The question of the social effects of Anglo-American colonization has vexed observers practically since the founding of Jamestown in 1607. Contemporaries—most of whom had vested, often competing, interests in overseas ventures—debated whether colonizing schemes improved or debilitated society, while subsequent investigators have pondered how these schemes affected early modern English sociopolitical sensibilities. For Lauren Working, the latest entrant into these lists, America constituted a key element of Jacobean notions of civility and of early seventeenth-century political culture, as well as “a vital component of the Protestant vision of reform that emerged from the upheavals and traumas of religious and political controversies in Europe and beyond” (4). Accordingly, colonization promoters “infused expansionist discourses with the language of political duty but also encouraged gentlemen to lavishly imagine how plantation might improve the civil life” (21), while “policy-makers” considered these endeavors in terms of creating an empire (28), including the government of non-English people, from the 1580s in the process of English “state formation” (15).
Working has provided a useful treatment of early seventeenth-century English ideas about colonization, especially with respect to the generally understudied Native perspective on “civilizing” (205). Yet an ideological-intellectual history of empire cannot provide a comprehensive examination of imperial development absent a connection with the behavior of those who actually directed overseas colonization. Such approaches focus on published works by idea men. This, unfortunately, obscures the reality that these documents were produced to persuade, especially Crown officials; they were neither intellectual conceptions nor declarations of public purpose. An intellectual emphasis also tends to misapprehend the nature of the purposes of seventeenth-century projectors (private interests, in twenty-first-century terms) who undertook public purposes, such as building lighthouses and schools, as well as sponsoring colonization—and, thus, to misapprehend the nature of the early modern English polity.
Unquestionably, English awareness of and interest in America increased after the accession of James I to the throne in 1603. Unquestionably, also, certain patronage networks of Jacobean merchants and aristocrats, including those led by two of the most prominent gentlemen, Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, and Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, laid the platform, despite numerous failures, for permanent English establishments in the Caribbean and North America. But did the cultural references and societal prescriptions offered by colonizing cheerleaders such as Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, or the stillborn efforts of sociopolitical aspirants such as Sir Walter Ralegh, necessarily translate into a wider desire to create an imperial policy or an imperial state? The reception question remains an exceedingly difficult one to answer.
Working discusses these networks but assigns responsibility for imperial initiatives to the Crown, even as she acknowledges that its role was intermittent; the king issued and revoked charters and sought revenue from tobacco cultivation despite James's notorious aversion to the weed. In actuality, government involvement in the English Empire was consistently reactive: private operators—both legitimate and otherwise—managed overseas ventures, while ambitious agents on the ground advanced those interests and their own on the ground. John Rolfe constitutes a significant example: he introduced sweet-smelling tobacco into Virginia and married the Powhatan Pocahontas—arguably the most (in)famous Native “civilizing” case—before he and Rebecca Rolfe met Queen Anna during the Virginia Company's 1617 recapitalization campaign.
Did Rolfe read Hakluyt? We may never know, although Working has made the wider interest of Jacobeans in America clear. We do know, though, that the same factionalism that beset Jacobean England beset English colonizing ventures and Anglo-American politics. The Virginia Company leaders Warwick and Southampton—who regarded themselves as adherents of the “chivalrous” aristocratic ideal described by Working (29)—fell out while a Native attack on the would-be civilizers devastated their province in 1622. The turmoil wrought by the resulting finger-pointing, accompanied by proclamations of disinterested virtue by all concerned, obliged Crown intervention. Then, Virginians overthrew their governor in 1635 as their metropolitan counterparts did kings in 1399, 1461, and 1485, and would again in 1642 and 1688.
Did these events manifest the success of an Anglo-American “civilizing project” (205) or did Jacobean “articulations of an imperial polity” (65) amount to a pretext for engaging in familiar political and economic behavior farther afield? The jury must remain out.
