I am looking for resources that would give me the best understanding of how the New World was settled and colonies and providences were created by different nations and corporations in Europe. How did the English (and English corporations) settle the New World? The French? Spain? Portuguese? Dutch? I would love video, audio and written resource suggestions if you have any. Thank you so much!
Matthews Restall's Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest is an incredible book that addresses many of the popularly promoted ideas, both the "classic textbook" ideas of technologically superior white men with guns mowing down fields of natives and the "edgy redditor dae columbus was evil" ideas that minimize native agency.
Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America ed. Cameron, Kelton, and Swedlund, is another good volume that challenges both scholarship and popular narratives that rampant disease was a cause of, not the result of, colonial practices. It's more academic than Restall, but is great if you want the most recent research.
For the colonization of Peru specifically, I recommend:
Vertical Empire by Jeremy Mumford covers both Inca economic infrastructure and how Spanish colonialism adapted and transformed it for its own purposes. This one is more accessible than the other, but not at the cost of detail or interest. A must read for the political and economy processes that colonization and conquest involve.
Colonial Habits by Kathryn Burns looks at convents and nuns in the colonial social order, primarily in Cuzco. Lots of great discussion of how gender, culture, and religion intersected with power in the early modern world.
Invaders as Ancestors by Peter Gose is a theoretically packed but incredibly rewarding analysis of the interaction between the religious authorities and native populations of colonial Peru. I'm no historian, but this book is in top competition as my favorite about the region. It diversifies the membership and strategies of the clergy who ministered to the natives, and it restores native agency in events instead of the typical "white man beats indian with stick until he believes in Jesus" story with some cool stories of natives appropriating and navigating Christianity as their own source of political and social power. It also directly discusses the question that pops up here so often: "Did the natives really think Europeans were gods?"
Karen Ordahl Kupperman's "The Jamestown Project" is an excellent source on early English settlement in Virginia.