The Jamestown Project

by Karen Ordahl Kupperman

Listen to a short interview with Karen Ordahl Kupperman
Chris Gondek | Heron & Crane Captain John Smith's 1607 voyage to Jamestown was not his first trip abroad. He had traveled throughout Europe, been sold as a war captive in Turkey, escaped, and returned to England in time to join the Virginia Company's colonizing project. In Jamestown migrants, merchants, and soldiers who had also sailed to the distant shores of the Ottoman Empire, Africa, and Ireland in search of new beginnings encountered Indians who already possessed broad understanding of Europeans. Experience of foreign environments and cultures had sharpened survival instincts on all sides and aroused challenging questions about human nature and its potential for transformation. It is against this enlarged temporal and geographic background that Jamestown dramatically emerges in Karen Kupperman's breathtaking study. Reconfiguring the national myth of Jamestown's failure, she shows how the settlement's distinctly messy first decade actually represents a period of ferment in which individuals were learning how to make a colony work. Despite the settlers' dependence on the Chesapeake Algonquians and strained relations with their London backers, they forged a tenacious colony that survived where others had failed. Indeed, the structures and practices that evolved through trial and error in Virginia would become the model for all successful English colonies, including Plymouth. Capturing England's intoxication with a wider world through ballads, plays, and paintings, and the stark reality of Jamestown--for Indians and Europeans alike--through the words of its inhabitants as well as archeological and environmental evidence, Kupperman re-creates these formative years with astonishing detail.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, The United States Of America, American, British Literature

392 pages, Hardcover

First published March 23, 2007

About the author

Karen Ordahl Kupperman is an American historian who specializes in colonial history in the Atlantic world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
She was born in North Dakota, but moved often during her childhood. She studied History at the University of Missouri, after which she obtained a prestigious Woodrow Wilson fellowship and attended Harvard University, graduating with a MA in 1962. She later attended the University of Cambridge to earn her PhD.

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book looks at the Jamestown settlement as it relates to what was happening in the world. If you are at all interested in world or American history, I recommend this to you. It is not a dry read through and relates stories of people and places and gives many references for further research.

Edited 19-Jun-2010:
I read this book right before Savage Kingdom: The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of America and liked it equally. In fact, I would highly recommend reading them together as this one focuses on what's going on in the world and only touches on the history of the colony. If you do read them together, however, I would recommend the other one first.

I would also like to add that this reminds me of just how open to interpretation even the most well documented histories are. Some of the main characters in this book were only footnote characters in the other and some of the stories told had different feels to them even though they were the same story from the same source.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Karen Ordahl Kupperman points to the significance of Jamestown in establishing an English presence in North America. It is through the many failures and limited successes that a model for English colonialism emerged. The Jamestown Project emphasizes the work of other scholars that have made plain England's late arrival to colonialism and the Americas. Through Jamestown, Kupperman is able to demonstrate why English colonial efforts were belated. One of Kupperman's more interesting points is that Native Americans were familiar with Europeans and Africans long before settlement thanks to prior contact and travel to Europe. While Kuperman only focuses on Jamestown in the work's final two chapters, the books early chapters helps dispel myths surrounding early English attempts to enter trade markets in Asia and Africa and eventually North America.

[John Sharp · Rating 2 out of 5]

I haven't finished this book yet. Like a lot of books I am running across lately, the author is having a hard time getting to the actual subject. I am 120 pages into a 327 page book, and we aren't even close to Jamestown. No one is even thinking about or preparing for a voyage to Jamestown. Instead, I have read 120 pages of information about everything in the world BUT Jamestown.

I really hate it when authors pad out their stories just to make them longer. You know, as readers we sometimes appreciate it when an author just gets to the point!

We will see if I can finish this. I am now just flipping pages to see if I can get to the Jamestown stuff.

Update: Finally getting to information about Jamestown at page 210, Chapter 7. Two-thirds of the way through the book. The author threw in some Jamestown tidbits around page 170, but that was it.

In short, if you want to strictly learn about Jamestown, this isn't the book. On the other hand, if you want to learn about several hundred years of the interactions between England and the rest of the world, then several hundred years of colonization efforts by Europeans, you might enjoy this book.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was great. It is not really a history of the Jamestown settlement- rather, it is the history of the world as the English and Indians saw it at the start of the 1600s...the world in which the Jamestown settlement came into being. Kupperman points out that Jamestown was only one of a ton of settlement and trading projects all over the world for the English. They had already tried a settlement in North Carolina which failed, they were making attempts in Guyana, on islands in the Caribbean, they were colonizing Ireland, and they were setting up joint stock trading companies in Turkey and Africa and East Asia, etc. A settlement was attempted in Maine at the exact same time as Jamestown, but failed due to the harsh winter. Meanwhile, the Indians had known of Europeans for almost a century by the time Jamestown was founded, and they had been directly interacting with Europeans for decades. All kinds of Indians were taken to Europe, both by force and because they chose to go. Some returned and spread knowledge of European languages, Christianity, etc. All this stuff happened pre-Jamestown.
Kupperman tells a story of trial and error here...we need to remember that the English did not know exactly how this was going to work, and so it took some time to figure out what they needed to do. The Indians were figuring things out too- they knew about Europeans, but they had never dealt with resident Europeans. Neither side was stupid; the English tried things that had worked for the Spanish, things that had worked for other English people in other parts of the globe, and then when these approaches failed they had to improvise. After a decade or so, they figured out how to make the colony work, and this became a model that subsequent successful English colonies could emulate.

[Monical · Rating 1 out of 5]

In the beginning, the author introduces Adam and Eve and how they came to colonize Virginia. Yes, that is an exaggeration but also a good example of how Kupperman brings in wildly diverse information to support her book that is supposedly about Jamestown but really is an in-depth discourse about colonization and exploration in general in the 1500's. Maybe something historians would appreciate, but obviously I didn't!

[Ashley McMullen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm rating this so low not because it's a bad book - it's thoroughly researched, well written to be read easily, and interesting - but because it is absolutely not the detailed account of Jamestown that the thesis of the book claims. While mentions of Jamestown are sprinkled throughout the book, the author doesn't start discussing the colony until around pg. 212 of 327 (excluding notes and index), at which point, she spends a total of three chapters and the text feels rushed.

She spends so much time discussing the world of exploration and the history happening during the late 1500s and early 1600s that by the time you get to what you came for, you're left feeling unsatisfied. While I did find some interesting information in here (it's history, so there's always that) - and a few things I hadn't read in other books on the subject - it just wasn't what I had expected or been led to believe I would be reading about. The points she makes back to her thesis feel glossed over, and she manages to diverge from it even in the last three chapters. I was also more critical of this book because I have a background in history and have researched this topic a lot.

Overall, a good book if you're looking for the overarching, connecting history of colonization in the Americas during that time period, but not so much if you're looking for a focused, in-depth read on the Jamestown colony.

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Continuing on my pre-revolutionary America theme I enjoyed this book a lot. It actually doesn't talk that much about Jamestown until the very end but sets the European and World stage, believes and events of the early 17th century when the Ottoman Empire was strong, tolerant and more enlightened than Europe, especially England which sat on the far edge of the world. As all non-fiction suffered from a little receptiveness but not too bad.

[Tony · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hate giving such a low rating for such a well-researched book, but it is difficult if not impossible to read. I had hoped to learn, through story-telling more about Jamestown, but the book doesn't really get into Jamestown until the last 2 chapters of the book. This book probably would appeal to academics who are working on their PHD in 1600's era European exploration.

[Julia Bloom · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really interesting history! The connections that Kupperman makes between the Atlantic World and the Jamestown Colony are amazing. My only complaint is that I wish she would have weaved Jamestown into the Atlantic World throughout more of the book instead of the last three chapters only.

[Megan O'Malley · Rating 4 out of 5]

maybe my brain is slow but this book had an abundance of detail (people places and dates) that i literally could not keep up with….which makes it good bc it provides tons of context to the jamestown colony…..but also bad bc my head hurt

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good read for the history leading up to the colonization of the Americas. Very good background detail.

[Lena · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got a little lost and confused during some points in the book, but it was really interesting! I enjoyed reading a different perspective on Jamestown.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Jamestown Project was really interesting. About 2/3 the way through, though, I began to skim.

[Everett F. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting Braudelian view of the origins of the Virginia colony and the British Empire itself. Five starts.

[Dennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good background on the global landscape that influenced the various actors in the Jamestown Project. As some reviews have noted, I also expected this would be mostly about the happenings in Jamestown. I glad it wasn't! Exceptional research and using the history of other regions to convey the thinking and actions of the English financiers and settlers.

[Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Jamestown Project feels like two loosely connected essays melded into one book. The deep background about matters such as European colonization ventures and Europeans who had "taken the turban" - renounced European ways and essentially taken up life in Muslim cultures - was interesting to me but would probably not be to the average person who picked up the book expecting a history of Jamestown and its founding. Approximately half the book addresses Jamestown; the other half deals with deep background and the life of well-known but frequently misunderstood individuals such as John Smith and Rebecca Rolfe, aka Pocahontas/Mataoka.

Someone expecting a pure, popularly accessible history of Jamestown may be disappointed with this book; however, if you have an interest in colonial history and the interaction of European (mostly English) and Muslim cultures (mostly Turkey) in the 16th and early 17th C., you might be interested in this one. Also if you're interested in human interaction with the environment in early America, and how the English settlers interacted with the Indians who were already there when they arrived, you might find this one to be worthwhile. (The author's main point with regard to this latter area is that initially, the power dynamics might not be what you'd expect.)

This incorporates and refers to various written documents from the late 16th and early 17th C. which I'd love to follow up on ... except for now I need to take this book back to the library, so I'll have to do it later. (One of these was Sidney's Defence of Poesie, which is also quoted in the second essay in No Island Is an Island.) On a scale of 5 I'd say it's a 3.5.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kupperman is certainly one of the greatest Colonial American researchers, and this book is quite good. The drawback for me is though the book is supposedly about Jamestown, it's mostly not.

Kupperman's work spends much time trying to lay a mental/cultural foundation in an attempt to delve into the English mind before undertaking the Jamestown Project. She does well here, but her summary attempt touches a number of tangential, nonessential factors, such as Islam. She really has to stretch facts and truth to bring Islam into the picture.

Further, Kupperman mentions nothing about statist-monopolistic controls that spurred merchants into looking for new/better opportunities. She does mention that throwing off those controls in part did lead to the colony's successes, but she only mentions that in the last couple of paragraphs, almost as an after thought.

Do not get this book if you're looking for a good look into Jamestown history. That is not what this book is about. It is good as a different look into events leading up to Jamestown's founding, but if one is looking for a better event summary leading to Jamestown, read the few pertaining chapters from Murray Rothbard's "Conceived in Liberty." If you're looking for a good, detailed history of Jamestown, check out Tony Williams' "The Jamestown Experiment" or James Horn's "A Land as God Made It."

[Michael Wing · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just starting this nonfiction, and is it ever thorough. Extremely well researched, broadly represented, and finely organized from the Europeans and the new Americans. I have learned several historical facts that were either confused or reversed in my past. Great stuff after only 100 pages. Finished the project this weekend and thoroughly enjoyed being offered thorough research on culture, economics, prejudices, and politics of the countries claiming our land and manipulating natives. John Smith figures through the research predominantly. Do you know he was a prisoner in a Turkish prison? The English were connivers and liars about the Jamestown project to try and attract fools. The Bermudas were an interesting mistake, inspiring "The Tempest." The reading is slow but not tediouss. This is required reading in several college courses.

[Don · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is quite a book, putting Jamestown into perspective. It looks at what the English were trying to do and why, and what the Natives were looking for, as well as what the colonists were striving to accomplish.

What I thought was particularly interesting was the overall European view, offering analysis of how Jamestown and other attempted settlements fit into the English system (no gov't money!) and how they were perceived by the Spanish (a threat!).

In this day and age, it's interesting to see that the USA was built on the bricks of one of the first "modern" corporations, that a few religious zealots were influential, and that iron-fisted martial law was deemed necessary to make it work. It is apparent that corporatism and militarism have blossomed in this land through the past 400 years.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're looking for a chronological history of what happened at Jamestown in the early settlement years, this isn't the book for you. Much of it is not directly about Jamestown at all. Instead, "The Jamestown Project" describes the world in which the settlement of Jamestown occurred: England's experiences of the larger world, Native American experiences of Europeans, England's attempts at colonizing, and so on. The book helps provide context about why the Jamestown settlers acted the way they did. In that respect, it is very interesting. Because the book is organized by topics, however, you'll find people who died or returned to England in one chapter popping back up in the story later in the book, which can make sorting out the order in which decisions were made a little confusing.

[Kris · Rating 3 out of 5]

She really takes the long view in this book - providing a lot of historical background prior to the actual settlement of Jamestown, which really doesn't start until at least half way through the book. This was a lot of good context. Her main argument is that though the U.S. likes to look to Plymouth and the Puritans as its origins, Jamestown existed prior to this and was the model that all later settlements followed, including Plymouth. I'm not sure she gives enough evidence to back that up, but it may well be true. The book is informative and well written.

[David R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The goal here was to demonstrate that Jamestown colony (especially 1607-19) ultimately became a success through hard lessons, and that modern perceptions that the colony was a foolish hive of gold diggers is largely incorrect. Kupperman performed a great deal of background research in preparation for writing this book, but really went over the wall. We don't even get to Jamestown until past page 200. Unfortunately, the real core of the book, as stated, is glossed over fairly quickly. Lots of editing would have helped this book.

[Matt · Rating 1 out of 5]

good historical background of the first travels to North America. A little slow however and I am getting bogged down in the all the details. Every person who ever sailed for American is mentioned, and half of their life stories are told. I am hoping the pace picks up.
Three months later. The pace never picked up and I never picked the book up again.

[simon · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book posits that Jamestown was the first colony that shaped the way British colonialism happened from them out. I'm not sure if it's a great thesis, but there's a lot of good info in this book. It's kinda hokey at times, but probably great for intro to Early American history or something like that.

[Pam · Rating 4 out of 5]

every book on this subject is different

[Charlene · Rating 3 out of 5]

For grad course this fall.

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't know that I would enjoy this book as much as I did. Much more about European colonization in general than the Jamestown Colony specifically. Great read, well written. Loved it.

[Chrism485 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very thorough and interesting account

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Compares what was happening in Ireland at the time, importing English to settle. Likely more native American contact with Europeans than we'd been taught.