Book description
Envisioning an English Empire brings together leading
historians and literary scholars to reframe our understanding of the
history of Jamestown and the literature of empire that emerged from it.
The founding of an English colony at Jamestown in 1607 was no
isolated incident. It was one event among many in the long development
of the North Atlantic world. Ireland, Spain, Morocco, West Africa,
Turkey, and the Native federations of North America all played a role
alongside the Virginia Company in London and English settlers on the
ground. English proponents of empire responded as much to fears of
Spanish ambitions, fantasies about discovering gold, and dreams of
easily dominating the region's Natives as they did to the grim lessons
of earlier, failed outposts in North America. Developments in trade
and technology, in diplomatic relations and ideology, in agricultural
practices and property relations were as crucial as the
self-consciously combative adventurers who initially set sail for the Chesapeake.
The collection begins by exploring the initial encounters
between the Jamestown settlers and the Powhatan Indians and the
relations of both these groups with London. It goes on to examine the
international context that defined English colonialism in this
period-relations with Spain, the Turks, North Africa, and Ireland.
Finally, it turns to the ways both settlers and Natives were
transformed over the course of the seventeenth century, considering
conflicts and exchanges over food, property, slavery, and colonial identity.
What results is a multifaceted view of the history of Jamestown
up to the time of Bacon's Rebellion and its aftermath. The writings of
Captain John Smith, the experience of Powhatans in London, the letters
home of a disappointed indentured servant, the Moroccans, Turks, and
Indians of the English stage, the ethnographic texts of early
explorers, and many other phenomena all come into focus as examples of
the envisioning of a nascent empire and the Atlantic world in which it
found a hold.
"The stimulating essays in this collection demonstrate the
usefulness of reaching out, not just in spatial and temporal terms but
also in disciplinary ones. By placing Jamestown in a wider frame, we
have a better understanding of Jamestown and of the North Atlantic
world in the early seventeenth century."-Renaissance Quarterly
Robert Appelbaum is Lecturer in Renaissance Studies at Lancaster
University and is the author of Literature and Utopian Politics in
Seventeenth-Century England. John Wood Sweet teaches history at the
University of North Carolina and is the author of Bodies Politic:
Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830, also available from
the University of Pennsylvania Press.
