The Barbadian Adventurers: Commerce, Colonization, and Migration in the English Atlantic World, 1627-1713 8 views

This dissertation examines the history of the English Caribbean in the seventeenth century by centering adventurers, agents of colonization steeped in English commercial culture and practices. The “Barbadian Adventurers,” whose leading members included Francis Lord Willoughby, Sir Thomas Modyford, and Sir John Yeamans, operated from England’s valuable sugar colony and became imperial entrepreneurs by treating colonization as a business venture. They founded new colonies in Surinam, Jamaica, and Carolina in the Caribbean, North America, and South America. Adventurers blended public service with private enterprise by surveying overseas environments, identifying the human labor and natural resources at their disposal, and exploiting them to subject new lands to the influence of market economics. Unlike more famous colonial founders including John Winthrop, the Earl of Shaftesbury, and William Penn, who viewed the Americas as fertile grounds in which they could implant their political ideologies, social theories, and religious practices, adventurers practiced a flexible commercial approach attuned to the material realities of a volatile, highly contested Caribbean world. They envisioned England as a commercial empire and became leaders of new colonies to establish them as sites of commodity production and exchange. By combining scholarship on the history of England’s merchant class with studies on the circum-Caribbean and the nature of England’s empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this dissertation identifies merchants as the actors responsible for England’s ascendancy as a major power in the Atlantic world. England encouraged adventurers because they accepted the enormous bodily and financial costs required to create far-flung, interconnected commercial systems, but to centralize its authority over its new dominions and make them into a uniform political community, England, and after 1707, Britain, mitigated the influence of adventurers and other local actors.

PHD (Doctor of Philosophy)

Adventurer; Barbados; English Merchant Culture; English Colonization; Francis Lord Willoughby; Surinam; Sir Thomas Modyford; Jamaica; Sir John Yeamans; Carolina; Trade, Planting, and Privateering; Colonial Expansion and Regulation; Caribbean and Atlantic World

English

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2026-07-29