The Colonial Period in the Americas

The Colonial Period in the Americas, roughly 1492 to the wave of independence movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, spans the era of European conquest, settlement and administration of the Western Hemisphere following Christopher Columbus's 1492 voyage, during which Spain, Portugal, England, France and the Netherlands established colonial empires that reshaped the Americas' population, economies and political geography. Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires in the early sixteenth century established an enormous silver- and sugar-based colonial economy administered through viceroyalties and worked substantially by coerced indigenous and, especially in Portuguese Brazil and the Caribbean, enslaved African labor transported across the Atlantic in vast numbers. English and French colonization, concentrated mainly in North America and the Caribbean from the early seventeenth century onward, produced a more varied mix of colonies, from New England's religious settler communities to the Southern colonies' plantation slave economies, while the period as a whole brought catastrophic demographic collapse to indigenous American populations through introduced Old World diseases against which they had no immunity. The period closes unevenly across the hemisphere, ending first with the United States' 1776 declaration of independence and continuing through the Spanish American independence wars of the 1810s and 1820s.