This study situates the colonization of Virginia, the centrepiece of early English overseas settlement activity, in the social and political landscape of the early seventeenth century.

This study situates the colonization of Virginia, the centrepiece of early English overseas settlement activity, in the social and political landscape of the early seventeenth century.

In Advancing Empire, L. H. Roper explores the origins and early development of English overseas expansion. Roper focuses on the networks of aristocrats, merchants, and colonial-imperialists who worked to control the transport and production of exotic commodities, such as tobacco and sugar, as well as the labor required to produce them. He is primarily interested in the relationship between the English state and the people it governed, the role of that state in imperial development, the socio-political character of English colonies and English relations with Asians, Africans, American Indians, and other Europeans overseas. The activities stimulated the expansion and integration of global territorial and commercial interests that became the British Empire in the eighteenth century. In exploring these activities from a wider perspective, Roper offers a novel conclusion that revises popular analyses of the English Empire and of Anglo-America.

In Advancing Empire, L. H. Roper explores the origins and early development of English overseas expansion. Roper focuses on the networks of aristocrats, merchants, and colonial-imperialists who worked to control the transport and production of exotic commodities, such as tobacco and sugar, as well as the labor required to produce them. He is primarily interested in the relationship between the English state and the people it governed, the role of that state in imperial development, the socio-political character of English colonies and English relations with Asians, Africans, American Indians, and other Europeans overseas. The activities stimulated the expansion and integration of global territorial and commercial interests that became the British Empire in the eighteenth century. In exploring these activities from a wider perspective, Roper offers a novel conclusion that revises popular analyses of the English Empire and of Anglo-America.

The first comparative treatment of settlers' trading, pirating, and colonizing activities in the Caribbean Brimming with new perspectives and cuttingedge research, the essays collected in The Torrid Zone explore colonization and cultural interaction in the Caribbean from the late 1600s to the early 1800s-a period known as the "long" seventeenth century-a time when these encounters varied widely and the diverse actors were not yet fully enmeshed in the culture and power dynamics of master-slave relations. The events of this era would profoundly affect the social and political development of both the colonies that Europeans established in the Caribbean and the wider world. This book is the first to offer comparative treatments of Danish, Dutch, English, and French trading, pirating, and colonizing activities in the Caribbean and analysis of the corresponding interactions among people of African, European, and Native origin. The contributions range from an investigation of the indigenous colonization of the Lesser Antilles by the Kalinago to a look at how the Anglo-Dutch wars in Europe affected relations between the English inhabitants and the Dutch government of Suriname. Among the other essays are incisive examinations of the often-neglected history of Danish settlement in the Virgin Islands, attempts to establish French colonial authority over the pirates of Saint-Domingue, and how the Caribbean blueprint for colonization manifested itself in South Carolina through enslavement of Amerindians and the establishment of plantation agriculture. The extensive geographic, demographic, and thematic concerns of this collection shed a clear light on the socioeconomic character of the "Torrid Zone" before and during the emergence and extension of the sugar-and-slaves complex that came to define this region. The book is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the social, political, and economic sensibilities to which the operators around the Caribbean subscribed as well as to our understanding of their actions, offering in turn a better comprehension of the consequences of their behavior.