Overview
New Spain governed Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean and pushed a northern frontier of missions and presidios. New France stretched along the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi through the fur trade, thirteen British colonies grew densely along the Atlantic seaboard, and Russia reached the Pacific Northwest.
Key developments
Colonial societies mixed European, Indigenous, and African peoples, from the stratified castas of New Spain to the plantation slavery of the British South. Relations with Indigenous nations ranged from trade and alliance to war and dispossession, and the transatlantic slave trade carried hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans to the continent.
End and transition
The Seven Years’ War (1754–1763) ended French power in mainland North America and left Britain dominant but heavily in debt. British attempts to tax the colonies then ignited a crisis that moved toward revolution.