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This chapter examines two English colonization efforts in Madagascar, which were planned in the 1630s and enacted in the 1640s. Madagascar may have succeeded as a colonial settlement in the 1640s had its English organizers deterred from assiduously trying to emulate recent colonial successes in the Atlantic and Caribbean. These prior English experiences overrode two equally relevant models, those of the Dutch at Batavia and the Portuguese at Goa. The accumulation of colonial experiences, evident by the 1640s, constrained subsequent commercial or colonial efforts.

This chapter focuses on trade consuls and ambassadors. Charged with representing the crown overseas and governing English communities, these political leaders acquired valuable experiences that defined successive ventures, both through the tangible presence of leaders who participated in multiple overseas ventures and through the many accounts they published of their exploits around the world. Their presence, moreover, helped a weak state use private companies to project itself abroad through these informal civil authorities.

It was after the establishment of the East India Company in 1600 and the first successful English settlement in Virginia in 1607 that English trade and enterprise underwent truly radical change, acquired a thoroughly intercontinental character, and laid the foundation of the British Empire. This chapter outlines the development of English transoceanic commerce during these expansionary times, and considers its impact on the economy of the mother country. Finally, the expansion of transoceanic trade played a major role in attracting foreign capital and stimulating the financial innovations which have been dubbed a ‘commercial revolution’. Colonial expansion was not a sufficient condition for economic development, as demonstrated in Spain and Portugal, but it was certainly an important positive stimulus, as recognized by contemporaries. The fact that Englishmen seized the opportunities opened up by transoceanic commerce goes a long way towards explaining English development in this period.

This chapter explores English and Dutch relationships with native peoples in Atlantic North America. In practice, these relationships were violent ones, though there were important differences. The chapter shows that only English settlement became the basis for a long-term, large-scale trans-Atlantic transfer of people and culture. This necessitated expropriation not only of resources but territory, a process executed where necessary with savagery, assisted by the impact upon native peoples of introduced diseases, especially smallpox. This made possible the later explosive eighteenth-century settler population growth which would be a key stimulant of the Industrial Revolution. To this extent the Anglo-Dutch-American archipelago was mapped in blood.

This chapter considers 1619 Virginia alongside contemporary efforts to colonize the Guianas. Though 1619 was a momentous year for Virginia, it is only in hindsight that we can recognize its importance. The 1619 charter for the Amazon Company demonstrates the appeal of contemporary alternatives. From the early seventeenth century, South American colonization schemes competed with those to the north. Many colonial enthusiasts argued that surer riches would be found closer to the Iberian empires. Building upon the explorations of Walter Ralegh, colonists there forged long-lasting indigenous alliances that were held as an ideal for the rest of the century. Guiana settlers and promoters also embraced tobacco as a viable export commodity at a time when the Virginia Company was admonishing its colonists for growing it. Yet, the Guiana settlements also provoked the protest of Spanish diplomats. The ultimate failure of the Amazon Company redirected investments and enthusiasm towards Virginia and other English settlements.

This chapter illustrates how no one had in mind to establish the institution of Negro slavery at the start of English settlement in America. Yet in less than a century the foundations of a peculiar institution had been laid. The first Negroes landed in Virginia in 1619, though very, very little is known about their precise status during the next twenty years. Between 1640 and 1660 there is evidence of enslavement, and after 1660 slavery crystallized on the statute books of Maryland, Virginia, and other colonies. By 1700 when African Negroes began flooding into English America they were treated as somehow deserving a life and status radically different from English and other European settlers. The Negro had been debased to a condition of chattel slavery; at some point, Englishmen in America had created a legal status which ran counter to English law.