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

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis by Lauren Working Abigail L. Swingen (bio) The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis lauren working Cambridge University Press, 2020 254 pp. However much colonial Virginia or Massachusetts Bay have played outsized roles in the history of the United States, for scholars of English imperialism, the early seventeenth century tends to be overlooked. There was no coherent imperial policy driving colonialization, and James I has traditionally been portrayed as uninterested in empire. Lauren Working's exceptional book, The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis, offers a compelling case as to why we should pay greater attention to the early 1600s when exploring questions about the significance of the early English empire. The book focuses on how imperial experiences in the Americas transformed concepts and practices of civility and sociability among elites in the metropole during the early decades of the 1600s. This is a London-based story, not one of colonial encounter, but rather of colonization's broad cultural influence [End Page 297] on the colonizers, even those who had little or no experience in North or South America. The book offers a fresh analysis of some familiar material, such as popular sermons, poems, moralizing prescriptive literature, and records of the Virginia Company, reading both print and manuscript sources against the grain to analyze the contested cultural meanings of American events and "things" and their broad and transformative impact on Jacobean political culture. Working focuses on the "concepts, motifs, and objects that animated and spurred domestic debates over conformity and social order, rituals of violence, and political participation" (27). Colonization influenced not only how gentlemen understood imperial pursuits or their desire to take up tobacco smoking, for example, but also how they interacted with each other and presented themselves as "civilized." Working persuasively argues that early seventeenth century debates about the meanings, violent experiences, and tangible consequences of colonization transformed metropolitan concepts of civil society, which became deeply inflected with imperial ideas. Such transformations were inextricably linked to the reigning monarch and his court. Working convincingly shows that James I, who was allegedly disinterested in colonization of the Americas because of his fear of angering the Spanish, was far more concerned with empire than we might think. Working presents James I as both deeply ambivalent about and interested in colonization in America: he was certainly wary of war, but he was also anxious to use empire to promote his philosophical agenda about royal authority and indivisible sovereignty. The book begins with a consideration of the concepts of planting and cultivation and explores the significance of the violence inherent in trying to establish "civil" societies in the Americas. There are familiar tropes here, such as the fact that America was widely understood to be "uncultivated" and therefore uncivilized or "savage" by Europeans. This also related to English experiences in Ireland and certain parts of Scotland, where violence was seen as necessary to successfully impose English education as well as enclosure, architecture, and mapmaking to demonstrate supremacy. As Working writes, through the building of English-style estates, for example, "gentlemen expressed their status while using plantation management as a stated means of extending the authority of the state" (58). The English understood the cultivation of land as both a civilizing project and a violent colonizing process and did not see much contradiction between the two. [End Page 298] The concepts worked together to demonstrate the power of individuals and the state/monarch they represented. In some ways these concepts became amplified through direct experience with Indigenous people in the Virginia colony, which as Working demonstrates, was viewed by English gentlemen through a Protestant "providential framework" that required the enforcement of a uniform "religious orthodoxy" (69). These perspectives reflected deep concerns about domestic society as much as they did about the religious practices of Indigenous Americans. Similar to how religious heterodoxy threatened stability in England, violent confrontations with Indigenous people in Virginia were seen as "a struggle for the preservation of English values among an onslaught of horrors" (76). Chief among those horrors for the English...