The extraction of wealth from British colonial territories would be justified by the ingenious combination of ideas about improvement and chattel slavery. While the establishment of the Atlantic settlements was an affair of colonial companies and private proprietors, they were gradually taken into direct government by Westminster. But the conflict between settlers’ defence of their autonomy under the theory of the ancient rights of Englishmen and metropolitan sovereignty would eventually push the settlements into statehood – a result that could be understood to open a wholly new global commercial order. By contrast, the East India Company continued to operate as a lucrative, though diminishing source for private enrichment until crown sovereignty was given formal imprimatur in 1813. Not keen to expand Britain’s administrative duties across the world, British lawyers and political leaders would reimagine their empire in terms of occasional interventions to protect private investments and to enforce the system of international rules they held valid all over the world.

Chapter 6 considers the depiction of hunger, appetite and imperialism. Food comprised an integral component of colonial discourse in the period, and the representation of hunger and appetite therefore provided a significant means by which the theatres could legitimise or critique England’s overseas expansion. The chapter focuses on the use of hunger and appetite as a means to critique or endorse emergent bourgeois ideologies of imperialist expansion, with an emphasis on how colonial adventures are constructed as both a solution to the problem of hunger and the object of new and occasionally unnatural appetites. It considers the cultural significance of cannibalism as an act which at this time was associated not only with subaltern native populations, but also with the expansive appetites of European colonisers, in a manner which could be deployed to express anxiety at the potential consequences of imperial expansion.

Between the late sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries, England’s dramatic enlargement in commerce, manufacturing, and territory encouraged this peripheral north-western European power to view it as not only desirable but practicable to secure to itself a silk industry and to supply itself with homegrown silk. This chapter considers firstly the increasing familiarity with silk within the British Isles, and the motivations and incentives that followed for producing silk domestically – paying close attention to the experimentation and measures introduced under James I, who offered particular patronage to sericulture. While novel initiatives and flagship projects brought some attention and investment, low temperatures and issues with expertise compromised production in England. The trials did constitute a breakthrough in understanding however, and stimulated extensive projection in new colonies under the auspices of the Virginia Company in North America. The goal of silk production prompted Virginians to introduce international experts, new buildings and literature, and new policy initiatives – albeit in the face of the dramatic and all-consuming rise of tobacco culture. The final part of the chapter highlights how a second wave of Virginian experimentation in the 1650s and 1660s brought more focus to women’s roles and embedded sericulture within economic and scientific ideas about English colonialism.

In 1607, the English established a presence in a place Algonquians called the Chesapeake and claimed it for themselves. On the other side of the Atlantic, news from the colony suffused metropolitan discourse. From table conversations to printed books, diaries to Parliament speeches, debating Virginia imbued domestic political discourse with an interest in the imperial. This chapter explores how the first sustained experience of colonization beyond the British Isles shaped articulations of the English polity and increasingly put pressure on policy-makers to commit to empire. Shifting practices in statecraft, concerted attempts to ‘civilize’ others as a method of expansion and control, and the intense political friendships and rivalries that underpinned elite honour all played a role in how gentlemen – and eventually the king himself – came to associate the integrity of their own political authority with the survival of ‘the London colonie’ in Virginia.