Envisioning an English Empire

Robert Appelbaum is Lecturer in Renaissance Studies at Lancaster University and is the author of Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England. John Wood Sweet teaches history at the University of North Carolina and is the author of Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

• ForewordIntroduction: Sea Changes1 The Conquest of Eden: Possession and Dominion in Early Virginia2 Powhatans Abroad: Virginia Indians in England3 John Smith Maps Virginia: Knowledge, Rhetoric, and Politics4 The Politics of Pathos: Richard Frethorne's Letters Home5 The Specter of Spain in John Smith's Colonial Writing6 The White Othello: Turkey and Virginia in John Smith's True travels7 England, Morocco, and Global Geopolitical Upheaval8 Irish Colonies and the Americas9 Hunger in Early Virginia: Indians and English Facing off Over Excess, Want, and Need10 Between "Plain Wilderness" and "Goodly Corn Fields": Representing Land Use in Early Virginia11 Settling with Slavery: Human Bondage in the Early Anglo-Atlantic World12 "We all smoke here": Behn's The Widdow Ranter and the Invention of American Identity Conclusion: Jamestown and Its North Atlantic World

"An engaging study of the remarkably varied ways in which the Atlantic identity of one fragile community coalesced in ideas and experiences forged in England and in societies around and even beyond the northern Atlantic rim."-William and Mary Quarterly"Important reading for all students of the early modern American and Atlantic worlds."-Journal of American HistoryThis ambitious, interdisciplinary collection of essays offers scholars of colonial American, world history, British history, and the Atlantic world fresh, revisionist insights into the history of Jamestown up to the time of Bacon's Rebellion, while also examining the international context that created English colonialism."-History"The stimulating essays in this collection demonstrate the usefulness of reaching out, not just in spatial and temporal terms but also in disciplinary ones. By placing Jamestown in a wider frame, we have a better understanding of Jamestown and of the North Atlantic world in the early seventeenth century."-Renaissance Quarterly"A highly recommended source of the serious scholar as well as for anyone wishing to understand one of the most important periods in history."-Virginia Quarterly Review"Certain to become required reading for graduate students, this book and the methods and lines of interpretation employed by its authors reveal new layers of meaning that will shape the scholarly discussion of early Jamestown and the Chesapeake for many years."-Georgia Historical Review