The mythic story of English America’s origins has long focused on the Mayflower pilgrims and their 1620 democratic compact. Less well known are the activities of the leading joint-stock royal charter companies that established colonial settlements like those of the Virginia and Hudson’s Bay Companies. Operating in ways often independent of the Crown, these for-profit companies established communities, trade routes and legal regimes in what Whiteside terms “proprietary settler colonialism”, all of which were pivotal in shaping the political-economic transformation of British North American colonies and their capitalist evolution. The fortunes of these company colonies were built on unfree labour, the appropriation of land and displacement of Indigenous peoples. The book explores the consequences of colonizing companies’ activities by connecting their historical significance to contemporary struggles for reconciliation, decolonization and reclamation.

The mythic story of English America’s origins has long focused on the Mayflower pilgrims and their 1620 democratic compact. Less well known are the activities of the leading joint-stock royal charter companies that established colonial settlements like those of the Virginia and Hudson’s Bay Companies. Operating in ways often independent of the Crown, these for-profit companies established communities, trade routes and legal regimes in what Whiteside terms “proprietary settler colonialism”, all of which were pivotal in shaping the political-economic transformation of British North American colonies and their capitalist evolution. The fortunes of these company colonies were built on unfree labour, the appropriation of land and displacement of Indigenous peoples. The book explores the consequences of colonizing companies’ activities by connecting their historical significance to contemporary struggles for reconciliation, decolonization and reclamation.