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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]