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Initially, the Virginia Company governed its 1607 Jamestown settlement through martial law. Beginning in the late 1610s, however, change began to occur as the basis of Virginia's economy shifted to agricultural production of a staple crop—tobacco. Land was distributed as private property to individuals, and the Virginia Company promised its colony self-government under the common law, all for the purpose of encouraging Englishmen to settle in Virginia. Reform, however, did not lead immediately to a free market legal order. The Virginia Company, and later the royal government, continued to regulate the economy extensively. Harsh, coercive mechanisms for maintaining public order and obtaining labor from settlers also remained in place in an effort to produce profits for English investors. A free market legal order could not develop until the Virginia Company was replaced by royal government in 1625.

Presents the discovery that Hobbes was a shareholder in both the Virginia Company and its sister organization, the Somer Islands Company (which dealt with the colonization of the Bermudas). He was granted a share in the former by his employer, William Cavendish (future second Earl of Devonshire) in 1622, and attended its meetings regularly over the following two years. The essay explores the internal politics of the Virginia Company during this period and discusses the ways in which Hobbes may have been influenced by this experience.

This chapter explores a new strategy for defending the Virginia project that emerged in the early seventeenth century as a male king, James I, ascended the English throne and as England's powerful secretary of state Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, sought to overcome the dishonor attached to Elizabethan sovereign engagements overseas through a robust vision of state-led colonization. Eager to usher in an era of vigorous English sovereignty under a fit male ruler but discouraged by James's uneasiness in challenging Spanish title across the Atlantic, Salisbury became the energetic prime mover behind the Virginia Company. Intended to embody the English body politic and thereby endow the colonizing venture with a legitimacy derived more from the public than the king, the company was from the outset a controversial entity that leaned on a rich literature of the providential state to argue for Virginia's commonwealth status. After Salisbury's death, the company would become vulnerable to the machinations of James's new treasurer, Lionel Cranfield, first earl of Middlesex, who would seek to reinvent the Virginia Company as a mere trading company whose function was less to found a viable American kingdom than to ensure a steady flow of revenue to royal coffers.

This chapter analyzes the Virginia Company’s accusations that the players were the enemy of Virginia. The Company’s insistence on the players being diabolical, papist, and idle takes on renewed significance in the context of Virginia, precisely because the image of the adventurer as craven bankrupt chimed with two other types that were invested in New World exploration: the Spanish and the players themselves. While the Virginia Company distinguished between the ideal adventurer and the unholy trinity of devil, papist, and player, plays collapsed the adventurer, devil, papist, and player into one another. Through analyses of both Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614), which unfavorably compares Virginia adventuring and the experience of playgoing, and of the promotion and ubiquity of tobacco in playhouse drama, we might begin to think of the playing companies as constructing and even celebrating a vision of the New World as anti-Virginian, albeit not anti-colonial.

This introduction frames the momentous events of 1619 as a coordinated and considered series of responses to the challenges that the Virginia Company faced in the second half of the 1610s. It outlines these challenges, including the Company’s financial struggles, difficulties with attracting colonists, changing Indigenous relations, and evolving political circumstances in England. In this context, the Company leadership debated the nature and purpose of the Virginia colony. This resulted in the new projects and ventures that led to the issuing of the so-called Great Charter, the gathering of the General Assembly, the transportation of the concerted numbers of women and bound servants, and the arrival of the pirate ships bringing the first Africans to the colony. The introduction provides an overview of the essays within the volume, framing their contributions to a new historiography of 1619 that emphasizes the deep interconnections between the ideas that inspired new forms of settler freedom and new institutions of African slavery. This conscious process of debating and reconceptualizing the Virginia colony, in London and on the ground in the Chesapeake, provided a new framework for English colonialism across the Atlantic world in the following decades.

In addition to the other momentous events of 1619, the year also marked the Virginia Company’s first widespread granting of private land to colonists. The private land grants have long been seen as a natural outgrowth of a peculiarly English colonial desire to own and exploit land in the Americas, and as a first step toward the construction of a Lockean liberal settler society. This essay challenges these assumptions by recovering the long and complex debate within the Virginia Company about the virtues and pitfalls of offering planters private land. It traces different schemes for establishing landownership and connects them to competing ideas about market regulation and political economy in contemporary England. The essay ultimately argues that the system of plantation estates that developed in the 1620s, operated by private planters with indentured laborers but retaining some civic functions, was a compromise between these two models. It represented a unique evolution of English thinking about landownership, commerce, and civic order, which can only be fully understood by acknowledging the complex negotiation over private land that wracked the Virginia Company in the late 1610s.

This chapter explores the creation of Virginia's General Assembly in a late Renaissance intellectual and political context in which safeguarding the colony's public took on new urgency. It attends to the ideals of the public and commonwealth that animated Virginia Company leaders like Robert Cecil, first earl of Salisbury, and Sir Edwin Sandys and recovers the particular political crisis the colony confronted in early 1618 from two different directions. In the first place, corporate entities like the Virginia Company faced new pressures from King James I and his Treasurer Sir Lionel Cranfield, who had come to eye such public repositories as sources of wealth to which the king had a rightful claim. The greater threat, however, came from the machinations of Robert Rich, second earl of Warwick, who had similarly come to regard Virginia's public stock as fair game, though for God's purposes rather than the king's. It was immediately after Warwick launched a raid on Virginia's public stock that the Virginia Company created the General Assembly. Its purpose would be to stand sentinel against any such pillaging missions, whether by royal treasurers or Puritan pirates, in the future.

The Virginia Company, this chapter argues, was not merely a commercial enterprise, a joint-stock corporation, created in order to attract and invest resources in the colony of Virginia. It was a conceived by its members as a political society in itself whose purpose was, in turn, to establish political society in Virginia, to some degree in its own image. It was conceived in terms of the language of the commonwealth—a society of self-governing virtuous citizens—and also in terms of the language of greatness, a company that, through its own pursuit of glory, would augment the power of the state in its rivalry with other European states. These political languages were largely consistent with the political thought employed in English society more generally in the seventeenth century. As a civil society that was separate from the national stage, however, the Company also afforded a space in which it was possible to experiment with political discourses that were regarded as dangerous in other contexts. Two such discourses were the interrelated traditions of democracy and reason of state, which came to the fore in the final years of the Company.

This chapter reveals the centrality of urban planning to the Virginia Company’s vision for the colony from 1607 until the Company’s dissolution. Company officials, strongly influenced by civic humanist thought, were acutely conscious of the need to manage the threat of self-interest in the new commonwealth, and they did so by seeking to build urban spaces and institutions for defense and market regulation. The mass cultivation of tobacco only accentuated leaders’ fears about private interests. It pushed a faction within the Company to promote a plan for incorporated boroughs, drawing upon the flourishing civic corporate traditions of England’s chartered towns and cities, in an effort to instill virtue into a society increasingly dominated by staple production. But other planters or investors rejected the corporate plan and their opposition to this spatial ordering of the colony was critical to the bitter factionalism that engulfed the Company in the 1620s. The specter of semi-autonomous city-states, which proved incapable of defending themselves against the 1622 Powhatan uprising, finally convinced James I to revoke the Company’s charter, allowing the surviving settlements to evolve into military-agricultural outposts. Virginia’s first planter class were thus born of frustrated urban corporate plans.

This chapter investigates how debates about “the Indians” or the Powhatans informed Jacobean political thought. By calling it “our project,” Gray rendered “the savages” a collective concern, one that implicated Londoners as well as colonists. Through an examination of several sources and events from 1619, contrasted against the criticisms and bitter accusations of mismanagement following the 1622 massacre and the dissolution of the Virginia Company several years later, this study suggests that the English experience in Jamestown played a vital role in shaping nascent concepts of imperium in the early seventeenth century and that English interactions with indigenous tribes played a crucial part in metropolitan articulations of civil society. Ultimately, this chapter demonstrates that the earliest attempts at colonization was not just a case of the English acting on America but also that America and its peoples informed English discourses of state and society from its inception, far earlier than is generally assumed.

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 focuses on the impact of George Chapman’s The Memorable Masque for the royal wedding of 1613, in particular how its display of Christianized “Virginian priests and princes” to promote investment in the Virginia Company’s religious mission in the New World was parodied in three plays. Fletcher and Field’s Four Plays, or Moral Interludes, in One borrows Chapman’s Virginians, but excises his conversion plot, staging Indians in thrall to lucre and the converting colonist as a lost soul. Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII invokes a “strange Indian with the great tool,” who instead of inspiring charity invokes only lust and greed. In The Tempest (which was revived at court in 1613), Trinculo’s recollection of the “dead Indian” that wowed England memory forms part of the play’s satire of both The Memorable Masque and the Virginia Company’s rhetoric of conversion as embodied in their display of Virginian bodies.

On May 14, 1607, 104 men and boys landed on a small peninsula in the Chesapeake and established Jamestown. The colonists sailed not for themselves but for the Virginia Company, whose shareholders were financing this foray into the New World. The colony was established as a military outpost. The Virginia Company purposely outfitted the early colony like an army unit due to concerns over the extraction of resources and fears of a hostile native population. At the moment when Jamestown was settled, the English military was undergoing a profound transition. Dubbed the “military revolution” by scholars, the change reordered the weapons, organization, and ideas of war. The constructions of manhood in early Jamestown reflected these changing ideas. This chapter explores how conflicting ideas of manhood arising from changes in the military led to conflict among the settlers. It argues that Anglo-American masculinity was being defined on the ground at the same time that definitions of masculinity were threatening the cohesion of the fledgling colony.

Between 1584 and 1632, there were three new English translations of the Aeneid published in print. This chapter demonstrates that all three of these were written by prominent members of the Virginia Company. The primary aim of this chapter is to explore different ways the Aeneid could be used to reflect on the colonial activities and foreign policies of England from the years 1615 to 1632. The three translators under consideration — Sir Thomas Wroth, Sir Dudley Digges and George Sandys — chose different books of the Aeneid and approached colonial politics from different angles. This chapter also argues that isolating a single book of the epic enabled translators to apply the poem to current political concerns.

This chapter augments existing scholarship that has focused on Hobbes’ royalism by emphasizing how Hobbes’ translation of classical history steered between the Scylla of antiquarianism and the Charybdis of baldly instrumental rhetoric. The chapter shows the formidable interventions a translator could make amidst the seventeenth-century poiesis of international law. The stakes of Thucydides included the accuracy of the Genesis story, the extent or existence of natural obligations, and the capacity of men, as one of Hobbes’ notes put it, to “gr[o]w … civil.” Reading Hobbes’ translation in the context of seventeenth-century debates over the law of nations offers a chance to see how history and humanism intersected in the making of international law.

This chapter examines the early years of Virginia and Maryland. At its outset, Virginia was constituted as a trading company governed by military law. But when the trading company went bankrupt, Virginians needed English investment. Virginia then adopted the common law to assure Englishmen that their investments would be safe and thereby to encourage them to invest. By the 1630s, the common law had been received in Virginia. Maryland, in contrast, adopted the common law in the earliest years of its settlement. Lord Baltimore, who founded Maryland as a haven for Roman Catholics, appears to have understood that the common law provided the best possible protection of property rights and that protecting the property rights of Catholic settlers would ensure their ability over time to practice their faith.

Chapter Four turns to the examples of English joint-stock companies formed for colonization and international trade, using them to illustrate the limits of the period’s arguments about sovereignty and to explore the formal problems implied in the corporation as a “person” and “body politic.” The chapter discusses two corporate ventures founded by Sir Thomas Smith at the end of his life and then follows the joint-stock company from Ireland to Russia and Virginia, as recounted in Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; 1599-1600). It examines the corporation as a system of administration with distinctive modes of archiving information as a form of capital, and it considers the narrative logic of corporate discourse and the role that ideas of “value” have in corporate writing. The chapter concludes by showing how the corporation becomes a micro-state unto itself, issuing in the establishment of the colony of Virginia, but it also uses the idea of the corporation to make visible the fragile and compositional nature of all political bodies, states, and nations.

By 1617 members of the congregation discussed moving. The challenges of living in Leiden remained great. They also feared the Netherlands becoming engaged in war with Spain. After considerable discussion, the congregation decided to emigrate, and to seek a new home in North America. Representatives of the congregation sought a particular patent from the Virginia Company of London. Because the venture would be costly, they negotiated with investors led by Thomas Weston. The investors would put up most of the money. The settlers themselves would work for seven years with income from their effort paying off the investors. When one of the ships engaged for the voyage, the Speedwell, proved unseaworthy, most of the intended colonists crowded onto the Mayflower. Conditions forced them to settle at Cape Cod. Being outside the area specified in the patent, the passengers drew up and signed the Mayflower Compact, setting terms for self-government.