APUSH Period 2 (1607–1754): Building Colonial America

Colonization

The establishment of permanent settlements and political control by a distant power.

Mercantilism

An early modern economic theory claiming global wealth was finite and colonies should provide raw materials and markets to strengthen the home country (export more than import).

Navigation Acts

British laws meant to regulate colonial trade to benefit Britain (e.g., using British ships, channeling key goods through British markets, collecting duties, limiting trade with rivals).

Salutary neglect

A period/idea of lax or inconsistent British enforcement of trade regulations, allowing some colonial evasion because the empire remained profitable.

Transatlantic trade

The movement of goods, people, capital, and ideas across the Atlantic between Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas, forming an interconnected Atlantic World.

Middle Passage

The transoceanic leg of the transatlantic slave trade in which enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas under horrific, deadly conditions.

Triangular trade

A simplified teaching model of Atlantic trade routes linking North America, West Africa, and the Caribbean/Americas; useful, but it oversimplifies a complex, multi-stop trade network.

Consumer Revolution

The early-to-mid 1700s increase in colonists’ purchase of British-made goods, deepening economic and cultural ties to Britain.

Spanish missions

Religious outposts in Spanish America intended to convert Native peoples and incorporate them into Spanish-controlled communities.

Presidio

A Spanish military fort used to secure territory and support Spanish settlement and mission systems.

Caste system

A legally and socially recognized hierarchy in Spanish America that categorized people partly by ancestry (Spanish, Native, African, and mixed groups).

New France

The French colonial empire in North America centered on the St. Lawrence River, Great Lakes, and Mississippi River valley, built heavily on trade networks and Native alliances.

Fur trade

A major economic foundation of New France (especially beaver pelts), encouraging small outposts, trading towns, and deep interior connections.

Coureurs de bois

French traders who traveled into the North American interior to trade (especially furs), helping create an “empire of connections.”

New Netherland

A Dutch colony along the Hudson River emphasizing trade and shipping, with a diverse and pluralistic population; later seized by England (1664).

Chesapeake colonies

English colonies (especially Virginia and Maryland) shaped by tobacco, dispersed plantations, early high mortality, and heavy labor demand.

Tobacco cultivation

A labor-intensive Chesapeake cash crop that drove plantation expansion and strongly influenced social and political development.

Indentured servitude

A labor system in which workers signed contracts to work for a set number of years in exchange for passage, food, and shelter; common in the 1600s.

Chattel slavery

A system treating enslaved people as property for life with inheritable status; expanded strongly in the late 1600s–1700s and became racialized in law.

Bacon’s Rebellion (1676)

An uprising of frontier settlers in Virginia tied to frustrations over land, colonial leadership, and Native policy; often linked to elites’ later shift toward enslaved labor.

Puritans

English Protestants who sought to “purify”/reform the Church of England and build disciplined religious communities, strongly shaping New England society.

City upon a hill

A phrase associated with John Winthrop’s vision of Puritan New England as a moral example to the world.

Quakers

Members of the Religious Society of Friends; founders of Pennsylvania, associated with greater religious tolerance and comparatively better early relations with Native peoples.

First Great Awakening

Religious revivals in the 1730s–1740s emphasizing emotional preaching and personal conversion, often challenging established religious authority (e.g., Edwards, Whitefield).

Zenger trial (1735)

A New York case in which printer John Peter Zenger was acquitted after criticizing the governor, remembered as supporting the principle that truthful criticism should not be punished as libel (not modern First Amendment protections).