| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet, editor. Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World. (Early American Studies.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2005. Pp. xv, 368. Cloth $59.95, paper $24.95.
The approaching four hundredth anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, the recent discoveries of the Jamestown Recovery archaeological project, and the development of Atlantic world studies have combined to spark renewed interest in the events surrounding the founding of the first permanent English colony in North America. This essay collection is the first of several forthcoming commemorative volumes, indicating widespread interdisciplinary interest in understanding the events at Jamestown within the transatlantic, international, and indigenous worlds that shaped them, and in using Jamestown as a lens through which to scrutinize more closely the forces that produced not only this first English colony, but the almost contemporaneous surge of interest in North America among other Europeans as well.	1
The historians and literary scholars whose work appears in this volume place the Virginia project (both its London and Jamestown components) in a broader context that not only includes Powhatan Tsenacommacah, Spain, Ireland, and West Africa, but also the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Divided into three sections, "Reading Encounters" examines early Anglo-Powhatan relations; "The World Stage" explores the international contexts that influenced Virginia; and "American Metamorphosis" charts changes in Virginia and in the meaning of Virginia over the course of the seventeenth century.	2
Among those essays on contact and conditions in early Jamestown, Emily Rose's "The Politics of Pathos: Richard Frethorne's Letters Home" is especially notable. Her careful reading of Virginia Company records indicates that Frethorne's famously pathetic letter to his parents was, in fact, a piece of propaganda used (and perhaps solicited) by Henry Rich, second earl of Warwick, in his successful campaign to have the Virginia Company dissolved. Among the essays on early encounters, James Horn's on the English in Tsenacommacah and Alden Vaughan's on Powhatans in England both conclude that Anglo-Powhatan conflict was inevitable. Lisa Blansett details John Smith's privileging of experience over status in his Map of Virginia.	3
Susan Iwanisziw's "England, Morocco, and Global Geopolitical Upheaval" and Pompa Banerjee's essay on "Turkey and Virginia in John Smith's True Travels" together insist on the importance of the Ottoman Empire and of relations between the Christian and Muslim worlds to European expansion and the Catholic/Protestant rivalries that we see as initiating an Atlantic world. Iwanisziw, innovative in both evidence and approach, examines the alliance between England and Morocco, which she argues served to buttress Morocco against the Ottoman Empire and Spain, and England against Spain and Ireland. Banerjee introduces readers to the details of John Smith's eastern travels, pointing out that although Smith traveled in Turkey before going to Virginia, he wrote about his travels after both journeys. Therefore, his experiences in Chesapeake may have influenced his writing about Turkey just as much as the more common supposition that his Turkey travels affected his perception of Virginia. She forces readers to think carefully about the implications for early Americanists of using sources whose authors were trying to understand not just one new colonial locale but a much larger world that was broadening rapidly in several directions.	. . .

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