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Comparative Studies
Historians generally distinguish three main ways in which European colonization differed from one another. The first is settler colonialism, by which was permanent settlements were established in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa by European arrivals primarily from Britain and France. Colonies often resulted in the forced migration of indigenous peoples. The second method, plantation colonialism, was instituted for the mass production of specific crops, such as coffee, tobacco, and cotton in the Caribbean and parts of North America. The final method of colonization is called the Iberian on-shore model which comprised a ruling minority of Spanish and Portuguese merchants, missionaries, and soldiers who enforced dominance over the indigenous populations in Mesoamerica.

France
France founded colonies in the Americas: in eastern North America (which had not been colonized by Spain north of Florida), a number of Caribbean islands (which had often already been conquered by the Spanish or depopulated by disease), and small coastal parts of South America. French explorers included Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524; Jacques Cartier (1491–1557), Henry Hudson (1560s–1611), and Samuel de Champlain (1567–1635), who explored the region now known as Canada that he reestablished as New France. About 16,000 French men and women emigrated to this land with the great majority becoming subsistence farmers along the St. Lawrence River and traded fur with the natives. The colony's climate was not conducive for the spreading of disease and so, their population grew exponentially to 65,000 by 1760. The colony was taken over by Britain in 1760, after the French and Indian war, but social, religious, legal, cultural and economic changes were few in a society that clung tightly to its recently formed traditions.

Britain
The British eventually went on to control much of North America, the Caribbean, and parts of South America. The first British colonization attempt was conducted in what is now Roanoke and Newfoundland, although unsuccessful. In 1606, King James I granted a charter with the purpose of discovering the riches at their first permanent settlement in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. They were sponsored by common stock companies such as the chartered Virginia Company, financed by wealthy Englishmen who exaggerated the economic potential of this new land.

In Britain, the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century broke the unity of Western Christendom and led to the formation of numerous new religious sects which often faced persecution by governmental authorities. Many people came to question the organization of the Church of England by the end of the 16th century. One of the primary manifestations was the Puritan movement, whicH sought to "purify" the existing Church of England of its residual Catholic rites. The first of these people, known as the Pilgrims, landed on what is now known as Plymouth Rock inMassachusetts on November, 1620. Continuous waves of repression led to the migration of about 20,000 Puritans to New England between 1629 and 1642, where they founded multiple colonies. Later in the century, the new Pennsylvania colony was given to William Penn as a settlement of a debt that the king owed his father. Penn established that the land would be used primarily as a refuge for persecuted English Quakers; although others were welcomed. Baptists, German and Swiss Protestants and Anabaptists also flocked to Pennsylvania. The lure of cheap land, religious freedom and the right to improve themselves with their own hand was very attractive. Unlike the Spaniards, the British came with families and permanently lived in what is now North America. Because the British colonizers' wives accompanied them, the colonizers rarely interbred with the native women nor had children of a mestizo race.

From the beginning of Virginia's settlements in 1587 until the 1680s, the main source of labor and a large portion of the immigrants were indentured servants looking for new life in the overseas colonies. During the 17th century, indentured servants constituted three-quarters of all European immigrants to the Chesapeake region. Most of the indentured servants were teenagers from England with poor economic prospects at home. Their fathers signed the papers that gave them free passage to America and an unpaid job until they became of age. They were given food, clothing, housing and taught farming or household skills. American landowners were in need of laborers and were willing to pay for a laborer's passage to America if they served them for several years. By selling passage for five to seven years worth of work, they could then start on their own in America. Many of the migrants from England died in the first few years.

Economic advantage also prompted the Darien Scheme, an ill-fated venture by the Kingdom of Scotland to settle the Isthmus of Panama in the late 1690s. The Darien Scheme aimed to control trade through that part of the world and thereby promote Scotland into a world trading power. It had poor planning, short provisions, weak leadership, lack of demand for trade goods, and devastating disease. The failure of the Darien Scheme was one of the factors that led the Kingdom of Scotland into the Act of Union 1707 with the Kingdom of England creating the united Kingdom of Great Britain and giving Scotland commercial access to English, now British, colonies.

Mainly due to discrimination, there was very little interaction between indigenous and British society. The Europeans viewed the natives as savages who were not worthy of participating in what they considered civilized society. Due in part to their exclusion from British society, the native people of North America did not die out nearly as rapidly nor as greatly as those in Central and South America. Still, many conflicts arose between the British and Indians, such as the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears. These policies stripped the natives from their lands and pushed them further out west.

France and England
The French colonial regions in the Caribbean were economically focused on sugar plantations. For Britain, John Smith, convinced the colonists of Jamestown that searching for gold was not meeting their immediate needs for food and shelter. The lack of food security leading to extremely high mortality rate was quite distressing and cause for despair among the colonists. To support the colony, numerous supply missions were organized. Tobacco later became a cash crop as the sustaining economic driver of Virginia and Maryland.

Spain
Systematic European colonization began in 1492, when a Spanish expedition headed by the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus sailed west to find a new trade route to the Far East but inadvertently landed in what came to be known to Europeans as the "New World". He ran aground on 5 December 1492 on Cat Island (then called Guanahani) in The Bahamas, which the Lucayan people had inhabited since the 9th century. Western European conquest, large-scale exploration and colonization soon followed after the Spanish and Portuguese final reconquest of Iberia in 1492. Columbus's first two voyages (1492–93) reached Hispaniola and various other Caribbean islands, including Puerto Rico and Cuba. In the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, ratified by the Pope, these two kingdoms divided the entire non-European world into two areas of exploration and colonization, with a north to south boundary that cut through the Atlantic Ocean and the eastern part of present-day Brazil. The Spaniards began building their empire of the Americas in the Caribbean, using islands such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola as bases.In 1497, Italian explorer John Cabot, on behalf of the Kingdom of England, landed on the North American coast, and a year later, Columbus's third voyage reached the South American coast. As the sponsor of Christopher Columbus's voyages, Spain was the first European power to settle and colonize the largest areas, from North America and the Caribbean to the southern tip of South America. Based on this treaty and on early claims by Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa, discoverer of the Pacific Ocean in 1513, the Spanish conquered large territories in North, Central and South America.

Ten years after Columbus's discovery, the administration of Hispaniola was given to Nicolás de Ovando of the Order of Alcántara, founded during the Reconquista. As in the Iberian Peninsula, the inhabitants of Hispaniola were given new landmasters, while religious orders handled the local administration. Progressively the encomienda system, which granted tribute (access to indigenous labor and taxation) to European settlers, was set in place. To reward their troops, the Conquistadores often allotted Indian towns to their troops and officers. African slaves were introduced to substitute Native American labor where the indigenous population was nearing extinction on many islands. Over the first century and a half after Columbus's voyages, the native population of the Americas plummeted by an estimated 80% (from around 50 million in 1492 to eight million in 1650), mostly by outbreaks of Old World disease. Some authors have argued this demographic collapse to be the first large-scale act of genocide in the modern era.

Portugal
The Portuguese gradually switched from an initial plan of establishing trading posts to extensive colonization of what is now Brazil. They imported millions of slaves to run their plantations. The Portuguese and Spanish royal governments expected to rule these settlements and collect at least 20% of all treasure found (the quinto real collected by the Casa de Contratación), in addition to collecting all the taxes they could. By the late 16th century silver from the Americas accounted for one-fifth of Iberia's total budget. In the 16th century about 240,000 Europeans entered ports in the Americas.

Spain
The Spanish had different goals in their exploration of the land than the other European powers. They came to make a fortune and take it back home to Spain while never having the intention to stay and create a new life. They had three goals for exploration: “Conquer, convert, or become rich”. The Spanish justified their claims to the New World based on the Ideals of the Reconquista. They saw their reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula out from the Moor's control as evidence of the “divine help". They believed it was their duty to save the natives from eternal damnation by converting them to Christianity. In 1431 the first Spaniard had finally became Pope. This was interpreted as justification for Spain’s right to implement Christianity throughout the world. And with the English Protestants colonizing North America, the Spanish Catholics felt even more pressure to exert their power throughout the Central and South American lands.

Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés took over the Aztec Kingdom and from 1519 to 1521, he waged a campaign against the Aztec Empire, ruled by Moctezuma II. The Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, became Mexico City, the chief city of what the Spanish were now calling "New Spain". More than 240,000 Aztecs died during the siege of Tenochtitlan, 100,000 in combat, while 500–1,000 of the Spaniards engaged in the conquest died. Other conquistadors, such as Hernando de Soto, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, pushed farther north, from Florida, Mexico, and the Caribbean, respectively, in the early 1500s. In 1513, Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and led the first European expedition to see the Pacific Ocean from the west coast of the New World. In an action with enduring historical import, Balboa claimed the Pacific Ocean and all the lands adjoining it for the Spanish Crown. It was 1517 before another expedition, from Cuba, visited Central America, landing on the coast of Yucatán in search of slaves. To the south, Francisco Pizarro conquered the Inca Empire during the 1530s. As a result, by the mid-16th century, the Spanish Crown had gained control of much of western South America, and southern North America, in addition to its earlier Caribbean territories.

On Columbus's return to Hispaniola in November 1493, he learned that his men had been massacred by another Taino tribe. In revolt, Columbus and his army attacked the Indians, capturing about 2,000 and sending 500 of these prisoners of war (POW) to Spain where they were enslaved. The “Practice of Tribute” required that every Indian male turn in a certain amount of gold every ninety days or face death. The reading of The Requerimento before war was intelligible to the natives but stated that the indigenous peoples were subjects of the Spanish Crown and would be tortured upon resistance.

Portugal
Over this same timeframe as Spain, Portugal claimed lands in North America (Canada) and colonized much of eastern South America, naming it Santa Cruz and Brazil. On behalf of both the Portuguese and Spanish crowns, cartographer Americo Vespuscio explored the American east coast, and published in 1502–1503, his new book Mundus Novus (New World), which disproved the belief that the Americas were the easternmost part of Asia and confirmed that Columbus had reached a set of continents previously unheard of to any Europeans. Cartographers still use a Latinized version of his first name, America, for the two continents. Portuguese conquerer, Pedro Álvares Cabral colonized Brazil while others tried colonized the eastern coasts of present-day Canada and of the River Plate. These include João Vaz Corte-Real in Newfoundland; João Fernandes Lavrador, Gaspar and Miguel Corte-Real and João Álvares Fagundes, in Newfoundland, Greenland, Labrador, and Nova Scotia (from 1498 to 1502, and in 1520).

The most distinct and important way that the Spanish and Portuguese differed in their colonization practices was through the creation of a new class of people: the mestizo. Due to rape and intermarriage with indigenous women, the mestizo population consisted of European and Native American ancestry. A caste system based on skin tone was set forth basing those with the darkest skin as the lowest status of hierarchal order. The order from highest to low was Spanish, mestizo, indigenous, mulatto, African.