Plantation settlements. In the sixteenth century, Spain still dominated European colonization of the New World. Great Britain entered the competition near the end of the sixteenth century, but early British attempts to found overseas settlements faltered. During the seventeenth century, however, the British succeeded in establishing colonies in the Americas that would provide the foundation of a world empire. With the exception of the Puritan settlements in New England (undertaken to escape religious persecution), these early colonies were plantation settlements that in certain respects resembled those the Spanish had already established. As such, they embodied a combination of commercial and patriotic aspirations: the merchants and adventurers who founded them wished to make personal profit for themselves, but they also generally shared the larger goal of securing economic self-sufficiency for Britain. They hoped that crops might be grown in the colonies and shipped back to Britain, either to be consumed or turned into finished products.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, British plantation settlements had been founded in two parts of the New World: the southern Atlantic coast of North America (i.e., Virginia, 1607; Maryland, 1632); and the islands of the Bermudas and the West Indies (i.e., Bermuda, 1609; St.
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