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Chapter 2 "God Sells Us All Things for Our Labour" john Smith's Generall Historie In 1588, Thomas Hariot claimed that Virginia naturally produced "Silkewormes faire and great, as bigge as our ordinary Walnuts." 1 Following the program set out by Hakluyt's "Discourse of Western Planting" and other such promotional texts, he went on to assess the possibilities for commodity offered by these silkworms: Although it hath not bene our hap to have found such plenty, as elsewhere to be in the countrey we have heard of, yet seeing that the countrey doth naturally breed and nourish them, there is no doubt that if arte be added in planting of Mulberie trees, and others, fit for them in commodious places, for their feeding and nourishing, and some of them carefully gathered & husbanded in that sort, as by men ofskil is knowen to be necessary: there wil rise as great profit in time to the Virginians, as thereof doth now to the Persians,Turks, Italians and Spanyards. (68-69) The source of Hariot's information about this "plenty" is not clear. If he heard it from indigenous Americans (for evidently he became competent in some Algonquin dialect), we must wonderwhether they behaved as did the peoples Columbus encountered on his first voyage, always suggesting that the commodities he sought could be found elsewhere.2 On the other hand, Hariot might have heard of the abundance of silkworms only from Hakluyt and other promoters. In either case, he couples such speculative reports (differently motivated, although he might not have realized it) with empirical observations about the environment's natural capacities , here the evident abundance of mulberries, to develop an aspect of the georgic projected by the Hakluyts. The particular program he had in mind here would never pay off, partly because the indigenous species of mulberry, red rather than white, was not well suited to sericulture no matter how artfully it was planted.3 Hariot's unwarranted projection of sericulture in Virginia and similar such instances raise questions that had remained implicit the Hakluyts ' speculations: what precisely was the nature of the linkage between economy and environment in practice, and from that how ought labor 30 Chapter 2 to be ordered? The literature offirst-generation colonists answered these questions in two conflicting modes. Sixteenth-century optimism about new economic capacities persisted, but was now often accompanied by criticisms that the environment was being mismanaged. The colonists, it seemed, were not always living up to the promise ofthe land. At first, this failure of the American promise was simply the colonists's failure to produce their own subsistence from an obviouslyfertile land. Soon, however, the critique ofmismanagement took a more complicated turn. As the tobacco economy developed in Virginia, the problem was defined as one of simultaneous overproduction and underproduction: the colonists were misusing the environment's capacity, producing tobacco but not food for subsistence and other important commodities for trade, thereby developing land practices that worked against the public good. Thus while writings from colonial Virginia follow the Hakluyts in urging economic growth, they resonate with modern critiques of growth when they explore the specific ways in which economic activity depends on local environmental capacity and when they assess that capacity in order to propose the regulation or management of economic activity. Like much of modern green writing, that is, they argue that there is something fundamentally wrong with Americans' relation to the land and sometimes offer tentative solutions to the problems they identify. In their criticisms ofthe tobacco economy in particular, these texts also run up against economic resistance to such solutions-and in this respect as well will sound somewhat familiar to modern environmentalists. In specifying the role of human labor, first-generation colonial writings such as A True Declaration of the Estate

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