Settling the Good Land - Governance and Promotion in John Winthrop’s New England 1620-1650

Settling the Good Land is the first institutional history of the Massachusetts Bay Company, a cornerstone of early modern English colonization in North America. Agnès Delahaye analyzes the settlement as a form of colonial innovation, to reveal the political significance of early New England sources, above and beyond religion. John Winthrop was not just a Puritan, but a settler governor who wrote the history of the expansion of his company as a record of successful and enduring policy. Delahaye argues that settlement, as the action and the experience of appropriating the land, is key to understanding the role played by Winthrop’s writings in American historiography, before independence and in our times.