Christopher Columbus was not the first European to set foot in the Americas, but he was the most consequential. Sanctioned by God and hungry for gold, conquistadors ransacked the Americas’ Indigenous populations. In 1607, England established its first permanent American colony at Jamestown. England’s relationship with the local tribes ultimately devolved into war. Both Spain and England devised legal theories to justify their acquisitions of Indian land.

During the 1600s, the southwards and westwards expansion of Germanic, which had begun 2,000 years earlier in northern Europe, regained a new impetus. There was an explosive expansion of the English language into and across the Atlantic Ocean, which was to lead to the eventual death of a very large number of the indigenous languages of the Western Hemisphere. During the 1600s, 350,000 people left the British Isles for the Americas. Some of this expansion of English was the outcome of large-scale, planned, quasi-official attempts at colonisation. Others were haphazard settlements by refugees, pirates, runaway slaves, sailors, shipwrecked mariners and passengers and military deserters such those from the English army of Oliver Cromwell which had captured Jamaica from the Spanish in the 1650s.

Songwork is central to the project of Elizabethan settler colonialism, with English ballads justifying the violence of conquest and reinforcing the stereotypes of Indigenous “savagery” in the Virginia colony. With the introduction of kidnapped Africans as slaves in 1619, the mysteries of African song become the preoccupation of British commentators, who can make neither head nor tail of it. Music becomes a site of colonial policing with the prohibition of African drumming and the attempted control of song. Yet the songs of the oppressed are not wholly stilled, neither in the fields and praise houses of the African bondspeople, nor in the ballads of indentured servants from the prisons and poorhouses of the British Isles. Meanwhile, on the fringes of the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts, iconoclast Thomas Morton establishes his Merrymount settlement and infuriates the Puritan elders with his maypole and his bacchanalian ballads, marking perhaps the first instance of secular song as a challenge to the governing establishment. The musical soundscapes of two wars of Puritan conquest – the Pequot War and King Philip’s War – are set against the wars between hymnody and psalmody in the Puritan church. The songs of Bacon’s Rebellion and the poor dragoons of the French and Indian War conclude the chapter.

Although English settler colonialism was ascendant in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Americas, its literature was often written as disaster. This chapter considers three modes of catastrophe – accident, disaster, and trauma – to argue that the violent forces and harsh conditions of life in the New World fragmented former identities and that coloniality emerged from that shattering. The story of accident is told through Jamaican creole Jonathan Dickinson who, along with his small crew of family, friends, shipmen, servants, and slaves, were shipwrecked en route from Port Royal to Philadelphia in 1696. They landed in Florida, where their accidental arrival led them to impersonate the Spanish, to provoke enmities with Indigenous people over both their feigned and their real identities, and to desperately improvise their way over 230 miles to rescue. The story of disaster is told through early Jamestown, a site where extreme suffering and violence compounded to guarantee dire outcomes. For the small number of settlers who survived, their Englishness did not survive within them. From the Starving Time to the First Anglo-Powhatan War, their coloniality took shape in a space of abjection and aggression, marking settlement as a theater of brutality and horror. Trauma is recounted through the narrative of the Pequot War and the life of Mary Prince. These stories of unbridled warfare against the Pequot of New England and the un/common trauma inflicted on enslaved people of the Caribbean bear testimony to the radical dispossession white colonials inflicted upon Native and enslaved people, and the struggle to maintain identities in this context. Together, attention to accident, disaster, and trauma ruptures any smooth accounting of colonial “development” and instead testifies to the tearing, sundering, and shattering that make this history remain uneven, unsteady, and unresolved.

Chapter 6 considers the depiction of hunger, appetite and imperialism. Food comprised an integral component of colonial discourse in the period, and the representation of hunger and appetite therefore provided a significant means by which the theatres could legitimise or critique England’s overseas expansion. The chapter focuses on the use of hunger and appetite as a means to critique or endorse emergent bourgeois ideologies of imperialist expansion, with an emphasis on how colonial adventures are constructed as both a solution to the problem of hunger and the object of new and occasionally unnatural appetites. It considers the cultural significance of cannibalism as an act which at this time was associated not only with subaltern native populations, but also with the expansive appetites of European colonisers, in a manner which could be deployed to express anxiety at the potential consequences of imperial expansion.

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.