The Jamestown Project delivers both more and less than its title suggests. Much more than just another account of Jamestown's founding moment, Karen Kupperman's new book offers an Atlantic (and frequently global) history of the generation of projectors and opportunists who envisioned and established the first English colonies in the Americas. Kupperman argues that the itinerant adventures of men like Walter Raleigh, John Smith, George Sandys and William Strachey in the ever-expanding Ottoman Empire provided these would-be “lords of half the world” (44) with invaluable experience and incentive to establish English outposts overseas. As Nicholas Canny first argued in 1973, the English colonization of Ireland provided further education for aspiring colonial administrators and served as a springboard for the series of colonization projects mounted by the English the length and breadth of North America in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Written for a broad readership, The Jamestown Project offers an impressive synthesis of almost thirty years of scholarship on Atlantic colonization. Kupperman gracefully describes the colonial project from multiple perspectives, both Native and European. Kupperman's earlier work on Native understandings of European colonization projects is incorporated here alongside insights gleaned from recent studies of what Spanish and papal operatives knew about the endeavors of their English rivals. In addition, Kupperman recovers the rich diet of information and opinion about the New World that confronted Elizabethan theatergoers. Eastward Hoe and The Tempestfeature here as significant measures of popular interest in and knowledge about the American ventures.

The price of such a wide-ranging account is that it lacks depth where one most expects it: in its discussion of the Jamestown project itself. While timed and packaged to ride the wave of interest in Jamestown's 400th anniversary in 2007, this new volume devotes only a third of its richly illustrated pages to the early years of America's first permanent English colony. In the work's three closing chapters Kupperman deftly integrates the findings of archaeologists now working at the Jamestown fort site. Yet in other respects Kupperman's story of Jamestown's uncertain first decade holds few surprises. After ten years of desperate trials and fatal errors, Kupperman argues, colonists eventually stumbled upon a recipe for success: “widespread ownership of land, control of taxation for public obligations through a representative assembly, the institution of a normal society through the inclusion of women, and development of a product that could be marketed profitably to sustain the economy” (2). That improvised recipe for devolution, Kupperman concludes, then became the basis for many subsequent colonial settlements, most notably in Plymouth in 1620.