An aerial view of Baltimore, Maryland.
An aerial view of the city of Baltimore in Maryland, USA. Maryland was founded by Sir George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, a convert to Roman Catholicism. Sir George resigned his position in the court of King Charles I (r. 1625-1649), and was granted land in the New World to make a place of refuge for fellow-Catholics, at that time the target of discrimination and even persecution at the hands of Charles’s Protestant opponents in Parliament. Maryland was named after Charles’s consort Queen Henrietta Maria, daughter of King Henry IV of France, herself a Roman Catholic.
FOLLY and injustice seem to have been the principles which presided over and directed the first project of establishing those colonies; the folly of hunting after gold and silver mines,* and the injustice of coveting the possession of a country whose harmless natives, far from having ever injured the people of Europe, had received the first adventurers with every mark of kindness and hospitality.
The English puritans, restrained at home, fled for freedom to America, and established there the four governments of New England.* The English catholics, treated with much greater injustice, established that of Maryland;* the quakers, that of Pennsylvania.* The Portuguese Jews, persecuted by the Inquisition,* stripped of their fortunes, and banished to Brazil, introduced, by their example, some sort of order and industry among the transported felons and strumpets by whom that colony was originally peopled.
Upon all these different occasions, it was not the wisdom and policy, but the disorder and injustice of the European governments, which peopled and cultivated America.
Adam Smith was one of the first people in history to appreciate that a nation’s wealth is not to be measured by how much gold and silver its Exchequer has amassed. That error is the basis of Mercantilism, whereby the Government works hand-in-glove with favoured companies to seize and stockpile gold, tax foreign imports, and carefully regulate international trade to weaken competitors. Smith argued that a nation’s wealth is the free economic activity of its citizens, its ‘gross national product’, not the hoarded gold of its Government, and that competition and foreign trade make everyone better off. See The Adam Smith Institute for more.
They were: Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. Massachusetts grew out of Plymouth Colony, founded at Cape Cod by the so-called Pilgrim Fathers in 1620, under the auspices of the Colony of Virginia established in 1606. See The Voyage of the ‘Mayflower’.
Maryland was founded in 1632 by convert Sir George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore. Although created for persecuted Roman Catholics, it was never restricted to them. He named it after Queen Henrietta Maria, daughter of King Henry IV of France, and consort of King Charles I of England.
Founded by Englishman William Penn (1644-1718) on the basis of a Royal Charter granted to him in 1681 by Charles II, in acknowledgment of a debt of honour to Penn’s father. The Quakers, founded by George Fox in 1650, were originally hardline Protestants in the Calvinist and Puritan tradition; gradually they moderated their severity. Many leading figures in the abolition of slavery and prison reform were Quakers.
A programme similar to the Spanish Inquisition was established by King John III of Portugal in 1532. It was feared that converts to Christianity from other religions, chiefly Judaism but in colonies such as Goa in India also Hinduism, did not hold to strict official Roman Catholic teaching; so trials were convened, and some 40,000 people were transported or bound over to comply with Government’s official morality and religion. The Inquisition continued, both in Portugal and in the country’s colonies, until 1821.
Précis
Eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith argued that the success of British and Spanish colonies in the Americas was despite, not because of Government policy. The quest for gold was founded on a bad economics, their treatment of indigenous populations was high-handed, and the colonies were often peopled by those fleeing injustice at home. (52 / 60 words)
