Islands of Settlement

• Main Author: Jarvis, Michael J.
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University Press 2021
• Subjects: Nantucket; Newfoundland; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198847229.003.0004

North Atlantic islands played a key role in early English imperial expansion as critical sites of precedent and experimentation. From John Cabot’s first landing in 1497, Newfoundland gave England both a claim to America and a base for an enormously profitable fishery. Further south, and following its initial accidental English occupation in 1609, Bermuda became England’s first fully settled overseas colony. Furthermore, and crucially, it provided a template for colonial success that was widely copied throughout the Caribbean. New England’s Nantucket Island offers a third maritime-oriented imperial site of innovation as a uniquely successful seventeenth-century whaling base. This chapter highlights the contributions these different North Atlantic islands made in British imperial expansion and their changing roles across time, especially in the wake of the American Revolution.