Reviewed by Patrick Griffin | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.4

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Reviewed by Patrick Griffin | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century. By April Lee Hatfield . (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Pp. 312. $39.95.) Reviewed by Patrick Griffin , Ohio University
In this well-researched and engaging study, April Lee Hatfield explores an overlooked aspect of the seventeenth-century Virginia experience. She argues that scholars have long portrayed Virginia as "a self-contained entity that interacted with other colonies only individually, through England" (p. 2). In doing so, early American historians have ignored the durable bonds between Virginia and other colonies in the New World. By examining the ways in which Virginians interacted with planters in the Caribbean, merchants in the New Netherlands, and Puritans in New England, Hatfield hopes to demonstrate how such networks "all worked to enmesh" Virginia "fully within an Atlantic context" (p. 7). We have, of course, long considered seventeenth-century Virginia part of the Atlantic world. Try to think of a study published in the last ten years that does not implicitly or explicitly situate the colony in such a context. But Hatfield argues that the overlapping and intersection of transatlantic and intercolonial bonds better explains the distinctive aspects of Virginia's history, more so than, say, James Horn's study of the direct connections between England and Virginia, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994).	1
To illustrate this argument, Hatfield provides a series of thematic snapshots showing the varied ways that Virginians were connected to other peoples living on the western shores of the Atlantic world. Virginians viewed their colony as an island, one defined by native American conceptions of geography and linked by trade routes to other European colonies in North America. Settlers both resisted and embraced this sense of isolated engagement with a wider world. They fought Indians in the Chesapeake region to "impose their own meaning on its geographic features" (p. 8) and to exploit native American exchange routes. While reinscribing the physical world around them with new meaning, English Virginians also established significant connections with colonies up and down the western littoral. This process, according to Hatfield, created "a complex Atlantic world crisscrossed with overlapping ties" (p. 50). Intercolonial bonds were defining features of everyday life in Virginia because of the dispersed nature of English settlement in the Chesapeake. With no port towns, mariners from other colonies had to travel far upriver to individual plantations. These mariners brought goods and information, further strengthening the ties that bound Virginia to places like Boston, Barbados, and New Amsterdam.	. . .

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