Thirteen Colonies That Were Never Meant to Become One Country

The thirteen British colonies in North America were founded at different times, for different reasons, by people who often disliked each other. Massachusetts was settled by religious dissenters who wanted separation. Virginia was a business venture that nearly failed. Pennsylvania was a proprietor's experiment. Georgia was a buffer zone. Nothing about them pointed toward union, and for most of their existence they had more contact with London than with each other. This documentary covers the hundred and seventy years before independence, when the outcome was not yet visible to anyone living through it. It begins with the failed attempts that came first, and the extremely thin margin by which the early settlements survived at all. It covers how each colony developed its own economy, its own religious character, and its own relationship with the crown, and why a merchant in Boston and a planter in Charleston in 1700 would have understood themselves as belonging to different worlds. The middle chapters cover the machinery: the assemblies, the charters, the trade laws, and the enormous distance that made enforcement of anything from London slow and unreliable. It covers the labour systems the colonial economy rested on, including indentured servitude and slavery, and how those systems differed sharply between north and south. It covers the wars with France, and how paying for them changed everything. The final chapters trace the two decades in which thirteen separate places discovered a shared grievance, and how quickly a set of tax disputes turned into something else. The documentary ends where the colonial period ends, without extending into the revolution itself. Narration is measured and even, without dramatisation, suited to background listening or sleep. Where historians disagree about causes, the disagreement is stated rather than resolved.