Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Introduction
The Colonies in the Eighteenth Century
After the upheavals of the period of the Glorious Revolution in England
(late l68Os-early 1690s), the American colonies had settled down into an
uneasy truce by the end of the first decade of the eighteenth century. During
the first half of the eighteenth century—or, more precisely, from about 1710
until the end of the French and Indian War in 1763—the colonies settled
into a relatively stable society and form of government. Stable, relative to the
swift and dramatic changes of the preceding century, when the American colonies
were founded. The history of the colonies during this period can therefore
be examined in a far more cross-sectional, and less chronological, manner
than can the earlier century, or the dramatic and exciting pre-Revolutionary
and Revolutionary eras that followed.
But the first half of the eighteenth century was not only a stable time for
the colonies. It also saw far greater uniformity between the separate colonies
than could have been imagined in the preceding century. The diversity—of
religion, of motivation, of government, of culture—between the various colonies
had been enormous. What possible connection could there be between
the grim Puritan theocrats of Massachusetts Bay and the tolerant, pacific, and
enterprising Quakers of Pennsylvania; between the Puritans and the aristocratic
landed elite of tobacco-growing Virginia; or between the Dutch in New
Amsterdam and the Swedes on the Delaware? But the events and upheavals
of the 1680s and 1690s had sewn, for the first time, a firm thread of uniformity
throughout the colonies. The common imposition of political institutions;
a common relationship to the mother country, Great Britain—these common
experiences were, slowly but surely, to weld a solidarity between these once
totally disparate settlements, a solidarity that would ripen. Without these unifying
experiences over the first half of the century, the united effort of the
13