Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion

Preface

Preface Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion seeks to spur fresh work, to ask new questions (and old questions again), and to help further understanding of the development, settlement, and nature of life in Virginia ’s first century. The idea for the volume emerged during our collaboration on a historiographic essay—“Smoke and Mirrors: Reinterpreting the Society and Economy of the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake”—that sought to show the potential for new directions in the early history of the region. The essay argued that recent work and new perspectives revealed the weakness of prevailing interpretations of the economic character and social development of the Tobacco Coast colonies. But rather than suggest a new master narrative to take the place of the old grand orthodoxy, the article stressed the need for more research—on a variety of long-neglected topics .This essay collection, along with the symposium that preceded it, is part of that effort, not to redefine the field, but to suggest new angles of view, new approaches, and new arguments that help advance our ability to understand the nature of life in early America.With essays employing a variety of methodologies, analytical strategies, and types of evidence, this volume explores a wide range of topics that touch upon numerous aspects of the lived and imagined experience of the early American world: from religion to government , trade to imperialism, slavery to Native American society, landscape to the sexual politics of the household. Each of the essays is based on new original research by an international group of historians. To begin, these essays are specifically about Virginia and how it fits into the early modern world, considered broadly. Because much of the last gen- viii / Preface eration of work on the Chesapeake generalized from the sources and records of colonial Maryland, Virginia’s unique problems have often been lost in too-easy assumptions of regional homogeneity in all things. And yet the volume is not a collection of local histories. As the essays show, analysis of the problems that confronted the peoples of early Virginia often require contexts that reach beyond county lines, colonial borders, and imperial boundaries. Far from narrowing our comprehension of the Chesapeake, focusing solely on Virginia advances our understanding of both the limits and true potential of regional approaches to the history of early British America. We have chosen to emphasize “early modern”Virginia, rather than “colonial ,” as a way to break down the artificial barriers that too often separate early American historians from the great problems and literature of the early modern world. “Colonial” implies a teleology; it suggests a timeless meaning of empire; it assumes an essential parochialism about the people who inhabited these shifting societies; and it creates a sense that these places (with the exception of their commercial connections) were largely self-contained, sealed off from the bigger trends and cultural life of the contemporary world. “Early modern” is, of course, no less of a historiographic construction. But “early modern” speaks to a broadly held consensus about the problems and character of the postmedieval, premodern world, which saw the rise of the nation-states in Europe, the problems of organized war and state formation, the expansion of European societies throughout the Atlantic, and the birth of large-scale merchant and financial capitalism. It was a time marked by a transformation in the unity of Christendom; an explosion in the trading and use of enslaved men and women; an unprecedented mingling and mixing of peoples, ideas, worldviews, and cosmologies from disparate areas of the globe; and the aggressive conquest of the Americas. The story of Virginia in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century is a story of the early modern world, and we all should aspire to resist the tempting complacency of the familiar categories and constructs of American history. The essays in this volume were all presented at an intimate symposium held in August 2007 at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. The four-hundredth anniversary year of Virginia ’s founding seemed an especially appropriate time to reflect upon how the story of England’s first colony in America has been told. The symposium brought together numerous experts, along with the volume’s contributors, Preface / ix not only to critique the essays but help stimulate a more general dialogue about the past, present, and future state of the field. This workshop-style presentation of the...