Empire, Religion and Revolution in Early Virginia, 1607-1786

This book is a chronicle of England's contrasting imperial civil and ecclesiastical policies for its first two colonies, Ireland and Virginia. The settlement of Virginia contrasted sharply with England's experience in Ireland. It was not an undertaking of the state but a commercial enterprise delegated by James I to the merchant adventurers of the Virginia Company of London. The colony was launched without the familiar English civil, military, and ecclesiastical personnel and leadership applied in Ireland. It was the Company's obligation to recruit settlers for the colony, provide governance, administration, laws, and religious worship in accordance with the English Church. Ireland was not an imperial model for Virginia.
The novelty of governing a sparsely settled colony thirty-seven-hundred miles distant from Whitehall in London proved financially difficult for the Virginia Company. After its charter was revoked in 1624 the province became a royal jurisdiction. Gradually over several decades the governor and legislature advocated and implemented statutes for the conduct of civil, ecclesiastical, trade, and commercial affairs. Between 1680 and 1713 London officials applied new imperial policies for the governance of overseas affairs that became the formula for the administration of the province until the Declaration of Independence.

James B. Bell is a Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University, UK, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is the author of The Imperial Origins of the King's Church in Early America, 1607-1783 (Palgrave, 2004) and A War of Religion: Anglicans, Dissenters and the American Revolution (Palgrave, 2008). He has taught at Princeton University, Barnard College, the College of Wooster, and the Ohio State University, USA.

Acknowledgements
List of tables
Some Useful Dates
PART I
Prologue
1. England's Early Imperial Interests: Ireland and Virginia
2. The Virginia Company of London and America: Virginia, 1607-1624
3. Virginia and Royal Jurisdiction: Laws, Governors, and Church: 1624-1660
PART II
4. Churches and Worship
5. A Social Profile of Virginia's Ministers, 1607-1700
6. Salaries and Discipline of Seventeenth-Century Clergymen
7. Divisions of the English Church in Virginia's Pulpits: Anglicans, Puritans and Nonconformists
8. The Libraries of Two Century Seventeenth-Ministers: Anglican John Goodbourne and Nonconformist Thomas Teackle
PART III
9. An Age of New Imperial Policies: Church and State, 1660-1713
10. The Peace Disturbed: Salaries and Controversies, 1696-1777
11. Virginia's Favoured Anglican Church: Faces an Unknown Future: 1776
12. The College of William and Mary: Faces an Unknown Future, 1776
Epilogue: A New Age Breaks with the Past
Appendix I - Clergymen who Arrived in Virginia Between 1607 and 1699
Appendix II - Clergymen who Arrived in Virginia by Decades Between 1607 and 1699
Appendix III - Colleges and Universities Attended by Seventeenth-century Virginia Clergymen
Appendix IV - Virginia Parishes and their Ministers in the Seventeenth-century
Bibliography
Index