Compare and contrast the development of English settlement and colonization during the seventeenth century, including mercantilism, trans-Atlantic trade, and the regional differences among the New England, Middle, and Southern colonies (GSE SSUSH1, Domain 1).

What this topic is asking

The Georgia Milestones US History EOC opens its story in the colonial era, a span most other state US History tests skip entirely. The GSE standard SSUSH1 wants you to compare and contrast how England settled and colonized North America in the seventeenth century, and above all to explain why the three colonial regions (New England, the Middle Colonies, and the Southern Colonies) developed such different economies and societies. These questions sit in Domain 1 (Colonization through the Constitution) and are often built on a map, a quotation, or a description you must match to a region.

Why geography produced three regions

Why each colony was founded

Colonies were planted for different reasons, and the exam expects you to connect a founding motive to a region.

• New England colonies were founded largely for religious freedom: the Pilgrims (Plymouth, 1620) and the larger group of Puritans (Massachusetts Bay, 1630) wanted to worship as they chose and to build a model Christian community.
• Middle Colonies were founded for a mix of trade and tolerance. Pennsylvania was a haven for Quakers under William Penn; New York began as the Dutch trading colony of New Netherland.
• Southern Colonies were founded mostly for profit and land. Virginia (Jamestown, 1607) was a business venture by the Virginia Company; Georgia (1733), the last of the thirteen, began as a debtors' refuge and a military buffer against Spanish Florida.

Mercantilism and trans-Atlantic trade

Mercantilism tied the colonies into the trans-Atlantic trade. The infamous triangular trade ran in a loop across the Atlantic: manufactured goods and rum went from the colonies and Europe to West Africa; enslaved Africans were shipped across the Middle Passage to the Americas; and raw materials such as sugar, tobacco, and cotton went back to Europe. This system enriched colonial merchants and the mother country while resting on the forced labor and suffering of enslaved people, a contradiction the exam expects you to recognize.

How the regions came together

Despite their differences, the thirteen colonies shared an English language, English legal traditions, a growing habit of self-government (covered in the next dot point), and, by the 1760s, a shared grievance against British control. Those common threads made it possible, decades later, for thirteen very different societies to unite against Britain.

Try this

Q1. Explain why the Southern Colonies developed a plantation economy while New England did not. [2]

• Cue. The South had a warm climate and long growing season suited to cash crops (tobacco, rice, indigo) on large plantations, increasingly worked by enslaved labor; New England's cold climate and thin, rocky soil could not support cash crops, so it turned to fishing, shipbuilding, and trade.

Q2. Define mercantilism and explain how the Navigation Acts enforced it. [2]

• Cue. Mercantilism is the policy that colonies exist to enrich the mother country by supplying raw materials and buying its manufactured goods; the Navigation Acts enforced it by requiring that key colonial goods travel on English ships and be sold through England.