For God, King, and People

Alexander B. Haskell’s book offers an intellectual history of the ideas circulating around the planting of English Virginia. The work begins with Sir Walter Raleigh’s The History of the World which, Haskell argues, advocated colonisation as a divine dictate that created scattered commonwealths which enhanced royal dominion (and true religion) throughout the world. The heart of the book is a long rumination on the fate of this conceptualisation in various texts about Virginia, the first long-lasting English colony in the Americas. Haskell chronicles struggles over how to define what the English were doing in Virginia, what the relationship of that undertaking was to the polity in England and how those debates played out at key moments of struggle both within Virginia and in the transatlantic conceptualisation of the outpost. In five chapters, Haskell posits that English engagement in the wider Atlantic initially drew upon Renaissance commonwealth ideas, that these became entangled in Virginia’s emerging identity as a plantation settlement reliant on agriculture and that the advent of Hobbesian understandings challenged the hegemony of the earlier formulation. The first chapter, ‘Providence, the Renaissance Atlantic, and the Law’, makes the uncontroversial claim that widespread providential thinking shaped analysis of the vagaries of early attempts in the Americas. Building from this insight, Haskell considers arguments over whether England was justified in making such attempts; intriguingly he hints that leading English Roman Catholics may have been especially opposed. Advocates for colonies sought to limn out an English contribution that would be consistent with the law. Here in particular, but also in later chapters, Haskell adds to the appreciation of religion’s role in supposedly secular Virginia

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