The economic policy of Mercantilism was designed around the premise that the colonies existed to build up the supply of gold in Empire. To achieve this goal a nation had to build up a favorable balance of trade by exporting more than it imported. The primacy of this belief in Europe helped foster the dramatic race for Empire around the globe as each additional resource, manufacturing centre and market helped contribute to the balance of trade. New England shipbuilders benefitted from the Navigation Acts because they protected their enterprise from foreign competition. Southerners found the market for their goods shrinking as it could only be shipped to England, which in turn encouraged smuggling. Conversely, far from being brought closer together, the English and French colonies began to fight extensively in the mid-eighteenth century as English settlers began to spread North and West into French lands. 

The establishment, by John Rolfe in 1619, of tobacco as the primary cash crop of the colony lead directly to economic prosperity in Jamestown and helped stem the tide of winter starvations that had previously blighted the colony. Although aid from the Native Americans was important, it was insufficient to prevent the colony slowly atrophying. 

Bacon’s Rebellion took place in Virginia, in 1676. It was an armed uprising by indentured servants, poor settlers and slaves against the rule of Virginia Governor William Berkeley. The rebellion began because Berkeley failed to provide for the safety of the colonists against Native American incursions, and because the poorer classes in the colonies—both black and white—were disturbed by the strict hierarchical nature of colonial Virginian society. The makeshift alliance between black slaves and white indentured servants disturbed the ruling classes greatly, and it caused a massive reduction in the use of indentured servants for labor, leading to a hardening of the racial hierarchy of colonial America—particularly in the South.

During the colonial period, neither Northerners nor Southerners held much regard for the rights of blacks. However, in the North the economy was much more heavily based around small land holdings and city life than it was in the South. The South produced the vast majority of America’s cash crops. Southerners believed that they could not keep their plantations operating profitably without the import of black slaves – an opinion that would persist up to, and past, the outbreak of the Civil War.

The 1773 protest by the Sons of Liberty in Boston was in response to, and in defiance of, the Tea Act of 1773. The Sons of Liberty protested by destroying shipments of tea sent by the East India Company by throwing them into Boston Harbor.

The Stamp Act was a duty imposed on the revenue of the American Colonies. The Intolerable Acts and the Coercive Acts were colloquial names for the series of rulings made by the British Parliament in response to the 1773 protest. The Townshend Acts referred to a series of acts concerned with the American colonies, passed in 1767.