English America began with failures before lasting colonies stuck
British colonization of the Americas covers English, Scottish and, after 1707, British settlement, beginning with failed late-sixteenth-century ventures and running alongside the plantations of Ireland. Jamestown in 1607 was the first colony to last. Most later won independence, though a handful survive as British Overseas Territories.
Norse Vinland around 1000 CE was the first documented European foothold in Newfoundland; Columbus’s 1492 Castilian voyage restarted sustained contact. England seized Dutch New Netherland in mid-seventeenth-century wars, then after beating France took Canada and lands east of the Mississippi, reshaping the continental map.
From the mid-1800s Britain granted self-government; most northern colonies joined Canadian Confederation in the 1860s–70s, Newfoundland only in 1949, with later statutes completing autonomy. Early English efforts trailed Spain and Portugal, then intensified under Elizabethan explorers seeking Northwest Passages and Grand Banks fisheries.
The early roll call is uneven. Walter Raleigh's Roanoke Colony of 1585 soon vanished; Jamestown, founded in 1607, grew into Virginia; Bermuda was settled by accident when the Sea Venture wrecked there in 1609; and Pilgrim separatists planted a Massachusetts colony in 1620. The Hudson's Bay Company's charter created Rupert's Land, and Barbados and Jamaica anchored Caribbean holdings. The 1763 settlement also added the Floridas, though they went back to Spain when the American Revolutionary War ended in 1783. After that, historians speak of a Second British Empire more interested in Asia, Africa and trade, yet Britain still added British Columbia, the Falklands, British Honduras, and after 1815 Trinidad and British Guiana. Canada won full autonomy under the Statute of Westminster in 1931 while keeping the British monarch as head of state, and most remaining colonies gained independence between 1962 and 1983; many now belong to the Commonwealth of Nations.
Source: British colonization of the Americas
