British America collectively were various colonies of Great Britain and its predecessor states in the Americas prior to the conclusion of the American Revolutionary War in 1783.
England made its first attempts at colonizing the Americas in 1585. From 1607, numerous permanent English settlements were made, ultimately reaching from Hudson Bay, to the Mississippi River and the Caribbean Sea. Much of these territories were occupied by indigenous peoples, whose populations declined due to epidemics, wars, and massacres. In the Atlantic slave trade, England and other European empires shipped Africans to the Americas for labor in their colonies. Slavery became essential to colonial production, as on Barbados, Jamaica, and other sugar islands.
