At the beginning, the fate of English mainland colonizing had balanced upon twinned conceptual structures. A legal anthropology of civility and barbarity had sustained initial claims of imperium and dominium, justifying occupation and government of alien lands. A discourse of “commoditie” had spoken simultaneously of the use and improvement of those lands. The labor of transformation that all this envisaged had reinforced English justifications for keeping.

Colonizers’ actual capacities to make productive use of mainland resources depended upon the development of markets – markets in products, obviously, but also in land and labor. Initiated in the colonizer’s first acts of intrusion, markets widened and deepened over the course of the seventeenth century as the accumulation of voyages, projects, and plans collectively bound the mainland into the transoceanic networks of adventure and return that were creating the English Atlantic world. Even as seigneurial proprietorship succeeded corporatized commerce in the English model, colonizers’ retention and extension of their hold on the mainland remained a function of their capacity to commoditize an ever-wider array of action.