On the Jamestown Project

“This is the creation story from hell.”

This is a really interesting book, although I think it is trying to be two things at once. Of those two things, one is well-done, the other is half-baked.

In this work, Kupperman starts her introduction with a quick overview of popular imagination of the origins of the United States. What we tend to cover most heavily is Plymouth Colony, and I think I speak for most Americans when I say that we see this as America’s true founding, although we all recognize that the construction of Jamestown is important. Plymouth offers a clear picture—we know what the Pilgrims wanted and we tend to think of them as far less morally complicated than other colonial expeditions. Of course, this claim must be qualified, as King Philip’s War, in particular, was remarkably brutal and Native peoples were treated really badly by Puritans. Nevertheless, I think that, in spite of their rigidity, we can find much to admire in the Puritans. Not so with the construction of Jamestown. Jamestown had a brutal first decade, was responsible for the first importation of African slaves, and led to the construction of the dehumanizing labor relations of the plantation. What’s more, we all know the story of Pocahontas. As Disney-fied as it is, the profound tensions between Algonquin peoples and the English can’t really be overstated. Kupperman then argues that the Puritans pulled much of their inspiration from Jamestown, which really developed the “English model” of colonization. Thus, the true start of the Anglo-American colonial project and, by degrees, the United States, can be found in Jamestown. I anticipated that Kupperman’s argument would then have contemporary relevance, making the (perhaps facile) argument that the ills of the United States can be traced to its origins in Jamestown.

Yet, the remainder of the text doesn’t spend much time on that argument. The focus of the book is instead on the mental maps that the English produced leading up to the European settlement of Jamestown. In fact, Jamestown doesn’t really appear at all until the last third of the book. That’s not to say this is a bad thing; on the contrary, Kupperman’s analysis of English thinking about the Americas (and the world) is really bright and thorough. Yet, the book feels disjointed.

There’s a lot here on European relations with the Middle East and North Africa, something that I hadn’t really encountered in a book on colonial Anglo-America before (although there is almost always reference to this topic in overviews of Spanish America). The importance of Christianity and the need to push back against the Ottoman Empire was central to English thinking about the world. Kupperman ably argues that many English people truly believed that “Christendom” was in decline and that the end times were near—largely thanks to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. While accessing the markets of Asia and developing profitable ventures were the ultimate goals of colonization, both of these aims must be understood against a firmly Mediterranean background.

I was particularly interested in Chapter 5, on the borders of the Americas. There is a really good discussion of the way Europeans viewed seas and oceans here, and I eat that stuff up—I don’t know why I find it so fascinating that the Atlantic was seen as three seas (the Oceanus Occidentalis between England and North America, the Mare Atlanticus between the Caribbean and North Africa, and the Oceanus Australis which contained all the rest + the entirely of the Indian Ocean), but I do. That’s some good stuff.

The main subject matter of the book—the worldview in the background held by Englishmen in the age of early colonization—is treated really well, but it’s really difficult to make sense of Kupperman’s arguments here due to the way the topic is framed. I’m sure there’s a better way to manage that, and I wish that Kupperman had done so.