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Charts the founding of the American Empire.
The Fourth Kingdom is the second volume in a series of books, The Personality of American Power, tracing the distinctive continuities in the American way of war and strategy-making. A handful of themes emerge: securing the continuity and legitimacy of the Anglo-American regime; grounding the use of state power in political principles and ideology; calculating security interests in a fully global geopolitical context; seeing the path to great-power status as leading to westward, transatlantic expansion; differing strategic views between the imperial frontier and the metropolis; and an ongoing contest between advocates of a "blue-water," maritime, "off-shore balancing" approach to both colonial and continental affairs and promoters of direct engagement to achieve a favorable great-power balance. Seeing the North American colonies as a developing "Fourth Kingdom" adds a new dimension to the dominant "three-kingdoms" historiography of the tumultuous Stuart and Cromwellian years. Between the founding of the Jamestown colony and the carving-out of "Penn's Woods" seven decades later, English settlers came to control the critical seaports of North America, all but excluding other European powers.
"A lively, exciting, and sophisticated work that sheds new light on the political relationship between Stuart Britain and its emerging colonies. Donnelly highlights the impact of English domestic politics over the unsteady course of plantation and colonization and shows how conflicts outside Europe came to inform the upheavals of the domestic realm." — Gabriel Glickman, University of Cambridge