[3] A significant percentage of the Native Americans living in the eastern region had been ravaged by disease before 1620, possibly introduced to them decades before by explorers and sailors (although no conclusive cause has been established).

[4] Mercantilism was the basic policy imposed by Britain on its colonies from the 1660s, which meant that the government became a partner with merchants based in England to increase political power and private wealth.

The colonists themselves faced high rates of death from disease, starvation, inefficient resupply, conflict with Native Americans, attacks by rival European powers, and other causes.

The most important of these was St. Augustine, founded alongside Mission Nombre de Dios in 1565 but repeatedly attacked and burned by pirates, privateers, and English forces, and nearly all the Spanish left after the Treaty of Paris (1763) ceded Florida to Great Britain.

Through the Spanish and Mexican eras they eventually comprised a series of 21 missions to spread Roman Catholicism among the local Native Americans, linked by El Camino Real ("The Royal Road").

The first European colony, Caparra, was founded on August 8, 1508, by Juan Ponce de León, a lieutenant under Columbus, who was greeted by the Taíno Cacique Agüeybaná and who later became the first governor of the island.

[25] The majority of the population in Puerto Rico was illiterate (83.7%) and lived in poverty, and the agricultural industry—at the time, the main source of income—was hampered by lack of road infrastructure, adequate tools and equipment, and natural disasters, including hurricanes and droughts.

[43] The consensus view among economic historians and economists is that the indentured servitude occurred largely as "an institutional response to a capital market imperfection," but that it "enabled prospective migrants to borrow against their future earnings in order to pay the high cost of passage to America.

Leo Lemay says that his 1744 travel diary Gentleman's Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton is "the best single portrait of men and manners, of rural and urban life, of the wide range of society and scenery in colonial America.

The administration was eventually led by Governor Sir Edmund Andros and seized colonial charters, revoked land titles, and ruled without local assemblies, causing anger among the population.

King William III sought to unite the New England colonies militarily by appointing the Earl of Bellomont to three simultaneous governorships and military command over Connecticut and Rhode Island.

The Middle Colonies consisted of the present-day states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware and were characterized by a large degree of religious, political, economic, and ethnic diversity.

In 1691, governor Sir Francis Nicholson organized competitions for the "better sort of Virginians onely who are Batchelors," and he offered prizes "to be shot for, wrestled, played at backswords, & Run for by Horse and foott.

After King Phillips War, Andros successfully negotiated the Covenant Chain, a series of Indian treaties that brought relative calm to the frontiers of the middle colonies for many years.

The major battles took place in Europe, but American colonial troops fought the French and their Indian allies in New York, New England, and Nova Scotia with the Siege of Louisbourg (1745).

In the 1763 Treaty of Paris, France formally ceded to Britain the eastern part of its vast North American empire, having secretly given to Spain the territory of Louisiana west of the Mississippi River the previous year.

This social upper echelon built its mansions in the Georgian style, copied the furniture designs of Thomas Chippendale, and participated in the intellectual currents of Europe, such as the Enlightenment.

The types of local commercial exchange in which they participated independently were well integrated with the trade networks between colonial merchants throughout the Atlantic region, especially markets in dairy and produce commodities.

The American political culture was open to economic, social, religious, ethnic, and geographical interests, with merchants, landlords, petty farmers, artisans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Quakers, Germans, Scotch Irish, Yankees, Yorkers, and many other identifiable groups taking part.

Finally, the Americans were fascinated by and increasingly adopted the political values of Republicanism which stressed equal rights, the need for virtuous citizens, and the evils of corruption, luxury, and aristocracy.

Colonial physicians introduced modern medicine to the cities in the 18th century, following the models in England and Scotland, and made some advances in vaccination, pathology, anatomy, and pharmacology.

People began to study the Bible at home, which effectively decentralized the means of informing the public on religious manners and was akin to the individualistic trends present in Europe during the Protestant Reformation.

[132] Like the many wives of founders and soldiers of the American Revolution, Mary Bartlett's life "shows how crucial a role these women played while their husbands fought the battles and formed the laws of the new nation.

It was not just that they were making it all work at home, they were also passionate patriots themselves, engaged in the government and the war just as their husbands, sons, brothers, fathers, and friends were", according to Cokie Roberts in Founding Mothers : The women who raised our nation.

Life expectancy was much greater in the American colonies because of better food, less disease, lighter workloads, and better medical care, so the population grew rapidly, reaching 4 million by the 1860 census.

He argues they grew from small villages to take major leadership roles in promoting trade, land speculation, immigration, and prosperity, and in disseminating the ideas of the Enlightenment, and new methods in medicine and technology.

"[149] In 1652, the Massachusetts General Court authorized Boston silversmith John Hull to produce local coinage in shilling, sixpence and threepence denominations to address a coin shortage in the colony.

Farm women provided most of the materials needed by the rest of the family by spinning yarn from wool and knitting sweaters and stockings, making candles and soap from ashes, and churning milk into butter.

Merchants often bought wool and flax from farmers and employed newly arrived immigrants, who had been textile workers in Ireland and Germany, to work in their homes spinning the materials into yarn and cloth.

These factors made families and communities fundamentally different from their counterparts in Europe and New England in the Virginia-Maryland region before 1700, along with dispersed settlements and a reluctance to live in villages, together with a growing immigration of white indentured servants and black slaves.