'The affections of the people': Ideology and the politics of state building in colonial Virginia, 1607--175

Recent studies of European state formation have revealed that in the early modern era, before the national states of the modern age gained ascendancy, the question of how to organize a stable and flourishing polity was far more open-ended than it has come to seem today. Applying this insight to the early modern Atlantic world and focusing especially on the British American colony of Virginia, this dissertation asks anew what kind of polities the founders of the American colonies believed they were establishing and how those individuals' efforts to realize their state-building ideals shaped colonial political culture. Through an analysis of a wide range of contemporary documents, the study finds that Virginia leaders brought to the colonial venture a considerably more sophisticated conception of what constituted, and how to construct, a civil society than historians have usually realized. Striving to establish in Virginia a "commonwealth" in which human "passions" were sufficiently restrained to safeguard both authority and liberty, the colony's leaders concluded that the only way that they could ever create the authority that they deemed necessary to support civilized life was by leaning upon a supposedly natural tendency in humans to feel a powerful sense of obligation toward their benefactors. By granting to settlers all of the benefits that they expected from English government, including not only protection but also liberty, these men believed, Virginia's government could secure those inhabitants' "natural obedience." By tracing the influence of this idea through a century and a half of Virginia politics, including the regular attacks that local politicians waged against the colony's governors as well as the steady crystallization of racial beliefs that identified some Virginia inhabitants as so unresponsive to generosity that they deserved to be permanently excluded from full membership in colonial society, the dissertation attempts to demonstrate that the overriding logic of those politics was the desire not, as historians have typically argued, to safeguard liberties for their own sake or to enhance personal wealth and power, but rather to preserve those conditions deemed necessary to maintain the people's gratitude, or "affection," and therefore their obedience.