How did a new colonial venture become a commonwealth, “a community that enjoyed fundamental moral and political integrity” (273)? Alexander Haskell's rich and intricate history suggests that answering this question, rather than asking why the English extended their sovereignty across the ocean, is the pressing project for understanding England's first colonial endeavors. His explanation starts with the intellectual history of Renaissance Christianity and civic humanism, and then he traces out a series often unexpected trajectories that connect English ideas about how polities could achieve God's will on earth to the political imperatives of the day. The work is detailed and richly sourced, and it rewards close study.

Haskell argues that rather than emphasizing the relationship between rulers and ruled in the affairs of nations on earth, the Christian humanists of the late sixteenth century understood a commonwealth, the archetypal unit of human organization, to be a means of directing human actions, performed in their various offices, to fulfill God's plan. Haskell builds on that concept to “[trace] the justificatory efforts that surrounded the Tudor and early Stuart Virginia venture” and to demonstrate “how the colony slowly gained substance as a recognizable commonwealth” (17). Importantly, he argues, its initial promoters conceived of it as a whole polity rather than as a constituent part of England. Indeed, Haskell notes: “as late as the 1630s, writers were still not confident that their readers even knew the word ‘colony’”(8).

By placing Virginia in this explicitly Renaissance context, Haskell pushes the project of early modern empire into an earlier intellectual framing than it often enjoys. He reminds us that the colony's early promoters worked without—because they were working before—Thomas Hobbes's powerful notion of a sovereign state, a concept most associated with his 1651 work, Leviathan. The intellectual work demanded by Virginia's planting was therefore not the anachronistic question of “whether colonies should be commonwealths at all or merely the provinces of the state that planted them” (16), but it was rather a process of “ongoing inquiries and debates concerning when the inventions of this world did or did not overlap with Providence and how to bring about that earthly and divine correspondence” (18). From this starting point, Haskell walks his readers through the challenges faced by Virginia's promoters.

The book is organized chronologically, an useful structure for its close reconstruction of complex ideas. Virginia's promoters faced many challenges. Early failures seemed to portend god's disapprobation of the structure, if not the project, of planting. Elizabeth I's support for Virginia wavered, and as a female queen, she did not embody the manly virtues the project demanded. James I was certainly male, but he too was ambivalent about Virginia's merit and utility. Haskell demonstrates how writers responded to such realities by producing new understandings of the best way to promote a commonwealth.  Elizabeth's female leadership demanded strong “captains” to guide her American projects. Under James I, the rise of new statist theories and the public unit of the “company” worked to compel the king to support that which he might find uninteresting. Eventually, as the Virginia Company failed, planters tied the king to his duty in the distant territory, demanding their status as shepherds of a commonwealth be respected. Only when a new generation of thinkers, most notably Hobbes, questioned the very idea that a colony could be a commonwealth rather than a constituent part of the sovereign's united realm, did the intellectual era come to a close.

For historians of religion, the work provides a refreshing intervention in a literature that has treated religion as one of several competing justifications for empire. Haskell does not shy away from the various motives that animated the colony's promoters—some personal, some financial, some spiritual—but as he outlines their progressive arguments, he argues that during its early decades, Virginia grew within an intellectual framework that presumed the persuasive power of proving a project could fulfill providential ends. Virginia's promoters constructed casuistic arguments in which “God's will sometimes [trumped] human morality, dramatically expanding the liberty of those within his chosen polities while justly curtailing the freedom of those without” (20). It was a mode of argument that explicitly justified conquest and enslavement, and it permitted the pursuit of the ordinary (and pecuniary) ends of government in order to follower greater divine paths. Religion, in Haskell's treatment, was an integral part of theories of government, rather than a motivation for individual actions.

At the same time, readers seeking an exploration of how Virginians responded to American circumstances, why they turned to slavery, or how the actions of native peoples challenged their ideas will be disappointed. Haskell places these aspects of Virginia's history within the casuistic framework of commonwealth, in which all the Virginians’ actions were interpreted as steering the steps of humans along “divine pathways” (89). For example, Haskell argues that Virginians interpreted Opechancanough's attack on Jamestown in 1622 as evidence that God had “relieved the colonists of the duties of converting and civilizing their barbarous neighbors while also giving then greater latitude in carrying out their other planter obligations” (215). Bacon's Rebellion, which came after the rise of Hobbesian concepts of sovereignty during the English Civil War, is analyzed primarily as a crisis between that perspective and the former commonwealth vision (though it is not reduced to that issue alone). It would be patently unfair to ask such a work to attend fully to circumstances in Virginia in addition to the rich intellectual history it presents, but it does mean that the sources of change chronicled by the narrative remain predominantly English.

Despite this caveat, Haskell has presented a rich, important, and innovative way to understand the role of religion in the founding of a colony that is often seen as driven primarily by commercial motives, and it also provides a significant intervention in the literature on England's initial colonial ventures.