The purpose of this book is to provide students and non-specialist readers with a brief, integrated account of British involement in the Americas, from the entry of the English into the New World in the late 15th century to the disintegration of the British and other Euro-American empires in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Based on secondary sources, the study aims to acheive a synthesis which embraces the developments of colonies in the whole of Anglo-America, throughout the British territories which stretched from the Carribean to Canada. This synthesis is structured chronologically, in order to provide a narrative framework for understanding the origins and evolution of British colonialism, from the antecedents of empire in the Tudor period to the aftermath of empire following the American Revolution. This text aims to provide not simply an account of Anglo-American colonial development, but to blend narration of the major moments and movements in its evolution with an anlysis of the major structures of colonial economy and society both in North American and the Carribbean.
In addition, it seeks to set the Anglo-American world in the broader background of Euro-American colonialism, both by pointing to similarities and differences between Britain and its major European rivals, particularly Spain, and by drawing attention to the part that rivalries between European powers played in the expansion of Britain's empire. These comparisons indicate how British colonization enmeshed with, and related to, the larger process of European expansion; they also provide a perspective on the peculiarities of British America.
- ISBN10 0582209501
- ISBN13 9780582209503
- Publish Date 12 December 1994
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 11 May 2007
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Pearson Education Limited
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 360
- Language English