Antiques.

 
For whosoever commands the Sea, Commands the Trade: whosoever Commands 
the Trade of the world: Commands the Riches of the world and 
consequently the world it selfe. 
Sir Walter Ralegh, "A Discourse of the Invention of Ships, Anchors, 
Compass, & c.," 1615, published 1650 

English society in America originated four hundred years ago with the establishment of a fortified settlement at Jamestown, on a peninsula near the mouth of the James River in Virginia in 1607. Under the leadership of such men as John Smith, the group of about 108 colonists held together during the early years, the grim "starving time," when survival demanded uncommon resourcefulness. In 1620 another group of English colonists established themselves at Plymouth in what is now Massachusetts. In both places, the inhabitants quickly recognized the need to set up trading relations with the American Indians they encountered. The settlers could not grow sufficient food to meet their requirements and relied on the Indians to supply them . The Indians, for their part, were attracted to the metal and manufactured goods offered by the Europeans. The ensuing trade made it possible for both Jamestown and Plymouth to endure their initial travails.

Endurance meant expansion. In the 1630s the "Great Migration" of Puritans to New England got underway, and in the Chesapeake region, Leonard Calvert, brother of the second Lord Baltimore, established a successful colony at Saint Mary's City, Maryland, in 1634. After the difficult early years, development in Virginia and Maryland was truly remarkable, thanks particularly to the tobacco industry, which secured the two colonies' economic fortunes, and the adoption of a range of English institutions and practices, which laid the basis for government at provincial and local levels. English men and women who went to the Chesapeake region in the seventeenth century saw themselves not as social outcasts exiled to a distant shore but as participants in a rich ...