Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World.

Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World. Edited by Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet. Early American Studies. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, c. 2005. Pp. xvi, 368. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-1903-6; cloth, $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-3853-2.)

The idea for the collection of essays under review was generated in discussions at a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Jamestown in the Atlantic World directed by Karen Ordahl Kupperman. The book has been published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in its Early American Studies series, which emphasizes interdisciplinary scholarship on the history of America from 1600 to 1850. In this volume, literary scholars outnumber historians nine to six. As coeditor John Wood Sweet (historian) notes, contributors agreed that "Jamestown should be understood not simply as a historical event in the customary sense, but also as a literary phenomenon" (p. 2). On balance, the book should appeal most to those comfortable with literary studies and the "Atlantic world" paradigm. Historians may give it mixed reviews.

In her foreword to the book, Kupperman asserts that all scholars working on this era and its texts "have in common the seriousness with which they take their sources and the generators of those sources" (p. xv). There are, nevertheless, some disciplinary differences that, for better or worse, stand in the way of collaboration and easy communication across the boundaries of academe's closely guarded kingdoms. If the purpose of historical study is to construct narratives and arguments about the past based on the evidence found in carefully scrutinized sources, literary scholars are sometimes content, it seems, to problematize and explore those sources for their own sake.

Take, for example, Emily Rose's essay, "The Politics of Pathos: Richard Frethorne's Letters Home." Rose demonstrates that these letters--much used by U.S. survey instructors to illustrate the tribulations of indentured servants in early Virginia--were part of a propaganda campaign waged by elite opponents of the Virginia Company who hoped that poignant complaints about bad conditions would bring an end to company rule in the colony. Frethorne, she says, was a well-connected young man, not at all typical of the servant class. But what about his letters home? Should we revise our understanding and use of these documents now that we know more about their author's atypicality? Rose has nothing to say about such issues. Her interest is in Virginia politics, not servants.

Fortunately, we have plenty of evidence from other sources about servants and servitude, chiefly the voluminous manuscript records of the colony's county court proceedings. An unacknowledged preference of literary scholars for analyzing published texts rather than unpublished materials leaves to historians the difficult but rewarding tasks of finding and mining the incredibly rich archival sources--such as the county court records--that document vital facets of everyday life and social relations. Kupperman again sets a high (historian's) standard for scholars dependent on the documents and other sources of the early modern era: "Scholars must try to know as much as the creators of their sources knew and must try not to make easy assumptions about their motivations, justifications, and evasions. We must seek first to comprehend the choices they made and the institutions they created as contemporaries understood them rather than in terms of their meanings to later generations" (p. xv).

In light of this advice, consider Lisa Blansett's examination of Captain John Smith's Map of Virginia--an important and intriguing source documenting both the personal achievements of Smith and the more general English desires for imperial control over the peoples and resources of that colony. One wonders what Smith would make of Blansett's decidedly postmodern assertions and speculations about the map's many symbols and meanings. For example: "Within the bounds of the map is a relentless syncopation of different world views that reside within yet strain against Western representational strategies" (p. 82). One might, with equal justification, also ask what early Virginians would think of Pompa Banerjee's hypotheses that Smith's experiences in the Ottoman Empire shaped his behavior in Virginia and that the burgeoning networks of a busy Atlantic world extended well beyond that vast ocean to distant corners of a different sea. And what might they say about the legal and philosophical notions of property, land use, waste, and agrarian capitalism featured in Jess Edwards's deft piece on colonization and uses of the land in seventeenth-century Virginia?

Our imaginary readers from that other country--the past--would have no trouble understanding Andrew Hadfield's determination to compare and contrast the English colonial experiences in Ireland and America. They would almost certainly be intrigued by Robert Appelbaum's provocative, probing exploration of food cultures and hunger in Jamestown and the wider world. Three essays by historians James Horn (conquest and possession in early Virginia), Alden T. Vaughan (Virginia Indians in England), and Michael J. Guasco (early English notions of slavery) would be comprehensible, if not completely acceptable in their conclusions. Matters involving race and social relations in a multi-ethnic setting were difficult then and still are difficult to disentangle now.

All readers would agree that this is a thoughtful, well-produced volume. The illustrations (including maps) are clear and apposite, though a magnifying glass will come in handy for some. As for the Atlantic world idea, it now seems almost beyond reproach as an organizing concept for understanding the dynamics and reach of that colonial "world we have lost." But does it pass the Kupperman test mentioned above? Maybe we ought to be looking more closely at the intense localism and parochialism of many, if not most, American colonists. Scholars tend to be cosmopolitans--identifying with the opposite strain in American history challenges our powers of empathy and imagination. It is worth a try.

J. DOUGLAS DEAL

State University of New York at Oswego