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With the defeat of the Dutch and the imposition of the Navigation Acts, the British colonies in North America became part of the global British trading network. The colonists traded foodstuffs, wood, tobacco, and various other resources for Asian tea, West Indian coffee, and West Indian sugar, among other items. [72]
Ferro, Marc, Colonization: A Global History (1997) Gibbons, H.A. The New Map of Africa (1900–1916): A History of European Colonial Expansion and Colonial Diplomacy (1916) online free; Hopkins, Anthony G., and Peter J. Cain. British Imperialism: 1688–2015 (Routledge, 2016). Mackenzie, John, ed. The Encyclopedia of Empire (4 vol 2016) Maltby ...
The decolonization of the Americas occurred over several centuries as most of the countries in the Americas gained their independence from European rule. The American Revolution was the first in the Americas, and the British defeat in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) was a victory against a great power, aided by France and Spain, Britain's enemies.
British America collectively refers to various European colonies in the Americas prior to the conclusion of the American Revolutionary War in 1783. The British monarchy of the Kingdom of England and Kingdom of Scotland—later named the Kingdom of Great Britain, of the British Isles and Western Europe—governed many colonies in the Americas beginning in 1585.
The British economy had begun to grow rapidly at the end of the 17th century and, by the mid-18th century, small factories in Britain were producing much more than the nation could consume. Britain found a market for their goods in the British colonies of North America, increasing her exports to that region by 360% between 1740 and 1770.
The colonies defended themselves with colonial militias, and the British government rarely sent military forces to America before 1755. [25] According to historian Robert Middlekauff , "Americans had become almost completely self-governing" before the American Revolution (see Salutary neglect ) .
A 1670 illustration of African slaves working in 17th-century colonial Virginia in British America. England's early efforts at colonisation in the Americas met with mixed success. An attempt to establish a colony in Guiana in 1604 lasted only two years and failed in its main objective to find gold deposits. [36]
In other words, colonial powers had more support from their own region in pursuing colonies in the 19th century than they did in the 20th century, where holding on to such colonies was often understood to be a burden. [29] A great deal of scholarship attributes the ideological origins of national independence movements to the Age of Enlightenment.