

Michael J. Jarvis
How can the small, isolated island of Bermuda help us to understand the early expansion of English America?
First discovered by Europeans in 1505, the island of Bermuda had no indigenous population and no permanent European presence until the early seventeenth century. Settled five years after Virginia and eight years before Plymouth, Bermuda is a foundational site of English colonization. Its history reveals strikingly different paths of potential colonial development as a place where slave-owning puritan tobacco planters raised large families, engaged overseas markets, built ships, created a...
How can the small, isolated island of Bermuda help us to understand the early expansion of English America?
First discovered by Europeans in 1505, the island of Bermuda had no indigenous population and no permanent European presence until the early seventeenth century. Settled five years after Virginia and eight years before Plymouth, Bermuda is a foundational site of English colonization. Its history reveals strikingly different paths of potential colonial development as a place where slave-owning puritan tobacco planters raised large families, engaged overseas markets, built ships, created a Christian commonwealth, hanged witches, wrestled to define racial difference, and welcomed godly pirates raiding Spanish America.
In Isle of Devils, Isle of Saints, Michael J. Jarvis presents readers with a new narrative social and cultural history of Bermuda. Adopting a holistic, multidisciplinary approach that draws upon thirty years of research and archaeological fieldwork, Jarvis recounts Bermuda's turbulent, dynamic past from the Sea Venture's dramatic 1609 shipwreck through the 1684 dissolution of the Bermuda Company. He argues that the island was the first of England's colonies to produce a successful staple, form a stable community, turn a profit, transplant civic institutions, and harness bound African knowledge and labor. Bermuda was a tabula rasa that fired the imaginations of English thinkers aspiring to create an American utopia. It was also England's first puritan colony, founded as a covenanted Christian commonwealth in 1612 by self-consciously religious settlers who committed themselves to building a moral society.
By the 1670s, Bermuda had become England's most densely populated possession and was poised to become an intercolonial maritime hub after freeing itself from its antiquated parent company. The first scholarly monograph in eighty years on this important, neglected colony's first century, Isle of Devils, Isle of Saints is a worthy prequel to In the Eye of All Trade, Jarvis's masterful first book. Revealing the dynamic interplay of race, gender, slavery, and environment at the dawn of English America, Jarvis's work challenges us to rethink how Europeans and Africans became distinctly American within the crucible of colonization.
Rich and rewarding.
With his first book, Michael Jarvis established himself as our generation's leading historian of colonial Bermuda. In this volume, a prequel to that monumental work, Jarvis situates the early history of Bermuda in the context of a growing English presence in the Atlantic basin in general and in relation to the development of England's mainland colonies in North America. Based on extraordinary research, Isle of Devils, Isle of Saints is the best starting point for understanding Bermuda's complex and vital history.
Deeply researched and impressively wide-ranging, this book brings to life the early history of the Bermuda colony in what will surely become the standard work. Jarvis writes with great sensitivity to the on-the-ground experience of colonization and the process of colonial ethnogenesis. Atlantic Crucible will challenge historians to reconsider the nature of the early English Atlantic world and grapple more fully with what Bermuda, hundreds of miles from mainland North America, reveals about other colonial experiments.
Seventeenth-century Bermuda boasted godly settlers, a staple crop, enslaved labor, and a robust maritime trade, making it a great venue for understanding colonization's intensive cultural adaptations. Jarvis's fabulous interdisciplinary intervention places Bermuda in its larger Atlantic and global contexts while also explaining its peculiar version of English expansion.
Bermuda played a crucial role in the creation of the English Atlantic. In this beautifully written book, Michael Jarvis, this generation's acknowledged authority on Bermuda, explores the early colony's dramatic history and the vital social, religious, and economic developments that came to characterize England's seventeenth-century American empire.
The fruit of thirty years of archival and archaeological work, this treat for Bermudians, specialists, and non-specialists alike achieves that most difficult of goals: a flowing narrative that is at once deeply engaged with multiple fields of scholarship as well as being eminently pleasurable to read.
Michael Jarvis's stirring work contributes to our understanding of Bermuda's role in developing the English Atlantic during the formative years of the early seventeenth century and the early tensions that arose among its settlers. He provides an important history of institutions and peoples that formed in the Bermudian context.
In dazzling depth and breadth Michael Jarvis explores how Bermuda went from being a place to avoid at all costs to a flourishing laboratory for colonial and religious design and a center of English interests.
Preface
Author's Note
Introduction. A New Bermuda Triangle
Chapter 1. Isle of Devils
Chapter 2. Planting a Christian Commonwealth
Chapter 3. Bermuda: Company and Colony
Chapter 4. Becoming Bermudian: Saints
Preface
Author's Note
Introduction. A New Bermuda Triangle
Chapter 1. Isle of Devils
Chapter 2. Planting a Christian Commonwealth
Chapter 3. Bermuda: Company and Colony
Chapter 4. Becoming Bermudian: Saints, Slaves, and Sinners
Chapter 5. Tobacco Troubles: Diversification in an Expanding English Atlantic
Chapter 6. Clerical Conflicts and Civil War
Chapter 7. Restorations: King, Company, Colony
Chapter 8. The Battle for Bermuda, 1669–1684
Conclusion. Change and Persistence in a New Maritime Bermuda
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Essay on Sources
Index
with Hopkins Press Books