Introduction: “In the Beginning, All the World was America”

Ever since Plato around 355 bc brought to the world the story of the lost continent of Atlantis, visions of an imaginary ideal society in the western hemisphere have been an integral part of utopian mythmaking in Europe. Though relatively little known during the medieval period, the legend of the antediluvian world of Atlantis was rediscovered by humanists in the early modern period. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 had accelerated the recovery of ancient scientific texts, while the concurrent invention of movable type printing allowed the faster and wider propagation of learning. These developments inaugurated a scientific revolution, which saw great advances in scholarship in areas ranging from geography, astronomy, chemistry, physics, and mathematics to manufacturing and engineering. This expansion in human understanding broke the mold of the humanists’ earlier non plus ultra attitude to their ancient inheritance. But it was the discovery of the New World that added a fresh and invigorating inflection to the ancient myth of the lost utopia. Adam Smith famously described the discovery of America, along with that of a passage to the East Indies by way of the Cape of Good Hope, as “the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.” Coming close on the heels of Columbus's voyage, printed narratives such as Thomas More's Utopia (1516) and Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1527) capitalized on the excitement following the historic event by rallying Europeans to join the revolution in empiricist scientific exploration and speculation.

The key question in this scientific inquiry was not what the discovery of America meant for that continent, but what the discovery of the New World meant for the Old World. That is to say, the geographical, ethnographical, historical, and topographical narratives of America that began to appear in ever-growing numbers in the course of the seventeenth century were in fact narratives of self-exploration and self-critique. It was for this reason that the discovery of “America” was as much a mental process as a historical event. By the same token, “America” was as much a concept or a metaphor as a self-evident geographical space. As in the case of Plato's dialogues of Timaeus and Critias, which hold the original references to the island of Atlantis, the abiding significance of such narratives as Richard Hakluyt the Younger's Discourse of Western Planting (1584), Thomas Harriot's A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590), and John Smith's Generall History of Virginia (1624) is that they mobilized contemporary readers – often indirectly and unintentionally – to examine their own ideas of political and economic power, and hence of government and society.