The nation we now call the United States started as one big company town; being owned by corporations is part of our national DNA. The Kingdom Company tells the untold story of the Virginia Company's role in the early settlement of Virginia and Massachusetts. The company, a joint-stock corporation authorized by King James, was made up of aristocrats, adventurers, and "planters" who sailed across the North Atlantic, built homes, hunted, prospected, and grew crops on lands that were already home to millions of Indigenous Peoples.
Back in England, the owners of the company sold lotteries, raised investment, and marketed the overseas settlement as the seventeenth century equivalent of a get-rich-quick scheme. The made settlement rules that made it profitable to kidnap women off the streets to sell as brides for the largely male planter population. They embezzled money, pirated ships with other flags, knowingly sent people to their certain death, and behaved so badly the King revoked the company charter in 1624.
We've all heard of Pocahontas, but most people don't know she died on a Virginia Company ship after having dinner with her kidnapper. The Mayflower shapes many Americans' historical identity, yet most people don't know that her journey was paid for by company investors. The company history provides a compelling true-to-life plot, complete with secret weddings, piracy, and internal intrigue. The book tells the story through the eyes of the Virginia Company Treasurer, one of the Mayflower passengers, a sex worker, and the captain of a pirate ship who was partly responsible for the company's demise.
