was expanding, so was Russia: the latter expanding into northern Asia from 1580 to 1700; as Russia expanded, England benefited from the resultant increased trade, like a bicyclist being dragged along in the wake of the speediness of a lead competitor.57 As matters evolved, there was a complementariness between Russia’s spread east and England’s spread westward to the Americas and southward to Africa, except that Russia had less competition from major powers and competition from China only intermittently.58 “The greatest transformation of the world of the seventeenth century,” says one scholar, “was the explosive expansion of Russian trade and settlement across Siberia….” Thus, by 1639, Russia had reached the Pacific.59 Boosting London not only was the ability to work out an entente with the Ottomans and the Dutch but good relations with the continent’s giant—Russia—too.
As London grew corpulent from the business of a growing merchant class, the English became more ambitious in their overseas adventures.60 In some ways the formation of the Muscovy Company in 1555 served as a model for the expansionism of the Turkish Company—later the Levant Company—in 1581 and the English East Indian Company and the commercial colonialism that beset what became Virginia a few decades later.61 Interestingly, one of the first families of London’s settler colonies, the Van Cortlandts, for whom a major park in the Bronx continues to be named, had roots in Russia. Oloff Stevense Van Cortlandt arrived as a soldier in North America in 1638. Of noble ancestry, he was lineally descended from the Dukes of Courtland in Russia, but eventually his family became tied by marriage to other grandees in what became New York State, including the Van Rensselaers, the Schuylers, the Jays, the Livingstons, and the Barclays.62
As Russia was expanding eastward and Western Europeans were expanding southward to Africa and westward to the Americas, gobbling land and resources as they proceeded, Japan entered two centuries of self-imposed isolation, methodically massacring missionaries seen as the first wave of an invasion, until the nation that was the major result of westward colonialism and enslavement, the United States, pried open the archipelago in 1853.63 Word may have reached Japan that in 1565 the Spanish had occupied what they called the Philippines, and a few decades later the Dutch colonized what became Indonesia.
In sum, the stars were aligning for London’s merchants, as Russia was distracted eastward and the Ottomans sought ties with England (and vice versa) to countervail Spain.
HENCE, AN ACCUMULATION OF factors propelled England into North America—Virginia, more specifically—in the early seventeenth century. The lust for wealth, the competition with Spain and the Ottoman Turks, and related factors led to this settlement project in what became Virginia. In the late sixteenth century, Sir Walter Raleigh ventured to South America, dazzling Londoners with the potentialities of all sorts, wealth not least, unveiled,64 providing a path to reach the eminence of Spain by dint of emulation of its skill in enslaving the unwary. Sir Simon D’Ewes was among those who backed settlements in North America, particularly in order to exploit timbers and pelts and fish—and to block the so-called Papists. Doing so would prevent their antagonists from exploiting same, garnering funds by which England could be invaded again.65
In 1609, the English Virginia Company, which had established Jamestown in Virginia two years earlier, moved to dispatch settlers across the Atlantic with more vigor.66 Initiating centuries of contestation between Madrid and London, Spain as early as 1611 was pondering destruction of the new settlement in Virginia.67 Of course, the indigenous were not necessarily thrilled when invaders wandered into their bailiwick, leading to severe conflict,68 at both ends of a colonial chain from Massachusetts to Virginia.69
BUT WHY WERE BERMUDA AND VIRGINIA early targets for settlement? In a sense, London was taking the path of least (European) resistance in that a good deal of the Caribbean had been gobbled up by Spain already, not to mention a good deal of the Americas generally. Despite seeking to conciliate the Ottoman Turks so as to better confront Spain, both of these European powers continued to irritate London during this era.70 Seeking to oust the Dutch from the Malay Peninsula produced results as dismaying as attempts to oust Madrid from the Western Hemisphere.71 It was during the decisive year of 1619 that the Dutch East India Company captured what became Jakarta and burned it to the ground, providing resources for this European power that brought it to the top table.72
Indeed, a betting man in 1624 would have wagered that the winner of the century in diffusing their tongue globally would be the Dutch. They had arrived on the African coast in 1592 and established Pernambuco and New Netherland by 1624, seemingly outstripping the English.73 As early as 1624, the Dutch were hauling tobacco from Virginia,74 helping to inculcate in the minds of some colonists the value of Pan-Europeanism—or what became the “whiteness” project.
At the same time, Captain John Smith was complaining about Dutch and Spanish incursions into Virginia,75 suggestive of the weakness of London’s position. (Smith, who escaped Ottoman Turks by beheading his captors, knew something about a weakened position.)76 Yet London’s success was partly derived from Continental Europe being sucked into what became the Thirty Years’ War, which weakened England’s rivals at a propitious moment. Just as the culmination of the U.S. Civil War led to an offensive against Native American polities, this European inferno contributed in inception and conclusion to the same result. Though it may not have been realized at the time, London’s colonial success was also vouchsafed when in 1628–29 Spain suffered a stinging defeat at the hands of the Dutch, one of the most profound setbacks for Madrid since they were turned back from England in 1588. Spain then was bogged down in Italy and, quite simply, had taken on too many foes.77
In fact, His Catholic Majesty, King Philip of Spain, spent every day of his forty-four-year reign at war—against the Dutch (1621–1648); against the French (1635–1659); and against London (1625–1630 and 1654–1659); and, generally, on the Iberian Peninsula (1640–1668), including Portugal. U.S. imperialism should take note that even the ostensibly strongest powers, which certainly Madrid was in the seventeenth century, can quickly find themselves being not-so-strong powers after being involved in seemingly ceaseless war.
The point here is that the Dutch and Spanish were denuding each other in the first few decades of the seventeenth century, which also allowed England to rise.
Also benefiting London was the reality that France continued to reel from the impact of the Edict of Nantes of 1598, which generated tremendous religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics while attempting to grant basic rights to the former.78 At the same time, unlike Paris, London was not consistent in observing the “Freedom Principle,” the notion that the enslaved became free upon arriving on French soil. This was the case especially when it mattered in the late sixteenth century, when Paris consistently ruled in favor of Africans seeking their freedom, a trend in which London wavered until 1772 with the celebrated decision of Lord Mansfield, which in turn helped to convince wary North American settlers that counterrevolution was the preferred route to escape the logic of abolitionism. Thus the internal religious conflict in France made it difficult for Paris to turn its attention fully to what was becoming its eternal foe across the Channel, which also propelled London’s rise. This included anti-Jewish fervor: issued during the same year as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the Code Noir—or slave code—reeked with religious intolerance, enjoining colonial officials to “chase all the Jews who have established residences from our isles” and barred the practice of any non-Catholic religion by either masters or the enslaved.79
IN 1618 KING JAMES I GRANTED a royal charter to the Company of Merchants, who were trading in Africa, leading to the first London stronghold on the Gold Coast; the first English trading post was constructed at Kormantine that same year.80 Enslavement of Africans took a notional leap forward when “Twenty Negars” arrived in Virginia in August 1619, inaugurating a new era in settler colonialism and slavery alike.81 However, as we have seen—at least going back to the depredations of Sir
