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France began the process of colonization in 1609 when Louis XVI (1754-1793) shipped four thousand peasants from western France to Quebec at crown expense. Over the next century and a half, they were joined by an additional six thousand men and women, including soldiers, convicts, orphans, and free settlers. Although the French hoped that emigration to Canada would take off and lead to the creation of a large colony capable of serving as both a guaranteed market for metropolitan manufactured goods and a supplier of cheap timber, furs, and other colonial commodities, the region's cold climate and the existence of more lucrative Caribbean colonies discouraged many potential emigrants from making the journey. The bulk of those who did emigrate were landless young men who signed on for three-year contracts as indentured servants working to clear land, cut timber, farm, and trap animals for their furs. Most saw their time in the colony as temporary and tried to return home as soon as their period of service ended. When coupled with the small number of women present in Quebec, this trend ensured that the French colony remained small and widely dispersed.

Although similar motives lay behind the creation of Britain's North American colonies, local climatic conditions ensured that the resultant settler societies were much more complex than their French counterparts. Like its scattered Caribbean holdings, Britain's southern colonies possessed climates suitable for the creation of a plantation economy. Instead of sugarcane, however, the southern colonies focused their efforts on harvesting cotton and tobacco with the help of indentured servants shipped out from the metropole in large numbers. Indentured servants were similarly responsible for helping the middle colonies of the Chesapeake region produce timber, grain, and other farm products. Unlike their French counterparts, British indentured servants included both craftsmen and landless farmers. Moreover, most chose to stay on in the colonies after their service was up in hopes of attaining social mobility and access to cheap land. Nevertheless, population growth in the early years of colonial development was slow due to high death rates and the relative lack of female emigrants. Reductions in the number of emigrants after 1680, caused by changing economic conditions back in Britain, also took their toll on population growth. As the supply of labor began to dry up, the southern plantation colonies turned to the use of imported African slaves to make up the difference. Although large, the size of this slave population never approached that of either the Carribean or Iberian colonies in South America.

The final pieces of Britain's colonial puzzle in the Americas were New England and Canada. While emigration to other colonies was spaced out over a century and a half and frequently was composed of young male indentured servants, the Puritan migration to New England was limited to 1629-1642 and consisted of whole families fleeing religious persecution and economic hardship in England. On arrival, the Puritans created small, religiously based independent farming communities mirroring those they left behind in England. Canada, on the other hand, was more diverse, particularly since it was acquired as the result of Britain's ongoing wars with France. After seizing the last vestiges of French Canada during the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), the British decided that they had spent too much time and money just to give it all back. While most French settlers chose to emigrate to other colonies in the New World rather than fall under permanent British political control, a sizeable portion remained, thereby presenting their new rulers with the difficult and delicate task of absorbing them into Britain's American Empire. Early efforts to buy the loyalty of these French settlers by granting them local autonomy and accommodating their cultural, linguistic, and legal differences quickly broke down, particularly after loyalists flocked northward into Canada in the wake of the American Revolution. The resultant Anglo-French tensions gradually intensified over the course of the nineteenth century as Britain opened the rest of Canada to settlement by emigrants eager to flee land shortages and poverty in Europe. . . .

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