AP® United States History · Unit 2 · Topic 2.2
Why the English Came
Most English colonists came chasing land and profit, not religious freedom. Jamestown was founded by investors expecting a financial return, and headrights turned land into the bait that filled ships with laborers.
Jamestown started as a business. The Virginia Company was a joint-stock company: a group of London investors pooled their money, bought a royal charter, and funded ships and settlers in 1607 hoping to find gold, or at least a profitable export, and pay themselves back with interest. There was no king's treasury funding this out of generosity. Investors wanted returns, so the colony's whole purpose from day one was commercial, not spiritual.
The headright system was how the Virginia Company and later royal government solved a labor problem: who would do the dangerous work of clearing land and growing tobacco? Anyone who paid for their own passage, or paid for someone else's, got fifty acres per person brought over. A wealthy planter who paid for five indentured servants' passage collected 250 acres free. This turned immigration into a land grab. Poor English families sold everything for a chance at ownership they could never get at home, and wealthier men got rich importing labor.
That bet was often fatal. By 1624, about 6000 people had arrived in Virginia, but only about 1200 were still alive. Disease, starvation, and conflict with Powhatan peoples killed most arrivals within a few years. This matters for the unit because it sets the economic logic that follows: tobacco profits demanded more land and more labor, headrights encouraged importing workers, and that same hunger for cheap labor is what later pulled enslaved Africans into the system.
Key terms
- Joint-stock company
- A business where investors pool money for a venture and share the profits or losses, used to fund Jamestown.
- Headright system
- A land grant, usually fifty acres, given to anyone who paid for their own or another person's passage to a colony.
- Virginia Company
- The London-chartered joint-stock company that financed and governed the 1607 Jamestown settlement.
- Indentured servant
- A laborer who agreed to work for a set number of years in exchange for paid passage to the colonies.
Watch it explained
- How it worksHow does a joint-stock company turn London investors' money into a fort at Jamestown?
- How it worksWalk me through the headright system handing fifty acres to whoever pays for a passage.
- Worked exampleShow me Virginia's arithmetic: about 6000 arrivals by 1624 and about 1200 people still alive.
- Common mistakeWhy isn't religious freedom the reason most English colonists actually crossed the Atlantic?
Check yourself
End of topic.