Can Americans/anyone who is good at history tell me, a person who isn't from the US, why the Europeans colonized America?

You pretty much covered it in your question.

There wasn’t one reason and it all certainly wasn’t for good reasons.

There were many early explorations across the Atlantic that indicated that there was a vast amount of mostly untapped land and natural resources. Columbus didn’t “discover America”, as we were told in elementary school. He was simply one of those explorers of what came to be known as the Americas (named for Amerigo Vaspucci, map maker and explorer).

The main reasons, in my opinion were greed and selfishness.

“Religious freedom” is often cited as a reason the “Pilgrims” and others came to America, but they were religious zealots themselves who didn’t tolerate others’ beliefs very well.

While I’m sure some Europeans and Native Americans got along, the white folks were mostly interested in stealing their land. I’m not even sure early settlers would have seen it as stealing as that would imply a certain amount of humanity attributed to Native Americans whom were seen as “savages” by the Europeans.

Plus, of course, colonialism didn’t begin or end with the America’s.

Billions and billions of dollars in Gold, silver, emeralds and other jewels ! In today’s dollars.

As @cookieman points out, what became the United States was not the only place colonized during the European Age of Exploration. The Spanish, British, French,Dutch and Portuguese also explored and established colonies in Africa, the Far East and Central and South America. A large part of the reason for most colonization was for the exploitation of the natural and human resources (think enslavement) in these differently developed regions. Later justifications for some of the colonization was for religious conversion such as the Spaniards who subjugated the Native American tribes in the West through missionary work. And of course, this was happening in African countries as well.

We were taught that when Columbus and other explorers first came to the Americas they were looking for a faster trade route to the East. But once reports of this rich new land were sent back by the explorers, many were sent to exploit the natives and the resources. And some groups did come to escape religious persecution like the Huguenots from France.

An equivalent today is the race for space and the idea of colonizing Mars.

@Tropical_Willie How do they know there was gold there though? And even if there was gold, wasn’t it more logical to just gather a bunch of soldiers, kill all the natives, take their gold and go back to their place? It took more work to colonize an entire land.

@Mimishu1995 Different groups came for lots of different reasons. The Spanish explorers in the West were lured by gold although a lot of what they sought was mythical. Mostly the Spaniards were conquistadors here to do what you said – take the gold, kill the natives and run. But they were also accompanied by religious men like Father Junipero Serra who established missions that subjugated the Native tribes to persuade them to follow Christ.

Look at India as another example of this. Or French-Indochine. Surely there are parallels.

You’re talking about a period of several hundred years and many different regions so different means of exploitation were used at different times.

As to why colonize, many of the colonists were poor in their home countries and seeking to better their lot. And it was to the benefit of rich merchants and royalty to establish permanent colonies so they could grow crops like tobacco and cotton that thrived in the Americas and could be shipped to Europe. Tea from China! You needed some kind of permanent infrastructure for the growing and transporting of these products.

As to your first question, it wasn’t colonized all at once. Different small colonies over many years. And the West wasn’t settled or part of the US until many years later.

@janbb Thank you for pointing to the French-Indochine thing. So if I think of it as something similar to what happened to my country during the French invasion, I would be able to understand better right?

Your explanation is the best so far :)

@Mimishu1995 they didn’t know from the start but once in the Americas they found riches beyond their wildest dreams.

Here are 15 of the most important explorers.

For the freedom to practice religion as they chose.

Wealth. At first they just explored. Then they traded with the natives a bit. Then once they realized the true wealth of the Americas lay not with it’s gold but in its soil they were determined to possess the New World.

Empire building to put it simply.

Yes, wealth, power, influence, and competition with other European powers, mainly. Great Britain ended up with one of the most powerful and largest empires the world has ever seen. Even small Holland managed to have a very large number of extremely profitable colonies all over the world.

It wasn’t entirely just greed and powermongering, in that the mindset of competition and threat meant that the colonizing nations considered each other to be threats, and so they felt a need to compete in this way in order to protect themselves from being invaded and defeated by the others militarily. And that wasn’t just an idea – see for example the Spanish Armada’s move to invade Britain.

The truth about religion is that people were persecuted and killed in some areas, and still are, for practicing their brand of religion.

As history progressed some slaves, criminals or younger noble sons who wouldn’t inherit, would be sent to the colonies to find their fortune or handle the estates for their families. Plantations and land were often granted to nobles, who had duties and estates in Europe or elsewhere. Then various immigrations including the Irish potato famine through the Vietnam War, the US has always offered another chance for legal immigrants.

To me, it’s much the same now with foreign companies buying up rural land cheap, for factory farms or other purposes. And as we have financial interests globally as well.

History is so interesting.

Countries have always fought over land. The New World was a golden opportunity since the Native Americans lacked the European weaponry. You could equally ask why Africa was colonized.

World domination.

Land.

Wealth, politics, freedom, politics, wealth.

Land.

I figure the first explorers and settlers were some sort of a combination of a curious bunch, seeking wealth, or they came to the New World to escape persecution and poverty. If you are dying where you are living then taking a chance at freedom and safety (relatively speaking) seems worth the risk to some people.

Religious freedom was a big deal, especially for my group. I think they hoped to find gold and other things to be able to trade. There was an Asian trade route with Europe already. My history sucks, you should google for American history and a lot of it will come up. The 1400’s though 1600’s would give you a lot of information about the original explorers.

The Sephardic Jews from Portugal started coming to the Americans in the 1600’s if I remember correctly. Some had gone to England first and met religious persecution there and then came to what is the US today. Some had gone to Brazil when there was Dutch had a settlement there I think, and then later to the United States because the Dutch tolerated us and felt we were good business partners. It’s something like that.

So, yeah, wealth, politics, religious freedom, other freedoms, land, conquering.

The Spanish explorers came first. They landed in what is now called Mexico, and laid waste to the native Americans living there, searching for gold. They brought the first horses the American Indians had ever seen.

Europe was very interested in establishing an off-shore penal colony. (They were somewhat more successful with Australia) Many people that ended up in America did not go of their own free will in search of a better life as many are “taught.”. They were SENT as heretics (which is where the concept of religious freedom comes in), criminals, drunkards, etc. Most people who can trace their heritage to the Original Colonies tell stories of a great-great-great-great-great someone who was a: thief, vagrant, prostitute, etc. There’s a reason for that.

^^ I know that Georgia was established as a penal colony (which may explain a lot.)

@Dutchess_III That doesn’t sound right. Columbus first landed on the island of Hispañola.

Edit: I wonder what the chronology is after that. I just don’t remember. The Spanish went to St. Augustine. Ponce de Leon and the fountain of youth. I don’t know when the Spanish first arrived in Mexico. I didn’t do well in Latin American history.

Columbus was an explorer for Italy.
I stand corrected. Columbus came first in 1492.
The Spanish came in 1519 or so.

I know he was Italian, but the Spanish funded Columbus. I still think Ponce de Leon was the next explorer to come to the Americas, and that would be to St. Augustine, FL.

Explorers in general were always motivated by the thought of Gold. Or maybe not so much the explorers themselves but those who funded their trips. You are rich and already have power, then what does it hurt to fund some ships to go out and grab you some land and gold. The Nobles didn’t have to do the hard work. They only needed to fund it. It was always about money and till today continues to be the reason why just about anyone explores and how they get funded. The promise of a possible pot of gold, in the end, is a great motivator. Then the rest is easy once good land is found and can be colonized and farmed or raided. As for nations, they always try to expand their empire.
And the poor had every reason to leave and none to stay if they were ever going to have a shot at changing their lives for the better.

@Dutchess_III Ok, I had time to google. I didn’t realize that Ponce de Leon came over to the Americas with Columbus on his second voyage in 1493. It says on the Wikipedia that he traveled to Hispanola and Puerto Rico in the early 1500’s and then to St. Augustine in 1513, but says he tried to establish colony in 1521. So, maybe Mexico had the first Spanish colony in 1519? I am not sure, but maybe that is the distinction.

The Italians funded Columbus, not the Spanish. The Spanish funded themselves. And that is why Mexicans speak Spanish today.

I thought Queen Isabella funded Columbus.

@Dutchess_III

No. Columbus was Italian, but his expeditions were funded by the Spanish crown.

I concede @Darth_Algar.
BUT THEY BROUGHT THE FIRST HORSES TO AMERICA!

LOL. :) Ok, yes on the horses.

There is a recent theory that Columbus was actually an agent of Portugal. Here’s an article about that theory.

Thank you everyone for your input. Your answers have given me a lot of perspective.

So what prompted this question was a children’s book I just bought to do research for my story. I’m working on a story about a soldier being stranded in an island inhabited by strange wolf people and having to rely on a kind wolf man to function around the island. The island’s people hate humans because of a history of war between the two, and it’s up to the soldier and the wolf man to resolve the hate. The conflict between the wolves and the humans is based loosely on the period of colonization, and I’m trying to find a good reason for why the wolves and the humans went into war in the first place.

So, back to the book. I was reading the first page when I was immediately thrown off by this line “a pilgrim is someone who goes on a long trip in God’s name.” What kind of God pushed people to a land they didn’t know well? And I learned at school that the settlers went to America to take the land, not worship God. So I went here to ask to clear up my confusion.

@Mimishu1995 I could see the wolves and humans competing for natural resources and food, since both are usually meat eaters. If the wolves chose to live on an island, minus humans, and one showed up, I could see that angering them. Sounds like a fun book, I’d read that!

@Mimishu1995 A pilgrimage can refer to any type of religious journey one undertakes. In Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales they were going on a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral. Pilgrims went to the Holy Land. Although some of the colonialists were called Pilgrims the term doesn’t really mean they were sent by God to America.

The Protestants were persecuted by the ruling Catholics backin Ye Olde England. So they ran away.
But thats just 1 reason out of many.
It’s also kid friendly, whereas plunder and rape is not.

@Dutchess_III What period are you talking about? Mainly Catholics were persecuted by Protestants after Henry the 8th established the Church of England. There were brief periods when the Catholics were in ascendance but not many.

1600s. When the Mayflower sailed.

“Differing from their contemporaries, the Puritans (who sought to reform and purify the Church of England), the Pilgrims chose to separate themselves from the Church of England because they believed that it was beyond redemption due to its Roman Catholic past and the church’s resistance to reform, which forced them to pray in private.”

Queen Isabella was a Catholic, and during that time in Spain the Catholics were in control and forcing people to convert or leave the country. In fact the Pope titled her “the Catholic” I don’t remember the name of that Pope.

This is why much of Latin America, which is predominately Spanish speaking is Catholic.

It’s believed that many Spanish Catholics were Jewish many generations back.

Of course parts of America were also influenced and populated by the Spanish as we discussed above. Especially Florida, and later the French areas like Louisiana.

@Dutchess_III If you read your link, the Pilgrims were not persecuted by Catholics. They were critical of the remnants of the Church of England’s practices that were similar to Catholicism who also were not Catholics. They were a stricter schism of Protestantism.

And yes @JLeslie the Spanish were Catholic but that’s really not what we’re discussing now.

@janbb Agreed, but I’m just saying not everyone who came to America to settle were Protestants being persecuted by the Catholics. Some were Catholics bringing Catholicism to the Americas. Depends what time in history we are talking about and what part of the world the people were coming from. America is full of hundreds of different stories. Plus, we talked about Columbus at length above and Isabella funded his exploration.

Of course the story of the Pilgrims and other Protestants is also true and big parts of the original 13 colonies.

It wasn’t just for freedom of religion, it was for resources, like land. With huge tracts of land, the early settlers started tobacco plantations, sugar plantations, cotton plantations, etc. I believe the first tobacco plantations were in the late 1500’s or early 1600’s.

Tobacco in the US colonies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_in_the_American_colonies

@Mimishu1995, so just to be clear: your new perspective based on the answers is that Americans’ ideas of history are pretty confused? That seems to be the case here.

The general definition of “pilgrim” you have is right, and the term “pilgrimage” has a lot of uses; but the use of the term for the Pilgrim settlers of Massachusetts in 1620 was a special case. They were members of the Puritan sect who broke off from the established Church of England. There’s really no reason to think God sent them. Anyway, they went by way of the very hospitable Netherlands, which was not an unknown land and where they stayed for ten years. The term “Pilgrims” became attached to them later.

They were looking for a place where they could live by their own rules, which, by the way, meant they didn’t tolerate people who lived by rules other than theirs. But by then there had been explorations and settlements by Europeans along the North American coast for more than 100 years, and they were driven by curiosity and greed much more than by any religious motivation.

The lands were already populated, though, and the native peoples were at first very helpful to the settlers, teaching them things and giving them food. That’s how many of them survived. The settlers repaid them by robbing them, killing them, and even enslaving them. Not all, but some, and enough to turn amicable neighborliness into deep mistrust and hostility.

If you look at the history of the British Empire, just for one example, you will see that unfamiliarity of environment, language, culture, and religion was no barrier to colonization around the world. The English were from a little island and were looking at a vast expanse of open land with unknown possibilities for prosperity and power. What were a few little hardships compared with the opportunities?

Good point about religion, @Jeruba. My college history professor used to say the pilgrims didn’t want freedom of religion, they wanted freedom of their religion.

@jca2, right. Roger Williams, remember, founded Providence, Rhode Island, as a refuge for people escaping the religious oppression of the colonists in Massachusetts:

Religious dissident Roger Williams is banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony by the General Court of Massachusetts. Williams had spoken out against the right of civil authorities to punish religious dissension and to confiscate Native American land.

According to my reading, the concept of separation of church and state, so fundamental to our constitutional government, was promoted by Williams not so much to keep religion out of the state as to keep the state from messing with religion, which he thought had to be protected from secular authority.

^^Interesting.

@Jeruba: Also, Anne Hutchinson (who, here has a parkway named after her):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Hutchinson

@Jeruba Re: Separation of church and state: that seems to be the current Supreme Court reading of it as well.

^^ Although again there does seem to be a problem around protecting all freedom of religion versus protecting freedom to follow one particular religion.

(My cited reading wasn’t a reading of the law but of a book about Roger Williams.)

I don’t see the problem @Jeruba.

@Dutchess_III, well, that’s my opinion and not a fact. I don’t like to see religion intruding into any judicial or other governmental process, and especially not favoring one religion over others.

of course we don’t. It’s expressly forbidden by the Contitution.
I don’t understand the problem in ”Although again there does seem to be a problem around protecting all freedom of religion versus protecting freedom to follow one particular religion.” What problem are you seeing?

@Dutchess_III I’m sure @Jeruba can speak for herself but what I interpret her to mean is that we, i.e. the Supreme Court, seem to be skewing towards protecting specifically Christian rights and practices rather than the rights of all religions to worship as they please.

@janbb And most Christians seem to be okay with that. I don’t understand it.

I always tell them, if you favor a religion against the Constitution, what happens when that religion is NOT Christianity. That’s the only argument that gets through to them.

Same concept The Satanic Temple was attempting to impart with the Baphomet statue battles in the US, although for different intents, I’m sure.

I don’t think it’s a problem. If you could give me a real life example that shows that it is I’ll check it out.

I’ll let @Jeruba answer if she cares to. The question is really for her.

Yes, thanks, @janbb. Talking about overturning Roe v. Wade, for one.

I really didn’t want to start something here, though. Sorry, @Mimishu1995.

That’s a good example @Jeruba. Now we’re on the same page.

@Jeruba No, I don’t mean that America’s ideas are confused. I just meant that I have never heard about things like a thirst for gold or the rulers having nothing to lose from sending people to America. To be honest though, I didn’t learn much about any of this at school. My school just stopped at Columbus discovering America and jumped straight to America fighting for freedom, so there was clearly a gap in my knowledge of what happened in-between Columbus and the Revolutionary War. And most of the information I found on the Internet was written from an American’s perspective, so I just wanted to get an explanation that is easier to understand for a foreigner.

GQ.

One of the aspects of US history that seems to be getting overlooked here I’d one American South West. Most of the land between California and Texas, roughly south of Oregon, Idaho, Montana and South Dakota was once part of Mexico, and colonized be Spain. Many of the original Spanish settlers were granted land by the Spanish crown. Many Spanish settlers were what were known as conversos, meaning they or their ancestors had converted from Judaism to Christianity to escape persecution during the Spanish Inquisition. As generations passed, the religious part of the heritage may have dwindled off, leaving some practices and traditions. I have some friends of Hispanic heritage who tell me they are Catholic as far back as their family traditions can be traced. Interestingly, they say they don’t eat pork, also as far back as they know in their family.