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THE FOUNDATION OF COMMONWEALTHS One of the clearest indications of the humanist education of those authors concerned with the New World was that their treatises promoting the colonial designs were composed according to the conventions of classical rhetoric. They were, that is, instances of classical oratory. Of the five disciplines in the humanist curriculum, rhetoric held a central position. The art of rhetoric was defined variously by classical and humanist authorities but always as an act of persuasion. Humanist culture, sometimes referred to as rhetorical culture, placed great emphasis upon the contingency of knowledge. In such an environment, in which knowledge was a matter of plausibility rather than certainty, the ability to persuade was crucial to social and political action. In the studia humanitatis the active life of the citizen was represented as vital to the health of the political community. Speech, in particular, was believed in its various forms, including writing and printing, to be one of the most important means through which to pursue action. Classical rhetoricians and their Renaissance imitators distinguished three genera, or kinds, of rhetoric; the forensic, epideictic and deliberative. Each genus was distinguished by a context, a function and an end. The context of forensic rhetoric was the law court; its function was accusation and defence and its end, justice. Epideictic, or occasional, oratory, had its genesis in the funeral oration; its functions were praise and blame, and its ends fortune and virtue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the 1970s historians began to emphasise that the English colonised America not by settlement but conquest. The lands of Amerindians were seized by force of arms, just as the Spanish had conquered Mexico and Peru. More recent studies have emphasised that English colonisers were uncomfortable with the language of conquest and employed natural law arguments that were more appropriate to agricultural settlers than to conquistadors. It is argued that these natural law claims underpinned the development of a commercial ideology of expansion. The use of the argument of terra nullius, for example, is said to reveal assumptions about the exploitation of the land that would underpin the expansion of commerce in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Each of these interpretations, whether emphasising conquest or natural law, has drawn material from the early modern English tracts justifying colonisation to support their argument. Both would have that literature to be more coherent than it is. In fact, English promoters of colonies in the first century of colonising plans employed a whole battery of frequently conflicting arguments. These arguments were not only incoherent between authors and across time, but often the same author would resort to a range of mutually contradictory arguments. In this chapter I consider not only the use of ideas associated with the justification of agricultural colonies and conquest but also two arguments concerning the justification of colonies which have been ignored by historians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of English colonisation to the beginning of the reign of James I was one of failure. Under James, a colony was established in the Chesapeake that would prove more resilient than its forerunners, but no less prone to disaster. The hopes for profit raised by Elizabethan promoters of colonies had proved false. Jamestown promised no greater returns. In its first ten years the colony produced no profits. In the following ten years, through to the dissolution of the Virginia Company, private tobacco plantations delivered profits to individual adventurers. The Virginia Company, which controlled the colony, never made a profit. Against this background, particularly with the spectacular Elizabethan failures in mind, the Virginia Company promoters never presented profit as the principal motivation for colonising. In the Jacobean period, promoters were no longer prepared to test the credulity of their audiences, and they turned away from Ralegh's dreams of riches. While still employing the language of Ciceronian moral philosophy, they augmented the argument of honour and diminished profit and expedience. The experience of failure produced a decisive turn in the ideology of Jacobean colonisation. The promoters of Jacobean colonies were increasingly deeply committed to a neo-Roman and quasi-republican scepticism of profit as a threat to the pursuit of civic action. They were committed, accordingly, to the primacy of virtue as the motive and guide for political life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians have distinguished two attitudes in early modern Europe to the problem of the possession of the New World. The first, supported primarily by theologians, particularly the school of Salamanca, was cautious and sceptical concerning the scope of European claims to property in the New World. Opposed to the theologians, according to this account, were the humanists. Humanists were closely associated with colonial ventures – unsurprisingly, given their emphasis on the vita activa. They are said to have allowed their preoccupation with glory, particularly the glory of conquest, to encourage their unapologetic justifications of the enterprises (Sepulveda was merely one of many such enthusiasts). This portrayal has neglected a central tension within Renaissance humanism. Humanists, as we have seen, balanced their pursuit of glory with a careful vigilance against corruption. This anxiety was in part based upon the threats of wealth and luxury that were believed to arise from conquest, but it also encompassed the related question of possession. The humanist promoters of English colonial projects were profoundly concerned with justifying the adventures, but this concern was not motivated simply by their pursuit of glory. It also reflected a fear that colonial possession would corrupt the commonwealth, or worse, would reveal the corruption of the commonwealth (both the English commonwealth and the new commonwealth which was to be established). Moreover, the promoters articulated a Ciceronian concern with justice for its own sake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

And yet when these insatiably greedy and evil men have divided among themselves goods which would have sufficed for the entire people, how far they remain from the happiness of the Utopian Republic, which has abolished not only money but with it greed! Thomas More's hostility to greed was characteristic of Renaissance humanism. The distinctive aspect of his discussion of greed in Utopia is that he invented a society free from this vice which he located, twenty-four years after Columbus' first voyage, in the New World. Was More alone in imagining the New World through humanism? Humanism was the dominant intellectual force of Renaissance Europe. In what way did it shape Europe's ‘discovery’ and conquest of the New World? My aim is to explore this question in relation to the English (or, more precisely, anglophone) understanding of America from More's generation, early in the sixteenth century, through to the demise of the Virginia Company in 1625. Humanists were active in New World projects throughout Europe, but it was in England, I shall argue, that the humanist imagination dominated colonising projects. Frequently, prominent English humanists – John Rastell, Thomas Smith, Philip Sidney, Humphrey Gilbert, Walter Ralegh – were at the forefront of colonisation. Many others who were prominent humanists (or patrons of humanists) – Richard Eden, John Florio, Dudley Digges, Henry Wriothesley – were also involved in the projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]