Introduction

W hen James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, the empire he inherited included Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and a number of surrounding islands. Calais, England’s last vestige of its medieval empire on the Continent, was lost to France in 1558. The famous Elizabethan voyages of Francis Drake, Martin Frobisher, Humphrey Gilbert, and Walter Ralegh, though fresh in the minds of English humanists and adventurers, had not resulted in any permanent settlements. Quite oppositely, the failure that accompanied most of these ventures served more to impede future efforts than to encourage them. Thus, by the end of Elizabeth’s reign, England remained, in the words of the imperial proponent John Dee, an “islandish monarchy.” 1 Some forty years later, on the eve of the English revolution, the Atlantic was populated by approximately fifty thousand English subjects. They lived in more than a dozen settlements in Bermuda, Newfoundland, the Caribbean islands, and several colonies along the eastern mainland of North America (including Virginia, Maryland, and several New England colonies). 2 The story of the success and failure of these various endeavors, and of the religious, political, demographic, and economic variety among the colonies of the English Atlantic world during their first few decades, is well known to students of Atlantic and American history. 3 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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