| Summary: | The present chapter traces the emergence of Scottish Atlantic writing in the seventeenth century by focusing on works from the 1620s that promote the colonization of Nova Scotia. It studies works written by James VI and I, William Alexander, Robert Gordon, Thomas Hariott, and Richard Guthry while also discussing the role the Virginia Company and the indigenous Mi'kmaq and Maliseet populations played in Scotland's attempts to colonize Nova Scotia. It situates these agents and works in the larger contexts of European empire-building. It also considers forms of internal colonialism in the British Isles, including writings about the Highlands and Islands and inner-British power dynamics after the Union of Crowns. The utopian tradition offers ways to understanding the spaces, temporalities, and cultural agents in the emerging Scottish Atlantic, including the tropes of newness and reform as well as the intertextual relationships with earlier travelogues and the longevity of the Scottish colonial imagination.
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