Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation (review)

One of the most powerful legacies of the last thirty years of study of the colonization of the Americas has been the view that colonization efforts were undertaken for profit. This view has allowed us to teach our students, for example, that the English were not the high-minded religious idealists of nationalistic historiography, but rather the precursors of capitalistic greed who are, if less admirable, at least more recognizable to modern students. Despite the care we generally take to complicate those notions - - for example, by noting the multiple problems with terming this capitalism, and by reminding students that it took the English decades before they actually realized any profit - - on the whole, our understanding of the motivations of early colonizers shifted irrevocably as a result of these recent decades of research. We may take care to speak of mercantilism instead of capitalism, but in general, our adherence to the profit narrative has remained steadfast.

But Andrew Fitzmaurice’s Humanism and America provides us with a new and thoroughly historicist view of early English colonization by pointing out the anachronisms of this grand narrative. To be sure, he acknowledges, mercantilism was a motive for colonization, but this was not the sole or even the most distinctive feature of the cultural world of the late English Renaissance. That honor goes to humanism, an intellectual movement that remained overwhelmingly skeptical of monetary greed during the sixteenth century - - and a movement which, as Fitzmaurice carefully demonstrates, played an important role in shaping early colonization efforts. Most significantly, he reveals the interconnections between humanism and mercantilism and the changes over time that allowed English humanists, by the early seventeenth century, to overcome their anxieties about empire and to pursue wealth with clear consciences. He also shows that not only did most of the important colonizers and promoters have humanistic educations; even those without such elite educations were fundamentally influenced by humanism via a wide range of popularizers, most notably ministers. Using a wide range of documents, from promotional tracts to sermons to the writings of the Virginia Company, Fitzmaurice demonstrates that humanism was the primary lens through which the English understood the promises and terms of establishing colonies in the Americas.

Humanists hastened to dictate colonization’s proper path. Especially during the sixteenth century, English thinkers adhered to what Fitzmaurice terms the Ciceronian humanist ethos, which held up the overriding importance of virtue and honor in the pursuit of an active civic life. These ethics made them deeply cautious of conquest and possession of others’ lands, since those activities could make citizens more desirous of wealth than virtue and right actions. Humanists needed only to point to the example of imperial Rome which, as Cicero warned, was subjected to justice for its greed for foreign wealth and land. But humanists also promised that their own fate need not be so dark and that, by adhering to their virtuous intentions, a “new commonwealth” would bring honor to God and nation.

So if English humanists played a role in keeping colonizing projects oriented to honor in the early years, how did that orientation change over time? Fitzmaurice’s argument pivots on the role of rhetoric as it shifted during the sixteenth century. As humanists embraced classical styles of rhetoric, specifically the Ciceronian use of deliberative, politically-oriented modes of persuasion, they engaged in two endeavors that would prove to be contradictory. On one hand, mastery in the ability to persuade was an accomplishment that conferred honor on the orator and society alike because oratory was viewed as central to sustaining the commonwealth. In this regard, oratory was viewed as central to the civilizing process. But on the other hand, pro-colonization rhetors were sometimes called upon to persuade individuals who were best influenced by discussions of profit. Thus, at the same time that humanistic orators eschewed greed, they also found it necessary to appeal to profiteers in order to achieve the greater goal of garnering economic support for the honorable commonwealth...