The Columbian quincentenary is not so much a remembrance of times past as a reconstruction of times present. For, whereas Europe’s medieval kings took legitimacy and authority from God’s ordinance, the mesh of supra-national and super powers and transnational conglomerates who arrange our destinies today, needs a more sophisticated array of techniques to proclaim the inevitability of current hierarchies of power and the rightfulness of its versions of progress.1
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References
1.
1 Hazel Waters, ‘Introduction’ to Curse of Columbus, Race & Class (Vol. 33, no. 3, January–March 1992), p. v-v.
2.
2 See ‘The first charter of the London Virginia Company’ in P. L. Barbour, ed., The Jamestown Voyages Under the First Charter 1606–09 (London, Haklyut Society, 1969).
3.
3 Virginia Council, Articles, Instructions and Orders … to Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, Governor of Virginia (London, May 1609). In S. M. Kingsbury, ed., The Records of the Virginia Company in London (Washington, 1933).
4.
4 Richard Hakluyt, The Principal, Navigations, Voyages and Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589).
5.
5 As quoted in Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise (London and Sydney, John Curtis, 1990), p. 271-271.
6.
6 Ibid., pp. 272–3.
7.
7 Quoted in Lerone Bennett, Jr, The Shaping of Black America (New York and London, Penguin, 1975), p. 43-43.
8.
8 American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia by Edmund Morgan (Norton, New York, 1975).
9.
9 Virginia CouncilInstruccions, Order and Constitutions … to Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, Govenor of Virginia,in The Records of the Virginia Company of London, op. cit., vol III, p. 14-14.
10.
10 Ibid.
11.
11 ‘A justification for Planting in Virginia’ in The Records of the Virginia Company of London, ibid., p. 2. See also Robert A. Williams, Jr, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: the discourses of conquest (New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990).
12.
12 Calvin’s Case, 77 Eng. Rep. 377, 397 (1608).
13.
13 Robert Johnson, Nova Britannia Offering Most Excellent Fruits by Planting Virginia Exciting All Such As Be Well Affected to Further the Issue (London, Samuel Machin, 1609).
14.
14 For a discussion of the ideological role of ‘providence’ in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Anglican thinking, see Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, God Speaks First to his Englishmen (London, Gresham College, 1988).
15.
15 See ‘Denial by the Virginia Company in London of the sovereign rights of the Indians in the land’ in W. S. Robinson, ed., Early American Indian Documents: treaties and laws, 1607–1789, vol. 4: Virginia Treaties, 1907–1722, note 84 at 28 (1983).
16.
16 Williams, op. cit., p. 214.
17.
17 Ibid., p. 216.
18.
18 See Edward Waterhouse, A Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affairs in Virginia. With a Relation of the Barbarous Massacre in the Time of Peace and League, Treacherously Executed by the Native Infidels upon the English, the 22 of March last. Together with the Names of Those Massacred in The Records of The Virginia Company, op. cit., vol. III, pp. 541–71.
19.
19 Nicholas Ferrar, Sir Thomas Smith’s Misgovernance of the Virginia Company (Cambridge, Roxborough Club, 1990).
20.
20 Winthrop D. Jordan, ‘Modern tensions and the origins of American slavery’, Journal of Southern History (Vol. XXVIII, February 1962), pp. 18–30.
