John Rolfe
Send to Google Classroom:
John Rolfe (l. 1585-1622 CE) was an English merchant and colonist of Jamestown best known as the husband of Pocahontas (l. c. 1596-1617 CE). He is also known, however, for his successful cultivation of tobacco in Virginia which established the crop as the most lucrative export of the early English colonies of North America. Tobacco had proven itself a profitable trade commodity for the Spanish who had colonized South and Central America and the West Indies throughout the 16th century CE. The English hoped they would have the same kind of success with their colony at Jamestown, but the settlement struggled for three years just to survive until Rolfe arrived in 1610 CE with tobacco seeds he believed would do well in the marshy soil of Virginia. Rolfe produced his first crop by 1611 CE, not only saving the colony but establishing a cash crop that would form the basis for the colonial American economy.
December 17, 2020
As every schoolchild learns, Columbus set sail with India on his mind’s horizon. Rarely, though, do schoolchildren learn why Columbus sought to cross the Atlantic. Hoping for an alliance with the Grand Khan of the East, he aimed to retake Jerusalem and destroy Islam; more prosaically, his voyages promised an end run around the trade monopolies of the Ottomans and the Mamluks. And when Columbus arrived in the Americas, fresh from the battle which marked Spain’s final defeat of the Muslim kingdom of Granada, he saw or, more accurately, imagined Muslims everywhere. Spanish conquistadors would claim to see mosques in Mexico, American Indians wearing “Moorish” clothing and performing “Moorish” dances, Turks invading New Spain from the Pacific, and West African slaves attempting to convert America’s indigenous peoples to Islam. Filtering their experiences in the Americas through the lens of their wars with Muslims, Europeans in the New World engaged in a ne