Jamestown's foundation in 1607 remains an iconic moment for many modern Americans, the basis of their form of government and identity (cf. 112). While considerable scholarship has demonstrated how and why the first enduring English colony in North America was not the United States writ small, rather less effort has been lent to establishing what, in fact, was the significance of settlement on the Virginian tidewater for contemporaries themselves.

From politicians and promoters, investors and intellectuals, to colonists and captives, Envisioning an English Empire offers an interdisciplinary triangulation of the meanings of Jamestown for those who made it happen, if sometimes unwillingly and often inadvertently. The editors contend that the mental and physical horizons of Jamestown's makers were long, spanning the Atlantic to encompass simultaneously the American interior, northwest Africa, Hapsburg- and Ottoman-dominated Europe, as well as broad in time, ranging from the precedents of imperial Rome to current Spanish preeminence and, hopefully, English preemption. To explain the reality of Jamestown, they argue, we must fathom the prior expectations and speculative ambitions of multiple players, participants who were as much changed by convergent circumstances as vice versa.

Part 1 examines how different traditions of territorial and political sovereignty, Algonquin and English, combined with competing hopes for native political gain versus colonial profit to generate misapprehension and hostility, hospitality and manipulation. This examination is initiated by James Horn's deft overview of the situation in Virginia (ca. 1575–1625) as English settlers and American inhabitants sought to (re)gain the initiative in determining what kind of place Jamestown should or could become. The three essays following demonstrate that this struggle was not confined to the harsh realities of the Chesapeake peninsula and that Jamestown would be a hybrid creation. Alden Vaughan contemplates how Algonquians conveyed to England were as much enterprising envoys as exotic entertainments, men and women who took the opportunity to learn how they might best negotiate their people's place in a new Atlantic world rather than merely allowing themselves to be taught their place by English hosts. As a corollary, English colonization was not a foregone conclusion. Indeed, Lisa Blansett deconstructs John Smith's cartography to show how prior knowledge of other European imperialists and wishful projection sustained the English effort amid constant setbacks. These setbacks were often England's own doing; the Jamestown undertaking was riven politically, economically, and socially. A close rereading by Emily Rose of Richard Frethorne's plaintive letter home bears witness to how the hardships of a laboring servant were the fault of, and further fuel for, the agendas of different domestic interest groups.

Perhaps the main reason why Jamestown survived such factionalism was that key players agreed that more than a tiny American outpost was at stake. Part 2 maps how the Chesapeake enterprise was but one leg in a longer race to achieve international primacy and why Jamestown was never simply the result of a uniquely American tack but, rather, of tried and tested European imperial vectors. Hence Eric Griffin provides an articulate analysis of the love-hate relationship between Catholic Spain and England, the latter trying to imitate the former's success in order to sustain a Protestant nation. For some, Spain was not the only priming paradox; it was a source of anxious envy and avid emulation. The Ottoman Empire also had this function, as Pompa Banerjee reminds us in the case of Smith's carefully fashioned Eastern exploits. These imperial rivals were bested, and Jamestown possible, because England successfully navigated strong geopolitical crosscurrents. Thus the nation could be persuaded, courtesy of dramatic representations lucidly considered by Susan Iwanisziw, that strategic and economic alliance with an Other, Morocco, made better sense than age-old religious animosity or any nascent racial prejudice. Thus the subjection of Ireland was not a discreet precursor for American colonization but, as Andrew Hadfield argues, a project in parallel, which Jamestown contributed toward as well as relied upon for inspiration.

Jamestown took root because the English adhered stubbornly to some sociocultural imperatives while adapting, if not adopting, other New World modes at precisely the same time. Part 3 addresses these transformative transactions by exploring attitudes surrounding four commodities: food, land, forced labor, and tobacco. Of course, they were variously intertwined. Together, Robert Appelbaum and Peter Herman's essays trace how English dietary norms and perceived shortages prejudiced perceptions of, and relations with, native agriculturalists even as tobacco plantations formed the basis for a distinctly American culture. Michael Guasco offers a timely reassessment of how Southern chattel slavery was not a peculiar institution but grew from both English intellectual traditions and immediate European experience, while Jess Edwards considers the trajectory in reverse when proposing that conflicted ideologies of seventeenth-century English land ownership may first have been resolved in America.

I have two reservations. First, the attempt to look ahead, to survey the period circa 1625–75, is rather unsteady. It does not engage with important midcentury developments and seems out of its historiographical depth when closing with suggestions that Virginians had, by century's end, grown into a distinctly American identity at the deliberate expense of their English heritage, conveniently setting the scene for eighteenth-century divergence. Second, there is a bit much of Smith's America and too little of James Stuart's England. Metropolitan dimensions of Jamestown do not receive the attention they warrant. For example, there are allusions to the importance of promotional propaganda, but neither sustained treatment of its key forms nor estimation of its reception and the prevalent images English people (would-be migrants) had of Virginia. Likewise, the collection tends to take Jamestown's shifting connections with expressly Stuart political-imperial designs, or the divided interests of London's mercantile community, for granted. This despite the book's main title and incisive introduction. Yet the longest silence for a work of Atlantic history relates to the issue of how the experience of Jamestown would transform not just the English abroad but at the imperial center too. How was it that Sir John Beaumont could pen over 1,000 verses on “The Metamorphosis of Tabacco” [sic]? Or, later, what did it mean that the health-giving virtues of Indian corn were being advertised to Londoners? If Chesapeake tobacco yielded 5 percent of customs revenues by 1670 (21) then clearly Jamestown promised social advancement for some stay-at-homes (cf. xv) and arguably contributed toward Stuart political innovation.

Quibbles aside (e.g., partial avoidance of split infinitives; reference to the early eighteenth-century Virginian-Londoner William Byrd, as Robert), the collection tenders twelve well-written, often adventurous essays on a perennial topic. However, those with a yearning for metropolitan pursuits (perhaps, by definition, readers of this journal) may, on occasion, feel becalmed.