Information Management and the Early English Atlantic Empire, 1603-1640
Open AccessThis dissertation examines how information management lay at the heart of the English state’s efforts to construct an empire in the Atlantic from 1603 to 1640. In the first decades of the seventeenth century, English subjects settled colonies as far-flung as Virginia (1607) and Guiana (1609), experimenting with colonization along the Atlantic seaboard and in the Caribbean. During these years the state also developed large networks of informants and spies, built a centralized archive, engaged in censorship and propaganda, and instituted bodies of centralized oversight, to protect and promote England’s nascent empire. By examining these previously unexplored aspects of the state’s colonial engagements, this study challenges the dominant narrative of the early English Atlantic empire—characterized as a late seventeenth-century project of the fiscal-military state—and reveals the myriad strategies of information management the government employed to further its early seventeenth-century imperial project. Previous scholarship has rendered the early Stuart project as a prehistory of empire, or if generous, an accidental one. By closely examining the Crown and Privy Council’s attention to the early decades of Atlantic colonization, this dissertation challenges notions of political “salutary neglect” and makes significant revisions to histories of English state formation and empire building. Both historians of England and colonial North America have tended to couple the processes of modern state formation and empire building with the development of centralized administrative authority and naval expansion in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. However, this narrow and traditional interpretation of empire limits our understanding of the early English empire’s composition, and, more broadly, the sophisticated strategies the state used to navigate the complex Atlantic context. By employing information management as a category of analysis, I identify spaces of power harnessed by the English state in the absence of strong military power and centralized authority. Intelligence networks, print culture, and archive-building, for example, when taken together under a shared analytical framework, are revealed as collaborative and complementary efforts. Moreover, by examining these practices as tools for empire building, this dissertation expands our criteria for the range of actors who contributed to this project. I demonstrate how spies, archivists, printers, Amerindian emissaries, and many others, worked under the direction of Crown and Council to further England’s fledgling empire. Hardly accidental or neglected, I argue, English empire building was a collaborative and creative project, imagined and promoted by the early Stuart kings and their governments, and based in no small part on information management.
- All rights reserved
Notice to Authors
If you are the author of this work and you have any questions about the information on this page, please use the Contact form to get in touch with us.