Shaftesbury's Aristocratic Empire

• Published in: Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury 1621-1683 pp. 101 - 125
• Main Author: Leng, Thomas
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: United Kingdom Routledge 2011; Taylor & Francis Group
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700; Superb; Young Man; TNA; Lay A Way; Providence Island; Denzil Holles; Royal Divorce; Secretaries Of State; Edward III; Osborn Shelves; MS 63057B; Ashley River; Rightful Council; William III; Royal Africa Company; George Savile; Poyning's Law; Plantations Council; John Culpeper; Public Administration; Conventicle Act; Charles II's England
• DOI: 10.4324/9781315567273-5
• ISBN: 9780754661719; 0754661717

This chapter considers how expanded England might have impacted on the aristocratic identity which shows to have been key to Shaftesbury's politics. It discusses the relationship between Shaftesbury's colonial and domestic political engagements. Shaftesbury's engagement with England's colonising movement was fourfold: as investor, proprietor, legislator, and via the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, intellectual pioneer. Shaftesbury was motivated to take on these responsibilities by the same combination of aristocratic ambition and duty which led him to take such a prominent role in the public administration of empire. Shaftesbury as proprietor had already dispensed with another governor, Yeamans in Carolina. Shaftesbury's engagement with Carolina was clearly different, and its relationship with his domestic political career perhaps more complex. Shaftesbury's council never became the all-seeing eye of the imperial state, its gaze being disproportionately drawn to the Caribbean at the expense of England's mainland American colonies.