Andrew Fitzmaurice. Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500-1625. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. x + 216 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-82225-1.
Reviewed by Peter Mancall (Department of History, University of Southern California)
Published on H-Albion (May, 2005)
Cicero and Machiavelli in America
Ever since the approach of the Columbian quincentennial in 1992, scholars from a variety of disciplines have been looking at seemingly every aspect of the European colonization of the Western Hemisphere. Few of these studies are celebratory in any meaningful sense. The European colonization of the Americas, which historians in earlier generations had praised, has become cloaked with tragedy. Rather than a positive story of the spread of European civilization in a land of indigenous savagery, scholars now frequently castigate the interlopers. The transformation in the historiographical tradition has gone farthest with the case of the English in North America. Taken together, many of the recent works have contributed to nothing less than a new black legend, this time of the English (as opposed to the Spanish) conquest of America.
Andrew Fitzmaurice's welcome book essentially distills the issues relating to the conquest into a single question: how could the English live with themselves? That is, how did they construct an intellectual edifice that allowed them to sustain a colonization movement that had increasingly desperate consequences for the indigenous peoples of North America and for many of the colonizers themselves? Fitzmaurice would have no patience for scholars who have suggested that the English had always intended to subdue Native Americans. His is a more nuanced and sensible approach, pivoting on the question of what leading proponents of colonization had in their minds when they created plans for establishing English settlements abroad. As he makes clear in this learned book, none harbored genocidal thoughts, and a surprisingly large number of them were concerned about the impact of their actions on Americans.
According to Fitzmaurice, the English colonization of North America coincided in England with the spread of humanism, or more specifically "the studia humanitatis: the revival of Greek and Roman disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, history, moral philosophy and poetry that had flourished in Italy for more than a century" (p. 4). Those who studied these disciplines employed their logic in what Fitzmaurice terms the "oratorical foundation" (p. 9) of the commonwealths they hoped to create abroad. Much of their discussion focused on how to create governments that would neither crush the indigenous population nor coddle the colonizers into lives of laziness and luxury. Colonists were to be citizens imbued with notions of duty, not distracted by dreams of profit alone.
Fitzmaurice does not claim that the ideas in the heads of elite commentators and promoters necessarily matched those of everyone in England. Promoters might dream of creating a commonwealth of those who put honor first, but knew that many of those who boarded ships for America were more interested in lucre. Further, some of the authors of the texts he studied were not members of the elite in any obvious sense, and the decision by authors to write in the vernacular suggests a desire to have arguments read by many readers who did not know Latin. In his efforts to support his views about the wide importance of these texts, Fitzmaurice notes that "ideology can also be absorbed without reading or hearing texts" (p. 18). In other words, one need not determine what everyone was reading, or even how popular a given text might have been, to come to some judgments about the ideas that together gave meaning to colonizing efforts. It is sufficient instead to read the existing texts carefully and to trace certain ideas that can be found within them.
Fitzmaurice's book includes two weighty chapters focusing on moral philosophy, the first relating to Tudor colonization and the second to Jacobean, followed by others that examine particular issues in more depth, such as differing legal notions of colonization or an in-depth analysis of John Smith's writings (primarily relating to Virginia) and William Shakespeare's Tempest. In the process, he treats the views of the famous, such as John Donne and the younger Richard Hakluyt, and some who are less utilized by scholars now, notably William Crashaw. He takes sermons seriously as texts that reveal much about colonization, an important departure from David Beers Quinn and others who tended to downplay their significance.
Throughout the book, Fitzmaurice analyzes clues in promotional texts that reveal knowledge of specific authors associated with humanism, notably Cicero at first, and, later, Tacitus and Machiavelli. Promoters drew different lessons from these classical authorities. From Cicero they learned the importance of civic duty and used the opportunities afforded by colonization to advance the cause of good government. As Fitzmaurice puts it, the "early modern English tracts promoting colonies prove to be one of the most sustained and vigorous humanist discussions of the best form of government produced prior to the civil wars" (p. 11). This impulse led the promoters for a time to suppress the pursuit of profit as a motive in favor of honor and glory. Promoters during the Elizabethan period "argued in classical humanist terms that the reward for establishing colonies would both be honestas and utilitas, honour and profit" (p. 77). But over time this Ciceronian perspective gradually faded in response to the actual conditions that the English found and created in North America, especially in Virginia. Significantly, as conditions on the ground worsened for the colonists during the Jacobean era, promoters emphasized the corrupting qualities of profit itself. "Death," Fitzmaurice argues, "replaced gold as the glory of Virginia" (p. 76). By the time that transition took place, new arguments had also appeared--an anti-colonial literature characterized by the satire of the play Eastward Ho (first staged in 1605) and Joseph Hall's Munder alter et idem, first printed in 1605 and again in 1609. During the early Stuart era the promoters, either little affected by such anti-colonialism or impatient with the caution embedded within the Ciceronian position, discarded their hesitance and embraced views closer to those of Tacitus and especially Machiavelli. From this new vantage point, legal niceties no longer had to be observed; "expedience and necessity" (p. 168) now loomed large in arguments for expansion.
Promoters had to adapt to shifting circumstances if they were going to succeed. None understood this fact better than those behind the Virginia Company, who needed to maintain interest in their settlement despite the spreading news of high mortality and troubles with Americans. It was fine for English men with no prior experience in the Americas to embrace a Ciceronian perspective because they did not yet understand that success was far from imminent and most people in England had little idea about what was going on in the Western Hemisphere. But if the promoters did not change their views in the face of mounting evidence of incipient disaster they would have been dismissed. The cleverest among them thus first found renewed value in the idea of a glorious death in a good cause serving larger national ambitions and then adjusted their posture again, removing some of the ideological hindrances that had limited earlier actions.
But when exactly did this transformation take place? On some level, the shift was practical. The transfiguring power of a noble death could only go so far and was no way to convince people to board a ship for an unknown place. With the realization that original schemes needed adjustment, which occurred probably somewhere in the mid-1610s when the English recognized the value of tobacco, the intellectual edifice of colonization shifted away from the Ciceronian and toward a more avowedly Machiavellian position. The English needed that shift to overcome their belief that colonization would lead to corruption. In fact, anticipation of success in the Americas bred anxieties precisely out of fears that pursuing empires had had devastating effects in ancient Rome and Greece. "Given the role played by empire in both Greece and Rome in the creation of 'Asiatic' luxury," Fitzmaurice comments, "English promoters were particularly alert to the possibility of corruption arising from the acquisition of New World territories" (p. 135). Thus, he argues, the promoters spoke of the importance of creating "new 'commonwealths' that would be separate from the English commonwealth, but under the English crown" rather than employing "the language of empire" (p. 135). Fitzmaurice claims that these ideas can be extracted from what he admits was a certain "incoherence in the justification of colonies" that "revealed a deep neo-Roman anxiety that expansion was a cause of corruption" (p. 138). This anxiety could be seen in the ways that English promoters claimed they had no intention "of taking possession of others' lands" (p. 138).
Some readers of Fitzmaurice's book might not agree with some of these assertions. But to his credit Fitzmaurice on occasion not only extracts ideas; he also tries to show relationships between them and between particular individuals, notably those scholars associated with the Salamanca school (who had written about the Spanish justifications for their American empire) and more important those affiliated with St. John's College, Cambridge (which included John Dee, Alexander Whitaker, Henry Wriothesley and Samuel Purchas). Further, Fitzmaurice uses authors and their works well, none to more advantage than Crashaw. "[W]e will take nothing from the Savages by power nor pillage, by craft nor violence, neither goods, lands nor libertie, much lesse life," Crashaw declared in a sermon in 1610. The land was abundant and could produce all that the Americans needed, including ample supplies of timber, iron, tar, pitch, and land. "These things they have, these they may spare, these we neede, these we will take of them" (p. 145). That posture stood in stark contrast to what the English understood from authors such as the Dominican Bartolom de Las Casas (whose classic criticism of Spanish actions in the Western Hemisphere was translated into English and published in 1583). In other words, the English created an intellectual edifice in which they justified their actions in North America by claiming that they had more noble goals than mere profit and eschewed the kinds of violence and theft they believed characterized the Iberians' conquest. Fitzmaurice also offers a novel interpretation of the most important visual evidence from the period, the Theodor de Bry engravings (based on paintings by John White) that appeared in the 1590 edition of Thomas Harriot's Briefe and True Report of the Newfound Land of Virginia. Rather than noting, as others have, that the images of the Picts were to make the point that Americans could become civilized over time, Fitzmaurice opines that the images "meant that in times past the English had been virile, martial and virtuous like the Virginians of the present" (p. 163).
For all of its strengths, Fitzmaurice's account would be more effective if he had paid closer attention to the ways that ideas circulated in the Tudor and Stuart era. For a work in a series labeled as "Ideas in Context," there is surprisingly little attention to the actual flow of ideas. There is no sustained discussion of the importance of print or, alternatively, the continuing importance that manuscripts played among those who laid the intellectual foundations for an English America. This problem becomes most apparent with references to Hakluyt's vital text known as "The Discourse on Western Planting," which Hakluyt probably produced while he was in Paris and circulated when he returned to London in 1584. But this work, contrary to Fitzmaurice's claim of its publication in 1584 (p. 152), was not published for almost three hundred years, as David Beers Quinn and Alison Olson Quinn point out in their definitive edition of the text, published by the Hakluyt Society in 1993.[1] What was the significance of the fact that this text circulated in manuscript, and probably among a small group? Should its contents be taken as seriously as a text that was printed? And, sticking with Hakluyt for a moment more, if it is true, as Fitzmaurice claims, that "the legal humanist case" reached a "climax" with the publication of his Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation in 1589 (p. 154), what was the significance of Hakluyt publishing an expanded edition at the end of the century? Alternatively, though Purchas did publish a number of manuscripts that Hakluyt had passed on to him, and though one can find a humanist streak in his texts, as Fitzmaurice properly notes for his large work known as Hakluytus Posthumous published in 1625, what did his earlier major work, published in 1613 and then in revised editions in 1614 and 1617, reveal?
Fitzmaurice would have strengthened his case if he had looked at a broader range of texts. He accepts the claims of Crashaw and others that the English did not intend to take the lands of Native Americans but pays little attention to the English response to the so-called "massacre" that the Powhatans perpetrated on the Virginia colonists in 1622. Though this study ends in 1625, Fitzmaurice occasionally uses later evidence, but ignores the views of John Winthrop, who in 1629 laid out a precise argument for seizing the lands of Americans who had not "improved" them in the English sense of the word. Winthrop, who lacked any obvious anxieties about taking lands that were already occupied but not settled according to seventeenth-century English Protestant ideals, might have fit well as an exemplar of certain Machiavellian values, but he is not here. Further, it was a mistake--presumably made by the publisher--to not include any illustrations, especially given Fitzmaurice's new interpretation of the de Bry engravings. Though this is a work of intellectual history, readers of such works need to know what kinds of visual evidence existed. Images, too, conveyed specific ideas that shaped the expectations and desires of colonizers. Finally, though Fitzmaurice does a terrific job in describing English humanist beliefs, humanism is such a protean body of ideas that it can be used to justify very different colonial contexts, from the failures of the sixteenth century to the travails and (to the English) triumphs of the first quarter of the seventeenth century. This is not to dispute the significance of the studia humanitas but instead to suggest that by explaining so much it is difficult to judge what it would not include.
These points aside, Fitzmaurice has performed a genuine service with this work. Though not everyone would agree with his sense that scholars looking at the early modern encounter between Europe and America have paid insufficient attention to issues that fall in the realm of intellectual history, this study has the chief merit of pointing out how issues of education and formal culture shaped the colonial experience. In its depth of knowledge about the sources of colonial propaganda, the work also reveals how an educational system based on certain classical traditions proved more than adequate for providing the analytical tools necessary for the realm's expansionist vision.
Note
[1]. David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn, eds., A particular discourse concerninge the greate necessitie and manifolde commodyties that are like to growe to this realme of Englande by the Western Discoueries lately attempted ... Known as Discourse of Western Planting, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society, extra series, 45 (London, 1993), p. xv.
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Citation:
Peter Mancall. Review of Fitzmaurice, Andrew, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500-1625.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
May, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10544
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