Abstract
THE STORY OF JAMESTOWN’S FIRST YEARS is often told as a tardy, frail, and fumbling beginning for English settlement in the New World. Undermined by its leaders’ stubborn and often brutal pursuit of unrealistic plans, Jamestown found salvation in the form of tobacco monoculture, which the Virginia Company neither intended nor fully embraced. The logic of tobacco cultivation led to an insatiable desire for land and labor that culminated in the violent expulsion of the Chesapeake’s native population and the establishment of African slavery. The turmoil and violence of Jamestown’s beginning, in this telling, were problems that prefigured their solution in the establishment of a regime of racial exclusion and exploitation.