TIMELINE

WORK, EXCHANGE, & TECHNOLOGYPEOPLINGPOLITICS & POWERIDEAS, BELIEFS, & CULTUREIDENTITY
1660

  • South Atlantic System links plantation and neo-European colonies

  • Mercantilist legislation in England: Navigation Acts (1651, 1660, 1663)

  • New York inherits Hudson River Valley manors from the Dutch; Carolina proprietors try but fail to institute a manorial system

  • Migrants to Pennsylvania seek freehold lands

  • Rapid expansion of African slave imports undergirds sugar, tobacco, and rice plantation systems

  • The Middle Passage shapes Africans’ experiences of arrival

  • Indian slave trade emerges in South Carolina

  • First Mennonites arrive in Pennsylvania (1683)

  • Dominion of New England (1686–1689)

  • Glorious Revolution (1688–1689)

  • War of the League of Augsburg (1689–1697)

  • Founding of the Restoration Colonies: the Carolinas (1663), New York (1664), Pennsylvania (1681)

  • Collapse of the Puritan Commonwealth leads to toleration in England

  • Isaac Newton publishes Principia Mathematica (1687)

  • Restoration makes England a monarchy again; royalist revival

  • The Glorious Revolution makes England a constitutional monarchy

  • Massachusetts loses its charter (1684) and gains a new one (1691)

1690

  • New England shipbuilding industry and merchant community come to dominate the coastal trade

  • Agricultural labor and artisanal skills in high demand in the Middle colonies

  • Quakers emigrate to Pennsylvania and New Jersey

  • Second wave of Germans arrives in Pennsylvania, Shenandoah Valley

  • Parliament creates Board of Trade (1696)

  • War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1713)

  • John Locke publishes Two Treatises on Government (1690)

  • Rise of toleration among colonial Protestants

  • Print revolution begins

  • Colonists gain autonomy in the post–Glorious Revolution era

  • Tribalization developing among Native American peoples

1720

  • The price of wheat rises (doubles in Philadelphia, 1720–1770)

  • British trade dominates the Atlantic

  • Opportunity and inequality in the Middle colonies

  • Ohio Company of Virginia receives 200,000 acres (1749)

  • Scots-Irish begin migrating to Pennsylvania (c. 1720)

  • Parliament charters Georgia (1732)

  • Penns make Walking Purchase from the Delawares (1737)

  • Robert Walpole is prime minister (1720–1742)

  • Stono Rebellion (1739)

  • War of Jenkins’s Ear (1739–1741)

  • War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748)

  • George Whitefield’s visit to America sparks the Great Awakening (1739)

  • Benjamin Franklin founds American Philosophical Society (1743)

  • New colleges, newspapers, magazines

  • African American community forms in the Chesapeake

  • Planter aristocracy emerges in the Chesapeake and South Carolina

  • Culture of gentility spreads among well-to-do

1750

  • Freehold society in crisis in New England

  • Half of Middle colonies’ white men landless

  • Conflicts over western lands and political power (1750–1775)

  • British industry being mechanized; colonial debt crisis

  • 40,000 Germans and Swiss emigrate to Pennsylvania (1749–1756)

  • Anglo-Americans pushing onto backcountry lands

  • French and Indian War/Seven Years’ War (1754–1763)

  • The Albany Congress (1754)

  • The Treaty of Paris (1763)

  • Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763)

  • At least twelve religious denominations in Philadelphia

  • Neolin promotes nativist revival among Ohio Indians (1763)

  • Victory in the Great War for Empire sparks pro-British pride in the colonies

  • Desire for political autonomy and economic independence strong