the English Inheritage Relevant to the Virginia Company

English Inheritage Relevant to the Virginia Company:

English Economic Development Turns To Overseas Commercial Trade that led to the Incorporation of the Virginia Company which was tasked to found at least two North American colonies

 

 

 

That monopolies policy question had evolved as the core of merchant adventure overseas expansion before—and after—1553. By 1600 it was one of England’s most potentially explosive policy issues. In this chapter I ought begin to answer questions that need background and suggestions of answers to come, such as “what is this monopoly thing? How did it affect overseas commercial trade and colonization? How did it mobilize restive non-London merchant adventurer overseas activists? How did the non-London overseas adventurers and supporting elites gain access to policy-making so to demand their own North America overseas trade and colonization joint stock corporation?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prologue to the Volume

 

My motivation for writing this series of volumes developed from my research which began in 2008–and continues to this day. Somewhere in that almost two decade crusade, I realized American states, whether original thirteen colonies, or other states founded by settlers that left them in their movement into the continent, had closer ties to the original colonies that is most Americans realize. 

My economic development career included work in local and regional government and economic development in three states, culminating with eight years in a national economic development not for profit. it was so obvious to me from this experience that states, regions and local government made policy and implemented economic development different from each other. The question that arose: why are each of these states different? Why do their policy-making structures and institutions of the same name (legislature for example) make policy using their own distinctive recipe. To answer that question, I intensified my research through the Articles of Confederation, the Early pre-bellum Republic, and the post Civil War through 1990-2000. The last period was covered in my first publication: Two Ships Passing In the Night. Following its publication, I turned to the other periods.

From that research I discovered states could trace their differences back to their entry into the Union as a state. I further realized much of the initial state system of many was simply carried over from its colonial past, or was the result of its writing of its initial constitution and its entry process as a state. While writing the second volume (Follow the Sun), after my third was published in 2017 (Two Ships Passing in the Night), I decided I could not complete it without better understanding the colonial history of that state. Simply put, for the original thirteen colonies the colonial period was their formative years (Delaware being a bit more complicated).

There was one problem that frustrated me. For all the years spent studying American history, I had little more than superficial knowledge of American colonial history. So my crusade was enlarged to include colonial history. And that’s how “As the Twig was Bent, So Grows the Twig” started. Now I write the introductory volume for the first state, Virginia, a volume that starts with the role, nature, legacy and history of the Virginia Company and its impact on its development as a future American state..

Writing Chapter 1 which focuses on the nature of the Virginia Company, I discovered that the prevailing conception of the Company is that it was “private”, whatever that meant, and for other that it was for the most part a “business corporation” using profit as its goal for the founding and management of the colony. Both perceptions collapsed very quickly and my research sent me off in directions I had not anticipated–deep into the entry of England into its mercantilist era and its first efforts to transition from its medieval period.

The Virginia Company was not just private company; it was an English “great merchant trading company”. The Company did not follow conventional business management principles and practices; they had yet to be developed. The mission of the Company evolved out of England’s initial effort to broaden its participation in both European and global overseas commerce and trade. Colonization was an afterthought that few bothered to think through realistically. In any case, I was drawn not only into the Elizabethan era, but the Tudor as well.

It became very evident to me the Virginia Company was similar to the Titanic; constructed and designed for a mission it would not complete, and would sink in the process. England in 1606 was in no way ready to found a colony in North America, than the United States is currently able to found a colony on the moon. That is the story I tell in Chapter One and Two. How all this was to affect Virginia’s political, economic and social development as a colony fell into place as I reinterpreted the period during which the Company “governed” the colony–through 1629 (not 1624).

Chapter 2 deals with the post 1550 expansion of commercial trade by England. It ends immediately previous to the start of the incorporation of Virginia Company in 1605-6. By focusing on the period between 1550 and 1605 we can better understand the factors and drivers that underlay the mission and the design of the vehicle, the Virginia Company joint stock corporation–as important we introduce the why the activists and future leadership who advocated for the incorporation of a great merchant trading company to implement the mission.

Chapter 3 will discuss the Tudor-Stuart transition and its effect on the design and organization of the Virginia Company. As we follow that we will discover why Virginia and Massachusetts developed along a different time line and colonization process–mission. Among other factors, the two were profoundly affected by rivalry between London and Plymouth-Bristol. Let’s stop there for now. Suffice it to say, the Virginia Company was a lot more complicated and its complication flowed from England’s emergence as an medieval polity in transition into the very early stages of European mercantilism. Virginia as a colony was not an experiment; it was an afterthought that at best was premature, and a reality that it was doomed to fail from the start.

[999] But here, I call attention to an implication that will characterize Virginia from other English colonies that followed her founding: No other colony went through this period, not even her sister colony Massachusetts (whose founding was a precious decade and half after Jamestown, and whose political development followed its own path with leadership drawn from anti-royalist puritans whose governance was theocratic and oligarchical. Massachusetts was founded after the Virginia Company second subsidiary was reorganized in the early 1620’s. That too will be discussed later.

Enjoying its own autonomy derived from its own separate subsidiary, New England was outside the jurisdiction of the London Virginia Company subsidiary. It was able to develop along its own path while able to observe the goings on in Virginia. Looking ahead to Philadelphia-Pennsylvania’s founding in 1681-3, and New York’s colonial period begun by the Dutch two years after Jamestown, and conquered by the English in 1664, we can easily see that the major English colonies started in the seventeenth century had noticeably different time lines and different political-economic-social dynamics that the Virginia Company colony of Virginia.

Using a metaphor, each colony’s early childhood was very different from the other. We have discovered, inadvertently a major reason, not the only reason by far, but a major reason why each colony  was in its way different, and those differences became embedded into its future statehood.

Finally, keeping in mind a slew of American colonies were founded in the 1700’s when England had evolved into Britain, and the Parliament had asserted its position against the monarchy that its politics, if nothing else, no longer resembled anything Virginia had encountered. Accordingly, we can appreciate that timing of the colony’s founding does matter. Penn’s Philadelphia was seventy-five years distant from Jamestown, decades after the Restoration, for example. What Virginia will experience as we go forward is distinctive to Virginia–and that is what we hope to capture in our mainline narrative.[999]

For the heritage of Virginia to be best understood, the colony did not become a Roanoke or Sagadahoc, but rather, relying on its settlers, it survived the disasters inflicted on it by the Virginia Company and matured to lead us into our formation as a nation. That story will be told also.

 

If we are to understand how and why the Virginia Company was designed as it was, and how it came to be the vehicle by which England launched what turned out to be the first successful English North American permanent settlements-colonies, we should appreciate the Company was a creature of England’s entry into the mercantile age of Europe, a period that began during the 1550’s. That entry was conducted in earnest as a result of England’s post 1550 pivot to global commercial trade.

With this pivot England broke from its pre-1550 English semi-isolationist one-export  trade with northern Europe. The fifty or so years previous to the Virginia Company incorporation constituted the bulk of England’s experience and expertise in overseas commerce, and from that skill and knowledge base England attempted a major colonization imitative with the 1606 expeditions launched by the Virginia Company. In 1606 the Virginia Company founded settlements in Maine and Virginia.

Over the next twenty years, using one organizational form or another, the Company founded successful colonies at Jamestown, Plymouth (the Pilgrims), Massachusetts (the Massachusetts Bay Colony (the Puritans) at Boston, and a colony in Bermuda). Its Virginia charter in 1624 was suspended and despite several concerted efforts to renew it none were successful; the last was in 1643. During that extended time period the Company constantly meddled with Virginia affairs, and collapsed for good in the 1660’s. It legacy as the midwife of Virginia, however, compels us to start Virginia’s history with the Virginia Company, the corporate founder of the first two of the original thirteen colonies. 

In doing so, I immediately encountered a problem: few,  including me, had a firm ideas as to what the Virginia Company was, what it did or did not do, and what heritage it left for history. The Company was certainly the “mother/midwife”/founder, whichever the reader prefers, of Virginia and Massachusetts colonies” and for decades it managed or tried to manage the affairs of both colonies. The Company  first infused English DNA into initial what would become American political institutions of each colony, and without a clear sense of its identity, role and legacy, a vacuum exists as to the English inheritance in the birth of these colonies.

To compound this vacuum, the research of any number of historians and commentators have made their own assumptions, simply borrowed those of others, or ignored the question entirely. Accordingly, I start from the origins of the Virginia Company so we can tackle the first of these questions: just what was this Virginia Company and what role or mission it tasked with, by whom. Having made this determination, I would then proceed on with the other questions as well. With a more firm understanding of the nature of the Company, its leadership and mission(s), we can then consider its performance and the fate of the colonies they founded.

So being the Curmudgeon I am, here’s my attempt to outline what I believe is the Company’s origins and nature–the first steps in its establishment of England’s first successful American colony. My goal is to provide more meaning to Virginia’s founding than a simple, incorrect, and fabricated tale of John Smith, and/or Pocahontas that is the best we have done regarding America’s first successful permanent colony–unless, of course, one dwells on the “starving year” (1609-10) cannibalism or a 1619 auction block that sold the first Black slaves in Virginia.

 

2050 is only twenty-five years away. This chapter discusses English overseas commercial development after 1550 in order to assess the impact of English economic, political, and social development on the design and capacity of the 1605-6 Virginia Company. In particular the chapter focuses on the major pivot in English overseas commercial trade that occurred after 1550. That period is nearly five hundred years ago.

Five hundred years in the English past is a lot to expect from my reader. Most readers, particularly American readers, are not familiar with English history that far in the past. Many will not instinctively find it interesting, or relevant; most Americans understandably will not have the background and will not easily navigate a period of time from which the Virginia Company emerged.

My argument is relatively straightforward: the Virginia Company, indeed England itself, had not developed sufficient capacity and experience to attempt a permanent settlement in North America. Entrusting that mission to the Virginia Company in 1606 was too much to ask. Baring an extraordinary miracle, that mission in 1606 was beyond the capacity of the Virginia Company. More likely than not, was either doomed to outright failure or major set back. England and its proxy, the Virginia Company, had not emerged from its medieval age, although it was in its very first years of transitioning away from it. 

Add to that the idea that American history goes back that far may be quite a shock. The notion that the Virginia Company was a creature of the late medieval, or, if one prefers early modern history, may literally be a bit of a temporal shock for Americans. While it is not my purpose in this chapter to debate the character of America, it is reasonable to argue that most contemporary Americans are not “English”; we are not, and arguably never have been, ethnically descendant from England, but have embraced ethnic backgrounds across the globe, including indigenous North American.

Accordingly, this chapter draws from English history, my assessment of those factors and drivers that limited the capacity and prospects of the Virginia Company by an attempt to cross one bridge too far, from commercial trade to permanent settlement in 1606. A defective Virginia Company, not equal to that task, left its mark on the political, social and economic development of Virginia, the first successful North American English colony, and created in Virginia its own heritage and impact that affected its subsequent development to, and after, American statehood.

That impact by the Company, in my judgement, has not been satisfactorily assessed, leading to important misunderstandings of Virginia and its development. Virginia, I argue has been a distinctive American colony and state throughout its history and in the interests of all Americans we need to better understand its beginnings, and its relevance to the larger development of the United States.

All Americans no matter their ethnic or racial backgrounds can benefit from recognizing the Virginia Company went wrong in its initial settlement, and Virginia’s subsequent development was affected and shaped by that heritage. Being the first successful English colony, Virginia bore the burden of English colonialism in a period when England itself was emerging from its medieval age and entering into a period of transition that climaxed with its own civil war. Virginia experienced over fifty years in that transition, noticeably more than its companion early states (New England and Maryland especially). Virginia was shaped most profoundly because of the timing of its development and the expression of that inopportune timing, the Virginia Company.

Unfortunately, if I leave this historical gap unattended, the reader will almost naturally let his or her contemporary priorities, preoccupations, impressions of that foggy past, crowd into what is read in this history. A rush of old movies and fictional books will fill in any gaps. Not knowing much about it, many might not appreciate England is on the threshold of its own Civil War, an event that changed her as much as ours changed us. We may think of her England as the beginning of the British Empire–and toss in all that baggage. Powerful contemporary paradigms such as democracy, colonialism, or industrialization, can subtly creep in as benchmarks or virtuous paths to follow, even though the Elizabethan era is “pre” all of them.

Hard as it may be, the real-life setting of this module’s time may not match our images. The period we now discuss is when London started its growth to become a large city–i.e. English urbanization is just starting. We are two hundred years before Charles Dickens  and  Adam Smith. Highclere castle (Downton Abbey) was built in1679, more than 125 years in the 1550 future. The ships, tools, weaponry, navigation aides, heavy equipment, the lack of maps and a globe filled with unknown geographies–even the modern fork lies in its future. Illness, disease, scurvy, death, and pandemic’s as plague, smallpox changed family life, marriage, and shortened lifespans.

While the Virginia Company was being negotiated London was just recovering from a plague episode. We are the better part of three quarters of a century before the infamous Navigation Acts which established the basic rules of England’s commercial trade and its colonial economy. Those governance principles were issued AFTER England’s civil war was over, and Cromwell was dictator of England (1651). 

America is older than most of us realize. Virginia’s roots go deeper into medieval England than most of us realize.

Bluntly, in order to instill some contemporary relevance into the Virginia Company’s impact on our history, and the development of the state of Virginia, we’ve got to take a brief and focused glimpse into this period in which America became a glimmer in the English eye. At minimum we need a sense of the chronology, and outlines of its economic and social dynamics that characterized the time period  and the institutions that mattered in its policy-making, all of which were in flux. 

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Module Start

England’s Transition into the European Mercantilist Age: Overseas Trade and Commerce

Our “history” in this module thus focused mostly to Elizabeth’s launching of English overseas and commercial trade, the foreign policy she pursued, and the dominant institutions of policy-making in use as England entered into early European mercantilist system after 1550. This is hundreds of years before England developed into the British Empire; a period when she was not a major player and had a very weak economy. In this section my focus centers around the Elizabethan overseas policy-making process, the the state of the English economy in transition, and the level England had attained in overseas trade and commerce by 1550.

The drivers and initiatives of that period, immediately before the design of the Virginia Company, exerted serious impact on its formation, and offer insight into why its supposedly principal mission, permanent settlement in North America, got sidelined by an implementation process dominated by commercial trade and import into England. They offer important insight as to why the Virginia Company was NOT “ready for prime time”. Neither was England for that matter, but that is another story [See England’s Crisis of the Seventeenth Century is America’s Inability to Deal With Virginia’s First Fifty Years as a Colony]

 

The key to my argument that England itself was not ready to launch a colony in 1606 follows from an understanding that England had just begun–literally–her entry into what would be the “modern” era. Many historians have called Virginia’s colonization as “an experiment”. I disagree. It was much less than an experiment. England had not reached the point where it had upgraded her medieval policy system to the stage that it possessed the capacity to design and manage a permanent settlement thousands of miles across the Atlantic. Mankind talked about going to the moon centuries before it ever could launch an expedition; just because England and others could dream about colonization in a remote wilderness three thousand miles across the Atlantic doesn’t mean they could launch an effective expedition to do so. 

In fact England was just entering into the pursuit of meaningful global overseas trade and commerce only fifty years previous to the charter for the Virginia Company–the period which we are now going to describe. That entry into overseas commerce reflects the transition England was making in its economic-social-and political transition into its early modern period. Trade and commerce is not colonization. In this module I hopefully demonstrate that England in the post 1550’s still retained a great deal of her medieval politics, society and culture and they greatly affect the shape and design, not to ignore leadership of the Virginia Company and her definition of just what a colony entailed and required.

Amazingly, so little was known about North America; England’s exploration and discovery of its Atlantic coastline had just begun. One of the tasks assigned to John Smith while he was in Jamestown was to sail up the North American coastline and make a map. Those who designed and led the Virginia Company had no clear idea where it was going, nor what they needed to do after it set up shop there.

The story behind the design and incorporation of the good ship Virginia Company emerged out of the turbulent change that characterized England’s pivot to overseas trade and commercialization over the last half of the sixteenth century. As such the Company was, first of all, an expression of England’s aggregate experience (or the lack of it) in overseas commerce and secondly reflected the determination of activists who firmly believed the future of England lay in its attainment of a leading position in mercantile trade and strength to compete in European mercantilist foreign affairs. The “settlers” who went on the expedition were either desperate economic refugees, or aristocratic/gentry victims of primogeniture who sought wealth, adventure and opportunity.  None had any experience in a permanent North American settlement.

To understand the dynamics of change in play, I briefly describe several English demographic and policy-relevant factors that played observable roles in the Virginia Company advocacy and design. By no means comprehensive or inclusive of the period, my presentation stresses relevant aspects of each as they affected the design, incorporation, and implementation of the Virginia Company and its charter.

In reverse chronological order: England’s one export, little import overseas trade, first great trading company, the Company of Merchant Adventurers, emergence of the cloth/wood cluster, rise of a concentrated urban underclass, London as a mega city and its implications, rupture of the medieval class structure, population growth and urbanization, and the English enclosure movement. That last disruption, the first chronical-logically, popped the cork on English modernity. It jump-started an incremental, slow moving change based on population movement and consequent urbanization, its unbalanced locational distribution and the social change that followed in its wake. 

Reserved for the last is an outline of Elizabethan policy-relevant institutions and practices. That topic serves as a segueway into the Tudor-Stuart succession that will lead into the actual advocacy and design of the the Virginia Company, the great merchant trading company meant to conduct English colonization. Our final topic, a segueway into the first chapter, the great merchant trading companies and the post 1550 pivot into an expansion of overseas global trade and commerce, provides context for Virginia’s macro foreign environment. 

While each of these topics risks a short wandering into the weeds of early English, late medieval history, they do provide support for my initial assertion that England and the Virginia Company were not ready for prime time colonization. Rather it was launched prematurely because of pressures English elites felt as they entered into the early European mercantilist system. 

In the Beginning was the Enclosure Movement and the Plague

An historical timeline of the drivers which influenced the English post 1550 pivot to broaden English global trade and commerce is essential so the reader can fit our story into a larger context. That timeline starts with the English enclosure movement. That movement, more complex and evolutionary than a simple description of its features suggest, is narrowed by my limited purpose to merely outline several of the drivers released by opening its Pandora’s box. The movement started in the 13th century, gathered momentum during the Tudor years, the late 15th century into the 16th and 17th–the last being the period on which I focus. It continued well into the 1800’s. An important caveat to our use of enclosure as less a “starting point” for England’s transition from medieval to early modern history, is that it wasn’t. What is more reasonable to say is the enclosure movement unleashed forces of change, economic, social and political drivers that would over centuries aggregate into noticeable disruption in the traditional medieval system.

Embraced by a few aristocrats hoping to increase their wealth and position by restricting the use of land which heretofore had been available to serfs for common use such as firewood, grazing livestock, and hunting  by enclosing them with hedges and or fence after harvest. Once enclosed the lords used the enclosed area for their sheep herding, from which they sought revenues from  making wool/cloth raw material or for their use or or sale of meat. As such, the reason for enclosure  was to increase full time pastorage for sheep raising. F. J. Fisher horribly succinct definition that ‘Enclosure–i.e. the suppression of common grazing rights–by agreement was a feature of the age,” but he compensates by alluding to the huge sweep of time enclosure persisted, adding his next sentence “But as pressure on land mounted, the question of its use became increasingly a political one.“ [99] F. J. Fisher, Tawney’s Century”, in Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge at the University Press, 1961), p. 5

The expanse of time during which the enclosure played out compels an reminded that its definition and the positions taken on it vary among the time periods. In the beginning the cry of those affected negatively was “depopulation” which from their perspective it was. By the time of Henry VIII and certainly Elizabeth, however, given change that flowed from it, agricultural innovation and an increase in food and textile production provided offsetting perspectives, and instead of sheep herding, mining exploration and an extractive mineral cluster had added to its repertoire.  The Tudor’s themselves tended toward the preservation of arable land, but its priority was low and attention to it was inconsistent, leaving its implementation to those with “a dog in the fight”. In several ways by the 1550’s enclosure had settled into a position similar to our eminent domain: messy, loud, and decided upon by local justices. [99] See also Maurice Beresford, “Habitation versus Improvement: the Debate on the Enclosure Agreement” in F. J. Fisher, Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge at the University Press, 1961).

As to the manor, agriculture, the effect was to remove land from use by serfs and encourage them and gentry to rent and/or purchase land for themselves–particularly after the black plague when local agricultural labor became expensive and the fiscal needs of the manor lords great. Still, the manor lords enclosed more pasture land, therefore raising more sheep for use in wool manufacture and foodstuffs until sheep outnumbered the English by three-to-one.

Scattered about England, wool and cloth manufacturers were  accordingly able to easily source wool, those with an entrepreneurial bent were able to form companies thus jump-starting a serious industrial wool and cloth cluster. Scattered about England, wool and cloth manufacturers were  accordingly able to easily source wool, those with an entrepreneurial bent were able to form companies thus jump-starting a serious industrial wool and cloth cluster. expensive and the lords needed funds for themselves. freemen dependent on manor land, leaving many with little practical alternative than to move from the manor and seek land or employment elsewhere.

In so doing they blended into England’s larger guild movement. and organized themselves into regional/occupational guilds. Guilds led to cohesive and skilled regional clusters , that as the cluster matured, it tended to centralized into and around larger businesses, which tended to grow best on the peripheries of newly densely populated or urban areas–a process that inherently favored London and its suburbs, and a few regional centers, particularly those with ports whose residents demanded wool and cloth products for their use and benefit.

Creation of an “enclosure commons” extended over the centuries that followed, taking ahold of  aggregations of land from serfs’ use, but in its way facilitated private ownership/renting/ and sharecropping of land alongside and the fostering of a new industrial wool and cloth cluster that spread incrementally across England. Naturally, the incremental increase in private land ownership meant a disruption of the medieval manor based class system, and the development of an landed (free holder) agricultural yeoman, along with increases in artisans, and merchants, also moving to more urban locations where they were more likely to prosper.

Over the years many of these prospered and infused development of a gentry proto-class that by the time of the Virginia Company participated in its affairs as investors, advocates, Company leadership, and even settlers in the New World. It also altered the attitudes, and even occupations of the small English aristocracy to the extent they could participate in sectors apart from agriculture, including mining, and even overseas trade and discovery. Warfare, a mainstay, had been expanded to include privateering. 

Wool/cloth manufacturing startups also led to a more mobile population who either moved from serf agriculture into cities to became a proletariat, or creating former serfs into land owning yeomen/artisans. In short, England increased its population mobility and during these centuries a measured, for the most part urbanization followed. The exception to this as we shall later describe is London. Those who were unable to cope with displacement were often transformed into economic refugees who eventually resettled in slow growth, expanding urban areas that offered potential jobs, or whatever. From this we will hear assertions of “surplus population”, and from others a need for “Christian charity”, while London children will be rounded up and sent to Virginia as indentured servants.

Since the cloth industry-cluster usually was the magnet, this reshuffling of people supplemented the workforce needs of that cluster in a somewhat uneven and volatile manner fostered inadequate housing and unstable neighborhood in newly forming cities and regional centers. For our purposes this “underclass” proved to be a durable feature of English urbanization, and the settlement of large numbers of these souls in London and dense areas did affect the early permanent settlement of Virginia. We shall also discuss them later in this background module.

The enclosure movement promoted agricultural innovation which increased foodstuffs, and woolmaking, it also fostered English urbanization. That required and generated merchants who distributed foodstuffs, housewares, and personal needs, and another grouping, artisans, who produced and sold specialized and more complex products and services for which skills and training were appropriate and necessary to carry on the small businesses that resulted from these activities. Change also meant the development of an underclass, mostly urban, which was based on those who could not easily navigate through a medieval system in flux.

These “drivers” of English economic, social and political change constitute the main takeaways of the English enclosure movement’s impact on the Virginia Company. As to the direct effect of the movement on North American colonization, the reader can take note of Allan Greer’s “Commons and Enclosure in the Colonization of North America (American Historical Review, Vol. 117, No. 2, April, 2012) pp. 365-386. Whatever its good or bad intentions, the enclosure movement was incredibly disruptive, and over the several centuries it unleashed forces that undermined the traditional medieval economy as well as the class system on which it rested. 

I can identify the following drivers that impinged on the formation or operation of the future Virginia Company and its mission: formation of several proto classes such as land-owning freemen/gentry, artisans; a cloth-making labor force taking root in newly emerging population centers scattered through a good deal of eastern and northern England, many of which became towns, regional urban centers, and over time small cities; for several reasons most gravitated to London metro area, and the population of that capitol city mushroomed disproportionately.

These “drivers”, I repeat, are not caused by the enclosure movement, but are the result of the evolution of these drivers across centuries, none of which were foreordained or inevitable, but did in fact make their appearance into the time period of our history. The important take away is that England by the time of its pivot to global overseas commerce and colonization, was no static medieval polity, society, or economy. It was already beginning, if unannounced, its transition into what will be the early modern age. By 1550 it would have no less than one hundred years, more realistically one hundred and fifty years, to go before it crossed the line into a new age. That includes I might add, the English Civil War which the reader ought not forget still lies ahead.

Population Mobility, Urbanization, London as a “Mega City” and the rival Outer Ports

If one is going to make a case that population grown played an effect on England in the period leading to the 1606 design and incorporation of the Virginia Company which itself was affected by the post 1550 pivot to globalize England’s overseas trade, commerce, and colonization, one needs some back ground statistics. Not easy to do; England had no formal census until 1801. Testing out Google’s chat AI, it came up with the following–citing it was based on historical tax records:

In 1300 the population of England was estimated between 4.5 and 5.5 million. By 1350–at the height of the first onslaught of the black plague pandemic (post 1347) it was down to an estimated 3.75 million. A killing off of approaching half the population. By 1400, the low point was about 2.1 million. By 1500 after a century of stagnation, the population was about 2.2 million. Here’s were the dramatic change erupted: by 1550 the population is estimated at 4 million. By 1600 the estimation has a range between 4.1 and 5 million. Other estimates place the population as high as 5.5 million by 1650.

If so in the century and a half after 1500 more than three million increase from a population base of 2.2 million. There is no great immigration and so the increase is natural reproduction in the period when England sought to dramatically increase the scale of its overseas commerce in an effort to satisfy aggregate consumer demand, and to increase discretionary income as a means to augment investment in England’s infrastructure, its governmental needs, and to provide resources to compete effectively in a rising European mercantilist age.

There are a raft of explanations and publications that attempt, probably unsuccessfully, to explain the population explosion, but/ most importantly, no repudiation of the dramatic increase. Included in the chief reasons for the rise in population were an improvement in agricultural productivity and crop innovation (wheat, crop rotation, more use of fertilizers, a warmer temperatures, fewer plague episodes, new job opportunities mainly from cloth/wool-related manufacturing and sales, greater demand for products, especially food and personal care due to increased dependent urban populations, which led to mild increases in prosperity (with inevitable ebbs and flows), and that likely engendered better nutrition, rise in birth rates and lower mortality rates.

The concentrated time period, between 1500 and 1550, the time period under discussion in this module, alerts us to likelihood there were a lot of mobility, with new neighborhoods created in newly forming urban areas, entrepreneurial opportunities, and a prevalence of decent good times (not booms) interspersed with ebbs and temporary pullbacks. High hopes and a desperation abounded, and above all a sense that change was afoot, and the fear among some that traditions would be abandoned; such transitional periods as this was tend to foster strong religious movements–which hindsight confirms.

The numbers are probably smaller than we would suspect, but activists abound, and given the huge gap between elites and non elites, key decisions and policy made are made by a few elites clustered around major institutions, and well-placed decision-makers, who intermittently look over their shoulders at the new cities, neighborhoods, filled with new potentially volatile underclass. The tendency as we shall see is for the decision-making elites was to turn to government for support, at least approval, of their projects, or for sustenance by franchises, concessions and farming to grab what they could to maintain the quality of their life.

With the aristocracy itself in flux, and in search of security through change or resisting it, a rising gentry and merchant class, a new free holder yeoman asserting themselves on the manor and in agricultural areas, and the Church of England still at war with the dispossessed Catholic Church, and under pressure from a number of activist preachers, cults, and proto-sects, the parish and vestry politics and country and city governments themselves in transition, the reader should probably be willing to accept this is a period of change, not static or mired in old traditions. As I shall argue in the 1550’s the popular sense that overseas trade, commerce, following in the path paved by the Spanish, Portuguese, and the near competitor and ally, the Dutch offered the best chance of continuing growth while protecting England from their intrusions. Carole Shammas offers an excellent explanation as to why overseas trade and commerce was England’s best path:

The need to increase overseas trade as a partial solution to restive populations and economic disruptions was considered more and more desirable, if not necessary, by the elites of the kingdom. Given the gap between London and the Outer Ports, London’s mentality, for example, will see colonization as a means by which “surplus population” can be exported to new lands and the New World. Jamestown and Virginia would be drawn into this, as many of its prospective settlers will be urban economic refugees, or even children sent over from London jails. Bristol (and Plymouth), however, saw a colony as a means to garner imports, as well as a source of funds that helped sustain its ports and shipbuilding cluster. Perhaps, more than anything was the desire to tap into the London overseas trade nexus to their benefit.

 

Uneven Urbanization: London as a Mega City and Marginalization of Outer Ports

From the above data it is clear the continuing Enclosure Movement had moved into the background replaced by the Black Plague pandemic. The English population had been reduced by about half in the fifteenth century, and by the onset of the sixteenth, it was just beginning a rather dramatic rebound. 

At this point it is reasonable to assume the Enclosure Movement had prompted incremental restructure of England’s medieval agricultural manor-based economy, which kick-started some agricultural innovation and efficiencies, dispossessed serfs and led to yeoman free holder status for others. Artisans and the rise of the gentry to 1550 was pronounced, and, as Stone observes, aristocrats were in their own transition from medieval culture and system. Combined with turmoil within the English religious community, these changes suggest England’s class system was in transition from medieval to something else.

The key change-force we now move to is that the English were more mobile than they had been for centuries, and the population was shifting from the manor to denser centers that were becoming urban or existing cities and towns. This shift was by no means “balanced” in that population more or less evenly distributed itself across the country. Simply, put, in relative terms London, the capital city enjoyed rapid growth. The other urban centers, less so. This unbalance had noticeable, indeed serious impact, on the design, incorporation, and the operations of the 1605-6 Virginia Company. It also significantly impacted the course of events during the post-1550 pivot in English overseas commerce, trade and especially colonization.

London in 1500 had about 50,000 residents. (Estimates of its 1400 population, the low point in the Plague era was less than 50,000). By 1550 estimates were around 80,000 to 120,000. In 1600 London reached about 200,000, it doubled to 400,000 by 1650. This is the period around which this module focuses. These numbers include the larger metro areas (suburbs as well as central city). Population growth did not stop; in 1700 it grew to about 500,000 and 1750 reached 700,000, and the 1801 census recorded over one million. Ballpark figures or not, this is a serious increase in population that surely strained the resources of the government as well as provided some level of revenue support to offset it.

Such consistently rapid growth had negative consequences such as the realization that unequal distribution of wealth combined with large concentrations of poor and underclass created if nothing else the perception of volatility and the fostering of crime. Housing conditions were evident and the reality of mixed neighborhoods meant living conditions were likely very apparent to rich and poor alike. As always, employment was the preferred solution and this meant economic development as a policy occupied a high priority–linked as it was to public safety. Overseas trade and commerce as a job generator and and the best candidate to raise the standard of living by satisfying consumer demand.

What lay behind this new preoccupation with trade? … Certainly England’s growing demographic problems were creating an environment essentially favourable to some form of economic change. We know that in the sixteenth century English population accelerated its recovery from the low level at the end of the Black Death period, and probably passed the four million mark. ‘Enclosure’ and the new methods of agrarian organization made farming more efficient and market-oriented, but they also reduced the number of persons needed on the land. Unless the society could find profitable ways to utilize this superfluous manpower, per capita output would decline. Complaints about rogues and vagabonds, and the restless migration of people into and out of towns … testify to this unemployment and underemployment problem. [99] Carole Shammas, “English commercial development and American colonization”, in K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair, the Westward Enterprise: English activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480-1650 (Wayne State University Press, 1979, pp. 167-8

Only London could be ranked with the great continental cities. Its growth had outstripped even the doubling of [England’s] population. By the beginning of the seventeenth century it contained more than a quarter of a million people, and by the end nearly a half million, most of them poor migrants who had flocked to the capital in search of work or charity. London was the center of government, overseas trade and finance, and of fashion, taste and culture. It was ruled by a merchant oligarchy whose wealth increased tremendously over the course of the century as international trade expanded.

Other than London, however, the story was quite different. English urban demography by 1600 consisted of “About 800 small market towns of several hundred inhabitants … and in contrast to most of Western Europe, there were few large urban areas. Norwich and Bristol were the biggest provincial cities with populations around 15,000. Exeter, York, and Newcastle were important regional centers though they each had populations about 10,000 inhabitants. [England] … was predominantly rural, with as much as 85% of its people living on the lands [99] https://www.britannica.com/place/United-Kingdom/The-early-Stuarts-and-the-Commonwealth

Since Bristol is England’s third largest city of the period (York 2nd, Plymouth 4th)–and a major player in the Virginia Company story as was Plymouth– we can observe the huge gap that opened up in England’s post sixteenth century demographic. Bristol’s pre-Plague population in the mid-1300’s was between 15,000 and 20,000 people. Through the sixteenth century Bristol’s population was no higher than 10,000 to 12,000, with some estimates citing 9,500. By 1700 Bristol grew to about 20,000 recapturing its previous high mark; it grew to 64,000 in 1801 and today is about one-half million. Both Bristol and Plymouth are port cities, and their shared location in southwest England often meant they joined together in a common effort to enhance their position vis-à-vis London. 

Today, contemporary global economic development often contends with super-large, mega cities in the emerging world. These mega cities concentrate the poor and cannot easily rise above the never ending problems that beset them. National politics become consumed by mega city problems, as well as the mega city being a threat to national stability  and prone to anomic violence. Other regions cannot grab their share of growth and opportunity easily, and they too join in pressuring national bodies for their place in the sun. It appears that fifteenth and sixteenth century England also shared that problem. While London began its takeoff, it left behind the slower regional and outer port cities.

London’s left alone in its growth, created an unbalanced English economy with population movement winding up more often than not in London. 

…criticism of London’s position in the economy veiled an apprehension which was in the main, justified. The capital had come to condition many of the day-to-day workings of the [nation as a whole]. Quite apart from the far-flung influence of its demand for consumer goods, London as the fountain-head of privileges, the centre of government, the site of the principal law courts, the seat of the great trading companies, the crux of the land market, the main repository of trading capital, and the primary source of credit, was the inevitable controller of much economic activity in other parts of the land, and, as we shall see, the narrow bottleneck through which (to the chagrin of the provincial merchants) textiles produced in the remotest areas passed for shipment abroad [99] B. E. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England: A Study in the Instability of a Mercantile Economy (Cambridge University Press, 1964) p. 4

Moreover, as Robert Ashton suggests, residence in London offered access to the network of arrangements such as farming and patents which they as members of the business elite became interlocked with the crown, its priorities, factions and bureaucracies. As such Company elites “were more intimately associated with the crown and the court. These were magnates whose economic interests while resting on a firm foundation of commodity trade, split over into the exploitation of concessions on the periphery of government finance and economic policy … Many of the patents of monopoly of this period fall into this category; so, in a sense does the expedient of customs farming. Other concessions were the product of the crown’s shortage of income which forced it back on the expedient of rewarding its servants and those whom it delighted to honor by concessions in kind rather than by payments in cash–by such devices as patents, licenses, and custom farms. [99] Robert Ashton, the City and the Court, pp. 11-12

The key to this change was by 1600 population increase had gotten to the point it exposed an unanticipated consequence: the silent creation of new election districts in the Houses of Commons and Lords, most of which were outside of London.

In Henry VIII’s first parliament [Jan, 1510] there were 37 knights who sat in 37 shires (Lords) and 223 burgesses who represented the chartered boroughs and towns of the kingdom. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign [1603] borough representation [Commons] had increased by 135 seats. The Commons was replacing the Lords in importance because the social element it represented had become economically and politically more important than the nobility. Should the crown’s leadership falter, there existed by the end of the century an organization [Commons] quite capable of seizing the political initiative … Elizabeth has sense enough to avoid a showdown with the Commons and she retreated under parliamentary attack on the issue of her prerogative rights to grant monopolies regulating and licensing the economic life of the kingdom [99] https://www.britannica.com/place/United-Kingdom/The-clash-with-Spain

Consequences of London: the Mega City: As suggested earlier, English urbanization in this period led to unbalanced growth between the city of London, a growth that made it into a “mega” city of this age, and the regional and port cities of England. It must not be assumed that the latter did not grow at all; that would be a mistake, but the gap between the two was enormous and sustained. Their limited growth awakened a desire to improve their situation, and it also prompted  some ambition from its elites and merchant entrepreneurs who over time resented the treatment they got from London-based adventurers and the City’s aldermen as well. English historians know well this distinction and demographic change, urbanization in particular. As an economic developer, I know well the role in economic growth that can be played by activists from secondary metro areas and small and mid-sized cities. Given, however, the prominent role London would play in overseas trade and colonization, it is wise to start with London’s post enclosure rise.

During the last decades of Elizabeth’s reign after 1585, during the war with Spain, the composition, size, and configuration of Parliament evolved dramatically–as we outlined earlier. Elizabeth would feel its first efforts to shape policy—and pushback from royal dominance—centered on the monopolies, their effects on the economy, and the corrupt exercise of authority, and access by only very restricted elements of society. While there were several “third rails” of the Tudor-Stuart transition policy (religion was certainly one), but the one most salient to our topic remained “monopolies”. The “floating monopolies” (the great merchant trading companies) of overseas trade were as much a target as customs and farmers that had prospered under Elizabeth. The good ship Virginia Company, the last of these great wonders was destined to inherit the growing parliamentary and religious-based opposition. Jamestown and Virginia was going to be caught in the havoc it created.

Left in the background was that England was enjoying population growth at the same time as its enclosure movement was displacing former serfs from the manor and its fields. Economic refugees found their way to regional centers and thus England started to urbanize, and London exploded, to her discomfort. Gaps between the larger towns and regional cities, also undergoing a milder urbanization, prompted Elizabeth and her Crown government to delegate overseas trade and commerce to the rising gentry/aristocratic private sector.

Therein lies the origin of the public-private partnership nexus that was to be the Virginia Company and the other great merchant trading companies previously. That was ok enough, but shifts in population during this period led to shifts in power configuration in the Houses of Lords and Commons. Effects of this would be felt in the 1590’s, but in 1604 they exploded in Parliament especially. The Virginia Company, formed in 1605, really got caught up in this fight–never got out of it–and then lost the charter to manage Virginia in 1624.

The Economy in Transition: During this period the English economy was fragile and in transition. B. E. Supple alerts us to issues such as population concentration in London, the resulting marginalization of non-London outer port cities, and dependence on a one industry (wool) export economy. All were accurate but also interrelated. All exacted a serious effect on the pivot of post 1550’s English overseas trade  Contemporary global economic development has to contend with super-large, mega cities in the emerging world; it appears that fifteenth and sixteenth century England did also.

… criticism of London’s position in the economy veiled an apprehension which was in the main, justified. The capital had come to condition many of the day-to-day workings of the [nation as a whole]. Quite apart from the far-flung influence of its demand for consumer goods, London as the fountain-head of privileges, the centre of government, the site of the principal law courts, the seat of the great trading companies, the crux of the land market, the main repository of trading capital, and the primary source of credit, was the inevitable controller of much economic activity in other parts of the land, and, as we shall see, the narrow bottleneck through which (to the chagrin of the provincial merchants) textiles produced in the remotest areas passed for shipment abroad [99] B. E. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England: A Study in the Instability of a Mercantile Economy (Cambridge University Press, 1964) p. 4

Supple follows up with an assertion that London was growing far too fast and far too much as the place where business need be conducted. He lent credibility to the dilemma of the Outer Ports whose complaints “tell us much, although by no means all, concerning the economic relationships between the various local economies which comprised the England of the time” [99 , p. 4]. He also focused attention on the importance of wool as the mainstay of England’s export trade: “It is essential to go into slightly more detail concerning the manufacture of woolen textiles, for they occupied a unique position in the structure of English industry and trade [99, pp. 4-5]. That England as essentially was a one export economy (wool and cloth) had enormous repercussions not just economically, but importantly, politically prompt discussion on that topic:

B. E. Supple, a Cambridge professor of economic history, asserted London in the pivot years grew far too fast and set the standard for it being the place where business need be conducted. Sensitive to the complaints that were heard during that time from the outer ports and regional cities he lent credibility to the dilemma of the Outer Ports. Stating these complaints  “tell us much, although by no means all, concerning the economic relationships between the various local economies which comprised the England of the time” [99 , p. 4]. He also focused attention on the importance of wool as the mainstay of England’s export trade: “It is essential to go into slightly more detail concerning the manufacture of woolen textiles, for they occupied a unique position in the structure of English industry and trade [99, pp. 4-5].

Finally, if we link increase in population with urbanization, the wool trade London cluster created another dynamic: the unemployable poor, a restive urban population base when times were tough and a Dickensian like workforce in booms. That the functions of the capital, governance for example, overlapped with the restive population some form of economic development that could alleviate this was facilitated and was supported by the affluent in London. “Since cloth made up the bulk of exports, and since the industry was highly concentrated, in all cases of abrupt decline in overseas demand society was faced with the phenomenon of mass unemployment …[no one] could hope to absorb the idle labor resulting from a cessation of activity [p.6]. London and the nation’s chief decision-makers did not have to travel far to see consequences of poor economic growth.

 

 

In that London was garnering way more than its fair share of cloth merchants, manufacturers, and exporters he draws our attention to the role the one export overseas economy had on London’s development and the impact of its economic  growth on the other parts of England. Cloth/wool, in their manufacturing and export were vital to developing the wealth needed for investment in other industries, and the cloth/wool industry wealth, as we have discovered, were captured early in their growth by by the marriage of their merchant elites and the king, whose issuance of royal monopoly and privileges profoundly affected the economic power of London as the preferred site. One can understand the London adventurers accessed the resources of the Crown, but the latter also seriously benefited from the rising class of merchants and manufactures that resided or worked out of London. 

By the time of Henry VII, the late 1400’s, exporting wool merchants chartered (1496) a guild-like joint stock corporation and the King issued a monopoly patent to that entity’s members to trade to Antwerp—which Henry than secured by treaty with the Low Countries. The combination of guild-like membership, joint stock corporation of wool exporters that owned the infrastructure, ships, and factor relationships necessary to export were combined, and then secured a royal charter to a specified geography that limited competition, reduced risk, and provided legitimacy to the traders in their relationships abroad all became preconditions for future overseas trading ventures. That these were in place in the form of the Company of Adventurers before the sixteenth century reminds us of the slow growth of manufacturing in this period, and the continued dominance of agriculture in the economy. The macro picture is that England has begun its movement away from feudalism—only begun—but change and transformation will go hand in hand and will pick up momentum incrementally, slowly may be a better word.

In the beginning raw wool was exported, than cloth produced at home was exported. Bristol, and of course, London entrepreneurs sent it to the continent, and over a few decades. Wool and cloth exports developed into an industry cluster that included factories, ports, and ships—and close relationships with continental merchants and agents (factors). Landowners responded by enclosing more pasture land, and raising more sheep until sheep outnumbered English by three-to-one.

Cloth export, primarily a one way export only concentrated in ports such as Antwerp, the primary entrance point, and over time a European agent-factor nexus developed that allowed London and eastern-sited cloth merchants to develop and sustain an advantage in cloth trade that other English regions could not penetrate. 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. During the fifteenth century, the focus of the Company of Adventurers was abroad; that’s where its offices were and the continent and its ups and downs, conflicts and opportunities, captured the interest of these merchant adventurers.

Cloth industry became more concentrated as it matured, raising the cost of entry so over a few generations only a few merchant owners dominated overseas wool export and the Company of Merchant Associates-Adventurers that held the royal monopoly itself developed into an oligopoly of its own. The propensity to concentrate cloth manufacturing and export on the eastern side, along the English channel, was pronounced, and it facilitated a Company of Adventurers transformation in a London-based industry nexus, ‘Merchant adventurers’ who risked themselves and their money to find new commercial markets in Europe had emerged in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in commercial cities across England. Exeter had one, as did Newcastle, Hull, Chester and York. Bristol’s Merchant Ventures which dated back centuries, had recently received its first charter of in corporation from King Edward VII in 1552 [99] Phillip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated, p. 10

Overseas merchants, among others, routinely organized themselves into guilds and companies to maintain and control access to the special techniques and knowledge, or ‘mysteries’ of their trades. Many only later sought out royal grants to allow them further immunities of self-government, relief from certain taxes, and most importantly, unimpeded rights to travel from and reside beyond the realm … [99] Phillip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated, p. 10

Outer Ports (non-London) considerably smaller in population and port infrastructure entered into cloth export but encountered heavy discrimination from the larger London cloth manufactures and Company members. With Company-created headwinds for cloth export, these Outer Ports took advantage of their western and southern locations, and developed overseas pursuits favorable to their non-continental geography. They developed their own infrastructure and their own versions of a maritime and overseas elite, infrastructure, and tradition. Hence, during the fifteenth century they oriented their overseas trade differently than the London-based Company of Merchant Adventurers. For reasons including local economic development, they got caught up in England’s perpetual conquest of Ireland, and started developing Irish plantations. As the century played out they turned their attention more to discovery and exploration of new lands, privateering against the Spanish, and later colonization.

The focus on Ireland consumed a good deal of their enthusiasm for overseas involvement. At a time when London was creating regulated joint stock corporations, which we shall describe shortly,  with charter-derived monopolies over geographic areas of the globe, the Outer Ports were harnessed to the invasion of Ireland and the conquest of land they converted into an English plantation-manor. Hence, the reader might keep in mind a sort of bimodal overseas English overseas trade path and their own form of policy-making. This will become not only relevant to understanding the Virginia Company and Virginia’s colonization, but will lend considerable light to the implosion of the Virginia Company that led to its suspension of the Virginia charter.

 

But the real kicker in the London-based merchant joint stock trading companies that opened up overseas trade like no one else could, was that they parked their ships in London’s ports and along the Thames, and were poorly insulated from the political changes that underlay the instability of the time. These great merchant traders, along with their lucrative profits, were “monopolies on water”, pretty to look at as they sailed by, but very hard to get a cut in the action because of their  closed oligarchic shareholding organization.

In Henry VIII’s first parliament [Jan, 1510] there were 37 knights who sat is 37 shires (Lords) and 223 burgesses who represented the chartered boroughs and towns of the kingdom. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign [1603] borough representation [Commons] had increased by 135 seats. The Commons was replacing the Lords in importance because the social element it represented had become economically and politically more important than the nobility. Should the crown’s leadership falter, there existed by the end of the century an organization quite capable of seizing the political initiative … Elizabeth has sense enough to avoid a showdown with the Commons and she retreated under parliamentary attack on the issue of her prerogative rights to grant monopolies regulating and licensing the economic life of the kingdom [99] https://www.britannica.com/place/United-Kingdom/The-clash-with-Spain

As time moved on an increasingly more powerful Parliament. facilitated a power shift towards parliament during the transition from Tudor to Stuart that followed from Elizabeth’s 1603 death. During the last decades of her reign, during the war with Spain, the composition, size, and configuration of that political institution evolved dramatically. Elizabeth would feel its first efforts to shape policy—and that pushback from royal dominance centered in large measure on the monopolies, their effects on the economy, and the corrupt exercise of authority and access by  very restricted elements of society. It would be the Scot James I that would have to deal with it in full flush in 1604—and that didn’t work out well for him. While there were several “third rails” of policy that poked parliament (the half-sleeping bear of policy-making, religion was certainly one) but the one most salient to our topic was “monopolies”. [999]

 

the Cloth/Wool Cluster; one-Export Overseas Trade; Monopolies, Charters and the Joint stock corporation; and the Swamp that functioned as Elizabeth’s Policy-Making System

So far we have discussed the macro “background factors” that lay in the shadows of the period from which the Virginia Company would emerge–and reflect. These background factors were edging England into a slow-moving but no doubt felt, into a transition into something that concerned the players but which aside from fears and worries likely could not identify. Chasten by memories of the Black Death, and fearful that unless they took action England would be left behind in a new competitive and war-prone mercantilist world. Historians are tempted, I know I am, to hint England was entering into a very early modern world–but the future English civil war makes that a very premature assertion. Still a transition is a transition and England in the post-1550’s knew times were a changing.

From the 1550’s to 1605 England engaged in a series of overseas initiatives that prepared the way for the 1606 Virginia Company’s launch of colonies in English North America. The lessons and experience gleaned from these initiatives constituted the great bulk of the knowledge and skillset which the elites that launched and sailed on the took with them over the Atlantic. I argue, probably far too repetitively, that they needed more;

England was still not prepared to start colonies across the Atlantic. Ireland was one thing, at least it was close, its past and inhabitants were known, its value to England appreciated. Virginia and New England were unknown except for coastal explorations. The hubris that infused these English elites, infested is a better word, was a characteristic of that age and elites that participated in colonizing during that period used it as a filter to remove caution and inject a can-do ambition that exceeded the technology of the period and the depreciated reality they would encounter in the North American wildernesses. 

A large part of the hubris was tied to the relative success in overseas commerce that England enjoyed during the post 1550 years, and the lack of thought and planning that they put into colonization, thinking instead their commerce experience would carry over to colony-making. Religious fundamentalism, so prevalent in these years, did not help either, as it motivated many to throw themselves into missionary work among the Natives they found. The Hakluyts, today a foundational source for what the English thought about Virginia colonization, represent this tradition, and their naivete, combined with inexperience and hubris of the post-1550 England thrust English adventurer elites into the activism that fabricated the Virginia Company.

The above section title includes the next layer of factors that drove the design and implementation of the Virginia Company and its mission. These factor-drivers are so interwoven  they defy description, and cannot be easily pulled apart for discussion. The wool/cloth cluster and the one-export economy will be discussed first because they infused the decision-making of much of England’s overseas-relevant elite that had immediate access to the Crown and its policy system. What the reader should look for in the below narrative is that despite its command over society, Crown support, the overall English economy and society, its policy making systems were seriously flawed; able to adopt policy choices but unable and largely unwilling to implement these choices without deferring to a series of overlapping bureaucracies, the development of a medieval city-town-county system of local governments to which much jurisdiction over policy was given to make and implement, powerful near autonomous dynastic families, an emerging group of twelve guilds that dominated the viable English workforce, and an ascendant, first advantage modern sector, the wool/cloth industry whose leadership was quick to develop its own overlapping hierarchies and interweave them throughout London institutions, and then to construct and mobile England’s first great merchant trading company, the Company of Merchant Adventurers. That Company constructed and then “sat on” a one-export, virtually no import overseas commerce, and then “sat on it” even thought that overseas economy did little for England, but on the other hand generated considerable personal wealth and status for them.

What we describe is a aristocrat-merchant-gentry configured Crown and City of London policy system that made and implemented kingdom-relevant decision-making, pushing other regions and urban centers off to the margins. You may be amazed to learn the discovery of America fell mostly to the latter while the London elites headed to the Far East (China, Japan) or the East Indies (India, Southeast Asia). England from the start of its pivot to global overseas commerce, exploration and colonization had not developed a consistent unified approach–and would not until after the English Civil War.

In the period with which we are concerned, the Crown, either Tudor or Stuart, did not fully commit to overseas commerce, trade or colonization but instead turned over its direction to delegated leadership of those aristocratic, merchant, and gentry “adventurers, and their great merchant trading companies. What may amaze the reader is the “system of governance” that followed was a fragmented, semi-autonomous crafted along government functions, Crown priorities, and operations central to the English economy converted into what we might call “franchises”, but they called “concessions”, “monopolies”, “licenses”, “patents’, which in aggregate have come to be known as “farming”. I turn to Professor Robert Ashton to outline the rationale and “players” in that transitional-medieval English policy system that dominated early English colonization of North America–see how poorly this fits into the way Americans tend of thinking about English governance in that period!

There were … members of the business elite whose fortunes were … intimately associated with the crown and the court. These were magnates whose economic interests, while resting on a firm foundation of commodity (specific products) trade, split over into the exploitation of [government] concessions on the periphery of government finance and economic policy. Some of these concessions arose out of the familiar conjuncture  of circumstances whereby a government with an ambitious programme of economic and social controls lacked an administrative machinery to make that program effective and filled that vacuum by using private enterprise. Many of the patents of monopoly of the period [for example the great merchant trading companies] fall into this category; so, in a sense, does the expedient of customs farming. Other patents were the product of the crown’s shortage of income which forced it back on the expedient of rewarding its servants [i.e. cutting a deal with loyal supporters] and those whom it delighted to honour by concessions in kind rather than payments in cash–by such devices as patents, licences and customs farms. The courtly recipients of these privileges had in turn to call upon the aid of the business world to put their concessions to profitable use. …

Parliament met relatively infrequently and occasions might often demand a relaxation of statutes [laws] in the interests of the economic welfare of the nation. An impecunious government can perhaps hardly be blamed if it also saw in the licensing system a means whereby it might kill the economic and fiscal birds with the same stone, since it was often convenient to give concessions direct to those who had claim upon its bounty [i.e. had legitimate contracts for services or products], and thus save disbursements from the exchequer [the Treasury, for Americans]. [99] Robert Ashton, the City and the court, 1603-1643 (Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 17-18

The great merchant trading companies were but one institution (the one that dominated overseas commerce and trade) in this policy-making and implementation nexus. American commentary often does little to fit royal rule over the colony into this less than tyrannical or dictatorial policy context, and it often simply describes the Virginia Company as a “business” controlled by profiting investors, or simply as “private” (as a contemporary reader would understand the meaning), but the Virginia Company, the first great merchant trading company tasked with colonization, was much more complicated than that. How and why it did what it did in Jamestown–or Sagadahoc) does not fit into our conventional contemporary sense of business or private institutions. Understanding that larger medieval context is necessary to understand why I assert that Virginia’s inheritance of the Virginia Company, a Company that was not ready or sufficient to conduct a successful colonization, was not “ready for prime time”–and its failure shaped Virginia’s political and economic development to this very day.

Indeed the Company was intended to be English North America, attempt to square its sixteenth century version of a public-private partnership circle by providing each a subsidiary for London and one for the “Outer Ports” to do its thing in North America. Neither subsidiary was well-prepared, both essentially failed, but the Londoners, who poorly understood what they were doing–or not doing–, achieved what amounted to an existential survival that entitled them to a “redo”, i.e. make at some point another effort. They were able to go on and found the first successful English colony in North America.

That is the heritage that Virginia acquired and used to conduct its path to American statehood. New England, on the other hand restructured and owing more to the evolutionary path of English protestants uncomfortable with the Stuarts and their view of the Anglican Church, were able to plan and settle a colony with more grit, sternness, community and flexibility under their own leadership, with minimal subservience to a Crown in its last days.

Still, left largely to its own devices, a few hardy, if sometimes brutal and certainly self-serving Company employees and free holder settlers carved out a Virginia colony created from the memory of an England they once knew, based on manors, a dependent and largely controlled workforce located in areas left by or taken from the native inhabitants–with which relations were volatile and also brutal. The economy they fell into was also a one export overseas commerce, tobacco being that export, an export that fit more or less into the expectations of the Mother Country. 

 

Company of Merchant Adventurers Create England’s One Export Overseas Economy: Why is this topic included in this background? It certainly appears to be a wander into the weeds–and for many it might be. The reason is that England developed a strong and vibrant cloth/wool cluster out of the enclosure period, and it survived the horrors of the Plague. It rose rapidly in the back half of the fifteenth century (late 1400’s) with the ascendancy of  Tudor Henry VII. Taking advantage of the rise of England’s guild system, and the protections of England’s new system of local government.

Using municipal corporations and institutions like the City Guild Merchant, livery and craft guilds strengthened powers of membership and workforce skill training which combined with Tudor willingness to decentralize England’s policy implementation exerted considerable impact on England’s economy and prosperity-growth. The rise of livery guilds, with membership based on larger merchants and distributors led to accumulated of wealth by a very few, and the perpetuation of that wealth by developing family dynasties that controlled the companies through generational succession.

Succinctly, cloth/wool companies and guild membership amassed great wealth and stability which they levered to access Crown/sovereign support. These cloth merchants and manufacturers entered into the City of London’s administrative and elective positions thereby achieving great power and impact over the City’s governance. By this point, the cloth/wool manufacturing and merchant cluster had turned itself into England’s chief, and for all practical purposes, only non agricultural-land ownership force in the English economy.

In 1496, a few of the larger more wealthy and powerful wool/cloth magnates joined together to establish a joint stock corporation formed explicitly to build upon an already evident exporting to their products to Antwerp (Holland) for finishing manufacturing and export to northern Europe. By the time of Henry VII, (1496) exporting wool merchants, operating out of a guild-like joint stock corporation, we shall call for convenience “the Company of Merchant Adventurers” had established a significant institution that effectively oversaw what constituted England’s overseas trade and commerce. With the monopoly granted to them from Henry VII , the Company secured a trade monopoly to northern Europe, with Antwerp, as its headquarters. Henry further secured the monopoly’s position through treaty with the Low Countries. We shall return to this later, but the Company of Merchant Adventurers was England’s first great merchant trading company.

In essence, this export was one-way, i.e. no imports of note in the return trip meant no new products entered England, and England’s commercial trade consisted only one product exporting. Only raw cloth/wool was exported; offshore European companies and their guilds refined and produced the finished product for sale in northern Europe. This one-way export of raw cloth/wool products deadheaded the sector, leaving the innovative and most profitable refinement to the foreign Antwerp resident companies, which the English companies ownership secured their personal stake or worked out a trade relationship which they could personally benefit.

But little to none of this spilled over to non members of the trading company. Other non Company English companies could not legally participate in this trade on the continent, nor could they–and their workers–benefit from any profits from it. To the extent cloth/wool export to Europe generated profits, they were not available to other English companies to use for trade of non-cloth products. English Innovation and multi-product import or export to most other markets was stifled, and were further inhibited by foreign traders. The realities of the Company of Merchant Adventurers monopoly of northern European trade translated into an unplanned, almost insurmountable, unconcerned and unmotivated behemoth that was of no use to the expansion of English commercial trade to other countries and regional markets.

As this wool/cloth cluster transformed into a semi-modern industry sector, the number of competing cloth/wool companies who were not original members of the Company sought membership, but found the approval of the Company’s elite very difficult to obtain. This was because the Company membership realized that this pressure would dilute their share of the profits and opportunities of trading in Europe. That was unacceptable and permitted by the terms of the royal charter the directing oligarchy of the Company of Merchant Adventurers centralized its corporate organizational structure by wielding their considerable power, influence and position over its membership. and creating in its wake mini hierarchies that flowed from  its board of directors into powerful committees, themselves dominated the Company’s executive committee composed of a few family dynasties that constituted its top leadership.

In essence the Company’s corporate organization resembled Russian Matryoshka nesting dolls, with each doll an autonomous grouping of its membership that in its way working through the executive committee acquired a measure of influence and protection of interests.

The development of an internal hierarchy based on wealth, industry scale, status and individual activism fostered an oligarchy whose ambitions and desire to maintain and increase their position and wealth by not only dominating their guild, but extending its influence into the larger English economy and polity. Insulated by its charter and the trade monopoly granted to it, the Company was able to assume great autonomy from Crown day-to-day authority; indeed, most headquarters function was lodged in Antwerp, and a number of its prominent players resident there as well.

With the start of sixteenth century and the transition of the Tudor dynasty to the early Stuarts, the elites of the cloth industry occupied through its relevant guilds considerable power over London economy, society, and its economic life. A second autonomous overlapping layer of elites that controlled its exports through the great trading company, the Company of Merchant Adventurers, that operated and serviced their continental trade to Europe.  In 1505, Henry VII further awarded the latter yet another new and “improved” charter that enhanced their export monopoly. and solidified the the company’s governing oligarchy, making it nearly impregnable to attack from its members-shareholders.

Other London guilds merged to acquire scale that could exert economic power of its members across the English economy. In 1508 the Shearmen’s Company obtained from the king (Henry VII) a charter that included a variety of privileges for the industry and its members, and the guild was awarded a monopoly over the industry. Far from a precedent the impact of the cloth/wool nexus was so remarkable that the cloth/wool nexus became the standard for both guilds and later trading companies. To be sure other of the twelve chief livery/craft guilds expanded their corporate structures, developed their own memberships, oligarchies and hierarchies, leaving a great deal of England’s economy under the sway of self-operating guilds, whose elites and membership companies also enjoyed their measure of insulation from the Crown. 

The Company, called the Company of Merchant Adventurers, was the first of England’s great merchant trading companies. That model set in place the pattern that other groups of companies would use in the great post-1550 pivot to overseas trade and commerce. In 1606 this model, as adapted and evolved, would be used to incorporate the Virginia Company.

The Impact of Cloth/Wool Guild and Company Behemoth

That enhanced position necessarily benefited these few elites, whose chief motivation was to increase their own wealth and status. During this period, they acquired powers from the sovereign that allowed them to dominate guilds and the companies they operated. Hindsight suggests their world view narrowed to the affairs of their own companies and the cloth/wool sector, losing along the way a sense of how their dominance set the parameters of the English economy, did little to inspire innovation or entrepreneurship, or to satisfy the various needs and demands of an expanding and increasingly urbanized population.

[999]At the same time, the early, 1500’s. these cloth/wool companies had located around England’s key port cities, but above all London whose cloth/wood section dominated not only the metropolitan economic base, but whose ebbs and flows resulted in an volatile and potentially disruptive workforce that produced some disruptive and disturbing situations such as the “Evil May Day of1517” when thousands of City residents rose up against foreign workers and residents pillaging their homes and hanging a number who they felt were stealing crust from their mouths and jobs from their families.[999]

The realization that badly distributed prosperity and an economy that was not producing sufficient number of jobs, and the lack of products other than cloth and wool related were not supportive of an economy that could meet the demands of a competitive mercantilist Europe, that was especially prone to war and colonial empires. While these weaving-cloth/wool related guilds-companies prospered and stepped ahead of guilds in other sectors, they were able to access to Crown support and thus stepped up their use of a policy-making system that brought each, Crown and private elites, mutual benefit–albeit at a cost of mutual bickering and ebbs and flows with events and economic downturns. By the Elizabethan era, these guilds and their cloth & wool companies increased employment and gained scale, and accordingly generated considerable wealth to their owners.

For our purpose, a ready market and workforce developed to the benefit of the wool and cloth cluster which having “first advantage’ for capital and workers spread to the larger urban areas, producing in its wake sizeable companies and the beginnings of dynastic families who became important economic leaders, that carved for themselves advantages from and for their guilds, and privileges for themselves from the towns and cities in which they were located. This was a period in which urban/town incorporations and government filled in the political-economic vacuum of urban geographies taken over by William the Conqueror in 1066 [999]. 

[999] Cloth-making existed ages and eons before the enclosure movement, and it gained early access into the English guild system as it took form following the Conquest. Among the very first to achieve a guild charter, not only in London, but also in many regional centers as well, Unwin observes “… the weavers secured at an early date by the open grant of charter. Like the bakers they gained the privilege of farming their own taxes. But they secured it much earlier (before 1130) and continued to hold tit till Tudor times. The position of the weavers amongst London trades was in this respect unique, but in the 12th century there were gilds of weavers enjoying similar privileges at Lincoln, Oxford, York, Winchester, Huntington and Nottingham … [and] Winchester.

A century later many of these gilds are found to be engaged in a struggle with a newly constituted municipal authorities who refuse them the rights of freemen… The weavers of London gained their first charter from Henry I at about the same time as the city received its charter… Now the effect of the charter granted to the weavers was to place them effectively on a level … with the barons and religious houses that possessed “sokes” in London. The grant of a gild gave them a private jurisdiction, a soke, a collective leadership over their trade”. [99] George Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London (Frank Cass & Company, 1632, Fourth Edition), pp. 43-45

As Unwin further states “The first weavers were not mere craftsmen. Their ability to purchase a charter, the amount of their farm, which was twice that of the bakers and their possession of a court of merchant law, all point to their having a body of well-to-do traders amongst them [However] During the 12th century, a body of influential citizens who were interested in the cloth trade and had an unchartered gild of their own“–attempted to buy out the weaver charter and were successful. While the old guild would fight back, it is clear there was money in cloth making and intense competition to enter the profession. [99] Unwin, pp. 45-6. Unwin’s observation is an important one for understanding the emerging dominance of England’s cloth/wool makers. Their guild was not simply composed of craftsmen who spun cloth/wool product, but merchants that traded it.[999]

[9999]Cloth/wool related guilds were widespread, but more to the point, their wealth generation was pronounced and that fostered lots of merchants and businesses that wanted to be in on the action and were anxious to prevent other wool competitors from completing the standard process of seeking a royal charter and monopoly without serious pushback from others who wanted it as well. To say it another way, the guilds and the wealthy oligarchs that served in their governance were highly motivated to keep their guild pure of “mere Merchants” for a number of reasons, but foremost was to protect their own positions and wealth generating companies.

As this wool/cloth cluster transformed into a semi-modern industry sector its number, scale and complexity led the directing oligarchy of the Company of Merchant Adventurers to centralize in its corporate organizational structure thus wielding considerable power over its membership creating in its wake mini hierarchies that flowed from  its board into committees, all in its way dominated by its executive committee composed of a few family dynasties that constituted its top leadership. The development of an internal hierarchy based on wealth, industry scale, status and individual activism fostered an oligarchy whose ambitions and desire to maintain and increase their position and wealth by not only dominating their guild, but extending its influence into the larger English economy and polity. 

By no means inclined to “democratic-style decision-making” these merchants turned their companies into larger producers of wool and cloth and jealously pursued ambitions that almost inevitably led them to concentrate around and in England’s larger ports, London of course being the foremost. To be sure the enclosure  movement opened up the craft and fed into its manufacture. generating wealth, providing a steady workforce, as its size and scale wealth generator. Bristol and other outer ports, inland regional centers, as well as London morphed into small wool/cloth centers, but again London was the center.[9999]

 

[999] Guilds by the late fifteenth century had reached a point that the organization had encountered serious obstacles such as foreign (Dutch and Flemish apparently the most aggressive) businesses establishing a presence in England and setting up businesses usually in London “suburbs” outside the city limits, attracting workers and apprentices and setting them up in sweat shops joining guilds, and competing with domestic businesses without fear of London guilds or city regulation. The havoc and social discontent this created directly caused a large and particularly violent “xenophobic riot”, accusing foreign workers of stealing jobs and eating our bread”, looting foreign houses hanging many, on Evil May Day 1517 (p. 247).  By the 1520’s the guilds were able to mobilize support and through Parliament in 1524, and in 1528 ruling by the Star Chamber came to grips with “alien” workers and business. 

The aliens were not all industrialists, nor did they all settle permanently in London. Many were merchants engaged in importing a great variety of manufactured goods which were still better made on the continent than in England, or in exporting English cloth in a half-manufactured state so that it might be dyed and finished to the taste of the foreign consumer. Whether therefore as importers or exporters they were popularly regarded as taking the bread out of the mouth of English craftsmen 

… The real evil for which the innocent alien was made the scapegoat was one for which an adequate remedy cannot even yet be said to have been found–that massing of unorganized labour which is popularly known as the ‘sweating system’… The true remedy was to extend their [the guilds’] powers beyond the boundaries of the city so as to place the regulation of aliens in their hands.  [pp. 248-9][999]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whatever the goals, promoting or joining a joint stock [corporation] in early modern Europe was as much a form of ‘civil self-presentation’ [keeping up with the Joneses] as a financial choice, where a shareholder was understood not just as an investor but also an undertaker [believe it or not, that was the term attributed to those that developed plantations, often overseas], and an adventurer [an occupational term applied to those in overseas trade/commerce] in a society association, fellowship, brotherhood, and–in the sense, the term applied to any group of people, from friends to soldiers, come together for some reason–company. In an medieval guild dominated economy was in reality a “closed and tightly regulated world, which valued expertise enforced by elaborate rules and norms and centuries-old commercial and social associations like the guilds and livery companies … though it would be centuries before shareholders would be thought of as owners, even at these early stages they often took some part in deciding how a company was run, or at least in selecting some among their number to do so on their behalf” [99]Phillip J. Stone, Empire Incorporated, pp. 3-4

 In 1528 the Clothworkers Guild combined the Shearmen,  Fullers, and Weavers–the industry had not only organized itself, but had secured its autonomy from other guilds creating in the process a relationship of power and access into crown politics and a relationship with the king.

While guilds could be either craft, with apprentices and quality standards, other guilds called livery gilds were composed mostly of merchants who developed working relationships with the larger urban corporations, i.e. early English city government. They also took actions to institutionalized their export to northern Europe by incorporating a wool and cloth exporting company to manage their holdings and protect their interests. Key to this was their use of this new company to inhibit competition that threatened their profits and wealth. In what had now become the path to autonomy and power, the exporters formed themselves into what became England’s first merchant trading company: the Company of Merchant Adventurers of London.

Almost simultaneously these powerful large cloth merchant adventurers got themselves elected to London political offices, eventually assuming dominance over not only England’s cloth/wool industry, but the politics and electoral offices of London. Their dominance over wool/cloth export led them into an alliance with the Crown that resulted in an export trading monopoly from the Crown. The linkage of an export trading monopoly for northern continental Europe with a clothing worker guild itself with monopolistic-like control over the occupations of and the manufacture of the products, underscores a institutional practice that developed in England during the age of the Plantagenets (12th century), and by the time of our post 1550 overseas trade and commerce pivot, were deeply embedded, quite legitimate, expected and aspired to.

That this internal centralization of authority would not only reflect wealth and social status, but also correspond to the “art of a deal” that would characterize guilds, as well as joint stock corporations and their membership, should not be a surprise. An oligarchy of families, wool and cloth dynasties of family and wealth, were virtually destined to settle over the Company of Merchant Adventurers–indeed, all in place by the last years of Elizabeth–meant this nexus constituted the political establishment of any export and overseas trading policy-making. 

Occurring in two expansionary bursts, between the 1480’s and 1510, and the 1530’s to 1550 cloth export by the first decade of the seventeenth century (1600-1610) were three quarters of England’s total exports, of which three quarters went to Germany and the Low Countries.  Brenner estimates the guild-like Company of Merchant Adventurers controlled 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.

 It was in the Jacobean period that a considerable money market developed in connection with government borrowing, with syndicates for custom farms [private individuals who purchased from the king a monopoly for tax collection to almost anything else] and sales of crown lands, with increased use of mortgages by landowners as a normal means of creating cash flow, and [prompting] commercial expansion generally” [99] K. R. Andrews, p. 361 

At the point when growth in the cloth trade stagnated during the decade of the 1550’s the impulse of those desiring to trade in untouched markets directly affected the course of overseas trade and foreign commerce. New Adventurers were drawn to action. While not abandoning their memberships or relations with the powerful Merchant Adventurers, they modified her structure and incorporated the first of the major “regulated” joint stock trading companies that would be formed during this the second half of the sixteenth century.

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. 21-3.

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 [the Muscovy or Russia Company], 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.

[999] The first major English joint stock corporation, the Company of Merchant Adventurers was actually the launching pad for a succession of both unregulated and regulated joint stock corporations that occurred after 1553. The true role of the Company of Adventurers is to also understand that its leadership saturated the policy making and the elective position of the City of London.

 Members of the Company held the city’s key offices, its Lord mayor and the Aldermanic City Council, and by the 1550’s passed them on to their progeny: Customer Smythe held key positions, as did his son, Thomas who in his day was Sheriff, not of Nottingham, but London. Both sat on London’s governance council. Both were directly allied to the sovereign of the time, ensuring the sovereign held sway over the capital city—the center for foreign trade. In this way, London merchants had access to royal policy and policy-making—and to the sovereign.

But more to the point, the enthusiasm and experience of the London merchant community to overseas trade, and colonization was limited to a few, of its membership. Even if high-placed such as Thomas Smythe, that leadership consumed itself trying to sail very leaky boats, i.e. the joint stock corporations they managed required heavy baggage relationships with the larger community, and much time would be spent patching up majorities, bailing out of problems caused by a chronic under investment, and failure to fulfill their membership and stock subscription commitments.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the Importance of the Post 1550 Pivot in English Overseas Commerce and Colonization

The relative success of that pivot encouraged England’s overseas community to press the Crown into establishing a North American permanent settlement as a first step in achieving her Far East commercial ambitions, along with defending itself against its mercantilist European competitors. After a period of weak, disruption-prone and unstable governance after the death of Henry VIII (1547), England in 1558 commenced what was its fourth successor sovereign, Elizabeth I.

By that time it was fairly evident England was off to a late start in the mercantilist age, and its economy was not sufficiently productive to provide her with sufficient investment capital and sustainable economic prosperity to overcome the multiple gaps between her and her other competitors. Enhanced overseas trade and commerce was the key to resolving both and over the next fifty or so years, most of which under Elizabeth England developed the confidence, skills and capacity that she perceived herself ready to take the next step, permanent overseas trading posts and colonies as the prelude to a hoped for empire.

From my perspective at least, that last step was premature: England was not yet ready of prime time. Most importantly, as early as the first decade of the seventeenth century, during the transition from the Tudor to the Stuart dynasty that a fragmentism in its political, religious, social and economic fundamentals fabric was deepening, and that a “drift to a potential civil war” overlay its efforts to catch up and create an economy capable to resolving its liquidity and resource inadequacies. While there was a consensus on these as goals, there was much less agreement on who would benefit, and the process by which it would be implemented.

If one has to start somewhere to retell the transformational start to serious English overseas trade, it begins with the Company of Merchant Adventurers. The Company was certainly the platform from which serious overseas trade commenced in the 1550’s. It also dominated policy-making relevant to such trade, and its success was a model for those who wanted to head off in new directions—after all a good many of the new adventurers were members of the Company, and did not surrender their membership after the commenced their new trading companies.

 Certainly, the power of the Company in regards to impact on the governance of London, and its relationship with the sovereign persisted into the early Stuart years and affected the period during which the Virginia Company managed Virginia helps us understand that Virginia was not the cutting edge of English colonial and commercial trading in the Stuart years. That was Virginia’s fate: it was not foremost in the minds of English policy-makers, but neither was it out of the ball park. Support, perhaps enthusiasm is a better word for North American settlement during the pre-civil war years ebbed and flowed. During these years the Company of Merchant Adventurers occupied front page headlines and more parliamentary interest as the Cockayne Affair did between 1614 and 1624

There are multiple ways and reasons that explain why countries and kingdoms developed  on some scale overseas trade. England’s took a path that resulted in its distinctive incremental evolution of a more comprehensive overseas trade: one  factor was enclosure wool/cloth exceeded local needs and its manufacturers took advantage of  Low Countries and export to them. To facilitate export, the early Company of Adventurers took form.

England in the 1550’s was facing a crisis, which in hindsight was its ability to rise to challenges of making it through the first phase of modernity. English historians recognize this; permit me to cite one of its noted historians of that period, Lawrence Stone, who provide us with an introductory, well-articulated assessment of what the post 1550 crisis entailed:” … whatever the strength of the pressures for change … a situation … which faced [England’s] aristocracy at this period … may reasonably be described as a crisis. …  It is nevertheless between 1560 and 1640 that the real watershed between medieval and modern England must be placed. [99] Lawrence Stone, the Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1158-1641 (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 12

After outline a succession of internal changes that occurred in this period, Stone finishes up by asserting that “foreign trade developed sufficiently to begin to preoccupy the minds of statesmen, and to make a London alderman the financial equal of a baron; then that usury was first opening legislated for, that interest rates fell to modern levels, that the joint stock company began to flourish, that colonies of Englishmen were established across the seas, that England abandoned its territorial ambitions in Europe and dimly recognized its future as a naval power; then that capitalist ethics, population growth, and that monetary inflation undermined old landlord -tenant relationships…. It was to this changing, challenging world that the peers had to adapt themselves between the accession of Queen Elizabeth and the outbreak of civil war. Their failure helped to open up the way to the political upheavals of the seventeenth century …

it offers a new explanation of the central event of modern English history–the breakdown of monarchical and aristocratic government in 1640 [the onset of the English civil war], and its reestablishment in 1660 (Restoration), and 1688 [the Glorious Revolution] [99] Lawrence Stone, the Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1158-1641 (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 13

“That foreign trade [be] developed sufficiently”

Stone makes clear England at the time it decided to expand foreign trade (1550’s) was confronting a near existential crisis of modernity and entering a period of fundamental and disruptive change which was “the central event in modern English history”. My first chapter details the benchmark great merchant adventurer trading companies that preceded the Virginia Company in a period of transition from medieval to modern England.  This background chapter culls out key drivers and factors that are important to understanding how and why England developed these trading companies and in so doing makes the case that England’s macro politics and demographic ought be factored in to explain why England was not ready for prime time colonization in 1606.

There are at least two questions that follow from this statement. First, it is hard to believe that England is only entering into serious global trade as late as 1550. For me that is understandable in that an appreciation of European history after the fall of Rome, a thousand years past, reveals that European breakout relative to global competitors is only occurring in the late 15th century; Spain, Portugal, and Holland (within the Hapsburg Empire) seized the early momentum. They could, and did, seize upon discovery and exploration and gained first advantage in capturing foreign trade or resources exportation (gold and slave trade). What might not be appreciated is these countries seized their avdantage because of the favorability of their geographic position after the fall of the Byzantine Empire with the taking of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453. George Louis Beer sets up their situation:       

 The expansion of England in the seventeenth century was not the result of isolated or fortuitous circumstances, but like all great historical developments it was intimately connected with the main currents of the world’s political evolution. … From time immemorial up to the discovery of America, the most important of commerce brought to Europe the spices, silks, ivory and precious stones of the East. During the middle ages, access to the East could be attained virtually only from the Mediterranean, and as a consequence the Italian cities were able to control the commerce. From Italy the Eastern produces were sent to the German Hanseatic cities … This condition lasted until the rise of the Ottoman power in the fifteenth century, when the Turks not only captured Constantinople, but also developed a formidable navy and made themselves masters of the Mediterranean. As a consequence Europe was to a great extent cut off from trade with the East. The dissatisfaction with this state of affairs and the imperative demand for a renewal of regular commercial intercourse with he Orient led to that period of intense scientific and exploring activity which culminated in the discoveries of Columbus and Vasco da Gama … a new highway to the Indies was revealed … The future belonged not to the Mediterranean countries, but to those on or near the Atlantic seaboard. [99] George Louis Baer, the Origins of the British Colonial System, 1578-1660 (1908, 2024), p. 1-2,

The rest of Europe was placed in catch-up mode. England. As I will shortly argue, England, relatively quickly, began breaking from its medieval systems after Columbus and the cessation of the War of the Roses which itself culminated with Henry VII (1485) ascended  to the Throne. Devastated by that extended (thirty years) semi-civil war, England found it necessary to seek out forms of economic growth–which motivated his issuance of charters and monopolies to gilds, individuals, and the Company of Merchant Adventurers to speed economic development and to counter the accumulated effects from the enclosure movement.

The lure of gold that Spain extracted from South and Central America increased the pace of Spanish commerce and colonization. Spain was fortunate in that gold export was in “high demand” as the currency reserve, but also a source of funds to pay for the costs of early modernization–including the facilitation of capital investment for trade and commerce. While Americans have long cited the attraction of gold in the quest that underlie the Jamestown settlement in particular, gold as the driver for North American settlement has been exaggerated and misunderstood. To the extent there was “an American dream” that motived Europe, gold did play a part. Gold paid for Spain’s initial colonization and certainly motivated the conquistadores and the wish England could discover the same elevated the desire to uncover the mysteries of North America.

If England was behind-the-ball in 1550, much of the blame lay in its lack of material resources, and the fact it was poor relative to its gold/spice-financed competition. On top of that, the English state after Henry VIII through Elizabeth was more concerned with religious change and the social and cultural divisions it unleashed. Henry VIII’s breakup of the Catholic Church facilitated creation of a  new generation of aristocrats, and the rise of the gentry both of which disrupted the old manor based agricultural system. The breakup from the Catholic Church resulted in land redistribution resulting from royal confiscation of monasteries and nunneries, and that invariably creates political instability, and economic change. That disruption pushed discovery and exploration off the top rungs of English priorities.

Also as Beer notes, before the break with Rome and the Catholic Church, the “papal bull (executive order by the Pope) debarred Catholic England from access to the most attractive parts of America. Thus for nearly two generations [discovery] was intermitted; and was then resumed [after the break] in the exploring, commercial, and colonial activity of the Elizabethan age. .. There is a close connection between the varied activities of the Elizabethan seamen and the future colonial movement. With the object of establishing direct commercial relations [bypassing the Spanish] with the Far East, many devoted their attention to finding a northern route. [99] George Louis Baer, the Origins of the British Colonial System, 1578-1660 (1908, 2024), p. 3,

 

 

unwin & monopolies London and all the rest

 

The cloth and wool industry grew and matured during the fifteenth century. With the assistance of the Crown that produce became England’s first major export. That the cloth/wool manufacturers along with the rise of English merchants captured London’s City Corporation and formed an alliance with the crown not only cleared the way for its export, but also set off a mal-distributed population and economic growth. That in turn led to a insufficient increase of wealth, and its retention by the cloth merchant oligarchy that had developed. Neither of these factors aided a more vibrant and sufficient general prosperity that would have increased the demand for English  new products and services–and the entrepreneurship that would lead to more exports.

This period which started around 1500 is one that needs deeper explanation–and that deals with my second question: how and why did Elizabeth’s policy-making detract from the pace of England’s modernization and economic growth?  Given Elizabeth’s path was pretty much adopted by the incoming Stuart dynasty, a case can be made that not only did her policy-making processes feed into an English civil war, but its use by the Stuarts intensified political-religious conflict that increased the pace into that civil war. It is necessary that AI can demonstrate how that policy-making system impeded and distorted England’s drive to overseas trade and commerce, as well as its colonization–and made in the interim near impossible any serious colonial permanent settlement adventures.

The irony I see happened was that England never disengaged from its drive to increase trade through colonial exports when it set up its first colonies. They did not realize that the two were seriously different goal-initiatives. In particular, the latter depended on the first (exports) be developed that could finance the hugely expensive and time-consuming permanent settlement colony. Whether the funds came from private, public, or both, it was absolutely a requisite that discretionary wealth and governmental and trade capacity be developed to the extent it could pay for permanent settlement.  England needed colonial exports to finance its modernization and capacity-building, but how could one expect such from brand new colonies in a wilderness at war with its native population. The blowback from this miscalculation ruined the Virginia Company–and the pay go system of financing colonial development. Both topics will be discussed in future chapters.

Instead of wealth, prosperity and capacity, England’s policy-making processes created oligarchies, clogged and corrupt policy, and a disjointed, inefficient and only marginally productive overseas trade and governance. Oligarchies  and a small number of dynastic-like families formed around monopolies, farming and concessions; these inhibited faster sustainable and more balanced economic growth. That is what the post 1550 pivot to broad economic trade and commerce hoped in part to correct. The problem for me, however, was the next logical step, colonization and empire, required more wealth and. most importantly, enhanced economic capacity and reasonable political stability capable of founding and sustaining a very expensive and time-consuming drive to set up permanent settlements thousands of miles across the stormy seas.

As Stone points out, the benefits of the economic capacity and political stability were not in place until after the 1689 Glorious Revolution. That was the period during which England was able to found most American colonies. Simply put, in 1606-7 England was not ready for prime time colonization. Accordingly, its first efforts of colonization yielded in Virginia’s case a colony that was unable to attain any serious economic or population breakout until the 1640’s at best–and actually later than that. Virginia had a solid nearly seventy-five years in which some level of self-government resulted in its own distinctive political culture and economic base, not to ignore noticeable effects on the development of its political structures and institutions.

 

the Wool-Cloth Export Cluster: Cloth Industry, the Company of Merchant Adventurers, the One Export English Overseas Trade and Commerce System: a Case Study

 

London, as one might expect, bore the brunt of this developing and expanding underclass.  From the last will follow a perception by some of a “surplus population”, or by others, more religiously motivated, a grouping  who responded to those in need with something called “Christian charity”. The latter, a religious tenet to be sure, was also to be central to the permanent settlement of one of the Virginia Company’s two subsidiaries, and the first, a concept embraced by the other subsidiary (and the king) that corrupted its selection of Virginia migrants to settle in Virginia.

Each of these drivers, of course, supplemented mobility and agricultural transition started by the enclosure movement No doubt the reader can see where I am going: change in some form and in some sector, class, or geography was now built into the medieval system. Intentioned or not, the Pandora’s box of English modernization crept into England’s institutions, classes, politics, society and the economy and by the time of Elizabeth I had moved England into transition from medievalism to, well, something else, some of which were the very first discernible steps into the modern world.

In essence, although England in the Elizabethan-Stuart period was still encrusted with profound medievalist institutions, beliefs and practices, does not mean they were frozen in time, but in fact were in transition. All of these drivers or factors mentioned above will play a serious role in the design and use of the Virginia Company–and a responsible for its attempted colonization of North America, as well as for its decision to compete in the new mercantilist age. As early as the Elizabethan period, England grappled with its need to accommodate these changes with increases in wealth, disposable income, and commercial growth that would be created through global commerce and trade. The success of English global commerce would mean increased wealth, and from that vibrant investment and increased resources available to meet crown and state demands would hopefully result. Whether or not the actors of this period had any consensus on this is doubtful, but hindsight allows us to recognize the England’s drive to trade, commerce, and colonial settlements was related to its transition into modernity.

That mission is one of the very first steps England took as it started to enter into what will become its modern age. That colonization came so early into England’s drive to modernization, however, suggests to me strong evidence England, nevermind the Virginia Company, was not ready for prime time settlement of colonies. The capacity for the latter assumes the former can develop greater capacity and effective institutions that can cope with the demands of effective colonization. Unfortunately, serious global trade was still a new and poorly developed policy venture which had not developed sufficient to build England’s capacity and resources to the extent they would be reasonably sufficient to take the next step: colonization.

Why had England Not Developed Sufficient Capacity? Its Political/Policy Processes Were Stuck in Medievalism

The enclosure movement incrementally altered the English manor-centered medieval agricultural base, it also facilitated the formation of multiple groupings into proto-classes that either owned their own land, settled in small and regional centers, or fled to London in their search for prosperity, employment, and a homestead. Over the years that followed it sustained  gradual urbanization, but it also formed an industry manufacturing cluster, cloth/wool, in the enclosures.

The combination of these drivers helped to form a political “tendency” that was not simply instrumental in the transition to early modernity described above, but a sort of default strategy adopted by a critical mass of political actors, chief of which, of course, was Elizabeth. Today one might refer to it as a “script” but whatever it was called, as we will assert shortly, by the first decade of the sixteenth century  guilds and trading companies embraced the royal charter and the accompanying privileges and monopoly. Michael J. Braddick calls attention to this tendency when he picks up the 1550 pivot to broaden English overseas trade and commerce. He identifies the chief actors and a particular reason why the “tendency” made sense to them:

The expansion of overseas trade, and the first steps towards settlement in the Americas, proceeded in ways that were, in some sense analogous to the means by which the practical authority of the Tudor and Stuart state was intensified in its core areas. In particular activists played an important role in lobbying for the use of state power in new territories and new functions. In this case the extension took place as a result of the ‘variable interplay of state control and individual initiative in which great men at Court and in the councils of the realm performed an indispensable role as intermediaries’. The trading companies chartered in the period between 1550 and 1640 represented a technique whereby national government at little cost to the exchequer could act to promote the expansion of English commerce. In fact so successful was the strategy that by the 1580’s, it was only trade with France, Scotland, and Ireland that was not in the hands of a company. 

Companies overcame a number of problems associated with new trades. In many cases the commercial risks were high–the markets for English goods, and the English market for expected imports equally uncertain. To these commercial risks were added other, real and imagined. For example, political relations between the governments of the two areas might be poorly established, and merchants unsure that their property and persons were secure. Similarly in many trades English merchants were entering into more or less direct competition with traders from other European countries and that posed a threat to commercial interests. As a result merchants entering these new and uncertain trades developed particular techniques of organization. Merchants banded together into guild-style organizations in order to negotiate with foreign governments …Associated with such functions might be controls over price and quality… With or without a monopoly the power of such regulated companies was much enhanced by a charter … In response to this difficulty a characteristic form of funding developed which spread the risk–the joint stock. [99] Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England: 1550-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 398-9

Company of Merchant Adventurers: the Corporation, Royal Monopoly, Charter

Monopoly and Internal Oligarchies 

During the sixteenth century that followed after its incorporation, Company of Merchant Adventurers took steps to limit access of “mere merchants” into its membership, casting out retailers, wholesalers, finance and other merchant groups. Keeping these elements from being able to export, at least easily, profitably and at a scale, the were able with their geographic and industry monopolies marginalized other rivals, frustrated opportunities not to their benefit, while further accumulating the wealth derived from export of England’s sole export industry–thus limited export only to cloth/wool/textiles. Simultaneously, the Company of Merchant Adventurers turned their own corporate leadership into small, narrow near-perpetual oligarchy that founded member family dynasties that effectively closed the door for the rising gentry class that could not achieve membership in the Company.

With the royal charter they secured a royal grant of monopoly to a specified geography (Antwerp) that limited competition, reduced risk, and provided legitimacy to the traders in their relationships abroad. Being the first of  guilds-exporters, the pattern was set for all that followed. The all-important  take away was that a guild monopoly over a trade was then infused with a second monopoly to trade that product in a defined geography. This model became preconditions for future overseas trading ventures. Thus these devolved from the Company of Merchant Adventurers before the sixteenth century.

Cloth industry became more concentrated as it matured, raising the cost of entry so over a few generations only a few merchant owners dominated overseas wool export and the Company of Merchant Associates-Adventurers that held the royal monopoly itself developed into an oligopoly of its own. The propensity to concentrate cloth manufacturing and export on the eastern side, along the English channel, was pronounced, and it facilitated a Company of Adventurers transformation in a London-based industry nexus, ‘Merchant adventurers’ who risked themselves and their money to find new commercial markets in Europe had emerged in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in commercial cities across England. Exeter had one, as did Newcastle, Hull, Chester and York. Bristol’s Merchant Ventures which dated back centuries, had recently received its first charter of in corporation from King Edward VII in 1552 [99] Phillip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated, p. 10

Overseas merchants, among others, routinely organized themselves into guilds and companies to maintain and control access to the special techniques and knowledge, or ‘mysteries’ of their trades. Many only later sought out royal grants to allow them further immunities of self-government, relief from certain taxes, and most importantly, unimpeded rights to travel from and reside beyond the realm … [99] Phillip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated, p. 10.

At the point when growth in the cloth trade stagnated during the decade of the 1550’s the impulse of those desiring to trade in untouched markets directly affected the course of overseas trade and foreign commerce. New Adventurers were drawn to action. While not abandoning their memberships or relations with the powerful Merchant Adventurers, they modified her structure and incorporated the first of the major “regulated” joint stock trading companies that would be formed during this the second half of the sixteenth century.

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. 21-3.

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 [the Muscovy or Russia Company], 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.

[999] The first major English joint stock corporation, the Company of Merchant Adventurers was actually the launching pad for a succession of both unregulated and regulated joint stock corporations that occurred after 1553. The true role of the Company of Adventurers is to also understand that its leadership saturated the policy making and the elective position of the City of London.

 Members of the Company held the city’s key offices and by the 1550’s passed them on to their progeny: Customer Smythe held key positions, as did his son, Thomas who in his day was Sheriff, not of Nottingham, but London. Both sat on London’s governance council. Both were directly allied to the sovereign of the time, and ensured the sovereign held sway over the capital city—the largest in the kingdom, of course, and the center for foreign trade. In this way, London merchants had access to royal policy and policy-making—and to the sovereign.. [999]

But more to the point, the enthusiasm and experience of the London merchant community to overseas trade, and colonization was limited to a few, of its membership. Even if high-placed such as Thomas Smythe, that leadership consumed itself trying to sail very leaky boats, i.e. the joint stock corporations they managed required heavy baggage relationships with the larger community, and much time would be spent patching up majorities, bailing out of problems caused by a chronic under investment, and failure to fulfill their membership and stock subscription commitments.

Occurring in two expansionary bursts, between the 1480’s and 1510, and the 1530’s to 1550 cloth export by the first decade of the seventeenth century (1600-1610) were three quarters of England’s total exports, of which three quarters went to Germany and the Low Countries.  Brenner estimates the guild-like Company of Merchant Adventurers controlled 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.

By the 1550’s, actually earlier, the Company essentially ran the one-horse export economy that England enjoyed. As such it developed into a bastion of wealth for its members, this wealth was put to use in a number of investments and opportunities. Some merchants, however decided that opportunity lie in expanding overseas trade to the four corners of the globe, particularly the Far East and the East Indies. And so in the middle 1550’s England started its oversea commercial trade pivot. With the power emanating from their privileged monopolies London-based cloth merchants pleaded their case to the central royal government in residence at London.

Cloth export, primarily a one way export only concentrated in ports such as Antwerp, the primary entrance point, and over time a European agent-factor nexus developed that allowed London and eastern-sited cloth merchants to develop and sustain an advantage in cloth trade that other English regions could not penetrate. 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. During the fifteenth century, the focus of the Company of Adventurers was abroad; that’s where its offices were and the continent and its ups and downs, conflicts and opportunities, captured the interest of these merchant adventurers.

Using the Company of Merchant adventurers, the more aggressive companies ventured out across the English Channel into continental European where the English had relationships and a past history. Holland, then a part of the Hapsburg Empire in revolution against the Catholic Hapsburgs, was the natural home base. From Holland, English cloth attracted serious demand from northern Europe, and over time cloth and wool became England’s first export product of size. Underlying this centralization was two budding institutions of early English mercantilism: the joint stock corporation and the Crown’s use of monopolies, charters, and “farming”.  These institutions will be fleshed out shortly, but they are formalized business structures that dominated a great deal of Elizabethan colonial and indeed crown policy-making. Phillip Stern introduces these institutions to the reader

Like other chartered offices and enterprises [of this period] overseas franchises could be bought, shared, sold, inherited, farmed out [think of farming as a royal franchise over a government product, service or function]  and financed. As they marshalled partners and investors, often including the ... [crown and ministers] such projects did not easily distinguish state from individual interest [i.e. public from private interests] and as such were less public private partnerships than portmanteaus [mutual personal largesse] … Overseas charters projected [the Company’s] authority into places where the Crown legally and pragmatically had none. Territory jurisdiction or trading privileges abroad had to be acquired by taking it, or by negotiating for it, via grants, contracts, purchases or agreements with the peoples and polities they found there. … If such ... [practices and structures] seemed to blur the lines between colony and commerce, finance and governance, they arose from a world in which such …boundaries had never existed in the first place. [99] Phillip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated: the Corporations that built British Colonialism (the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2023), pp. 18-19)

[999] Like Professor Stern, I encounter in this historical tale a difficulty translating it into terms and expressions comprehensible to a contemporary reader. But such terms are hard to find as their meaning and application and use five hundred years in the past does not conform easily to contemporary understanding and modern realities. In this period of time of this history, a corporation was an institutional term for an entity to perform certain broad but specified functions and purposes, and  provided sufficient autonomy to conduct a “business” or a set of  transactions  for what was construed as a government function–such as export trade. In 1500-1600, the King/Queen owned/ruled the country/kingdom; the state is personal to him/her. The sovereign’s dilemma is that he/she cannot do everything at the same time and the “corporation” was a vehicle by which the sovereign could delegate and/or decentralize sovereign powers. This is not a classic definition of today’s Wal-Mart, or GE, but sometimes one wonders about corporations such as Microsoft and Alphabet. 

In this history, a corporation such as the joint stock merchant trading company Company of Merchant Adventurers is granted by the crown and endowed with rights, privilege’s and responsibilities salient to its mission. This royal treatment is commonplace in this era and dates back quite a few years into the 12th century. This “corporation” is also similar to the municipality, such as London (entrusted with task, functions and a mission to govern a municipality), which is “governed” in the Tudor period  by the City of London Corporation, headed by a Lord Mayor, and a Common Council whose alderman were elected from wards. This form of government evolved from the 1141 royal charter that granted its local authority and autonomy, and the rights and privileges to the corporation salient to its governance of London as defined at that time, and adjusted as it expanded.

The use of a “corporation” structure in medieval England by the time of the Tudors, very evident during the Elizabethan period, was widespread for missions of some importance, complexity and scale, and for which they should be considered “traditional” in the English context. Today, of course, “corporation” is private and not governmental, and usually considered as “business”, but through this period of English history that is not accurate. That distinction truly became more solid hundreds of years in the future. During English history the “corporation” was a flexible structure, a hybrid in each distinctive period that delegated royal powers to a private, i.e. non royal entity, and enjoyed through its royal charter delegated powers and autonomy relevant to their implementation.

While they were not a public-private partnership in today’s spirit of the term, they were such in the spirit of the time when kings and queens ruled a kingdom given to them by God (or something close to it). Thus when we refer to the Virginia Company in this history, it should be thought of as a 1605-6 great merchant trading company structured as a joint stock corporation, empowered by royal charter to perform specified tasks with parameters and responsibilities that limited and defined the permissible actions and  responsibilities. Americans ought to regard the Company, not as a contemporary business company with greedy investors, but as a royally empowered entity delegated formerly royal powers and resources entrusted with functions and mission to which it is accountable to the Crown and its sovereign. It does not fit our contemporary definitions very well, so our Company of the early seventeenth century should not wear clothes that generate reactions more typical of the modern age. [999]

Stern proposes this period to be an age of “corporate colonial capitalism”. He is expressing what is almost obvious when one delves deeply into colonialism of this era is that in many ways it is foreign affairs subcontracted with a corporation that enjoys a relatively distinctive relationship with the crown and is subject to direct sovereign accountability. Stern’s creative description of that age does properly focus on the organizational structure which he, as I, believe is central to understanding its behavior and actions. It allows us to include in the corporate decision-making the necessity of its accountability to the English sovereign.

It also makes obvious that these corporations are far from pure profit-making entities, and their investors have multiple motivations, that while including profit, are also tempered by fealty, patriotism, and the kingdom’s ability to function amid mercantile competition. Religion too will also infuse the behavior of these entities. Finally, their decision-making is very much linked to macro politics of the kingdom, and the priorities of the sovereign. Ironically, and correctly, Stern also observes how all this can lead over time, distance, and personality to an insulated corporation aloof from its home base nation.

In the Virginia Company, the problem, I stress is the “drift into civil war” that created such tensions between the king and parliament and their supporters, and between classes and religions. In the beginning of this period, the City of London for instance, is tied closely to the Crown; by the time of the English Civil war, less than forty years in the future, London is a creature of Parliament. The Company–and the Virginia colony–will be greatly affected by such drifts. As such one might construe as part of England’s inheritance to Virginia, is her turbulence as it affected colonization.

Usually much stress is made by American historians of positive inheritances such as English common law, and its fledgling “drift” to democracy. True enough, but each has their limits regarding England’s initial half-century or so early North American colonization. While there were limits to excesses provided by English common and contract law of that period; instead one could include the definition of individual honor, as medieval a value characteristic of that age, could check individual misbehavior, and affect positive motivation as well. Still more than anything, the medieval “art of the deal” in which we can label policy-making, was more personalistic than legalistic, reflecting social and hierarchical institutional realities (although the jurist Coke played a role in the design of the Virginia Company while serving as a Cecil protégé). As one must navigate this drift to civil war, anyone who has his office in, or adjacent to, the Tower or London, seldom forgets who signs her paycheck.

But the businesses and business practices we value today had yet to be developed; the institutions of business were rudimentary, and among them the joint stock corporation was respected, and consciously employed in the more substantial, complicated, and risky business enterprises such as overseas trade. Business practices, the audit/bookkeeping for example existed, but do not compare to modern practices, and were casual in their use and not without biases in their application.

The use of farming, grants and patents, were used often of necessity due to the chronic lack of discretionary income by the Crown and its bureaucracies. Crown fiscal affairs is arcane and medieval as one might expect, but fiscal liquidity in an age of land being the primary asset of choice, leaves little room for cash lying around; when there are few, if any, institutions such as banks, if one needed cash an exchange of it for a “deal” such as corporate colonialism constantly required made, the art of the deal quite different than one normally experiences or expects today–but even this is questioned by Stern:

The story of how the joint stock corporation came to shape British colonialism from its sixteenth century origins through the era of decolonization may on first glance seemed ripped from today’s headlines, as billionaires race to colonize Mars, and global technology companies have grown to the point that they look, as Mark Zuckerberg [Facebook or META founder and owner] ‘more like a government’. In a world where an oil conglomerate might run what has been aptly described as a ‘private empire’, and even insiders [today] come to think of the British Crown as “the Firm”, understanding the thin line between private and public governance has a deep and complex past has never been more consequential … that if the joint stock corporation was well-suited to [ late medieval] empire, it was not because it was some inexorable juggernaut. Rather, like empire itself, it was–as it remains–a powerful paradox: person and group; public and private; commercial and political; mercantilist and capitalist; sycophantic and rebellious; regional and global; immortal and fragile; smugly patriotic and belligerently cosmopolitan; and the cornerstone of a British Empire never fully owned or operated by Britain as such’. [99] Phillip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated, p. 2

Naturally, the Company’s royal overseas “monopoly” generated considerable compliant, opposition and resentment from disenfranchised merchants and gentry, but the great merchant trading companies, placed well in court politics, protected by court bureaucracies, and with resources to mobilize the overseas farmers and Elizabethan monopolies/franchises that saturated the imports from overseas markets.

One final term pertinent to this art of a Tudor deal, is “the royal charter”. The charter is somewhat similar in spirit and function to an American executive order; in particular it is personal to the sovereign and is intended to be flexible with its ultimate meaning at any point being defined, not simply by law or contract, but by the continued support of and by the king. Over this period, the issue of royal charter was being challenged by a rising and not especially happy House of Commons (lower chamber of Parliament). Stern comments that such charters could become “unseated through never fully supplanted by Parliamentary legislation, but [each] ,,, shared the basic assumption that corporations, in the words of the seventeenth century jurist Edward Coke, ‘[rest] only in intendment [intentions] and consideration of the law“–i.e. limitations cited above that a charter was both a political as well as legal transaction.

“Conceiving of corporations as “concessions” of the State [as we do in argue in this section], made for another formidable irony. Stern reminds us that over time and place that “affording corporations an outside power that states [home government] could not always control and that frequently could be employed to control states“, I will propose Coan’s corollary that such powers could be exercised by colonies in the name of the corporation to reflect their own needs and requirements. This corresponds to my larger insertion that weakness of the Virginia Company translated into self-government by Virginians during the extended Company period. [99] Phillip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated, p. 6

Company of Merchant Adventurers–Political-Policy-Making

Headquartered in London and Antwerp, the Company of Merchant Adventurers elites were in a potentially influential and strategic position from which a commanding role in England’s overseas trade and commerce. As we shall see, they chose to do so but for the most part limited their activity to protecting and enhancing their Company access to northern Europe through Antwerp and to confine themselves to cloth-wool apparel related products for export. They were not interested in imports, save to commodities use to cloth and wool industry/guilds.

Still, in that cloth and wool constituted three quarters or so of all English exports in this period, their use of London as their principal English port secured for them the status of evolving into the so-called establishment of English foreign trade. [99] Robert Ashton, the City and the Court, pp. 23-4

In many ways, especially social, the Company elites transformed London into a Company town, Company members and officeholders transformed their elites into an English elite quite different from the dominant landed agricultural-manor-based aristocracy; the Company was a merchant elite, an urban commercial one that concentrated in the mega city that London had become. Having said that, however, company elites often chose to involve themselves in London politics and to secure elective office, alderman, and the Lord Mayor. Their primary interest,  aside from securing what benefit they could from London politics, was to access and cement an alliance with the Crown and the Sovereign. Their wealth made loans to the state possible, and their experience offered advice and middlemen for the sovereign to supplement his initiatives and priorities abroad.

As a prominent and affluent element in London’s governance of the capital city they could offer considerable resources and advantage to the cash-starved monarchy. In the Tudor period they gained access to court politics and acquired the sovereign’s favor at least to the extent the Queen saw them as a useful ally in domestic finance and foreign affairs, an ally that brought stability and critical resources. With London England’s mega city and the Crown as allies the Company’s members and core oligarchy became as close to the commercial established as England possessed at that time. 

Their narrow view of such trade, however, was not encouraging or facilitative for a more expanded notion of overseas trade, and, as we shall see made London somewhat more vulnerable to political instability particularly when the cloth/wool trade was in some difficulty or in lean years when exports declined due to war or market issues. In such times when the gilds and cloth/wool companies reduced their workforce or were not hiring workers the economic refugees from the countryside looking for employment easily visible groupings of restive and sometimes volatile underclass raised anxiety of more affluent and secure Londoners, as their neighborhoods and substandard housing could not easily be ignored or bypassed. 

 

1550 the decade the Pivot Begins

By 1550, this trade occupied such a compelling economic position in the English economy that it overwhelmed other trade opportunities, and England settled into to a one product export overseas trade. From that point England’s non wool/cloth continental trade was limited to some Levant and Iberian peninsular ports, with northern Europe easily dominate. Wool/cloth manufacture was widespread. At least twenty-five counties had flourishing wool/cloth production clusters; heavy cloth tended not to be exported, but lighter blends were likely to be exported, and they concentrated near port cities. Supple concluded these exports injected lifeblood into local economies, but London was the chief beneficiary. … perhaps as much as 90 per cent, and certainly over 75 per cent of England’s exports were of articles made from wool. No wonder to contemporaries it appeared ‘the cloth trade is … the axis of the commonwealth, whereon all the other trades … do seem to turn and have their revolution’, or that it could be called  ‘the flower of the king’s crown’ …the milk and honey of our Canaan, the Indies of England. [p.6]

the merchants wanted “artificial restrictions on mobility–limitations on the number of looms to be owned or managed by individual entrepreneurs, apprenticeship requirements, general industrial control–in the hope of making the influx of factors [labor] of production more difficult. This had clearly happened in the 1550’s with the Cloth Acts, and in 1563 with the Statute of Artificers after a period of boom and slump. There is little doubt that the attempted regulatory measures in the early years of the seventeenth century were a response to structural difficulties which the broadcloth industry was experiencing as a consequence of a prolonged period of low overseas demand“. [99] Supple, p.28-9. In essence, these London cloth merchants were able to dominate, if not control, the fortunes of the cloth cluster and the one export overseas trade and their program to protect their industry and the wealth it generated did not foster the economic growth England so badly needed.

 

 

[999]

the Elizabethan Policy System

With such a success story, it is no wonder the Company of Merchant Adventurers became a role model for on-the-make merchants from the rising gentry class. They could deal with products other than cloth/wool/textiles but when domestic demand was insufficient or satisfied, they saw the merit in broadening overseas trade, commerce and import. Their willingness to innovate and break into new areas of trade was stifled by the dominance of the cloth/wool behemoth, whose wealth and dominance over decision-making and key financial institutions and capital simply made a desert out of London for their interests.

While not reaching the point of opposition to the Company of Merchants of the establishment of this era, they saw potential in copying the Company of Merchant Adventurers methods and organizations. When an opportunity opened up in the 1550’s the more adventurous, under the leadership of John Cabot’s son, Samuel broke the ice by creating a new merchant trading company (Muscovy) around a new trading elite that sought opportunities, mostly in China and Japan, following the Portuguese and Spanish leads.

The 1550 pivot seemingly threatened to be a pivot in overseas trade away from the Company of Adventurers, but was not regarded so in that period. It was more a wave of interest in overseas trade that was perceived as an economic opportunity that should be seized. Led by a generational change in English entrepreneurs, and sons of the establishment that were willing to carpe diem. Since they did not threaten the interests of the establishment, but indeed offered them prospects that stabilized England’s tensions and offered prosperity to the rising population and growing urban centers.

As London became king of the wool export trade, it compelled England’s outer ports to devise their own path. England’s post 1550’s overseas pivot followed a bimodal development pattern: London and the Outer Ports. The rivalry and bitter competition played a notable role in England’s invasion of Ireland, and global discovery and exploration. London’s approach to overseas trade, the trading factory, and the great merchant trading companies differed radically from that used in the Outer Ports. We will discuss that in more detail below.

Equally, important, London’s organizational vehicle, the joint stock Company of Merchant Adventurers became the model, the corporate form that dominated England’s overseas trade and commerce, and colonization. In that the Tudor’s, for reasons to be soon discussed, delegated much of overseas commercial trade to private corporations the joint stock corporation’s strength, the ability to attract private investors in a manner that transcending individual companies and wealthy merchants it proved to most in that time period as the most promising corporate structure suitable to the task.

That form of business organization demonstrated an ability to achieve dominance over the domestic cloth industry. Its entry into partnership with the sovereign and the English state in its overseas export venture was made possible by a sovereign grant of monopoly to that corporation in the industry export to northern Europe. To the merchants on the inside, however, its attractiveness included a flexibility in its governance structures that centralized corporate authority into a few largest investors of the corporation–offering to them security in an investment most risky.

What made the joint stock merchant trading company seemingly effective in their view was it  oligarchic and restricted membership created wealth that could be reinvested in more expeditions and trade. By the late 1500’s the joint stock corporation, not unlike a Russian doll, proved amenable to superimposing a hierarchy of internal oligarchies, that centralized its governance in a few, very few investor who were converted in to a corporate governance by family dynasties. Later on, we shall focus on this issue, but for now the change in joint stock governance over the last half century came at the increasingly noted expense of fostering jealously and frustration of those who wanted in on this opportunity.

The point of controversy was on their “monopoly” which closed their access and prevented others from participating and sharing in its wealth creation. Their perception was they lacked the political and policy making power to do so. The point of this is the dominant corporate structure of English overseas trade and commerce, had entered into the seventeenth century with what proved to be a fundamental flaw–a flaw so serious the structure would be unable to enter effectively into the new policy area du jour: colonization.

How the partnership with the state and sovereign was affected by the union of the joint stock corporation and the royal monopoly and grants or, the crown, privilege. Unable to form their own great merchant trading company, the Outer Ports turned to privateering, the development of Irish plantations, and after the 1580’s, leadership in the discovery and navigation of North America and the West Indies.

In the meantime, London merchants, including some of the cloth merchants, pressed as they were by Henry for financing, looked to expand their overseas trading monopolies to other geographies besides northern Europe, now entrapped in a series of wars and crosscutting webs of political alliances. But they too were frustrated by the stagnant power of the Company of Merchant Adventurers and its dominance of crown politics and English economic life.

Integrate with F: the Elizabethan Policy System

England, a half-century before the Virginia Company, had evolved into a one-export only overseas commerce economy. That one-export, wool and cloth commerce to northern Europe, was about all the English economy had, other than a small Iberian peninsula trade. The reason behind this limited trade was the the rise of England’s cloth merchant elite oligarchy, its dominance over London politics, and its coming of age in the late 16th century as the commercial establishment of both London and England’s commercial and overseas trade community.

The cloth merchant elite oligarchy was not particularly interested in moving into other products or geographic areas, but rather focused itself on milking profits for itself from northern Europe. The Crown, being more reactive to pressures for domestic overseas trade than risking negative reactions from its more successful European competitors simply found other matters of interest in its foreign affairs. If we express this in policy-making terms, I suggest England’s overseas policy system had become mired in a more medieval guild-dominated semi closed policy system that was unable to aggregate the interests of other groupings to pursue a more aggressive overseas commercial policy. That is essentially what happened in the post-1550 overseas commercial trade pivot in the last half of the sixteenth century.

Firmly embedded during  the sixteenth century, the oligarchies of the Company of Merchant Adventurers, comprised as it was with the vanguard dynastic families within the guild-based commercial elite of England, this policy actor-institution merits further investigation. The English domestic economy, as had its European neighbors, had evolved into a nexus of guilds built around crafts and occupations  along what we call today industry sectors. Organized around the domestic supply and demand constraints and resources these guilds had themselves evolved into hierarchies and from there into family dynastic oligopolies. Within each a guilds a bimodal internal organizations separated craftsmen from merchants, with the latter dominating the politics and policy-making of the organizations.

George Unwin describes this system of these gilds-companies that emerge from the late medieval years into the establishment in existence during the period this history is concerned. Unwin describes it as “a social hierarchy … organized on the principle of selection from above“, in which “the membership of the company did not necessarily confer equal rights on all its members“. Most companies by that time, as stated above, had divided each organization into “an upper section known as a livery and a lower, usually known as a yeomancy. The distinction corresponds roughly with that between those who exercised trade in the products of a craft or crafts, and those who manufactured them. The livery consisted of the more affluent members of the society …[with] the vast bulk of the members of the livery were traders rather than craftsmen. [99] Robert Ashton, the City and the Court, p. 43 in summary of George Unwin’s, the Gilds and the Companies of London, p. 217.

Ashton observes that by the end of sixteenth century the guilds and the livery companies had evolved into oligarchies as discussed above, but from those oligarchies there emerged, or were in process of emerging, a smaller subset of members whose power positions within the company was superior to others. Ashton then asserts that the smaller, more powerful grouping  manipulated, legally, the election process within the company  in a way that “one oligarchy  superimposed itself upon another” (p. 45) (Ashton asserts “the executive authority within each company was normally vested in a master and a number of wardens … who exercised their functions in conjunction with a select body which was usually known as a court of assistants) (p. 44). In contemporary parlance, we could label the masters as chair of the board of directors, the wardens as committed chairs, and the court of assistants as board of directors– all of which I might add are elected by the membership of the company.

The bottom line is that within each gild and company protests arose, and as time elapsed the superimposed elite dynastic elites who reduced not only the company membership to subservience but all but a few of the most powerful members of the company’s leadership. Say this another way, a very small grouping of the London merchant community dominated the larger merchant community–and even though the latter lacked power to defend themselves, were in effect induced to pursue their own interests outside the establishment and its company. It is these individuals that will feed into those who advocate for larger overseas trading and commerce, and who therefore will dominated the post 1550 pivot.

Thus these splits were not without their tensions, and during the period of the post-1550 overseas pivot those merchants, in particular, who were outside the London power base of these oligarchies took action and developed initiatives that was able to interest the Crown and draw a measure of support from it. At the same time, the English merchant elite, underwent a generational change in which the younger commercial merchants outside of the cloth-wool Company of Merchant Adventurers, themselves became interested in an aggressive overseas commercial trade. It is these two groupings that injected themselves into the overseas trade policy nexus and pressured-interested the Crown into involvement with their initiatives–without breaking from the larger uninterested Company of Merchant Adventurers.

The point of this is the reader is alerted that England’s commercial elite was in no way exclusively composed of a nexus of oligarchical guilds and trading companies but also included other merchant elites that operated on their own terms and interests in their own businesses, and who given the opportunity, usually obtained by the award of farming monopolies and franchises conferred by the Crown upon them. As such they were isolated from the other wealth driven oligarchies derived from each segment of the English economy. In our contemporary perspective, these practices are medieval at best, and simply wrong-headed or corrupt. But in an age of transition when their use, if controversial, was widespread if not pervasive, they were commonplace and for the most part legal and legitimate.

That over time they engendered intense opposition among many, especially among the rising gentry who, if anything wanted “in” on these or protection from them, they aggregated and with the rise of parliament at the onset of the seventeenth century they emerged as a major issue high priority during the Virginia Company period. These “monopolies” had an enormous affect, one way or another, on the Company’s administration of Virginia–and as we shall see, Virginians themselves sought to use them for their personal advancement, and they too became a significant feature of the policy system Virginians set up for themselves.

Say it another way, there was another different, and for some alternative career in what I call farming, but more precisely involves being awarded, usually for some payment, by the crown a concession, sort of a franchise over some economic sector, product, service over which the awarded enjoys a monopoly. In our day and age it is amazing that several key public matters, for example tax, fee, and custom collection were “farmed out” with monopolistic concessions to individuals for some “consideration” to the crown or the exchequer.

Lacking a public bureaucracy to monitor these affairs, the institution was rife with whatever evil one wants to attribute to it: inefficient, abusive, arbitrary, corrupt, incompetent, or in a kindlier world, privatize the function or activity. Volumes have been written on this institution, but the institution which saturated the Tudor years, especially Elizabeth’s reign, but was passed over to the Stuarts who as we shall see put their own stamp on it to reflect their own preferences. In a public-private partnership such as the Virginia Company, the institution infused itself into various aspects of the corporation, for example the Company Magazine, and later Dale’s Gift grants of land.

England’s politics and policy-making were no way a democracy at this time period. Its economic policy-making was closed off from many who normally were themselves elites, but unable to penetrate the web of court decision-making to engage in overseas trade. Nevertheless, a seeming peculiarity of this period is the merchant grouping was in great flux, with power centered in oligarchies at each level, but with interaction and contact with each other, and those in lesser positions in their institutional hierarchies. Isolated socially to be sure, merchants and even craftsmen at all levels came together to make their way in their drive to status and wealth. While the “art of the deal” was largely restricted to the haute bourgeoisies [described below] those included in the deal would include individuals from the many groupings within the merchant community.

The higher one moved up  the hierarchy of the greater livery companies, the more prominent become the members of what can be described as the “haute bourgeoisie“. … its wealth was derived mainly from activity in the sphere of overseas and domestic trade, sometimes associated with the exploitation of government concessions [farming]. It was from such persons that the ruling civic class-those that attained to the aldermanry and mayoralty–was primarily recruited; and in their view the raison d’etre of members of a livery company was probably radically different from that of liverymen who sought to use the machinery of the gild to put themselves in a favorable position vis-à-vis the crafts. It must be admitted that the centre of gravity of the economic world of many of the members of this haute bourgeoisie, institutionally speaking, was not the livery company, but the privileged chartered company [great merchant trading companies] engaged in foreign trade [pp. 47-8].

Needless to say fragmentation created rivalries, and alliances, with the great bulk of the elite unable to pursue their ambitions without making their deal with the Crown and its bureaucracies. It is in this context the Virginia Company would be designed and a consensus forged to approve its incorporation. Put it bluntly, the Virginia Company would be a creature of this policy system, and its corporate structure proved a poor insulator in shielding its internal affairs from the practices of the macro English-crown policy system. To understand how this economic policy-making culture was infused into both the corporate design and the actions of its corporate leadership Ashton integrates the farming institution with the various groupings of the period’s commercial elite, the crown policy making process, and by implication into the public-private partnerships such as were the great merchant trading companies of the period:

… powerful as the ties which bound such multiple commercial concessionaires to the government … there were other members of the business elite whose fortunes were more intimately associated with the crown and the court. These were magnates whose economic interests, while resting on a firm foundation of commodity [business] trade, split over into the exploitation of concessions on the periphery of government finance and economic policy. Some of these concessions arose out of that familiar conjuncture of circumstances whereby a government with an ambitious programme of economic and social controls lacked the administrative machinery to make that programme effective and filled the vacuum by using private enterprise. Many of the patents of monopoly of the period fall into this category; so, in a sense, does the expedient of customs farming. Other concessions were the product of the crown’s shortage of income which forced it back on the expedient of rewarding its servants and those whom it delighted to honour by concessions in kind rather than by payments in cash–by such devices as patents, licenses and customs farms. The courtly recipients of these privileges had in turn to call upon the aid of the business world to put their concessions to profitable use. [99] Robert Ashton, pp. 17-18

Thus, we can see how and why an influential and powerful merchant  such as,  Sir Thomas Smythe could play such a central role in the Company, but also connect it too the highest levels of the court and the various groupings within this merchant community. “His father, the celebrated Elizabethan concessionaire, Customer (also named Thomas) Smith(e), the son engaged in activities which were more purely commercial in character. Unlike his father, he is not to be found in the forefront of those merchants who dabbled extensively in government financial concessions. But there can be no doubt about his pre-eminence in the world of Jacobean commerce. Governor for fifteen years in all of the East India Company, he was also in his time, governor of the Russia, French, Levant, Virginia and Somers Islands  [Bermuda] companies. [99] Ashton, pp.16-7

Smythe was to become one of James I most trusted allies in the business world, and the government made extensive use of his talents, not only in his capacity as governor of so many chartered companies, but also as a member of government commissions, including the navy commission in 1618, and the treasury commission in 1619“. A longstanding member of parliament, a philanthropist, as well as CEO of his own substantial mix of businesses (from mining to haberdashery, as well a experience as an alderman and sheriff of London, and an ambassador representing the crown in several foreign missions, Smythe transformed his mammoth home on Philpot Street as the headquarters not only of the Virginia Company but the place in which his business, trading companies, and government interactions took place.

At one point he even housed the French embassy in this residence, and conversely at one point he spent a year or more imprisioned in the Tower of London, awaiting possible execution. To think Smythe as simply a businessman, as most histories do, is a misnomer. Businessman he was, but he was also representative of the various tilts and nooks in which a merchant during the post-1550 pivot into global overseas trade could venture. Perhaps, as much as any, he was the personification of London, and the dominant merchant of that capital city. Link this with membership in the cloth-based Company of Merchant Adventurers who held the charter and monopoly over the export of cloth and wool.

Most, if not all, of the major players behind the Virginia Company incorporation already possessed wealth, a level of status, and position in England’s affairs. Personal wealth was certainly an element of this, however, their policy activism was not primarily based on greed but patriotism. After the post 1550’s England competed to defend herself from the ambitions of the major mercantilist power, Spain (and Portugal) and the Hapsburgs, and it was widely sensed in England that it had gotten off to a late start in mercantilist affairs and it was necessary to catch up–as fast as possible.

Elements of the merchant class broke away from the Company of Merchant Adventurers to broaden trade opportunities for themselves and in order to make such trading feasible entered into a partnership with the Crown. In need of royal monopoly privileges they agreed to incorporate public obligations to pay the Crown for its expenses. They both justified these as a need to increase England’s economic development by in part turning their profits into investments for creating jobs and domestic prosperity through overseas trade. Imports and exports was the strategy they employed to create discretionary income that fueled English growth that would allow her to catch up and compete in the European mercantilist system.

In an age in which the dominant historical paradigms are anti-capitalist, the prevalent notion of wealth and greed as the motivation for Virginia translates into to the belief the Virginia Company was a private business enterprise, armed with a royal charter. seeking to make a profit out of colonization. I argue in this history that belief misinterprets the role and function of the great merchant trading companies, and sidesteps the mission of the Virginia Company to be the first of the English merchant traders tasked with the founding of a permanent settlement-colony. In this mission the Virginia Company was distinctive, and that distinction reflected what was a signature project of its sovereign and an intent to raise England into a first rate mercantile European power by bringing about serious economic growth and prosperity for the king, and his kingdom.

The proponents for Virginia colonization in England envisioned a lot more than a bunch of England’s second son nobles and gentry wandering about the countryside looking for gold. The basis for this sad story arises from how the Company carried out its first expedition in 1606. That expedition and the supply and settler ships that immediately followed wound up pursuing gold for a different set of reasons than the Virginia settlers  looking for gold. How this misdirection happened is a story we will tell in the history.

 

 

 

Redundant Backup

Background to the Post 1550’s Pivot

Added to this burden was the very serious and transformative “enclosure movement”, which moved peasants out of serfdom, increased the value of their labor to the landed aristocracy, and resulted in the displacement, off and on, for well over a hundred years. From this turmoil a middle class emerged, alongside a mobile displaced peasantry that moved to the cities of the king Perhaps the more cogent observation I can make of Elizabeth’s foreign policy other than her decentralization of commerce and foreign trade to merchant adventurers, is their pronounced tilt to war and her consistent support for the compelled creation of plantations by nobles and adventurers in Ireland. North America was never her prime focus, and neither was it for James I.

The Crown as did most of her aristocracy preferred Ireland for its closeness, and for where military, not trading skills, were most valuable. Elizabeth’s favorites were divided into broker-administrators, or most frequently military campaigns waged on her behalf, but for which they were financially involved and responsible. Raleigh and Essex dominated her last years and they were personifications of her last years on the throne.

Not alone in her political-social-and economic instability, England, a relatively small island with limited resources, was sensitive to her perceived vulnerability. However,  merchant,  community were a bit more ambitious—they labeled themselves  “merchant adventurers” for a reason. Thanks to Hollywood and our shared language and heritage, Americans, especially those relatively unaware of the continent’s history and politics, fail to realize that Spain and Portugal got a headstart, and as late as 1600. England had not caught up. England’s overseas trade and foreign policy through much of the sixteenth century was neither bold, nor adventurous, an image we Americans have concocted through media, novels and movies. Had we spoke and wrote in French we never would have formed these images.

One ought to be aware that in this period religious-based internal politics spilled over into overseas affairs. Today it wise to remind the reader that Elizabeth inherited the throne from her Catholic half-sister—who married the Catholic ruler of Spain, Phillip II who became co-ruler of England. That half-sister imprisoned Elizabeth for a year in the Tower of London because of her Protestantism. Phillip II went on to become the arch enemy of England, and by 1585 both Spain and England were at war. That war that lasted for almost twenty years. England spent most of that war in Holland fighting as a mercenary ally.

While the war provided England’s aristocracy with military experience and skills, the navy was left undeveloped, in large measure the consequence of the kingdom’s limited resources and fiscal capacity. England would privatize its navy in the form of a sort of militia-privateer, private navies fought for their own reasons, on their own dime, with their own sailors and ships. In peace this would, in theory at least, convert to a merchant marine.

The Spanish Armada, defeated in 1588, was not the end of the war with Spain. During the 1590’s, Drake in particular mounted, a serious English counterattack against Spain. Terribly expensive, it was not successful. England did not win the war with Spain in 1588; one could charitably call it an expensive stalemate. The Armada continued its assault on England—and Ireland, but Spain was frustrated after three more attempts. Predictably, there were effects on English overseas trade and colonization.

Two main groups of would-be promoters [of North American trade and colonization] emerged after the signing of peace with Spain [in 1604] checked privateering missions. The first consisted of Londoners, headed by Richard Hakluyt and Sir Thomas [Smythe], a leading merchant who had taken up Raleigh’s Roanoke rights. The London groups interest remained the Chesapeake and North Carolina region favored by Raleigh. The second group, mainly west-country men, looked towards northern New England, probably inspired  by reports of a voyage in 1605 5o Maine by Captain George Waymouth under the patronage of the Earl of Southampton, as well as by fishing [lobby] between the west of England and Newfoundland. [99] R. C. Simmons, the American Colonies: From Settlement to Independence (W. W. Norton & Company, 1976), p. 12

Since we typically have high regard for the power of the British navy, we need to understand the mighty and powerful English navy we hear about in our histories, movies, TV, and novels, was at least fifty years (considerably actually more) in the future. When Elizabeth assumed the throne England had a mere 20-30 moderate sized ships. By 1600, she had expanded the navy  to about 50. In 1588, the Spanish armada alone was about 130 ships that carried about 30,000 soldiers. The English navy, accordingly, offered little protection to its merchant marine in its overseas ventures—in fact quite the opposite.

During Elizabeth’s reign, England’s small navy, was supplemented with English merchant adventurers and ship owners. Many of the merchant adventurers that participated in the voyages of discovery were veterans of the war with Spain and such expeditions often used anti Spanish privateering to pay the costs. England could boast of a  reasonably vibrant shipbuilding industry with sailors and private businesses that could supply and repair the ships. and that was an important exception to a relatively small manufacturing base. The English private merchant marine that supplemented the small English navy was still in its early days. To be competitive, modern one might say, So, in this vital area of foreign affairs England’s relied on a privately-owned shipping industry and shipbuilding, with its own private owners, sailors and suppliers, and even ports. More to the point we will discuss in some detail the relationship Elizabeth developed with the London merchant adventurers. [999] See Below

Also most of us are generally unaware of England’s ally and rival, Holland, who seized upon maritime trade as a national economic development initiative during this period.  Holland in the midst of its “Eighty Year War” with Spain proclaimed a republic in 1588 but achieve its independence only in 1648. During that time, if anything, England was embarrassed with its inability to match Holland’s overseas success, especially in the East (Japan, China and Southeast Asia) and it took decades for England to catch up with Dutch technology and maritime expertise pertinent to shipbuilding, navigation and trade. This would play a role in future English colonization, but in this time period the East India Company should be understood as an effort to contain Holland’s Asian trade ambitions.

No surprise: when the decision was made to expand English overseas trade, England would use its merchant marine and designate a private company to do the heavy lifting. Shortly, we will observe that Elizabeth relied on her private merchant marine in overseas trade and reach a partnership with the London merchant adventurers; that decision was influenced by several factors and dynamics, but she had little alternative but let the private sector take the lead in overseas trade and colonization. The royal navy would take generations to mature and acquire the size, capacity, skillset and technology to compete with the other mercantile players. So, by default, tasks in these overseas areas had to be shared with what today we call the private merchant marine. The Virginia Company an example of this.

When the Crown entered into partnership with a private corporation; the corporation was responsible for its own defense, on the high seas and the permanent settlement, and also was tasked with supplementing the English economy through export, import. The Crown and its Court, however, inconsistent supporters, and during  the early Stuart years would  play a secondary role in these overseas ventures. and their implementation.

[999] The naval power [of the English state] at [the Crown’s] disposal was small; the army available was scarcely adequate for the capture of a major sea-port, let alone its tenure as a base in the heart of enemy territory; expertise in the mounting and handling of large-scale amphibious operations took many decades to mature …

The Queen’s navy was still but a small part of the force [England] could exert at sea … Privateering was the characteristic form of naval war, and the royal navy itself tended to conform to the main patter. The queen employed her ships in privateering, investing them in joint stock expeditions for a corresponding share in the profits, even in voyages over which she exercised no control …. The chief of her navy was also the chief of the nation’s privateering forces: a great shipowner and promoter of private ventures, he sometimes took a personal share in the fitting out of royal ships … He became deeply involved in the whole business of setting forth ships of reprisal, for which he issued licenses. …

Furthermore most of the queen’s leading naval men had a substantial stake in private shipping, from entrepreneurs like the Haskinses’ down to the ordinary captain who served in a royal ship one year, and took out his own the next [99] R. K. Andrews, Trade Plunder and Settlement, pp. 243-49]

The Crown could not task its navy for the development of overseas markets, nor protect the permanent settlement/colonies founded in far away locations such as the American wilderness. Students studying Jamestown may wonder why there weren’t any “redcoats” or English soldiers manning walls and palisades. Aside from the fact that redcoats did not become standard for the English army until the English civil war when they were worn by Cromwell’s New Modern Army, the Crown had no funds for such a force in the New World. [999]

 

Wool manufacture was widespread. At least twenty-five counties had flourishing wool/cloth production clusters; but heavy cloth tended not to be exported while lighter blends likely to be exported were concentrated near port cities. He concluded these exports injected lifeblood into local economies, but London was the chief beneficiary. … perhaps as much as 90 per cent and certainly over 75 per cent of England’s exports were of articles made from wool. No wonder to contemporaries it appeared ‘the cloth trade is … the axis of the commonwealth, whereon all the other trades … do seem to turn and have their revolution’, or that it could be called  ‘the flower of the king’s crown’ …the milk and honey of our Canaan, the Indies of England. [p.6]

 

As London became king of the wool export trade, forcing the outer ports to devise their own path. England’s post 1550’s pivot in that trade would follow a bimodal development: London and the Outer Ports. The rivalry and bitter competition played a notable role in England’s discovery and exploration, and London’s approach to overseas trade, the trading factory, differed radically from that used in the Outer Ports. Equally, important, London’s organizational vehicle, the joint stock corporation evolved a series of different forms, and by the last quarter of the sixteenth century they were given the title of merchant trading companies, a distinctive combination of ownership, management leadership, cargo size, business plan, and mostly because of their partnership with the Crown who issued to them their distinguishing characteristics: a monopoly of trade in a geographic region. Against this, the Outer Ports turned to privateering, the development of Irish plantations, and by the 1580’s leadership in the discovery and navigation of North America.

 

If we link increase in population with urbanization the wool trade London cluster created another dynamic: the idle poor, and a restive urban base when times were tough. That the functions of the capital, governance for example, overlapped with the restive population’ Since cloth made up the bulk of exports, and since the industry was highly concentrated, in all cases of abrupt decline in overseas demand society was faced with the phenomenon of mass unemployment …[no one] could hope ot absorb the idle labor resulting from a cessation of activity [p.6]

 

London and the nation’s chief decision-makers did not have to travel far to see the consequences of poor economic growth. The importance of overseas trade as the breakout initiative in creating jobs, prosperity, individual wealth, and more competitive relations with other kingdoms was obvious, and lent support to the Crown’s willingness to work with the successful merchants to trade across the globe—and by the seventeenth century an excellent strategy, colonization, by which it could put to good use its “surplus population”.

 

 

 

 

It also seemed an excellent policy to fill up the king’s coffers, that could satisfy his many expenses, including the Court and his favorites, and the costs of government. The Crown bureaucracies also looking out their windows saw opportunities as well, as did parliament’s M.P.s, and the rising gentry class. There was a lot going on in England during this period, many important issues and policy areas, but overseas trade, economic development is what we call it today, was never far from the minds of those who were looking for ways to create wealth and achieve visions.

 

This dynamic process underlay the political and economic transition from Tudor to Stuart in foreign affairs, but was more pronounced in trade and somewhat less so in permanent settlement. London merchants dominated the trade, and little appreciated today, the vehicle they used for overseas trade (the joint stock corporation) evolved into England’s behemoth merchant trading companies, and almost by default. The poor fit between merchant trading companies, adapting their trading factory motif, and applying it to found a permanent settlement was arguably destined not to go well—and that constitutes much of this chapter.

The vehicle of choice came in two basic versions: the joint stock corporation and the “regulated trading company” or regulated joint stock corporation. The distinction mattered much in those days, and has been featured prominently in the historical literature of the time, but both versions. served the same core purposes:  “The trading companies chartered in the period between 1550 and 1640 represented a technique whereby national government, at little cost to the exchequer [the English treasury department] could act to promote the expansion of English commerce. In fact, so successful was the strategy that by the 1580’s it was only trade with France, Scotland and Ireland that was not in the hands of a [joint stock company]company. [99] Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England: 1550-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 398-9. In fact, despite the multiplicity of other forms of business organizations that traded overseas (family, partnerships, for example) the great trading merchant joint stock corporations dwarfed all the others in distance of market, size of cargos and trade, ability to develop the foreign market, and reduce costs.

 

At this point we need to take a deep dive into the overseas commercial trade and colonization  policy-making system  that produced relevant decisions, initiatives–and implemented them. To do this it is necessary to introduce to the reader, the oligarchy-monopoly of the great merchant joint stock corporation that dominated that system: the Company of Adventurers. They enjoyed a monopoly of trade in cloth and wool—and hence controlled a great deal of everything that was exported from England. In the sixteenth century the Company of Adventurers essentially ran the one-horse economy that England enjoyed. As such it was the bastion of wealth and the centerpiece of whatever was English entrepreneurism. It dominated London, and as we shall see its politics and city leadership.

London was a Company town, with a pronounced position in the one exception to an elite dominated by a landed agricultural-manor-based aristocracy, the City merchants and their wool export trade. The 1550 pivot I have referenced thus far is a pivot in overseas trade away from the Company of Adventurers—led by a generational change in English entrepreneurs, and England’s need to provide an alternative to the up and down economy generated by the wool trade, and an alternative to the fear that trade had matured to the point that it could grow no more.

The key position enjoyed by the Company of Merchant Adventurers in growing London, was disturbed by the increasing droves of economic refugees from the countryside that were settling in England’s new urban centers. Evicted from a manor, and dispersed to seek work in concentrated urban areas, the metros’ of England, and London in particular were stressed. In London’s case, the major industry was cloth-making its export, but a dearth in other growing sectors meant the employment burden fell on cloth.

The poor souls affected were left to the streets. and jails. Fluctuations of cloth trade “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]. 

Since, urban unemployed were more apt to be concentrated geographically Supple argues “the textile industry played an almost unique role at this time” in the English economy. Its limitations became very visible, and those with resources to form their own business, ranging from “gentlemen’ victims of primogeniture, to new aspirants of the gentry merchant grouping were restive as well. An unskilled poverty class haunted the new urban centers across the nation, and the economic development need was to find opportunities to satisfy their needs for housing and food, but also to calm the rising aspirations of a new population desiring their own opportunity to make a new start. But what they encountered was a London-Company of Adventurers-Royal partnership/alliance that stifled initiative and wealth generation. As described by Phillip J. Stern this clogged up policy system

Sixteenth century England … was a franchise government in which offices and positions were both public service and private property, with prerogatives and perquisites meant to offer opportunities for social and financial advancement. For someone like [England’s 1580 North American discovery leader] exploration, predation, and plantation abroad sat at the intersections of entrepreneurial enterprise and what he called “Chivalric policy and philosophie”, but what more commonly might have been known as a “project”. Like other chartered offices and enterprises, overseas franchises could be bought, shared, sold, inherited, farmed out and financed. As they marshalled partners and investors, often including the Queen and her ministers, such projects [discovery and exploration] did not easily distinguish state [government] from individual interest, and as such were less public private partnerships than portmanteaus . Unlike their domestic brethren, however, overseas charters [the monopoly] projected their authority into places where the Crown, legally and pragmatically, had none. Territory, jurisdiction, or trading privileges abroad had to be acquired by taking it or by negotiating for it via grants, contracts, purchases and agreements with the peoples they found there. … If such models [of transaction] seemed to blur the lines between colony and commerce, finance and governance, and public office and private profit, it was because they arose from a world in which such fast boundaries had never existed in the first place. [99] Phillip J. Stern, Empire Incorporated, p. 19.

In this situation, other merchant adventurers, either members in the Company, or those drawn to other occupations and products saw increased trade as the solution to their problems and hopes. In the last half of the sixteenth century the Company because of its restricted membership and the impact of primogeniture no longer offered an avenue for future English merchant adventurers as it had previously. England needed economic growth to allow for adjusting to the changes it was undergoing; overseas trade was easily one of the opportunities to allow for such growth. It was time to move on, the cloth-based Company of Adventurers were not, and so other merchant organizations did.

 Company of Merchant Adventurers Set the Path for London-based Overseas Merchants

How did the London London merchants gain a head start in overseas trading? The answer lies in the formation of England’s first major joint stock corporation by London-based cloth merchants: Company of Merchant Adventurers. Blending a guild-like cloth industry membership with a royal monopoly to a structure with exclusive export across the English Channel to the continent,  the new corporation was, almost by definition, the first English proto-type joint stock corporation relevant to English overseas trade. The Company received its first charter in 1407; obtained its breakthrough charter Henry VII in 1496 and 1505, and Elizabeth’s 1564 charter transformed Company’s membership in the corporation into a patrimony of families that created a lock on the Company’s “board of directors” and committee leadership.

With restricted membership allowed to the Company by Elizabeth, the Company’s governance, now self-perpetuating, meant the leadership held control over the non Board Company shareholders. The upper levels of the Corporation held virtually a monopoly not just in continental wool export, but also the Company itself. Inheritance of this membership became the entry for future leaders, and rendered the Company structure a closed oligarchy dedicated to continental trade of English cloth. From that point on the London-based leadership of the Corporation incrementally placed restriction on cloth merchant in the outer ports and cities, as well as factors in he continental ports of trade which effectively shut them out of .the cloth overseas trade. While Elizabeth moderated this in the course of her reign, it did not alter a core resistance of the Company governance to entry by non-London merchants.

In alliance with the Crown in policies concerning commercial trade, and aligned with English Crown vs. Parliamentary politics, the Merchant Adventurers proceeded to dominate the political governance institutions of the City of London, placing the latter within the King’s orbit, by securing the election of its members to important positions of power during much of the pre-English Civil War period. That meant the great power and influence of London merchant adventurers associated with the corporation amassed great influence over the governance of the City of London, and the investment and finance activities of  the capital city of England during the century in alliance with Elizabeth.

The net effect, intended or not, small powerful oligarchy of London merchant adventurer families for all practical purposes marginalized overseas trade by other merchant adventurers. The exclusive focus on the Company on wool export and the Continent meant it constrained access of other to London’s wealth and investment, as well as access to the Court. The simple story is London was where the action was—but England’s general population, about four million in 1600, were in the countryside. Excluded, marginalized entrepreneurs and aspiring gentry from areas other than London had to deal with London’s size and concentration of power and institutions, but unwilling to abandon their place of origin they pursued their adventures from their homelands and dealt with London’s power as their needs required. This, of course, intensified their frustration.

Overseas trade become one of the Tudor monopolies, and a very important one at that. The heavy weight of the cloth merchants and the Company of Adventurers, however, shook the vigor out of the the overseas manufacturing, finance, trade and investment communities of England. “the comparatively primitive structure of England’s overseas trading system hindered the development of her extra-European enterprise. In the sixteenth century English merchants conducted simple bilateral trade with the Baltic and Mediterranean and Levant trades … Such a structure, which was associated with a heavy reliance upon cloth exports, gave little scope either for acquiring the specie needed for [Asia] trade or for marketing [99] K. R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement, p. 361

Colonization is not Trade and Commerce

[999] That distinction, to form a permanent settlement—what today we call a colony–lie at the center of the Virginia Company venture. As we shall discover being England’s first permanent settlement the distinction was new ground to the English, and for most of those involved with the design of the initial Company. The change of mission it appears was a distinction that may not have mattered greatly in their calculations. Professor L. H. Roper explains this assertion by his own that “English people [in this period] interested in overseas ventures always regarded Asia as the ‘brass ring’”/ Asian commodities, particularly pepper, was a lucrative trade that not only satisfied English demand, but was a key re-export as well. The real problem that confronted its designers,  the most “intractable, was the distance involved by any route chosen. [999]

Nevertheless these overseas adventurers set sail and began fifty years of exploration, trade overtures, expeditions, and formal ventures led by the great trading merchant adventurer companies. With little to no experience at first the “adventured on” and garnered what they could from their quest to reach and trade with the Far East. In time, the notion of colonization took shape. 

What the new emphasis on markets [trade/commerce] did for American colonization was to restore its plausibility and underline its desirability. Jacobean organizers of projects [would tell] prospective participants [settlers] that men would be planted [settled] and the gospel spread in the New World by way of ‘merchandizing and trade”, rather than by conquest, and denied that there was any similarity in ‘ends’ or ‘managing of means’ between their ventures and those of the Elizabethans. After ‘some planting and husbandry’ the Americas could supply not only England’s needs but those of other nations as well. 

[999] That distinction, to form a permanent settlement—what today we call a colony–lie at the center of the Virginia Company venture. As we shall discover being England’s first permanent settlement the distinction was new ground to the English, and for most of those involved with the design of the initial Company. The change of mission it appears was a distinction that may not have mattered greatly in their calculations. Professor L. H. Roper explains this assertion by his own that “English people [in this period] interested in overseas ventures always regarded Asia as the ‘brass ring’”/ Asian commodities, particularly pepper, was a lucrative trade that not only satisfied English demand, but was a key re-export as well. The real problem that confronted its designers,  the most “intractable, was the distance involved by any route chosen. [999]

Nevertheless these overseas adventurers set sail and began fifty years of exploration, trade overtures, expeditions, and formal ventures led by the great trading merchant adventurer companies. With little to no experience at first the “adventured on” and garnered what they could from their quest to reach and trade with the Far East. In time, the notion of colonization took shape. 

What the new emphasis on markets [trade/commerce] did for American colonization was to restore its plausibility and underline its desirability. Jacobean organizers of projects [would tell] prospective participants [settlers] that men would be planted [settled] and the gospel spread in the New World by way of ‘merchandizing and trade”, rather than by conquest, and denied that there was any similarity in ‘ends’ or ‘managing of means’ between their ventures and those of the Elizabethans. After ‘some planting and husbandry’ the Americas could supply not only England’s needs but those of other nations as well. 

Advocates of colonization, however, ‘had little idea what the successful commodity or commodities might be–wine, sugar, naval stores received the most mention–they could draw attention to current trade developments which supported their argument“. When this statement was made, it was two years before Rolfe reached Virginia and settler-investor recruitment after the 1607-9 setbacks collapsed was in its prime. That prompted in 1608-9 significant reforms and reorganization of the Virginia Company, infused by new leadership; the spokesperson was part of it. The Company restructure resulted in the issuance of a second charter and a somewhat redefined relationship with the Crown. The spokesman for the newly restructured Virginia Company intention was to remind prospective new settlers/investors of how much experience had been accumulated over those last half-decade and that they would be part of a future success.

“What a novice our nation was [at that time] with these [sixty] yeeres, in case of forrane trade, not knowing whence too fetch, nor which way to transport, but only to some mart or staple towne within two days sailing and that was counted so great a matter then, that therefore they were called ‘Marchant adventurers’ … [then it was only] “the great hulkes of Italie’ and the ships of other nations which brought in the rich goods and fed us …”. But as he pointed out things had changed In 1609 England had control of its own merchandising, but “much remained to be done ‘before this little Northerne corner of the world [England] could be ‘the richest Store house and Staple for merchandizing all Europe’. The overseas settlements were portrayed as being a crucial part of the general effort that was already clearly under way to expand English commerce [99] Carole Shammas, “English commercial development and American colonization”, in K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair, the Westward Enterprise: English activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480-1650 (Wayne State University Press, 1979, pp. 170-1

Those words, written in a 1609 Virginia Company pamphlet, by spokesman, Robert, later to be referred to as ‘Alderman’, Johnson, son-in-law and second-in-command to the new Virginia Company Treasurer & CEO, Sir Thomas Smythe. Johnson played a major role in the Virginia Company through its charter suspension in 1624 and the death of Smythe in 1625.

What can be suggested is at late as 1609 the post-1550 pivot in English overseas trade experience instilled confidence of future settlers and investors that the task was noble, legitimate, to some degree regarded as a success; by 1609 England’s confidence resulting from that series of initiatives and ventures had brought England a long way from its almost comical start a half century earlier. “Johnson could see the turning point as occurring in the Elizabethan period”. [99] Carole Shammas, “English commercial development and American colonization”, in K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair, the Westward Enterprise: English activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480-1650 (Wayne State University Press, 1979, pp. 167. If so, the post-1550 pivot was viewed as not only critical to England’s success in the seventeenth century, but the foundation on which future success could be achieved.

Advocates of colonization, however, ‘had little idea what the successful commodity or commodities might be–wine, sugar, naval stores received the most mention–they could draw attention to current trade developments which supported their argument“. When this statement was made, it was two years before Rolfe reached Virginia and settler-investor recruitment after the 1607-9 setbacks collapsed was in its prime. That prompted in 1608-9 significant reforms and reorganization of the Virginia Company, infused by new leadership; the spokesperson was part of it. The Company restructure resulted in the issuance of a second charter and a somewhat redefined relationship with the Crown. The spokesman for the newly restructured Virginia Company intention was to remind prospective new settlers/investors of how much experience had been accumulated over those last half-decade and that they would be part of a future success.

“What a novice our nation was [at that time] with these [sixty] yeeres, in case of forrane trade, not knowing whence too fetch, nor which way to transport, but only to some mart or staple towne within two days sailing and that was counted so great a matter then, that therefore they were called ‘Marchant adventurers’ … [then it was only] “the great hulkes of Italie’ and the ships of other nations which brought in the rich goods and fed us …”. But as he pointed out things had changed In 1609 England had control of its own merchandising, but “much remained to be done ‘before this little Northerne corner of the world [England] could be ‘the richest Store house and Staple for merchandizing all Europe’. The overseas settlements were portrayed as being a crucial part of the general effort that was already clearly under way to expand English commerce [99] Carole Shammas, “English commercial development and American colonization”, in K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair, the Westward Enterprise: English activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480-1650 (Wayne State University Press, 1979, pp. 170-1

Those words, written in a 1609 Virginia Company pamphlet, by spokesman, Robert, later to be referred to as ‘Alderman’, Johnson, son-in-law and second-in-command to the new Virginia Company Treasurer & CEO, Sir Thomas Smythe. Johnson played a major role in the Virginia Company through its charter suspension in 1624 and the death of Smythe in 1625.

What can be suggested is at late as 1609 the post-1550 pivot in English overseas trade experience instilled confidence of future settlers and investors that the task was noble, legitimate, to some degree regarded as a success; by 1609 England’s confidence resulting from that series of initiatives and ventures had brought England a long way from its almost comical start a half century earlier. “Johnson could see the turning point as occurring in the Elizabethan period”. [99] Carole Shammas, “English commercial development and American colonization”, in K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair, the Westward Enterprise: English activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480-1650 (Wayne State University Press, 1979, pp. 167. If so, the post-1550 pivot was viewed as not only critical to England’s success in the seventeenth century, but the foundation on which future success could be achieved.