Transcriber’s Note:
Obvious printer errors corrected silently.
Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation are as in the original.
About This Book
The author portrays Virginia's natural abundance—fauna, crops, and potential industries—and discusses hopes for expanded trade routes and competition with Dutch and Swedish settlements. He contrasts Virginian plantation and parish institutions, primogeniture, and landed gentry with New England's town-centered, congregational settlement and agrarian smallholdings. The narrative follows the political realignment after the English civil conflict, the influx of royalist settlers, enlargement of land grants, and the role of genealogies and elite families in shaping local leadership. Overall it argues that economic and ecclesiastical frameworks, rather than innate social inferiority, produced the region's distinctive social order.