Rethinking Colonialism in Economic Terms: The Tempest, Captain John Smith’s Virginia Narratives, and the English Response to Vagrancy

Abstract

Recent criticism of The Tempest and early modern travel narratives has discussed the ways in which these texts are implicated in a larger discourse of colonialism. Anticolonialist critics have sought to “demystify the national myths” of the Empire and to write an alternative history of the colonial encounter.1 Typically, in their desire to delegitimate colonialist selfrepresentation and restore agency to a native counter-voice, critics have drawn out moments of textual rupture and contradiction in early modern texts such as The Tempest and John Smith’s Virginia narratives.2 Undoubtedly, recent ideology critiques of The Tempest have gone a way toward unmasking Western incorporation of new world, peripheral cultures. But because so much attention has been paid to the politics of the early modern English—Native American encounter, we have generally overlooked the extent to which many central early modern colonialist texts, particularly John Smith’s writings, are primarily concerned with describing embattled economic relationships among the European colonists themselves. Much of Smith’s concerns in the Virginia narratives, for example, center on issues of English idleness, unproductive labor, and exploitation of the early Virginia labor force by merchant capitalists, economic topics that have been largely passed over in the more sociopolitical, colonialist readings of early modern travel writing.3 KeywordsSeventeenth CenturyEconomic TermAlternative HistoryEnglish CultureUnauthorized MigrationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.