The Civic Solution to the Crisis of English Colonisation, 1609-1625

Andrew Fitzmaurice

This paper looks at the ideology of the colony established by the Virginia Company, the first permanent colony established by the English in North America. The paper argues that the ideology of the Virginia Company was civic: that is, neo-Roman and specifically Classical and Italian republican in its intellectual alignments. I propose that this civic ideology was first offered in 1609 as a solution to the failures of Elizabethan colonisation and more immediately to the crisis of the Jamestown colony. In its most obvious form this civic ideology is manifested in a turn from the Elizabethan attempts to emulate Spanish riches to the argument that only civic virtues, and the rejection of wealth, will establish a flourishing commonwealth. From the demonstration of this republican ideology, we may draw two primary conclusions. First, we must revise not only the pre-Civil War history of English republicanism, but also the foundations of American civic traditions. Second, it has frequently been observed that the Elizabethan model of New World conquest was abandoned for colonisation, and it has recently been argued that this shift was toward the idea of commerce and the closely associated legitimising argument of res nullius. Foremost, however, among the various strands of civic tradition employed by the Virginia Company was that which was particularly hostile to commerce. The shift from Elizabethan ideas of empire did not, therefore, anticipate a British commercial empire. Rather, as Robert Gordon (1624) observed, the Virginia colony walked in the footsteps of the Italian republics.

[WP #97004]