Information Management and the Early English Atlantic Empire, 1603-1640
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Information Management and the Early English Atlantic Empire, 1603-1640 by Kelsey Flynn B.A. in History, December 2008, University of Maryland- College Park M.A. in History, May 2011, The George Washington University A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 15, 2016 Dissertation directed by Linda Levy Peck Columbian Professor of History The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Kelsey Flynn has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of February 17, 2016. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation. Information Management and the Early English Atlantic Empire, 1603-1640 Kelsey Flynn Dissertation Research Committee: Linda Levy Peck, Columbian Professor of History, Dissertation Director Marcy Norton, Associate Professor of History, Committee Member David J. Silverman, Professor of History, Committee Member ii © Copyright 2016 by Kelsey Flynn All rights reserved iii To my family iv Acknowledgments This dissertation owes a debt of gratitude to the generosity of many people. I would first like to thank my dissertation director, Linda Levy Peck. It is a great privilege to work with the very best. With her encouragement, commitment, and insight, I have grown tremendously as a scholar. I thank Professor Peck for taking me on as a student and for encouraging me to follow my curiosities across Europe and the Atlantic. I would also like to thank the rest of my superb committee. Marcy Norton, my dedicated second reader, always encouraged me to think deeply and creatively. This project is worlds better because of her guidance. David Silverman read the entire draft and his comments proved invaluable to my revisions. Denver Brunsman lent his support to this project even before arriving to GW and continued to offer encouragement and perspective throughout the process. Finally, I am especially grateful to Sabrina Baron, whose English Civil War class ten years ago first piqued my interest in seventeenth-century England. At GW, I was privileged to learn from many excellent professors, especially Andrew Zimmerman, Suzanne Miller, and Nemata Blyden. My friends and colleagues also provided tremendous support over the years, including: Holly Polish, Scott Thompson, Christopher Hickman, Jon Keljik, Tamar Rabinowitz, Natalie Deibel, Patrick Funiciello, Justin Pope, Nick Alexandrov, Seth Lashier, Kate Densford, and Katie White. I am especially grateful to Jack Garrett, my friend and ally from start to finish. This research would not have been possible without the support of many excellent institutions and generous grants. Like many D.C. area early modernists, I owe a special thanks to the Folger Shakespeare Library, whose resources and programs were critical to my training and research. The Folger also provided me with much needed funding during v my writing years, for which I am exceedingly grateful. This fellowship also gave me another home, at Shakespeare Quarterly, where my colleagues, Jessica Roberts Frazier, Gail Kern Paster, Jennifer Leinhart Wood, and Anna Levine gave me much needed encouragement and support. Fellowships and grants from the Huntington Library, the Cosmos Club Foundation, the Loughran Foundation, and the Lois. G. Schwoerer Scholarship allowed me to visit the many archives this project required. I would also like to thank the Institute for Historical Research at the University of London for providing me with a visa so that I could spend a research year in the United Kingdom. I would like to thank my parents, Michael and Susan, and siblings, Erin and Michael, whose patience, support, and love made this all so much more manageable. They treated every opportunity, across the country and the Atlantic, as an adventure, and their visits were a welcome distraction from my work. Finally, I would like to thank my husband, Joseph Batista, who never doubted me. Writing a dissertation requires a special type of companion and it was with his support, encouragement, and patience that I was able to write this dissertation. vi Abstract of Dissertation Information Management and the Early English Atlantic Empire, 1603-1640 This 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 vii 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. viii Table of Contents Dedication .............................................................................................. ………………iv Acknowledgments ......................................................................................................... ..v Abstract of Dissertation ............................................................................................... ..vii List of Figures .……………………………………………………………………..……..x Abbreviations……………………………………………………………………………..xi Introduction…………………………………………………………………………….….1 Setting the Stage………………………………………………… …..……………….....30 Chapter 1: Designing an Embassy for Espionage: English Intelligence in Spain and the Negotiation of Atlantic Diplomacy...………………………………....................44 Chapter 2: The Printing Press and the Pulpit: Imperial Propaganda for England's National Project, 16071623……………………………………………………...............92 Chapter 3: From Antiquaries to Archivists: Sir Thomas Wilson and the State Paper Office……………………………………...…………………………………......145 Chapter 4: Making a Royal Colony: The Virginia Commission, 1623- 1625……...…..188 Chapter 5: "Dangerous" Subjects and "Domestic Enemies:" Colonial Defense during the Anglo-Spanish and Anglo-Powhatan Wars…………………...……….........236 Chapter 6: Accounting for Empire: Customs, Lading, and the Great Migration…...…..278 Conclusion…………………………..……………………………………………….…313 Bibliography……………………………..………………………………………….….323 ix List of Figures 1. Title Page. Treasuror, councell and company for Virginia. A proclamation for the erection of guest houses, 17 May, 1620. London: Felix Kingston, 1620…...129 2. Title Page. Council for Virginia. A declaration of the state of the colonie. London: Thomas Snodham and Felix Kingston, 1620…………………………..…130 3. Broadside. G. Newman to the minister and church-wardens of [Bethersden] London: T. Snodham 1616………………………….………………………….….136 4. Arthur Agarde’s Compendium (1610). In F.S. Thomas, A History of the State Paper Office: A View of the Documents Therein Deposited. London: J. Petheran, 1849…………………………….………..…………………..160 5. Printed bill of lading. 1636. TNA HCA 15/1…….………………………………....307 6. Printed bill of lading. 1636. TNA HCA 15/1………….………………………..…..309 x Abbreviations Add. Additional BodL Bodleian Library, Oxford CSP Calendar of State Papers ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography OED Oxford English Dictionary TNA The National Archives (UK)