Andrew Fitzmaurice

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Andrew Fitzmaurice | The Commercial Ideology of Colonization in Jacobean England: Robert Johnson, Giovanni Botero, and the Pursuit of Greatness | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.4 | The History Cooperative

The Commercial Ideology of Colonization in Jacobean England: Robert Johnson, Giovanni Botero, and the Pursuit of Greatness

IN early April 1609, Philip III of Spain, the most powerful monarch in Europe, sat down to read Robert Johnson's Nova Britannia. The tract had been published in London less than two months earlier, at which point Pedro de Zúñiga, Philip's chief spy and ambassador in London, sent it to his sovereign. Philip was sufficiently impressed by the book, translated into Spanish as La nueva Bretaña by Jesuit Joseph Cresswell, to command members of his royal council to study it.¹	1
In some obvious ways, Johnson's tract demanded the Spanish government's interest. Johnson was a leading figure in the Virginia Company and his tract promoted the company's cause. In 1609 Spain was still jealously defending its claim to imperium over the entire New World, so Nova Britannia offered ample proof that England was serious about its challenge. It is striking, however, that of the numerous published tracts promoting Virginia in 1609 Zúñiga singled out Johnson's for the attention of his monarch. Johnson's Nova Britannia was the first of the tracts sponsored by the Virginia Company to be published in that year, yet its importance lay in far more than its chronological priority.	2
Johnson's tract signaled a shift in English thinking about colonization. It revealed a new emphasis on the political goal of grandezza, or greatness, and a new stress on commercial wealth as the foundation of greatness. These shifts attracted Zúñiga and Philip's attention. The pursuit of greatness had been a central concern of Renaissance humanism, deriving from the broader humanist concern with glory. For Niccolò Machiavelli, as for most humanists, greatness was reflected in the wealth and power of princes or cities, but it was achieved by the exercise of virtue. Power was not in itself a sufficient condition of greatness. Where power was achieved without virtue there was no greatness. In Machiavelli's hands greatness was defined in the martial terms that humanists inherited from Roman culture. He was concerned largely with the consolidation and augmentation of power through martial virtues, employing the idea of greatness to articulate that ambition. These seemingly timeless political pursuits must be placed in context: the modern state did not exist in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when Machiavelli formed his views. At this time sovereigns were not sovereign. They were not territorially competent; that is, their authority was compromised particularly by the great temporal power of the Roman Catholic Church prior to the Reformation and by the feudal powers of a multitude of lords and barons. The ideology of greatness was a tool employed to break the powers that prevented the consolidation of power and authority by a single sovereign and therefore vital to the formation of the modern state. Moreover, in its aggressive expansionism, the ambition for greatness linked state formation with empire building.	3
By the late sixteenth century, a new generation of humanists challenged the Machiavellian understanding of greatness. This new understanding maintained the ambition for territorial competence and expansion but greatly diminished the language of virtue. Greatness was now defined in economic rather than martial terms, and the leading exponent of this reformulation was Piedmontese theorist Giovanni Botero. According to Botero, "the greatnes of a Citty" simply consisted in "the multitude and number of Inhabitants and their power." Inhabitants' power would arise from their industry and commerce. He emphasized the need for "a supreame Authority & power."² Johnson, who caught Philip's attention with Nova Britannia, was a central figure in the English reception of Botero. Indeed, of the many Botero imitators in England, Johnson took his engagement with the Italian the farthest. He supplied the most systematic account of Botero's thought and most clearly revealed the influence of Botero's ideas on his own thinking.	. . .

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