England’s Transition into the European Mercantilist Age: the Virginia Company’s Inheritance from England
Introduction and Statement of my Argument
This book is mainly about the English and their part, or presumed part, in the discovery of North America, and its eventual exploitation and settlement. …The treatment that follows is not in the form of a detailed connected narrative and analysis, but rather an exposure of successive points of interest, information or synthesis which exemplify some of the problems of documenting and understanding a process which we know even today very imperfectly … combined with attempts to formulate some general statements, which do not pretend to cover exhaustively anything like the whole field [of relevant approaches] … It cannot be too strongly stressed that the last word has not been said to any aspect of early North American discovery. …Without being neglected [the study of the discovery and settlement of North America] has been looked at more as a preface to the history of the North American nations than as history itself–a necessary prelude to be skipped over lightly and rapidly before the writer gets down to his main task of developing a historical theme in detail for a later period. This book is offered then, as a small step forward in knowledge and understanding in an extensive area of study, providing an introduction to certain problems of content and method. David Beers Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481-1620 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), Forward, xvii…xx
Making My Historical Approach Relevant: Virginia and Massachusetts Siblings of the Virginia Company—
While I by no means argue the Virginia Company “determined” Virginia’s future to this day, I do believe the period of the Company’s founding, not only presided over its birth, but “bent the twig” of its political, social and economic growth in ways that still persist into the present. Using the metaphor of this book, the Virginia Company not only planted the young tree, but bent it in ways that shaped the direction and course of its future growth into what she is today. Implicitly, the reader can assume that I regard the colony-state’s birth as a major factor in its subsequent history, and for this reason we have to understand the Virginia Company better than we currently do. This module-chapter begins that narrative by identifying and explaining the inheritance from England’s great pivot to overseas trade, commerce and colonization (1500-1605) as they were detailed in the First Charter of 1606. That Charter was the master agreement behind the public-private partnership that was the basis of the Virginia Company’s mission.
For example, Virginia’s basic unit of local government was the county. Currently Virginia has 95 counties (and 38 independent cities considered by the Bureau of the Census as county equivalents). Only Texas and Georgia have more. So Virginia is third. Massachusetts–also founded by the Virginia Company–has 14 counties, several of which are virtually non functional. Only two states have fewer (Delaware has 3, but Connecticut and Rhode Island have none; instead, they use regional councils or towns respectively). The national average for the fifty states is 62. I might add the Virginia birth was in 1607 and Massachusetts 1620,1629. Question: Why the difference between Virginia and Massachusetts? Virginia today: 8.8 million, Massachusetts, 7.2
Virginia and Massachusetts, both founded by the Virginia Company, are on opposite extremes of the use of American county governments? This history will not ignore that question, and will address the question of “why are American states, so similar in some respects, so different in others”. One reason is that their “births”, their initial founding as a colony, vary in time and how the “mid-wife” performed. In regards to the Virginia Company as midwife, I will make the case that the Company, operating during a transitional period in English history, treated Virginia and Massachusetts quite differently. In Virginia’s founding, the Company tried took a more active role in the founding–and failed miserably. In the case of Massachusetts, the settler-in-residence government made its own path and in its founding was largely self-governed.
Benefit of acknowledging the Importance of the Virginia Company
The Company, incorporated in 1605-6, was a creature that emerged from the period of England’s pivot to global trade and commerce–a period which England was still medieval in its structure and values–and the Company, its leadership, its Virginia-based governance, and its its settlers, reflected those values, structures and practices particularly in its founding of the Virginia colony. The Virginia Company may have been structurally, skill set-wise. and attitudinally lacking the capacity to successfully found and sustainably operate a colony in that time period. Virginia, a generation before Massachusetts, was managed in different times a generation later, by a reorganized and restructured Virginia Company under the same king, James I.
The failure of Virginia Company and suspension of her Virginia charter–but the continuance of her Massachusetts and Somers Island charters–suggest the story is more complex. Rather the chronology of events and initiatives suggest England’s overseas pivot period was part of a larger English transition that continued at least until the civil war–and necessarily into the Protectorate and Restoration periods as well. Americans awareness of early Jamestown constitutes the great bulk of what they know of seventeenth century Virginia history.
In that narrative of the first Jamestown decade lies most of what they know and think about the first successful colony of the English in America–and in that perspective the role and legacy of its founder, the Virginia Company of London, has little place and no consequence on the future of the colony after its 1624 charter suspension. For me at least the profound irrelevance of the Virginia Company has been as much the result of the fog of long past historical periods, but the chronic and persistent need of historical commentators to discuss only what is relevant to their historical theme used for their paradigm of American history. Whatever paradigm commentators may put me into, my purpose in these chapters-modules is less a paradigm than an accurate as I can make description and analysis of the Virginia Company’s role in Virginia’s birth and impact on the future course of Virginia’s history. If I intend to assess and analyze the impact of the Virginia Company on the colony-state of Virginia’s future development and evolution. my first task in this history–and hence the task of this chapter–is to explain, at least introduce–what the Virginia Company is, and from where and why did it originate. We cannot simply start our story with the arrival of three ships on the James River and 104 persons.
This focus on early Jamestown/Virginia, however, essential, does not provide Americans with an balanced perspective of early Virginia colonial history, nor does it offer a perspective into how Virginia fit into long-term American themes and historical path-trends. The early years of the seventeenth century were a discontinuity in Virginia’s early colonial period, and the various paradigms that were developed from it were not useful and were mostly discarded by future historians; instead they blamed symptoms of the Jamestown problem, not core problem–which lie in England with its lack of capacity, an unawareness of wilderness realities, and experience to plan and organize a permanent settlement in North America. Specific symptoms such as poor location, Indian relations, factionalized leadership and constant infighting, mistaken-ridden settlement plan that sought gold and extractive metals rather than producing foodstuffs, poor settler recruitment, disease from swamps causing death rates that destroyed any hope for a sustainable and productive economy, exceptionally bad weather, and an inability to develop sound relations with the neighboring tribes and which over time led to the Great Massacre of 1622.
My focus on the Virginia Company and its design and organizational structure, leadership, and in particular, the First Charter which was totally inadequate to found a permanent settlement and which Virginia survived only by the timely arrival of De la Warr in mid-1610 sensitizes readers that the various specific factors usually cited can be viewed as symptoms of a larger problem: lack of capacity in 1606 of the Company to produce and lead the establishment of North American colonies. This module-chapter begins with my critique of the lack of realistic planning, the newness of using the “modified” joint stock company developed from experience during the pivot and dynamics associated with the early Stuart transition–the Virginia Company being the prime example. As described in our module concerning the great merchant trading companies formed during the overseas pivot, these merchant trading companies were built around both exploration/discovery and commerce-colonization associated with trading factory commercial goals and modus operandi, including mission definition, investor base, and financial time frames.
Suffice it to say, with exceptions, most historians commenting on Virginia matters previous to 1609 (a second charter was issued and approved in June 1609) have given the First Charter with implications as to how it affected Jamestown a wide berth. A close examination reveals it was not a pure proprietary corporation nor a pure joint stock. Whatever legal status it was, the First Charter was fabricated to ensure the participation of James I in the project, and was thus customized to suit his requirements.
The inability to exert meaningful control over Jamestown events and had serious impact of the young colony. The consequences of the instructions issued to the colonist and the quality of governance by the Jamestown resident Council widely neglected, and even outright ignored. Much of the blame for what followed has been placed elsewhere. As an example provided below, a recent and excellent book of the corporations that built British colonialism treats the First Charter Virginia period. These issues form a foundation for my approach to the heritage and inheritance of the Virginia Company as the incorporator and the first administrator of the colony.
We shall discuss this is much greater detail in a later chapter. but is included in this intro because despite being an organizational leper, indeed in my mind because it was an organizational leper, it is this fabricated corporation that formally governed and managed during the years 1606 through late 1609; in addition because of a 1609 shipwreck, communication of the new charter with a new governor did not reach Virginia until the spring of 1610. The intervening period is usually known by Americans as the “starving year”. To say it another way, the 1609 Charter, with all its reforms and changes, did not practically assume Virginia site control until mid-1610.
As a consequence of dynamics unleashed due to the overseas pivot period which we are presently starting to discuss, the design of the Virginia Company was greatly affected and the Virginia Company’s First Charter reflected reaction to them by the advocates and the policy decision-makers that devised that Charter. The consequences that can be attributed to these effects were so disruptive to the course of the Virginia Company’s overall Virginia heritage and the development of the colony/state that the reader should be made aware of this early on in our description of this topic. Succinctly put, the Virginia Company in the course of her governance of Virginia was never able to reverse the effects of the first five or so years of her administration. The other colony founded by the Company, Sagadahoc in Maine, collapsed and was recalled in 1608. Virginia lingered on and found a way to survive this terrible start, but it only began to seriously reach breakout growth in the late 1630-1640’s.
Opening Observations and Setting Expectations–
Probably most Americans think of the Virginia colony as an English experiment by an English business company; that is inaccurate. The Virginia Company was a privately financed venture, but her mission and the organizational structure of its joint stock corporation reflected her true public-private partnership essence. Its First Charter board of directors were appointed by the king, and it met in the court of James I. Conventional American perception of a business venture badly fits into the Virginia Company whose practice of “business’ was one that was appropriate to a medieval society, economy and polity.
Elaborate on the Jamestown Foundation’s summary of Jamestown
Still the comparison with entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and his Space X corporation which launches its rockets from a facility owned by NASA competing to land on the moon (or Mars) fast if not first, the reader will instinctively realize its core public-private mission and organizational structure. The similarity is amazing and that should guide us in our understanding of what happened in Jamestown in 1607.
Instead of a galaxy far away, this module centers on the Elizabethan overseas global pivot in commerce, trade, and colonization– a past era that began more than five hundred years ago. For that goal to be effective this module must “beam the reader back” into an age more medieval than one might imagine. The half-century long English pivot into global trade and a commercial power, with the purpose of transforming the underdeveloped largely medieval English economy, jump-starting it from almost “scratch’ into a competitive European mercantile economic base. A transformative project that emerged from the overseas pivot was the Virginia Company.
Not only is this out of the usual skill set of most Americans, but raises the issue of whether any American cares about it. Whether or not anyone cares, the real founding of Virginia in particular–and Massachussets as well, was conducted by the Virginia Company. The American history that followed can be best understood by having an effective frame of reference of what that Company was and how and why it fared as it did. A colony’s birth is crucial in understanding its childhood and later years. That is what this module is about, and it may well be a challenge for most.
This period of English transition from late medieval to the very beginning of early modern is when England more truly began its breakout away from the European continent into the as yet undiscovered and largely unknown world that lay beyond the “edge” of that world that Columbus shattered eight years previous. His (and Spain’s) discovery pushed England after 1550 to start developing meaningful overseas trade and commerce. The overseas pivot continued well over a century but by the end of Elizabeth’s reign and the ascension of Stuart James I (1603), advocates for a proposed Virginia Company were banging on James I’s door to bring him onboard to English North American colonizations.
The initial chapter-modules focus on the Elizabethan period when England seriously went “global”, the Tudor-Stuart Succession, and James I incorporation of the Virginia Company. Her mission to develop commercial trade links would address English needs to satisfying explosive population growth demands while providing resources to compete with an emerging European mercantile economic and political pressures. Launching English overseas and commercial trade initiatives were both proactive and reactive to these policy pressures..[999]
The key to my argument that England 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 characterized Virginia’s colonization as “an experiment”. I disagree. The Virginia Company and its trade and colony-building mission was less an experiment than a venture into the dark side of the Atlantic–or the moon for that matter. England had not meaningfully upgraded her medieval policy system to the point that it possessed capacity to produce policy decisions of sufficient quality, or to develop maritime technology sufficient to cross the Atlantic and build a durable settlement, or design, defend and manage a permanent settlement thousands of miles across the Atlantic.
These tasks were simply dumped into the Company’s mission statement and royal charter and off the ships went. They might as well have been sailing off the edge of the earth for all they knew. For example, a task assigned to John Smith while he was in Jamestown was to sail up the North American coastline and its interior and make a map. Those who were chosen to lead the new-founded colony had no clear idea where they were going, nor what they needed to do after it set up shop there. This is a serious problem for American historic observers because the Virginia Company heritage was its earliest years under the direct and indirect First Charter governance. This problem is so serious that special attention by Americans interested in this topic warrants description in this module-chapter.
As such the global overseas pivot was another example of the Tudor use of state institutions, but it also entailed the involvement of England’s private sector to whom Elizabeth delegated responsibility for day-to-day policy implementation–and even more important–the financing of the initiative itself. Today we call these examples of public-private partnership; the great trading companies and their monopolies personified this joint initiative. The Virginia Company was a great trading company entrusted with England’s first seventeenth century founding of North American colonies.
This module provides background to my readers on the English experience, aspirations and capacity that contributed to the creation and subsequent operation of the Virginia Company. To most Americans this “thing” called the Virginia Company is a rather odd duck. Many come away with the notion the Company is a commonplace, if greedy, business company seeking profits– which to a limited degree it is but In real life, however, it was a private public partnership with the Crown incorporated to establish colonies in North America on behalf of its investors but mostly for the English crown. Whatever it was, or was supposed to be, it didn’t work out. In 1624 King James I suspended its Virginia charter, and after short interlude the Crown took charge and assumed responsibility for the management and operation of the Virginia colony. Some would argue that didn’t work out very well either–but that is another story for another time.
Post 1500 English Pivot to Overseas Global Commerce: Origins of the Virginia Company and the Age from which her inheritance to Virginia were drawn
More Medieval than Modern–Resiliency of English Medievalism as it affected the overseas global pivot
As the reader will discover, I place the Virginia Company’s time period as way more medieval than early modern. That will be a major theme in this module and one that is central to one of my initial arguments that England was not yet ready in 1606 for colonization which is in part a backdoor observation that England’s first ventures were still in its medieval period. Later colonies such as Pennsylvania in 1681, seventy-five years later than Virginia, had a much easier go of it and were more effectively established. Jamestown comes so early in English history that Henry VIII’s daughter played a major role in the North American venture may remind the reader that the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolution started at about the same time; Martin Luther died in 1546, Henry VIII 1547, and John Calvin 1564.
Let’s say it another way: Jamestown was founded in the last years of the medieval era. There is seldom a precise date for transformative period such as these, it fair to say we are in the last days of medievalism and the very first tentative years of early modern–in fact the two overlap. That is an important observation in our understanding of the Virginia Company and its Virginia colony. America is older than most Americans realize. Looking back four hundred years plus, contemporary readers unknowingly lose touch with background drivers of change, and the emotions and anxieties they generated.
Mid sixteenth century decision-makers were still feeling the effects of a little-known enclosure movement that continued to disrupt landed aristocrat-serf manor economics and population mobility. More obvious was the memories and the still current reality of black plague pandemics. After killing about one half of England’s population, population growth by 1500 was making a comeback that accelerated effects of enclosure population mobility, and distorted and complicated England’s economic growth and general prosperity. Finally, the steroidal growth of London left the remainder of England, particularly, its non-London “outer” ports frustrated and determined to find their own niche in this period of transition. Naturally, this division impacted post-1550 adventures into global overseas commerce and colonization.
On top of this, the tendency of Tudors to use and expand England’s crown powers and scope of action heavily impacted the fiscal burden and budgetary politics of the period and generated a strong and persistent need to encourage more economic growth to keep up with population growth and aristocrat-gentry pressures on crown policy-making. The rise of the merchants combined with their narrow band of wealth accumulation, based a good deal from a one product export to northern Europe, further disrupted and fragmented crown policy-making. Few Americans, maybe some English, would realize the Virginia Company had so great an inheritance from the period immediately previous to its incorporation–and few do appreciate its future impact on the economics, society, and politics of its Virginia colony–and later Massachusetts.
While the need for more global trade and commerce was obvious by the 1550’s, the aggregated disruptions and policy fragmentation of England’s impacted her initial steps away from medieval economy and politics, leaving the overseas policy area to others, mostly private merchants and gentry who pursued overseas adventures for either the wrong reasons, medieval honor and warfare, or the pursuit of wealth by an elite few merchants who held the resources needed for the pursuit of overseas trade, commerce and colonization. Finally, as we shall
As we shall discover, England’s post 1550 growth was unbalanced and uneven. London grew into a mega city that dwarfed all other cities and regional centers. The one-export overseas trade (raw cloth and wool to northern Europe) did not take a lead in the new overseas trade expansion, but stood aside and marginalized other advocates and drivers of overseas trade growth. A clear bifurcation between London and the Outer Ports exerted considerable impact on the overseas trade strategies followed by England in this period previous to the incorporation of the Virginia Company. This bifurcation had a very serious effect on the Company’s design, its implementation of its mission, and its likelihood of success.
Persistence of Feudal Practices, Behaviors and Values into the Pivot Period
J. H. Elliott reminds us that “the English, like the Spaniards were influenced in important ways by the Spanish precedents, Yet in the same time … had their own priorities and agenda, which themselves were shaped by historical preoccupations, cumulative experience and contemporary concerns. The aspirations and activities of both the planters of Jamestown, and the conquerors of Mexico can be full appreciated within the context of national experience of conquest and settlement, which in both instances, stretched back over many centuries. For historically Castile and England were both proto-colonial powers long before they set out to colonize America. [99] J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, pp. 1
In some way or other, the Virginia Company inherited elements, aspirations, and aspects of the period , blending them into a non-coherent whole, sending it out to do what they had not yet figured out or came close to understanding, Since then historians and their students have taken it and selected from it matters and observations that reflect their values, times, and aspirations–to the point that today little of the Virginia Company’s heritage seem useful or, in many cases. so unimportant they are ignored , smushed into sentences and a paragraph or two, and put to service tasks helpful to understanding a perceived future, but far less faithful to the actualities of the period itself. This history, as imperfect as it shall be, attempts to reverse that past by reconstructing a more reasonable version of the lived Virginia Company.
Accordingly, this history needs to offer a brief description of the more comprehensive post 1550 period that includes not only the transition from the feudal system, but also the resilience of that feudal policy system as it affected the North American colonial experience. The first example for this will be to assert there was quite of bit of the traditional feudal approach that still existed during the post-1550 pivot and in the first decades of the American colonial “experiment”. Conquest of non-English territories, it will be observed, is a clear and important pattern in the development of American colonization.
The formation of relatively high-powered mercantile entities was a new type of colonial experience for the English, and for most other European nations as well … Yet it is clear that during the Middle Ages less commercialized areas such as England were accustomed to practicing a very different type of territorial domination, one which reflected their own feudal form of organization. Lords or knights who subdued native populations on the Continent [in France or Holland, for instance], in the Near East, and in Ireland lived off the tributes and dues and seldom attempted to integrate the economy of the conquered land with that of the homeland for the benefit of the latter.” [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), p. 152
Shammas calls to our attention that the overseas expeditions that characterized much of the English Elizabethan years did not follow the traditions that developed out of the wool and cloth one product export by the London merchant-led Company of Merchant Adventures. Not only did they not use the great merchant trading companies, they were not merchants at all. Rather, they were usually aristocratic or well-placed gentry who persuaded Elizabeth their expeditions would serve interests of English foreign policy, while simultaneously reaping rewards for her and them.
Their model of such expeditionary adventurers were little different than that employed by the earlier Spanish conquistadores as they carved out Spain’s overseas empire a few decades earlier. Shammas asserts that “by 1500 England had developed both a fairly complex mercantile community [merchants] and a moderately centralized government, [but overseas] expansion at first was more of a reaction to …[the adventurers] and Elizabethan attempts to claim New World land, like the early Spanish conquests in the America’s, continued in many ways to bear the marks of the type of domination prevalent in earlier centuries.[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), p. `52
Restated more bluntly, much of the post 1550’s pivot was most accurately characterized by English overseas (Atlantic) activities that were expressions of traditional medieval warfare, the long-standing Tudor exercise of royal foreign affairs, and the medieval exercise of aristocratic values and behavior by aristocrats or gentry with aspirations. In many instances they were carried out by Elizabeth’s favorites, Dudley for example, or by others who aspired to be her favorite (Raleigh, for example), and still others, such as Gilbert and many others as seekers of adventure and fortune that were as personal as they were English patriotism. Reflecting this, Shammas further asserts that
Clearly New World colonization appealed to a very narrow segment of the Tudor population. Merchants played a limited role in these early colonization efforts, as did the country squire, the religious dissident, and the ordinary laborer. Those who became enthusiastic about claiming American territory in this period were the same men who pushed for action against the Spanish, wanted the Crown to extend protection to the Low Countries [Holland], and fought in Ireland and France, men such as Walter Ralegh, his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert [et a] … Some quickly lost interest in America and went on to further martial adventures, but others actually organized expeditions staffed by friends from court and country, relatives, servants, and seamen.
Whether well-placed or hangers-on, these gentlemen tended to frequent the court and chose military rather than administrative tasks as a means to advance themselves … as the Crown furnished neither enough opportunities nor the kind of service to satisfy the ambitions of these men, they organized private expeditions to Europe, Ireland, and America. They grasped at opportunities as they emerged and there was no real pattern in their choice of destination. Some went to Ireland before they became interested in America while others did the reverse. The object of this form of expansion was the acquisition of an area which would provide economic rewards in the form of revenues, tributes, rents and offices that could be parceled out to followers …
The most appealing territory in the New World, however, was … elaborate schemes for taking over [copying] the ready-made empires of Spain: for example Ralegh in founding Roanoke, evidently hoped to use it to attack Spanish colonies. Later in his second New World enterprise, Ralegh hoped not only to conquer Guiana, but also continue and take over the rest of Spanish South America … most of them were looking for Indian [American] cities and they usually had a particular place in mind [i.e. el Dorado, Cibola the Seven Cities of Gold] when they began to organize their empires pp. 154-5 [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), p. 153
Shammas is not alone in this claim that medieval values and practices continued into the overseas pivot and colonization. They come at in by comparing it to the Spanish approach in colonization of the New World. Historians, such as J. H. Elliott, see differences between Spain and England in this period, but a major similarity was caused by their shared “national experience of conquest and settlement … which stretched back over many centuries. For historically, Castile and England were both proto-colonial powers long before they set out to colonize America“.
Medieval England pursued a policy of aggressive expansion into the non-English areas of the British Isles, warring with its Welsh, Scottish and Irish neighbors, and establishing communities of English settlers who would advance English interests and promote English values on alien Celtic soil. The English, therefore, were no strangers to colonization, combining it with attempts at conquest which brought mixed results. Failure against Scotland were balanced by eventual success in Wales which was formally incorporated in 1536 into the Crown of England…. Across the sea the English struggled over the centuries with only limited success to subjugate Gaelic Ireland, and ‘plant’ it with settlers from England …The reign of Elizabeth was to see and intensified planting of new colonies on Irish soil, and in due course a new war of conquest.” That the Irish colonization was her first overseas priority, next to the managing of Spanish relations, and that they both consumed much of her limited resources certainly affected any colonial aspirations she might have had to the New World. [99] J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 16-7
As Elliott would argue that adventurers such as Gilbert and Raleigh, having been previously deeply involved participants in Elizabeth’s Irish colonization and plantation-building, had done so not as planters but military leaders. While they made have built an estate house, they acted more consistent with “undertakers” who recruited settlers for homesteading plantations as a reward for military service. This complicated, if subtle, distinction alerts us that Irish colonization in this period demonstrated the continuity of English medieval pattern in their colonizing, rather than a settler-agricultural homesteading more consistent with the predominant American experience.
The introductory background described thus far has discussed what I call was England’s first transition that carried her away from her previous medieval system. England was “in motion”. It was not static, but nor was it in radical change. To employ a bad metaphor–a practice I love–the egg that held the medieval system had been cracked by the enclosure and the plague. Some content of the egg had been squeezed out, but by no means was the omelet (of English modernity and the formation of the British Empire) had only barely started.
Profoundly tied to the past, relying much on its mentality, value system, and tried and true practices of a past England closer to the War of the Roses (or certainly Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s Lord Chamberlain), than those Oliver Cromwell, or John Pym (who would figure prominently in the colonial operations of the Virginia Company) the pivot period political and administrative culture did little to sensitive the Company leadership or its settlers to what lay ahead. During the period of the overseas global pivot, liberal thinkers, like Francis Bacon, Edward Coke, and the Earl of Salisbury (Cecil) were still on board supporting positions of James I, and his son, Charles I as they attempted to ride the waves of change in the first decades of the seventeenth century.
Many American historian commentators have read into their comments on this period a as evidence of forward, if not progressive democratic propensities, the English adventurers of this period, Humphrey Gilbert for example, are seriously medieval in their approach to the New World. Better examples of the pivot period are any of the three characters that went by the name Thomas Smith (all knighted, by the way). Even Edwin Sandys, about whom I shall make the case, were cultural residents of the late medieval than early modeve. Massachusetts settled a generation after Virginia’s birth, had its characters like George Downing, who matured into ” a perfidious rogue”, and civil war spymaster whose success prompted the naming of the street on which the English Prime Minister calls home. Far removed from the thought of Rousseau or Locke, or from a Parliament that had matured into a formal democratic party-oriented path to democratic-like policy-making, their policy views relevant to founding a colony followed medieval precedents and aspirations. who settled in Boston in 1632 and was one of Harvard’s first graduates. Downing moved on to capture three of the four regicides of Charles I.
Hence, as the medieval pattern was applied to Jamestown, most blatantly in the imposition of the military colony in 1610(ish), it could be passed into the American experience as the “ancient” settlers were granted land for service in Dale’s gifts post 1612. These new free holders identified with their past indenture holders differently, or to a lesser degree, than new arrivals during the later teens. It is likely, in my opinion that this distinction also “played into” the very rapid spread of tobacco planting in the early to late teens.
The First Transition
I:In the Beginning was the Enclosure Movement, Plague, the Formation of the Wool-Cloth Cluster-Industry Sector, and the Rise of London as England’s 16th Century “Mega City”
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 initially by a few aristocrats hoping to increase their wealth and position by restricting the use of their manor’s land. Previously, the manor land had been available to serfs for common use such as firewood, grazing livestock, and hunting. With enclosure by the manor lord, these acres were demarcated by enclosing them with hedges or fence after harvest. Once enclosed the lords used the enclosed area for their sheep herding, which they their either sold or used manor serfs to make wool/cloth raw material or sale of meat.
F. J. Fisher’s succinct definition that ‘Enclosure–i.e. the suppression of common grazing rights–by agreement was a feature of the age,” but he also acknowledges 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. This is because the devastating Black Plague followed in the fourteenth century. The plague radically altered the manor’s class configuration and in so doing almost revolutionized its economics.
Overtime the enclosure movement created several groupings from serfs that were dispossessed from the confiscated land: The first group, and the most fortunate, were those serfs that were able to purchase land from the lord and thus became free holders, i.e. former serfs. A second group led to artisans and trading merchants who usually moved off the manor and gravitated to larger settlements that were infused over time with increased population until they developed into an urban center. The third group, those that remained serfs, either abandoned their manor and headed for wherever they could find a living to sustain themselves and their households.
England than had three other drivers of change, urbanization, class mobility, and geographic population mobility, that arose from the enclosure movement. Each driver interacted with the others and without intention or planning, England was infused with sustained drivers of change. With increased population mobility less tied to agricultural manors new population drove a new urbanization movement that continued for five hundred years. Having said this, the Black Death hit England in June 1348, spreading to London in September, and advancing through the Isles thru 1351. This initial burst is estimated to have killed about one-third of the population. In the following decades the plague returned at intervals that persisted into the seventeenth century–for example the plague returned to London in 1603-4, immediately previous to the incorporation of the Virginia Company. As one would expect the Plague disrupted England and Europe and that tested the sustainability and continuity of the medieval systems hit by it. It also wreaked havoc on families, personalities, attitudes, expectations and the mental health of all.
How hard was England hit? Not easy to estimate; England had no formal census until 1801. Testing out Google’s chat AI, it came up with the following–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 1348) 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. After 1500, however, a dramatic change erupted: by 1550 the population estimated at 4 million. increased by 1600 to an estimate that ranged between 4.1 and 5 million. Other estimates place the population as high as 5.5 million by 1650. This is the period discussed in this module, and it is a half-century previous to the incorporation of the Virginia Company.
The reference made often in the literature regarding the Company refers to a “surplus population” which given the huge population increase of the period reflects a larger more pressing and complicated context than is conveyed in the early Jamestown period literature. In any case. in the century and a half after 1500 more an estimate three million increase from a population base of 2.2 million by 1650. The increase is by 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 increase discretionary income as a means to finance investment in England’s infrastructure and to provide resources to compete effectively in a rising European mercantilist age is more understandable. Also understandable is the rise of an underclass, and the incredible development of London as an exploding “mega city” that generated considered urban rivalry by England’s smaller urban areas. [999]
[999] 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”, it is reasonable to expect by the time of Shakespeare’s England (1564-1616), the country had recaptured much of its population base and looked for opportunities to grow economically.[999]
The expanse of time during which the enclosure played out compels a reminder that its definition and the positions taken on it vary across the time periods. In the beginning the cry of those affected negatively was “depopulation” and the focus was on the lot of the disposed serfs. By the time of Henry VIII, and certainly Elizabeth, however, given the changes that flowed from it and the political environment of the time, agricultural innovation and an increase in food and textile production provided offsetting perspectives; finally, instead of sheep herding, mining exploration and an extractive mineral cluster had added to its repertoire and demonstrated enclosure’s ability to develop clusters that attracted investment by wealthy entrepreneurs. Our Thomas Smythe (Virginia Company CEO) inherited his father’s (Customer) mining investments and continued his efforts.
3. 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 about 40,000-50,000, down from an estimated 1300 population between 80,000 and 100,000. By 1550 estimates indicated London grew dramatically after 1500 (a range of 60 to 120%): 80,000 to 120,000. In 1600 London’s population doubled to 200,000, and it doubled again to 400,000 by 1650. From 50,000 in 1500 to 200,000 by 1600 means a 400% increase over the century discussed in this module. London’s population growth did not stop; in 1700 it increased to about 500,000, and in 1750, 700,000. The 1801 census recorded over one million. Whether or not these are ballpark figures, this is a serious increase in population–which in its early years was as unsettling as comforting.
[999] Alan Taylor cites that “During the sixteenth and early seventeenth the rural people suffered increasing displacement and unemployment as their aristocratic landlords adopted a program known as enclosure …. Probably about half the rural peasantry lost their lands between 1530 and 1630. … The new poor gravitated from the rural villages to the market towns and seaport cities, especially London, which grew from 120,000 people in 1550 to 200,000 in 1600, and 375,000 in 1650. A sprawling and frightening metropolis, London became notorious for filth, poverty, plagues, fires, crime, and executions. A city of extremes, London also hosted in expanding commerce manifest on the riverside docks, as well as displays of aristocratic splendor and power at the royal court. The growing numbers of unemployed and underemployed reduced the wages of that employers had to pay. The growing population also bid up the costs of food and housing, depressing the already bleak living conditions of the poor (pp. 121-2 [999]
This explosion was not matched by any other English city. For all practical purposes population growth excluding London were minimal. In England it seemed all roads led to London. How did this compare to other European mercantile capital cities? Paris, Europe’s largest city of the time, had about 150,000 to 250,000 residents in 1500; it is estimated to have grown to 275 to 350,000 by 1600. France, however, was much larger than England: estimated to be 14 to 16 million in 1500, and18 to 20 million by 1660. England, on the other hand, 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 to quadrupled its population from 1500 to 1600, and England’s non-London population essentially stagnant. I am reluctant to push these AI estimates beyond the obvious; London clearly became England’s dominant population center. This incredible London growth, given England’s rather static growth, supports our belief that England’s initial population explosion translated into a London explosion that turned it into a rapid growing “mega city”.
There are several reasons London did so well relative to the other regional centers of the country; one important driver was the growth of its wool and cloth cluster, which by 1500 was already exporting to northern Europe. If one wanted a job in England, London’s only major national manufacturing cluster was all she had to offer. Unfortunately, the cluster was pockmarked by its ebbs and flows in sales and employment and simply was not able to handle population growth of this magnitude. Such consistent rapid growth had its fair share of negative consequences.
Excepting the export of English raw cloth and wool to northern Europe, English overseas trade and import was underdeveloped when the global overseas pivot commenced in the 1500’s. English elites recognized that overseas trade and commerce was the best and most effective strategy to grow the economy and provide prosperity and innovation that would create jobs for an increasing population. 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 mission to colonize North America. With little to no thought given to the change in its mission, to establish North American colonies, the changes which today we might call “the democratization of capital for overseas investment”, a new investor base was deemed eligible to purchase ownership shares in the Company
London developed into England’s most visible example of her vastly unequal distribution of wealth, i.e. inequality. It seems that, sooner or later, England’s manor refugees wound up in London, creating large concentrations of poor and the underclass. Obviously, as England’s capital city, London and its suburbs were home base for English elites, London’s concentrated underclass was hard for them to ignore. The impression upper English elites took away was their understandable fear that underclass volatility that constituted a threat both to their safety and England’s stability; associated with that was the perceived link with crime. None of this was lost on English royalty of the period: from Henry VIII to Queen Elizabeth I and then the new Stuart King James I all it took to realize these threats was a ride through their capital city.
Periodic anomic events sprinkled through the sixteenth century serving as a consistent reminder that England was truly in a period of transition, and unless its economy could finance a path out for these distressed areas and their residents, with jobs for instance, and unless that economy could satisfy increasing consumption and housing needs, there was trouble ahead. More to the point, public safety meant job creation and quality of life. A quick review of London’s riots reveal that four major London-based mass anomic riots occurred during the sixteenth century: the Evil May Day of 1517 (which we will shortly use as an example), a series of smaller anti foreigner “they are stealing our jobs and taking bread from our mouths” riots and murders that constantly occurred from 1560 until the Apprentice riots of the 1590’s, and the 1592 Southwark riot. We could also mention the 1601 Essex coup which generated anomic London reaction that directly threaten Elizabeth. Job creation or the availability of jobs struck visible interest from London’s residents as well as from its elites.
London’s condition provided motivation for English elites that economic growth should receive high priority and that their interest in finding relief from England’s social disruption was therefore timely. 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 perceived corruption of the Tudor policy system. The East India and Virginia Companies were a prime beneficiary of this timely economic development background crisis.
As always, employment was the preferred solution. The ebbs and flows of England’s only major economic manufacturing cluster, wool and cloth, was the City’s chief employer. By 1550 it was obvious that it alone could not provided consistent and sufficient jobs and this meant economic development, job creation by developing new sectoral clusters led to the equally obvious need to make products to satisfy domestic consumption and employment, while exporting those which enjoyed overseas market success. Overseas trade and commerce as a job generator, and the best candidate to raise the poor’s standard of living, and also to satisfying consumer demand or a growing population. If Americans in particular are looking for core motivation for their colonization and for the Virginia Company, these are the key underlying needs hoped for–not simple profits for its investors.
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 ….
Outside of London, however, the story was quite different. English 1600’s non-London urban demography 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
B. E. Supple asserts the non-London countryside, towns and outer ports “principal economic role “lay not in manufacturing but in finishing and distributing, in marketing and arranging supplies of food and raw materials …The shortage of capital … kept standards of living at, or below, a level today associated with underdeveloped or backward economies ”’ deprived of the economics of large-scale operation”. [pp. 2-3]. Squeezed into their own countryside, provided little discretionary income that at its best sustained resident’s existence, and little more. Dominated and surrounded by an agricultural economic base with an inadequate transportation network, and a poorly developed logistics sector serious advantage derived from overseas trade did not permeate into their geography and spark change. All London could provide them was cloth and wool which was the only craft sector of scale that could be found in these small centers.
Supple notes “the growth of London was in itself a potent factor stimulating regional specialization and hence interregional dependence … The growth of the London market exerted pressure on the resources of remote areas as well as those of home counties …. England remained nearer to the fifteenth-century mould than to the nineteenth” pp. 4-5. The chief exception to this being those areas which had generated a small but functional cloth and wool manufacturing, a manufacturing that served the region’s domestic economy and was ill-tied to export.
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. London-based wool ad cloth merchant elites were content with their one-export economy, and were either opposed or indifferent to a global trade expansion.
This left the Outer Ports to proceed on their own. But cloth and wool export, even if dominated by London metro, did allow another small and concentrated cluster to function (and the with the future war with Spain) grow; shipbuilding, spurring a network of assorted rope, timber, iron-mongering, tools, and sails manufacturing existed in the larger outer ports, which also provided services to fishing, defense, and a workforce (sailors) to man the ships.
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 and policy-making consumed by mega city problems; the mega city being a threat to national stability and prone to anomic violence; the effect of the mega city on other urban and regional centers, however profoundly it upset elites in those geographies, found it hard to penetrate into London-dominated and royal policy-makers–saturated as they were with wool-cloth merchants and manufacturers. Other regions could not grab their share of growth and opportunity easily, and they incrementally sought to pressure 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. 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, hence was 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
3: You Can’t Keep them Down on the Manor: Cloth/Wool Manufacturing/Merchant Clusters Develop
As to the manor, England’s medieval unit of its agricultural economic base, the effect of those changes were to remove land from use by serfs and encourage them to move on for better or worse. That resulted in a new group of free holders (i.e. non-serf landowners), some of which evolved into gentry resulting from some entrepreneurial venture. After the black plague when local agricultural labor became expensive and forced manor lords to respond, created a new round of tensions and outcomes. In the later years of this transition, the Tudor’s tended toward 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 present day eminent domain: messy, loud, oozing moral platitudes, and decided upon by local justices-jurisdictions. [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).[999]
Development of proto-classes, artisans, free holder agricultural householders broke away from serfdom and created opportunities for future generations, while a more mobile English population moved about to find and take advantage of opportunities that fostered densely packed geographies with more complex economic, and social, communities that spawned both disruption and innovation potential; these forces of change moved off from our history’s front page into the back pages almost automatically and imperceptibly. Over the centuries that followed one could see an English medievalism slowing evolving, but still profoundly medieval in character, values, and configuration. English medievalism was not motionless, static, or stagnant, but more in transition to an unknown future at some unknown later date.
As long as enclosure continued to feed a revival of population from the Black Plague, the two drivers of change worked behind the scenes creating pressures and tensions that fostered new changes and drivers, of which the formation of a wool and cloth manufacturing cluster was, for me at least, the most important influence on the the design (joint stock corporation) which when combined with London’s mega city urbanization profoundly shaped the Company’s organizational politics and the process by which a royal public-private partnership came into being in 1605-6.
Manor depopulation followed, anomic uprisings occurred, and incremental urbanization began.. The manor lords, despite the economic change created within their manors, still enclosed more pasture land, raising yet more sheep for use in wool manufacture and foodstuffs–until sheep outnumbered the English by three-to-one. This raised the question as to what to do with all this sheep wool and raw cloth made from it? Home (manor)-based manufacturing followed, and then powered by water, manufacturing on a larger scale by companies commenced, and, lo and behold, wool and cloth manufacturing clusters sprinkled throughout the kingdom.
Wool manufacture was widespread. At least twenty-five counties developed flourishing, if small, wool/cloth production clusters. Scattered about England, wool and cloth manufacturers were accordingly able to easily source wool and attract workers from their regional manors. Those with an entrepreneurial bent were able to form companies thus jump-starting a serious manufacturing wool and cloth cluster that added to the local-regional elite whose wealth usually was plowed back to the company thereby in good times expanding production and employment.
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 regional economies. In short, England increased its population mobility and during these centuries a measured urbanization followed. The exception to this as we shall later describe is London. Those serfs who were unable to successfully cope with displacement were transformed into economic refugees who eventually resettled in the budding urban areas or London where the opportunities seemed apparent. From this we will hear assertions of “surplus population”, and from others, usually more followers of a radical Protestant sect, who promoted a need for “Christian charity”. Success of this first wave English underclass was very uneven, with the result that more unsuccessful piled into neighborhoods or entry level wool cloth factories as proletariat.
Since agricultural manor-based labor proved expensive during and after the plague, manor lords were under pressure as well as they too had to find places to settle their sons and daughters in the English primogeniture-obsessed society. The kingdom’s social hierarchy became more complex as its aristocracy and its daughters-widows and gentlemen found their place in a elite hierarchy in some flux. The rise of the Tudors added to this as they clashed with the installed base of the aristocracy in their effort to centralize power in London’s court. The rise of the wool and cloth merchants only added to the mix, as a gentry elite took shape.
Some wool was homespun and lords sold it to merchants for more revenues. Manor lords also sold meat to domestic merchants. Increasingly, the end products typically fell into the hands of small manufacturers or companies of sheep-herders who either grew their business or sold it off to larger manufacturers, meat processers, and domestic merchants who distributed both as well as the wool and cloth products. Since lighter blends were likely to be exported to Iberia and Antwerp, export of such cloth became an opportunity to supplement the predominant sale of cloth domestically. Accordingly, manufacturers often concentrated near port cities, the most successful of which was the London metro area. By 1500 the English exported more finished cloth than raw wool to Antwerp principally. There was little import to England involved in this trade.
Guilds, Towns and Cities Emerge from Enclosure and Develop–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. While the inclusion of guilds added to the wool and cloth industry expansion and professionalization, it also injected specialization in England’s emerging craft industries and that invited competition in recruitment, and supplemented the effects of the Company’s concentration.
Economist B. E. 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]. 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 East India and Virginia Company affairs as investors, advocates, shipowners and sea captains, merchants and staff and leadership for the guilds that developed. Manor lords and the regional aristocracy in turn took advantage of their opportunities, some drawn into overseas adventures, others into the military, and others to the court and Crown. Also, some along with gentry were attracted to English mining, and the extraction of materials such as ores, coal and copper.
The cloth cluster prospered joining in the formation of its occupational guilds, a workforce entity that developed skillsets, limited competition, set pricing and labor costs for the larger denser communities that crossed the red line into urban areas. In so doing, the sectors blended into England’s larger guild movement by organized themselves into regional/occupational guilds. 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.
Guilds led to more 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.
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 estimated 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.
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 (see below) that held the royal export monopoly developed into an oligopoly of its own. There was little trickle down from the cloth export and the exclusionary membership policy by the Company meant a very large percentage of English merchants were shut out from cloth and export, and left to their own devices.
Propensity to concentrate cloth manufacturing and export on the eastern side, along the English channel, around London was pronounced, and it transformed the Company of Adventurers into a London-based industry nexus, Accordingly Outer Port ‘Merchant adventurers’ who risked themselves and their money to find new commercial markets in Europe … 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 Effectively shut out out of cloth export they looked in other directions for opportunity.
the salience of the joint stock corporation How did the London London wool and cloth/sheepherder merchants gain a head start and were able to restrict their membership to the advantage of the few members? The answer lies in the particular business structure of the Company of Merchant Adventurers: England’s first major joint stock corporation. Blending a guild-like cloth industry membership with a royal monopoly into 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 from Henry VII in 1496 and 1505, and Elizabeth’s 1564 charter transformed Company’s membership into a patriarchy of families that created a lock on the Company’s “board of directors” and committee leadership that could be passed on to their successor-first born.
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 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.
Headquartered in London and Antwerp, the Company of Merchant Adventurers elites were in a potentially influential and strategic position from which they could assume a commanding role in England’s overseas trade and commerce. 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 of use to cloth and wool industry/guilds. In that cloth and wool constituted three quarters of all English exports in this period, their use of London as their principal English port secured for them status and a level of protection as they set up foreign contacts, relations, and trade abroad–which over time evolved into becoming the “establishment” of English foreign trade. [99] Robert Ashton, the City and the Court, pp. 23-4 The Company of Merchant Adventurers also left those interested in other commercial trading to their own devices and lobbying. While they did not oppose such ventures head on, the Company’s dominance over overseas policy felt the pressure of their deadweight on the policy process.
The net effect, intended or not, was that a small, powerful oligarchy of London merchant adventurer families, for all practical purposes, marginalized overseas trade by non-member merchant adventurers. The exclusive monopoly of the wool-cloth Merchant Adventurers Company on wool export to the Continent meant it constrained access of others to London’s access to Europe’s wealth and blocked English entrepreneurs access to the Orient and East Indies. The simple take away is London was where the action was. The Company marginalized entrepreneurs and aspiring gentry from areas other than London who were stymied by London’s size and concentration of power and institutions. 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 and it also fragmented the focus of their trade and render their business plans and overseas missions more complex and multifaceted. Perhaps most of all it allowed the entrepreneurs more leeway to take advantage of the more profitable, if risky, war-raiding and privateering.
The narrowness of interests within the Company followed from its lack of inclusiveness within the wool and cloth sector and the closed organizational structure of the Company secured by royal charter continued into the 1560’s. The latter is due, as Brenner’s asserts, that these wool-export minded London merchants “more tightly controlled conditions under which the cloth export commerce was pursued–and specifically the Merchant Adventurers success precisely from the 1550’s and 1560’s in getting the government to increase their privileges considerably. Indeed, in view of the relatively favorable conditions that actually prevailed for London denizen merchants in the traditional cloth trade with northern Europe from the late1550’s to the early 1600’s it is not easy to see why they would have felt the need to seek alternatives farther afield. [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp. 10-11.
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 the homes of the foreigners, and hanging a number who they felt were stealing bread crusts 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.
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. The take away from these observations is the English cloth export evolved into an foreign trade dead end. It stopped with cloth and wool export only, with little to no import. What import to England existed was on the initiative of other nations for the most part. The wealth generated from this one-export no import commercial trade brought about by the first great trading company, the Company of Adventurers, held by a small group of family dynasties who dominated the Company of Adventurers and its transactions, and who passed on their position through primogeniture inheritance.
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.
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
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. 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 copied her structure and centralized, hierarchical leadership derived from the Company of Merchant Adventurers and incorporated the first of the major “regulated” joint stock trading companies to 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.
The First Transition Leads into a Second: Pivot to Global Commerce and Mercantile Competition: effects on the Virginia Company and Restatement of Our Module’s Purposes
If you want to understand the impact and the long-term legacy-inheritance of the Virginia Company, then one ought be aware as to how and why the Company took its shape and manifested itself in its organizational structure, its mission it was intended to accomplish, the motivations, values and practices of its leadership, and the degree to which experienced the complexities of its tasks and tested its capacity to operate. The Virginia Company, and the legacy it left to Virginia, was a creature of Elizabethan England–with a notable input from the Stuart king, James I.
It was doing the Elizabethan age that England first seriously ventured into global affairs and tested its experience, skillsets, organizational structures, and entrepreneurial leadership that was fundamental to the design, capacity, and leadership of the Company, and profoundly shaped its mission definition and colonization priorities. It was James, the English king with only two years experience on the English throne who launched the venture, and inserted his control structures into the Company’s “First (1606) Charter”. It was that charter that resulted in Virginia pushed to the very edge of its extinction, and set the new born colony down a path from which its colonization efforts never recovered.
Forced to recognize a reality created as much by its remote wilderness location as by its mishandling of its birth, the colony’s settlers fueled by necessity their own path, brewed their own secret sauce of self-governance, developed an autonomy, an identity, and confidence distinct from their London Company leadership masters. After 1624 James suspended the Virginia Company charter and assumed royal responsibility to manage the colony, shortly before his death in early 1625. Falling into a political limbo, the colony effectively managed its own affairs until James’ successor, Charles I, reached a deal with settler leadership fifteen years later in 1639, immediately previous to the onset of the Civil War when London effectively lost any meaningful on-site authority of Virginia, its environment and its governance. That site-control was not established until the mid-to-late 1610.
London authority and royal control was partially reasserted in 1661 (Restoration) only after having left Virginia to its own devices for its first fifty-four years of life. During that period two generations of settler leadership set the tone and installed the institutions, a plantation-manor tobacco export economy, and a hierarchical, grossly unequal, hollowed out medieval social-class system and culture, that conducted mostly hostile relations against its Native American neighbors as it seized their lands and expanded the colony. It did so by unifying around the institutions set in place during the Company period, fortified by those values, spirit, and confidence that sprang from its Company-based “secret sauce”, and led by an young, inspired, but inexperienced appointed governor who “went native”, and in adopted the ways, values, practices and institutions imparted by the Company and operated by the native abandoned company elites that had assumed the governance of the colony in the absence of London.
Having identified England as still a medieval polity whose policy process was still firmly embedded in medieval practices, structures, and priorities, the complex role of Spain as competitor, former sovereign, and eventually a warring enemy and Ireland as not only a colonization competitor but as a role module for the anticipated North American colonization my problem becomes on of proving this to the mostly American reader who is looking for other dynamics and themes that explain the Virginia Company inheritance.
English history previous to the founding of Jamestown and Sagadahoc is often viewed as wandering into the weedy fields of another country. Even if such fields are weedy, however, they will offer serious insight as to why the events in Virginia developed as they did–and they will expose the lack of control, and the inability of the 1606 First Charter Virginia got off to such a bad start, so disruptive that the Virginia Company was never able to acquire the traction needed to bring the colony into a “breakout’ position. Succinctly put, the inheritance the Virginia Company received from English experience in the global overseas pivot was not sufficient for her to found a colony by 1606.
In particular, the pivot period allow us to understand the experiences and values of that period as they would have been perceived by the officers and employees, as well as settlers of the Virginia colony, and the secret sauce of an abandoned corporate elite, whose actions, values and beliefs do not easily match the aspirations and the image of most Americans. They also were part of James I’s inheritance when he assumed the throne in 1603. Finally, they shed critical light into the last day of Elizabeth, in particular the Essex Rebellion, which had a meaningful impact on the leadership of the Virginia Company.
The problem is greatly magnified because the Virginia Company was born out of a transitional medieval period of English history. The Elizabethan, early Stuart and the English Civil War periods did, and do not, travel well across the Atlantic, and most Americans, myself included, came late, if at all, to understanding their character and nature. Lost in a five-hundred year historical fog, an American appreciation of its fundamentally medieval nature and character, England’s emerging entry into mercantilist Europe, and the rise of Protestantism, Reformation, and Renaissance, are not sensitized to the macro events and disruptions that affected England’s first successful attempt to establish a North American colony.
That renders our understanding of the Virginia Company and its period of colony-building so that we fail to include it into our own historical description of how and why Virginia developed, institutionalized, and transferred itself into the 1789 American Republic, and then evolved as an American state. The purpose of this introductory module, then, is to identify those elements of English history that were material to the development and operations of the Virginia Company relevant to its founding and management of the Virginia colony.
Accordingly, I trace the Company’s inheritance to Virginia starting during the English “first transition” after the enclosure and the black death plague; that transition commenced in the late 1400’s and ran through 1500-1550–the period which were responsible for the formation of the Virginia Company. This transition from the more pure English medieval system constituted the initial steps England took into contemporary modernity and for the most part they consist of changes in the English economy and society, some of which had implications for English politics, policy-making during the Elizabethan period, 1550 through 1605. This first transition obviously set the stage for the more impactful second transition which is central to our overall history.
This transition led into a second transition period that lasted into the English civil war (which for our convenience started in 1639). Within this extended period the Virginia Company was lobbied and designed, incorporated, and conduct the first missions dispatched to North America to found colonies as defined and tasked by the 1606 charter issued by James I. From this second transition through the post 1550’s overseas commercial pivot we can identify the most salient elements of the Company’s inheritance to Virginia to point out those factors and drivers which were in place in the 1550’s that factored into the advocacy, incorporation and implementation by the Company structure of tasks and goals, by its leadership, which affected the founding of Virginia, and profoundly shaped her subsequent economic, political and societal development.
That transition, however, needs to be tempered with a balanced perspective of England during this early period–as seen by an outstanding British historian of the period: K. R. Andrews. To be fair to other historians, K. R. Andrews assumes the view that was medieval in soul, institutions, and processes, and that Virginia colonization and its immediate colony-building are less the expression of future, modern, dynamics, personalities and values than an expression of a medieval sense of colonization and colony-building.
He also agrees that the global overseas trade and commercial pivot of the post-1550’s was motivated in large part by medieval dynamics in combination with the need to develop the English economy so its enhanced capacity could create prosperity domestically, and additional resources (fiscal primarily) that permitted the Crown and the court to compete effectively, if not catch up, with other European mercantilists. In this sense, the post 1550’s global commerce and trade pivot was an economy development strategy, and fully understood as such, by the Crown and count as well as by other key actors such as the Outer Ports and Parliament as well. In the next section we employ help from K. R. Andrews a noted British historian of this period, who will provide a description, from a British perspective.
K. R. Andrews Assessment of the Period of the Overseas Global Pivot: Trade, Plunder, and Settlement
To the extent stability reasserted itself during the 1690’s and the Glorious Revolution, it can be argued that in the 1550’s at minimum England had begun and was proceeding through a series of transitions, each of which in its fashion interfered to some noticeable degree in negatively affecting England’s capacity to found, govern and sustain her North American colonies. The net effect of this chronic lack of capacity was to foster, if not require, her North American colonies to take their own affairs into their own hands, each in their own manner, and in varying degrees, with distinctive reactions from England. This assessment is congruent with the of Carla Gardina Pestana whose “Prologue” first paragraph states: “the Stuart dominions [in English North America] beyond the three kingdoms sprang up opportunistically and therefore were not unified under a single centralized system. The variegated landscape created did not share a unified purpose or common nature, but did have numerous discernible features which established a baseline against which the changes of the decades that followed can be measure.” [99] Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640-1661 (Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 14
In the case of the overseas pivot period that lasted at least to Charles I (1625-29) Virginia and New England, excluding the Somers Island, remained the only two regions undergoing English colonization. Accordingly, we turn to Kenneth R. Andrews (and later Robert Brenner) to update and carryon the English transition in its overseas pivot period. K. R. Andrews also subscribes, as I do, to the notion that England’s overseas pivot period can be assessed at minimum as a contest between two regions, London and the Outer Ports (Plymouth and Bristol primarily), and evolving shifts in classes and proto-classes engaged in the overseas pivot. Andrews also concurs that dynamics of this period stating that “as for its handling of ventures in commercial, maritime and colonial expansion, it is best expressed by the term ‘patronage’ signifying variable interplay of state control [Crown] and individual initiative in which the great men at Court, and in the councils of the realm performed an indispensable role as intermediaries. … [99] K. R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement: Maritime enterprise and the genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630 (Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 12-17
The links between the crown and its [intermediaries] were informal and not deliberately contrived [i.e. planned], being perhaps too subtle for man’s intervention, growing naturally out of a society in which clientage ruled all relationships within sight of the Court, and which paternal, but weak and parasitic state could only hope to ride the nation with a loose rein. But government [patronage was not merely permissive, and the active interest of powerful men in this various enterprise [overseas pivot] helped it to gain cohesion and self-consciousness as a national movement … It was this magnificent propaganda which was largely responsible for the illusion which gained strength in later times that some grand mercantile and imperial strategy was at work, and that the founding of the essentially commercial empire was a royal achievement, inspired by a coherent policy of economic nationalism [i.e. colonialism,]
K. R. Andrews notes at this point that the effects of this style or mode of Crown policy-making led to “the crown’s indirect conduct and remote control of its [intermediaries] oceanic efforts no doubt encouraged the tendency toward self-government in the emergent empire, which can be observed in the activities of the East India Company, as well as the New World colonies. … In the long run the [overseas colonization and commerce] gained strength from this characteristic, but in the short run it was weakened by its dependence on private initiative and resources, and by a lack of central organization, strategic direction, even elementary discipline. The price paid for these deficiencies was heavy: casual planning under-funding, amateur leadership, continual quarrels among the promoters and the leaders, continual disorder among the sailors, soldiers and planters [settlers]
Who were these “intermediaries” of which K. R. Andrews speaks?. “It is usual to classify the promoters of [overseas trade and colonization] into merchants on the one hand and landed gentlemen–varying from dukes [i.e. aristocracy] to mere gentry–one the other.” [p. 17] There were, as one would expect in a society in transition, interplay and overlap of these groupings, and success or failure could bridge the gap between the two. In each venture or organization the groupings could participate . “Many gentlemen engaged in trade, notably the ship owning gentry of the southwest [Outer Ports] who conducted trade with Spain and Portugal especially exporting corn and fish, including the Newfoundland cod, in increasing quantity. These formed a powerful interest, embracing the West Country ports and their merchants, a large financial and family network deeply concerned in North American matters and well capable of asserting itself in Parliament … Nevertheless the landed aristocracy and gentry played little part in foreign trade…
Also “organized on joint-stock lines [what I call the great merchant trading companies of London], merchants were dominant. Until 1609 only one gentleman of the Court, the earl of Cumberland–was admitted to [their] membership. Later, for political reasons [we will refer to this as the regulated joint stock corporation] others were allowed to take shares, but the management of the trade remained in merchant hands and merchants supplied nearly all the capital [p.18].
London merchants of the East India and Russia Companies dominated the northeast … Gentlemen adventurers were of course prominent in voyages of plunder-piracy, privateering and the semi-official expeditions of the sea war [with Spain] … Throughout the period, plunder was a commercialized business dominated by merchants. Courtiers and other landed gentlemen certainly made an important contribution to colonial enterprise. From the beginning they were the main champions of plantations, whether in the South or North America … In the pioneering colonial projects of the sixteenth century merchants played a secondary role, supplying some of the money, but often only on loan, and showing no eagerness to take part. But in the reign of James [beginning with the Virginia Company] they came into the arena in strength.
Elizabeth I
The bulk of the overseas pivot period transpired during the reign of Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, for which Sir Walter Raleigh named the first successful and durable English colony, Virginia. Elizabeth, whatever else she was, was at her core a creature of the traditional medieval world–and that perspective and value system underlined her behind the scenes leadership during the period of the global overseas pivot. The most impactful event of the pivot period, the twenty-year war with Spain that culminated only 1604, left behind gross suspicions and serious internal cleavages.
Pragmatic, flexible, not without her convictions and strength of personality, Elizabeth I sustained England in its war with Spain and presided over England’s first efforts in global overseas commerce, the age of discover, and its initial colonization attempt. But without much doubt, her Court, her policy-making methods and institutions were firmly lodged in a past that belonged much more to her father, who executed her mother, than anyone else. It is at the end of this period, then, immediately after her death, that the Virginia Company would be created and incorporated.
One of the earliest twentieth century American colonial historians, and among the best, was Charles A. Andrews. Today, he is firmly lodged in American historiographic “imperial” paradigm which is about the closest an American historian can come to living in a dog house. Talk about out-of-favor, he is tagged with just about all of the baggage the word colonialism and nationalism carries in today’s literature. Although it is not my purpose to wander in the weeds of the imperial paradigm, Andrew’s focus and perspective still has its merit for contemporaries. His introduction to his outstanding classic work cogently identifies the key players and the motivation of Elizabeth’s transitional overseas pivot period.
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 pivotal among the older Continental powers. Barred from 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. … Trade followed the flag, and shipbuilding activities of the outports, accompanying the growing commercial connections with the Continent, culminated in the ambitious designs of the Merchant Adventurers of London and their monopoly of the woolen export businesses.[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. 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
Most supportive of our position on the importance of the first royal charter to the voyages of the Virginia Company was Herbert A. Osgood assertion the Virginia Company did not follow the pattern of the Elizabethan period, i.e. of such voyages be conducted by private enterprise, he believes James I employed a different perspective and inserted his own control over the overseas venture:
The voyages of discovery, the commercial enterprises [i.e. the great merchant trading companies], the single experiment in colonization of the reign of Elizabeth (Roanoke) were the results of private enterprise. Individuals, associations, or companies furnished the means, the state giving the requisite authority [i.e. charters and privileges of monopoly] and verbal encouragement or guidance. Its financial resources, especially when administered with the caution that characterized Cecil and the Queen, were husbanded for purposes of more direct and pressing utility [i.e. flexibility]. From the standpoint of the government discovery and colonization were remote interests. … Still, however, with the accession of the Stuarts to the throne an experiment was tried which suggested, not the assumption by the exchequer of responsibility for the expense of colonization, for its losses or gains …. In this the private or proprietary element appears in the form of a patentee, much like the Southampton Associates of Humphrey Gilbert, or the freemen of the city of Raleigh, but they are brought for all practical purposes under control of a royal council. [99] Herbert L. Osgood, the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 1 (Forgotten Books, the MacMillan Company, 1904), pp. 23-4. This abandonment of the Elizabethan pattern by James I regarding the Virginia Company is crucial to understanding our position, and to an understanding of the two royal charters that followed the first. Bluntly, James without providing direct financial support for colonization assigned it to the private sector (if by default) and then made the private sector responsible to him as the King. As we shall see James was unwilling at this point to limit the authority and power of the king in this new policy area to they private sector or to the Parliament that was contesting that power.
While C. A. Andrews correctly observes, this need for an English global overseas pivot was felt by her father who experienced the first impacts of Spain’s discovery and colonization of America, Andrews explains Elizabeth’s open mind to the overseas global pivot and the entry into the European mercantile world. It is not, nor ever would be, her reign’s central theme; rather she was caught in the turbulence of that entry, from her sister’s (Mary I) marriage to Phillip II of Spain, to the implications of her father’s version of the Protestant Reformation, the war with Spain that followed upon decades of European rebellion (Holland in particular), and the Pope’s Counter Reformation that supported and created the legitimacy on which Spain’s colonization of America was based. Mostly reactive, Elizabeth was not passive, and she participated gingerly and behind-the-scenes in most of the events of the pivot period.
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… [Actions taken include 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. (C. A. Andrews, the Colonial Period in American History, Vol. 4 (Yale University Press, 1938, 1964), p. 1)
But at this point I ought insert Elizabeth’s perception of the English economy and the need to raise more capital to meet the demands she faced in ruling–at least if J. E. Neale is to be believed–were more fiscal, i.e. budgetary, and directly tied to her activities as Queen, including dynastic relationships abroad, court matters, and the raising of funds to counter her foreign rivals abroad. Most of all she need funds for her own matters. p.294
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 add 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 supplemented the overseas pivot lent substance by providing a veneer of durability to the overseas trade and commerce system and elements of both defense and offense important to its success in that race. While there are many observers and actors of the period that had other goals and missions, such as expansion of Christianity to the New World, they were ancillary to the period’s core purpose: to develop England’s economy so that it could accommodate and maximize its own internal economic growth so that it could effectively compete, catch up with its mercantile European kingdoms. Practically, to accomplish this in 1550’s required that England also engage in the Age of Discovery expeditions.
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. Those searching for a Northeast Passage bumped up against North America 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 over the century that follows; commentators of the English post 1550 to 1620 period, I believe, would do well to emphasize the tenuous beginnings colonization had in the sixteenth century.
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 North American coastline, and a glimpse into the native populations.
Let’s Next Get the Chronology Right–Trevor Burnard makes us aware that the sixteenth and seventeenth century efforts toward colonization of the Atlantic were led by England/Wales, not Britain; he further alerts us that the British Union which included Scotland started in 1707. So we really can’t call this British, an eighteenth century term, colonization. Secondly, Carla Gardner Pestana, the English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640-1661 (Harvard University Press, 2004) correctly asserted the key event that defined the seventeenth century English Atlantic experience was the English Civil War.
To her the breakdown in English colonial authority during the Civil War “came early in the settlement process, even before that authority had been fully established. It also gave emerging settler leaders enhanced confidence in their ability to manage their own affairs, a confidence seemingly justified by their consolidation of local power in the 1640’s and 1650’s at the expense of proprietors of the Crown”. She concludes that “the colonies were left to fend for themselves as the imperial center imploded.” [99] Trevor Burnard, “the British Atlantic” in Jack P. Greene and Philp D. Morgan (Editors), Atlantic History: a Critical Appraisal (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 116-118
Burnard places the period of our overseas pivot by England within “the first distinct period” during which “the imagining and the realizing of the late-sixteenth century colonizing process urged on the English Crown and on English merchants by propagandists such as Richard Hakluyt. That period lasted roughly from 1580 to the mid-1620’s [the Virginia Company period], covering Raleigh’s early Roanoke Island ventures, the settlement of Virginia and Bermuda in 1607 and 1609, and the start of settlement in the West Indies and New England in the 1620’s. In this early phase English colonial enterprise in America emerged from a heady combination of national ambition, Protestant mission, economic pragmatism, and thirst for individual and collective greatness that, fermenting through the late-Elizabethan period coalesced during the reign of James VI and I. Shaped by competition in Europe with Spain, a desire to counter the Catholicization of the Americas with aggressive Protestantism, and an utopian urge to end English poverty through the exploitation of Atlantic resources. English entry into the Americas was, in one sense the last act of the Renaissance. Yet it failed to realize any of its initial expectations. Up to the mid-1620’s English colonies in America were straggling, unhappy places that met none of the English objectives for Atlantic expansion. [99] Trevor Burnard, “the British Atlantic” in Jack P. Greene and Philp D. Morgan (Editors), Atlantic History: a Critical Appraisal (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 118-119
While England/Britain competed with other European mercantile powers in all periods, the first period is dominated by Spain, with their ally the Netherlands a role model of their need to catchup in technology and maritime commerce. J.H. Elliott draws special attention to Spain, and he states the two were “not two self-contained cultural worlds, but between cultural worlds that were well aware of each other’s presence”. For a good deal of the overseas pivot they were at war, while in its beginning years, Philip of Spain was also king of England. Phillip consented to London’s formation of the Russia trading company and modified Spain’s trade policy to allow the interaction of Russia and England. In 1607, at peace, Jamestown still had to shield its location from Spain, and build forts and palisades to resist not only their neighbors, but Spain.
What is less appreciated was England’s use of the conquistador model in their dealings with natives, their land, and the settlers prioritized search for gold and silver (mining) for export. On top of this the English fabricated an image of the Spanish conquest, the “Black Legend”, which took hold in England justifying its use of the Spanish model, saturated with cruelty, obsessive cultural superiority, urban and towns-centered conquest of the interior. Thus the English countered with their own settlement approach which they deemed was culturally superior, more economic in nature, and focused less around conquest than land for agriculture and homestead. Markedly less urbanized and considerably more rural than the Spanish settlement model, English colonization was therefore more moral and humane. That’s how the story went back then anyway.
The English in their mind were more ‘planters‘ than conquistadores, but as Elliott observes the Spanish conquest mode crept into even the most academic of its advocates, Richard Hakluyt. His proscriptive writing, Pamphlet for the Virginia Enterprise of 1585 argued that when confronted by natives with planting and homestead, ‘we may proceed with extremity conquer, fortify and plant in soils most sweet, most pleasant, most strong and most fertile and in the end bring them all in subjection and civility“. Adventurers and explorers, less focused on settlement than privateering and war against Catholics, also translated their activities into a more Spanish conquistador practice.[99] J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, pp. xvii, quote, p. 7
England’s Post 1550 Overseas Commerce Transition’s as an Economic Development Strategy
England was in process of evolving into a medievalism in transition. This module’s focus topic, the pivot of England into overseas global trade and commerce 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. As it was the adaptability of its organization, the limitations of the experiences of its leadership, the lack of technology necessary to a colony three thousand miles away, and a near-complete lack of understanding of just what a colony’s permanent settlement entailed was way beyond anything England’s inheritance of that period could provide to settler-Americans.
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 1590’s 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. [999] Unlike the authoritarian kings of France and Spain, Queen Elizabeth had to share national power with the aristocracy and gentry who composed the bicameral national legislature known as Parliament. By birthright the aristocracy filled the House of Lords, while the gentry dominated the House of Commons by winning elections to represent the electorate of the middling sort of men. Only about 25 percent of the adult men owned enough property to qualify for the vote–and only for [that] one house of Parliament. Of course the structure [institution] also disenfranchised all women. Although a narrow system of government by our standards, the English constitution [unwritten] was extraordinarily open and libertarian when compared with the absolute monarchies then developed in the rest of Europe. Consequently it mattered greatly to the to the later political culture of the United States that England, rather than Spain or France, eventually dominated colonization north of Florida. [99] Alan Taylor, American Colonies (Penguin Books, 2001), pp. 119-122.
As Taylor further comments the growth in the “middling sort” after 1500 due to the population expansion. This expansion fostered a new grouping, England’s ‘lower sort’, my underclass, grew “and deteriorated in circumstances”. Given that jobs in the English newly formed urban areas were closely linked to the boom or bust wool and cloth clusters of each area, and stagnated in between, it was quite evident both to individuals of that time, and to historians and economists that the English economy had not developed to the point it could sustain and provide opportunities to such a large, unexpected, and rapidly growing segment–which, as detailed above– flowed extremely disproportionately to where the wool and cloth industry dominated, i.e. London. “Where the clothiers do dwell, or have dwelt, there are found the greatest number of the poor”, Robert Reyce, 1618, Alan Taylor, American Colonies, p. 120 [999]
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.
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
Accordingly, the key motivating force behind English global overseas trade after the 1550’s were the entrance of London non-cloth exporting merchants desiring to enter other commerce, including import and other goods and commodities. Unlike the West Country merchant adventurers the London-based merchants hoped to bypass Spanish and Portuguese monopolies and in search of highly valued spices, silk, cotton and tea. Their insistence that England venture to the Orient and East Indies and India meant news routes and trading relationships had to be developed through the northeast along the Artic or through Russia, Persia, and the Mediterranean. This London involvement began with the reappearance of Sebastian Cabot, son of John, an explorer whose maps, expertise and past travels for Spain, afforded him a sort of celebrity status. Under his leadership, the age of England great merchant trading companies began with his governorship of the first, and most page-turning, the Russia Company.
Previously, through the 1540’s, the magnet of Spanish and Portuguese success and prosperity captured the attention of those who which greater involvement in overseas matters and commerce, merchants, ship owners and gentry of the Outer Ports. Turning into their wind, so to speak, these adventurers of the Outer Ports were venturing to North America in voyages of discovery, they followed Portugal into North Africa and the slave trade, and tempted by easy, if risky, gains and profits from privateering of the Spanish West Indies and their cargos of gold they were engaged in their version of a pivot to overseas involvement.
To a great extent, [therefore] English oceanic enterprise derived its ideas and ambitions [before the 1550’s] from Portugal and Spain where most of its energetic exponents had business and contacts [to the Outer Ports adventurers]. Out of these ties grew knowledge, emulation, rivalry, enmity–a cycle repeated in the Elizabethan period, and again in the Jacobean’. In this early period before the 1550’s, English overseas efforts were actions of individuals, mostly on their own initiative for their own purposes. As K. R. Andrews again reports “Individuals or groups pursue their [overseas] projects independently, without apparent contact [with others], and there is no voice that speaks for them all, as Richard Eden is soon to do, and after him Richard Hakluyt. Ideas are raised and dropped again, initiatives are not followed through, there is a succession of false starts. All but a few committed persons are ignorant and indifferent” [99] K. R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement, p. 62
It was the early 1550’s that England turned or pivoted in earnest toward global overseas trade and commerce. Yet it is as early as the 1540’s that we can see what K. R. Andrews calls “the pioneering role of the Bristol men, the Plymouth men. Southampton men, but London initiative and support were for the most part conspicuous by their absence, the Crown, the court and government lent a helping hand often, and sometimes gave a lead, but the City hung back. At this time the community of London merchants were richer and more powerful than ever before, and its wealth and power were fast increasing, yet the range of London’s overseas trade contracted during the reigns of the to Henries. For the basis of the nation’s commerce was the production of woolen cloth for export, but although those exports doubled during this period, they flowed increasingly into a single narrow channel: through London to Antwerp. Other branches of foreign trade–to the Mediterranean, northern Europe and the Iberian peninsula–fell away as the period progressed and the London-Antwerp sea link swallowed more and more, depriving the English outports of much of their business and making Antwerp the one great great source for imports … Antwerp was a most convenient centre for England’s overseas trade, for it became the financial and commercial capital of Europe during these decades, and the great [merchant trading] company of London cloth exporters [at this time], the Merchant Adventurers, had privileges there which multiplied the profitability of their privileges in England. Their interest lay in exploiting, not in looking for alternative [99] K. R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement, p.63.
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.
An Inheritance to Virginia from England: Lessons Not Learned
Let’s First Clear Away the Thicket–Virginia long labeled as an experiment was not an experiment. While Bacon (Roger, not Francis), who wrote several hundred years previous to this period probably came closes in medieval England to outlining the scientific method, it was Galileo who expanded it to actual application. Trouble is he was born in 1564 in Italy. His productive work started in the 1590’s and as far as I can tell the English were unaware. Francis Bacon, England’s equivalent was born in 1561; his insightful writings on colonization were during James I reign after Virginia had been founded. His insights most famous writing, On Plantations published in 1625, is most appropriately based on the lessons learned in Virginia and Ireland. In a more helpful, less cranky tone, I would suggest experiment is the wrong term as it does not aptly describe what the English were doing in setting plantations in Virginia.
They were either unaware of important risks, and disregarded and minimized risks they knew about. Plan was a four-letter word to them. The English described themselves as adventurers–and that is what they were about. They still do; Tracy Borman in her recent history of the Tudor-Stuart transition, the Stolen Crown: Treachery, Deceit, and the Death of the Tudor Dynasty (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025), pp. 109-111 labels them as “adventurers” and describes Raleigh’s chief career was plundering the Spanish, in the course of which he founded Roanoke. That congruent with my history, anyway.
Books have been written discussing the Hakluyts thoughts–and they are not much more than thoughts–regarding colonization and North American colonization in particular. Historians have duly recorded the influence and the role they played in English Elizabethan policy-making. [99] see Peter Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Englishman’s Obsession for an English America (Yale university Press, 2007); J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, pp. 6-7. Their thrust was more to advocate than a how-to manual, and almost anyone employing them concedes their serious limitations and lack of understanding of the realities of planting a permanent settlement in the wilds of Virginia in particular, and their inconsistent at best prescriptions for Native American relations.
Indeed, their clearest instructions regarding the latter included the need to obtain sustenance necessary for survival from them, trade for English necessities, and “conquer” them if required, taking such lands as needed for colonial expansion, export, and development. Sound, moral and consistent principles–Humbug! They didn’t know what they were talking about, and they never left England for the new world. They did influence the Elizabethan debate and policy-making on colonization, I concede, but that only confirms to me it is evidence of how little the other English policy-makers knew about the topic. That is a take away from this module.
the Lessons NOT Learned–What seems apparent to me is that while England as a whole entered into a good number of “adventures” overseas in the period of the overseas pivot, it remains unclear how much experience and lessons were drawn by the elites as to how to conduct and develop successful colonial enterprises. Gilbert’s endemic misadventures would alert overseas venturers what not to do, but Raleigh is a the best case for this suspicion in that he conducted England’s first overseas colonial settlement–albeit, he did so by blurring its chief mission or purpose by combining several missions (privateering, military home base, permanent settlement, and private wealth, and the expansion of the Elizabethan state).
In particular, the question of how best to finance such a settlement followed what was the traditional business plan of English overseas venture of making the single overseas expedition the basic unit of finance. Each following overseas Roanoke expedition had its own financial plan, particular investors, and method and mode of implementation. Even though it was highly likely a succession of supply expeditions would be required, there was little planning to follow up beyond the next supply expedition.
English overseas ventures developed a bias to be reactive to the previous expedition, and since the news was seldom good, finance became even more problem some. Often to put the finances together, the corporation had to restructure itself. Roanoke’s third colony for example required a major restructure, which, it turns out was never completed, plus a complete set of new investors, and the recruitment of a new batch of settlers.
All this consumed time, and that became worse when one added to it the normal travel periods that fluctuated between two or more months for each segment of a round-trip. As it turned out this schedule could, and would never be able to meet the supply obligations of a permanent settlement in North America. We will see the same issues come up with Jamestown. The same could be said for assembly of a fleet and recruitment of settlers. Given that these expeditions were usually public-Crown-private investor/adventurer affairs multiple approvals, each with their own process had to be achieved. As we saw, the impact of the Spanish War shut down not only supply but contact with the colony. The colony, lacking its own ocean-capable ships was isolated.
Roanoke it would seem suggests some important take aways should have been taken away–at least by Raleigh. As indicated earlier we will return to Raleigh in the next several chapters. he will get into trouble in the 1590’s and while he will make a comeback, the pivot period was his peak. He will engage in other overseas ventures, Guiana for example, which failed both for new reasons and older reasons that Roanoke past experience should have corrected.
In many ways, Guiana, his last major overseas venture is still very much within the Spanish conquistador feudal model. Feudal patterns were not challenged in his mind, and his prominence and popularity in some quarters in overseas ventures likely carried some weight and inspired his share of that grouping to continue in the feudal mode of conquest and the attainment of honor, personal wealth, anti-Catholicism, and English patriotism. Guiana failed in 1618–a decade after Jamestown and its starving years-still Raleigh seems to have been on automatic pilot. Hubris, the desire for wealth, and the process by which expeditions were launched were very slow to change during these times.
I will argue in this module that England set out to colonize North America prematurely, and the Virginia Company enterprise, as constructed in 1606, was not “ready for prime time” colonization. The Company would badly mismanage the birth of Virginia, leaving in its post-1624 charter suspension a colony that was already self-governing, and pretty much running its affairs in reaction to the events and situations its settlers encountered in the wilds of North America and London. The “not ready for prime time” criticism is the first of what will be many criticisms that this history will uncover and discuss. This module will lay the foundation for a larger argument that the Company was arguably doomed in its American venture from the day its ships left London for Jamestown Virginia. The rest of this history after the frist several modules will take Virginia thru the entire Company period and the transition to royal administration under Charles I who was “drifting into the English civil war”.
[999] 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 our backdrop to America’s Inability to Deal With Virginia’s First Fifty Years as a Colony]
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.
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.
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
Ron W. Coan 