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AP US History
Chapter 2 Questions
1) How were the Caribbean colonies significant in the British-American colonial
system?
With its close ties to English North America from the beginning and
influence on the development of the mainland colonies in several ways, the
Caribbean colonies became a major economic source for the British-American
colonial system. Sugar became the major product of the islands, and soon enough
the demanding work needed to tend to the crop developed into the utilization of
manual labor through enslaved Africans. This would later affect the widespread
use of African slaves in America until the time of the Civil War.
2) How did the Glorious Revolution impact the development of the BritishAmerican colonies?
When James II fled England in response to the small army brought into
England by William of Orange and his own daughter, Mary, a period would soon
begin in England known as “the Glorious Revolution.” As William and Mary
became joint rulers, Bostonians celebrated, as well as worked to abolish the
Dominion of New England and restore separate colonial governments. They later
combined Massachusetts and Plymouth to make it a royal colony, and the new
charter gave the crown the right to appoint governor as well as replaced church
membership with property ownership, because the basis for voting and
officeholding required the Puritan leaders of the colony to tolerate Anglican
worship. It also helped start the earliest ideas of American independence from
Britain.
3) What were conditions like in Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony?
From the its founding around 1629 until the end of the Dominion of New
England in about 1688, life in Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony was, for the
most part, very subjugated by those in England. In 1679, the colony was stripped
of its authority over New Hampshire by Charles II and was chartered as a separate,
royal colony whose governor would be appointed by him. In 1686, the brother of
Charles II, James II, created a single Dominion of New England, combining the
government of Massachusetts with the rest of the New England colonies and even
New York and New Jersey, too. He then appointed a single governor, Sir Edmund
Andros, to supervise all of Boston, in what would soon become a harsh and
suppressive rule. Due to this, the colonists became more than willing to remove
such a rule from power, as did happen after Britain’s “Glorious Revolution.”
4) How did the Navigation Acts and the Dominion of New England plant the
earliest seeds of the American Revolution?
As the enforcement of the Navigation Acts and the Dominion of New
England became powerful decrees in the colonies, many of the colonists
developed rebellious feelings towards the nation of Great Britain. With such a
control over the colony, the British ruled Massachusetts with an iron fist. Soon
enough, the settlers’ detestation of this rule would lead them to overthrow
governor Andros and establish their own type of government in the bay colony.
What the Glorious Revolution sparked was a new colonial opposition to
subjugation, and more specifically, that of England. Were it not for such an event,
life in Massachusetts, and all of America for that matter, may still be under a
suppressed rule by Britain, or even other nations.