Imagining empire: an ancient and noble ‘New World’ in the works of William Vaughan and Balthazar Gerbier, 1616-1660

Early European projects for the colonisation of the Americas blur fact and fiction. Colonists risked their lives and livelihoods for an idea of the Americas that was formed as much by fantasy and wishful thinking as by experience. This thesis examines two unrealised or partially-realised English and Welsh colonial projects from the seventeenth century to shed light on the atavistic and often fantastical world views that informed European ideas of the New World and what Europeans thought they might do, make or create there.
The thesis contributes to colonial, imperial and Atlantic histories, challenging the notion that what matters in histories of empire and colonialism is only what was enacted, rather than what was imagined or intended. Short-lived colonial projects have largely been footnoted or ignored within imperial, colonial, Atlantic and early Canadian and American histories but in omitting them from our analyses we see only part of the picture: the plans that came to fruition. Consequently, we may presume that the colonial visions that were achieved represent the totality of European colonisers’ intentions and worldview, that only the colonies that were successfully planted—or the coloniser’s whose ambitions were fulfilled—shaped the New World in the minds of Europeans and those they colonised.
The thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on the history of ideas, material culture studies, dress history, cultural geography, the history of cartography, utopian and literary studies, and art and architectural history. Common themes emerge: a shared obsession with order and with an idealised past founded in sacred and secular histories, myth, genealogies and legends. Yet each project offers its own insight into the conception of the New World, fusing the imaginary and the real in different ways to reveal differing contemporary concerns.