Initially, settlers in the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia relied on white indentured servants as their primary labor force, and at least some of the blacks who arrived in the region were able to acquire property. But between 1640 and 1670, a sharp distinction emerged between short-term servitude for whites and permanent slavery for blacks. By the end of the century slavery had become the basic labor force in the southern colonies.

In New England, the economy was organized around small family farms and urban communities engaged in fishing, handicrafts, and Atlantic commerce, with most of the population living in small compact towns.

In Maryland and Virginia, the economy was structured around larger and much more isolated farms and plantations raising tobacco. In the Carolinas, economic life was organized around larger but less isolated plantations growing rice, indigo, coffee, cotton, and sugar.

Religious persecution was a particularly powerful force motivating English colonization in the colonies. Some thirty thousand English Puritans immigrated to New England, while Maryland became a refuge for Roman Catholics, and Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and Rhode Island, havens for Quakers. Refugees from religious persecution included Baptists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians, to say nothing of religious minorities from continental Europe, including Huguenots and members of the Dutch and German Reformed churches.

By 1700, Britain's North American colonies differed from England itself in the population growth rate, the proportion of white men who owned property and were able to vote, as well as in the population's ethnic and religious diversity.