Reviewed by Andrew Fitzmaurice | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.4

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Reviewed by Andrew Fitzmaurice | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Andrew Fitzmaurice, University of Sydney

Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America. By Peter C. Mancall. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. 390 pages. $38.00 (cloth).
In this remarkable achievement, Peter Mancall has drawn on cultural, social, intellectual, and political history to produce an intellectual biography of extraordinary depth and luminosity. On several occasions Mancall wonders why Richard Hakluyt, who was such an enthusiast for plantations, came so close to voyaging to the New World himself yet always stepped back. The answer is surely that it was obvious even to this most ardent promoter of English colonies that all English attempts to establish colonies before and during his lifetime were disastrous and extremely dangerous. And yet at the same time, largely due to Hakluyt's own efforts, writing about plantations in early modern England was a spectacularly successful enterprise. Promoting colonies was so successful that it not only helped persuade large numbers of people to get themselves killed in colonization attempts but also made Hakluyt a wealthy man in the process.	1
Though Hakluyt was prolific in his production of texts concerning English voyages, he left relatively few traces concerning his own life and motivations. Mancall has accordingly chosen to reconstruct the contexts of Hakluyt's life and work. The reconstructions of Hakylut's actions and motivations are persuasive and offer new insights into Hakluyt's thinking. Moreover this method supplies the reader with a sense of the texture of Hakluyt's life. Mancall emphasizes the fragile and unstable nature of the world in which Hakluyt, like all early modern Europeans, lived. Hakluyt navigates his life through disease, famine, disaster, and uncertainty. It is a wonder that he managed to write at all. Certainly, readers are left with a powerful sense of why early modern Englishmen might have sought greener pastures.	2
Hakluyt's Promise painstakingly and progressively reconstructs the context for each of Hakluyt's major publications from the 1570s through his last years in the 1610s. Mancall rightly emphasizes that books were not only the center of Hakluyt's life but also regarded as crucial instruments in the foundation of English colonies. He furnishes a thorough account of the motivations behind all but one of Hakluyt's works, including previously neglected texts such as his Malayan Dialogues (which, if not Hakluyt's text, was certainly produced under his supervision). The exception, consistent with almost all Hakluyt scholarship, is that Mancall largely ignores Hakluyt's analysis of Aristotle's Politics. Hakluyt jointly presented the Analysis with the "Discourse on Western Planting" to Queen Elizabeth in 1583. David Armitage has convincingly placed the Analysis in the context of the Discourse.¹ The "Discourse on Western Planting" showed how plantation could be used to reform the English commonwealth, and plantation was understood to be a means of establishing commonwealths. Mancall is reluctant to explore Hakluyt's analysis of Aristotle's canonical text, which Hakluyt understood could help Englishmen think about the foundation of colonies in America, because it makes no "direct links" with colonizing enterprises. This omission seems excessively timid given that one of the virtues of Hakluyt's Promise is the reconstruction of probable meaning from context.	. . .

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