Good question and one that is often answered a bit too narrowly. The key issue is whether trade routes promoted resource extraction and/or economic development, and if the latter, what sort of development. Of course, the most famous route, with the greatest impact on New World colonies, was the Triangular Trade, which had some variants. In addition, though, there were several versions of a simpler two-way transatlantic trade, from the UK to the northern colonies, from France to Quebec, and from Spain/Portugal to Latin American places. Last, and less known, a transpacific trade took shape in the 17th century, connecting the Philippines with Mexico through the west coast port of Acapulco. So here we have at least half dozen routes to assess in terms of impacts.

The core of the triangular trade, ca. 1600-1800, was the exchange of slaves for materials and goods – African captives brought to eastern Atlantic ports, exchanged for gold or British manufactured products, then transshipped brutally to colonial depots – Charleston, New Orleans, the Caribbean islands, and in smaller numbers, New York, for example. There, captives were again sold, for cash or goods (sugar, tobacco, timber) which returned to a UK starting point (often Liverpool). Yet this sequence was not the only one, particularly in New England, where merchants sent rum and other North American goods to Africa, secured slaves for auction to sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and brought liquid sugar (molasses) to American shores for distillation into more rum. Though this sounds tidy, actually, rarely was either triangle completed by one ship in one voyage; each triangle stands more as a mythical model than a description of standard practice. Nonetheless these ventures, plus those made by Spanish and Portuguese slavers extracted over nine million Africans from their home terrains across the 16th through the 19th centuries. That’s quite an impact, creating slave economies from Virginia to Trinidad to Brazil. Another three-sided trade involved slavery indirectly, as when Yankees sent colonial goods to the sugar islands, shipped to Russia to exchange sugar for iron, which returned to New England.

Bilateral trade is simpler to grasp, and yet may depart from our current notions of exchange. The Kingdom of Spain extracted precious metals from Latin America, sending back goods for colonizers, especially through Veracruz, which became Mexico’s principal east coast harbor. By contrast, French trade with Quebec was a constant drain on the monarchy’s funds; often goods sent to sustain some 50,000 settlers cost more than double the value of furs gathered and sold. However, Virginia tobacco sold to Britain at times created high profits, but this single-crop economy proved vulnerable to commodity price fluctuations (Cotton’s southern surge came after the American Revolution.). Clearly trade did not automatically translate into sustained development, though port cities did prosper, not least because they became anchors for coastal shipping within and among colonies. At times, expanding trade could irritate the colonizing state, as when Mexican merchants created a long-distance 16th-18th century trans-Pacific route from Acapulco, trading an estimated 100 tons of silver annually for Chinese silks, cottons, spices, and pottery – resources the Crown thought should be sent to Madrid instead. Overall, my sense is that colonial trade routes deepened exploitation of people and nature appreciably more than they fostered investment and economic development.

Contemporary Americans often picture the War for Independence as a straightforward struggle between American patriots and the British crown over the political independence of the colonies. The reality is far more complex: the colonists did not represent a homogeneous bloc, and in some senses the conflict resembled a civil war over political sovereignty in the colonies. Like all civil wars, it extracted a toll on the civilian population, many of whom who found themselves displaced and their lives disrupted by the military and political struggle being played out in North America.

Not every inhabitant of the colonies in 1776 supported the Declaration of Independence and the political break from the English crown. It is impossible to know precisely how many supporters the Patriot forces enjoyed (especially when announcing one’s allegiance was a potentially risky move), but modern historians estimate that, at most, the Patriots enjoyed a bare majority of popular support—that is, no more than half the residents of the colonies supported the cause of independence. Between one-sixth and one-fifth of the residents of the colonies remained loyal to the British crown; the remainder of the population did their best to avoid an open declaration of their sympathies, since “fence-sitting” was often the safest political and practical course.

Fully fifteen to twenty percent of the residents of the North American colonies retained their allegiance to the crown during the conflict. These loyalists presented some serious challenges to the Patriot forces mounting the War for Independence, already strained by the demands of fighting the world’s most powerful military with scarce resources and an embryonic government. Loyalists threatened to provide information or material support to British forces, and the stakes involved in the struggle—in the eyes of the Crown, after all, the Patriots advocating treason in their push for independence—led the Patriots to deal with Loyalist elements harshly at points in the struggle. Desperate to deter loyalists from overtly supporting British forces, Patriots imposed loyalty oaths on colonists suspected of British sympathies. Other Loyalists had their land confiscated; by war’s end, the hostilities had forced some 60,000 Loyalists to leave their homes in the thirteen colonies and relocate to England or to other parts of the empire.

The 1994 PBS film Mary Silliman’s War does an excellent job of demonstrating many of the tensions the War for Independence created in local communities, and the ways in which civilians caught between two warring armies attempted to continue their lives against a backdrop of conflict and civil war. The film is based on the true story of Mary Silliman, whose husband Selleck actively prosecuted Loyalists for treason as the state’s attorney for Connecticut. After winning a death sentence for two Fairfield men, their relatives kidnap Selleck and threaten to hang him if the convicted Loyalists ascend to the gallows. In charting Mary’s efforts to secure her husband’s release, the film vividly portrays the often insoluble dilemmas faced by civilians during what remained (until the 1970s) America’s longest war.

Is this scene set in the Twilight Zone? According to historian Jon Butler, Huguenots died out as a distinct religious and ethnic group during the 18th century.

In the five years following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685, the Huguenot population in France declined from 1 million to less than 75,000, most of whom converted to Catholicism under duress. Huguenot emigrants traveled primarily to England, Germany, and Holland. Most of the Huguenots who arrived in British North America had emigrated first to England. Butler estimates that between 1,500 and 2,000 Huguenots came to America by 1700.

The American Huguenots, like the Huguenot emigrants to European nations, quickly assimilated into their host communities. In Massachusetts, South Carolina, and New York, the colonies to which the majority of Huguenots migrated, many attained material success and married outside of their church. Butler blames the disintegration of Huguenot communities in part to “the indelible pathology of 17th-century French Protestantism,” as Huguenot clerics “were poorly prepared to exercise the instruments of church government in exile.” The French Protestant Church in the quarter century prior to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes had existed in a weakened state due to the abandonment of national synods, which had left the group without “experience in making decisions beyond the local and provincial level.” Butler also notes that group cohesion in America was especially difficult because the size of the group that migrated was very small.

Sources from the 19th century repeat a story that Huguenots from South Carolina prepared a petition for Louis XIV asking permission to settle in Louisiana when it first was colonized at the end of the 17th century. Louis’ supposed response—that he wanted Louisiana as “a dominion of true believers not a republic for heretics”—is considered by historian Bertrand Van Ruymbeke as “most likely apocryphal.” Van Ruymbeke notes that Huguenots were allowed to migrate to Louisiana, but that the very few who did settle there had to convert to Catholicism.

Following the acquisition of the territory by the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase, religious restrictions for immigrants to Louisiana were removed, and the first Protestant church in New Orleans was established in 1805. If a Protestant from France had immigrated to Louisiana in 1901, he or she would have found that large communities of Protestants from areas other than France had settled in the northern portion of the state, and that most of Louisiana’s inhabitants had remained Catholic.