Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World. Edited by Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet. Early American Studies Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. xv + 368 pages.
This review was originally published in Clio: A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History 36, no. 3 (Summer 2007), 434-439.
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Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World
Edited by Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet
Reviewed by Michael A. McDonnell, University of Sydney
Jamestown looms large in the historical imagination as a place of "beginnings." It has served, for some, as the place where "American" history began. Others see it as the place of origin of representative government or the birthplace of democracy. Still others have seen it as the origin of a slavebased plantation system. British historians have emphasized its role as the beginning of England's overseas empire. More recently, scholars and filmmakers alike have seen Jamestown as the testing ground for harmonious relations between natives and newcomers, while postcolonial scholars have woven texts about the settlement into new critiques of England's grand imperial ambitions. In short, seen through many lenses, Jamestown has been used for a variety of purposes and agendas.
Yet without the benefit of hindsight, Jamestown was none of these things. As James Wood Sweet reminds us in the introduction of Envisioning an English Empire, the English were no pioneers in the Atlantic, and the settlement was a disaster for its first two decades at least: most settlers quickly died, relations with the natives were precarious from the start, most of the money invested in the colony was lost, and the settlement itself was soon overshadowed by England's rapidly expanding Atlantic interests. But if this book helps de-center the primacy of Jamestown in the historical imagination, it also uses the fledgling settlement to shed illuminating light on the complex and dynamic forces in play in the early modern Atlantic world in 1607. In this volume, then, Jamestown itself becomes the lens-or prism-through which we can "envision" the English empire.
As Wood explains in a perceptive introduction, the book had its origins in a set of discussions at a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Jamestown in the Atlantic World sponsored by the Folger Shakespeare Library and directed by Karen Ordahl Kupperman. Following this meeting, Sweet and coeditor Robert Appelbaum believed they needed to redraw the map of the early Atlantic world in two ways: by thinking about a wider Atlantic world, one which included Europe and the Mediterranean as much as Africa and the Americas, and by seeing Jamestown as a literary phenomenon as much as a historical event-a phenomenon in which participants often defined their roles in this emerging world by the written word.
To accomplish this, the editors brought together six historians and nine literary scholars to explore the rich written texts as historical sources and literary productions. The result is a delightful collection of essays that range widely yet cohere nicely because of the central focus on Jamestown in this wide Atlantic world. As Kupperman notes in her foreword to the collection, it is a book in which the usual sources are put under the microscope and closely scrutinized for complexity, but also opened out and put into the broadest context.
The book is divided into three parts, roughly corresponding to the ways in which participants viewed their encounters with new peoples and new lands. In the first section, for example, scene-setting essays by James Horn, Alden Vaughan, Lisa Blansett, and Emily Rose examine initial encounters in the Chesapeake and look "inward" to Algonquian and English perceptions of each other and their own ambitions. If, after 1622, conflict between natives and newcomers looked inevitable, Horn argues that it was not simply a result of conflict over land. Rather, Powhatan and the English competed over rival world visions and ambitions. And just as some English explored the idea of absorbing natives into an English and Christian polity governed by the King, so too did Powhatan dream of new alliances and incorporating the English into a new bicultural society. As Vaughan points out, Algonquian travelers to England brought such ideas with them, even if they often left with a much more discouraging impression.
Of course in the Algonquian case, we need to remind ourselves that the arrival of the English was only one more Atlantic event in a series of encounters. As Sweet notes, local Indians had had decades of experience with mariners from Portugal, Spain, France, and others from England, none of whom had posed too much of a threat to the local balance of power. When the English arrived in 1607, professing deceitfully that they were not staying, Powhatan had to think carefully about his own alliances, rivalries, and trade networks-not just in the Jamestown area, but across a vast region encompassing the Chesapeake Bay and extending hundreds of miles into the interior. A different but parallel set of inherited alliances, rivalries, and trade networks complicated English efforts, too, as Rose shows in her exposé of indentured servant Richard Frethorne's plaintive letters home. Such explorations show a complex, often contested, but always evolving set of expectations and motivations in both European and Indian communities, complicating our often two-dimensional view of the "conquest" of the New World. And if, as Blansett shows, John Smith sought to literally envision a landscape and project ownership of it with his Map of Virginia (1612), he could only do so with the help of locals, giving us a lasting visual record of the "ineluctable interconnectedness of colonizer and colonized" (8).
If Indians' actions were shaped by perceptions of their early Atlantic encounters, so too were English initiatives. As Kupperman notes, many Virginia colonists lived and breathed the air of the Atlantic world, not just the English world. In the second series of essays, Eric Griffin, Pompa Banerjee, Susan Iwanisziw, and Andrew Hadfield all explore the "world stage" upon which the English acted and which often gave meaning and limits to both expectations and experiences. Illuminating a world in which historians often fear to tread, these literary scholars reexamine now standard texts to explore the role of diverse places such as Turkey, Morocco, Spain, and Ireland in the minds of English colonizers. Putting the Virginia colony in this wider perspective yields some surprising insights, not least of which is a salutary reminder that the English had other things on their minds when colonizing North America.
Spain, of course, loomed large in English thinking. When the English saw the Spanish amass vast colonies and great wealth, they often happily exaggerated the "Black Legend" in criticizing the barbarism of the Catholic imperialists. But their loathing of the Spanish and professed sympathy for their colonized subjects, more often than not, was motivated by envy and served as a rhetorical mask for their own imperial efforts. Smith's own ambiguous attitude toward the Spanish typified not just this belief in imperial excess, but also the role of Spain as a model for colonial success, too. The ambiguous and often utilitarian attitudes of the English were also apparent in their important relations with Muslim Morocco. Despite differences in religion, and what we would later call race, the English cultivated surprisingly important political, economic, and cultural ties with Spain's avowed enemy. Ultimately, as Iwanisziw argues, the literal place of Morocco on the English stage helped Englishmen to envision Muslims, Moors, and Native Americans as potential allied players in the geopolitical opposition to Spain and its Catholic network.
The contingent nature of colonialism and attitudes towards both colonialism and the colonized were also evident in England's dealings with its first and arguably most important colony, Ireland. Efforts by Protestant English to subdue Catholic natives and establish profitable plantations have long been seen as a crucial model for English colonial plans elsewhere. But if Hadfield successfully demolishes many of the more traditional parallels drawn between Ireland and the Americas, he also highlights the shared view of colonial venturers in both places that they had inherited the Roman mantle and a belief in translatio imperii-an ideal, even an obligation, to extend civility from one place to the next through imperial conquest, settlement, and dominion. Armed with this mindset, the English could depict natives in Ireland and America alike as ignorant but redeemable or savage and implacable enemies depending on the particular circumstances-and-needs-of their relations with each at the time.
In the final section, "American Metamorphosis," the essays address the unexpected, unpredictable transformations that took place as a result of these new encounters. Looking forward in time, Robert Appelbaum, Jess Edwards, Michael J. Guasco, and Peter C. Hernán examine the ways in which the visions of both settlers and Natives were transformed over time by their experiences, ranging over a diverse set of topics such as conflict and exchanges over cultures of food, new ideologies of property and slavery, and changing perceptions of colonial identity at the time of Bacon's Rebellion in the 167Os. In a fascinating essay on food, for example, Appelbaum shows that conflicts over food in the new colony resulted from more than just competition for survival. Instead, as in Europe, food was a cultural artifact, and it quickly became a crucial symbol of the cultural and social differences between settlers and natives. Land too, of course, quickly became a focal point for conflict, but as Edwards explains, the English did not so much bring traditional ideas of land usage and ownership with them, but instead forged new ideas in the Americas in response to colonial needs and opportunities. Control of land-and ideas about land ownership-was almost as fiercely contested at home as it was abroad, and the debate would resonate back and forth across the Atlantic.
If ideas of food and land ownership were contested, it has become clearer in recent years that the introduction of slavery into Virginia was not. Indeed, most historians now agree that putting American slavery into a broader Atlantic context lessens the significance of the arrival of the first cargo of slaves at Jamestown in 1619; the early Virginia experience was largely about the replication of patterns already established elsewhere. But Guasco's revealing essay on the multiple meanings of slavery in England and America reintroduces us to the idea that the wide range of practices and ideas about slavery in Europe meant that at least some of the early colonists were opponents of bondage and slavery, and that Africans were not the only ones singled out in the early years of Virginia as fit objects for enslavement. Perhaps appropriately, the presence of Native Americans in North America both complicated ideas of slavery, and ultimately-after-1622-helped legitimate a more racial-based form of slavery.
In the end, Guasco's essay also implicitly points to the limits of this volume. As Constance Jordan notes in her conclusion, this is primarily a cultural history of Jamestown, exploring the mindsets-or discourses of understanding-that predominated among those early colonists. It is thus limited by the textual sources most clearly in use here, and thus Africans, Native Americans, and lower-class English are not adequately represented. Ironically, perhaps, the essay that deals most explicitly with one of these groups, indentured servants (Rose's piece on Richard Frethorne's letters home), clearly shows that Frethorne's letters may have been just one more pawn in a propaganda game played by rivals for control over the colony. Perhaps more seriously, the conspicuous absence of ethnohistorians and archaeologists, to take two examples, is disappointing in light of Kupperman's opening comments that new approaches and new techniques in these fields, especially, are transforming our views of this early modern Atlantic world.
But perhaps this is asking too much of a book that advances an already ambitious broader agenda. For Sweet and Appelbaum ultimately wanted this collection to compel us to "rethink our basic assumptions about the relationships between ideas and actions, between ideology and interests, between events and the contexts that gave them meaning" (2). By focusing this work on Jamestown and exploring that moment both as a literary and a historical event, they largely succeed in this. By making the participants at Jamestown the lens through which to view larger imperial worlds, they also present a vision of the promising possibilities inherent in a wider Atlantic approach. Finally, the authors here also do a wonderful job of exposing and exploring the tension and gaps between participants' rhetoric and expectations versus their experience and the limits of what was possible. These are insights that ultimately resonate far beyond the triumph and the tragedy that was Jamestown.