Proprietary Settler Colonialism and the Making of North America

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 o