From John Smith to Adam Smith

Abstract

This chapter explores the long-term legacies of 1619 for the construction of an English settler colonial model. While contemporary Irish plantation projects gave the English colonizing movement considerable experience with settler colonization in densely populated and recognizably European areas, that experience by no means prepared that movement for planting in far-off lands inhabited by unfamiliar people with exotic cultures. As England’s first sustained experience with settler colonization at a distance, the Virginia colony played a foundational role in identifying, confronting, and working out solutions to the many problems that colonizers throughout the Anglo-American world would face as they created in the Americas the powerful and highly successful settler empire that many observers, including Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations (1776), would celebrate during the last half of the eighteenth century. This essay treats the Virginia colony as a learning laboratory and offer a systematic survey of the problems the colony confronted and how its solutions would inform and influence later English settler colonizing projects.