Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 by John H. Elliott

Castile's overseas expansion. The founding of the Virginia Company in 1606 under royal charter reflected the new determination of merchants and gentry to combine personal profit and national advantage by means of a corporate organization which owed more to their own energy and enthusiasm than to that of the state.113 The very fact that the agent of colonization was to be a trading company pointed towards a future English `empire of commerce'.
    Yet the tensions that bedevilled the Company from the outset suggest that an empire of commerce was by no means foreordained. The seigneurial aspirations that nearly wrecked the Jamestown settlement were to recur frequently in English colonizing projects of the seventeenth century. Indigenous labour might be in short supply, but the introduction of a slave labour force would in due course allow for the growth in the British Caribbean of societies characterized by the same kind of attitude to conspicuous consumption as was to be found in the Hispanic-American world.
    If large quantities of silver had indeed been found in Virginia, there is little reason to doubt that the development of an extractive economy would have created a high-spending elite which would have more than lived up to the dreams of the gentlemen settlers of Jamestown. But the lack of silver and indigenous labour in these early British settlements forced on the settlers a developmental as against an essentially exploitative rationale; and this in turn gave additional weight to those qualities of self-reliance, hard work and entrepreneurship that were assuming an increasingly prominent place in the national self-imagining and rhetoric of seventeenth-century England.
    The presence or absence of silver, and of large native populations that could be domesticated to European purposes, had other implications, too, for the two imperial enterprises. With much less immediate profit to be expected from overseas colonization, the British crown maintained a relatively low profile in the crucial opening stages of colonial development. This contrasted strikingly with the interventionist behaviour of the Spanish crown, which had an obvious and continuing interest in securing for itself a regular share of the mineral wealth that was being extracted in the Indies. Similarly, with fewer Indians to be exploited and converted, the British crown and the Anglican church had much less reason than their Spanish counterparts to display a close interest in the well-being of the indigenous population in the newly settled lands.
    As a result of this relatively low level of royal and ecclesiastical interest, there was correspondingly more chance for a transatlantic transfer of minority and libertarian elements from the metropolitan culture to British than to Spanish America. While Massachusetts was a reflection of the growing pluralism of English society, it was also a reflection of the relative lack of concern felt by the British crown in these critical early stages of colonization over the character of the communities that its subjects were establishing on the farther shores of the Atlantic. There was, said Lord Cottington, no point in troubling oneself about the behaviour of settlers who `plant tobacco and Puritanism only, like fools'.114 The Spanish crown, acutely aware of its own dependence on American silver and of the vulnerability of its silver resources to foreign attack, could not afford the luxury of so casual an approach to settlement in its overseas possessions.
    If, then - as the Cortes and Jamestown expeditions suggest - many of the same aspirations attended the birth of Spain's and Britain's empires in America, accidents both of environment and of timing would do much to ensure that they developed in distinctive ways. But in the early stages of settlement, the creators of these Spanish and British transatlantic communities found themselves confronted by similar problems and challenges. They had to take `possession' of the land in the