This chapter investigates how debates about “the Indians” or the Powhatans informed Jacobean political thought. By calling it “our project,” Gray rendered “the savages” a collective concern, one that implicated Londoners as well as colonists. Through an examination of several sources and events from 1619, contrasted against the criticisms and bitter accusations of mismanagement following the 1622 massacre and the dissolution of the Virginia Company several years later, this study suggests that the English experience in Jamestown played a vital role in shaping nascent concepts of imperium in the early seventeenth century and that English interactions with indigenous tribes played a crucial part in metropolitan articulations of civil society. Ultimately, this chapter demonstrates that the earliest attempts at colonization was not just a case of the English acting on America but also that America and its peoples informed English discourses of state and society from its inception, far earlier than is generally assumed.

Connected Histories in the Early Modern WorldConnected Histories in the Early Modern World contributes to our growing understanding of the connectedness of the world during a period in history when an unprecedented number of people-Africans, Asians, Americans, and Europeans-made transoceanic or other long distance journeys. Inspired by Sanjay Subrahmanyam's innovative approach to early modern historical scholarship, it explores topics that highlight the cultural impact of the movement of people, animals, and objects at a global scale. The series editors welcome proposals for monographs and collections of essays in English from literary critics, art historians, and cultural historians that address the changes and cross-fertilizations of cultural practices of specific societies. General topics may concern, among other possibilities: cultural confluences, objects in motion, appropriations of material cultures, cross-cultural exoticization, transcultural identities, religious practices, translations and mistranslations, cultural impacts of trade, discourses of dislocation, globalism in literary/visual arts, and cultural histories of lesser studied regions (such as the Philippines, Macau, African societies).

No abstract

From its origins in the Chesapeake and the Caribbean to its transformation into smoke in a Jacobean chamber, tobacco entered drastically new contexts of use as it travelled from Indigenous America to the social spaces of early seventeenth-century London. This article draws on comparative anthropology and archaeology to explore how early colonization, particularly in Jamestown, influenced the development of smoking among the English political elite. This offers a case study into the ways in which Indigenous commodities and knowledge were integrated into English ritual practices of their own; it also reveals the deliberate choices made by the English to set themselves apart from those they sought to colonize. Placing the material practices and wit poetry of gentlemen within the geopolitics of colonialism raises attention to the acts of erasure or dispossession that accompanied the incorporation of tobacco into urban sociability. Here, the practices of Indigenous peoples were modified and altered, and the pleasures of plantation were expressed as an intoxication as potent as the plant itself.

No abstract