the Motherland Bends Virginia’s Twig: Brenner’s rising new entrepreneur-investors propose to finance–and develop–an English permanent settlement colonies which in Virginia’s case meant to form an oligarchic policy system and a trans-Atlantic World Order
At face value, this module purports to describe Virginia’s role in England’s merchant-finance-logistic-investor class transition to the next stage that will end with the recognizable more modern finance capitalism that invested in the Industrial Revolution, and served as the inspiration for Karl Marx’s haunting of London’s libraries.
But there is more.
We are also describing the emergence of an elite that formed a policy system for Virginia. That policy system will rest on structures, values, and relationships between key institutions put in place by that elite during this extended time period to about 1660. While we may refer to the “oligopoly” and its oligarchs that compose and dominate this first policy system, our description of their rise, their personalities and behavior, and the values they seemingly held also laid the first foundation for a political culture we will call Tidewater.
This so-called oligarchy was in its composition eclectic, if not outrageous, and at points verged on its war of all against all. But unspoken, at least as far as I know, these often ruthless, greedy, violent plantation owners and businessmen came together in Jamestown and found a way to get along, divvy up their spoils, and, like pirates form a sort of representative policy system that unified them against the blunderings of the mother country, and provided a structure to which they could make policy and pursue strategies. Eventually they will evolve into a “Little Parliament”, but don’t get your hopes up–there will be ample qualifications as to what that meant.
In this module, one might make the mistake of thinking the Council of State is that body. Of more concern to us here is how they united against the governor, and did so with such success they embedded for one hell of a long time an almost instinctive resistance to a policy system characterized by a strong governor. Left mostly unsaid in the module, however, was the prime beneficiary of this will be its dominant level of government: the local guys and the plantation that was the prime unit of the policy system and economic base.
Ironically, at the time this oligarchy came into being, a babe was born–not in Bethlehem, but in a Bristol England suburb. John Locke was born in 1632, and he will be, arguably, the defining theorist of the policy system that came together in the seventeenth century. As a man deeply involved in American colonization, Locke no doubt was raised and lived his life aware of the goings on in Virginia–and elsewhere. I wonder, if not suggest, if the experience of the Virginia oligarchy that evolved and then came into full power in the 1650’s, his period of education, tilted his thinking and slipped into his theory. I will not argue, rather weakly whisper, that that Virginia’s first policy system reflected mildly many the features of his compact theory of government.
How the Motherland Bent the Virginia Twig: Brenner’s Emerging Capitalists: Explaining how a new group of merchants replaced the old English merchant adventurers
Robert Brenner’s classic Merchants and Revolution constructs the evolution and the development of capitalist entrepreneurs and investors from the Elizabethan-era to Merchant Adventurers ( London-based merchants such as Thomas Smythe and the famous trading companies (East Indies Company, the Levant), to the path-breaking Virginia Company, whose failure spawned the rise of a new generation of merchant-entrepreneur-investors who seized onto the English colonialization movement during the turbulent pre-Civil War (previous to 1642) period to rise to the commanding heights of eighteen century capitalism and industrialization.
His thesis, long acknowledged as both classic and page-opening has not generated the attention it deserves, particularly with American historians of the colonial era. In part, I believe, this is because “Brenner’s assertion” does not fit well into their narrative themes which each major historian of American colonial history has pursued during the different time periods. L. H. Roper draws our attention that of necessity Virginia as the first English colony, permanent settlement in the new world, thrust Jamestown, the Virginia Company, and early Virginia into the limelight. He asserts that:
from the period preceding the American Civil War until the 1960’s, Virginia constituted the chronological ace in the sectional struggle with adherents of New England over the ‘origins’ of American society and cultural attitudes which Great Britain bequeathed to the thirteen colonies which won their independence from it in 1783. This self-consciously Whiggish view attempted to place early American history within a wider context of the progress of Anglo-American liberty, and so, trumpeted such ‘achievements’ as the creation of the Virginia House of Burgesses, the first representative assembly in the New World’. It also lauded, particularly, the ‘yeoman-adventurer persona of Captain Smith as the prototype of American character against the rival claims made by ‘Yankees’ on behalf of the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ and ‘Puritans’ as the progenitors of the United States [99] L. H. Roper , the English Empire in America, 1602-1658; Beyond Jamestown (Routledge, 2009, 2015), p. 2
Roper continues his historiographic assessment describing a post World War II historian paradigm which in stark contrast to the previous depiction sees American colonial history through the prism of the American Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and most critically (because in its own weird way this history is congruent with) a historical experience which is driven by and based on a “history [from the perspective] from the bottom up”. Up to this point that has mean concentrating on those, cynically, who were not Founding Fathers or dead white presidents [99] L. H. Roper , the English Empire in America, pp. 2-3. Roper cites a variety of works reflective of this approach in his footnote 5, p. 142. He summarized the hysterographic thrust of this paradigm from a sub-group, the ‘Chesapeake school’:
colonial society in the region surrounding the Chesapeake Bay underwent a series of phases en route to ‘modernity’. In the first decades of English settlement … the relatively egalitarian character of the early population, coupled with a keen desire for advancement and the exigencies of frontier life, exacerbated by the reality of routine premature death, created a rough-and-tumble socio-political environment in which only the fittest prospered, tobacco became the be-all and end-all, and a bizarre form of metropolitan social structure developed. By 1660, however [the period of our “second migration”) the population had settled to the degree that recognizable elite had emerged and the enslavement of Africans had become part of the the ‘success’ equation. After the convulsions of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676), and in Maryland, the Glorious Revolution (1688-9), the membership of the colonial elites became further entrenched, and in accordance with their counterparts in other colonies, copied as best they could, the behavior and characteristics of the metropolitan aristocracy; they became increasingly ‘anglicized’. [99] L. H. Roper , the English Empire in America, p. 3
On the face of our comments thus far, the reader may rightfully conclude our argument in these module series reflects the latter paradigm. To that I must insert the prime purpose of this particular module, is to take this rough evolution and add a layer or two of subtlety, add a few more moving parts, and squeeze it into a conceptualization of what was Virginia’s first genuine policy system, a policy system fabricated by the first generation oligarchy “of the fittest”, which over time, after adoption by a second migration induced by William Berkeley, became the foundation for future policy systems, including those that formed during the Articles of Confederation and the Early Republic United States.
To this I would add the evolution I envision for Virginia and for each of the thirteen colonies does not culminate with the “entrenchment” of a institutionalized elite whose value system is congruent with a “metropolitan aristocracy” ( a term that still awaits definition). The policy system evolution that awaits our reader is one that emerges from the “deference classes” that are not meaningfully included in the first policy system we are describing–and for most practical purposes not Tidewater Virginia’s second migration policy system either. To make our history relevant today, and seriously provide an answer why our states and cities are different, we must understand policy systems and political cultures change, they evolve, and like Covid they find a new and disruptive way to manifest themselves.
These 1630 “deference” groupings of individuals consist of subsistence tobacco (household) plantations, indentured servants, slaves either Indian or Black, and Native American tribes will, each in their good time, develop new generational cohorts, migrate, and settle their own lands as they “Go West”, “North”, Sunbelt, New South or whatever. The reader will see that as we move toward the American Revolution we will begin to discuss the phrase “Interrupted Revolution”, and in Virginia we will describe the settlement of the Piedmont, but most importantly the Shenandoah Valley, as rudimentary “regional” policy systems that coexist with the dominant “Tidewater” policy system. At this point the reader may appreciate that we have not forgotten those who in the first sixty years of Virginia history were not included in the governing policy system of the province-colony.
I will also add this caveat that this Virginia policy system is not by any means the first United States policy system, if only because congruent with Virginia’s evolution there was a vastly different evolution ongoing in Massachusetts. That this caveat acknowledges some level of tension between the two different systems is also fundamental to our perception of the development of American political culture-an evolution which we believe is fundamental to understanding the policy systems of each period.
Each policy system rests, sometimes uneasily, on a political culture, at least until the arrival of the Early Republic when the elemental base of a modern political culture will evolve from its colonial base of religion, ethnicity, and local migration. That mercifully is not our task here–but it is a warning of things to come. For example, an implication is that American economic development policy reflects not only the structural and elite policy-making of a policy system, but of the values inherent in its configuration of political cultures of its citizens and residents.
through which American colonial history has passed over the now four centuries since Jamestown. We have not denied our English heritage, in particular its structural imports and law, but also its emigrants and their motivations for crossing the Atlantic. But what, I think we have done is emphasize how we altered that inheritance, usually in ways that set us apart, ways that made us “exceptional”.
Insert Roper historical periods
We have also focused on our drift to independence and the events and the “thinking” that led us to become the nation we are today. Indeed, I am struck by how much historians of the eighteenth century already think in terms of “us versus them”, to the extent that Founding Fathers such as Benjamin Franklin came rather late to that perspective. There is more of the sixteenth century colonial America that is central and relevant to our basic question: Why are (American) states and cities so different, and yet the same, to each other?
I also suspect four hundred years blows in a lot of historical fog that obscures the relevance, and the sympathy for, the personalities and events of this period. For many they just get lumped in as the afterthought of the decline of medievalism. Labeled as mercantilist, this period is just not up to the relevance and centrality that events, personalities, and philosophies of the eighteenth centrury seem to convey. This is unfortune for this history because the most fundamental bending of the colonial twig that will become the American “tree” is done during the seventeenth century. We forget that twelve of the thirteen colonies were founded by the Stuart kings, with only Georgia settled and founded after the Glorious Restoration—which in itself will result in some considerable turbulence in our colonial provinces.
If so lost in this fog are how and why key institutions and structures we inherited were adapted. In this module I wish to call attention how the English politics of the pre-Civil War period, Charles I –Parliament during the 1630’s, the religious struggle within the Church of England, and the rise of a new generation of entrepreneurs-investors profoundly shaped the development of Virginia’s economic base and policy system—and Massachusetts to boot. That these dynamics shaped the Virginia governor’s powers and roles in the emerging Virginia policy system will also prove fundamental. That they further confirmed the role and power of Virginia’s emerging local elites, and cemented into place the plantation as the fundamental unit of Virginia’s economic base and its policy system has to be brought to the reader’s attention.
Virginia today is written off as an plantation, slave-based tobacco export monoculture and policy system, which is true enough as far as it goes. But left to its own devices it is very conceivable the rising new generation of English entrepreneurs-investors would have taken Virginia in a very different direction. That they did not do so is due to Charles’s misadventures in colony creation, caused by his debts of extravagance, and by his flirtation with Catholicism and his stubborn and polarizing vision of the Church of England, a vision and doctrine very much out of step with England’s emerging middle and upper classes.
Having traced the passage of domestic Virginia’s political, economic, and hinterland expansion following the demise of the Virginia Company’s charter after 1625 to 1632, we are now about to make a return voyage to England, whose not so “merrie: new politics are about to profoundly affect the course of events in Virginia.
Recasting the Fall of the Virginia Company as a Struggle Among Merchant Elites
The civil war within the Virginia Company, pitting Warwick and Sandys against Smythe and his traditional merchant adventurer traders eventually gave way at its end to a Smythe and Warwick (his son) ouster of Sandys by getting the King to terminate the Virginia Company charter. By that time, the adventurers always dependent on royal favor, had blended with the guild and cloth traders, and had blurred their trading careers with a career in the City of London’s elective and office holding governance.
Their identification with London, responsible for the establishment of the two subsidiary corporations and the two colony startup in 1606 had by 1625 expanded into a clash between London and the secondary ports and cities that permeated into and became a core strand in the Parliamentary position against the King and his style of arbitrary, difficult to compromise, divine right governance. The trading company monopoly approach that precluded gentry investment in colonial opportunities had been shattered by the legislation that created the Virginia Company, and after the 1609 investment had left the Company with two hostile sets of shareholders that fell into a civil war by 1618.
Largely ignored by American historians, the Virginia Company had been a battleground between Edwin Sandys and Smythe, papered over by lottery funds that substituted for an unwilling investor class to finance the sustained support of a permanent settlement in Virginia. When the king ended the use of lotteries, the jig was up, and Sandys in 1618 launched his Parliamentary-supported bid for dominance over the Company. While the King was loyal to the merchant investors, the implosion that followed the Massacre of 1622 created a cattle stampede of opposing forces that in the end led James to call an end to the joint stock charter, and assume his own governance. The suspension of the charter in 1625 was not intended to be permanent, but James died and his son had his own mind, and priorities, about colonial involvement–and they did not include the Virginia Company.
Amid these goings on, a further schism within the aristocratic investor class, between the merchant adventures and aristocrats such as Warwick, Butler and Rich believed English colonization should be directed as a check against the Catholic Spanish and her immense empire. They favored Anti-Catholic privateering, and a more opportunistic fusion of colonial startups in Spain’s back yard. This was not at all to the liking of Smythe’s East Indies merchant adventurers’ who, more closely tied with royal foreign policy , centered around a “quick profit” trading post-factory model that promised success in Asia and the Orient, but never fit well with Virginia’s permanent settlement in the American wilderness.
If the Smythe era merchant adventurers learned anything from their horrendous experience with the Virginia Company’s efforts to link investor profit seeking with an effective permanent settlement self-sufficiency strategy is that they couldn’t. Competing with the Irish Ulster Plantation, James’s priority, they put whatever investment cash they could commit there, and not in Virginia. What they felt more certain of was the market philosophy pursued by the Dutch and their East Indies Company; this was akin to the trading factory resident in a settled geography with developed cities and policy systems, with whom they could negotiate deals-or conquer.
In Virginia they settled for an economic strategy built around tobacco and a company magazine monopoly for provisions–a monopoly that lend itself to inefficiency, if not outright corruption, alongside a good deal of customer dissatisfaction that encouraged the customer to make his own way in his isolated plantation. England’s tobacco monopoly and insistence that tobacco be routed through London helped–but it helped the custom farmers a lot more because that was where they money was made, not in the logistics. The need for a serious, if not core, element of a permanent settlement for an economic base that produced sufficient staples and “tools” in the colony so that “self-sufficiency” or sustainability of the colony’s population would be much less dependent on costly supplies from the motherland.
That was not compatible with the time frame of investors who formed the core of the merchant capital available the merchant adventurer period. It was that mismatch, along with the time lag in understanding the requirements of a permanent settlement that was primarily responsible for the ultimate failure of the Virginia Company joint stock company–in Virginia, but not Bermuda. Efforts to revive the Virginia Company after it was stripped of its Virginia charter did not arise from these merchant adventurers, but from Parliamentarian gentry investors that comprised the group led by George Sandys who dominated, if not led, the former Company officials during latter 1620’s through the early 1640’s.
Roper’s Metropolitan shared values-and the decentralization of those who lived with them and administered by them, and the immigrants who aspired to them
Experimentation in the merchant adventurer model was too late and too little, and Sandys saw the need for a new self-sufficiency model that broke with the merchant adventure monopolistic model of company magazines and investment vehicles. Sandys was willing to allow new, even non-Company, shareholders, to start plantations of their own and to allow them a measure of self-governance–a colony within a colony–that was expressed in the institutions he created with his 1618 Greate Charter reforms.
He allowed these plantation owners to cut their own deals with investors, import their own workers (not dependent on company-servants and supply ships) encouraged by the headright incentive system, and through the Council of State and Burgesses-General Assembly manage their own affairs, with close monitoring from London. It was these folk, that we have seen develop during the post company vacuum into the plantation conquistadores, the plantation-owning planter class, and now, with Claiborne, a potential merchant-logistics-finance class with its precursor to the Hudson Bay business plan.
And then came 1622. Rent by divisive internal politics and constituencies, without a consensual strategy on how to approach permanent settlement, the going concern that was the Virginia Company was put in a royal “receivership” in 1624-5. The shared decision-making with London-based investment community might have worked if the Company was not fighting bankruptcy and engaged in its great civil war, rendering the Company unable to meaningfully assist the local elite and thus maintain their loyalty to the Company.
The domestic officials assumed authority and in essence provided what little government was needed to restore order, seize Indian lands, and export tobacco. By 1630, a local oligarchy more or less ran things, mostly through the Council of State and a domestic Company official as governor. And then as we have seen, the King appointed John Harvey as governor, and then governor and Council were at loggerheads. In short, Virginia itself had fallen into a oligarchic semi-anarchistic free trade zone that happened to pay its bills and make some profit by exporting tobacco. Until about 1630 when the price of tobacco fell to abysmal low levels, in large measure due to tobacco overproduction. This Virginia colonialization effort was not working all that well. Charles, he with other priorities, was dragged into its governance–hence the Dorset and Laud Commissions.
Introducing the Reader to English Pre-Civil War Politics and Religious Change
At this point, we must refresh ourselves with the evolution of the English, now increasingly “British” investor-colonization and trading class. As we have seen with the Virginia Company experience, the colonization-investor class had its own troubles. It was drawn into a close, but unloving alliance with the Stuarts; it had wandered into the governance of the City of London; it was split into competing rival constituencies: cloth merchants (the largest element), the Smythe foreign merchant adventurer traders; the merchants and traders in England’s secondary cities and ports who had sought refuge in their gentry representatives to Parliament who pushed back hard against London merchant monopolies; and a bunch of somewhat entrepreneurial-privateer aristocrats that hated Spain and Papists and wanted English colonization to be infused with anti-Spain initiatives. Now that’s a mélange that would defy the governing abilities of any monarch.
It also did not help that Court and Parliamentary politics, pretty bad while James I was king, got even more contentious and way more complex, year by year coping with Charles. Both rules chief recourse was suspending for multi-years any Parliamentary session. But in session or not Parliament was still engaged. with King and Parliament traveling down ever opposite paths.
Charles entered in 1625 into a war his father did not want, against Spain. It ruined the continental trade of cloth, and depressed the largest non-agricultural sector of England’s economy, promoting demonstrations, and a sustained willingness to immigrate by an increasingly surplus population. Ireland was the principal beneficiary, but North American colonization picked up momentum. When the war ended in 1630, the experience had only worsen the clash with Parliament, and further widened the English interest in using colonial ventures as a check on the Spanish Empire.
Injecting Brenner’s Assertion into Virginia’s 1630 Situation
For a decade or so, the illusion of tobacco as an export profit maker sustained the Company, and enabled its transition from joint stock to royal gubernatorial policy system. Former local Company officials united behind the Greate Charter institutions, and were joined by representatives of the investor-owned hundreds and the owners of scattered plantations-communities they made decisions, infamously to permanently pacify the native population and seize their lands and crops to facilitate growth in tobacco monoculture and their own personal security and substance. A vacuous Charles, unwilling to assert his governance, let by default the locals run their shop, and develop their own ambitions–and the Claiborne venture was its first major outcome.
Whatever potential that venture had for Virginia, for Brenner it was arguably Virginia’s first major step in leading the path to develop a new English colonial investor class based in London–a replacement for the ever absent old Elizabethan merchant investors who had moved on. But if every action creates a counter action, Claiborne’s initiative had triggered the formation of a ill-organized, disparate, planter community left outside the new Claiborne joint stock adventure.
The collapse in tobacco prices around 1630, and arrival of Harvey, a most unfortunate choice by Charles, as governor weakened whatever hold the provincial executive branch had over Virginia economic and political development, and opened a opportunistic vacuum into which Claiborne and Tucker in particular united with a new grouping of English investor-owners, a grouping with close and direct involvement with tobacco export and ownership of Virginia plantations, to combine in a powerful game changing initiative that broke with the larger Virginia planter class and challenged, by the nature of its initiative, the authority and impact of the governor–if not the King. And then came the Maryland grant to Calvert by Charles!
Pushed aside in all this was the larger planter community, composed of large plantation owners, and associated with small and household plantations that grew and exported tobacco. Compared to the handful of Claiborne conquistadors, who while dominating the export of tobacco and the market for indentured servants, could not match the ability of the planter community to dominate local-hundreds-shire government, and the Burgesses when in their infrequent session.
Confronted with the reality of depressed tobacco prices, chronic Indian warfare, and now a governor who curtailed their essential flow of land sales and indentured servant headright, these tobacco plantation owners came together to sort out a program of self-reform and an export market favorable to their profit expectations. The revival of the Virginia Company, an event they could not seemingly stop, and the implementation of the Kent Island Claiborne Clique trade-export-import-London investment model in their eyes threatened they economic, and likely political autonomy, and so they fought Claiborne–and then came the Maryland-Calvert colony.
Carved out of their Virginia, saturated with hated Papists, Maryland created a rival group of tobacco planters with whom they must compete–to send their own scarce supplies to sustain them in their fragile startup added insult to injury. That Maryland could house the Claiborne venture was yet another scenario they feared. This was a scenario that seemed possible as Claiborne’s London investors after 1635-6 were evidently making their peace with Calvert.
They were never successful, but their 1631-4 effort came within inches of success- largely cause it was one element among several that thought they could profit from the Company’s revival. One of those other elements, of course, was Virginia’s own Claiborne Clique and their London investors. As Brenner argues this reflects the politics and initiatives associated with a transition period in English colonial capitalism. With the initial model of investment removed from new colonial ventures, some other form of investment capitalism, absolutely imperative to sustain over time a colonial permanent settlement in the hostile wilderness of North America had to be devised and evolved.
Brenner’s New Investor Class Takes Shape in the New World- Brenner is most concerned with following the rise of this London-based investor class. We on the other hand are more interested in the effect this new investor class had on the economic and political development in the colonies–and in this module Virginia. Still, the reader must be made aware that Thomson and his emerging colonial investment model-initiative was simultaneously with Virginia setting roots in other colonies as well.
Thomson, I think, was as much, if not more interested in the West Indies, but several of his core partners had pioneered early experiences with, of all things, the near defunct second subsidiary of the Virginia Company, which had been reconstituted as the New England Council. In our Massachusetts chapter we will explore that in more detail. Its action do affect Virginia, but at this point we are more interested in allowing Brenner to make his case on the testing of his model over the next two decades, calling attention to Thomson and his investors drift away from Charles and the royalist cause, to the Parliamentarian, thus creating a bridge to the Cromwell Protectorate. The reason for this seeming tangent is that Claiborne and his Virginia Clique of plantation conquistadors will drift in companionship with Thomason. The reader should understand this drift is the essential piece of information that will tie together the next three decades of Virginia’s policy system. It will provide the key to open the door for the survival of the Virginia planter class in the turbulent world of the English Civil War through the Restoration. It will provide the insight as to why Samuel Mathews will die in London in 1657 in the five year long process of conducting Cromwell’s attempt to restore his order and control over the Middle colonies. Mathews’ twenty-one year old son will at the time be governor of Virginia, while the former royal governor, William Berkeley, sits in his personal estate in retirement that will last a decade.
And you wonder why Virginia has no tradition of a strong governor?
That this transition period overlaps with the decline of Charles I’s regime, drifting toward civil war, and then into a two decade long civil war and Cromwell Protectorate meant that English colonialism was no longer a primary initiative of the Crown or Parliament (if truly it ever was), and with war consuming much of the available capital, meant that new colonies, and Virginia as the first colony, had to figure out their own investment models, and evolve them in the vacuum that was English colonial policy is this period of the 1630’s through the 1660’s.
In essence the colonies were on their own as they tried to attract the capital absolutely necessary to finance their settlement, associated infrastructure, and to establish and support the economic base they were required to build that would be able to support the permanent settlement more or less autonomously. That each colony after Virginia, while it would learn from the previous experience of the existing colonies, had to adapt those lessons to their geographies and the time period dynamics of their settlement. The reader, I suspect, can easily see how this transition period, will insert a partial answer into the question that underlies this book: Why are states and cities different today?
Brenner’s main concern was the development of a new capitalist class that would emerge during the sixteenth century, replacing the Elizabethan mercantile merchant adventurers capitalism, and evolving a different form of capital investment, provided by a different grouping of investors, a different class composition, and generational cohort change tossed in for good good measure. Virginia and the West Indies were central players in his evolution and development of the new capitalist colonial investment model, and he expends considerable time and pages to develop what occurred in Virginia as evidence to how that evolution played out–and why.
We are without any doubt largely in agreement with his thesis, and find it offers not only a wonderful view of how Virginia evolved her post 1630 economic and political development, but also explains how that evolution created the economic and political base on which the glorious glory days of Virginian eighteenth century plantations rested–until they began to collapse during and after the 1740’s. That collapse created the background for the drift of Virginia’s elite into the drive for autonomy and then independence. That Virginia dominated the first half of the Early Republic that followed, and played a huge role in constructing its constitution, only further supports our belief that we must properly understand the economic and political system that evolved after Jamestown and the Virginia Company.
Maurice Thomson, and his family, are Brenner’s leading actor in this early period of transition. Thomson got his start in Virginia, and that is how he got caught up in Claiborne’s initiative. But Thomson had his own ideas and before Claiborne he was already seriously engaged in forming his own investment company, his own Rolodex of investors and “lobbyists”. By the 1631 Dorset Commission and then Laud Commission, his success in starting New England and Canadian initiatives had been conducted–and were able to be successfully tapped in incorporating a wide North American-wide scope and scale to Claiborne’s upper Virginia escapade.
Thomson, and the adventurer network that was his brothers and sister, however, almost raised in Virginia were also simultaneously involved with the West Indies–which we must confess conveyed more promise, at least in the pre-Civil War period and during it, of profits, wealth and status. As we shall see in this module, when Claiborne ran into trouble with his initiative after 1637, he joined with Thomason in a wild West Indies venture of his own. This is part of Brenner’s model because what he was demonstrating was a new “entrepreneur” as investor. In his fourth chapter he charts “the meteoric rise of an entirely new group of traders, originating almost totally outside the company merchant community [Smythe’s merchant adventurers], which assume the task of developing American plantation production and commerce from about 1618 through the 1640’s” [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolutionaries, p. xii
What Brenner believes happened during this transition is an “entrepreneur” took residence in a colony, set up a project (settlement, plantation, economic venture (fur trading, logistics), imported a workforce, and laid in place his contribution to the colony’s economic base:. To secure the capital required for his project, the entrepreneur developed a partnership with London-based investment capital sources–investors who relied on the entrepreneur to create and sustain a sound business venture that could repay the investment, not only be covering the debt through sale of the venture’s exports, but through additional sales of provisioning and quality of life goods provide new revenues and profit.
A partnership of sorts between entrepreneur adventurer and London capital would solidify and, on their own, each plantation owner could “do his thing” and grow his project, with capital and imported goods from England. Here we can see how the economic autonomy of each plantation set in place dynamics that greatly impacted the development of Virginia emerging and fragile policy system. That it relied on imported dependent workforce that eventually transformed into a slave-based economy is yet another consequence of this new developmental partnership. In its final days, English capital was less used to buy new land, than to buy more slaves. That it resulted in increasing debt of the landowner, creating a debt-ridden elite, would lead to its own dynamics, that mightily impacted our developing nation.
With this capital the entrepreneur not only profited, and his future generations benefited (or not as we shall see), but was able to build what infrastructure he needed to sustain his operations and grow them over time. This model of investment-economic development matured during the transition period, and by its end in the 1660’s it was incorporated into a second generation migration into Virginia sponsored by the economic development strategy of Governor William Berkeley. By that time this investment model was built into, an invisible part of the infrastructure of Virginia’ s economic base–and was simply accepted and passed onto future generations, “without question or pause”–until it was obvious it was not working in the 1740’s.
Ron W. Coan 