The Virginia Venture: American Colonization and English Society, 1580–1660 by Misha Ewen

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Virginia Venture: American Colonization and English Society, 1580–1660 by Misha Ewen L.H. Roper The Virginia Venture: American Colonization and English Society, 1580–1660. By Misha Ewen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. What can we learn from another book on Jamestown? Actually, quite a bit, as Misha Ewen’s study of the first permanent English settlement in North America demonstrates. In the first instance, Ewen has significantly augmented the record of this venerable topic thanks to her visits to a range of British archives customarily ignored by historians of “early America.” The range of evidence she has unearthed provides a fine platform for tracking the connections that English people from all levels of the social pyramid had with early Virginia. These “micro-histories” (3) enable “us to get at the discreet, harder-to-reach corners of early modern society. In myriad unexpected ways, empire building seeped into the everyday life, and the accompanying documentary record, of early modern English society.” (152) Secondly, Ewen irrefutably corrects the still-prevalent view of the Virginia Company, which founded the enterprise in 1606, as an inept entity whose administration lurched from crisis to crisis until the Crown inevitably assumed direct control of Virginia in 1624. Rather, as she relates, the company leadership secured further governmental support for their initiative ranging from approval of lotteries to fund their operations to judicial approval of the transportation of criminals to labor on plantations to sermons promoting American prospects to prospective migrants. The establishment of Virginia helped set the pattern for English colonization by which “private” networks of merchants, aristocrats, and colonials took the lead, drawing upon their own connections, including governmental ones, to legitimize their ventures, raise money and recruit colonists. Ewen demonstrates then how the Virginia Company entrenched the concept of empire in metropolitan minds, just as it entrenched the English presence in America. Her work thus merits careful attention from historians of empire, colonization and seventeenth-century England. More particularly, it examines female investors, such as Lady Cecily West, whose jointure was used to fund the contribution of her husband, Thomas, baron De la Warr and Jamestown governor, but who invested in the colony in her own right, as well as the less elevated Mabel Collymore (35–55). It also chronicles the removal of the indigent to Virginia to solve crime, vagrancy and other social problems; transportation of felons and the indigent provided a ready alternative to hanging and an attempt to alleviate suffering but also manifested an insistence that the poor improve both themselves and a seemingly overpopulated realm (87–116). These accounts illustrate how colonization seamlessly grafted onto social practice. Ironically, though, they indicate the secondary, even epiphenomenal, effect of America on that consciousness. The successful introduction of tobacco cultivation and the end to the long, nasty war with the Powhatans. These crucial developments were underscored by the triumphal 1617 visit to the metropolis by the man largely responsible for them, John Rolfe, and his new wife, the Powhatan “princess,” Metoaka (a.k.a., Pocahontas). The couple’s grand tour (oddly unmentioned in The Virginia Venture despite a chapter devoted to “Creating Capital,” 57–86) included attendance at a court masque and a reunion between Metoaka and the tireless colonizing cheerleader, Captain John Smith, generated fevered interest in Virginia and a recapitalization of the Virginia Company. Its revamped leadership, implemented indentured servitude to facilitate migration and created a colonial House of Burgesses to provide self-government for planters. The devastating Powhatan attack of Easter 1622, though, doused these hopes and expectations. This “massacre” also generated such furious finger-pointing over the management and direction of the colony between clients of the Earls of Southampton and Warwick that the Crown was obliged to intervene. Meanwhile, tobacco proved alltoo-successful: planters in new colonies, most notably in Barbados, joined their Virginia counterparts in cultivating the weed thereby generating a price collapse as buyers of lottery tickets and readers of travel literature turned their attentions elsewhere. Who picked up the pieces? The Virginia Venture leaves open the wider question of who drove English overseas interests, which limits this otherwise fresh analysis; its fifth chapter lapses into the familiar, but misleading, comprehension...