NORTH AMERICA: European Colonists

European colonists introduced more diversity in terms of ethnicity, race, and labor systems to North America. French, Dutch, and Spanish colonial possessions in North America were diverse in ethnic and racial groups, but the governments of France, the Netherlands, and Spain did little to stimulate massive European migration. French, Dutch, and Spanish authorities encouraged landownership to rest largely in the hands of the state, the church, other institutions, and large landowners. The English government, however, offered incentives to private groups to engage in large-scale migration of English people to the Americas, mainly the Atlantic coast of North America. For all early European settlers, particularly those of limited means, close community-survival cooperation permeated the entire way of life in the colonies. "Settlers raised houses and barns, plowed fields, and built fences cooperatively and collectively. Mutual-aid events like corn-husking bees, log-rolling bees (to clear land), sewing and quilting bees, apple-paring bees, grain ring (threshing), bull rings (slaughtering), and ship launchings also served as social structures and gatherings that welded together the fabric of the working community of settlers in the same way that similar gatherings did among the Native peoples." Colonists everywhere widely practiced "barter and labor exchanges. . . . Money was scarce and in many areas used only sporadically, making early country stores mostly barter centers. . . . Cooperation, not competition, resounded as the dominant chord across" North America."

In terms of history of work in America, among the colonial powers, the Spaniards and the English made the greatest changes in social relations between Native Americans and the colonists. The Spaniards enacted laws to coerce Native Americans to work for colonial governments, landowners, and the church. Spain issued community land grants to groups of ten or more married settlers to maintain large sections of common lands, ejidos, set aside for the use of the entire community. These ejidos were for communal use for pasturing, watering, wood gathering, and/or hunting. The authorities also issued grants to found new towns with common lands for use by all townspeople. They made land grants to Indian pueblos as a way to confirm such Native Americans' ancient rights to their lands after the Indians recognized the sovereignty of the Spanish Crown.

The English migrated in substantial numbers to their North American colonies largely because of major shifts that occurred in landownership, land use patterns, and labor demands in England. Between 1500 and 1750, England evolved haphazardly from a feudal to a mercantilist and later to a capitalist and industrializing society. England transformed from a moral economy to a market economy of both rural (agricultural) and urban (industrial) capitalism. From the fifteenth century into the eighteenth century in England (as opposed to Great Britain, the union of England, Scotland, and Wales, which was accomplished officially in the early-seventeenth century), many aristocrats, the chief landowners after the royal family, decided to convert their lands from agriculture to the much more lucrative animal husbandry, particularly raising sheep for wool. They transformed much of rural England from a land of yeomen (an old term for freeholders or independent farmers) and peasants to landless rural proletarians. (Another name for wageworkers, proletarians are working people who do not own productive property from which to make a livelihood.) The process of land conversion, the enclosures, deprived many yeomen and peasants of a livelihood. The process did not happen peacefully. Occasionally, rebellions flared in various regions of the nation where the soon to be or already landless men and women destroyed fences, killed livestock, or fought the local militia. The aristocratic landowners, however, held the upper hand. They allowed some rural proletarians to remain on the land as agricultural laborers and forced many others to migrate to cities like London where they scrambled for paid employment, or if they were fortunate, to become apprentices or even self-employed artisans. The authorities showed much displeasure, if not hostility, toward an expanding population of urban, wage-earning working people because the landless lived outside of a moral economy, unbound by traditions and reciprocity of duties and responsibilities. The authorities passed numerous laws regulating wages and mobility of the landless and meted out severe punishment for crimes that most twentieth- and twenty-first-century Americans would regard, at best, as misdemeanors. Many landless laborers willingly took the dangerous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to work even as indentured servants in the colonies. They left behind the England of hunger, high food prices, crime, chronic underemployment and unemployment, subsistence wages, harsh labor laws that regulated wages and that forbid leaving jobs without the employer's permission, and compulsory labor for all able-bodied men, women, youth, and even children. The landless who left England (and other European nations) hoped to find opportunities in the North American colonies.

The English migrated in substantial numbers to their North American colonies also because England's expanding market economy needed colonies. Rulers, aristocrats, land speculators, investors, and bankers planned on England extracting natural resources from and selling its manufactured goods to its colonies. Protestant-dominated England first targeted Catholic Ireland as its first colony. From the sixteenth century into the nineteenth century, Ireland's Catholics, especially those who were peasants, paid a heavy price as colonial subjects living under English rule. Interestingly, most colonists came from Protestant Scotland rather than from England. They settled mainly in Ulster (Northern Ireland) where they treated the Catholic Irish as outsiders in their own country. The English, however, saw more opportunities for colonization projects in North America than in Ireland. They noticed that North America was less populated per square mile than Ireland was and that North America's indigenous population was more vulnerable to military and diplomatic pressures than were the Catholic Irish who entertained the possibility of receiving assistance from England's two largest enemies, Catholic Spain and Catholic France. More importantly, the authorities and others who hoped to get rich quickly saw colonization of North America as a convenient dumping ground for the nation's many tens of thousands of landless, urbanizing proletarians. Many of these landless working people went to North America, especially to the Mid-Atlantic and Chesapeake colonies, where they labored as indentured servants or as prison laborers.

While the Spaniards conquered Native American societies that had large populations and organized central governments, the English conquered Native American societies that had small population densities and that lacked centralized governments. The English wanted to control Native American labor power, but they failed to do what the Spaniards did largely because eastern North American Native Americans had no social and ideological organization to exploit nature beyond subsistence economic activities. So in some cases the English stopped trying to harnass Native American labor power, and in other cases the English worked to develop amiable, working relationships, especially centered on trade, with Native Americans. William Penn and the Quakers who founded Pennsylvania were among the few groups of colonists who cultivated amicable relations with Native American tribes and nations in what is now the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The English authorities also "invited" Europeans of other ethnicities and nationalities to immigrate to the colonies in order to develop North America as rapidly as possible. The English also absorbed the Dutch colony of New York and a Swedish colony in Delaware. The English needed a large supply of cheap labor from a source other than from North America and Europe. They realized the difficulties of enslaving or coercing Native Americans on their own lands and of pushing too many low-income English men and women to the colonies when the authorities needed many of them to serve in the military, labor in workhouses, or to bear the next generation of English people.

With the exception of the Russians, European colonizers brought enslaved Africans of many nationalities to the Americas to perform the arduous labor that created and expanded the economic wealth of the colonies for the colonial powers. In fact, before 1800, more Africans than Europeans came to the Americas. European colonial rulers used the labor of enslaved Africans to open the Americas to economic exploitation and development. Persons financing or taking part in colonial adventures, with few exceptions, exhibited most interest in extracting wealth from natural resources and from the labor of enslaved Africans, coerced or enslaved Native Americans, and indentured Europeans. In the thirteen English-speaking colonies along the Atlantic littoral of North America, rulers, aristocrats, merchants, and other affluent persons used various labor systems to gain wealth. They had no idea that these work relations made possible the development of a structural foundation and ideological framework of labor that in time defined much of what is now the United States.

Note: Most slaves happened to be Africans or descendants of Africans. Some Native Americans became slaves, but colonists quickly shipped most enslaved Native Americans to the West Indies. Some upper class Englishmen talked about enslaving poor Europeans. In fact, in the 1640s, Oliver Cromwell, who led the armies of the Parliament of England to victory in a civil war against the King, sent at least thirty thousand Catholic Irish peasants into slavery in the Caribbean. English and other European rulers and opinion-makers, however, decided for a variety of reasons, including fears of destabilizing their own and powerful neighboring nations, not to enslave poor Europeans. They found ways to turn the poor and the unfortunate into indentured servants.

Note: Historian Philip Curtin performed statistical research of data compiled between 1450 and 1870. He published the results of his research in 1969, stating that the absolute minimum number of enslaved Africans who reached the Americas was 9,566,000. Curtin admitted that his estimates could be off by as much as 50 percent, meaning that perhaps 14,200,000 enslaved Africans arrived in the Americas. Only 4.2 percent, or at least 400,000, of the 9,566,000 went to North America. Of the rest, at least 40 percent of enslaved Africans went to the West Indies, at least 37 percent landed in Brazil, and the remainder ended their forced immigration in Mexico, Central America, and Spanish-speaking South America.

Note: As Howard Lamar, Richard S. Dunn, and a host of other historians have shown, enslaved Africans took their place working alongside of European indentured servants and Native Americans who were either bonded or enslaved. The vast majority of enslaved Africans worked as producers of cash crops, especially the very valuable but extremely labor-intensive sugar cane, which was the chief crop in the West Indies and Brazil and which demanded the labor of 70 percent of enslaved Africans.