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By Root 1203 0

which the British used of natives in plenty of later colonies. But these settlements in the Americas were quite unlike most of the later colonies in Africa or the South Seas. Elsewhere, while English might be the formal language of government, it existed alongside local languages, customs and hierarchies. In the plantations, the English language, English law and the Christian religion excluded others. And because so many of the American settlements were established in a time of philosophical ferment when Thomas Hobbes and John Locke wrestled with the relationship between the individual and the state, when the king was beheaded and John Milton glorified the republic (only for the monarchy then to be restored), these New World settlements had more than a whiff of the Utopian about them, which later found its most concise expression in the commitment in the Declaration of Independence to ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. They offered sanctuary to the Nonconformist and were born with freedom in their very bloodstream. For a government in London, the long-term appeal of allowing or encouraging citizens to travel thousands of miles was the prospect of future dividends: Francis Bacon had said the ‘planting of colonies is like the planting of woods’. In the short term it offered the opportunity to export surplus poor people, landless younger sons of the gentry, religious dissidents and other irritants.

One of the earliest promoters of colonial settlement, Captain John Smith (immortalized in the dreadful Disney cartoon Pocahontas), soon made a claim which recurs throughout British imperial history. Colonial settlement promised England the chance to save itself from the degeneracy which was the fate of every great society. Smith’s fervent patriotism was undimmed by his colourful military background (he had fought for the Austrians against the Turks, killing three men in single combat before later being taken prisoner and sold into slavery). Joining the expedition to found a colony at Jamestown, in Chesapeake Bay, Virginia, in 1607 must initially have seemed just another adventure. Certainly, his fellow colonists did not find him a particularly congenial companion and he was soon in chains, accused of plotting mutiny. It was only when they opened the sealed box they had been given by the expedition’s commercial sponsors that his travelling companions – largely ‘gentlemen’ – made the unfortunate discovery that the company had chosen the soldier-of-fortune as one of the governors of the settlement. Class sensitivities were outraged, and continued to damage the Virginia project. The ‘gentlemen’ might have been content to go in for a spot of dashing robbery of a Spaniard, but they were damned if they were going to undertake anything as menial as tilling the soil or running fishing boats. Successful colonies, Smith later observed with a shrug, really needed people who could practise a trade.

From his experiences in Virginia, and his later attempts to establish colonies further north on the American coast – the area he named ‘New England’ – Smith concluded that it was really no good using plantations merely as places to dispose of indigent toffs and riff-raff who would otherwise be in prison or begging on the streets: the ideal settlement should reflect a true cross-section of society. On the model of the colony at Jamestown, in which those who bought shares became entitled to a share of any profits, Smith hoped to raise money from investors in future settlement schemes. Though he (of course) made a point of emphasizing the missionary role of settlers – godly people who would be carrying the gospel to benighted parts of the world – what he really wanted was a selection of people with useful skills, who might be expected to know about such things as the cultivation of vines or the manufacture of glass. America, he warned, was not a place to be plundered for gold, silver or precious stones, but ‘all you expect from thence must be by labour’. Sir Walter Raleigh (Humphrey Gilbert’s half-brother) had sailed up the Orinoco, his mind