New Books In Native American Studies

In his Relation of the second voyage to Guiana, published in 1596, George Chapman put the imperial ambitions of England into a telling verse couplet. ‘Riches, and Conquest, and Renowne I sing. / Riches with honour, Conquest without bloud’. For the metropolitan gentlemen of early 17th-century London, the colonising project in Virginia was deeply bound up with the tastes and social lives of statesmen. Chapman’s reference to riches and honour signal English ambitions at the outset of a colonising project in which the interior worlds of the state were profoundly transformed. In The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Lauren Working examines a complex trans-Atlantic process of the movement of objects, ideas, and cultural mixing. Colonialism was a civic project that might hold the keys not just to the prosperity and prestige of the kingdom, but to the refashioning of society. But beneath all this lay tensions that stemmed from the encount