Chesapeake Bay was a strategic setting for early English colonization in North America: in 1607, English settlers sailed into the bay and up the James River to establish Jamestown, while the surrounding territory was claimed by the Powhatan Confederacy. The region later became the focus of a major land grant to Cecilius Calvert, whose plan for Maryland sought to build a society governed by a privileged landed elite. Across these episodes, the bay’s significance lies in the contested effort to make colonial extraction and hierarchy work in a place where the English could not simply reproduce the Spanish model.

Jamestown and the Powhatan Confederacy

In 1606, three vessels—the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery—set out for Virginia under the command of Christopher Newport. The colonists, sponsored by the Virginia Company, entered Chesapeake Bay and followed a river they named the James, after the reigning monarch, James I. They founded Jamestown on May 14, 1607, beginning the English settlement described in the book after an earlier attempt at Roanoke had failed.

The settlers arrived without realizing that Jamestown lay within territory claimed by the Powhatan Confederacy, a coalition of about thirty polities owing allegiance to Wahunsunacock. His capital, Werowocomoco, was only twenty miles away. The colonists hoped to learn about the country and, if local people could not be induced to provide provisions and labor, to trade with them. The book emphasizes that the newcomers did not appear to consider growing their own food: their initial plans treated local political authority and labor as resources to be enlisted or compelled.

That approach reflected a colonial template influenced by the Spanish conquests in Mexico and Central and South America. The English initially planned to capture the local chief and use him to secure provisions and direct the population toward producing food and wealth for the settlers. The Virginia Company took twelve years to learn that this strategy, successful for the Spanish in other contexts, would not work in the north. The subsequent struggle was over the institutional alternative: a viable colony, the book argues, required rules that gave colonists incentives to invest and work.

Maryland’s Landed-Society Project

In 1632, Charles I granted Cecilius Calvert, Lord Baltimore, ten million acres on the upper Chesapeake Bay. The Charter of Maryland gave Baltimore exceptionally broad authority to make laws and govern the province. Its terms left him free to devise the political order rather than imposing a narrowly specified system from the Crown.

Baltimore used that authority to design a manorial society modeled on an idealized version of rural seventeenth-century England. The plan divided land into plots of thousands of acres, each controlled by a lord, who would recruit tenants to work the land and pay rent to the privileged landholders. The project aimed to establish hierarchy through control of land and dependent labor, rather than to distribute political and economic rights broadly.

Maryland formed part of a wider sequence of English attempts to restrict rights to a privileged few, in imitation of Spanish colonial arrangements. A later example came in 1663, when eight proprietors founded Carolina. Sir Anthony Ashley-Cooper and his secretary, John Locke, drew up the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, a blueprint for a hierarchical society ruled by a landed elite. Its preamble explicitly proposed avoiding a numerous democracy. Like the Maryland scheme, it expressed the ambitions of colonial elites to make political power and economic advantage reinforce one another.

Colonial Limits and Institutional Consequences

The book sets these projects against the limits of English North America as a field for colonial exploitation. The English began colonizing at a moment when the more attractive parts of the Americas—those with large Indigenous populations to exploit and gold and silver mines—were already occupied. North America was, in this account, the option left to them. The early English expectation that they could obtain provisions and wealth from local people therefore confronted a different setting from the one in which Spanish conquest had been practiced.

The attempted hierarchies in Maryland and Carolina did not represent an isolated departure. English elites repeatedly tried to restrict political and economic rights, but the book says this model broke down in Virginia and elsewhere in North America. The Chesapeake thus connects the first colonial experiment at Jamestown with later efforts to organize land, labor, and authority on an exclusive basis—and with the broader argument that institutions determine whether economic life rewards investment and work or serves a narrow elite.