The Ideological Origins of the Imperial State: Republicanism, Rights, and the Colonization of Virginia, 1607--1660

The emergence of the idea of the state was the critical development in early modern European political philosophy. While scholars have typically treated this development as a phenomenon that was internal to Europe, this dissertation argues that the advent of imperial expansion in the seventeenth century played a vital role in shaping the English ideology of the state. Focusing on the debates surrounding the early colonization of Virginia, I analyze the two primary languages of legitimation -- the discourse of classical republicanism and the discourse of rights -- that actors used to advance their favored imperial policy. Though scholars have often treated these languages as antithetical, I argue that political actors used them interchangeably, and, as a result of this intermingling, the content of these two discourses developed in unexpected ways. In colonial Virginia, the pursuit of individual prosperity became synonymous with the advancement of the common good, which in turn led to the argument that the protection of rights of property and traffic was vital to ensure that individuals could pursue ends that would ultimately prove beneficial to the commonwealth as a whole. But invocations of the common good and the sanctity of rights were insufficient in and of themselves to legitimize particular actions; rather, they required the arbitration and enforcement of a higher authority. By directing their appeals to state institutions, political actors implicitly laid the intellectual foundations for an ideology of the state as the political entity that was responsible for determining the common good and guaranteeing individual rights throughout the emerging empire. The fact that these two discourses were so closely intertwined during this formative period in Virginia's history suggests that scholars should reconsider the division of early modern Anglophone political thought into the opposed traditions of classical republicanism and modern liberalism. As I seek to show in this dissertation, it was precisely the intermingling of the two discourses that was critical to the development of a notion of the state that balanced a concern for promoting the common good against the need to ensure the rights of individuals.