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European colonization of the Americas

During the Age of Discovery, a large scale colonization of the Americas, involving a number of European countries, took place primarily between the late 15th century and the early 19th century. The Norse had explored and colonized areas of Europe and the North Atlantic, colonizing Greenland and creating a short term settlement near the northern tip of Newfoundland circa 1000 AD. However, due to its long duration and importance, the later colonization by the European powers involving the continents of North America and South America is more well-known.

During this time, the European empires of Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, Russia, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden began to explore and claim the Americas, its natural resources, and human capital, leading to the displacement, disestablishment, enslavement, and even genocide of the Indigenous peoples in the Americas,  and the establishment of several settler colonial states. Some settler colonies remain relatively rural and sparsely populated with Indigenous people as of the 21st century, including New Mexico, Alaska, the northern Great Plains, the North-Western Territory, and Greenland in North America, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the Yucatán Peninsula, and the Darién Gap in Central America, and the northwest Amazon, the central Andes, the Guianas, the Gran Chaco, and Araucanía in South America.

Russia began colonizing the Pacific Northwest in the mid-18th century, seeking pelts for the fur trade. Many of the social structures—including religions, political boundaries, and linguae francae—which predominate in the Western Hemisphere in the 21st century are the descendants of those that were established during this period.

The rapid rate at which some European nations grew in wealth and power was unforeseeable in the early 15th century because it had been preoccupied with internal wars and it was slowly recovering from the loss of population caused by the Black Death. The Ottoman Empire's domination of trade routes to Asia prompted Western European monarchs to search for alternatives, resulting in the voyages of Christopher Columbus and his accidental arrival at the New World.

With the signing of the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, Portugal and Spain agreed to divide the Earth in two, with Portugal having dominion over non-Christian lands in the world's eastern half, and Spain over those in the western half. Spanish claims essentially included all of the Americas; however, the Treaty of Tordesillas granted the eastern tip of South America to Portugal, where it established Brazil in the early 1500s, and the East Indies to Spain, where It established the Philippines. The city of Santo Domingo, in the current-day Dominican Republic, founded in 1496 by Columbus, is credited as the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement in the Americas.

By the 1530s, other Western European powers realized they too could benefit from voyages to the Americas, leading to British and French colonializations in the northeast tip of the Americas, including in the present-day United States. Within a century, the Swedish established New Sweden; the Dutch established New Netherland; and Denmark–Norway along with the Swedish and Dutch established colonization of parts of the Caribbean. By the 1700s, Denmark–Norway revived its former colonies in Greenland, and Russia began to explore and claim the Pacific Coast from Alaska to California.

Violent conflicts arose during the beginning of this period as indigenous peoples fought to preserve their territorial integrity from increasing European colonizers and from hostile indigenous neighbors who were equipped with Eurasian technology. Conflict between the various European empires and the indigenous peoples was a leading dynamic in the Americas into the 1800s, although some parts of the continent gained their independence from Europe by then, countries such as the United States continued to fight against Native Americans and practiced settler colonialism. The United States for example practiced a settler colonial policy of Manifest Destiny and the Trail of Tears.

Other regions, including California, Patagonia, the North Western Territory, and the northern Great Plains, experienced little to no colonization at all until the 1800s. European contact and colonization had disastrous effects on the indigenous peoples of the Americas and their societies.

Norsemen
Norse Viking explorers are the first known Europeans to set foot on North America. Norse journeys to Greenland and Canada are supported by historical and archaeological evidence. The Norsemen established a colony in Greenland in the late tenth century, and lasted until the mid 15th-century, with court and parliament assemblies (þing) taking place at Brattahlíð and a bishop located at Garðar. The remains of a settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada, were discovered in 1960 and were dated to around the year 1000 (carbon dating estimate 990–1050). L'Anse aux Meadows is the only site widely accepted as evidence of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact. It was named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1978. It is also notable for its possible connection with the attempted colony of Vinland, established by Leif Erikson around the same period or, more broadly, with the Norse colonization of the Americas. Leif Erikson's brother is said to have had the first contact with the native population of North America which would come to be known as the skrælings. After capturing and killing eight of the natives, they were attacked at their beached ships, which they defended.

Spain

Systematic European colonization began in 1492. A Spanish expedition sailed west in order to find a new trade route to the Far East, the source of spices, silks, porcelains, and other rich trade goods. Ottoman control of the Silk Road, the traditional route for trade between Europe and Asia, forced European traders to look for alternative routes. The Genoese mariner Christopher Columbus led an expedition to find a route to East Asia, but instead landed in The Bahamas. Columbus encountered the Lucayan people on the island Guanahani (possibly Cat Island), which they had inhabited since the ninth century. In his reports, Columbus exaggerated the quantity of gold in the East Indies, which he called the "New World". These claims, along with the slaves he brought back, convinced the monarchy to fund a second voyage. Word of Columbus's exploits spread quickly, sparking the Western European exploration, conquest, and colonization of the Americas.

Spanish explorers, conquerors, and settlers sought material wealth, prestige, and the spread of Christianity, often summed up in the phrase "gold, glory, and God". The Spanish justified their claims to the New World based on the ideals of the Christian Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslims, completed in 1492. In the New World, military conquest to incorporate indigenous peoples into Christendom was considered the "spiritual conquest". In 1493, Pope Alexander VI, the first Spaniard to become Pope, issued a series of Papal Bulls that confirmed Spanish claims to the newly discovered lands.

After the final Reconquista of Iberia, the Treaty of Tordesillas was ratified by the Pope, the two kingdoms of Castile (in a personal union with other kingdoms of Spain) and Portugal in 1494. The treaty divided the entire non-European world into two spheres of exploration and colonization. The longitudinal boundary cut through the Atlantic Ocean and the eastern part of present-day Brazil. The countries declared their rights to the land despite the fact that Indigenous populations had settled from pole to pole in the hemisphere and it was their homeland.

After European contact, the native population of the Americas plummeted by an estimated 80% (from around 50 million in 1492 to eight million in 1650), due in part to Old World diseases carried to the New World. Smallpox was especially devastating, for it could be passed through touch, allowing native tribes to be wiped out, and the conditions that colonization imposed on Indigenous populations, such as forced labor and removal from homelands and traditional medicines. Some scholars have argued that this demographic collapse was the result of the first large-scale act of genocide in the modern era. For example, the labor and tribute of inhabitants of Hispaniola were granted in encomienda to Spaniards, a practice established in Spain for conquered Muslims. Although not technically slavery, it was coerced labor for the benefit of the Spanish grantees, called encomenderos. Spain had a legal tradition and devised a proclamation known as The Requerimento to be read to indigenous populations in Spanish, often far from the field of battle, stating that the indigenous were now subjects of the Spanish Crown and would be punished if they resisted. When the news of this situation and of the abuse of the institution reached Spain, the New Laws were passed to regulate and gradually abolish the system in the Americas, as well as to reiterate the prohibition of enslaving Native Americans. By the time the new laws were passed, 1542, the Spanish crown had acknowledged their inability to control and properly ensure compliance of traditional laws overseas, so they granted to Native Americans specific protections not even Spaniards had, such as the prohibition of enslaving them even in the case of crime or war. These extra protections were an attempt to avoid the proliferation of irregular claims to slavery. However, as historian Andrés Reséndez has noted, "this categorical prohibition did not stop generations of determined conquistadors and colonists from taking Native slaves on a planetary scale, ... The fact that this other slavery had to be carried out clandestinely made it even more insidious. It is a tale of good intentions gone badly astray."

A major event in early Spanish colonization, which had so far yielded paltry returns, was the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire (1519–1521). It was led by Hernán Cortés and made possible by securing indigenous alliances with the Aztecs' enemies, mobilizing thousands of warriors against the Aztecs for their own political reasons. The Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, became Mexico City, the chief city of the "New Spain". More than an estimated 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. The other great conquest was of the Inca Empire (1531–35), led by Francisco Pizarro.

During the early period of exploration, conquest, and settlement, c. 1492–1550, the overseas possessions claimed by Spain were only loosely controlled by the crown. With the conquests of the Aztecs and the Incas, the New World now commanded the crown's attention. Both Mexico and Peru had dense, hierarchically organized indigenous populations that could be incorporated and ruled. Even more importantly, both Mexico and Peru had large deposits of silver, which became the economic motor of the Spanish empire and transformed the world economy. In Peru, the singular, hugely rich silver mine of Potosí was worked by traditional forced indigenous labor drafts, known as the mit'a. In Mexico, silver was found outside the zone of dense indigenous settlement, so that free laborers migrated to the mines in Guanajuato and Zacatecas. The crown established the Council of the Indies in 1524, based in Seville, and issued laws of the Indies to assert its power against the early conquerors. The crown created the viceroyalty of New Spain and the viceroyalty of Peru to tightened crown control over these rich prizes of conquest.

Portugal

Over this same time frame 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 Amerigo Vespucci explored the South American east coast, and published his new book Mundus Novus (New World) in 1502–1503 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. In April 1500, Portuguese noble Pedro Álvares Cabral claimed the region of Brazil to Portugal; the effective colonization of Brazil began three decades later with the founding of São Vicente in 1532 and the establishment of the system of captaincies in 1534, which was later replaced by other systems. Others tried to colonize the eastern coasts of present-day Canada and the River Plate in South America. These explorers 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).

During this time, 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 the combined total budget of Portugal and Spain. In the 16th century perhaps 240,000 Europeans entered ports in the Americas.

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. Explorers included Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524; Jacques Cartier (1491–1557), and Samuel de Champlain (1567–1635), who explored the region of Canada he reestablished as New France.

The first French colonial empire stretched to over 10,000,000 km2 at its peak in 1710, which was the second largest colonial empire in the world, after the Spanish Empire.

In the French colonial regions, the focus of economy was on sugar plantations in the French West Indies. In Canada the fur trade with the natives was important. About 16,000 French men and women became colonizers. The great majority became subsistence farmers along the St. Lawrence River. With a favorable disease environment and plenty of land and food, their numbers grew exponentially to 65,000 by 1760. Their colony was taken over by Britain in 1760, but social, religious, legal, cultural, and economic changes were few in a society that clung tightly to its recently formed traditions.

British
British colonization began with North America almost a century after Spain. The relatively late arrival meant that the British could use the other European colonization powers as models for their endeavors. Inspired by the Spanish riches from colonies founded upon the conquest of the Aztecs, Incas, and other large Native American populations in the 16th century, their first attempt at colonization occurred in 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 the land. The 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. In England, many people came to question the organization of the Church of England by the end of the 16th century. One of the primary manifestations of this 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 Plymouth Rock in 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 Province of Pennsylvania was given to William Penn in settlement of a debt the king owed his father. Its government was established by William Penn in about 1682 to become primarily a refuge for persecuted English Quakers; but 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.

Mainly due to discrimination, there was often a separation between English colonial communities and indigenous communities. The Europeans viewed the natives as savages who were not worthy of participating in what they considered civilized society. The native people of North America did not die out nearly as rapidly nor as greatly as those in Central and South America due in part to their exclusion from British society. The indigenous people continued to be stripped of their native lands and were pushed further out west. The English eventually went on to control much of Eastern North America, the Caribbean, and parts of South America. They also gained Florida and Quebec in the French and Indian War.

John Smith convinced the colonists of Jamestown that searching for gold was not taking care of 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, with the work of John Rolfe and others, for export and the sustaining economic driver of Virginia and the neighboring colony of Maryland. Plantation agriculture was a primary aspect of the economies of the Southern Colonies and in the British West Indies. They heavily relied on African slave labor to sustain their economic pursuits.

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 Colonies. 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. However, it was doomed by 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.

Dutch

The Netherlands had been part of the Spanish Empire, due to the inheritance of Charles V of Spain. Many Dutch people converted to Protestantism and sought their political independence from Spain. They were a seafaring nation and built a global empire in regions where the Portuguese had originally explored. In the Dutch Golden Age, it sought colonies. In the Americas, the Dutch conquered the northeast of Brazil in 1630, where the Portuguese had built sugar cane plantations worked by black slave labor from Africa. Prince Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen became the administrator of the colony (1637–43), building a capital city and royal palace, fully expecting the Dutch to retain control of this rich area. As the Dutch had in Europe, it tolerated the presence of Jews and other religious groups in the colony. After Maurits departed in 1643, the Dutch West India Company took over the colony, until it was lost to the Portuguese in 1654. The Dutch retained some territory in Dutch Guiana, now Suriname. The Dutch also seized islands in the Caribbean that Spain had originally claimed but had largely abandoned, including Sint Maarten in 1618, Bonaire in 1634, Curaçao in 1634, Sint Eustatius in 1636, Aruba in 1637, some of which remain in Dutch hands and retain Dutch cultural traditions.

On the east coast of North America, the Dutch planted the colony of New Netherland on the lower end of the island of Manhattan, at New Amsterdam starting in 1624. The Dutch sought to protect their investments and purchased the Manhattan from a band of Canarse from Brooklyn who occupied the bottom quarter of Manhattan, known then as the Manhattoes, for 60 guilders' worth of trade goods. Minuit conducted the transaction with the Canarse chief Seyseys, who accepted valuable merchandise in exchange for an island that was actually mostly controlled by another indigenous group, the Weckquaesgeeks. Dutch fur traders set up a network upstream on the Hudson River. There were Jewish settlers from 1654 onward, and they remained following the English capture of New Amsterdam in 1664. The naval capture was despite both nations being at peace with the other.

Russia

Russia came to colonization late compared to Spain or Portugal, or even England. Siberia was added to the Russian Empire and Cossack explorers along rivers sought valuable furs of ermine, sable, and fox. Cossacks enlisted the aid of indigenous Siberians, who sought protection from nomadic peoples, and those peoples paid tribute in fur to the czar. Thus, prior to the eighteenth century Russian expansion that pushed beyond the Bering Strait dividing Eurasia from North America, Russia had experience with northern indigenous peoples and accumulated wealth from the hunting of fur bearing animals. Siberia had already attracted a core group of scientists, who sought to map and catalogue the flora, fauna, and other aspects of the natural world.

A major Russian expedition for exploration was mounted in 1742, contemporaneous with other eighteenth-century European state-sponsored ventures. It was not clear at the time whether Eurasia and North America were completely separate continents. The first voyages were made by Vitus Bering and Aleksei Chirikov, with settlement beginning after 1743. By the 1790s the first permanent settlements were established. Explorations continued down the Pacific coast of North America, and Russia established a settlement in the early nineteenth century at what is now called Fort Ross, California. Russian fur traders forced indigenous Aleut men into seasonal labor. Never very profitable, Russia sold its North American holdings to the United States in 1867, called at the time "Seward's Folly".

Tuscany
Duke Ferdinand I de Medici made the only Italian attempt to create colonies in America. For this purpose the Grand Duke organized in 1608 an expedition to the north of Brazil, under the command of the English captain Robert Thornton.

Thornton, on his return from the preparatory trip in 1609 (he had been to the Amazon), found Ferdinand I dead and all projects were canceled by his successor Cosimo II.

Christianization

Beginning with the first wave of European colonization, the religious discrimination, persecution, and violence toward the Indigenous peoples' native religions was systematically perpetrated by the European Christian colonists and settlers from the 15th–16th centuries onwards.

During the Age of Discovery and the following centuries, the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires were the most active in attempting to convert the Indigenous peoples of the Americas to the Christian religion. Pope Alexander VI issued the Inter caetera bull in May 1493 that confirmed the lands claimed by the Kingdom of Spain, and mandated in exchange that the Indigenous peoples be converted to Catholic Christianity. During Columbus's second voyage, Benedictine friars accompanied him, along with twelve other priests. With the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire, evangelization of the dense Indigenous populations was undertaken in what was called the "spiritual conquest". Several mendicant orders were involved in the early campaign to convert the Indigenous peoples. Franciscans and Dominicans learned Indigenous languages of the Americas, such as Nahuatl, Mixtec, and Zapotec. One of the first schools for Indigenous peoples in Mexico was founded by Pedro de Gante in 1523. The friars aimed at converting Indigenous leaders, with the hope and expectation that their communities would follow suit. In densely populated regions, friars mobilized Indigenous communities to build churches, making the religious change visible; these churches and chapels were often in the same places as old temples, often using the same stones. "Native peoples exhibited a range of responses, from outright hostility to active embrace of the new religion." In central and southern Mexico where there was an existing Indigenous tradition of creating written texts, the friars taught Indigenous scribes to write their own languages in Latin letters. There is significant body of texts in Indigenous languages created by and for Indigenous peoples in their own communities for their own purposes. In frontier areas where there were no settled Indigenous populations, friars and Jesuits often created missions, bringing together dispersed Indigenous populations in communities supervised by the friars in order to more easily preach the gospel and ensure their adherence to the faith. These missions were established throughout Spanish America which extended from the southwestern portions of current-day United States through Mexico and to Argentina and Chile.

As slavery was prohibited between Christians and could only be imposed upon non-Christian prisoners of war and/or men already sold as slaves, the debate on Christianization was particularly acute during the early 16th century, when Spanish conquerors and settlers sought to mobilize Indigenous labor. Later, two Dominican friars, Bartolomé de Las Casas and the philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, held the Valladolid debate, with the former arguing that Native Americans were endowed with souls like all other human beings, while the latter argued to the contrary to justify their enslavement. In 1537, the papal bull Sublimis Deus definitively recognized that Native Americans possessed souls, thus prohibiting their enslavement, without putting an end to the debate. Some claimed that a native who had rebelled and then been captured could be enslaved nonetheless.

When the first Franciscans arrived in Mexico in 1524, they burned the sacred places dedicated to the Indigenous peoples' native religions. However, in Pre-Columbian Mexico, burning the temple of a conquered group was standard practice, shown in Indigenous manuscripts, such as Codex Mendoza. Conquered Indigenous groups expected to take on the gods of their new overlords, adding them to the existing pantheon. They likely were unaware that their conversion to Christianity entailed the complete and irrevocable renunciation of their ancestral religious beliefs and practices. In 1539, Mexican bishop Juan de Zumárraga oversaw the trial and execution of the Indigenous nobleman Carlos of Texcoco for apostasy from Christianity. Following that, the Catholic Church removed Indigenous converts from the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, since it had a chilling effect on evangelization. In creating a protected group of Christians, Indigenous men no longer could aspire to be ordained Christian priests.

Throughout the Americas, the Jesuits were active in attempting to convert the Indigenous peoples to Christianity. They had considerable success on the frontiers in New France and Portuguese Brazil, most famously with Antonio de Vieira, S.J; and in Paraguay, almost an autonomous state within a state. The Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God, a translation by John Eliot of the gospel into Algonquian, was published in 1663.

Religion and migration
Roman Catholics were the first major religious group to immigrate to the New World, as settlers in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of Portugal and Spain, and later, France in New France. No other religion was tolerated and there was a concerted effort to convert indigenous peoples and black slaves to Catholicism. The Catholic Church established three offices of the Spanish Inquisition, in Mexico City; Lima, Peru; and Cartagena de Indias in Colombia to maintain religious orthodoxy and practice. The Portuguese did not establish a permanent office of the Portuguese Inquisition in Brazil, but did send visitations of inquistors in the seventeenth century.

English and Dutch colonies, on the other hand, tended to be more religiously diverse. Settlers to these colonies included Anglicans, Dutch Calvinists, English Puritans and other nonconformists, English Catholics, Scottish Presbyterians, French Protestant Huguenots, German and Swedish Lutherans, as well as Jews, Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, and Moravians. Jews fled to the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam when the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions cracked down on their presence.

Disease and indigenous population loss
The European lifestyle included a long history of sharing close quarters with domesticated animals such as cows, pigs, sheep, goats, horses, dogs and various domesticated fowl, from which many diseases originally stemmed. In contrast to the indigenous people, the Europeans had developed a richer endowment of antibodies. The large-scale contact with Europeans after 1492 introduced Eurasian germs to the indigenous people of the Americas.

Epidemics of smallpox (1518, 1521, 1525, 1558, 1589), typhus (1546), influenza (1558), diphtheria (1614) and measles (1618) swept the Americas subsequent to European contact, killing between 10 million and 100 million people, up to 95% of the indigenous population of the Americas. The cultural and political instability attending these losses appears to have been of substantial aid in the efforts of various colonists in New England and Massachusetts to acquire control over the great wealth in land and resources of which indigenous societies had customarily made use.

Such diseases yielded human mortality of an unquestionably enormous gravity and scale – and this has profoundly confused efforts to determine its full extent with any true precision. Estimates of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas vary tremendously.

Others have argued that significant variations in population size over pre-Columbian history are reason to view higher-end estimates with caution. Such estimates may reflect historical population maxima, while indigenous populations may have been at a level somewhat below these maxima or in a moment of decline in the period just prior to contact with Europeans. Indigenous populations hit their ultimate lows in most areas of the Americas in the early 20th century; in a number of cases, growth has returned.

According to scientists from University College London, the colonization of the Americas by Europeans killed so much of the indigenous population that it resulted in climate change and global cooling. Some contemporary scholars also attribute significant indigenous population losses in the Caribbean to the widespread practice of slavery and deadly forced labor in gold and silver mines. Historian Andrés Reséndez, supports this claim and argues that indigenous populations were smaller previous estimations and "a nexus of slavery, overwork and famine killed more Indians in the Caribbean than smallpox, influenza and malaria."

Slavery

Indigenous population loss following European contact directly led to Spanish explorations beyond the Caribbean islands they initially claimed and settled in the 1490s, since they required a labor force to both produce food and to mine gold. Slavery was not unknown in Indigenous societies. With the arrival of European colonists, enslavement of Indigenous peoples "became commodified, expanded in unexpected ways, and came to resemble the kinds of human trafficking that are recognizable to us today". While disease was the main killer of indigenous peoples, the practice of slavery and forced labor was also significant contributor to the indigenous death toll. With the arrival of Europeans other than Spanish, enslavement of native populations increased since there were no prohibitions against slavery until decades later. It is estimated that from Columbus's arrival to the end of the 19th century between 2.5 and 5 million Native Americans were forced into slavery. Indigenous men, women, and children were often forced into labor in sparsely populated frontier settings, in the household, or in the toxic gold and silver mines. This practice was known as the encomienda system and granted free native labor to the Spaniards. Based upon the practice of exacting tribute from Muslims and Jews during the Reconquista, the Spanish Crown granted a number of native laborers to an encomendero, who was usually a conquistador or other prominent Spanish male. Under the grant, they were theoretically bound to both protecting the natives and converting them to Christianity. In exchange for their forced conversion to Christianity, the natives paid tributes in the form of gold, agricultural products, and labor. The Spanish Crown tried to terminate the system through the Laws of Burgos (1512–13) and the New Laws of the Indies (1542). However, the encomenderos refused to comply with the new measures and the indigenous people continued to be exploited. Eventually, the encomienda system was replaced by the repartimiento system which was not abolished until the late 18th century.

In the Caribbean, deposits of gold were quickly exhausted and the precipitous drop in the indigenous population meant a severe labor shortage. Spaniards sought a high value, low bulk export product to make their fortunes. Cane sugar was the answer. It had been cultivated on the Iberian Atlantic islands. It was a highly desirable, expensive foodstuff. The problem of a labor force was solved by the importation of African slaves, initiating the creation of sugar plantations worked by chattel slaves. Plantations required a significant work force to be purchased, housed, and fed; capital investment in building sugar mills on-site, since once cane was cut, the sugar content rapidly declined. Plantation owners were linked to creditors and a network of merchants to sell processed sugar in Europe. The whole system was predicated on a huge, enslaved population. The Portuguese controlled the African slave trade, since the division of spheres with Spain in the Treaty of Tordesillas, they controlled the African coasts. Black slavery dominated the labor force in tropical zones, particularly where sugar was cultivated, in Portuguese Brazil, the English, French, and Dutch Caribbean islands. On the mainland of North America, the English southern colonies imported black slaves, starting in Virginia in 1619, to cultivate other tropical or semi-tropical crops such as tobacco, rice, and cotton.

Although black slavery is most associated with agricultural production, in Spanish America enslaved and free blacks and mulattoes were found in numbers in cities, working as artisans. Most newly transported African slaves were not Christians, but their conversion was a priority. For the Catholic Church, black slavery was not incompatible with Christianity. The Jesuits created hugely profitable agricultural enterprises and held a significant black slave labor force. European whites often justified the practice through the belts of latitude theory, supported by Aristotle and Ptolemy. In this perspective, belts of latitude wrapped around the Earth and corresponded with specific human traits. The peoples from the "cold zone" in Northern Europe were "of lesser prudence", while those of the "hot zone" in sub-Sahara Africa were intelligent but "weaker and less spirited". According to the theory, those of the "temperate zone" across the Mediterranean reflected an ideal balance of strength and prudence. Such ideas about latitude and character justified a natural human hierarchy.

African slaves were a highly valuable commodity, enriching those involved in the trade. Africans were transported to slave ships to the Americas, were primarily obtained from their African homelands by coastal tribes who captured and sold them. Europeans traded for slaves with the local native African tribes who captured them elsewhere in exchange for rum, guns, gunpowder, and other manufactures. The total slave trade to islands in the Caribbean, Brazil, the Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, and British Empires is estimated to have involved 12 million Africans. The vast majority of these slaves went to sugar colonies in the Caribbean and to Brazil, where life expectancy was short and the numbers had to be continually replenished. At most about 600,000 African slaves were imported into the United States, or 5% of the 12 million slaves brought across from Africa.

Colonization and race
Throughout the South American hemisphere, there were three large regional sources of populations: Native Americans, arriving Europeans, and forcibly transported Africans. The mixture of these cultures impacted the ethnic makeup that predominates in the hemisphere's largely independent states today. The term to describe someone of mixed European and indigenous ancestry is mestizo while the term to describe someone of mixed European and African ancestry is mulatto. The mestizo and mulatto population are specific to Iberian-influenced current-day Latin America because the conquistadors had (often forced) sexual relations with the indigenous and African women. The social interaction of these three groups of people inspired the creation of a caste system based on skin tone. The hierarchy centered around those with the lightest skin tone and ordered from highest to lowest was the Peninsulares, Criollos, mestizos, indigenous, mulatto, then African.

Unlike the Iberians, the British men came with families with whom they planned to permanently live in what is now North America. They kept the natives on the margins of colonial society. Because the British colonizers' wives were present, the British men rarely had sexual relations with the native women. While the mestizo and mulatto population make up the majority of people in Latin America today, there is only a small mestizo population in present-day North America (excluding Central America).

Colonization and gender
By the early to mid-16th century, even the Iberian men began to carry their wives and families to the Americas. Some women even carried out the voyage alone. Later, more studies of the role of women and female migration from Europe to the Americas have been made.

Impact of colonial land ownership on long-term development
Eventually, most of the Western Hemisphere came under the control of Western European governments, leading to changes to its landscape, population, and plant and animal life. In the 19th century over 50 million people left Western Europe for the Americas. The post-1492 era is known as the period of the Columbian exchange, a dramatically widespread exchange of animals, plants, culture, human populations (including slaves), ideas, and communicable disease between the American and Afro-Eurasian hemispheres following Columbus's voyages to the Americas.

Most scholars writing at the end of the 19th century estimated that the pre-Columbian population was as low as 10 million; by the end of the 20th century most scholars gravitated to a middle estimate of around 50 million, with some historians arguing for an estimate of 100 million or more. A recent estimate is that there were about 60.5 million people living in the Americas immediately before depopulation, of which 90 per cent, mostly in Central and South America, perished from wave after wave of disease, along with war and slavery playing their part.

Geographic differences between the colonies played a large determinant in the types of political and economic systems that later developed. In their paper on institutions and long-run growth, economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson argue that certain natural endowments gave rise to distinct colonial policies promoting either smallholder or coerced labor production. Densely settled populations, for example, were more easily exploitable and profitable as slave labor. In these regions, landowning elites were economically incentivized to develop forced labor arrangements such as the Peru mit'a system or Argentinian latifundias without regard for democratic norms. French and British colonial leaders, conversely, were incentivized to develop capitalist markets, property rights, and democratic institutions in response to natural environments that supported smallholder production over forced labor.

James Mahoney proposes that colonial policy choices made at critical junctures regarding land ownership in coffee-rich Central America fostered enduring path dependent institutions. Coffee economies in Guatemala and El Salvador, for example, were centralized around large plantations that operated under coercive labor systems. By the 19th century, their political structures were largely authoritarian and militarized. In Colombia and Costa Rica, conversely, liberal reforms were enacted at critical junctures to expand commercial agriculture, and they ultimately raised the bargaining power of the middle class. Both nations eventually developed more democratic and egalitarian institutions than their highly concentrated landowning counterparts.

List of European colonies in the Americas

There were at least a dozen European countries involved in the colonization of the Americas. The following list indicates those countries and the Western Hemisphere territories they worked to control.

British and (before 1707) English

 * British America (1607–1783)
 * Thirteen Colonies (1607–1783)
 * Rupert's Land (1670–1870)
 * British Columbia (1793–1871)
 * British North America (1783–1907)
 * British West Indies
 * Belize

Duchy of Courland and Semigallia

 * New Courland (Tobago, Trinidad and Tobago) (1654–1689); Courland is now part of Latvia

Danish

 * Dano-Norwegian West Indies (1754–1814)
 * Danish West Indies (1814–1917)
 * Dano-Norwegian North Greenland (1721–1814)
 * Dano-Norwegian South Greenland (1728?–1814)
 * Greenland (1814–1953)

Dutch

 * New Netherland (1614–1667)
 * Essequibo (1616–1815)
 * Dutch Virgin Islands (1625–1680)
 * Berbice (1627–1815)
 * New Walcheren (1628–1677)
 * Dutch Brazil (1630–1654)
 * Pomeroon (1650–1689)
 * Cayenne (1658–1664)
 * Demerara (1745–1815)[[File:Tropenmuseum Royal Tropical Institute Objectnumber 60038552 Een gezelschap met gouverneur Van Hee.jpg|thumb|Baron [[Aarnoud van Heemstra]], the governor of the Dutch colony of Suriname, 1923]]
 * Suriname (1667–1954) (Remained within the Kingdom of the Netherlands until 1975 as a constituent country)
 * Curaçao and Dependencies (1634–1954) (Aruba and Curaçao are still in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Bonaire; 1634–present)
 * Sint Eustatius and Dependencies (1636–1954) (Sint Maarten is still in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Sint Eustatius and Saba; 1636–present)

French

 * Present-day Canada
 * New France (1534–1763), and nearby lands:
 * Acadia (1604–1713)
 * Newfoundland
 * Hudson Bay
 * Saint Lawrence River
 * Great Lakes
 * Lake Winnipeg
 * Quebec
 * Present-day United States
 * The Fort Saint Louis (Texas) (1685–1689)
 * Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands (1650–1733)
 * Fort Caroline in French Florida (occupation by Huguenots) (1562–1565)
 * Vincennes and Fort Ouiatenon in Indiana
 * French Louisiana (23.3% of the current U.S. territory) (1801–1804) (sold by Napoleon I) (also see: Louisiana (New Spain))
 * Lower Louisiana
 * Upper Louisiana
 * Louisiana (New France) (1672–1764)
 * French Guiana (1763–present)
 * French West IndiesThe Pallisaded Village of Lachine 1689.jpg in New France, 1689]]
 * Saint-Domingue (1659–1804, now Haiti)
 * Tobago
 * Virgin Islands
 * France Antarctique (1555–1567)
 * Equinoctial France (1612–1615)
 * French Florida (1562–1565)
 * Present-day Dominican Republic (1795–1809)
 * Present-day Suriname
 * Tapanahony (District of Sipaliwini) (Controversial Franco-Dutch in favour of the Netherlands) (25.8% of the current territory) (1814)
 * Present-day Guyana (1782–1784)
 * Present-day Saint Kitts and Nevis
 * Saint Christopher Island (1628–1690, 1698–1702, 1706, 1782–1783)
 * Nevis (1782–1784)
 * Present-day Antigua and Barbuda
 * Antigua (briefly in 1666)
 * Present-day Trinidad and Tobago
 * Tobago (1666–1667, 1781–1793, 1802–1803)
 * Dominica (1625–1763, 1778–1783)
 * Grenada (1650–1762, 1779–1783)
 * Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (1719–1763, 1779–1783)
 * Saint Lucia (1650–1723, 1756–1778, 1784–1803)
 * Turks and Caicos Islands (1783)
 * Montserrat (1666, 1712)
 * Falkland Islands (1504, 1701, 1764–1767)
 * Îles des Saintes (1648–present)
 * Marie-Galante (1635–present)
 * la Désirade (1635–present)
 * Guadeloupe (1635–present)
 * Martinique (1635–present)
 * French Guiana (1604–present)
 * Saint Pierre and Miquelon (1604–1713, 1763–present)
 * Collectivity of Saint Martin (1624–present)
 * Saint Barthélemy (1648–1784, 1878–present)
 * Clipperton Island (1858–present)

Knights of Malta

 * Saint Barthélemy (1651–1665)
 * Saint Christopher (1651–1665)
 * Saint Croix (1651–1665)
 * Saint Martin (1651–1665)

Norwegian

 * Greenland (986–1408 )
 * Dano-Norwegian South Greenland (1728?–1814)
 * Dano-Norwegian North Greenland (1721–1814)
 * Dano-Norwegian West Indies (1754–1814)
 * Cooper Island (1844–1905)
 * Sverdrup Islands (1898–1930)
 * Erik the Red's Land (1931–1933)

Portuguese

 * Colonial Brazil (1500–1815) became a Kingdom, United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves.
 * Terra do Labrador (1499/1500–?) Claimed region (sporadically settled).
 * Land of the Corte-Real, also known as Terra Nova dos Bacalhaus (Land of Codfish) – Terra Nova (Newfoundland) (1501–?) Claimed region (sporadically settled).
 * Portugal Cove-St. Philip's (1501–1696)
 * Nova Scotia (1519?–1520s?) Claimed region (sporadically settled).
 * Barbados (c.1536–1620)
 * Colonia do Sacramento (1680–1705/1714–1762/1763–1777 (1811–1817))
 * Cisplatina (1811–1822, now Uruguay)
 * French Guiana (1809–1817)

Russian

 * Russian America (Alaska) (1799–1867)
 * Fort Ross (Sonoma County, California)
 * Russian Fort Elizabeth (Hawaii)

Scottish

 * Nova Scotia (1622–1632)
 * Darien Scheme on the Isthmus of Panama (1698–1700)
 * Stuarts Town, Carolina (1684–1686)

Spanish

 * Hispaniola (1493–1697); the island currently comprising Haiti and the Dominican Republic, under Spanish rule in whole from 1492 to 1697; under partial rule under the Captaincy General of Santo Domingo (1697–1821), then again as the Dominican Republic (1861–1865).
 * Puerto Rico (1493–1898); first as the Captaincy General of Puerto Rico
 * Colony of Santiago (1509–1655); conquered by Britain in 1655, currently Jamaica
 * Cuba (1607–1898); first as the Captaincy General of Cuba
 * Viceroyalty of New Granada (1717–1819)
 * Captaincy General of Venezuela
 * Viceroyalty of New Spain (1535–1821)
 * Nueva Extremadura
 * Nueva Galicia
 * Nuevo Reino de León
 * Nuevo Santander
 * Nueva Vizcaya
 * Las Californias
 * Santa Fe de Nuevo México
 * Captaincy General of Guatemala
 * Louisiana (New Spain) (1769–1801)
 * Spanish Florida (1565–1763)
 * Spanish Texas (1716–1802)
 * Viceroyalty of Peru (1542–1824)
 * Captaincy General of Chile (1544–1818)
 * Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata (1776–1814)

Swedish

 * New Sweden (1638–1655)
 * Saint Barthélemy (1784–1878)
 * Guadeloupe (1813–1814)

German

 * Klein-Venedig (Holy Roman Empire)
 * Hanauish-Indies
 * Saint Thomas (Brandenburg colony)
 * German interest in the Caribbean (German Empire)

Italian

 * Thornton expedition (now French Guiana)

Denmark

 * Nova Dania (now Churchill, Canada)

Exhibitions and collections
In 2007, the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History and the Virginia Historical Society (VHS) co-organized a traveling exhibition to recount the strategic alliances and violent conflict between European empires (English, Spanish, French) and the Native people living in North America. The exhibition was presented in three languages and with multiple perspectives. Artifacts on display included rare surviving Native and European artifacts, maps, documents, and ceremonial objects from museums and royal collections on both sides of the Atlantic. The exhibition opened in Richmond, Virginia on March 17, 2007, and closed at the Smithsonian International Gallery on October 31, 2009.

The related online exhibition explores the international origins of the societies of Canada and the United States and commemorates the 400th anniversary of three lasting settlements in Jamestown (1607), Quebec City (1608), and Santa Fe (1609). The site is accessible in three languages.

title: European colonization of the Americas


text:
883

Year 883 (DCCCLXXXIII) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar.

Europe

 * Spring – Viking raiders ravage Flanders, and sack the abbey at Saint-Quentin. King Carloman II blocks their passage at Laviers, which had been on the banks of the Somme. Meanwhile, Vikings enter the Rhine, but are turned back by Henry of Franconia (possibly a margrave of Saxony). They over-winter at Duisburg.
 * King Charles the Fat travels to Nonantola (Northern Italy), where he meets Pope Marinus I. He receives complaints of Guy II of Spoleto, who is the official "protector" of Rome, and invades the Papal States. King Charles orders Guy to appear before a tribunal.
 * Guy II of Spoleto begins a revolt, and assembles an army supported with Arab auxiliaries. King Charles the Fat sends Berengar of Friuli with an expeditionary force to deprive him of Spoleto. An epidemic ravages Berengar's army, and forces them to retire.
 * Svatopluk I, ruler (knyaz) of Great Moravia, conquers Lower Pannonia (today's Southwestern Hungary and Northern Croatia), during the succession strife in the East Frankish Kingdom (approximate date).
 * The first historic document (written by Regino of Prüm) mentions Duisburg.

Arabian Empire

 * The Zanj Rebellion: Abbasid general Al-Muwaffaq brings in Egyptian forces, to help him in his two-year siege of the Zanj capital Mukhtara. He captures the city, and crushes the revolt that has devastated Chaldea (modern Iraq) since 869.
 * September 11 – Yazaman al-Khadim, Abbasid governor of Tarsus, routs a Byzantine army under general Kesta Styppiotes, in a night attack. According to Arab chroniclers, 70,000 out of 100,000 Byzantine troops are killed.

Births

 * Burchard II, duke of Swabia (or 884)
 * Ibn Masarra, Muslim ascetic and scholar (d. 931)
 * Zhao Jiliang, chancellor of Later Shu (d. 946)
 * Zhao Tingyin, Chinese general (d. 949)

Deaths

 * September 11 – Kesta Styppiotes, Byzantine general
 * Ansegisus, archbishop of Sens (or 879)
 * Anselm of Farfa, Frankish abbot (approximate date)
 * Bertharius, Benedictine abbot and poet
 * Bertulf, archbishop of Trier
 * Dawud al-Zahiri, Muslim scholar (or 884)
 * Eochocán mac Áedo, king of Ulaid (Ireland)
 * Froila, Galician bishop
 * Guy II, duke of Spoleto
 * Han Jian, Chinese warlord
 * Ignatius II, patriarch of Antioch
 * Pi Rixiu, Chinese poet
 * Wang Jingchong, Chinese governor (b. 847)
 * Yang Fuguang, Chinese general (b. 842)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: 883


text:
933

Year 933 (CMXXXIII) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar.

Europe

 * Spring – Hugh of Provence, king of Italy, launches an expedition to Rome to remove the Roman ruler (princeps) Alberic II and avenge his humiliation (see 932). It fails, however, as Roman civic militias repel the Lombard army. Hugh ravages the Italian countryside, before he withdraws to Pavia.
 * March 15 – Battle of Merseburg: King Henry I ("the Fowler") defeats the Magyars near Merseburg after his refusal to pay the annual tribute. During Henry's lifetime they never raid the East Frankish Kingdom again.
 * William I ("Longsword"), duke of Normandy, recognizes King Rudolph as his overlord. In turn he gives William the Cotentin Peninsula and the Channel Islands.

England

 * Prince Edwin, the youngest son of the late King Edward the Elder, is drowned en route to the West Frankish Kingdom and buried at Saint Bertin.

Africa

 * Fatimid forces fail to seize the Maghreb al-Aqsa (modern Morocco) from the local Berber tribes allied to the Spain-based Caliphate of Córdoba.

Births

 * Al-Hakim Nishapuri, Persian Sunni scholar (d. 1014)

Deaths

 * March 10 – Li Renfu, Chinese warlord and governor
 * March 16 – Takin al-Khazari, Abbasid governor of Egypt
 * November 21 – Al-Tahawi, Arab imam and scholar (b. 853)
 * December 9 – Li Congrong, prince of Later Tang
 * December 15 – Li Siyuan, emperor of Later Tang (b. 867)
 * December 18 – Yaonian Yanmujin, Chinese empress dowager
 * Acfred II, count of Carcassonne and Razès (France)
 * Adelolf, count of Boulogne (approximate date)
 * Alfonso IV, king of León and Galicia (Spain)
 * Du Guangting, Chinese Taoist priest and writer (b. 850)
 * Ealdred I, ruler ('king') of Bernicia (approximate date)
 * Edwin, English prince and son of Edward the Elder
 * Fujiwara no Kanesuke, Japanese nobleman (b. 877)
 * Harald Fairhair, king of Norway (approximate date)
 * Ibn Duraid, Arab poet and philologist (b. 837)
 * Mu'nis al-Muzaffar, Abbasid general
 * Shaghab, mother and de facto co-ruler of Al-Muqtadir
 * Tryphon, patriarch of Constantinople

title: 933


text:
936

Year 936 (CMXXXVI) was a leap year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar.

Europe

 * June 19 – At Laon, Louis IV, the 14-year old son of the late King Charles the Simple, is crowned King of West Francia after being recalled from Wessex by Hugh the Great, count of Paris. Hugh, whose father, King Robert I, was killed in battle near Soissons in 923, is given the title Duke of the Franks and becomes the second most powerful man in the West Frankish Kingdom.  The crowning of Louis IV follows the death of King Rudolph I at Auxerre earlier in the year.
 * Summer – Hugh of Provence, king of Italy, dispatches his son and co-ruler Lothair II with a third expedition to Rome to dislodge Alberic II. Assault after assault is repulsed by the Roman civic militia. At length, weakened by an epidemic, the Lombard nobles press on Hugh to accept a peace treaty mediated by Odo of Cluny.
 * July 2 – King Henry I ("the Fowler") dies at his royal palace in Memleben, Thuringia, after a 17-year reign. He is succeeded by his 23-year-old son Otto I, who is married to Eadgyth, a daughter of the late King Edward the Elder. Otto is the first German king to be crowned in Charlemagne's former capital of Aachen.
 * A Hungarian army invades Franconia and occupies Fulda. They are attacked by East Frankish forces and forced to go westwards. Otto I moves against the rebellious Elbe Slavs.
 * Archbishop Unni of Hamburg-Bremen visits the king of Denmark Gorm and the king of the Swedes Ring before he dies in Birka.

England

 * King Æthelstan sets the border between the Kingdom of England and Cornwall as the east bank of the River Tamar.

Africa

 * Spring – Muhammad ibn Tughj al-Ikhshid, ruler of Egypt and Syria, defeats the Fatimid forces near Alexandria. He drives them out of the city, forcing the Fatimids to retreat from Egypt to their base at Cyrenaica.

Arabian Empire

 * Summer – Ibn Muqla, an Abbasid official and vizier, is disgraced after his failed campaign against Muhammad ibn Ra'iq, the rebellious governor of Wasit. He is arrested and imprisoned in Baghdad.

China

 * November 28 – Shi Jingtang is enthroned as the first emperor of the Later Jin by Tai Zong, ruler of the Khitan-led Liao Dynasty, following a revolt against his rival, emperor Fei of Later Tang.

Religion

 * January 3 – Pope Leo VII succeeds John XI (who died the previous year) as the 126th pope of the Catholic Church.

Births

 * September 24 – 'Adud al-Dawla, ruler of the Buyid Dynasty (d. 983)
 * Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi, Muslim physician and surgeon (d. 1013)
 * Gunnor, duchess consort of Normandy (approximate date)
 * Zhou ("the Elder"), queen consort of Southern Tang (approximate date)

Deaths

 * February 13 – Xiao Wen, empress of the Liao Dynasty
 * July 2 – Henry the Fowler, king of the East Frankish Kingdom
 * July 5 – Xu Ji, official and chancellor of Former Shu
 * September 17 – Unni, archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen
 * September 27 – Kyŏn Hwŏn, king of Later Baekje (b. 867)
 * December 25 – Zhang Jingda, general of Later Tang
 * Abu Bakr ibn Mujāhid, Muslim canonical reader and scholar
 * Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari, Muslim Shafi'i scholar (b. 874)
 * Al-Muntakhab al-Hasan, ruler of the Rassid Dynasty
 * Andrew of Constantinople, Byzantine saint
 * Gagik I of Vaspurakan, Armenian king (or 943)
 * Ibn al-Mughallis, Muslim theologian and jurist
 * Murchadh mac Sochlachan, king of Uí Maine (Ireland)
 * Rudolph I, king of the West Frankish Kingdom
 * Dandi Mahadevi, Indian queen regnant

title: 936


text:
Russian colonization of North America

From 1732 to 1867, the Russian Empire laid claim to northern Pacific Coast territories in the Americas. Russian colonial possessions in the Americas are collectively known as Russian America (Русская Америка; 1799 to 1867). It consisted mostly of present-day Alaska in the United States, but also included the outpost of Fort Ross in California, and three forts in Hawaii, including Russian Fort Elizabeth. Russian Creole settlements were concentrated in Alaska, including the capital, New Archangel (Novo-Arkhangelsk), which is now Sitka.

Russian expansion eastward began in 1552, and in 1639 Russian explorers reached the Pacific Ocean. In 1725, Emperor Peter the Great ordered navigator Vitus Bering to explore the North Pacific for potential colonization. The Russians were primarily interested in the abundance of fur-bearing mammals on Alaska's coast, as stocks had been depleted by overhunting in Siberia. Bering's first voyage was foiled by thick fog and ice, but in 1741 a second voyage by Bering and Aleksei Chirikov made sight of the North American mainland. Bering claimed the Alaskan country for the Russian Empire. Russia later confirmed its rule over the territory with the Ukase of 1799 which established the southern border of Russian America along the 55th parallel north. The decree also provided monopolistic privileges to the state-sponsored Russian-American Company and established the Russian Orthodox Church in Alaska.

Russian promyshlenniki (trappers and hunters) quickly developed the maritime fur trade, which instigated several conflicts between the Aleuts and Russians in the 1760s. The fur trade proved to be a lucrative enterprise, capturing the attention of other European nations. In response to potential competitors, the Russians extended their claims eastward from the Commander Islands to the shores of Alaska. In 1784, with encouragement from Empress Catherine the Great, explorer Grigory Shelekhov founded Russia's first permanent settlement in Alaska at Three Saints Bay. Ten years later, the first group of Orthodox Christian missionaries began to arrive, evangelizing thousands of Native Americans, many of whose descendants continue to maintain the religion. By the late 1780s, trade relations had opened with the Tlingits, and in 1799 the Russian-American Company (RAC) was formed in order to monopolize the fur trade, also serving as an imperialist vehicle for the Russification of Alaska Natives.

Angered by encroachment on their land and other grievances, the indigenous peoples' relations with the Russians deteriorated. In 1802, Tlingit warriors destroyed several Russian settlements, most notably Redoubt Saint Michael (Old Sitka), leaving New Russia as the only remaining outpost on mainland Alaska. This failed to expel the Russians, who re-established their presence two years later following the Battle of Sitka. (Peace negotiations between the Russians and Native Americans would later establish a modus vivendi, a situation that, with few interruptions, lasted for the duration of Russian presence in Alaska.) In 1808, Redoubt Saint Michael was rebuilt as New Archangel and became the capital of Russian America after the previous colonial headquarters were moved from Kodiak. A year later, the RAC began expanding its operations to more abundant sea otter grounds in Northern California, where Fort Ross was built in 1812.

By the middle of the 19th century, profits from Russia's North American colonies were in steep decline. Competition with the British Hudson's Bay Company had brought the sea otter to near extinction, while the population of bears, wolves, and foxes on land was also nearing depletion. Faced with the reality of periodic Native American revolts, the political ramifications of the Crimean War, and unable to fully colonize the Americas to their satisfaction, the Russians concluded that their North American colonies were too expensive to retain. Eager to release themselves of the burden, the Russians sold Fort Ross in 1841, and in 1867, after less than a month of negotiations, the United States accepted Emperor Alexander II's offer to sell Alaska. The Alaska Purchase for $7.2 million (equivalent to $ million in ) ended Imperial Russia's colonial presence in the Americas.

Exploration
The earliest written accounts indicate that the Eurasian Russians were the first Europeans to reach Alaska. There is an unofficial assumption that Eurasian Slavic navigators reached the coast of Alaska long before the 18th century.

In 1648, Semyon Dezhnev sailed from the mouth of the Kolyma River through the Arctic Ocean and around the eastern tip of Asia to the Anadyr River. One legend holds that some of his boats were carried off course and reached Alaska. However, no evidence of settlement survives. Dezhnev's discovery was never forwarded to the central government, leaving open the question of whether or not Siberia was connected to North America.

The first sighting of the Alaskan coastline was in 1732; this sighting was made by the Russian maritime explorer and navigator Ivan Fedorov from sea near present-day Cape Prince of Wales on the eastern boundary of the Bering Strait opposite Russian Cape Dezhnev. He did not land.

The first landfall happened in southern Alaska in 1741 during the Russian exploration by Vitus Bering and Aleksei Chirikov. In the early 1720s, Tsar Peter the Great called for another expedition. As a part of the 1733–1743 Second Kamchatka expedition, the ''Sv. Petr under the Dane Vitus Bering and the Sv. Pavel'' under the Russian Alexei Chirikov set sail from the Kamchatkan port of Petropavlovsk in June 1741. They were soon separated, but each continued sailing east. On July 15, Chirikov sighted land, probably the west side of Prince of Wales Island in southeast Alaska. He sent a group of men ashore in a longboat, making them the first Europeans to land on the northwestern coast of North America. On roughly July 16, Bering and the crew of ''Sv. Petr'' sighted Mount Saint Elias on the Alaskan mainland; they turned westward toward Russia soon afterward. Meanwhile, Chirikov and the ''Sv. Pavel'' headed back to Russia in October with news of the land they had found. In November, Bering's ship was wrecked on Bering Island. There Bering fell ill and died, and high winds dashed the ''Sv. Petr'' to pieces. After the stranded crew wintered on the island, the survivors built a boat from the wreckage and set sail for Russia in August 1742. Bering's crew reached the shore of Kamchatka in 1742, carrying word of the expedition. The high quality of the sea otter pelts they brought sparked Russian settlement in Alaska.

Due to the distance from central authority in St. Petersburg, and combined with the difficult geography and lack of adequate resources, the next state-sponsored expedition would wait more than two decades until 1766, when captains Pyotr Krenitsyn and Mikhail Levashov embarked for the Aleutian Islands, eventually reaching their destination after initially been wrecked on Bering Island. Between 1774 and 1800 Spain also led several expeditions to Alaska in order to assert its claim over the Pacific Northwest. These claims were later abandoned at the turn of the 19th century following the aftermath of the Nootka Crisis. Count Nikolay Rumyantsev funded Russia's first naval circumnavigation under the joint command of Adam Johann von Krusenstern and Nikolai Rezanov in 1803–1806, and was instrumental in the outfitting of the voyage of the Riurik 's circumnavigation of 1814–1816, which provided substantial scientific information on Alaska's and California's flora and fauna, and important ethnographic information on Alaskan and Californian (among other) natives.

Trading company
Imperial Russia was unique among European empires for having no state sponsorship of foreign expeditions or territorial (conquest) settlement. The first state-protected trading company for sponsoring such activities in the Americas was the Shelikhov-Golikov Company of Grigory Shelikhov and Ivan Larionovich Golikov. A number of other companies were operating in Russian America during the 1780s. Shelikhov petitioned the government for exclusive control, but in 1788 Catherine II decided to grant his company a monopoly only over the area it had already occupied. Other traders were free to compete elsewhere. Catherine's decision was issued as the imperial ukase (proclamation) of September 28, 1788.

The Shelikhov-Golikov Company formed the basis for the Russian-American Company (RAC). Its charter was laid out in a 1799, by the new Tsar Paul I, which granted the company monopolistic control over trade in the Aleutian Islands and the North America mainland, south to 55° north latitude. The RAC was Russia's first joint stock company, and came under the direct authority of the Ministry of Commerce of Imperial Russia. Siberian merchants based in Irkutsk were initial major stockholders, but soon replaced by Russia's nobility and aristocracy based in Saint Petersburg. The company constructed settlements in what is today Alaska, Hawaii, and California.

1740s to 1800
Beginning in 1743, small associations of fur-traders began to sail from the shores of the Russian Pacific coast to the Aleutian islands.

Rather than hunting the marine life themselves, the Sibero-Russian promyshlenniki forced the Aleuts to do the work for them, often by taking hostage family members in exchange for hunted seal-furs. This pattern of colonial exploitation resembled some of the promyshlenniki practices in their expansion into Siberia and the Russian Far East. As word spread of the potential riches in furs, competition among Russian companies increased and a large number of Aleuts were apparently enserfed.

As the animal populations declined, the Aleuts, already too dependent on the new barter-economy fostered by the Russian fur-trade, were increasingly coerced into taking greater and greater risks in the highly dangerous waters of the North Pacific to hunt for more otter. As the Shelekhov-Golikov Company of 1783-1799 developed a monopoly, its use of skirmishes and violent incidents turned into systematic violence as a tool of colonial exploitation of the indigenous people. When the Aleutian serfs revolted and won some victories, the promyshlenniki retaliated, killing many and destroying their boats and hunting gear, leaving them no means of survival. The most devastating effects came from disease: during the first two generations (1741-1759 & 1781-1799) of Sibero-Russian promyshlenniki contact, 80 percent of the Aleut population died from Eurasian infectious diseases; these were by then endemic among Eurasians, but the Aleuts had no immunity against the diseases.

Though the Alaskan colony was never very profitable because of the costs of transportation, most Russian traders were determined to keep the land for themselves. In 1784, Grigory Ivanovich Shelekhov, who later set up the Russian-American Company that developed into the Alaskan colonial administration, arrived in Three Saints Bay on Kodiak Island with two ships, the Three Saints (Три Святителя) and the St. Simon. The Koniag Alaska Natives harassed the Russian party and Shelekhov responded by killing hundreds and taking hostages to enforce the obedience of the rest. Having established his authority on Kodiak Island, Shelekhov founded the second permanent Russian settlement in Alaska (after Unalaska, permanently settled since 1774) on the island's Three Saints Bay.

In 1790, Shelekhov, back in Russia, hired Alexander Andreyevich Baranov to manage his Alaskan fur-enterprise. Baranov moved the colony to the northeast end of Kodiak Island, where timber was available. The site later developed as what is now the city of Kodiak. Russian colonists took Koniag wives and started families whose surnames continue today, such as Panamaroff, Petrikoff, and Kvasnikoff. In 1795 Baranov, concerned by the sight of non-Russian Europeans trading with the natives in southeast Alaska, established Mikhailovsk six miles (10 km) north of present-day Sitka. He bought the land from the Tlingit, but in 1802, while Baranov was away, Tlingit from a neighboring settlement attacked and destroyed Mikhailovsk. Baranov returned with a Russian warship and razed the Tlingit village. He built the settlement of New Archangel (Ново-Архангельск) on the ruins of Mikhailovsk. It became the capital of Russian America – and later the city of Sitka.

As Baranov secured the Russians' settlements in Alaska, the Shelekhov family continued to work among the top leaders to win a monopoly on Alaska's fur trade. In 1799 Shelekhov's son-in-law, Nikolay Petrovich Rezanov, had acquired a monopoly on the American fur trade from Emperor Paul I. Rezanov formed the Russian-American Company. As part of the deal, the Emperor expected the company to establish new settlements in Alaska and to carry out an expanded colonization program.

1800 to 1867
By 1804, Baranov, now manager of the Russian–American Company, had consolidated the company's hold on fur trade activities in the Americas following his suppression of the Tlingit clan at the Battle of Sitka. The Russians never fully colonized Alaska. For the most part, they clung to the coast and shunned the interior.

From 1812 to 1841, the Russians operated Fort Ross, California. From 1814 to 1817, Russian Fort Elizabeth was operating in the Kingdom of Hawaii. By the 1830s, the Russian monopoly on trade was weakening. The British Hudson's Bay Company was leased the southern edge of Russian America in 1839 under the RAC-HBC Agreement, establishing Fort Stikine which began siphoning off trade.

A company ship visited the Russian American outposts only every two or three years to give provisions. Because of the limited stock of supplies, trading was incidental compared to trapping operations under the Aleutian laborers. This left the Russian outposts dependent upon British and American merchants for sorely needed food and materials; in such a situation Baranov knew that the RAC establishments "could not exist without trading with foreigners." Ties with Americans were particularly advantageous since they could sell furs at Guangzhou, closed to the Russians at the time. The downside was that American hunters and trappers encroached on territory Russians considered theirs.

Starting with the destruction of the Phoenix in 1799, several RAC ships sank or were damaged in storms, leaving the RAC outposts with scant resources. On June 24, 1800, an American vessel sailed to Kodiak Island. Baranov negotiated the sale of over 12,000 rubles worth of goods carried on the ship, averting "imminent starvation." During his tenure Baranov traded over 2 million rubles worth of furs for American supplies, to the consternation of the board of directors. From 1806 to 1818 Baranov shipped 15 million rubles worth of furs to Russia, only receiving under 3 million rubles in provisions, barely half of the expenses spent solely on the Saint Petersburg company office.

The Russo-American Treaty of 1824 recognized exclusive Russian rights to the fur trade north of latitude 54°40'N, with the American rights and claims restricted to below that line. This division was repeated in the Treaty of Saint Petersburg, a parallel agreement with the British in 1825 (which also settled most of the border with British North America). However, the agreements soon went by the wayside, and with the retirement of Alexandr Baranov in 1818, the Russian hold on Alaska was further weakened.

When the Russian-American Company's charter was renewed in 1821, it stipulated that the chief managers from then on be naval officers. Most naval officers did not have any experience in the fur trade, so the company suffered. The second charter also tried to cut off all contact with foreigners, especially the competitive Americans. This strategy backfired since the Russian colony had become used to relying on American supply ships, and the United States had become a valued customer for furs. Eventually the Russian–American Company entered into an agreement with the Hudson's Bay Company, which gave the British rights to sail through Russian territory.

Colonies
The first Russian colony in Alaska was founded in 1784 by Grigory Shelikhov. Subsequently, Russian explorers and settlers continued to establish trading posts in mainland Alaska, on the Aleutian Islands, Hawaii, and Northern California.

Alaska
The Russian-American Company was formed in 1799 with the influence of Nikolay Rezanov for the purpose of hunting sea otters for their fur. The peak population of the Russian colonies was about 4,000 although almost all of these were Aleuts, Tlingits and other Native Alaskans. The number of Russians rarely exceeded 500 at any one time.

California
The Russians established an outpost called Fortress Ross (Russian: Крѣпость Россъ, Krepost' Ross) in 1812 near Bodega Bay in Northern California, north of San Francisco Bay. The Fort Ross colony included a sealing station on the Farallon Islands off San Francisco. By 1818 Fort Ross had a population of 128, consisting of 26 Russians and of 102 Native Americans. The Russians maintained it until 1841, when they left the region. Fort Ross is a Federal National Historical Landmark on the National Register of Historic Places. It is preserved—restored in California's Fort Ross State Historic Park, about 80 mi northwest of San Francisco.

Spanish concern about Russian colonial intrusion prompted the authorities in New Spain to initiate the upper Las Californias Province settlement, with presidios (forts), pueblos (villages), and the California missions. After declaring their independence in 1821, the Mexicans also asserted themselves in opposition to the Russians: the Mission San Francisco de Solano (Sonoma Mission, 1823) specifically responded to the presence of the Russians at Fort Ross; and Mexico established the El Presidio Real de Sonoma or Sonoma Barracks in 1836, with General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo as the Commandant of the Northern Frontier of the Alta California Province. The fort was the northernmost Mexican outpost to halt any further Russian settlement southward. The restored Presidio and mission are in the present-day city of Sonoma, California.

In 1920 a one-hundred-pound bronze church bell was unearthed in an orange grove near Mission San Fernando Rey de España in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California. It has an inscription in the Russian language (translated here): "In the tear 1796, in the month of January, this bell was cast on the Island of Kodiak by the blessing of Juvenaly of Alaska, during the sojourn of Alexander Andreyevich Baranov." How this Russian Orthodox Kodiak church artifact from Kodiak Island in Alaska arrived at a Roman Catholic Mission Church in Southern California remains unknown.

Missionary activity

At Three Saints Bay, Shelekov built a school to teach the natives to read and write Russian, and introduced the first resident missionaries and clergymen who spread the Russian Orthodox faith. This faith (with its liturgies and texts, translated into Aleut at a very early stage) had been informally introduced, in the 1740s–1780s. Some fur traders founded local families or symbolically adopted Aleut trade partners as godchildren to gain their loyalty through this special personal bond. The missionaries soon opposed the exploitation of the indigenous populations, and their reports provide evidence of the violence exercised to establish colonial rule in this period.

The RAC's monopoly was continued by Emperor Alexander I in 1821, on the condition that the company would financially support missionary efforts. The company board ordered chief manager Arvid Adolf Etholén to build a residency in New Archangel for bishop Veniaminov When a Lutheran church was planned for the Finnish population of New Archangel, Veniamiov prohibited any Lutheran priests from proselytizing to neighboring Tlingits. Veniamiov faced difficulties in exercising influence over the Tlingit people outside New Archangel, due to their political independence from the RAC leaving them less receptive to Russian cultural influences than Aleuts. A smallpox epidemic spread throughout Alaska in 1835-1837 and the medical aid given by Veniamiov created converts to Orthodoxy.

Inspired by the same pastoral theology as Bartolomé de las Casas or St. Francis Xavier, the origins of which were in early Christianity's need to adapt to the cultures of Classical antiquity, missionaries in Russian America applied a strategy that placed value on local cultures and encouraged indigenous leadership in parish life and missionary activity. When compared to later Protestant missionaries, the Orthodox policies "in retrospect proved to be relatively sensitive to indigenous Alaskan cultures." This cultural policy was originally intended to gain the loyalty of the indigenous populations by establishing the authority of Church and State as protectors of over 10,000 inhabitants of Russian America. (The number of ethnic Russian settlers had always been less than the record 812, almost all concentrated in Sitka and Kodiak).

Difficulties arose in training Russian priests to attain fluency in any of the various Indigenous Alaskan languages. To redress this, Veniaminov opened a seminary for mixed race and native candidates for the Church in 1845. Promising students were sent to additional schools in either Saint Petersburg or Irkutsk, the later city becoming the original seminary's new location in 1858. The Holy Synod instructed for the opening of four missionary schools in 1841, to be located in Amlia, Chiniak, Kenai, and Nushagak. Veniamiov established the curriculum, which included Russian history, literacy, mathematics, and religious studies.

A side effect of the missionary strategy was the development of a new and autonomous form of indigenous identity. Many native traditions survived within local "Russian" Orthodox tradition and in the religious life of the villages. Part of this modern indigenous identity is an alphabet and the basis for written literature in nearly all of the ethnic-linguistic groups in the Southern half of Alaska. Father Ivan Veniaminov (later St. Innocent of Alaska), famous throughout Russian America, developed an Aleut dictionary for hundreds of language and dialect words based on the Russian alphabet.

The most visible trace of the Russian colonial period in contemporary Alaska is the nearly 90 Russian Orthodox parishes with a membership of over 20,000 men, women, and children, almost exclusively indigenous people. These include several Athabascan groups of the interior, very large Yup'ik communities, and quite nearly all of the Aleut and Alutiiq populations. Among the few Tlingit Orthodox parishes, the large group in Juneau adopted Orthodox Christianity only after the Russian colonial period, in an area where there had been no Russian settlers nor missionaries. The widespread and continuing local Russian Orthodox practices are likely the result of the syncretism of local beliefs with Christianity.

In contrast, the Spanish Roman Catholic colonial intentions, methods, and consequences in California and the Southwest were the product of the Laws of Burgos and the Indian Reductions of conversions and relocations to missions; while more force and coercion was used, the indigenous peoples likewise created a kind of Christianity that reflected many of their traditions.

Observers noted that while their religious ties were tenuous, before the sale of Alaska there were 400 native converts to Orthodoxy in New Archangel. Tlingit practitioners declined in number after the lapse of Russian rule, until there were only 117 practitioners in 1882 residing in the place, by then renamed as Sitka.

Russian settlements in North America

 * Alaska
 * Unalaska, Alaska – 1774
 * Three Saints Bay, Alaska – 1784
 * Fort St. George in Kasilof, Alaska – 1786
 * St. Paul, Alaska – 1788
 * Fort St. Nicholas in Kenai, Alaska – 1791
 * Pavlovskaya, Alaska (now Kodiak) – 1791
 * Fort Saints Constantine and Helen on Nuchek Island, Alaska – 1793
 * Fort on Hinchinbrook Island, Alaska – 1793
 * New Russia near present-day Yakutat, Alaska – 1796
 * Redoubt St. Archangel Michael, Alaska near Sitka – 1799
 * Novo-Arkhangelsk, Alaska (now Sitka) – 1804
 * Fort (New) Alexandrovsk at Bristol Bay, Alaska – 1819
 * Redoubt St. Michael, Alaska – 1833
 * Nulato, Alaska – 1834
 * Redoubt St. Dionysius in present-day Wrangell, Alaska (now Fort Stikine) – 1834
 * Pokrovskaya Mission, Alaska – 1837
 * Kolmakov Redoubt, Alaska – 1844
 * California
 * Fort Ross, California – 1812
 * Hawaiʻi
 * Fort Elizabeth near Waimea, Kauaʻi, Hawaiʻi – 1817
 * Fort Alexander near Hanalei, Kauaʻi, Hawaiʻi – 1817
 * Fort Barclay-de-Tolly near Hanalei, Kauaʻi, Hawaiʻi – 1817

Purchase of Alaska

By the 1860s, the Russian government was ready to abandon its Russian America colony. Over-hunting had severely reduced the fur-bearing animal population, and competition from the British and Americans exacerbated the situation. This, combined with the difficulties of supplying and protecting such a distant colony, reduced interest in the territory. In addition, Russia was in a difficult financial position and feared losing Russian Alaska without compensation in some future conflict, especially to the British. The Russians believed that in a dispute with Britain, their hard-to-defend region might become a prime target for British aggression from British Columbia, and would be easily captured. So following the Union victory in the American Civil War, Tsar Alexander II instructed the Russian minister to the United States, Eduard de Stoeckl, to enter into negotiations with the United States Secretary of State William H. Seward in the beginning of March 1867. At the instigation of Seward the United States Senate approved the purchase, known as the Alaska Purchase, from the Russian Empire. The cost was set at 2 cents an acre, which came to a total of $7,200,000 on April 9, 1867. The canceled check is in the present day United States National Archives.

After Russian America was sold to the US in 1867, for $7.2 million (2 cents per acre, ), all the holdings of the Russian–American Company were liquidated.

Following the transfer, many elders of the local Tlingit tribe maintained that "Castle Hill" comprised the only land that Russia was entitled to sell. Other indigenous groups also argued that they had never given up their land; the Americans had encroached on it and taken it over. Native land claims were not fully addressed until the latter half of the 20th century, with the signing by Congress and leaders of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.

At the height of Russian America, the Russian population had reached 700, compared to 40,000 Aleuts. They and the Creoles, who had been guaranteed the privileges of citizens in the United States, were given the opportunity of becoming citizens within a three-year period, but few decided to exercise that option. General Jefferson C. Davis ordered the Russians out of their homes in Sitka, maintaining that the dwellings were needed for the Americans. The Russians complained of rowdiness of and assaults by the American troops. Many Russians returned to Russia, while others migrated to the Pacific Northwest and California.

Legacy
The Soviet Union (USSR) released a series of commemorative coins in 1990 and 1991 to mark the 250th anniversary of the first sighting of and claiming domain over Alaska–Russian America. The commemoration consisted of a silver coin, a platinum coin, and two palladium coins in both years.

At the beginning of the 21st century, a resurgence of Russian ultra-nationalism has spurred regret and recrimination over the sale of Alaska to the United States. There are periodic mass media stories in the Russian Federation that Alaska was not sold to the United States in the 1867 Alaska Purchase, but only leased for 99 years (= to 1966), or 150 years (= to 2017)—and would be returned to Russia. During the war in Ukraine, such statements reappeared in Russian media. Those claims of illegitimacy derive from wrong or misleading interpretations of a policy of the Russian Federation to re-acquire formerly held properties. The Alaska Purchase Treaty is absolutely clear that the agreement was for a complete Russian cession of the territory. Not the purchase from the Russian Empire, but the legitimacy of colonial rule altogether has been an issue of the Alaskan Native peoples in their struggle to democracy and indigenous rights.

Russian settlements in North America

 * Unalaska, Alaska – 1774
 * Three Saints Bay, Alaska – 1784
 * Fort St. George in Kasilof, Alaska – 1786
 * St. Paul, Alaska – 1788
 * Fort St. Nicholas in Kenai, Alaska – 1791
 * Pavlovskaya, Alaska (now Kodiak) – 1791
 * Fort Saints Constantine and Helen on Nuchek Island, Alaska – 1793
 * Fort on Hinchinbrook Island, Alaska – 1793
 * New Russia near present-day Yakutat, Alaska – 1796
 * Redoubt St. Archangel Michael, Alaska near Sitka – 1799
 * Novo-Arkhangelsk, Alaska (now Sitka) – 1804
 * Fort Ross, California – 1812
 * Fort Elizabeth near Waimea, Kaua'i, Hawai'i – 1817
 * Fort Alexander near Hanalei, Kaua'i, Hawai'i – 1817
 * Fort Barclay-de-Tolly near Hanalei, Kaua'i, Hawai'i – 1817
 * Fort (New) Alexandrovsk at Bristol Bay, Alaska – 1819
 * Kolmakov Redoubt, Alaska – 1832
 * Redoubt St. Michael, Alaska – 1833
 * Nulato, Alaska – 1834
 * Redoubt St. Dionysius in present-day Wrangell, Alaska (now Fort Stikine) – 1834
 * Pokrovskaya Mission, Alaska – 1837
 * Ninilchik, Alaska – 1847

Natives

 * Grinëv, Andrei V. "Natives and Creoles of Alaska in the maritime service in Russian America." The Historian 82.3 (2020): 328–345. online
 * The Tlingit Indians in Russian America, 1741–1867, Andreĭ Valʹterovich Grinev (GoogleBooks)
 * Luehrmann, Sonja. Alutiiq villages under Russian and US rule (University of Alaska Press, 2008.)
 * Savelev, Ivan. "Patterns in the Adoption of Russian Linguistic and National Traditions by Alaskan Natives." International Conference on European Multilingualism: Shaping Sustainable Educational and Social Environment EMSSESE, 2019. (Atlantis Press, 2019). online
 * Savelev, Ivan. "Patterns in the Adoption of Russian Linguistic and National Traditions by Alaskan Natives." International Conference on European Multilingualism: Shaping Sustainable Educational and Social Environment EMSSESE, 2019. (Atlantis Press, 2019). online

title: Russian colonization of North America