"I like a plantation in a pure soil; that is, where

people are not displanted to the end to plant in

others. For else it is rather an extirpation than a
plantation." In his essay "Of Plantations," Francis
Bacon imagines an ideal colonial project, one without
the possibility of conflict, and without victims. Such
colonies were, of course, never more than a
philosopher's pipe-dream. By 1600, there was very
little "pure soil" left anywhere on the globe, excepting
the forbidding polar regions. The territories which
proved the main targets of English settlement in the
seventeenth century were the neighboring island of
Ireland and the eastern coast of North America, both
home to sizeable native populations. In both cases,
"plantation" often went hand in hand with "extirpation."
We might call Bacon's dream of victimless colonization "Utopian," were it not that Thomas
More in his Utopia is considerably more hard-headed. When the population of Utopia exceeds
the ideal number, More writes:
they choose out of every city certain citizens, and build up a town under their own laws in the
next land where the inhabitants have much waste and unoccupied ground . . . [I]f the
inhabitants of that land will not dwell with them to be ordered by their laws, then they drive
them out. . . . And if they resist and rebel, then they make war against them. For they count
this the most just cause of war, when any people holdeth a piece of ground void and vacant to
no good nor profitable use, keeping other from the use and possession of it, which
notwithstanding by the law of nature ought thereof to be nourished and relieved.
The supposed law of nature that justified the use of force in expelling peoples from their lands
would be cited constantly by colonial theorists in the seventeenth century. John Donne
stresses this very argument in his Sermon to the Virginia Company (1622), ranking the "law of
nature" alongside the "power rooted in grace" as justifications for settlement in inhabited lands.
One of the few to question this logic was the radical Roger Williams, who infuriated the New
England authorities by arguing "That we have not our land by patent from the king, but that the
natives are the true owners of it, and that we ought to repent of such a receiving it by patent."
In spite of controversies over how, if at all, to respect the rights of the prior inhabitants,
perhaps the most startling feature of much of what was written in or about the New World is
the slight notice given to Native Americans. They are never mentioned, for instance, by the
Massachusetts poet Anne Bradstreet, who concentrates instead on the relationship between
Old England and New. Like many Puritans on both sides of the Atlantic, Bradstreet believed
that settlements like the Massachusetts Bay Colony were blazing a trail of godly government
that the mother country might eventually follow. Roger Williams, too, while rejecting Puritan
intolerance, believed that the English had much to learn from the experience, good and bad, of
the New England settlers.
Simply ignoring the existence of the native inhabitants was less possible for the English writing
in or about Ireland. A long history of cultural and military conflict had given the English an
almost paranoid awareness of the intractable threat posed by the native Irish. The seemingly
intractable problem of Ireland was addressed by some of the greatest literary figures of the
period, from Edmund Spenser in hisView of the Present State of Ireland to John Milton in
his Observations Upon the Articles of Peace (1649), as well as by countless others. Could the
Irish, as some writers hoped, be weaned from their "savagery" and trained up in civilized
manners? Or must they, as the settler Thomas Blenerhasset chillingly proposed, be hunted
like animals for English sport? Blenerhasset's proposal dates from the early years of the Ulster
Plantation, in which the English aimed to solve their Irish problem once and for all through a
program of land seizures and mass settlement by English and Scottish Protestants. The
historical impact of the Ulster Plantation can be seen today in Northern Ireland, the one part of
the island still under British rule.
Even as she sent her children forth to settle beyond the seas,
England played host to immigrants from abroad. These included a
handful of natives of the New World (including, for a brief period,
Pocahontas), and larger numbers of Europeans. Among the latter
were some so-called marranos Spanish Jews who had, officially
at least, converted to Christianity. Jews had in fact been banned
from English soil since their expulsion in the thirteenth century.
Under Protector Cromwell's regime, however, the anti-Semitic laws
were eased, and Jews began to return openly to England. Even as
the English confronted alien cultures in their new settlements abroad,
England itself was becoming an ever more multicultural society.