In the early seventeenth century, cannibalism became associated with a startling range of political and social transgressions in England. Since the term ‘cannibal’ developed out of European travel and expansion, especially in the Caribbean and South America, scholars have often viewed this term as an imperial trope designed purely to justify invasion. The lurid tales of physical incorporation that appeared in European travel writing, however, do not sufficiently explain why indigenous rites of violence pervaded post-Reformation English anxieties over the nature of civil society and state authority to the extent they did. A consideration of Tupi and Carib warfare becomes important for understanding why cannibalism became such a salient metaphor to discuss religious error, factionalism, rising litigations, and the breakdown of trust in Jacobean communities. The language of cannibal violence, with its specific connotations of indigenous belief, places the socio-political climate of London on the eve of the Thirty Years’ War within emerging English ambitions in the Atlantic.

James I’s well-known aversion to smoking has long been viewed as a quirk in the king’s already eccentric personality. Eschewing teleological assessments of the inevitability of the rise of smoking in England, particularly its embeddedness in elite civility, this chapter considers authorities’ concerns over disorder and dissent. Aware of the significance of tobacco in Native American societies, the smoke of that ‘pagan’ plant evoked Catholic incense, the Gunpowder Treason, and a rejection of the manners so integral to post-Reformation concepts of order and deference. The chapter then turns to the formative influence of the tobacco debates in Parliament on forcing clearer articulations of colonial oversight in the 1620s. Despite its potential for subversion, pro-imperial MPs endorsed tobacco as a marker of their support for a burgeoning transatlantic polity. By praising tobacco as evidence of industrious Protestant cultivation, gentlemen championed a luxury commodity as a political necessity, even a political good. From the theatre of Parliament to the circulation of print, debates over the merits and appeal of tobacco placed imperial consumption within gentlemanly political culture, one bolstered by colonial intervention and access to overseas trade and intelligence.

In a collection of satires printed in 1621, the poet George Wither rejected the imperial-mindedness of statesmen around him.

In 1614, the lawyer and wit Richard Martin approached the bar in Parliament to deliver a humbling apology. Martin had given the House of Commons something of a history lesson, speaking at length of recent geographical discoveries, notions of conquest, previous European colonial efforts, the failed English settlement on Roanoke, and the means through which Virginia might strengthen the English foothold in the Atlantic.

In 1607, the English established a presence in a place Algonquians called the Chesapeake and claimed it for themselves. On the other side of the Atlantic, news from the colony suffused metropolitan discourse. From table conversations to printed books, diaries to Parliament speeches, debating Virginia imbued domestic political discourse with an interest in the imperial. This chapter explores how the first sustained experience of colonization beyond the British Isles shaped articulations of the English polity and increasingly put pressure on policy-makers to commit to empire. Shifting practices in statecraft, concerted attempts to ‘civilize’ others as a method of expansion and control, and the intense political friendships and rivalries that underpinned elite honour all played a role in how gentlemen – and eventually the king himself – came to associate the integrity of their own political authority with the survival of ‘the London colonie’ in Virginia.

Access to indigenous commodities and artefacts produced new fashions and codes of conduct in London. Unlike global trade more broadly, colonization imbued Atlantic objects with specific meanings that involved a politics of appropriation that relied on both the presence and erasure of indigenous peoples. The social spaces of the metropolis fostered environments that encouraged gentlemen to behave like colonizers, from the private gatherings where they read verses that glorified conquest often fuelled by the actual intoxication of tobacco on the senses to court performances where gentlemen adorned themselves with feathers and danced in masques that advanced imperial agendas. Examining clusters of consumption involving globes, pearls, and tobacco pipes alongside verses, portraits, performances, and commonplace books offers evidence of how gentlemen presented their masculinity in ways that reflected their growing ambitions in the Americas. The Inns of Court, where gentlemen were encouraged to debate the political realm in creative and often daring ways, were particularly influential in bringing colonial interests and commodities within provocative redefinitions of civility. The strong sense of virtue and moral responsibility that developed alongside wit and conviviality created a distinct vision of how gentlemen fashioned themselves in an imperial polity.

From Bermuda to the Amazon, key attitudes towards civility and cultivation impelled members of the elite to pursue colonial projects. This chapter gives an overview of Jacobean project culture, where implicit assumptions about savagery and the virtues of cultivation lay behind discourses about plantation. By viewing colonization as an extension of domestic political participation and reform, gentlemen did not separate the economic potential of plantation from the responsibilities of managing property and participating in civil governance. In contrast to hopes for quick profit through joint-stock investment and global trade, American landscapes became critical to elite concepts of their transatlantic polity and how it might be sustained and enjoyed. Land gave English gentlemen a sense of investment in political expansion that became rooted to their civil identities.