Most settlers in every North American colony are small farmers, but other industries develop within a few decades as varied as the settlements.

Cash crops include tobacco, rice and wheat.

Extraction industries develop in furs, fishing and lumber.

Manufacturers produce rum and ships, and Americans are producing one-seventh of the world's iron supply by the late colonial period.

Cities eventually dot the coast to support local economies and serve as trade hubs.

English colonists are supplemented by waves of Scots-Irish and other groups.

Freed indentured servants push further west as coastal land grows more expensive.

It takes time for Europeans and North American natives to learn the customs of the other side.

Europeans will often be offered fur, food or other items as gifts when they first encounter a tribe.

The Europeans do not understand they are supposed to take on an alliance with the natives, including helping them against their enemies.

Native tribes regularly practice gift giving as part of their social relations.

Because the Europeans (or most of them) do not, they are considered to be rude and crude.

After observing that Europeans want to trade goods for the skins and other items, natives enter into that commercial relationship.

As a consequence, both sides become involved in the conflicts of the other.

The Europeans in New France, Carolina, Virginia, New England, and New Netherland become drawn into the endemic warfare of their trading partners.

Charles II gives the newly acquired lands between New England and Maryland to his brother, the Duke of York (later King James II), as a proprietary colony, in 1665.

The colony, renamed New York, stretches from...

...Delaware Bay to ...

...Fort Orange.

Berkeley and Carteret try to entice more settlers to New Jersey in 1665 by granting land to settlers and by passing the Concession and Agreement, a document granting religious freedom to all inhabitants of New Jersey; the British Church of England allows no such religious freedom.

It is issued as a proclamation for the structure of the government for the colony written by the two proprietors.

In return for land, settlers pay annual fees known as quitrents.

The proprietors appoint Philip Carteret, George Carteret’s cousin, as the first governor of New Jersey, who designates Elizabethtown as the colony's capital.

The rapid progress of the French has greatly alarmed the United Provinces, who are desperate to maintain the Spanish Netherlands as a buffer state.

The Netherlands therefore hurriedly end their war with England, and despite the very successful conduct of the war, sign the Treaty of Breda on July 31, 1667, together with England, France, and Denmark.

The Dutch secure a worldwide monopoly on nutmeg by forcing England to give up their claim on Run, the most remote of the Banda Islands.

The Act of Navigation is moderated in that the Dutch are now allowed to ship German goods, if imported over the Rhine, to England.

As communications are slow, special dates are established for the different parts of the world, on which legal hostilities would end: September 5 for the English Channel and the North Sea, October 5 for the other European seas, November 2 for the African coast north of the equator and April 24, 1668, for the rest of the world.

Acadia is returned to France, without specifying what North American territories are actually involved on the ground.

Thomas Temple, the proprietor, residing in Boston, had been given a charter by Cromwell, which is ignored in the Treaty, and the actual handing off is delayed at the site until 1670.

In addition, the conquest of New Netherland by the English is confirmed on July 21, 1667, producing the Colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Delaware.

The Caribbean island of Saint Kitts is repartitioned between English and French forces.

The parties agree to postpone a discussion of the pawnings of Orkney (1468) and Shetland (1469) until a future occasion.

A large-scale slave trade with English privateers has begun.

The life expectancy of slaves is much higher in North America than further south, because of less disease and better food and treatment, leading to a rapid increase in the numbers of slaves.

Colonial society is largely divided over the religious and moral implications of slavery and colonies pass acts for and against the practice, but by the turn of the eighteenth century, enslaved Africans are replacing indentured servants for cash crop labor, especially in southern regions.

The thirteen colonies that will become the United States of America have all been established by 1732 with the British colonization of Georgia.

All have local governments with elections open to most free men, with a growing devotion to the ancient rights of Englishmen and a sense of self-government stimulating support for republicanism.

With extremely high birth rates, low death rates, and steady settlement, the colonial population grows rapidly as relatively small native populations are eclipsed.

British forces seize Canada from the French during the Seven Years' War (known as the French and Indian War in America), but the francophone population remains politically isolated from the southern colonies.

Excluding the natives, who are being conquered and displaced, the thirteen British colonies that will form the United States have a population of over two million one hundred thousand in 1770, about one-third that of Britain.

Despite continuing new arrivals, the rate of natural increase is such that by the 1770s only a small minority of Americans had been born overseas.

The colonies' distance from Britain has allowed the development of self-government, but their success motivates monarchs to periodically seek to reassert royal authority.