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.

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]

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.

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 transition away from what was traditional to, and characteristic of, the medieval polity that emerged from the William the Conqueror’s conquest of England in 1053 into something else–a something else we often call in the contemporary world “modernity”. Such a transition, especially in its very early stages is treacherous, and to associate it to what would emerge literally hundreds of years later as “modern” is something I very much wish to avoid.

Transition and its effects on Virginia Company policy-makers

The point I wish to make in this introductory background is that England was “in motion”. It was not static, nor was it in radical change, but it was in process of evolving into something that was not strictly medieval. This module’s focus topic, the pivot of England into overseas global trade and commerce, even leaving aside colonization , is by its nature a serious break with England’s medieval system. For example, the East India Trading Company and its sister great trading company, the Virginia Company, were a cutting edge departures from a medieval economy into a global mercantilist economy–an economic system which many contemporary historians and commentators do not hold in high regard, but nevertheless was an unchangeable reality Virginia Company actors could not ignore.

During the Elizabethan era England hitherto an agricultural country emerged from the shadow of her previous isolation and inferiority and took her stand as an equal and rival among the older Continental powers. Barred for the moment from the Portuguese route to the Indies, and from the Spanish route to the Antilles and beyond, she realized that her future upon the seas lay in entering the field of competition and contesting the claims of others …. [for example] the powers of admirals at sea were considerably extended, and their jurisdiction placed on a definite statutory basis. Trinity House, [ a private] company of seamen authorized to look after sailors, pilots, and navigation, was incorporated in 1514   … the records of the High Court of Admiralty begin in 1524, and those of the Navy Board in 1526… During the remaining years of the century, a powerful merchant marine and efficient [but small] war fleet was brought into being. 
Trade followed the flag, and the shipbuilding activities of the outports, accompanying the growing commercial connections with that of the Continent culminated in the ambitious designs of the Merchant Adventurers of London and their monopoly of the woolen export business. [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: England’s Colonial and Commercial Policy, Vol. 4 (Yale University Press, 1938, 1964), p. 1

It was passing through a stage of transition, during which it was influenced less by those in official authority than by private individuals  engaged in colonial and commercial enterprise, whose experience and advice … often guided the government in its effort to chart the policy of the administration. England’s commercial policy was slow in the making; it never reached the stage of exact definition … In its relation to the colonies in America, it was never an exact system, except in a few fundamental particulars. Rather it was a modus operandi for the purpose of meeting the needs of a growing and expanding state. (p. 2) The first settlement of America … was but the culminating phase of those great voyages of discovery which had engaged the attention of at least six of the maritime powers of northern and western Europe (p. 3)  [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History: England’s Colonial and Commercial Policy, Vol. 4, p. 2

That it will further evolve into industrial-finance capitalism complete with colonies, puts on more complexity and scale, but adds moral concerns regarding public and private benefit and opens the door to negative contemporary reactions and paradigms that, on the whole, distort our understanding of decisions made in that time period. Understanding what the Virginia Company was in its day, what tasks were crucial, what pitfalls that its design attempted to avoid, what interests were being served is a prime goal of this history. I cannot burden sixteenth and seventeenth century policy-making with contemporary morals and beliefs.

Chastened by recent emotions and fears drawn from the Black Death period, yet fearful that unless they took action England would be left behind in a new competitive and war-prone mercantilist world, and pressured by population increase and urbanization and their effect on their policy system and their own personal well-being policy-making in this long-past period defy any summation by historians, novelists, myself and the reader’s.

I know I constantly hint England was transitioning into a very early modern world–but the future English civil war makes that a very premature assertion. A great deal was broken in the 1630’s, in particular, and the 1600 mindset itself would transition. Indeed, a Tudor 1600 policy system would become a Stuart policy system in 1603. Still a transition is a transition, and England of the post-1550’s felt times were a changing and were reacting in their individual ways to them..

To defend that position it is important I acquaint the reader with how and why the Virginia Company was created and tasked with a mission that reflected the times of its birth and life span. Having said that, I pull the reader back and remind them of the first paragraphs, the Virginia Company was created in a period of transition. The actors and institutions involved know they are  breaking new ground, but that does not mean they understand the consequences of what they do for future generations. To the extent they do think of the future they understand it in terms of their present and past experience.

I add, James I, a Scot, the first Stuart king, who brought with him his own version of medieval, and the Virginia Company would be seriously affected by Stuart policy differences from the Tudor system. His world view also shaped the design and operation of the Virginia Company. In either dynasty, the Company was constructed by institutions and policy actors that are fundamentally medieval in their style of politics and economy, nevermind society. So I add to our complexity list, the Virginia Company was designed by two distinctly different royal dynasties (Tudor and Stuart).

The relevant policy-making institutions that noticeably shape the design, mission, and operation of the Virginia Company include, in no order: England’s royal sovereign, the court bureaucracies and their policy-making processes (which include patronage, farming, concessions and monopolies), a rising, but inexperienced Parliament, an evolving class structure in the midst of a Protestant Reformation, the English guild system, the Company of Merchant Adventurers, and an evolving local-regional government system that had been marginalized by a mega-city capital, London–with its own power bases that enjoyed close and fiscally useful Crown resources. 

Finally, since I deal with England’s entry into this mercantile competitive economic era in the normal course of this introduction, I will only add that England was not engaged in a space race to the moon, but rather a trade and commerce race with its European competitors, a race in which England was behind, and severely disadvantaged. Colonization was a weaponized strategy that lent substance and durability to the overseas trade and commerce system important to success in that race.

Dreams of empire were articulated by many, the practicality of such a goals are easily discounted by hindsight: the Thirty Years War that began in 1618 would play a role equivalent to the future English Civil War. We can’t underestimate the then contemporary reality that there was no reasonably detailed map of the globe that existed. English discovery, still ongoing through to the mid-eighteenth century, was a time consuming and hazardous affair. By 1607 English discovery yielded little more than an outline of the coastline, and a glimpse into the native populations.  In the period of this module, we are still in the Age of Discovery and in chapters to follow.

If some were dreaming of empire, just what or who that empire would consist of was not known in any serious detail. England would spend a half-century looking for a northwest passage to the Far East–a passage that did not exist. Technology and medicine sucks in this period; both play major roles in success/failure of colonization. Colonization would turn out to be a major enterprise with many consequences, but that was a story that would play out a century later, and historians of our earlier period, I believe, would do well to emphasize the tenuous beginnings it had in the sixteenth century.

START not redone–needs rewrite 

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

What is not appreciated about the period (post-1550 to 1605) during which England pivoted into global overseas commerce and began to consider founding colonies in North America is its policy-making process and predominant policy-makers were still lodged in English traditional medieval closed approach to policy-making. English society and its economy was clearly opening up to new proto classes, and the policy area global overseas commerce was a decided break from England medieval foreign involvement, the policy process that delivered the Virginia Company to America’s doorstep was really a struggle between and among elites that sought to secure the benefits from this trade by removing competition and by isolating participation of others not of their ilk.

The Tudors persistently relied on and delegated the private sector to conduct operations in this policy area, mostly because they didn’t have the resources or the skillsets and their policy priorities were elsewhere . But as Professor B. E. Supple asserts in the early pages of his description of the post-1550 English economy was that it was dealing with change that had already disrupted the medieval economy and presented new problems to be solved. To him there were “important dislocations in England’s economic structure” citing “the importance in the manufacture of textiles at home and of woolen exports in overseas sales as a whole, and on the other, in the fact that the English economy of the time was not such as to generate the type of trade cycle so familiar in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”. [99] B. E. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England, 1600-1642 (Cambridge at the University Press, 1964), p. 2

Say it another way, he’s alluding to the power of different oligarchies present in the policy process that froze or clogged the existing system and seriously inhibited further change in trade and commerce that was so necessary for economic growth sufficient to satisfy demand created by population growth, and break up geographic and distribution blockages that allowed such growth outside of the London “metro” area, thereby allowing more to share in the benefits accrued by such change.

By the early, 1500’s. these cloth/wool companies had located around England’s key port cities, most of all London whose cloth/wool cluster dominated not only the metro economic base, but extended its organizational tentacles into the country’s wool-cloth cluster as well. The cluster’s ebbs and flows injected volatility in prosperity/recession and disrupted the kingdom’s workforce that triggered relocation of the workforce not to ignore disturbing anomic riots such as “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. Lack of a social  safety net meant the unequal distribution of wealth produced horrible living conditions, horrific housing, and and desperation in the underclass.

The realization by many elites that badly distributed prosperity and an economy that could not produce sufficient number of jobs, because it rested on one industrial sector called attention to the lack of products other than cloth and wool which importation could introduce into the English economy increasingly called into question the previously dominant economic strategy of import substitution suggesting strongly it was counter productive. It was also increasingly clear the traditional English economy could not meet demands from a competitive mercantilist Europe, prone to war and colonial empires.

Innovation and entrepreneurship were suppressed and restricted to a very few elites that had successfully accessed their corporate oligarchy in guilds, which itself than seized ahold of City/town governance,  and accessed national policy-making through their use of structures like the guilds, obtaining local or royal offices, acquiring concessions, and, in overseas trade, incorporating joint stock great merchant trading companies with monopolist trade charters from the Crown.  The system that emerged exhibited an overpowering tendency to create a network of internal oligarchies within each corporate and public structure involved in both policy and in its implementation. Mired deep within the still traditional and aristocratic elite social structure saturated with inequality that dominated most every feature of the English Tudor policy system, England by 1550 needed and wanted to compete, produce and grow, but simply could not easily rise above its clogged policy system to achieve some sort of economic break out,.

Closed policy-elite stagnation ensued and the issue of the time was how to break into the policy process and access effectively the decision-makers that allowed for change. Taking advantage of this opportunity, the Crown was able to siphon off what it viewed as its share of the profits generated to support its priorities and lifestyle,  Through its definition of partnership, its monopolistic charters regulated but also defined and legitimized the policy making and implementation of those it chose to support. Robert Ashton in some frustration is forced conceded that the process, lacking a strong Parliament in particular, “ 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” [99] Robert Ashton, the City and the Court, 1603-1643 (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 18

How did all this happen? In the sections below several key background factors, dynamics and institutions that were involved in both growth, and several key institutional structures involved in the transition and change from traditional medievalism to the 1550 pivot (guilds, towns and cities, and the formation of the Company of Merchant Adventurers, and the joint stock great merchant trading companies) settled themselves into the policy process of overseas trade and commerce. 

[999] Guilds, Towns and Cities Emerge from Enclosure and Develop during the Plague–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 In essence Unwin describes guild development that preceded the pivot had evolved and over more than a century had lodged itself into the heart of English town and City of London policy-making. 

Cloth, wool, textile guilds, having a sort of first advantage, achieved scale, access into local and national policy, and exercised considerable influence in policy-making. 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 also wealthy merchant. In London, the latter would in time gain leadership of the guild transforming them into a “livery” guild that ordered and ran the affairs of one sector; by 1515 twelve such livery guilds were placed on a list issued by the Lord Mayor, a list based primarily on its wealth and exercise of power. These twelve livery companies occupied a compelling position over the policy making of London, as well as guild members of their chose profession. The Clothworkers Livery Company was included on that list. [999]

the Wool and Cloth Custer

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.

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 which became important economic leaders, that carved for themselves advantages and for their guilds privileges for 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.

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.

By the late fifteenth century guilds reached a point they encountered obstacles such as foreign (Dutch and Flemish 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. 

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. 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 say it another way, the guild’s top 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.

The result was a hierarchical series of decision-making oligarchies set into place within the cloth and wool; the top levels, what we would call the board of directors and its executive committee, developed into the chief decision-makers of guild affairs, and those with most impact in the guilds external relations .Using municipal corporations (city governance) 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. Also, the rise of livery guilds, with membership based on larger merchants and distributors led to accumulation of great wealth by a very few, and then the perpetuation of that wealth by developing family dynasties that controlled the companies through generational succession. 

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. Each created their own bureaucracy and network of oligarchies. But cloth and wool took this one step further: they exported their products to Antwerp and from there to northern continental Europe. 

Succinctly, cloth/wool companies and guild membership amassed great wealth and stability which they levered to access Crown/sovereign support. 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. The cloth industry elites occupied through its relevant guilds considerable power over London economy, society, and economic life. 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.

A great deal of that power and wealth originated through cloth and wool trade to the northern continent and those powerful merchants involved in it decided to cement their own position and standing through the incorporation of a second autonomous overlapping layer of elites that controlled its exports. They did this 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.

Company of Merchant Adventurers

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. 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. When the cloth merchants and associated guilds formed the first merchant trading company, the Company of Merchant Adventurers, they formalized and set apart their export to northern Europe, based on a trade monopoly given to them by several kings [see below]. This charter was important for many reasons, but foremost was that it gave to the London-based cloth and wool livery guilds the power, access, and resources of the capital city–placing enormous pressure and competitive burdens on those wool and cloth companies and guilds located around the Outer Ports of the country.

Wool 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]

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.

With the power emanating from their privileged monopolies London-based cloth merchants pleaded their case to the nearby central royal government that “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.

Formation of the Company of Merchant Adventurers

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 already existing export 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, “the Company of Merchant Adventurers” 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. The Company of Merchant Adventurers was England’s first great merchant trading company.

in essence, cloth and wool export was one-way, i.e. no imports of note in the return trip. This one way trade gives us insight into the mentality of the cloth and wool overseas: they remained at heart cloth and wool manufacturers and merchants. They were not committed to overseas trade as a profession or national goal, but rather as key if not essential to the cloth and wool profitability and their wealth. The nonexistent import trade as far as the English economy was equivalent to one hand clapping.

No new products entered England, and England’s commercial trade consisted only one product. Only raw cloth/wool was exported; offshore European companies and their guilds refined and produced the finished product for sale in northern Europe. 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. Again the self-serving and narrow perspective of the English cloth and wool elite layered upon the already clogged Tudor English policy-making process.

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 of the corporation’s headquarters function was lodged in Antwerp, and a number of its prominent players resident there as well.

Little to none of this spilled over to non members of the trading company. Other non Company English companies, cloth or wool and otherwise, 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. Profits in this export stayed in the coffers of a very few cloth elites, and were not available as discretionary investment for other priorities and opportunities. English Innovation and multi-product import or export to most other markets was stifled.

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

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. (T)he 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.

 

 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, which his son, Thomas inherited. Thomas Jr 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-making—and to the sovereign.

By 1550, this trade already occupied such a compelling economic position in the English economy that it overwhelmed other trade opportunities, and England was almost by default drifting into to a one product export overseas trade. At that point England’s non wool/cloth continental trade was limited to some Levant and Iberian peninsular ports. Supple concluded these small volume exports injected lifeblood into local economies, but London was still 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]

Add to this the cloth and wool merchants wanted more “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.

Let me summarize the first macro background overseas commerce and colonization dynamic that shaped the design and operation of the Virginia Company flowed from the enclosure movement into the rise of the wool and cloth cluster that intertwined with the English guild and town-City development to join with the Crown in a partnership of sorts that led to the export of wool and cloth to northern Continental Europe and the incorporation of the first great merchant trading company, the Company of Merchant Adventurers.

Important byproducts of that dynamic was the use of the joint stock corporation and its bias toward oligarchic internal structures that prompted elites to dominate its governance, encourage its entry into the governance of London,  and to centralize the wool and cloth export principally in the London metro areas but also around several Outer Ports of England. With its roots taking hold in London this wool and cloth one product overseas commerce export found its niche in the Tudor governance “system” and settled in to enjoy its benefits.

Dedicated to the prosperity of that small wool and cloth elite, it focused almost exclusively on the one product export, loosing touch with England’s need to develop an economy sufficient to the task of stimulating economic growth that could meet the demands of its increasing population and the needs of the Tudor state in competition with the mercantile countries of Europe. That left England in the 1550’s with many elites not able to participate in the one product export, seeking to expand the economy by extending England’s commerce to other products, not just in the northern Continent, but literally across the globe–than engaged in a dramatic and exciting age of discovery.

Simple as that may be, however,(that is a joke–so laugh) there is more background to discuss.

To be sure the enclosure movement  unleashed other dynamics, such as the destabilization of the manor medieval class structure, it also created a more mobile population, much of it either evolving into a gentry and artisan middle class that settled in what became urban areas, along with an increasingly desperate underclass displaced without skillsets suitable to non-agricultural pursuits. Then came the Black Death that reduced England’s population by at least half.

Rising from its ashes, England stabilized during the fifteenth century and incrementally increased its population and with its increased mobility being less tied to agricultural manors this new population drove an urbanization movement that continued for five hundred years. Like the wool and cloth dynamic the urbanization dynamic too had its complicated effect on the post 1550’s pivot to global overseas trade, commerce and colonization that led to the Virginia Company. To the relief of the reader, this second dynamic had more direct effect on overseas trade and colonization than the wool and cloth dynamic whose principal role was to produce the economic stagnation and foster inefficient and often corrupt Tudor governance.

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

If one is going to make a case that population growth 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.

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, 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. While I am reluctant to break out with “happy days are here again in merrie olde England” by the time of Shakespeare’s England (1564-1616) recaptured much of its population base and looked for opportunities to grow economically.

The concentrated time period, between 1500 and 1550 alerts us to likelihood considerable individual geographic and social mobility created both opportunity and anxiety, 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 on the poorest elements of the population. High hopes and desperation abounded. Above all, a sense that change was afoot, and fear among some that traditions would be abandoned. Such transitional periods as this fed into, and no doubt fostered religious movements of that period.

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 the  post1550’s period, the reign of Elizabeth in particular, 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. 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.

London’s elite mentality stressed trade and commerce principally to the Far East, India and East Indies with colonization marginalized as a means by which “surplus population” can be exported, and/or the natives converted to Christianity.

While nearly all in the early decades of this period wanted trade and commerce primarily, geography and the concentration of power, wealth in London thrust the non-London and southwestern coastal ports in other directions. Reaching the Far East meant discovering a “northwest passage” thru today’s Russia or artic Canada. London’s geography pointed its advocates toward Russia or the Levant (Ottoman Empire), and that’s where they went. English western coastal ports, however, called loosely the Outer Ports, used their location to involve themselves in Ireland and northern North America, principally the Hudson Bay and Artic Canada.

Mimicking Spanish and Portuguese colonization of the southern North America, the West Indies and Caribbean, and Central America northern South America, the merchant adventurers of the southwest coastal ports headed off into areas left alone by the Londoners. The change of direction altered the business plan of the western adventurers. Privateering, raids and rival settlements were included in their plans, and with the tension and the 1585 war with Catholic Spain escalated their overseas plans to an aggressive anti-Catholic resistance. Of necessity, all of these tendencies required an aggressive and sustained period of discovery and exploration to make any of it possible and effective.

So without intending consciously to do so, I have wandered into the second thread, by our reckoning, the most important of the two we discuss; the effects of England’s post 1550 population increase which triggered unbalanced urbanization caused by London’s population explosion transforming it into England’s version of a sixteenth century “Mega City” which itself led to the economic and political marginalization of West County Outer Ports. That marginalization was naturally not well received and it began a rivalry with London that quickly expressed itself into counter approaches in England’s post 1550 overseas trade and commerce pivot that involved different roles and path to England’s colonization. That rivalry set in motion what turned out to be the fundamental dynamic that shaped the structure, organization, and leadership of the Virginia Company. Those competing visions went on to affect directly the commencement of England’s first colonization initiatives in 1606.

Unbalanced Urbanization: London as a Mega City, Marginalization of Outer Ports

London in 1500 had about 50,000 residents. (Estimates of its 1400 population, the low point in the Plague era were 40,000-50,000 down from estimated 1300 population between 80,000and 100,000). 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. Population growth did not stop; in 1700 it grew to about 500,000, in 1750 reached 700,000. The 1801 census recorded over one million. Ballpark figures or not, this is a serious increase in population. This explosion was not matched–or close to match– by any other English city. 

If so, the half-century previous to 1550 witness a population explosion the perhaps as much ad doubled London’s 1500 and maybe more. During the half-century (1550 and 1603), Elizabethan years, London apparently doubled again, likely more. Arguably, Paris, Europe’s largest city of the time as about 150,000 to 250,000; it is estimated to have grown to 275 to 350,000 by 1600. France was much larger than England (14 to 16 million in 1500,18 to 20 million by 1660)(England was estimated at 4 to 5 million in 1500, and  4 to 5 million in 1660). Despite Paris’s initial lead, London’s growth rate, probably tripled London’s population from 1500 to 1600.  London was catching up to Paris. This incredible growth given England’s rather static growth supports our contention that England’s initial population explosion translated into a London explosion that turned it into a rapid growth mega city. It also sheds light as to the fate of England’s other urban areas (which we will discuss shortly).

Such consistent rapid growth had its fair share of negative consequences, such as London became the visible realization of England’s vastly unequal distribution of wealth. It appears that sooner or later the England’s economic refugees wound up in London creating  large concentrations of poor and the underclass. That the impression the upper English elites took away was fear of their volatility, and the likely fostering of crime. From Henry VIII to Queen Elizabeth and later King James I riding through their capital city could not miss the visible change in England’s social disruption of this period.

Desperate housing conditions were evident and the reality of neighboring mixed neighborhoods meant disparate living conditions were very apparent to rich and poor alike. Aside from supporting my assertion these were times of change in England, it raises the probable question English elites asked themselves as to how to deal with London’s population explosion, an explosion that would continue into the English civil war and centuries after. From our policy-making perspective this visible day-to-day witnessing of the social change explains a great deal why Crown policy elites, and parliamentarians coming to London placed economic development high on their agenda, and magnified the inequities, inefficiency, and simple corruption of the Tudor policy system.

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. Another AI question came up with four major London-based mass anomic riots: the Evil May Day of 1517 (which we will shortly mention), a series of smaller anti foreigner “they are stealing our jobs and taking bread from our mouths” riots and murders from 1560 until the Apprentice riots of the 1590’s, the 1592 Southwark riot. We could also mention the 1601 Essex coup which generated anomic London reaction. Anything that threatened job creation or the availability of jobs struck visible interest from London’s residents.

During this period [of our overseas pivot] there were major internal changes within England which altered perceptions about both the New World and colonialization of settlements, and which ultimately made possible the establishment of a network of settlements in America [p.151] … 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

As to non-London population centers of the period, however:

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 [1600] 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

Bristol was England’s third largest city of the period (York 2nd, Plymouth 4th)–both Bristol and Plymouth were destined to be major players in the Virginia Company drama.  The huge demographic gap that opened up in England stimulated these Outer Ports to either check the rise of London, which was impossible, or find an economic development path that worked for them. 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. Plymouth’s population, ranging from 3500 to 5000, still large relative to other English cities, caused her to join up with Bristol in a common effort to enhance their position vis-à-vis London.

They were forced into this alliance because a good deal of London’s elite merchants were still rapped around the wool and cloth export and held strong doubt that increased overseas commerce was the best strategy to create English jobs. They, however, were often pressed by the Crown and its elites, like Henry VIII’s Thomas Cromwell to pursue overseas trade opportunities, as well as reducing import duties to stimulate import of key commodities; foreign merchants set up shops in London, and over the years all this policy generated was anti-foreigner riots. As we shall se during Elizabeth’s years, she was open to discovery and trade ventures from both London and the Outer Ports.

Accordingly, the reader shall see modules filled with all sorts of grandiose merchant trading companies being incorporated after amazing ventures by their founders, a good deal of incredible exploration expeditions across the globe including Russia, Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and one colonization effort (Roanoke) laced with anti-Spanish privateering, but none of these produced a volume of trade sufficient to tackle England’s economic difficulties. Ironically, I talk of a post 1550 English pivot to global overseas trade, but the reader now is aware that pivot opened up a the Far East, North America, the Levant, and the West Indies from which future commerce (and empire) evolved–but which yielded little in terms of imports or exports in this time period. England did not acquire such volume until the days when sugar, tobacco and spices arrived in the 1620’s. The longstanding need for imports in volume is one reason why Virginia found in London a ready market for Rolfe and his wife Pocahontas.

As we shall see, however, Elizabeth’s helped seldom with financial aid, but rather the granted trade monopolies, and charters that provided her with revenues and often with favorites to help her finance her court and lifestyle and to not sell what little gold she had. She too was often inclined to support “English import substitution”, or English companies and workers  producing the desired imports. This seldom mentioned London’s less than enthusiastic response to overseas trade was an important factor in explaining why England finally turned to colonization in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Indeed the pivot attained what success it did chiefly with the launching of the East India and Virginia Company great merchant trading companies, the former two years before her death, and the latter three years after.

What is remarkable, however, is the development of a small group of  key merchants, gentry, and aristocrats, some from London, Sir Thomas Smythe being foremost, who did support the pivot, and were involved in the incorporation of the merchant trading companies, and who maintained an interest in the West Country exploration, discovery and colonization. That Smythe was CEO of both the East India and the Virginia Company, he also assumed top leadership positions in the other merchant trading companies of this period. Smythe had his hands in everything–and if anything that caused his undoing and likely his poor health.

The Elizabethans belonged to a society which was still uncertain about the role of trade in the economy. In the past few decades [she asserts] the work of economic historians has discredited the idea that the Elizabethan period was a time of great expansion in trade. Instead the English nation was essentially ‘straddling the fence’ in commercial matters throughout the Tudor period … Gentlemen on the whole did not specifically connect trade with the national or their own posterity while the Crown only became interested when trade seemed to be responsible for a gold outflow or [English] unemployment, and at such times protection of cloth manufacturing tended to have priority over protection of English traders. [99] Carole Shammas, “English commercial development and American colonization, 1560-1620′ in “the Westward Enterprise: English activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America 1480-1650 edited by K. R. Andrews, N. p. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair (Wayne State University Press, 1979, pp. 162-4

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. 

Consequences of London: the Mega City: 

Mostly raw wool/cloth was exported. English finished cloth products were not exported but sold domestically. Bristol, and many other cities and regions developed their own cloth/wool production capacity, guilds, and domestic trade, but it was London entrepreneurs that early on also sent it to the continent. London companies with access to the continent expanded rapidly such that over a few decades wool and cloth exports developed into an London-based industry cluster that included factories, port. The propensity to concentrate cloth manufacturing and export on the eastern side, along the English channel, was pronounced, facilitating a Company of Adventurers-led  transformation of the industry into 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. 10s, and ships—and close relationships with continental merchants and agents (factors).  Cloth export, primarily a one way export only concentrated in Antwerp, the primary entrance point.

Over time a European agent-factor nexus developed that allowed London and eastern-sited cloth merchants to 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. That concentration of exports prompted  the Company of Adventurers to locate its headquarters, offices, and even member residences in Antwerp.

…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

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.

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

See K R Andrews pp 62ff-about 70

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. 

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.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

As will become apparent to the reader, the period of the post-1550 pivot in English overseas trade and commerce is nearly coincidental with the reign of Elizabeth I. Her ascension to the throne in 1558 followed Mary I who began in 1553 and died in 1558. Mary in her effort to restore Catholicism to England married Phillip II of Catholic Spain, and overseas empire principally fixed in Central America and the West Indies, but not without serious interest and relationships in the Far East. The union of Mary and Phillip, on the whole, was not, and is not, viewed as successful or positive in regards to English economic development in particular. When Elizabeth took the throne she described England, in her own words, as “a sad state”. 

Alison Weir, a noted English historian of the Tudor period, elaborated on this sad state, and, for my purposes it does introduce the reader to an England which Americans in particular and non-English are not familiar. “Reduced to the status of a minor power on the edge of a Europe riven by religious and political strife, and a prey to the ambitions of the two major international monarchies, Spain and France. England and Spain were technically allies against France, but the reestablishment of Elizabeth of the Protestant faith in England … could not but cause dangerous discord with King Phillip who saw himself as the leader of the European Counter Reformation … France was torn by civil and religious warfare, yet the French king Henry II had not only occupied Calais [the last continental possession held by England, taken only months before the death of Mary I], but was also maintaining a threatening military presence in Scotland [in 1558 Mary “Queen of Scots” married to the future king of France]”. [99] Alison Weir, the Life of Elizabeth I (Ballantine Books, 1998), p. 2

While England was on the outskirts of Europe, it was small, not well populated relative to her competitors, and relatively poor with an economy unable to provide financial resources for the Crown and insufficient for her defense. “There was no money in the English treasury because much of it had gone to finance Philip of Spain’s foreign wars; its chief defences and fortresses were ruinous and had war come, it could not have defended itself“. A fiscal wreck in 1558, England “was in debt to the tune of L266,000–an enormous sum in those days“. This financial weakness explains much as to why England decentralized its governance in this period, developing local governments such a cities, towns and counties, and relied on the private sector and the landed-aristocrats to subsidize Elizabeth’s initiatives  and enlarge upon the government’s power and leadership in this perilous time. Overseas trade and colonization was very much entrusted to non Crown entities. [99] Alison Weir, the Life of Elizabeth I (Ballantine Books, 1998), p. 2

In this regard the English economy of 1558 was not positioned to deliver growth sufficient for Elizabeth (and England’s) needs and ambitions. “On the domestic front”, Weir argues, “life was not easy. England was not a wealthy country and its people endured relatively poor living standards. The landed classes–many of them enriched by the confiscated wealth of former monasteries–were determined in the interests of profit to convert their arable land into pasture for sheep, so as to produce the wool that supported the country’s chief economic asset, the woolen cloth trade. But the enclosing of the land only added to the misery of the poor, many of whom, evicted and displaced, left their decaying villages, and gravitated to the towns where they joined the growing army of beggars and vagabonds that would become such a feature of Elizabethan life. Once the religious houses [of the Catholic Church] would have dispersed charity to the destitute, but Henry VIII had dissolved them all in the 1530’s and many former monks and ouns were now themselves beggars” [99] Alison Weir, the Life of Elizabeth I (Ballantine Books, 1998), p. 3

Resting upon that single pillar, the wool (and cloth) industry, sustained much of England’s domestic economy in Elizabeth’s first years. As we shall demonstrate that industry, while dependent on the production of raw wool and cloth that was exported to northern Europe, and domestic wool and cloth that was more refined and finished served the English consumer with at least one source of pride and personal consumption. “At home, as trade flourished, so industry expanded” was the consensual path to growth on the time, and the expansion of overseas trade and commerce across the globe was the strategy of English economic development. As with the wool and cloth industry its domestic sophistication rested with its import of creativity in the form of Protestant  refugees from the continent who “introduced lace-making, silk weaving, engraving, needle-and thread making and other skills into England, while the woolen cloth industry continued to thrive and bring prosperity to an ever-widening area“.

The development of guilds in this time also created a supplemental-alternative path to individual prosperity through skills training. “The Statute of Apprentices of 1563, by making long indentures mandatory, helped to bring stability to industry and farming.  Yet commercial success had its debit side. The pursuit of wealth and the frantic race to acquire land and power meant that most people cared only for their own interests, and not for the public good, or the needs of those weaker than themselves. It was a greedy and avaricious age, corrupt in many ways … The rich lived well [99] Alison Weir, the Life of Elizabeth I (Ballantine Books, 1998), p. 9

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

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 size, internal composition, and configuration of evolved dramatically. By the last decade of her reign, Elizabeth encountered the restyled Parliament’s first serious efforts to shape policy—a pushback from royal dominance that initially centered in large measure on her use of monopolies, their effects on the economy, and the increasingly observable corruption and abuse exercise of her authority that often resulted. She retreated from this opposition by pledging less use of them. Her soon to follow death, however, meant  It would be the Scot James I that would have to deal with the new Parliament, which he did in 1604 to his considerable surprise from which he never seems to have reconciled himself. That inability to work with Parliament didn’t work out well for him. While there were several “third rails” of policy in the Stuart years that poked parliament and royal conflict (the half-sleeping bear of policy-making, religion was certainly one) but the one most salient to our topic was “monopolies”. [999]

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

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.

“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.

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 the question: how and why did Elizabeth’s policy-making process 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 fiscal and financial viability of the corporation that developed and managed the colony depended on exports from the colony as the chief, if not only, mode that could finance the hugely expensive, time-consuming permanent settlement colony. That was the situation the Virginia Company–and Sagadahoc–found themselves thrust into. My sense is this was at some level recognized by early Company decision-makers, but what they missed was two fold: one, that a colony’s exports had to be developed–a reality that made the trade factory model inappropriate from the get go. In the trading factor natives were a partner and the traders concentrated on trade not resources development or in-country logistics. The second issue the reality of developing an export base for different clusters that had potential to be export seems not to have been seriously considered during the Smythe period, and Sandys, who obviously had a better feel on this question, failed to realize the time factor–a prerequisite that meant he had better find some way to live with Smythe and his allies. Ending the corporate civil was was his only option in that regard.

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.

In essence, although England in the Elizabethan-Stuart period was still encrusted with profound medievalist institutions, beliefs and practices,

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

 

1550 the decade the Pivot Begins

 

 

 

[999]

the Elizabethan Policy System

 

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]

 

 

the Poor

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.

 

 

Colonization is not Trade and Commerce

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

[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.