Three Colonial Regions, Three Economies
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What students do
- Compare how coastline, soil, and growing season pushed three colonial regions toward three different economies
- Distinguish indentured servitude from chattel slavery using evidence from the lesson and from colonial law
- Read three passages from the 1775 book American Husbandry and name what its commercial lens shows and what it hides
- Trace how mercantilism and triangular trade connected all three regions to Atlantic markets
What it covers
- Why New England's economy leaned on the sea and shipbuilding instead of staple crops
- Why the Middle Colonies became the colonies' grain exporters
- How Southern plantation agriculture tied land to coerced labor
- How to read John Mitchell's 1755 map of British North America as an argument, not a picture
Learning targets
- Compare how geography shaped work across three colonial regions.
- Explain why New England relied on the sea and commerce.
- Explain why the Middle Colonies sold grain abroad.
- Connect plantation crops to coerced labor in Southern colonies.
- Judge how a 1775 writer described colonial work.
From one teacher to another
Most colonial-regions lessons stop at a sorting chart, so students memorize three lists but don't ever work out why. I wanted them doing the actual causal thinking: why thin soil and good harbors produce sailors and shipbuilders in one region while river access produces grain merchants in another. Labor gets treated with the same care, a fixed-term contract and a lifelong, race-based system kept deliberately distinct, and the 1775 source at the end asks students to credit what it documents about trade while naming exactly what its author's viewpoint erases.
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