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Compare And Contrast Virginia And Massachusetts Colonies

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By the end of the 16th century and the eve of the next, England was rising as a global power after defeating the collapsing Spanish empire, and it was now ready to create a colonial empire in the New World. By the early 1600s, two English groups procured royal charters from the crown in order to begin settlements in North America. Later, tens of thousands of English refugees migrated to these Virginia and Massachusetts Bay colonies during the Great English Migration of the 1630s. While Both colonies’ common English origin lead to them implemented similar forms of government, their differing climates and population characteristic would lead to differing economies and systems of labor that would shape the future of the United States.
Although they traveled to a new continent across the Atlantic, the people of both the Virginia colony and the Massachusetts colony implemented a similar governing structure to that of England. The overseas colonies assured their people the same rights as those in England, like that of a fair trial. Each colony also had its own system of self-government, where the colonists were able to arrange their affairs mostly independent of the English royalty. The Virginia colony founded its House of Burgesses in 1619, where Virginians were able to elect their own representatives to the parliamentary assembly. The Plymouth Bay colony, which was assimilated into the Massachusetts colony, drew up the Mayflower Compact in 1620 which was an agreement to create

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