Colonial America: Consumption, Slavery, Politics, and Conflict

Vocabulary flashcards covering 18th-century American colonial history, trade, slavery systems, governance, print culture, the Great Awakening, Indigenous diplomacy, the Seven Years' War, and Pontiac's War.

Consumer Revolution

The process during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in which rising incomes, increased availability of credit, and falling commodity prices enabled ordinary colonists to buy manufactured luxury goods as signs of respectability.

Commodity Money

Nontraditional media of exchange, such as standardized rates of tobacco in Virginia, used by colonies to overcome the scarcity of official British currency.

Bills of Credit

Paper currency issued for finite periods on a colony's credit, first issued in the Western Hemisphere by colonial Massachusetts in 1690.

Currency Acts of 1751 and 1763

Restrictions passed by the British Board of Trade to limit the usage of paper money in the colonies due to depreciation, counterfeiting, and British merchants' reluctance to accept depreciated notes.

Abigail Stoneman

An exceptionally successful eighteenth-century tavern owner in Newport who managed Atlantic trade merchandise, offered billiards tables, and boarded merchants.

Navigation Acts

Parliamentary regulations imposing taxes on trade to ensure profits enriched Great Britain, which colonists frequently violated through smuggling prior to 1763.

Nonimportation Agreements

Organized colonial boycotts of British goods formed in response to Parliamentary taxation acts, such as the Sugar Act of 1764, Stamp Act, and Townshend Acts.

Daughters of Liberty

Groups of colonial women who made political statements against British taxes by producing homespun cloth to support boycotts of British-made imports.

Plan of Philadelphia (1762)

Nicholas Scull's surveyed plan illustrating Philadelphia's calculated urban layout of regular blocks and public squares.

Primogeniture

A legal system requiring a family's estate to descend to the eldest male heir, helping Chesapeake planters keep wealth and property consolidated.

Entail

A gendered legal procedure that prevented the breakup and sale of land estates in Virginia, preserving large plantation estates across generations.

Gang System of Labor

A labor system dominant on Chesapeake tobacco plantations where enslaved workers labored from dawn to dusk in groups under the close supervision of a white overseer or enslaved driver.

Partus Sequiter Ventrem

The legal doctrine establishing that children inherited the legal status of their mothers, guaranteeing that children born to enslaved women were born enslaved.

Fry-Jefferson Map Cartouche

A 1751 engraving depicting colonial Virginia plantation life, showing enslaved laborers preparing tobacco for shipment while plantation owners conduct business.

Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina

The 1669 document coauthored by John Locke that explicitly legalized slavery in Carolina from its founding.

Task System

A labor system used on South Carolina rice plantations where enslaved laborers were given specific daily tasks to complete, after which they could grow personal crops on garden plots.

Stono Rebellion

A September 1739 uprising near Charleston where about eighty enslaved people marched toward Spanish Florida under a banner reading "Liberty!" before being defeated by local militia.

Patroonships

Huge tracts of land along New York's Hudson Valley granted to early Dutch families, where enslaved Africans worked alongside European tenant farmers.

Provincial Colonies

British North American colonies (such as Virginia and New York) under tight Crown control, where the king appointed governors who held veto power over legislative assemblies.

Proprietary Colonies

Colonies (such as Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and Maryland) where governors were appointed by a lord proprietor who purchased or received territorial rights from the Crown.

Charter Colonies

Colonies (such as Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut) governed by political corporations that elected their own property-owning governors.

Companionate Ideal

An eighteenth-century view of marriage derived from sentimentalism that framed husband-wife relationships as emotionally fulfilling partnerships rather than strictly economic transactions.

Coverture

The legal practice under which a married white Anglo-American woman lost all of her political and economic rights to her husband.

Print Culture

The broad range of factors surrounding how books and printed matter were produced, circulated, and consumed, shaping political and religious discourse in the colonies.

Great Awakening

A series of Protestant religious revivals in the 1730s and 1740s that created a shared language of individualism and personal relationship with God across the colonies.

Jonathan Edwards

A Northampton, Massachusetts Congregational theologian who preached predestination and authored the famous sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."

George Whitefield

An itinerant Anglican preacher and former actor whose dramatic open-air revivals drew crowds of thousands and energized the Great Awakening.

New Lights and Old Lights

The 1740s–1750s religious division between revivalists who embraced passionate faith ("New Lights") and traditionalists who viewed revivalism as delusion ("Old Lights").

Haudenosaunee

The participatory democracy formed by six Iroquoian nations (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora), also known as the Iroquois or League of Six Nations.

Covenant Chain

A 1744 agreement between the Haudenosaunee League and Northern British colonies establishing trade terms, colonial boundaries, and Haudenosaunee regional dominion.

Catawba Deerskin Map

A 1764 English copy of a Native American deerskin map showing Indigenous territory situated between Charleston and Virginia.

Natchez War

A 1729 conflict in which the Natchez nation expelled French planters from Louisiana, leading France to scale back its plantation efforts in the region.

Jumonville Affair

A 1754 incident in which George Washington led a force of British colonists and Native allies in killing a French diplomat, initiating the Seven Years' War.

Battle of Plassey

A June 1757 battle in India where Robert Clive and Indian allies defeated the French, expanding British control during the Seven Years' War.

Annus Mirabilis (1759)

Great Britain's "year of miracles" during the Seven Years' War, marked by decisive victories at Quebec, Louisbourg, Minden, and at sea against the French.

Neolin

A prophet who preached that Indigenous peoples must reject European goods, stop drinking alcohol, and unite to expel the British from their lands.

Pontiac's War

A 1763–1766 pan-Indigenous conflict against British forts and frontier settlements triggered by Neolin's teachings and British restrictions on trade and gift giving.

Royal Proclamation of 1763

A British royal decree establishing the Proclamation Line along the Appalachian Mountains as the boundary prohibiting colonial settlement on Indigenous land.

Join, or Die

Benjamin Franklin's May 9, 1754 political cartoon featuring a severed snake, advocating for intercolonial unity among the North American colonies.