The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1624 (review)

Published to mark the fourth centenary of the foundation of the English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, this volume of essays on Virginia in the Atlantic world achieves two impressive feats. Firstly, the collection, which is based on the proceedings of an international conference held at Williamsburg in 2004, brings together a stellar list of leading scholars to discuss the arrival of the English in the region that native people referred to as Tsenacommacah at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Secondly, these scholars present us with research that maps out current trends in history writing on the Atlantic world, presenting a multifaceted picture of that heterogeneous intercultural zone in the period between 1550 and 1624. In so doing, this collection also suggests some of the lines of debate that currently shape the study of Atlantic history along with future directions for research. Peter Mancall has therefore done far more than bring together essays on early English Virginia. He has coordinated a collection that places Virginia in Atlantic context and that sheds light on much broader Atlantic themes. Indeed, as Mancall points out in his neat introduction to the volume, not all of the contributions discuss Virginia in direct terms, but all of the essays, whether they focus on native Americans in Virginia, reading culture in early modern England or trade routes across the Sahara, enrich our understanding of the wider Atlantic systems of which the fledgling colony was part.

The essays in Virginia and the Atlantic World are organised into five main sections. The first of these contains contributions by Daniel K. Richter, Joseph Hall, and James D. Rice and looks at Native Americans in early modern North America. In broad terms, these essays explore the social and cultural worlds inhabited by Native Americans and the alteration of these worlds by the arrival of European people, goods and diseases. They also suggest ways in which Indians attempted to make use of these transformations. The second section of the book continues some of these themes through its focus on “Africa and the Atlantic.” Just as the contributors of the first section seek to emphasise the agency and the complex reactions of Indians in the face of change, essays on Africa by E. Ann McDougall, David Northrup, James H. Sweet, and a jointly authored piece by Linda Heywood and John Thornton consider the multifaceted manner in which Africans responded to the opportunities and challenges wrought by the changing economic, social and cultural environments of the Atlantic interculture.

The work in this volume that looks out onto the Atlantic world from Africa and from “Indian country” serve to demonstrate that the Atlantic was a contested space in which the ideas and ambitions of the inhabitants of the Ocean’s littoral clashed and came together. As Stuart B. Schwartz deftly points out at the end of this volume, we cannot deny the processes of enslavement, deracination and dispossession to which so many Africans and Native Americans fell victim. It is clearly possible and necessary, however, for historians to recognise the complexity of African and Indian cultures and to look at the ways in which different people from within these broadly defined groups attempted to shape the newly forming Atlantic to their advantage, albeit often in vain.

The collection continues with a third section, on “European Models,” which contains essays by Philip P. Boucher, Peter Cook and Philip D. Morgan, along with a jointly authored piece by Marcy Norton and Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert. This section seeks to understand the establishment of the English settlement at Jamestown in relation to the Atlantic activities of other European powers, most notably the Spanish. The fourth section of the book includes essays by Andrew Fitzmaurice, David Harris Sacks, Benjamin Schmidt and David S. Shields and looks at “Intellectual Currents,” placing the expansion of the English Atlantic in the sixteenth and seventeenth century in the context of changing European ideas about trade...