Establishment of the 13 Colonies

1607–1732 CE · Deep-Dive Event Pages · critical-turning-points

The foundation of British North America.

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Over the course of 125 years, the British Empire successfully established thirteen distinct colonies along the eastern coast of North America, beginning with Jamestown, Virginia, and ending with the founding of Georgia.

Key Numbers

Span of founding: 1607-1732 (125 years)
First & last colonies: Virginia → Georgia
Population by 1775: ~2.5 million
Enslaved by 1775: ~460,000 (1 in 5)
Jamestown winter survival: 61 of ~500 (1609-10)

Verified Facts

The 13 Colonies were not founded in a single act but accreted over 125 years, from the Virginia Company's landing at Jamestown on May 13-14, 1607, to James Oglethorpe's chartering of Georgia in 1732 as the final colony, named for King George II.
Jamestown nearly failed in its infancy: during the 'Starving Time' of the winter of 1609-1610, the population collapsed from about 500 residents to only 61 survivors, with archaeological and documentary evidence confirming the colonists resorted to cannibalism before relief ships arrived in May 1610.
Virginia was named for Elizabeth I, the 'Virgin Queen,' and was financed not by the Crown directly but by the Virginia (London) Company, a joint-stock venture chartered by King James I in 1606 — establishing the corporate, profit-seeking model that shaped early English colonization.
The Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower in 1620 numbered 102 passengers; before going ashore, 41 male passengers signed the Mayflower Compact, an early framework for self-governance, but roughly half the company died during the first brutal winter of 1620-1621.
Slavery took root almost from the start: in late August 1619 the privateer ship White Lion sold '20 and odd' Africans — likely Kongo and Ndongo people seized from the Portuguese slaver San Juan Bautista — at Point Comfort, Virginia, the first recorded Africans in mainland English America.
Pennsylvania was created in March 1681 when King Charles II granted William Penn a charter to settle a roughly 45,000-square-mile proprietary colony as repayment of a £16,000 debt the Crown owed Penn's late father, Admiral William Penn — making Penn the largest private landowner in the world at the time.
Penn intended Pennsylvania as a 'Holy Experiment' grounded in Quaker principles of religious liberty, nonviolence, and tolerance, a deliberate contrast to colonies founded primarily for commerce or as Anglican/Puritan strongholds.
The colonies clustered into three distinct regions — New England, the Middle Colonies, and the Southern Colonies — divided by climate, economy, and religion; Delaware, settled by Swedes as New Sweden in 1638 and later folded under Penn, won its own separate assembly in 1704 while remaining nominally tied to Pennsylvania.
By 1700 the colonial population had reached roughly 130,000, and explosive growth of about 3 percent annually drove it to an estimated 2.5 million by 1775 — of whom roughly 460,000 were enslaved, meaning nearly one in five colonists was held in bondage on the eve of the Revolution.

The World at This Moment

The English colonial venture unfolded as one strand of a violently competitive Atlantic system. When Jamestown was planted in 1607, Spain's silver empire (Potosí, Mexico City) was at its height, Portugal dominated Brazilian sugar and the Atlantic slave trade, and the Dutch and French were establishing their own footholds (New Netherland 1614; Quebec 1608). The seventeenth century was a moment of European crisis and expansion: the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), the splintering of Christendom after the Reformation, the rise of joint-stock capitalism, and the English Civil Wars that shaped Puritan emigration to Massachusetts Bay (1630). Beyond Europe, the Mughal Empire under Jahangir and Shah Jahan flourished, Ming China was collapsing toward the 1644 Qing conquest, and the Tokugawa shogunate consolidated Japan. By Georgia's founding in 1732, the colonies were enmeshed in a transatlantic economy of tobacco, rice, and enslaved African labor, on the eve of the Atlantic Enlightenment and the imperial wars (1739-1763) that would set the stage for revolution.

The Paradigm Shift

The colonies' establishment created a durable settler society on a different model from the Spanish and Portuguese tributary empires: dispersed landholding, representative assemblies (Virginia's House of Burgesses, 1619), and a labor regime that hardened from indentured servitude into racialized chattel slavery. Edmund Morgan argued that these developments were entangled rather than contradictory: the colonial economy that generated New World ideals of liberty and property rested materially on bound and enslaved labor, the "American paradox." Demographically and ecologically, sustained settlement triggered catastrophic Indigenous population collapse through disease, warfare, and dispossession, remaking eastern North America. Institutionally, the colonies seeded English common law, Protestant dissent, town and county self-government, and Atlantic commercial networks across the seaboard. The longer trajectory is decisive: these polities became the demographic and ideological reservoir for the United States, and through it a template for republican government, expansionist settler colonialism, and the contradictions of slavery and freedom that would define modern American history and, eventually, a globally dominant power.

In Their Own Words

"...which may, by the Providence of Almighty God, hereafter tend to the Glory of his Divine Majesty, in propagating of Christian Religion to such People, as yet live in Darkness and miserable Ignorance of the true Knowledge and Worship of God, and may in time bring the Infidels and Savages, living in those parts, to human Civility, and to a settled and quiet Government." — The First Charter of Virginia, granted by King James I, April 10, 1606

In Depth

A Coastline Becomes a Crucible

The Thirteen Colonies were not founded; they accreted. Across the 125 years from the Virginia Company's Jamestown landing in 1607 to James Oglethorpe's Georgia in 1732, a ragged string of English settlements along the Atlantic seaboard cohered into something none of its founders intended: the seedbed of a republic and, eventually, of the technological civilization that would dream of building minds.

Deep Preconditions

The colonies were a late, downstream consequence of a Europe set into motion a century earlier. The voyages that opened the hemisphere (sv-new-world) made an English Atlantic thinkable at all, while the Italian Renaissance (sv-renaissance) and the Gutenberg press (sv-printing-press) supplied both the navigational confidence and the cheap printed word that let dissenters argue, organize, and emigrate. Above all, the colonies are unintelligible without Martin Luther's rupture (sv-martin-luther): the Reformation fractured Christendom into rival confessions, and it was the losers and refusers of England's settlement — Separatists at Plymouth in 1620, Puritans flooding the Massachusetts Bay Company after 1628, Catholics in Maryland, Quakers in Pennsylvania — who turned a commercial venture into a haven. Religious dissent and mercantile capital were the colonies' twin engines. The joint-stock company, that Renaissance financial instrument, let investors pool risk to plant tobacco in Virginia and codfish in New England, even as the doctrine of mercantilism cast every colony as a profit center for the Crown.

That commercial logic carried a moral catastrophe at its core. When the White Lion landed some twenty captive Africans at Point Comfort in 1619, it bound the colonial economy to the transatlantic slave trade. As tobacco, rice, and indigo became the seaboard's wealth, slavery became its engine — a contradiction the colonies would carry, unresolved, into the nation they birthed.

What It Reshaped

The colonies' deepest export was a habit of self-government. Distance from London bred colonial assemblies, town meetings, and the founding of Harvard (sv-harvard) in 1636 to train a literate, argumentative leadership class. Here the diffuse inheritance of Athenian democracy (sv-athenian-democracy) and the Roman Republic (sv-roman-republic) found unusually fertile soil, fertilized further by Enlightenment imports — Newton's physics (sv-newton) and Descartes' method (sv-descartes) reaching a curious colonial mind like Benjamin Franklin (sv-benjamin-franklin), whose electrical experiments announced that the periphery could now generate, not merely receive, knowledge.

When London tightened its mercantile grip after 1763, the self-governing reflex hardened into rebellion. The colonies became the American Revolution (sv-american-revolution), and the constitutional argument they had rehearsed for generations crystallized in the Federalist Papers (sv-federalist-papers). The framework they built — and its unfinished business with slavery, which would detonate in the American Civil War (sv-american-civil-war) — became the political container for the Industrial Revolution's American chapter.

Threads Forward

The long arc is striking. The same Atlantic settlements that began as tobacco speculation matured into the industrial and scientific powerhouse that produced Edison's Menlo Park and the laboratories that, generations later, would deliver the World Wide Web (sv-www) and the deep-learning revolution. The republic incubated on that colonial coast became the dominant home of the artificial-intelligence project itself — the institutional descendant of those Harvard-trained arguers now building the systems that prompt this very timeline.

The Thirteen Colonies, in short, are a hinge. Behind them lies the whole apparatus of Reformation, print, and oceanic capital; ahead of them lies a constitutional, commercial, and scientific civilization whose ambitions would reach from a tobacco field at Jamestown toward the threshold of thinking machines.

Causes & Consequences

What led to it

The Protestant Reformation severed England from the Catholic Church under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, freeing English Protestants from papal rulings like the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas and motivating them to challenge Catholic Spain for dominance of the Atlantic and the New World.
Spain's conquest of the Americas after 1492 and the flood of silver from its South American mines demonstrated the wealth that overseas colonies could generate, inspiring rival European monarchs and merchants to invest in their own exploration and settlement.
The development of the joint-stock company let wealthy Londoners pool private capital and share risk, so that ventures like the Virginia Company of London could finance and supply colonies that no single investor or the cash-strapped Crown would have funded alone.
King James I granted the Virginia Company its royal charter on April 10, 1606, authorizing private investors to plant settlements, govern colonists, and exploit the land's resources, which led directly to the founding of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement, in May 1607.
The failure of Sir Walter Raleigh's Roanoke colony in the 1580s taught English backers hard lessons about provisioning and location while leaving investors eager to try again farther north, shaping the more heavily capitalized Virginia ventures that followed.
Religious persecution of nonconformists under Kings James I and Charles I drove Separatist Pilgrims to Plymouth in 1620 and over twenty thousand Puritans to Massachusetts Bay during the Great Migration of 1630-1640, populating New England with settlers seeking to build their own godly communities.

What it set in motion

The colonies pioneered representative self-government with Virginia's House of Burgesses in 1619, the first elected legislative assembly in English North America, establishing a tradition of colonial assemblies that later resisted Crown authority and shaped American republican institutions.
The discovery that tobacco could be grown and exported profitably saved Virginia after the 1609-1610 'starving time' and, through the headright system granting fifty acres per immigrant, created a plantation economy whose chronic labor demand drew waves of indentured servants and settlers.
The arrival of about twenty captive Africans at Point Comfort in 1619 marked the beginning of African bondage in English America, which Virginia and other colonies hardened into hereditary, race-based chattel slavery through laws passed from the 1660s onward.
England imposed mercantilist control through the Navigation Acts beginning in 1651, which restricted colonial trade to British ships and markets and forbade advanced colonial manufactures, generating economic grievances that festered for over a century.
Tightened enforcement of trade and tax policy after 1763, including the Townshend Acts, fueled protests such as the Boston Massacre of 1770 and the Boston Tea Party of 1773, escalating into the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
The expansion of colonial settlement and plantation agriculture progressively displaced Native American nations from their lands and exposed them to devastating Old World diseases carried by the Columbian Exchange, permanently transforming the demography and ecology of eastern North America.

The Live Academic Debate

A central debate concerns whether the colonies are best understood as a coherent unit or as fundamentally divergent regions. Jack P. Greene, in Pursuits of Happiness (1988), rejected the older "New England declension" paradigm (associated with Perry Miller) as a template for all the colonies, arguing instead that the Chesapeake pattern was more typical and that the regions only converged culturally after about 1710. Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom (1975) reframed Virginia's history around the co-dependence of liberty and slavery, an interpretation since extended and contested by historians of race like Winthrop Jordan and Kathleen Brown. A further, increasingly prominent line—advanced by Indigenous and Atlantic-world historians such as Daniel Richter (Facing East from Indian Country) and Pekka Hämäläinen—displaces the Anglocentric "founding" narrative entirely, foregrounding Native power, dispossession, and the multi-imperial contest. Scholars also debate periodization: whether 1607 or the later imperial integration (post-1660 Navigation Acts) marks the formative moment.

The Counterfactual

Counterfactual reasoning here must be cautious, since "the Thirteen Colonies" is partly a retrospective category. Had England's early ventures failed as Roanoke (1587) did, the seaboard would likely have been partitioned among rival powers: the Dutch entrenched on the Hudson, the French along the St. Lawrence and Mississippi, and Spain pressing north from Florida. Anglophone Protestant settler society, with its assemblies and common-law institutions, might never have achieved the demographic mass that made an independent United States conceivable. Yet broad structural forces—European demographic pressure, Atlantic capitalism, and the devastating epidemiological advantage Alfred Crosby described as the "Columbian Exchange"—make some intensive European colonization of temperate North America highly probable regardless of which crown sponsored it. The specific outcome that was contingent was the English legal-political inheritance: representative government, jury trial, and dissenting Protestantism. Without that particular configuration, a later continental polity might have resembled the more centralized, hierarchical orders of New France or New Spain rather than the federated republic that emerged.

Myth vs. Reality

Myth: The colonies were founded primarily as havens for religious freedom.

Reality: Most of the thirteen colonies were commercial ventures launched by profit-seeking joint-stock companies, not refuges for the persecuted. Jamestown (1607) was a business enterprise of the Virginia Company of London chartered to generate returns for investors, and even the religiously motivated Pilgrims sailed under a joint-stock arrangement financed by London merchants who expected to profit from trade with Native peoples. Religious motives drove only some settlements (Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island); others such as Virginia, the Carolinas, New York, and Georgia were primarily economic or strategic projects.

Myth: The Puritans came to America to establish religious freedom and tolerance.

Reality: The Puritans fled persecution but did not extend tolerance to others; Massachusetts Bay functioned as a theocracy that suppressed dissent. Dissenters such as Roger Williams (who later founded Rhode Island) and Anne Hutchinson were banished, and Quakers were persecuted and in several cases executed. Historians distinguish the Plymouth Separatists (Pilgrims) from the later, larger Massachusetts Bay Puritans, and note that conflating them feeds the myth that religious freedom was part of New England's founding ideals.

Myth: Plymouth and the Mayflower marked the beginning of English colonial America in 1620.

Reality: Jamestown, Virginia, founded in 1607, was the first permanent English settlement in what became the United States, predating Plymouth by thirteen years; an English colony at Newfoundland was also established earlier. Plymouth looms larger in national memory largely because of the storied single-ship Mayflower voyage and the Thanksgiving foundation narrative, not because it came first. The earlier English attempt at Roanoke (1585) failed and became known as the 'Lost Colony.'

Myth: Jamestown was the first European settlement in what is now the United States.

Reality: St. Augustine, Florida, founded by the Spanish under Pedro Menendez de Aviles in 1565, is the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement in the present-day contiguous United States, predating Jamestown by 42 years. The English-centered focus of much popular American history has long overshadowed the earlier and extensive Spanish colonial presence in the Southeast and Southwest.

Myth: There were thirteen distinct colonies that were established together as a unified group.

Reality: The colonies were founded piecemeal over more than a century, from Virginia in 1607 to Georgia in 1732, and were highly diverse in government, economy, and religion rather than a single coordinated enterprise. The familiar 'thirteen' is also legally imprecise: Delaware spent the colonial era as the 'Lower Counties' of Pennsylvania, sharing a governor with Pennsylvania while running its own assembly after 1704, and only declared itself a separate state on June 15, 1776.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which of the 13 colonies was founded first, and which was last?

Virginia was the first, beginning with the founding of Jamestown in 1607 by the Virginia Company of London. Georgia was the last, chartered in 1732 when King George II granted James Oglethorpe and a board of trustees control over the land. The full span of permanent English settlement that produced the thirteen colonies thus covered roughly 125 years, from 1607 to 1732.

What were the 13 colonies, and where were they located?

The thirteen colonies were Britain's North American Atlantic-seaboard settlements: Virginia, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, North Carolina, South Carolina, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. They are commonly grouped into three regions: the New England colonies (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire), the Middle colonies (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware), and the Southern colonies (Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia). These thirteen would later unite to declare independence in 1776 and become the original United States.

Why were the 13 colonies established?

Motivations varied by region. The New England colonies were settled largely by Pilgrims and Puritans seeking religious freedom; beginning around 1630, as many as 20,000 Puritans emigrated from England to worship as they chose, and Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Rhode Island were also founded on religious tolerance. The Southern colonies, by contrast, were primarily economic ventures pursuing material wealth through cash crops, while the Middle colonies attracted a diverse mix of settlers seeking land and opportunity. Many individual settlers also simply came for jobs, land, or adventure rather than faith.

What were the three types of colonial government?

England organized its colonies as royal (crown), proprietary, or charter colonies. Royal colonies, such as New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, the Carolinas, and Georgia, were governed directly by the king through an appointed royal governor. Proprietary colonies like Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania were granted to individuals with close ties to the crown who could appoint leaders and run their own governments. Charter colonies (Connecticut, Massachusetts Bay, and Rhode Island) operated under charters that allowed the most self-government, often electing their own governors and legislatures.

How did the colonial regions differ economically?

New England's rocky soil and cold winters discouraged large farms, so its economy centered on fishing, shipbuilding, timber, and trade with Europe and the Caribbean. The Middle colonies, with richer farmland and a milder climate, became known as the 'breadbasket,' growing wheat, rye, and barley and trading through ports like Philadelphia and New York. The Southern colonies, blessed with fertile land and a long growing season, built a plantation economy around cash crops such as tobacco, rice, and indigo, which increasingly relied on enslaved labor.

Did slavery exist in all 13 colonies?

Yes. Although slavery was concentrated in the Southern colonies, it was legal and present in all thirteen, and the economies of all of them depended on it to varying degrees. The first recorded Africans in England's mainland colonies arrived at Virginia in 1619 — roughly 20 men and women, likely from the Angolan kingdom of Ndongo. Their exact legal status is debated by historians, as chattel slavery was not yet codified; institutionalized lifelong slavery did not become Virginia law until the 1660s.