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The achievements of the period failed to match the expectations of a new generation of colonial expansionists, such as Richard Hakluyt, who envisaged the creation of an English Empire in America to rival and eventually supersede Spain's. This failure was the result of a structural weakness in English enterprise which repeatedly influenced its character and conduct during this period. Ultimately this weakness stemmed from the lack of sustained state support for overseas expansion. As a result, the burden of colonial and commercial development was left in the hands of private adventurers whose concern for immediate gain was detrimental to the long-term planning needed to promote colonization. Most London merchants, particularly the powerful Merchant Adventurers, were more concerned with traditional trades in Europe than the wider world.

This chapter follows the efforts of planters to learn about and to develop a consistently profitable cash crop from the early struggles with tobacco, cotton, indigo, and ginger to the remarkable prosperity they found in sugar cultivation. Beyond discussing the land, labor, livestock, equipment, and expertise required for successful sugar cultivation, the chapter includes an analysis of the importance of Barbados to the economic health of the English empire.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, many imperial thinkers, Lord Mayors, and adventurers in England thought of America and India together, and of America as a type of India. America seemed to offer an opportunity to avoid the dangers and competition of India. Some leaders hoped that American cultivation of silk, cotton, and spices would reduce the East India Company’s export of bullion to India and its imports of India’s finished goods that competed with English products. As the early English empire emerged, however, the promise of America seemed to change while the promise and threat of India and its goods, particularly its calicoes, seemed to increase. These changes, alongside war with Spain and the Dutch Republic, shaped the early structures, fashions, and aesthetics of the English empire.

This chapter discusses the imperial turn of the English Revolution, when the English state, through legislation and force of arms, undertook the first systematic attempt to consolidate Ireland and the Atlantic colonies into a profitably organized and politically potent empire. The discussion here focuses on how saints returned from the colonies and from the ranks of the Coleman Street elite worked in concert as moving forces behind the Revolution’s imperial turn. From the top down, they designed and executed imperial initiatives and colonial projects that relied upon innovative legislation and sophisticated forms of financing as well as naval warfare, landed conquest, military conscription, slave trading, and a spectrum of unfree, mostly coerced plantation labor. But from the bottom-up, we see that hundreds of thousands of people from around the Atlantic world were swept unwillingly into the violent vortex that powered England’s expansion into the Americas. But these human beings did not go without a fight. Army and navy mutinies, republican insurgencies, crowd actions, slave and servant rebellions, and slave ship revolts arose around the English Atlantic, where commoners, servants, soldiers, sailors, and slaves strove to secure their lives and liberties, all of which England’s imperial expansion threatened to make forfeit.

The detachment of ethnicity from empire means that it is no longer possible to label the empire as ‘Norman’. It is culturally multiple. That it is associated with human agency and not with identity means that the latter ceases to be a determinant. The beginnings of empire must be placed in the 1040s. It is seen as an empire with weaknesses from the beginning, but at the same time, the continuing commitment to its defence means that it remained a viable concern almost the end. Failure is therefore both human and systemic; King John can be seen as blameworthy, but so too was the system that made his personal failings so important. English and Norman identities are seen as consistently strong ones, but with changes taking place within the organic evolution of the phenomenon of empire. The question of plural empires is considered—the First English Empire and the Empire of the Normans. The phenomenon of European change is also crucial. The period as a whole is seen as being of outstanding historical importance. A proposal is made for future work.

Chapter Seven follows Coleman Street Ward’s merchant revolutionaries as they helped steer the Republic on its westward course of empire, a journey that accelerated the rise of slave societies in the colonies well before the terrible transformation to a plantation labor force dominated by enslaved Africans. But the rise of slave societies in the English Atlantic also provoked an abolitionist response in the colonies led by Samuel Gorton, who, following his stint in the mid-1640s as a Coleman Street Leveller, fused the struggle against political slavery to the struggle against economic slavery in New England. Back on Coleman Street, the former Bay Colonist Thomas Venner emerged as a leader of the Fifth Monarchist movement, as it rose to revive “the good old cause” of the English Revolution in the face of its imperial degeneration. These millenarian radicals wished to restore the Republic from the corrupting effects of slavery and slave-trading as they proliferated around England’s Atlantic empire. The chapter concludes that trans-Atlantic radicals led by Venner and Gorton linked the progress of republican freedom in England and its colonies to the end of slavery and slave-trading, thus making abolition an indispensable instrument in the realization of the apocalyptic project of the Protestant Reformation.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the notorious figure of John Wompas, also known as John White. Upsetting expectations is emblematic of Wompas's entire life. He was a Harvard-educated scholar who became a sailor; he called the Nipmuc village of Hassanamesit his home but spent his adult life dwelling among the English of Roxbury, Boston, and London; he claimed the right, by inheritance, to lead the Nipmucs, but elders of his tribe insisted he was “no sachem”; and he cheated his kin of their lands by selling thousands of acres of Nipmuc Country to the English, then bequeathed all of Hassanamesit to his Nipmuc kin in his will. These contradictions reflect a gap between expectations and reality. This book thus offers the opportunity to examine that gap and, in the process, revise people's understanding of Native New England and the emerging English empire that engulfed it.

This chapter focuses on John Wompas's residence in London, which allowed him to make new friends and acquaintances. As he had done before, he drew on them for financial and emotional support and rewarded them with deeds to Native land. Wompas again found a welcome reception at the court of Charles II, including expressions of support for the rights of the Crown's Native subjects. However, the king's supportive words would not translate into deeds, an outcome that reveals much about the English empire's shallow commitment to Native peoples. Resourceful as ever, Wompas managed through his own actions to secure assistance for himself and protection for the lands of his Nipmuc kin.

Chapter 4 investigates Dutch, English, and French smugglers who traded with Venezuelan subjects. Historians know very little about the social composition and trading methods of early modern smugglers. An in-depth analysis of hundreds of cases finds that these enigmatic figures came mostly from foreign colonies close to Venezuela including Curaҫao, Martinique, and Jamaica, but also from farther afield, in some cases. Most traders were part of small, multinational, multilingual, and multiracial crews. Although they were outsiders to Venezuela, these contrabandists maintained close contacts on shore who influenced how they conducted business. Smugglers were savvy and adaptable to local market conditions, customs, languages, and coast guard operations. Particularly important to the strategic intelligence of smugglers were Sephardic Jewish trading networks well versed in Iberian cultural traditions. Such contacts produced a smuggler’s craft that combined deception, force, bribery, and Spanish judicial savvy. At times the historical record indicates the presence of more elaborate and wealthy merchant conglomerates. Yet illicit exchange in the early modern maritime world offered egalitarian and entrepreneurial opportunities for small-time captains willing to trade on their own account. Counterbalancing potential profits were the inherent hazards of coastal violence, wartime privateering, coastguard patrols, exile, and forced labor.

This chapter traces the way in which Chesapeake political elites sought to use new kinds of refined urban spaces to secure their place within the Restoration vision of empire. It begins by examining the connection between the efforts of the new monarch Charles II to clamp down on urban corporate autonomy and his efforts to centralize the Atlantic empire. In response to this new reality, major new town-founding projects in the Chesapeake during this era represented an effort, on the part of Virginia’s governor, Sir William Berkeley, and Maryland’s proprietary Calvert family, to align their colonies with the royal vision but also to maintain local power to manage the tobacco market. This involved establishing new kinds of imperial urban spaces that resembled Restoration London. But this elitist vision of the city attracted resentment and hostility from the majority of middling planters, who clung to an ideal of independent urban civic communities as guarantors of their economic rights. This division, which catalyzed a broader class conflict over the region’s political economy, played a completely overlooked role in the tensions that fueled Bacon’s Rebellion and the parallel uprisings in Maryland.

This chapter examines how the dynamics of nationalism affect the nature of archaeological research in Southeast Asia, focusing on Thailand. It argues that the Thai state was caught between expanding French and English empires and maintained its independence through the careful nurturing of national unity. This chapter also argues that the concerted effort to present a strong and fluid Thai identity in the face of Western imperial power came at the expense of denying Thailand's diverse ethnic and cultural pasts.