Corporate naval supply in England’s commercial empire, 1600–1760

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 574-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edmond Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Economic Incentives ◽  
Ship Building ◽  
Commercial Success ◽  
Supply Problem ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Essential Resource

Britain’s imperial and commercial success rested on maritime links. Whether trading wool across the Channel to Europe, seeking spices in South Asia or importing sugar from the Caribbean, shipping was an essential resource. Yet, to undertake these trades, merchants required naval supplies – finished ships, timber to build them and stores to fill them – that were not always easily accessible. This challenge was particularly apparent in the early seventeenth century for trading corporations whose specific needs demanded innovative approaches to the naval supply problem. This article examines the responses of English corporations to the challenge of supplying its international shipping by focusing on activities on each side of the Atlantic. First, it assesses the development of the East India Company’s docks at Blackwall and Dundaniel, before turning to a detailed study of ship-building and supply in Virginia and New England. In doing so, this article highlights the importance of naval supply to Britain’s north Atlantic empire, both in terms of the rhetorical support for empire and the economic incentives of participants. This reveals how traditional interpretations of Britain’s naval development have too often focused on state-driven activities (particularly from the very end of the seventeenth century) and failed to examine the complex, sometimes chaotic attempts by private individuals and corporations to overcome the naval supply challenges common to this early period of globalisation.

Islands of Settlement

2021 ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Michael J. Jarvis
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Changing Roles ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Early English ◽  
Made In

North Atlantic islands played a key role in early English imperial expansion as critical sites of precedent and experimentation. From John Cabot’s first landing in 1497, Newfoundland gave England both a claim to America and a base for an enormously profitable fishery. Further south, and following its initial accidental English occupation in 1609, Bermuda became England’s first fully settled overseas colony. Furthermore, and crucially, it provided a template for colonial success that was widely copied throughout the Caribbean. New England’s Nantucket Island offers a third maritime-oriented imperial site of innovation as a uniquely successful seventeenth-century whaling base. This chapter highlights the contributions these different North Atlantic islands made in British imperial expansion and their changing roles across time, especially in the wake of the American Revolution.

“Canniball Negroes,” Atlantic Creoles, and the Identity of New England’s Charter Generation

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
John K. Thornton ◽  
Linda M. Heywood
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Way

Abstract In the early seventeenth century, New England merchants were heavily involved in privateering raids on Spanish and Portuguese shipping in the Caribbean and in capturing slave ships, almost entirely sent from Angola. Knowing the specific background and historical events in Angola allows us to solve a number of mysterious appearances, such as Imbangala (“canniball negroes”) raiders, and a “queen” who was probably a member of the Kongo-Ndongo nobility whose enslaved members also appear in Brazilian records of the same epoch. Careful use of contemporary and dense documentation of Angola and shipping allow this greater nuance and opens the way for other research.

“Why should you be so furious?”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Bross
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
First Aid ◽  
Global English ◽  
East Indies ◽  
English Identity

Chapter 4 focuses on the representation of Anglo-Dutch relations from Asia to America in the seventeenth century. The chapter analyzes the representation of an incident in 1623 on the spice island Amboyna when Dutch traders tortured (with waterboarding) and killed their English rivals in the East Indies. Decades later, New England writers returning to this incident, treating it as news, invoked anti-English violence half a world away to lay claim to a global English identity. The chapter compares visual representation of the Amboyna incident with John Underhill’s “figure” of the Mystic Fort massacre in New England, arguing that these representations of violence are key elements of colonial fantasies that made (and make) real atrocities possible. The coda discusses Stephen Bradwell’s 1633 first-aid manual, partly inspired by the Amboyna incident, which maintains that properly trained, authorized metropolitan authorities can control the potential dangers of the remedies torture and tobacco.

A Search for Power: The "Weaker Sex" in Seventeenth-Century New England

1982 ◽  
Vol 87 (1) ◽  
pp. 246
Author(s):  
Randolph Shipley Klein ◽  
Lyle Koehler
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England

Religious Enthusiasm and Separatism in Colonial New England

1945 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-140
Author(s):  
Maurice W. Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
English History ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Liberty Of Conscience ◽  
Colonial New England ◽  
Established Church

Thomas Underhill, a citizen of London during the Commonwealth, described that period of English history as “Hell Broke Loose.” Partly as a result of Anabaptist influence, and partly as a continuation of the indigenous Lollard movement, large numbers of persons in every part of England separated themselves from the Established Church and formed themselves into independent religious societies. Some of these groups were very eccentric in their beliefs and practices. Thomas Edwards, their bitter opponent, made a Catalogue of “the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies and Pernicious Practices … vented and acted in England” between the years 1642 and 1646, which he called, Gangraena. In it he distinguishes no less than two hundred and ten errors which were held by one or other of the sixteen groups into which he divides the sectaries. The sixteen were, “Independents, Brownists, Chiliasts or Millenaries, Antinomians, Anabaptists, Manifestarians or Arminians, Libertines, Familists, Enthusiasts, Seekers and Waiters, Perfectists, Socinians, Arians, Anti-Trinitarians, Anti-Scripturalists, Sceptics and Quietists.” The Parliamentary army especially abounded with men whose “great religion” was “liberty of conscience and liberty of preaching.” G. P. Gooch and others have shown how deeply the roots of modern democracy are embedded in the religious struggles of these seventeenth century sects. Most of them disappeared with the Commonwealth, or were absorbed in the rising Quaker movement, but certain fundamental principles for which they stood continued to exist and to mold public opinion.

Conflicts of Law: Reconsidering the Influence of Religion on Law in Massachusetts Bay

Numen ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Dale
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Legal System ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Single Point ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Governing System ◽  
Practical Effect ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Practical Impact

AbstractThe idea that there were different points of view in seventeenth century Massachusetts Bay is not a new one. Several recent studies have undermined Perry Miller's monolithic “Puritan Mind”—demonstrating there were many strands of thought even among the nominally orthodox, and suggesting that we think of the settlers in New England as members of a movement with many ideas, rather than holders of a single point of view.While the idea that there were divisions within the category of Puritan is not a new one, the extent to which that ideological pluralism had a practical impact on the Bay colony's institutions, from its families to its governing system, has not yet been explored. This paper is a preliminary effort to demonstrate how ideological pluralism led to different conceptions of law, and had a practical effect on the legal system developed in the first generation of settlement in Massachusetts Bay.

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