutary neglect as a law-it was a pattern of lax enforcement.
Worked example: if asked why racial slavery hardened in the Chesapeake after 1670, connect three causes: tobacco's insatiable labor demand, the declining supply of English indentured servants, and elite fear after Bacon's Rebellion. That combination, codified in laws, is the strongest answer.
Rule of thumb: labor system plus demography predicts social order-family towns in New England, plantation slavery in the Chesapeake, and plural commerce in the Middle Colonies.