The Company-Commonwealth

Abstract

The Virginia Company, this chapter argues, was not merely a commercial enterprise, a joint-stock corporation, created in order to attract and invest resources in the colony of Virginia. It was a conceived by its members as a political society in itself whose purpose was, in turn, to establish political society in Virginia, to some degree in its own image. It was conceived in terms of the language of the commonwealth—a society of self-governing virtuous citizens—and also in terms of the language of greatness, a company that, through its own pursuit of glory, would augment the power of the state in its rivalry with other European states. These political languages were largely consistent with the political thought employed in English society more generally in the seventeenth century. As a civil society that was separate from the national stage, however, the Company also afforded a space in which it was possible to experiment with political discourses that were regarded as dangerous in other contexts. Two such discourses were the interrelated traditions of democracy and reason of state, which came to the fore in the final years of the Company.