The American Nation: A History — Volume 1: European Background of American History, 1300-1600 — A Closer Reading

Commerce and the Charter as Instruments of Empire

Cheyney devotes sustained attention to the chartered company as a hybrid institution—part private enterprise, part state apparatus. He observes that such companies faced opposition from representative bodies like the States-General, which “threw what obstacles they could in their way,” while sovereigns who granted charters sometimes later disavowed them. The companies’ difficulties, he argues, arose from the very nature of their task: “distant commerce with barbarous races, amid jealous rivals, carried on with insufficient capital.” Yet he credits them with making spices, sugar, tobacco, and other goods accessible, and with creating “new centres of activity in old and stagnant as well as in new and undeveloped countries.” The analysis is concrete, grounded in specific economic mechanisms rather than abstract imperial destiny.

The Reformation as a Motive for Migration

In a chapter on the Protestant Reformation, Cheyney insists that its influence on colonization “can hardly be overestimated,” yet he immediately qualifies this by listing other motives: the desire to better fortunes, escape debt, or simply seek adventure. He notes that “many settlers came because at home they had failed” and that “no inconsiderable number came because they were forced to come”—through press gangs, pauper shipments, or prison clearances. This layered account resists a single-cause explanation. The religious motive, Cheyney suggests, was “one among many such impelling forces,” and he ties it to the broader pattern of coerced and voluntary migration that populated the colonies. The excerpts show a historian weighing evidence rather than advancing a thesis.

Structure and Scope of the Series

The front matter lists twenty-five volumes in five groups, from “Foundations of the Nation” through “National Expansion.” Cheyney’s volume is the first, covering 1300–1600, and its authors include Frederick Jackson Turner, Albert Bushnell Hart, and Charles McLean Andrews—a roster of early twentieth-century academic authority. The series design suggests a progressive, teleological framework: each volume builds toward a unified national story. Yet Cheyney’s own text, as excerpted, resists simple teleology by foregrounding contingency—the failure of companies, the mix of motives, the political friction between sovereigns and assemblies. Readers may find that the volume’s content complicates the series’ implied narrative of steady national development.

Cheyney’s volume rewards readers who approach it as a study of institutional mechanics rather than a prelude to American exceptionalism. The excerpts reveal a writer attentive to the gap between policy and practice, and to the often-coercive processes behind colonization. For those interested in the economic and political scaffolding of early modern expansion, this book offers a detailed, evidence-driven account—one that invites comparison with later volumes in the series and with more recent scholarship on the same period.

There’s something almost tender about how Cheyney traces the mercantile threads that pulled Europe toward the New World — money, faith, and power all tangled before anyone even saw Virginia. It reminds me of reading Russia — Text and Context, where the same weight of history presses quietly on every page. Both feel less like textbooks, more like letters from another century.