Dutch intolerance and war in 1676:
The Dutch had a harder time recruiting colonists than the British, and the Dutch Republic did not have as many people seeking refuge or a new life as the British.
By 1640, nearly 60,000 Englishmen had emigrated to the New World, many times more than the Dutch and French.
The British sent a hundred settlers to establish a colony in Guyana. Then came the Civil War in England, the execution of Charles I and the coming to power of Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans.
Migration to America slowed down, except for sending captured Scots to America after Cromwell waged war against them.
The Congress gave Virginia's colonists a year to obey its religious and political orders, while those who did not would be threatened with expulsion, but attempts to turn Virginia into a Puritan colony failed.
On the contrary, Virginia still had royalists who supported Charles I, and from 1647 wealthy royalist refugees fled from England to join the Puritans.
At the beginning of 1650, competition with Dutch merchants inspired the English to go to war against the Dutch - Protestants against Protestants.
Cromwell ended the war in 1655, the year he began his military campaign against Catholic Spain, which took place in the Caribbean.
The British occupied Jamaica in 1655, when there were still 1500 Spanish settlers and their black slaves. The British began to deport the Spaniards and used slave labor to manage the sugar cane plantations there.
Jamaica became a base for English "privateers", including the notorious Henry Morgan, and the activities of English privateers (pirates) would continue until 1670, when Britain would sign a treaty with Spain to end their war.
Slavery, the suffering of indentured servants and Quakers
In 1652, the Catholic colony of Rhodes (centered on the town of Providence) made slavery illegal.
Farther south, the colony of Virginia had fewer than 500 slaves—just three percent of its nearly 17,000 colonists.
Tobacco plantation owners there still used indentured servant labor, and indentured servants did not require the initial investment like buying slaves.
Quakers and Baptists began arriving in the colonies. The Puritans in Massachusetts hated Quaker pacifism, interpreting the Quaker's belief in inner light and the divine spark as pride. To the Puritans, the lack of authoritarian leadership of the Quakers seemed anarchist.
Then rumors spread among the Puritans that the Quakers were burning Bibles. By 1660, in order to maintain order and religious unity in the colony, the Massachusetts colony had imprisoned and hanged 3,000 Quakers, who sought refuge in the more tolerant colony of Providence.
Two Quaker women expelled from the Massachusetts colony mistakenly traveled to the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam and preached on the streets there.
Other Quakers who intruded into New Amsterdam were imprisoned and flogged, and the Dutch in New Amsterdam wanted to prevent "all kinds of improvisation" from coming to their colony.
The Dutch also expelled William Wickendam, a Baptist shoemaker who wandered from Rhode Island to New Amsterdam. Vickendan has been seen "dipping" converts in river water.
More clashes between the British and Dutch
In 1660, after Cromwell's death after 18 years of Puritan rule in England, the Puritans lost power in England, the English monarchy was restored, and a second wave of English immigration to the Americas began.
Merchants in England remained concerned about competition from Dutch and colonial English craftsmen. In 1663, Charles II of England approved the Navigation Act.
The Act required that all trade with the English colonies must be conducted using British ships, and that the colonies could only export certain products, including tobacco and sugar.
To counter Dutch trade in the Americas, England imposed a naval blockade around New Amsterdam in 1664.
The Dutch had been fighting the local Indians in the so-called "Peach War", and they also faced resistance from the Portuguese colonists in Brazil.
The second war between the British and the Dutch ended in 1667, when the Dutch recognized New Amsterdam as part of the British, and the Dutch exchanged their nascent British colony in Guyana for the British renaming New Amsterdam New York.
