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Y311: The Origins and Growth of the British Empire 1558–1783

The nature of colonial rule: mercantilism, companies, plantations and colonial government

  • 3 things to know
  • Unit group 3

Overview

Recall questions on mercantilism and letters of marque, chartered companies, plantations and labour, the Navigation and Staple Acts, the slave code and Royal African Company, religion, bases, Mughal grants, colonial taxation and law-making.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

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Evaluation

Why did Chesapeake planters shift from indentured servants to enslaved Africans in the later seventeenth century?

Key term

How were taxes actually raised in the mainland American colonies before the 1760s?

Numbers

Name three chartered companies used to run English overseas trade, with their founding dates.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    Define mercantilism as it shaped British colonial rule.

    Model answer

    It was the belief that world trade was a fixed quantity, so a state should keep colonial trade in its own ships and markets, exclude rivals, and run a favourable balance of trade in bullion.

  2. 2

    Define a letter of marque.

    Model answer

    It was a royal commission authorising a private ship to attack and plunder enemy shipping lawfully, turning a pirate into a privateer.

  3. 3

    Name three chartered companies used to run English overseas trade, with their founding dates.

    Model answer

    The East India Company of 1600, the Hudson's Bay Company of 1670 and the Royal African Company of 1672.

  4. 4

    Give one advantage and one drawback of granting a company a trading monopoly.

    Model answer

    A monopoly gave investors the security to fund forts, ships and long voyages, but it raised prices, invited smuggling and provoked demands from excluded merchants for free trade.

  5. 5

    Which cash crops underpinned the plantation colonies?

    Model answer

    Tobacco in the Chesapeake, sugar in the Caribbean, and rice and indigo in the Carolinas.

  6. 6

    Distinguish a plantation from ordinary colonial farming.

    Model answer

    A plantation was a large estate producing a single export crop with a coerced labour force working in gangs under supervision, rather than a household farm producing for subsistence and local sale.

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