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Abstract
The English colonization of North America has always seemed providential for the legatees of that process, and for good reason. Awakened at last to the potentialities of the New World by the profits of privateering and emboldened by the daring actions of Elizabeth and Francis Drake, the English shook off their profound disinterest in the Americas and embarked on a colonial venture of immense and improbable proportion. During the ensuing two centuries, they entered into the imperial scramble for the New World; established hegemony over the Atlantic Seaboard of North America; implanted (not always wittingly) a profuse variety of sturdy regional societies and economies committed more or less to ethnocultural pluralism, capitalist institutions, and exponential demographic and economic growth; and, in the end, capitulated to the colonies’ revolutionary insistence on independence from the Crown. When, soon after, the new nation was propelled forward by an industrial revolution, her citizens were prepared to believe that indeed they were pioneers of providence—all of which has been of small comfort to their less fortunate co-colonials around the globe.