4.1—The Principle (10 min video)

Transcript

_{The following transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors in spelling and/or grammar. It is provided for assistance in note-taking and review.}

Welcome back to another week. We’re going to take a look at a new topic over the coming days here. Actually, today I’m going to have you look at the different types of colonies that began to spring up in the New World after Columbus opened the doors for it once again from 1492 onward.

It’s a real interesting question that we have to ask ourselves today, and that question is, “Why did some colonies succeed very well, and why did some colonies not succeed as well?” In other words, why do some of the colonies that were founded in South America or North America, why are they essentially third world nations today?

That means, why are they nations that are extremely poor, or nations that often have very little liberty or very little freedom and so forth?

Versus the question, why did some of the colonies that were founded, why did they actually flourish? Why do they actually have things like life, liberty, and property to such an extent? Now our title, which you need to write down for today, is called the Colossus of Empire. And that’s because the various empires, such as the Spanish, or the Portuguese, or the British, which essentially was the English back then, or the French, as they began to race over here to lay claim to all the lands that they could find, they were essentially building these massive empires.

empires, something akin to say the Colossus of the ancient days, that huge statue there at Rhodes in the nation that we call today Greece.

But all of these different nations didn’t exactly found colonies in the same way or for the same reasons. In fact, one of the ideas that we’re going to mention right now, though it’s something we would look at at a different lecture topic, is the whole idea of the Enlightenment versus the Reformation. In other words, there were some colonies that were founded with very clear views of things like Christianity and the Scriptures, but then there were some colonies that were founded more off an Enlightenment idea that believed that essentially your mind, the mind that you have and the mind that I have, is essentially equal to what you can find out about truth or about God or about us in the Scriptures.

And so people that believe in that, that believe that the mind is equal to the Scriptures, they make decisions in a certain way. And the way that they founded colonies was very different from the way that people who viewed the Scriptures as being the final authority, from the way that they actually founded their colonies.

Now our principle for today has to do with these different colonies. And what I want you to note, what I want you to write down in your notes, and I want you to look over this over and over again, it’s very easy to remember, is that the colonies that were founded on faith and the idea of home, those were the colonies that lasted the longest.

Those were the colonies that had the most liberty, and those were the colonies that had the most wealth. And so, these colonies, which is interesting, the word “colony” comes from the Latin “colonia,” which always implies something to do with the farm or something to do with a settled home. Well, those colonies that were founded for religious reasons, such as people like the the pilgrims who wanted to come over here and be able to freely worship in the way that they believed they should worship, or those colonies founded by people who were just looking for new opportunities for home, for their family, for their children, and have this vision, “Okay, what can my grandchildren be doing? What can my great-grandchildren be doing?” Those were the colonies that lasted the longest. Those were the colonies that were the most successful and enjoyed the most freedom. Those are actually the colonies that really make up the United States of America, which is our grand topic for this whole year. And so, we have to understand that not all colonies were equal. In fact, I’m going to give you four different types of colonies. And today, we’re going to primarily look at three of them. But I want you to note a little bit about each one of these colonies. And you’ll have a little help on the screen here to help you note these. The first type of colony I want you to write down is what we call a trading post. This is a colony that’s founded on the shores, typically, of some nation in the Americas. This also was the time where the great powers of Europe were colonizing places like Africa, places like India, places like China or Indonesia and the great Pacific islands.

But a trading post colony was always founded right on the shore. It usually was kind of like a small town that was walled and had fortresses and guards and so forth. It might have a church or two, but primarily this colony was where businessmen went to, and they would trade with the natives. They would trade for fruits, they would trade for gold, they would trade for pearls, whatever it happened to be that they could sell back home at a profit.

And so these colonies were set up primarily just to make money. Now the nation that practiced this the most was probably the Portuguese. They set up colonies in places like Goa, which is in India, or all throughout Africa that were primarily trading posts. The French also did this. But my whole point with these trading post colonies is that these trading post colonies were not designed for hundreds of years. These trading post colonies were only designed for a few years to make as much money as possible in a short amount of time. So they didn’t really have a whole lot of vision behind them, which means they didn’t last the longest. Now the second type of colony I want you to write down is what we call a strategic colony. And a strategic colony was a type of colony that typically the French would settle. Now a strategic colony is very simple. A strategic colony is not necessarily that you want a particular piece of land or that you want to settle in a specific area. A strategic colony simply means that you want to set up a military base somewhere. You want to be able to control a certain region. And the primary reason why the French often wanted to control certain regions or certain vast lands that were often just forests and mountains and didn’t have much in between was because the French wanted to make certain that nobody else controlled it. So these strategic outposts weren’t really about new homes. They weren’t really about any specific vision. It was just to keep the other guy from having too much power. It’s kind of like if you’re playing with your brother or sister at home and you don’t want them to have a certain toy, you don’t really want the toy either, but you just take it. Or they have something else such as, I don’t know, the last bit of some food at the dinner table and you don’t really want it, but you just want to take it so they don’t have it. That’s kind of how the strategic colonies operated. That’s kind of how the French operated. They took it just so they could actually have it and control it so that the other guy wouldn’t inhabit. Now the third type of colony is probably one of the most infamous, meaning it’s the one that has the worst rap throughout history. That’s what we call an exploitation colony, which you see here on the screen. And exploitation colonies were typically founded by the Spanish, although all the major European powers dabbled in them in some way or another. But an exploitation colony almost seems like a home because you do have people settling for the long term and building cities and building walls and building fortresses and building homes within those cities, but the primary purpose of an exploitation colony is to take all the valuable stuff out of the land, to take all of the free labor from slaves, which they brought over to work the land or to mine in the hills to search for things like gold and silver, and then ship that back to Europe at a huge profit and make tons of money.

And so, they literally exploited both the land and the people who were already here. Most of the colonies of the Spanish did this, and because they operate in this way, again, they didn’t have a long-term vision for being here, and so therefore their colonies really weren’t as successful. And most of those countries still have a bad taste and a bad memory of when it was that the Spanish ruled over them. That’s how they still view them, and they typically don’t like to dwell upon that time very much. The fourth type of colony, which we’ll just touch on this week, we’ll actually explore it more deeply next week, is what we call a parish settlement. Now a parish is basically a region, part of a town maybe, or part of a larger county, that all congregates around one single church.

And these parish settlements were people who came over from Europe. They often came from English speaking countries or from Dutch speaking countries, but they came over here and they wanted to found new homes. They wanted a place that would be there for them, for their children, for their grandchildren, for their great grandchildren, and so on and so on and so on.

In other words, they had a vision that lasted beyond a few years that that even lasted beyond their own lives. And so as a result, you can probably guess how this works, those parish settlement colonies, those were the ones that lasted the longest. Well, tomorrow we’ll take a look at some of the instruments that helped the explorers get over here to actually found these new colonies in the first place.

We’ll see you then.