This project narrates the ventures undertaken by merchants in Elizabethan and Jacobean England in search of new opportunities across the Atlantic. Starting with the observation that the initial English interest in colonial North America is usually associated with the voyage of the Pilgrims to New Plymouth on the Mayflower in 1620, an enterprise associated more with piety than commerce, the authors state that the “making of America actually begins in England in the mid-1500s” (xxiv). The implication is that the earlier trading voyages were an important “prequel to the Pilgrims,” embodying many of the elements that shaped modern America (xxv): novel approaches to leadership, techniques for raising funding and spreading risk, and application of the latest technologies “to overcome seemingly insuperable challenges, accept and learn from failure, and cherish the quality that Americans have come to regard as quintessentially their own: perseverance” (xxv). This elegant quotation is indicative of the...
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Spring 2019
March 01 2019
New World, Inc.: The Making of America by England’s Merchant Adventurers
New World, Inc.: The Making of America by England’s
Merchant
Adventurers
. By John
Butman
and Simon
Targett
(New
York
, Little, Brown and
Company
, 2018
) 405 pp.
$29.00
Kenneth Morgan
Kenneth Morgan
Brunel University London
Search for other works by this author on:
Kenneth Morgan
Brunel University London
Online Issn: 1530-9169
Print Issn: 0022-1953
© 2019 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc.
2019
by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of
Interdisciplinary History, Inc.
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2019) 49 (4): 659–660.
Citation
Kenneth Morgan; New World, Inc.: The Making of America by England’s Merchant Adventurers. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2019; 49 (4): 659–660. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01349
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