This thread is dedicated to quality-posting, or the art of posting out-of-context excerpts from long and arduous academic articles.
>I shall begin.
In addition to trading relationships, the 1606 "First Virginia Charter" also
required the English settlers to develop personal ties with their indigenous
neighbors with the express purpose of bringing the "Christian religion to
suche people as yet live in darkenesse and miserable ignorance of the true
knoweledge and worshippe of God." 7 Given their expressed intentions and the
relatively small number of colonists who set sail, it is reasonable to assume that
both the Dutch and English colonists left Europe sincerely hoping they would
be able to quickly, and rather peacefully, develop interdependent trading and
on-going relationships with the Khoena8 of South Africa and the Algonquin
in the Pawmunkey Empire in Virginia.
As the early colonists waded ashore, their perspectives toward the native
inhabitants were shaped by their gender-based and class-based social systems,
pre-Enlightenment Christian ideology, and their mercantile economic systems.
Unlike our modern worldview, early modern ethnocentrism was not racially
oriented, and according to Kupperman, race would have been an "utterly foreign"
factor for English settlers since they did not divide "humankind into broad
fixed classifications demarcated by visible distinction." The early Jamestown
colonists would have initially perceived the physical differences they observed
between themselves and the indigenous people they met as being "accidental"
and "acquired characteristics" due to "environment and experience" and not
as being "inborn," determinist attributes.9
Underscoring the class-based focus of this early modern perspective,
12
Kupperman provides an excerpt from a letter written to the Jamestown treasurer,
Master George Sandys, by Michael Drayton in 1622.
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