Prologue
So far the history treated the Jamestown experience, if less personalistic, within the paradigm recognizable to contemporary Americans. Americans, understandably, are most concerned with matters American. Realizing intellectually we are English, and Jamestown-Virginia was a colony of England, we are much less concerned with our English inheritance, than how we transformed it into our American democracy, or how we evolved to a Revolutionary War of Independence.
Almost all are interested in how both concerns led to the rise of an exceptional American democracy, a democracy which currently begets the longest surviving government in the world. These concerns are usually, one way or another, mirrored in our contemporary text books and histories. This history departs from this paradigm. We look at our subject, American states and local government, with due consideration of their state policy system and culture. Accordingly, we are less focused on how we are exceptional, or why/how we were driven to Revolution, and subsequently to a modern-style democracy. We can’t ignore either, of course, but we approach the subject from our “bottoms up” state and local perspective, using economic development as our filter to focus attention on what we consider a very critical policy making area.
Washington introduced the reader to our perspective, focus, and filter, and now we explore the first American colony-future state, Virginia. The first module describes the first four-five horrendous years of our first “successful” settlement, Jamestown. For the most part that module is what the reader would get from most of our contemporary authors, historians and commentator-minus much of the elaboration, and personal stories on folk like John Smith and Pocahontas (Rebecca). We go light on the death camp experiences, and do not focus much on Native American relationships, choosing instead to emphasize its government, policy priorities, and its governing sovereign the London-Virginia Company, headquartered in London.
Jamestown at the least proves that not all abortions need be fatal. Saved in the nick of time by new governance, a new infusion of settlers, and a huge, if temporary infusion of supplies and foodstuffs (sent by the Virginia Company), the settlement, as we shall see in future modules will achieve a level of stabilization, a base, from which it would over the next twelve years linger, only marginally able to “break out” so that a level of self-sufficiency was attained.
This is Virginia’s “First Migration”, and most historians view it largely as a failure (which for the most part it was, depending on your values and goals), but for us was the period in which the central pillars of future state economic base and political-policy institutions/structures were installed. In other words, the Jamestown period, a period in which the London-Virginia Company was the government and corporate sovereign of the future state, exerted an outsized impact on the state’s future. It provides considerable insight into why Virginia is different from other colonies and states. In my parlance, the Virginia twig was bent most seriously during the Jamestown period.
The story we told in the first module does little to enhance our appreciation for the Virginia Company. Jamestown was a collage of bad decisions, badly executed by seemingly weak governance–at least until the ever-charismatic John Smith saves the day. The guy was a character, and he did keep things together before he went back to England, badly injured. Then the bottom fell out, and the first “starving time” (there will be one more) ensued, saved only at the last second, with the surviving settlers already abandoning Jamestown and on ship heading to a hopeful safety anywhere other than Virginia. This has to prompt the question on how had the Virginia Company got this so wrong! How did it make decisions that killed off almost all the settlers it sent over?
That is the question we pose in this series of four modules.
Why four modules? That’s a lot of pages. The problem is we have to examine closely what went wrong in London, which, after all, is where the decisions were made. Although Jamestown was England’s first “successful” colony, a close look reveals a mishandled and not to successful start that did not take hold, minimally at that, for the first forty years or so. The reason asserted in this history is that our first settlement was laden and plagued with the burden of England’s heritage of mercantilism and its approach to foreign affairs and trade. Truth be told, the English foreign establishment in the Tudor-Stuart years was not sufficiently mature, and was on the threshold, not of decline but was heading toward a transformative civil war.
The failures and catastrophe detailed in the first module resulted from the delegation of colonization to a corporation whose experience and structures were inadequate to the goals involved in the first settlement. Equally as important, that corporation got caught up in the backwaters of a rival colony-building effort in Ireland, the top favorite of the King, and lost its financing, within two to four years after the initial settlement of Jamestown. The Virginia Company by 1612 was almost as adrift as its colony was–caught up in the politics and policy of England’s foreign policy establishment.
The Virginia Company turned out to be the only pure joint stock ,membership corporation among the thirteen colonies. Small wonder. Very much an experiment, Virginia’s first period of history proved very unique, and that, for the most part, follows from its London-based joint stock and membership decision-making. If you want government to be run by a business, Virginia in the Jamestown period is not your model.
For the purposes of our history, however, purposes which are much more institutional, more sensitive to the way structures make policy, and how those structures were initially installed, we must explore and explain how England entered into foreign affairs, and how it eventually engaged in colonization. We, of necessity, must spend time understanding our English inheritance.
The American States evolved from colonies which were called “plantations” back then. These colonies or plantations evolved, survived and aged, until in due course, they became in some mysterious and little understood way, American states in 1776 in the Articles of Confederation–that little known, easily discarded period of American history, which I ofttimes call our First Republic. Just like our current Internet owes a great deal to its founding algorithms and structure, so too will will our first thirteen states be indebted to a little known period of our history. The same is true of our first colony, Virginia which suffered from its founder, the Virginia Company, near abortive experience. The Jamestown period, the seventeen years during which the Virginia Company sought to found America’s first settlement offers important lessons and insights still valuable in today’s contemporary world.
Our colonization was not led and conducted by the English government, or its Kings or Queens, for that matter. The early colonies were “proprietary” colonies. Proprietary is a 1600ish word that today means something akin to “private sector”. Proprietary comes in two forms: corporate, and fief (or personal). Say it another way, for Virginia a business corporation founded the colony, under contract with the English government (King/Queen), a contract known as a “charter”.
In today’s parlance it was a public-private venture, amazing similar to a city-building corporate structure that created Irving, California or Woodlands, Texas. Today building a colony is not really thought of as a business venture, or a private-public partnership, and a good start to our story is to alert the reader in colonial Virginia English private enterprise played a major role in our earlies history. The initial guiding principles of our colonial birth are business-derived, not philosophical or political constructs. I doubt anyone in this period ever came to America to establish an “exceptional democracy”, a refuge of the throbbing masses. As we shall see they came to make money, or found a religious homeland. Virginia was the former.
Hence one way to look at these proprietary colonies is a sort of late medieval public-private partnership, with the private sector as the dominant actor. Virginia, under charter from James I, was a corporate proprietary colony–in fact it will be the only corporate proprietary. It was the only one because the Virginia Company, the first, was an “experiment”, a hybrid form of joint stock corporation that after eighteen years failed. It left behind a legacy, however, a legacy that still is relevant today, even though it is buried deep in our history and rendered invisible due to the fog that shields history from our present-day minds, values, and interest.
The point, the take away, is that English-British colonization was a private-public joint endeavor, very dissimilar from its European rivals. The Virginia Company, however, was not simply a bunch of greedy merchants, whose profit seeking caused its failure as a colonizer; rather its failure resulted from the Company’s inheritance of the institutions, goals, and relationships developed for foreign policy and trade that were fabricated during the reign of Queen Elizabeth (I, not II), way back in the 1550’s. That inheritance castrated the Virginia Company during the time of the Jamestown settlement, and castrated it never was able to bring about a successful birth of a colony. In frustration, wracked by its own internal civil war, the Company’s charter was terminated by the King in 1624. Below is the long-winded explanation behind that castration.
I:
Replaying the English Past to Understand the Legacy the Virginia Company Inherited
Overview of Elizabethan Mercantilism
Charles Andrews and Herbert Osgood, two of our most illustrious and helpful American historians, both concur that English colonization exhibited two distinct periods: the first beginning as early as Cabot in the early sixteenth century, and ending in 1655 or so, and the second ending with Georgia in the early eighteen century. Virginia, naturally, is in the first period.
England’s (Elizabeth’s) primary attention in those years was internal unification, the securing of its immediate borderlands, Scotland and Ireland, and the heritage of her father’s Protestant Reformation and war with the Catholic Church. Domestically, the Crown, Parliament, and the Church of England were very much preoccupied with a turbulent and disruptive public agenda that limited its overseas ambitions, and imbued them, such as they were, with its internal domestic agendas.
In this way Elizabeth’s brand of mercantilism, as with all other countries, was heavily infused with what we today call nationalist agenda. Indeed, for all practical purposes, international politics and trade in this era were reflections of domestic needs and controversies, deeply affected by the whims, personalities and dynastic ambitions of their Kings and Queens.
Say it another way, the politics/policy-making that influenced trade, colonization, and foreign relations, even their organizational structures and their decision-making, were blurred into what is today referred to as “mercantilism” particular to each country. The reader is cautioned that mercantilism is a term imposed on the period by those who lived in later periods of history. The reader should not equate it a structured system of beliefs, objectives or values, built around a textbook of a value system. It is not similar in function, conceptual structure, and purpose as Keynesian economics.
In “real time politics” it was more improvisation than anything, with the other countries responding in a karaoke-like imitation of the behavior of the other countries. Mercantilism had its “tendencies”, characteristics, and particular behavior patterns that usually involved limited or all out war–or setting up colonies, but it should not be thought of as a coherent set of policies and way of thinking. This is not the age of rationalistic policy-making–if ever such an age existed? In England with which we are concerned, the configuration of players that participated in foreign policy relevant decision-making set the tone.
The reader is further advised, the underlying economic base is in serious transition (depression-recession influences decision-making), and socio-political-religious instability is passing a point of no return. By 1600 England is drifting into the turbulent seas of a civil war, and the Stuart kings, Scots, do not seem to possess the skill sets, nor the personality traits that lead to consistent and quality decision-making. James I is better than his successor, Charles, but the court-crown politics of James in motion around 1603-12 find in James a more open, if less consistent monarch than Elizabeth, but one who is in constant search as to whom he can trust amid a court and country that is not his own.
Within this turbulence and change, the English commercial “class” (the notion of class in a Marxian and modern sense is premature in this period-but the drift toward the formation of classes had begun) had emerged in the sixteenth century and, as we shall see, one of our American inheritances from England will be its “transfer” or import (in some form) to the colonies. As it turned out, Jamestown and the Virginia Company was a cutting edge of this commercial “class” evolution, and we shall discover that the period after 1600, especially after 1610, witnessed a rather serious and impactful transition from one commercial elite grouping to our own trading company grouping–i.e. the English commercial elite in the first twenty-thirty years of the seventeenth century shifted to a new phase–and the Virginia Company got caught in its crosshairs. Sadly, much of the Virginia Company’s fate is seemingly counterintuitive to the trends in the transition, but quite explainable and we shall discuss that in future modules.
In this breach, men like Sir Thomas Smythe, and even Sir Francis Bacon, will play an uneven, but still impactful role. It is Smythe that will advocated and take the lead in Virginia-relevant policy-making–until his enemies and age converged upon him toward the end of 1610-1620.decade. This unstable and personalistic-opportunistic policy-making atmosphere that pervades this period will not facilitate or support a sound colonization policy–and that is a very important factor in the failure of the Virginia Joint Stock Company. Virginia’s timing of its birth, was in a transition period that drifted into a full-blown decade long civil war–and easily the most turbulent and transformative period in English history since William the Conqueror. Say it one way, we inherited English institutions before they were “modernized”, indeed they were, despite the thrust of many of our American histories, pre-democratic as well, not to mention they were also pre-capitalist. Our colonization was more late medieval than modern.
Setting the Stage for the Tudor-Stuart Venture into Colonialization: Protestant Reformation and Break up of Medieval Economics, Politics and Society
English politics in 1600, on the cusp of England’s colonialization of Virginia, were still reeling from the Protestant Revolution, and it was feeling the effects of religious polarization and fragmentation. Today it is hard to “feel” the closeness of Jamestown with such hard-core medieval characters such as Henry VIII and even Queen Elizabeth or Mary Queen of Scots. But Jamestown began only four years after Elizabeth’s death. The mechanizations of Henry VIII were only seventy years previous. Luther and his “writs on the door” a scant ninety years from Jamestown. We are so deep in late medieval history the infamous Louis XIIII that we forget it will be the better part of forty years before he was even born. Jamestown was settled a decade before the Thirty Years War began. As Scrooge might of said of Jamestown. “there’s more medieval” than “modern” about you.
To me that issue is very important in our understanding of our early colonization. We were importing late English medieval institutions, structures, values and, significant for this module, an elite decision-making hierarchy that was distinctly divine right and medieval, with bubbles of “new people rising from the depths of society”. These are the early days of Parliament, and it is easy to think of it as it was a hundred years later. But in 1600 we are just beginning the period that leads to the English Civil War. That civil war has several starting dates, but 1638-9, or 1642 is when the fighting started. When we talk about early Virginia we are not talking about the rise of English democracy, or the Industrial-Capitalist Revolution. They are a hundred and fifty years in the future! My god, the crisis that led to the breakup of the English guilds is simultaneous with the settlement of Virginia.
the early seventeenth century presents a shifting scene and a new outlook. Men who had turned their eyes to the East were turning them to the West as well, interested not only in the expansion of trade, but in the expansion of England also. It was a period in which much that was medieval was running concurrently with the beginnings of modern things. While clinging to the past men were also engaging in undertakings that were opening a new and unknown world … Political and social conditions were in a state of flux, marking a conflict between the old and the new. Feudal tenures, adapting themselves to a new agriculture, were altering the status of class and caste The constitutional government of the Stuarts was entering upon its unsuccessful struggle of eighty-five years to maintain the divinity of kingship. Medieval methods and medieval conceptions of the social order were threatened at their foundations by the forces of a new individualism; in fact medieval habits and standards were breaking, through they were not yet broken, and were not to be broken for many a long year. [99] Andrews, Vol. 1, p. 75.
So let’s dampen our modernity, and open ourselves up to the period in English literature most known for the lines “Gather ye rosebuds when ye may. Old Time is still a-flying. And this same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying” (Herrick). That verse was written in 1648–nearly a half-century after Jamestown expedition first entered into the English agenda–and one year before England cut the head off of its king. America is a lot older than most of us think.
Disruptions in the English economic base, principal of which was the transition from medieval manors to private landowning (a significant element of which was Crown’s seizure of Catholic monasteries) and what today is called the “enclosure movement”. The various economic forces combined to create a “de-medievalism” disruption not dissimilar to 1980’s deindustrialization, excepting, of course, it was also a de-agriculturalization that fueled a future Industrial Revolution.
Lost in the fog of history is that the Virginia Company and early Virginia through 1650 labored on the outskirts of the Thirty Years War (1618-48), easily the most disruptive war in European history to that date. England was a bystander in that war, but, since everybody else was caught up in it, its trade, international relations, and religious polarization were much affected. Colonization, as we shall see, in this atmosphere became linked with English self-defense, and on the whole that was fatal to the Virginia Company, and a decidedly mixed bag of benefits and misfortunes to Virginia. As I will say ad nauseum, the timing for the founding of Virginia was terrible.
The transition away from the Catholic Church thousand year old responsibilities and supporting institutional infrastructure to an unwilling Church of England. Protestantism, further caused extreme social-workforce uprooting, serious economic desperation, and consequent migration as the unemployed reacted, as they do today, by getting he hell out of their personal hell they used to call “home”. and moved to a place of perceived better prospects.
No surprise, these economic instabilities and desperation also permeated religious volatility and further fragmented the Protestant movement with a number of very “interesting” sects and “movements”. These set in motion at least two major dynamics that became closely linked to North American colonization: internal economic disruption and migration, and formation of several important religious sects that were transplanted to America. Our early colonial political culture closely reflected these dynamics–as did our inheritance of our version of an English commercial elite.
The English, Scot and Welsh borderland regions, and regions such as East Anglia and cities like Bristol-Plymouth added an unexpected dimension of vying local jurisdictions, seething with internal transformation, very much involved in the politics of colonialization as a weapon in their struggle against the powers that be resident in London. Ironically, English sub-national jurisdictions will play an interesting role in the first fifty years of Virginia’s (and Massachusetts’s) colonization.
Historians label the economic system of the time as “mercantile”. Mercantilism, however, is a term with which this history is very uncomfortable.
The term implies more conscious and more systematic coherence than it exhibited to those contemporaries that lived in it. The first period of mercantilism, which Osgood calls the period of discovery, commenced for England with John Cabot’s (an Italian) travels beginning in 1497-Henry VII). Among other influences he found a route to North America that pointed England in that direction, and would make North America the default in any English colonization efforts.
Further discovery initiatives followed, the most important of which being those of Sir Francis Drake whose circumnavigation of the world between 1777-1780 added glamor and the fact he brought back a considerable amount of gold coins (Queen Elizabeth got half) stirred some interest. When he returned he became Mayor of Plymouth and Member of Parliament (MP), and was arguably a primary leader in the 1588 defeat of the Spanish Armada (the winds and storms were the Admiral of the English fleet that really mattered). His adventures during the 1590’s involved him mostly warring against Spain and raiding the West Indies (including a voyage to Raleigh’s Roanoke colony); he died at sea in 1597–a mere ten years before Jamestown.
Of more relevance to Virginia was his co-patriot and fellow privateer, Sir Walter Raleigh. As the bad Hollywood movies will testify, after the mid-1580’s he was an “item” and his love interests included Elizabeth herself. In 1591 he was granted a patent to found a colony in Virginia. Roanoke is well known to us today, in North Carolina the colony was likely taken by Powhattan raiders. Raleigh went on to further adventures. For our history, Raleigh may have exerted his greatest influence on the course of Virginia by interesting Elizabeth to take seriously the conquest of Ireland. He became an Irish landlord; he also was reputed to be a serious tobacco smoker. Raleigh survived his famous lover, (he died in 1618-beheaded by James I), and sold his Roanoke colony pattern to a group of adventurer-merchants headed by Sir Thomas Smythe.
Fishing (off the coast of North America), exporting of English cloth to northern Europe, and commercial trading into more far-flung geographies followed over the sixteenth century. In partial imitation of the Spanish and Portuguese, maritime adventurers, like Raleigh, ventured into privateering, and whose later manifestation produced pirates that spawned an incredible number of pre-1960’s bad movies. A series of seemingly never-ending wars further enhanced events in what was a rather important, if multi-faceted, period of time. The instability of this period further convinced Elizabeth that English security required the successful conquest of Ireland–which was inherited and adopted by James I and Charles I. The Irish paradigm in English foreign policy was primary, and it became England’s most favored colonization initiative, to which North American colonization was a very distant second.
Colonialization–establishing a permanent settlement or colony–was late in coming compared to Spain, Portugal and Holland, and even Sweden. Late in the age of discovery, the founding of a colony inherited much of the doctrine, and justification of English mercantilism of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. England was rising among the European powers, but it had gotten a late start, and it’s limited power and perpetual flirting with fiscal distress produced limited ambitions. When England planted its first colony in Virginia, its military power was insufficient to the task.
Compared to Spain England was a weak newcomer whose naval and military might were severely constrained by her fiscal weakness and insufficient domestic wealth to support foreign ventures–or, for that matter, the expenditures of the Queen/King. This was a chronic problem that underlay a great deal of English pre-Civil War politics. No English soldiers went with the Jamestown’s first ships in 1607–or the last in 1624; it was very much understood that the English joint stock company had responsibility for defending their plantations. That is why the term which contemporaries referred to these merchants, investors, and former military who engaged in colonization as “adventurers”.
Compared to Spain-Hapsburg Empire and France (which for all practical purposes was ruled during the seventeenth century by strong and focused Louis XIII, and the great one, Louis XIV), England relied on private armies and navies in this first period of our colonial history. It was these pressures and realities that led to the creation of the British East Indies Company (1600), and to the London-Virginia Company (1606). The latter, of which we discuss in this module, was intended to be the western counterpart to the Asian East Indies Company.
Indeed, they both were headed by the same CEO, Sir Thomas Smythe. Smythe’s “day job” in running the Virginia Company was being CEO of the East Indies Company. We also know what a behemoth the East India Company became over the following centuries, and one wonders what the Virginia Company could have been if properly supported by the Crown as was the East Indies Company. Anti-colonialist commentators today would have field day.
What was not built into this set of expectations and ambitions was the actions and priorities, of the King that inherited Elizabeth’s mercantilist structure. James I, from almost day-one, had decided that Ireland, and the settlement/conquest of Ireland, was his top colonization priority. Cast aside, the Virginia Company was left to its slow, but in a strange way productive, death. That story is the story we tell in this and the following Jamestown modules. Londonderry was deemed more important to English Stuart ambitions than Jamestown.
The failure of the latter, and the drift to the English Civil War, and the Cromwell Protectorate prevented the formation of a replacement to the Virginia Company until 1668, when the Hudson Bay Company incorporated. Instead of subduing India as the British East India Company did, North America became a free for all with each of the plantations, divided though they may have been internally, were pretty much delegated tasks associated with the larger London-Virginia Company. It was they that were entrusted the tasks associated with founding a permanent settlement and growing it to prevent the capture of the North American interior to either French or Spanish. That strategy-hope failed–but that is a story for a later set of modules.
Elizabethan Mercantilism:
Central Modes of Operation, Chief Actors/Decision-makers, & their Integration into the Elizabethan Mercantilist Paradigm
Sparing the reader from a lot of pages, we learn from Herbert Osgood that the core dynamic which saturated the Elizabethan foreign private public policy was the Crown called the shots, set the priorities, made the basic core decisions, and left to private contractors the implementation and execution. These private, profit-seeking companies carried out the objectives of Elizabeth’s foreign policy (including of course, colonization) as best they could–that included paying the bills, reimbursed only by whatever profits, wealth creation, they could glean in the attempt:
The voyages discovery, the commercial enterprises, [the] single experiment in colonialization of the reign of Elizabeth [Roanoke] were the results of private enterprise. Individuals … companies furnished the means, the state giving the requisite authority, and verbal encouragement or guidance [99] Herbert L. Osgood, the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Vol 1), the Forgotten Books, originally the MacMillan Company, 1904), p. 23
Notice the words “encouragement” and “verbal”. For the most part, Ireland excepting, the Queen did not foot the bill for these objectives, the funds and the risk were provided by the private entities. She got, in various ways, more than her share of whatever rewards these endeavors yielded.
In English mercantilism’s infancy, colonialization was a “distant” priority of the English government. Trade was always primary as England lacked critical natural resources, and her land constrained by being an island, England necessarily turned to the sea and needed a maritime infrastructure to maintain normal trade and relations with other countries. English Mercantilism commenced its development almost seventy-five years before Elizabeth acceded to the throne (1558), having to work with that reality.
That trade was led and conducted by the first English commercial grouping, the cloth or textile exporters. While some cloth manufacture was done in households, the textile “group” is one of the very first economic sectors associated with the much-later Industrial Revolution-which to put an order to things, preceded Capitalism. This, for our purposes, is the major leap in the formation of England’s commercial “class.”. Warning!. the textile commercial elite was NOT the author of Virginia colonization. Powerful though it was, the textile merchant were not colonizers.
Whatever else the English government was at that time, it was broke, financially impoverished, busted–yet surrounded and competing with more affluent monarchies. England was in this period not the great power it would become, but rather a second ranking power among contending European mercantilist powers. It was no accident the private maritime infrastructure that was created earned its peace time sustenance in large measure by raiding the assets of the other mercantilist powers, or in one way or another checking or intruding upon their trade.
To the extent the Crown used its scarce resources in foreign endeavors, starting with Henry VII and VIII, it devoted them to building an English navy, and facilitation of a private mercantile-militia fleet manned by private entrepreneurial sea captains, shipowners, and merchants that financed-used their vessels in trade. In times of war and intense commercial rivalry, this budding maritime private elite became a maritime militia as its ships raided enemy fleets, commercial trade, and its owners (and sailors, i.e. future pirates) transformed into privateers. Here we can see a great deal of the source for nationalist objectives in private mercantile actions. It is this grouping of “commercial adventurers” that our colonization is derived. In the last decades of the sixteenth century they will form several “trading companies” that will not only venture into geographies the textile merchants wouldn’t ever touch, but they will distance themselves from the textile merchants and attempt the first English North American colonization, Virginia.
That venture will fail–and that failure constitutes the core of our Jamestown module series. Hence, although the institutions of Virginia government will derive from this Jamestown experience, the development of Virginia’s commercial class will be more tied to a third generation of the English commercial revolution, than to a second generation Virginia Company. It’s confusing, I concede, but we inherited our commercial “class” after Jamestown and the Virginia Company. Say it another way, as England matured its commercial class, we participated in the evolution. Think of Virginia’s political and economic development as a “project in motion”, not a one shot inheritance injection–don’t you love these mixed metaphors. Be patient they can be effective if you give them a chance.
The European superpower of the late sixteenth century was Spain. Spain, the reader might note, was very powerful in large measure of the gold it harvested from its New World permanent colonies, complete with settlements and the migration of European population. The workforce was enslaved Native Americans, and then Black Africans. The Spanish model of settlement was not copied by the English. Instead, the budding English maritime sector developed from capital it “harvested” from Spanish-American shipping and ports. What the Spanish imparted to the English was an attraction to the gold that came out of the mines, gold that could close the financial gap between England and the most powerful mercantilists with which she competed.
Still the Spanish, as testified by Shakespeare’s play that launched the expectations for the Virginia Company, were a model to be envied. The defeat of the Spanish Armada. twenty years before Jamestown, was sort of the breakout point for English mercantilism. From that point on, England could expand its geographic scope of interest, and move more decisively to secure the defense of its borders: Scotland and Ireland being its highest priority. Between the late 1580’s and Jamestown’s 1607 founding, England gravitated into expanded trade opportunities, into Russia, from Russia to Turkey (called the Levant), and the West Indies. North America was on the margins, but Raleigh’s single colonial venture, Roanoke, happened in this period.
The other “big economic power” of the day was the Netherlands (and Sweden her ally). Often allies with the English, the Dutch drew their power and ample monetary resources, from trade, Phoenician style, from SE Asia, India, Mainland China and Japan. They will be the role model for the English trading companies–and the Virginia Company hybrid colonization experiment will convince the trading company survivors to tweak their model and East India Company, and later the Hudson Bay Company will develop differently than the “fiefdom-based proprietary companies” that actually led American colonization–until they were mostly replaced after 1690’s, but royal governors. Virginia is the sole example of a corporate (trading company) joint stock corporate colonization. Trust me. That matters and is not a mere unnecessary detail. It is yet another manifestation of American political development as a project in motion.
France explored the New York area as early as 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazano. Sporadic fur trading with the Indians occurred in the decades after. In 1609, two years after Jamestown, the Dutch, after Henry Hudson’s exploration of the Hudson River, incrementally set up a trading post or factory at the site of present day New York City. In 1624 that site was formalized into a city-port and official colony. There is little doubt Dutch interest in North America prodded and inspired an English reaction to establish its presence in that area. Therefore, we can see the reactive nature of England’s and we can also note that Virginia’s post Virginia Company development overlapped that of New Amsterdam.
The Dutch favored colonization by trading post, and free enterprise zones, which we refer to as “trading factories”. They set up the initial “Taipan” and trading districts-ports wherever they wandered, but achieved their greatest commercial success in Asia, southeast Asia and Japan. Trading factories were source for quick profit, with minimal planning, infrastructure, and investment. The English as we shall see, responded to all this by incorporating “trading companies”, private companies, whose boards of directors and investment capital were provided by wealthy English commercial merchants. The best known of these was the East India Company, incorporated in 1600. The London-Virginia Company was intended to be its North American counterpart.
Trading posts were the model that most attracted the English private adventurers who would invest in the Virginia Company. Trading factories were not envisioned as a permanent settlement in which emigrants of the mother country would come to live. Of note, England’s other competitor France followed the trading post model through the sixteenth century, establishing its first formal settlement, Port Royal, in Arcadia (Nova Scotia) in 1605, and Quebec in 1608. As we shall see the Virginia Company was meant to inject the English presence in what was turning into a timely hot spot for the expansion of European mercantilism. The Virginia Company’s first settlement, was in Maine, not Virginia–but that story awaits us in a future module.
A good deal of this chapter will revolve about the zero-sum nature of a trading post/factory colony-building strategy and the permanent settlement strategy that underlies the English colonization of North America. The East India Company was based on the trading factory model, and used it to lay the foundations of the English Raj. Yes, from a number of perspectives that strategy had great consequences, massive implications, and horrible if not fatal weakness. I am no lover of the British East Indies Company. Of the two, the Dutch model was most attractive to the private sector, and to the extent that colonial permanent settlements yielded gold, or things like timber for ships, the Queen and her governments were also much attracted. Otherwise, she was content to hire private privateers to raid the Spanish annual gold fleets and West Indies ports.
By 1570 Elizabeth, always attracted to trade-privateers, shifted to an Elizabethan style of colonization. Increasingly her primary foreign interest was resuming England’s age-old conquest of Ireland. In her mind, the only way to secure control over that island was military conquest, followed by resettlement of large numbers of “loyal” English-speaking Protestants. This new Irish “colony” was entitled a “Plantation”, and that Irish experience hardened into a sort of paradigm that defined English colonialization in the Tudor-Stuart period. While there were similarities between Ireland and North America, the geography and internal dynamics were quite different. When James I negotiated with merchant adventurers after his accession to power in 1603, he would adopt this Elizabethan style of colonization, and would also consider Ireland as his primary colonial effort.
That decision cratered the Virginia Company, and made it a “trading company zombie”–a company waiting to be put out of its misery. American colonial history may not have been seriously affected by the Irish Ulster Plantation, but Virginia was. Massachusetts, also settled by the Virginia Company, did not suffer the same fate precisely because the Virginia Company “spun off” the Massachusetts Bay Company in the midst of its death throes. Massachusetts followed a different path of political and economic development as a consequence–the decade between 1607 and 1620 made all the difference.
The Virginia Company always envisioned itself as establishing a permanent settlement in North America–it had to in order to maintain its commercial foothold in an area in which several major mercantilist powers were establishing theirs–but from the beginning the dynamic investment leaders did not want to follow the Irish Plantation paradigm–and neither did James. The Crown knew it didn’t have the financial or military resources for both. So it successfully negotiated with the merchant adventures to incorporate a hybrid colonization corporation that did not require direct public subsidy, but was paid for, and the risks assumed by private enterprise.
From that point on the telling of the story becomes complicated. Before completing the story behind the incorporation–and abandonment– of the Virginia Company, we must understand better who these merchant adventurers were. Hopefully, it is clear the Virginia Company hybrid, while a public-private partnership, was primarily a corporate led and financed initiative. Colony-building was. in effect, sub-contracted to a joint stock corporation, whose boards of directors were composed of investors with their own objectives and affiliations, whose top leadership were continuously drawn from elements of English society other than its traditionally powerful medieval nobility.
By 1606 the commercial elite, on the rise in Tudor England had reached by the times the Stuarts (and Virginia colonization) a state of maturity, and a newer generation had arrived on the scene. This is a vibrant and quite diverse commercial group that had united under the tent of the hybrid Virginia Company–a three ring circus of politics and infighting that was to be the Virginia Company. Aside from the obvious of making colonial policy more complex and infused with different objectives than royal and country interests, the recourse to a new developing private sector meant relying, to a considerable degree in the case of colonialization, on the organizational vehicles, competitive business interests in the formation of the colony’s economic base.
That it could extent to the colony’s future political development was way too much in the future to raise concern in early 1600’s. A more immediate issue was the suitability of the organizational vehicle, the hybrid joint stock corporation that was the London-Virginia Company. The reader may not be aware at this point that the fate of Massachusetts political and economic development will be tied to the Virginia Company because the Virginia Company would be tasked, through a subsidiary hybrid, the Plymouth Company, to settle and colonize the northern territories claimed by England. No doubt the reader’s eyelids flickered upon reading “Plymouth”. Massachusetts’s political-economic development would be hugely affected by the fate and fortunes of the Virginia Company.
Called “trading companies”, these private organizational structures of which the London-Virginia Company was one, had a serious future in global political development–as China, Singapore and India through their experiences with the Virginia Company’s older sister, the East India Company would testify. Trading companies could have played a similar role in North America–but they didn’t because the North American hybrid model, the Virginia Company, would fail early on in Virginia’s history. A different proprietary model would follow, the proprietary fiefdom. That too will need to be dealt with–in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia and South Carolina especially. Without realizing it, we have stumbled onto a critical and quite salient English colonialization dynamic that is central to why contemporary American states are different from each other–a dynamic usually underplayed by the traditional historian.
What was also important in the first decade of the seventeenth century was the willingness and the reaction of both the older commercial element, and new-emerging commercial interests to the Stuart resumption and intensification of the Irish plantation strategy pioneered by Elizabeth. In the midst of the debate and negotiations surrounding the incorporation of the London-Virginia Company, the Irish plantation raised its ugly head, and over a half-a decade would wreck the prospects for the Virginia hybrid joint stock corporation–leaving it with little more than a heartbeat and pulse for the remaining years of its life.
But there is more to this private sector colonization sub-contracting that the immediate concerns. Even after the demise of Virginia Company, the personnel and the heritage of the Virginia Company will linger on in Virginia–and these former Company officials, their associates and descendants will dominate Virginia political and economic development for more than a half-century following the Company’s death.
And there is more! The Virginia “Trading” Company, as mentioned earlier, was but the second phase/stage in the evolution of the English-British commercial development. Its death, as we shall see in a future module, will remove those commercial merchant adventurers from participation in North American colonization. In their place, however, a younger generation will replace them and those merchants will be the key cutting edge in the “famous” English Commercial Revolution that took shape in the eighteenth century–the precondition to a more famous “industrial revolution”.
From our perspective it would be these young English merchant adventurers who would provide the capital and import/export capacity that underscored the seventeenth century North American colonial economic bases. They also will be the vital connection to the development and establishment of an American commercial elite–an elite that would seize leadership of the American Revolution, and form the United State’s first “political party, the Federalists who wrote our Constitution. If Virginia played an exceptionally large role in the latter two movements, it was because the Virginia commercial elite, the tobacco plantation owners, were literally created by this third generation of merchant adventurers. I won’t even bring up that other dynamic of this history: political culture. An offshoot of this commercial elite will form the nucleus of the first two wings of American Community Development. Talk about a can of worms!
We need to know who these merchant investors were, what they wanted out of this hybrid, and how they entered into colonial policy-making. We need to know who these folks were that constructed the hybrid trading company, and how they negotiated the charter with James I. We need to know what befell them after the charter was signed and the first ships sent off to Maine and Virginia.
the Evolution of the English Commercial Merchant-Investor, Formation of Trading Companies, Municipal Competition, and a Desire to Break with Crown Plantation Colonialization
the Rise of the Cloth-Textile Merchants: the First English Commercial Elite
Foreign trade-based English merchants first came to prominence during the reign of Henry VII (father of Henry VIII) in the late 1480’s. The trade was between England and Flanders, Belgium, shipped from Antwerp. These early overseas traders were cloth merchants, whose export was to northern Europe, primarily through Flanders-Antwerp Belgium (then part of Holland), a trade that originated in the various North Sea English ports. The dominance of these lesser municipal ports/companies, however, could not be sustained.
So lucrative was this trade that it attracted the attention of great merchants and London officials that over the decades to follow, London merchants established their dominance and captured this export cloth trade. “English cloths came to be shipped almost exclusively to Antwerp, and from there to their ultimate destinations in various parts of Europe” [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 2003), p. 6. Occurring in two expansionary bursts, between the 1480’s and 1510, and the 1530’s to 1550 cloth export constituted by the fist decade of the seventeenth century (1600-1610) three quarters of England’s exports, of which three quarters went to Germany and the Low Countries. Brenner estimates the Company of Merchant Adventurers “controlled about one half of London’s total export trade, and asserted that the Company of Merchant Adventurers “constituted England’s outstanding commercial group by any test of wealth or power, and that its leading members enjoyed a disproportionate share of London’s highest political positions” [99] Brenner, p. 3.
The success of London merchants over merchants lodged in other English ports was cemented by the incorporation of what was termed the greatest of all merchant trading companies, the Company of Merchant Adventurers. With its restricted membership and narrow oligopolistic leadership, that London-based cloth merchants trading company established a near monopoly over England’s cloth export. In alliance with the Crown in policies concerning commercial trade, and in English Crown vs. Parliamentary politics, the Merchant Adventurers dominated the offices of the City of London. Placing the latter within the King’s orbit during much of the pre-Civil War period. In the debate with Parliament, and in upholding Crown initiatives in foreign ventures, the Company of Merchant Adventurers, and the individual companies included in its membership, became an important political-economic bloc that exerted considerable, but never dominant, impact on the policy of the Stuart years in particular.
While the Company of Merchant Adventurers, which still included by far the greatest number of the City’s wealthiest merchants provided relatively little investment support” to the network of new, growing and dynamic overseas trading companies, “becoming even more obsessively focused on their short-route cloth trade with northern Europe” [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 2003), pp. 21-23. In a sense, the success of the cloth merchants gave them a false sense that cloth was the gazelle of economic growth, that its northern European demand was not yet satisfied. So on the threshold of its best decade ever (1600-1610) were not attracted to new foreign markets.
Having gravitated to other interests in London office-holding, and its elective politics, the more active–and often largest–clothing merchants delved deeper into Crown and Parliamentary politics, providing critically needed support for Elizabeth, and on her death, some openness to the new Scottish King of England. However, if these preoccupations benefited individual cloth merchants, there were larger issues that the expansion of the cloth-textile industry had created, issues that resulted from the large number of workers, many of whom were off the manor and working in concentrated urban areas. The workforce of the newly created textile cluster were vulnerable to the fluctuations of trade with northern Europe.
If the unique economic position of the cloth export companies as the cutting edge of a new English economic base due the rise of textile manufacturing in what was hitherto an almost exclusive agricultural economy, granted them leverage in Court policy-making, it also came with a dark side that brought visible instability into English politics, particularly in times or economic downturn. A textile worker could be “unemployed”, unlike a manor serf who could at least grow his own food and had a dwelling and local support system. Textile workers were more apt to be concentrated geographically. And so Supple argues “the textile industry played an almost unique role at this time” in the English economy.
Fluctuations of trade and price, impediments to trade such as war or weather “were the principal causes of outbreaks of unemployment … Even when he was employed, the average textile worker had little enough income to buy his basic necessities, quite apart from any possibility of his saving enough to establish a buffer between slump and starvation“, and “when the looms stopped in areas where cloth manufacturing was a concentrated industry, the result might not be far from anarchy [99] B. E. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England, 1600-1642: a Study in the Instability of a Mercantile Economy (Cambridge University Press, 1964), p. 234].
A political schism of sorts developed between the new trading companies and the Merchant Adventures, with the latter enjoying greater wealth and superior access to the Crown, and most importantly to the offices, positions and governing bodies of London itself. In this way, the City of London, as a government body entered into the picture and agenda making of the English trading and merchant community. That it would also be drawn into the politics of Parliament and the forthcoming English Civil War was to add to the complexity and the fragmentation with the English commercial elites.
After the golden years of the Merchant Adventurers lost their glamour, the bottom quickly fell on the English export cloth trade to northern Europe. Much of English histories detail the internal fracture within the cloth export industry (such as the “Cockayne experiment), and the shifting alliances associated with pre-Civil War politics). Perhaps it was, as the great debate in English feudal to capitalism historical literature asserts, that economic development was fueled by either the movement of great demographic shifts, or the emergence of class-based conflict first expressed in textiles and an early agricultural workforce that took the first steps into a manufacturing (the Brenner Debate) — or as I suspect the hard rock of exporting cloth to the warring parties of the Thirty Years War, who used the Low Countries and Germany as their battlefields, leaving a fledgling Dutch Republic to emerge.
We can sidestep that debate and the dynamics and competing paradigms as well. Unlike Brenner we are much less concerned with the nature of the “road” from feudalism to capitalism-industrialization; our interests lie in the transfer and role of English commercial elites to the new economic bases in Virginia, and eventually to the other colonies. It is of secondary importance that we focus on the transfer of loyalties by the City of London as the Parliament-Crown Civil War plays out. We will have to pay greater attention to the proclivities and sympathies of Parliament in regards to export-import, commercial trade, monopolies and concessionaires, but in 1600 we can postpone those discussions to later modules.
Rise of the Second Commercial Elite: the Import-Re-Export Trading Companies
At this point our focus in on the Virginia Company, and the role it will play in the clarification of the role/character of English trade, specifically on the focus on import and England as a trading hub, and satisfier/promoter of English consumer demand, and the defining of colonization as an import-driver to English ships, ports, and merchants. We are most concerned therefore with the Virginia Company’s role in that developing paradigm, and the effects that role played in the colonization of Virginia, its economic base, and by necessity its system of governance.
Whatever it was, or whatever combination it was, the high and mighty Company of Merchant Adventurers gave way to the rising success of its rival the trading companies THAT IMPORTED from the far reaches of the globe. As a somewhat uninvolved island on the margins of that huge European war, England and her soldiers and merchants were free to work with the Dutch, free to venture into the weakened colonial spheres of influence in the West Indies and Far East, and as we have detailed delve deeper into southern Europe, Turkey and the Levant and northern Africa import opportunities.
The Company, in fact, competed with a number of other elements and groupings, among which were the smaller group of commercial merchants. But as Brenner further asserts by the eve of the Civil War, 1640 the political power of the Merchant Adventurers had greatly lessened. “A different group of merchants, who based themselves in the newly emerging commerce … especially the closely-linked trades with the Levant and East Indies, had joined, and to an important extent, replaced the Merchant Adventurers at the top of London’s mercantile society. In the space of several crisis-filled decades, the Merchant Adventurers saw their traditional north European cloth export market cut in half … [99] Brenner, p. 4
Lacking dynamic growth opportunities after 1550, and unable to establish a meaningful cloth trade with either Russia or the Levant (today’s eastern Mediterranean ports of Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Egypt, Morocco), several Merchant Adventurers, and a number of outsiders, often based in other ports split off from the Company of Merchant Adventurers. Over the next decades these merchant dissidents shifted their business model from export of English cloth to import of a variety of goods from a number of far-flung locations. First was trade with Russia, followed by the Levant (Mediterranean-Turkey) , The latter, imported silks, spices, and other such items of interest for sale in England.
To enhance this import business, several new trading companies, the Muscovy Company (1555) being the most known, prospered on whatever sale of English cloth was possible ,but imported furs and timber, and naval supplies. When the Levant trading Company withered up because of widespread piracy, the Muscovy Company evolved a land route from Moscow to Persia, eventually securing an Ottoman license for trade throughout their Empire (six voyages were made focused on this trade between 1557 and 1579). In any event during these critical years, English overseas trade diversified from an almost exclusive export of cloths to northern Europe, to a small, but quite profitable import trade.
While the Merchant Adventurers trade was thus an increasingly unitary one [cloth export to northern Europe], and separated from the others [expanded goods and import into new markets] the southern and eastern trades [the latter] experienced an increasingly intertwined growth, motivated by the same interlocking group of merchants with common commercial goals” [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 2003), pp. 15-17. In essence a new group of trading merchants had spun off from the Merchant Adventurers, and the latter pushed into trading with the Spanish, Portugal, Italy, and Turkey–forming the Levant Company in 1592. Our soon to be friend, Sir Thomas Smythe was a major leader in the latter set of trading companies.
Predictably. as the new traders sought to expand their trading, they became determined to crack the Portuguese and Spanish trading outputs in the Far East. So they founded yet another major trading company in 1599-1600: the East India Company. Dominated by Levant Company merchants (the East India Company actually met in their offices), and elected their first board of directors and their first CEO, Sir Thomas Smythe, then the CEO of the Levant Company. Originally entitled “Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies”, the East India Company excluded merchants from other cities and ports, and they were not happy campers. When another continent wide trading company (to North America) was to be given a charter, those municipal outcasts were determine to get their own seat on the new corporation. Here the reader can see the triggering motivation for the formation of the bi-modal Virginia Company in 1606.
The East India Company was empowered-tasked to serve as the trading body for the East Indian spices trade, a trade monopoly that included anything that could be imported to England in a region that extended from the Indian sub-continent to south east Asia and eventually China. An incredible sum, 70,000 pounds was raised by its allied merchants to finance the activities of the trading monopoly.
By 1640, representatives of the Levant-East India combine had become preponderant within what might loosely be termed the City merchant establishment, which consisted of the tip socioeconomic layers among London’s privileged company merchants, and had come to constitute the core of a recomposed City merchant political elite, which exercised its authority through the aldermanic court [city council], the East India Company board of directors, and the customs-farming syndicates. [99] Brenner, p. 4
To these victors belong the spoils, and the import trading companies assumed prominence in England after 1640, they could see the opportunities of colonization in West Indies and Virginia especially, with sugar and tobacco imported to England, the Spanish monopoly in both would be challenged. But as stated earlier, these trading companies had not been able to square the circle of reconciling the conflicting time frames and trader profits with settlement infrastructure, governance, and installation of the institutions necessary for an export economic base. Trading factory was one thing, building a permanent colony quite another.
This new grouping of England’s commercial elites, downplayed exports in favor of establishing a trading cluster based on imports (and re-export) to other for far away lands, imports that were attractive to English consumer demand, and which fed into both defense and emerging manufacturing arising throughout the country. “It is thus no accident that the very same merchants who first developed the Turkish and Venetian trades under charters from Elizabeth turned out to be among the leading shipowners of the period: proprietors of a growing fleet of great armed vessels, their boats could hold their own against all comers, and do so more cheaply than could the vessels of their chief competitors” [99] Brenner, p. 47; See also, p. 49.
As Robert Ashton observes both export and import generated opportunities for the merchant to “farm” his taxes and distribution of imports out to others who paid for their concession. In this sense, both import and export trade produced small opportunistic clusters of wealth accumulating entrepreneurs who live off of the trade, and who, if one is wont, in effect were a cluster of businesses in London and the other port cities. Networks created by trade extended in ways that we cannot trace nor fathom today–but were extensive and intruded into every nook and carry of Court policy-making.
From exports to imports, English commercial trade, and the elites and companies attached to it, had forged a new vision of the future economic relationship of England and the globe. In today’s terminology the clusters created by an import commercial vision, overlapped very nicely with supporting, but not leading, colonization in North America.
As we outline this shift from export to the Continent to import from the globe, we can see the seeds of what will become English colonial and trade policy, the Navigation Acts to be specific, the nature of which will play an exceedingly large role in America’s drift to Independence and Revolution. We will also glean valuable insights as to how each colony was differently affected by these trade proclivities, i.e. why Virginia tobacco was so important , while Pennsylvania wheat was not–reshaping the fate of the manor plantation in the two states.
The idea was to import to England the commodities and products of the globe, and for England to resell them to others who wanted or needed them–leaving for itself the pick of the litter to build its own economy, satisfy its populace and elites, and develop sufficient capacity to defend the Isles, and her trading routes, from hostile forces. Embedded in this transformation was a redefined conception of colonization, a colony that rather than serve as a release of surplus population, and a consumer of English goods, be capable of providing imports in bulk sufficient to satisfy English needs and offer a surplus for it to trade elsewhere.
What made import-driven commercial expansion beneficial [to England and commercial merchants] was its expanded base of occupations, workers and wealth accumulation opportunities English traders, concessionaires, and English ship-building and port facilities: import meant warehouses, and sale to interior cities and towns. [Early on] English merchants were motivated to expand English commercial horizons by the desire to emulate and, ultimately, to displace the Spanish and Portuguese in their trades for gold, spices and other commodities … They were encouraged to persevere in their efforts by the perceptibly declining power of their competitors [once again I suggest the effects of the Thirty Years War] … They found the new trades profitable over a very long period to a large extent because of the long-term growth of English home demand [99] Brenner, p. 45
Remarkably, from this dire fate flowed an opportunity that more diversified trade could build other industries, sectors and provide jobs in sectors other than textile-related. Opportunities for unemployed or for those flooding to these areas from the countryside in search of jobs meant a more diversified trade could grow occupations in manufacturing, finance, transportation/ship-building, port workers. Some of these opportunities could be seized upon as second jobs for farmers still engaged in agriculture (winter production). England had a larger population than ever, and these jobs offer some hope for a limited consumer demand, for selected products and commodities. Conversely, the decision by the companies associated with the Company of Merchant investors to double down on cloth export to northern Europe could run afoul of a mature market. That, in fact, prompted the Cockayne Experiment a decade later—an experiment that was a disaster to the cloth industry–beginning a downturn that would persist for decades.
Trading companies such as the East India and Virginia Companies were, to the Crown, not only a means of wealth-political support for his government, but an economic initiative that could ameliorate potential anarchy. Colonization, i.e. migration was another. In short, if the cloth merchant’s Company of Merchant Adventurers had its own leverage, besides its wealth, the import-settlement Trading Company such as East India and her sister trading company, the Virginia Company had theirs. The latter were clearly dominant in their role and influence in Crown-policy, but trading companies possessed their own deck of cards in their negotiations with the Crown and his ministers.
Not surprisingly sugar, indigo and tobacco would fit into this new trading nexus quite well. Caught in the early stages of this shift in trading visions, the Virginia Company was forced to reconcile the need to create a Virginia export economy attractive to the investors of the new commercial elite, and the requirements of self-sufficiency and an economic base of a permanent settled, growing colony. With ample opportunities for profit and trading elsewhere during this period, English second phase commercial trading company investors moved on to other ventures, leaving Virginia in a vacuum open to ventures from a different grouping of merchant entrepreneurs.
A Hint to Virginia’s Commercial Elite
This third grouping, young and determined were interested, willing, and capable of creating a new export based Virginia economic system in a very hostile wilderness. They were willing to build the permanent economic base necessary to support a hopefully lucrative export trade to the Mother Country. To them the stability of that economic base necessitated their dominance, if not control, over their local community and its governance. It was this third commercial grouping that in its turn will become the young American agricultural entrepreneur that will form the foundation of a future American commercial and business elite. In the beginning, this third grouping, so important to Virginia economic development, were not outsiders to the second generation Levant trading merchants, but their associates and offspring.
As much as we would like to use Smythe as a proxy for the commercial class during the Tudor-Stuart period, he, along with a few others, were atypical. Most merchants plied their trade, and minded their business; they were, if allowed inward-looking. Each cloth exporting company manufactured its own, and exported it on its own, using the protections and monopoly rights secured by the Company of Merchant Adventurers. Relationships with the Crown were personal if they existed, and if the merchant were included to be a political activist, the typical cloth merchant gravitated to participation in some level in offices and elective position in the City of London. Many of these positions were in their way lucrative, high on the social status scale, and not infrequently held for life, with some prospect they could be passed on to offspring.
The import-oriented trading company merchants who ventured to the extents of the globe were a different grouping. There was a minimal overlap with cloth exporters, but import-oriented trades were more eclectic in their backgrounds, location, and even social status. When we eventually deal with the post Virginia Company commercial groupings, we shall also find very little overlap with the trading company folk, and would differ notably in class and demographic configuration–they were younger and less advanced in status or title, for example.
Brenner in summary of these three distinct groupings of commercial merchants that arose in the Tudor-Stuart period agrees that “each of these stages laid the basis, to a limited extent, for its successor. But each ultimately gave rise to and was controlled by a separate social group of merchants, had its own distinct modes of organization and operation, and experienced its own, quite autonomous evolution”. [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso,2003), p. xi. Correct or not, I am predisposed to generational change, both in its members and the environment in which they lived, to explain these groupings.
The 1620’s were not the 1600’s nor were they the post 1550’s. If so each grouping was a transition to the next, and the overall Tudor-Stuart period, as far as overseas trade and colonization was concerned, was an unstable and sometimes volatile period on a timetable to change, instability, revolution and transformation into a new order and economic system. That, I might add, closely corresponds to our view of mercantilism, which I and others have argued appears to be a “system of thought and practice” only when looked at from hindsight of hundreds of years. In the Tudor-Stuart era, policy is all tactics and little strategy.
To this I would add that with each passing year, the drift to what will be a nearly twenty-five year revolution and a parade of shifting autocracies that followed accelerated policy-making by reaction, hope, desperation, and seldom by rational thought or planning. Virginia had the misfortune of its birth in a period such as this. Massachusetts fared better, but it did not enjoy the full-fledged legacy of founding and governance by the Virginia Company.
The capture of this trade by London-based merchant companies sparked an intense intermunicipal competition with the English west coast secondary ports such as Bristol and Plymouth joining east coast Boston, Hull, Ipswich that led to a compromise that formed two subordinate companies within the larger Virginia Company: the London and Plymouth Companies. Each had their own board of directors and organization. Each would mount their own colony expedition, the former to Jamestown and the latter, Sagadahoc Maine.
This not-to-subtle hint suggests a dynamic that will forever underlie discussion concerning the Virginia Company–that because of its initial configuration, its politics reflected the divide between the Crown-dependent London merchants, and the Parliamentarian merchants of the small municipalities. That division will haunt the operations of the Virginia Company, and significantly affect its fiscal capacity and political support for its objectives. While the discussion of the English commercial class is often conflated with the London and Crown merchants, the larger English commercial class was far from a monolithic community with identical interests and a internal consensus. Massachusetts and Virginia were founded by two different boards of directors, each lodged in the larger Virginia Company. Lots more on this as we go forward.
What is truly impressive is the degree to which the leading merchants who originally established the trade in the later sixteenth century back to the founders of the Levantine trade in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, if not to the pioneers of the eastward expansion of the previous generation Thirty Levant Company merchants who traded … in the 1630’s, can be linked by their own direct membership in the company. or by birth or marriage (often as a third generation) to the generation of merchants who entered the Levantine trade between … 1581 [and] 1605. … By 1640 significant numbers of the Levant Company’s richest and most active traders were thus joined in a highly ramified network of interlocking family relationships. Their web of connections helps to explain why the Levant Company merchants were so successful in exploiting the valuable privileges they derived from their close ties with government [99] Brenner, pp. 72-3
As we begin our own journey into the policy-making associated with the formation, incorporation, and the implementation of colony (plantation) building by the Virginia Company, we ought take warning that the latter was in many ways one of several ground zeroes in the disruption that enveloped England as it entered it incredibly turbulent seventeenth century. Succinctly stated by Brenner, being at a crossroads is definitely understated:
the early decades of the seventeenth century, and especially the years after 1620, have been characterized as a ‘time of transition’. The traditional cloth trade with northern Europe was [in fact] in profound decline, and the new commerce {importing from Levant & far-flung Asian, Spanish] was on the ascent. [Indeed] The commercial expansion to the Mediterranean, the Near East and the Far East, dating from the latter part of the sixteenth century, must be understood as part of that long-term reorientation of English commerce that has come to be called the “commercial revolution”. … In fact, … the impact of a second stage–the rise of commerce with the Americas, also based on imports, in tobacco and sugar produced on farms and plantations–was already being strongly felt. [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653,. p. 33
This network will be key to understand the political and economic development in Virginia from the fall of the Company in 1624, to well into the 1680’s and even 90’s. More on this in the next module series.
As our reader will discover in this module series (Jamestown) and the next (Transition from the Virginia Company) this period between 1610 and 1640 installed the basic institutions, structures and relations among them of Virginia’s policy system and economic base. This is a period in which the Crown was consumed with the politics of pre-Civil War England–and after 1638 the politics of Civil War England–leaving affairs of her Dominion colony Virginia off to the margins. It was only in 1639 that the King empowered and legitimized these institutions, and in 1642 sending over a royal governor with instructions to work with the political and economic institutions that had evolved in Virginia during the interim. In essence
Ron W. Coan 