This study situates the colonization of Virginia, the centrepiece of early English overseas settlement activity, in the social and political landscape of the early seventeenth century.

This collection offers a timely reappraisal of the origins and nature of the first British empire, in response to the ‘cultural turn’ in historical scholarship and the ‘new imperial history’. It addresses topics that have been neglected in recent literature, providing a series of political and institutional perspective; at the same time it recognises the importance of developments across the empire, not least in terms of how they affected imperial ‘policy’ and its implementation. It analyses a range of contemporary debates and ideas – political and intellectual as well as religious and administrative – relating to political economy, legal geography and sovereignty, as well as the messy realities of the imperial project, including the costs and losses of empire, collectively and individually.

Represents a history of the British Empire that takes account of the sense of empire as intellectual as well as geographic dominion: the historiography of the British Empire, with its preoccupation of empire as geographically unchallenged sovereignty, overlooks the idea of empire as intellectual dominion.

In Advancing Empire, L. H. Roper explores the origins and early development of English overseas expansion. Roper focuses on the networks of aristocrats, merchants, and colonial-imperialists who worked to control the transport and production of exotic commodities, such as tobacco and sugar, as well as the labor required to produce them. He is primarily interested in the relationship between the English state and the people it governed, the role of that state in imperial development, the socio-political character of English colonies and English relations with Asians, Africans, American Indians, and other Europeans overseas. The activities stimulated the expansion and integration of global territorial and commercial interests that became the British Empire in the eighteenth century. In exploring these activities from a wider perspective, Roper offers a novel conclusion that revises popular analyses of the English Empire and of Anglo-America.

This book provides an in-depth introduction to the issues involved in the expansion of European interests to the Hudson River Valley, the cultural interaction that took place there, and the colonization of the region. Written in accessible language by leading scholars, these essays incorporate the latest historical insights as they explore the new world in which American Indians and Europeans interacted, the settlement of the Dutch colony that ensued from the exploration of the Hudson River, and the development of imperial and other networks which came to incorporate the Hudson Valley.

Drawing on recent trends in both Atlantic and center-periphery literature, this book examines the relationship between the English crown - monarch, privy council, and ancillary bodies - and its Atlantic colonies under the early Stuart monarchs, James I and Charles I, circa 1603-1642.

Fear and the Shaping of Early American Societies is the first collection of essays to argue that fear permeated the colonial societies of 17th- and 18th-century America and to analyse its impact on the political decision-making processes from a variety of angles and locations. Indeed, the thirteen essays range from Canada to the Chesapeake, from New England to the Caribbean and from the Carolina Backcountry to Dutch Brazil. This volume assesses the typically American nature of fear factors and the responses they elicited in a transatlantic context. The essays further explore how the European colonists handled such challenges as Indian conspiracies, slave revolts, famine, “popery” and tyranny as well as werewolves and a dragon to build cohesive societies far from the metropolis. Contributors are: Sarah Barber, Benjamin Carp, Leslie Choquette, Anne-Claire Faucquez, Lauric Henneton, Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber, Susanne Lachenicht, Bertie Mandelblatt, Mark Meuwese, L. H. Roper, David L. Smith, Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, Christopher Vernon, and David Voorhees.