For God, King, and People: Forging Commonwealth Bonds in Renaissance Virginia by Alexander B. Haskell (review)

The English colonization of Virginia in 1607 is a developing story. Many long years ago, the early Chesapeake was routinely relegated to the historical shadows by virtue of the much greater interest in colonial New England. In the latter decades of the twentieth century, the transformative social and economic histories of the region by scholars associated with the Chesapeake School effectively destroyed that way of doing business. The historians, however, left themselves open to the criticism that they believed that the seventeenth-century Chesapeake was more important in the larger scheme of things than had been the case. In response, over the last few decades, historians have reframed the history of the early Chesapeake in light of the reality that the colony was planted in Native ground, on the periphery of an Atlantic world largely defined by the Spanish and Portuguese, and was but one small piece of a global puzzle centered more in the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean.¹

The early history of Virginia has been well served by scholars recently, but it is now hard to escape the impression that it was of marginal interest to contemporaries during its formative years. As a result, there is renewed attention to the process by which Virginia accrued greater significance. Some scholars have even returned to what looks like the first principle of the old Imperial School—that Virginia (or any other colony) can only be understood if we first remember that it was an appendage. Recent studies of servitude and slavery, for example, have shifted even more away from demand-side considerations to supply-side narratives in order to make sense of how England made Virginia. Paradoxically, the political, social, and economic realities of London appear increasingly important to scholars hoping to understand the American colonies more fully.²

Alexander B. Haskell’s For God, King, and People reflects this tendency to place Virginia in broader imperial context. In a similar vein to other scholars who have examined the intellectual underpinnings of English colonialism, Haskell is interested in the complicated and shifting ways that Renaissance ideas framed how colonial promotors justified their actions in America.³ Renaissance Virginia, he asserts, was as much an intellectual endeavor on the part of people deeply concerned about the past as it was an enterprise executed by people with eyes fixed on the future. Unlike scholars concerned with cross-cultural encounters, economic development, or emerging labor regimes, Haskell is fascinated by the relationship between commonwealths and colonialism. He argues that colonial enterprises were viewed as two things at once: a mechanism by which human beings, as God’s agents, extended dominion over the earth and a divinely inspired procedure for creating new commonwealths. In this context, the establishment of Virginia was consistent with widespread understandings of both history and providence, and it generated debate in England about sovereignty, the nature of government, and the character of civic communities. As Haskell asserts, Virginia was never simply a colony. It was a proving ground for emerging ideas about kingship, the state, and political communities.

Haskell’s humanist proponents of colonization were deeply concerned with the lawfulness of colonialism and how human endeavors mirrored what they understood to be God’s will. This premise leads Haskell to emphasize the importance of casuistry, or “the art of aligning human behavior with Providence in light of the difficulty of knowing God’s will with assurance” (56). The logic of casuistry shaped the writings of the elder Richard Hakluyt and John Dee and the advice they offered Elizabeth I. Importantly, Renaissance humanists, in this telling, planted the intellectual seeds for a Virginia that was imagined at the moment of its creation not simply as a colony but rather as a commonwealth in its own right, an argument that establishes the ground upon which Haskell builds the rest...