5 - An Empire of ‘Smoak’
Summary
Amongst many other weighty Reasons, why Virginia has not all this while made any progression into staple Commodities, this is the chief. That our Governours by reason of the corruption of those times they lived in, laid the Foundation of our wealth and industry on the vices of men; for about the time of our first seating of the Country, did this vicious habit of taking Tobacco possesse the English Nation, and from them has diffused it self into most parts of the World.
Here arrived one Sir Edmund Plowden, who had been in Virginia about seven years. He came first with a patent of a county Palatine for Delaware Bay, but wanting a pilot for that place, he went to Virginia and there having lost the estate he brought over, and all his people scattered from him, he came hither to return to England for supply, intending to return and plant the Delaware, if he could get sufficient strength to supplant the Swedes.
Despite these contemporary laments and the colony's erratic career, the permanent establishment of Virginia did provide the platform for the furtherance of English territorial ambitions, for the negotiation of the relationship between the metropolitan government and its colonies and, as we shall see in Chapter 6, for the development of Anglo-American colonial societies. As we have seen in the case of Virginia, a manifest degree of imperial impetus for overseas colonization did come from the Crown, even in 1606. Moreover, in addition to continuing to issue charters to the various entities which sponsored an explosion of colonial ventures between 1624 and 1663, various English governments, always with a close eye on their revenues, tried to bring the tobacco trade under closer control, culminating in the enactment of the first ‘Navigation Acts’ in 1651.
At the same time, the history of empire offers a further illustration of the extent of the grasp – and the limits of the reach – of the English state prior to the restoration of Charles II, particularly thanks to the fluid character of that state, especially prior to 1642.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The English Empire in America, 1602–1658Beyond Jamestown, pp. 93 - 120Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014