History

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England and Its Colonies

MAIN IDEA England and its largely self-governing colonies prospered under a mutually beneficial trade relationship. WHY IT MATTERS NOW The colonial system of selfgoverning colonies was the forerunner of our modern system of self-governing states. Terms & Names

•mercantilism •Parliament •Navigation Acts •Dominion of New England •Sir Edmund Andros •Glorious Revolution •salutary neglect

One American's Story

With her father fighting for Britain in the West Indies and her mother ill, 17-year-old Eliza Lucas was left to manage the family’s South Carolina plantations. On her own, the enterprising Eliza became the first person in the colonies to grow indigo and developed a way of extracting its deep blue dye. Eliza hoped that her indigo crops would add not only to her family’s fortune but to that of the British empire.

A PERSONAL VOICE ELIZA LUCAS PINCKNEY “ We please ourselves with the prospect of exporting

in a few years a good quantity from hence, and supplying our mother country [Great Britain] with a manufacture for which she has so great a demand, and which she is now supplied with from the French colonies, and many thousand pounds per annum [year] thereby lost to the nation, when she might as well be supplied here, if the matter were applied to in earnest.”

—quoted in South Carolina: A Documentary Profile of the Palmetto State

English settlers like the Lucases exported raw materials such as indigo dye to England, and in return they imported English manufactured goods. This economic relationship benefited both England and its colonies.

England and Its Colonies Prosper

Although many colonists benefited from the trade relationship with the home country, the real purpose of the colonial system was to enrich Britain.

MERCANTILISM The British interest in establishing colonies was influenced by the theory of mercantilism, which held that a country’s ultimate...