THE DEVELOPMENT OF EMPIRE
The British colonies in America had begun as separate projects, and for the most part they grew up independent of one another and subject to only nominal control from London. But by the mid-seventeenth century, the growing commercial success of the colonial ven- tures was producing pressure in England for a more uniform structure to the empire.
The English government began trying to regulate colonial trade in the 1650s, when Parliament passed laws to keep Dutch ships out of the British colonies. Later, Parliament passed three important Navigation Acts. The first of them, in 1660, closed the colonies to all trade except that carried by English ships. The English also required that tobacco and other items be exported from the colonies only to England or to English possessions. The second act, in 1663, required that all goods sent from Europe to the colonies pass through Britain on the way, where they would be subject to English taxation. The third act, in 1673, imposed duties on the coastal trade among the English colonies, and it provided for the appointment of customs officials to enforce the Navigation Acts. These acts formed the legal basis of England’s regulation of the colonies for a century.
how Indian societies often determined the character of relationships with colonial powers. Indeed, she argues that it was Indians who drew Europeans into their practices of diplomacy, warfare, family, agriculture, and gender. Similarly, Pekka Hamalainen, in The Comanche Empire (2008), details how the Comanche controlled vast swaths of the American Southwest, besting European colonial powers through their military and economic power throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centu- ries. He portrays the Comanche as building a successful empire that unraveled more because of internal mistakes and divisions than European conquest. And Michael Witgen, in An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America (2013), studies how the Anishinaabe and
Dakota of the Great Lakes and Northern Plains controlled trade and diplomacy in these regions despite the incursions of Europeans. Even as they interacted with European agents, they were far from con- quered or absorbed. Instead, they tended to control the patterns of interaction and cooperation and nurtured an independent culture for generations.