In the debate about the irreversible consequences of chance and necessity in history, we have been looking for some clues that lead to the occurrence of such accidental or inevitable results. [~]

The English-speaking people of Britain, who ruled most of the world in just over 200 years in modern times, seem to today seem like a complicated process of solving formulas, full of luck, weirdness, blood, calculation, and infall. However, it is undeniable that the regional ethnicity and social spirit of the British nation itself are very different from those of Spain, Portugal and France, which are also European coastal states.

First, there is the issue of population.

From the beginning of the 16th century to the beginning of the 17th century, Europe entered a stage of social self-reorganization and external exploration and curiosity, the frequency of large-scale European internal wars decreased to the lowest point since the Middle Ages, and England, which had been peaceful for most of the time, had a peak population growth that lasted for a century.

At the beginning of the 17th century, excluding Ireland and Scotland, which were not yet part of the future British Empire, England's native population exceeded 4.2 million, much more than other European countries in the same period.

The initial rise of urbanization has led to a sharp increase in population pressure in major English cities such as London, and all walks of life are redundant. A peaceful life is not guaranteed, and London's prisons are overcrowded with idle unemployed and thieves and hooligans. The founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in British North America, John Brown. Winthrop complained in his diary: "All the towns and villages complain about the burden of the poor. ”

At the end of the 16th century, the Xiaoice climate began to spread around the world. Coupled with the rapid growth of the country's population, social problems became more prominent, and from the beginning of the 17th century, England's determination to emigrate abroad was strengthened.

More than 100 years later, a priest named Malthus published a pamphlet called "The Principle of Population", which expounded on the contradictory relationship between population inflation and the country's economy, and proposed the chilling "Malthusian trap" population theory:

A peaceful environment for economic development will inevitably lead to population growth, which in turn will inevitably dilute per capita capital possession. This, in turn, has kept per capita output at a low level. Population growth grows in a geometric progression, while the means of subsistence only grow in an arithmetic progression, and the additional population is always eliminated in some way. It can be a plague, it can be a famine, it can be a war. It can also be something else......

It has to be said that the "far-sighted" large-scale foreign colonization activities of the English people began in the 17th century, allowing the English to bypass the Malthusian trap in advance, and in the following two hundred years, the descendants of the Britons spread all over the earth.

On the other hand, the Reformation movement in Germany, which began to sprout in the 16th century, also entered the British Isles with inexorable momentum, breaking the old and complicated social constraints of the church and seeking free faith and emancipation of the mind. The conflict between the British Protestants, represented by the Puritans, and the rulers of England was no longer limited to the religious level.

In 1603, the Puritans presented the Thousand Wishes to the then King James I of England. In the eyes of those in power, too much "self-righteous ideas" are intolerable. James I claimed that if the Puritans did not obey, they would all be expelled from the country.

Under the repressive policy, the Puritans had to leave their homeland. Wandering to the Netherlands, the Dutch, who also believed in Protestantism, severely limited the scope of their careers, and the disappointed English Puritans had to migrate to the New World in droves in search of a settlement that matched their political ideals. …,

It can be said that in the early 17th century, the religious factor played a crucial and decisive role in the emigration of England.

Chapter 147, ended up missing a boat trip. ”

Looking at his wife's happy appearance and gently kissing each other's foreheads, Su Zining just smiled and was noncommittal.

On June 6, 1624, the sail Galen of the 147th Regiment of the Whaling Regiment, a republic-class light cruiser that had completed sea trials and entered service, entered Cape Cot Bay to escape the wind and waves, and only then did he stumble upon the colonial settlement established by the English in the bay.

It's worth it! When the news came back to the mainland, the Congress was shocked, and the commander of the Navy, Brigadier Admiral Wang Tiezhu, also took the case and immediately sent the frigate Vostok to investigate, and the result was not only in Cape Cote Bay, but also in Massachusetts Bay, dozens of kilometers north of Cape Cote Bay, traces of English colonies were also found, and even some of the colonies have been created for almost three years!

The Mayflower had stumbled off course, but the inertia of history was still moving forward, and the English still broke into the Massachusetts coast again after 1621, and colonies such as Plymouth were still established. This time, however, the self-exiled Puritan adventure of North America became the more organized colonization of the Virginia Corporation. (Your support is my biggest motivation.) )