The well-ordered commonwealth: Humanism, utopian perfectionism, and the English colonization of the Americas

Abstract

This article utilizes the earliest English attempts to colonize the Americas as a lens through which to examine the assumptions held by elite Englishmen regarding the role of Indians and non-elites in their colonies. It focuses on the plans for, and experience of, colonizing Roanoke in the 1580s as a way to contextualize the later colonization effort at Jamestown. In these earlier failed attempts at colonization, patrician Englishmen began to espouse their grand plans for incorporating Native Americans into the social structure of England during this period. Specifically, they sought to erect in Virginia a well-ordered commonwealth in accordance with a utopian attitude best expressed by Sir Thomas More in the early sixteenth century and further refined by English thinkers, writers, and colonial advocates such as Richard Hakluyt, William Shakespeare, and Sir Thomas Smith. According to their own documents, they firmly believed that Indians, once “civilized,” would take their place alongside the majority of Englishmen as members of the plebeian class. The proprietors and officials of the Virginia Company bought into these ideas as well, and they brought them with them to Jamestown. Therefore, the origins of these early notions concerning the Native American place in the colonial English social structure provide valuable clues to the eventual relationships that developed on the Virginia mainland during the seventeenth century.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.