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THE CIVIC SOLUTION TO THE CRISIS OF ENGLISH COLONIZATION, 1609–1625

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 1999

ANDREW FITZMAURICE
ANDREW FITZMAURICE
Affiliation:
University of Sydney
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Abstract

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Historians have portrayed the Virginia Company and its colony, the first permanent English settlement in America, as an essentially commercial enterprise. The atmosphere of the colony is represented accordingly as one of proto-capitalist individualism. This paper shows that the Virginia Company promoters described the aims of its colony in civic terms: that is, in terms of a politics of virtue, citizenship, and the pursuit of the common good. Promoters of the colony drew on a civic tradition particularly hostile to commerce; a tradition in which wealth was portrayed as Asiatic luxury and corruption. The civic arguments of the Company were a response to the commercial and human disasters which characterized the first years of the colony and its Elizabethan predecessors. The civic ideology promoted by the Company was an attempt to remedy what were perceived to be the causes of this disastrous situation – corruption, greed, faction, and idleness. The promoters' civic arguments also provided an ideological motivation both for potential investors and colonists who might otherwise have been deterred by the financial and human expense.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , March 1999 , pp. 25 - 51
Copyright
© 1999 Cambridge University Press

Footnotes

The author wishes to thank David Armitage, Karen Kupperman, Anthony Pagden, Quentin Skinner, and the assessors for the Historical Journal for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. The author is also indebted to the participants in ‘International seminar on the history of the Atlantic world’ at Harvard University, and in particular to Professor Bernard Bailyn, for their responses.