The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis, by Lauren Working

Abstract

In this original and persuasive book, Lauren Working argues that colonisation in America significantly inflected elite political culture in the Jacobean metropolis, shaping debates on matters of state and informing civil identities: these were processes that reflected individual experiences of plantation and the implication of the metropolis in an Atlantic world of goods. Through an analysis of parliamentary debates, correspondence, printed literature, poetry and artefacts, Working conveys the ‘intensely interpersonal environment’ in which interest in American colonial projects flourished: gentlemanly bonds, fostered in parliament, the royal palaces and Inns of Court, sparked and sustained interest in plantation and the civilising project. Interpretations of early English colonial enterprise have tended to emphasise how the social, political and cultural baggage of colonists shaped outcomes and experiences in America. Instead, Working focuses her lens closely on the gentlemen who inhabited London; what they thought, wrote, read and consumed is the subject of this book.