- expanding England’s overseas empire
In the 1600s, colonization in North America received a major jolt from political changes in England. Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan leader of the revolutionary movement that had ushered in a decade of Parliamentary rule, died in 1658. 2 years later, conservative forces invited Charles II, son of the king whom Cromwell‘s supporters had executed during the civil war, to take the throne. The Restoration of the Stuart monarchy (1660), as the event was called, led to a new effort by the British Crown to expand its overseas empire and coordinate colonial affairs. A series of new colonies appeared in the Restoration era, mostly in the mid-Atlantic area between New England and the Chesapeake, attracting an overseas migration as great as any of the earlier ones. Charles II pursued aggressive policies to wrest trade from the Dutch, and Parliament enacted laws to wring more profits from North American colonies.