https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/1964/winter/jamestown-where-the-empire-began/
Jamestown, Virginia, was the first permanent British settlement in the Americas. It was named in 1607 after King James I, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, King of England and Ireland, who also reigned as King James VI of Scotland.
The three types of colonies that the British established in the Americas were Charter Colonies, Proprietary Colonies and Royal Colonies. Jamestown originated as a Charter Colony, in which the King granted control to a local colonial government to establish the practical rules of day-to-day governance. A Proprietary Colony required private investment, and was frequently used to reward friends and allies of the King. A Royal Colony was administered by a governor appointed by the Crown, but Royal Colonies often had elected governments and were self-governing.
Spain, Portugal and France had already made inroads into the New World by explorers such as Christopher Columbus (1492), Amerigo Vespucci (1507) and the Spanish conquistador Don Hernán Cortés (1590), conqueror of the Aztecs and Incas. The enormous riches that Cortés discovered, particularly gold, inspired sponsorship of the early British expeditions by wealthy businessmen seeking to increase their fortunes.
Jamestown is a three-part, twenty-four-episode television mini-series produced by Carnival Films, the people behind Downton Abbey, and filmed in Hungary. Sam Wollaston, of the Guardian, wrote:
[Jamestown’s] certainly a goldmine from a storyteller’s point of view. There are all sorts of horrors here—the birth of the British empire and of modern America, war and slavery just round the corner. It’s an almost endless seam of stories, and the three recent arrivals, each with their own horrors and journeys, are a good route in.
Bernard Cornwell once said, “Most historical novels have a big story, and a little story—you flip them and put the little story in the foreground.”
In Jamestown, the big story is the cathartic transformation of the 1606 trading settlement of the Virginia Company (also known as the London Company)—initially chartered by King James, off the coast of Virginia between latitudes 34 and 41, as an investment, with the aim of discovering gold and silver—into a Crown Colony in 1624, while at the same time bestowing on it the right to self-government. This unusual hybrid, ironically, led to the birth of American democracy.
