Merging and Emerging Worlds: Anglo-Indian Interest Groups and the development of the 17th Century Chesapeake

Proof that the renaissance in colonial Chesapeake studies is flourishing, this collection is the first to integrate the immigrant experience of the seventeenth century with the native-born society that characterized the Chesapeake by the eighteenth century. Younger historians and senior scholars here focus on the everyday lives of ordinary people: why they came to the Chesapeake; how they adapted to their new world; who prospered and why; how property was accumulated and by whom. At the same time, the essays encompass broader issues of early American history, including the transatlantic dimension of colonization, the establishment of communities, both religious and secular, the significance of regionalism, the causes and effects of social and economic diversification, and the participation of Indians and blacks in the formation of societies. Colonial Chesapeake Society consolidates current advances in social history and provokes new questions. TWO YEARS after the Powhatan Uprising of 1622 had nearly destroyed the Virginia colony, Gov. Sir Francis Wyatt declared that "our first worke is expulsion of the Salvages to gaine the free range of the countrey...for it is infinitely better to have no heathen among us, who at best were but as thornes in our sides, then to be at peace and league with them."