Empire and Political Economy in England from Jamestown to Amboyna

Although England's imperial ambitions had begun to take shape during the Elizabethan era, the early decades of the seventeenth century marked an important new phase in the building of an overseas empire. The founding of Jamestown in 1607 and the Dutch massacre of English merchants at Amboyna in 1623 bookend this Jacobean moment, which transformed tentative earlier ventures into more sustained colonial and commercial commitments. Yet this formative period was marked not by a coherent imperial vision, but by a cacophony of competing discourses. Early Stuart political economy literature advanced different conceptions of empire: while some writers championed an insular, self-sufficient maritime power anchored close to the British Isles, others embraced a sprawling, outward-looking engagement with global trade and rivalries. This article explores that divide through two case studies drawn from the pamphlet literature of the time: the debates over the North Sea herring fisheries, and the disputes surrounding the Virginia tobacco trade. Taken together, these cases open a revealing window onto the contested ideological landscape of early modern imperial political economy, one shaped less by unified doctrine than by overlapping and often contradictory agendas, whose unresolved tensions would continue to inform British imperial thought long after the Jacobean era.