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by Matthew J. Keller (Author)
In 1607, English settlers landed at Jamestown and history books called it the beginning of America. But the real story starts much earlier - and it belongs to the wrong empire.
Struggle for Survival: The Origins of the Thirteen Colonies traces the full arc of how America's founding colonies came to exist, beginning not with the Pilgrims or the Virginia Company but with the Spanish and Portuguese empires that first divided the Western world between them and the European powers that followed in their wake. Before the first English settler drove a stake into American soil, three empires had already competed, failed, and left their mark on the continent - shaping the political, economic, and geographic conditions that made the thirteen colonies both possible and necessary.
Each colony gets its own chapter. Each chapter tells the story of the people, the money, the religion, and the raw survival instinct that drove ordinary men and women to risk everything on an ocean crossing to build something from nothing in a land that had no intention of welcoming them. Virginia's tobacco gamble. Massachusetts and the religious desperation of the Puritans. The Dutch foothold in New York that England simply took. The Quaker experiment in Pennsylvania. The buffer colony of Georgia, founded not by dreamers but by a general who needed a military barrier between British Carolina and Spanish Florida.
The book begins where the story actually begins - with the Age of Exploration, the navigational technology that made transoceanic voyages possible, the treaties that divided the world between Spain and Portugal, and the economic pressures that sent England, France, and the Netherlands scrambling for whatever was left. It ends with thirteen distinct colonies that somehow, despite every reason not to, became the foundation of a nation.
This is American colonial history as it actually happened - not a myth of Pilgrims and destiny, but a hard, contested, often brutal story of survival, ambition, and accident.
Available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook.
