Participatory Government and Communal Property: Two Radical Concepts in the Virginia Charter of 1606

On April 26, 1607, about one hundred English men landed on the Atlantic shore of North America near Jamestown, Virginia. There they established the foundation for what would become the first permanent English colony in America. These men, and the men and women who followed in the next decade, left as their legacy a society that combined a rudimentary form of popular government with a system of private property. But these settlers established that society only after conducting seventeen turbulent years of social experiments. Had those experiments conducted in that Virginia swamp turned out differently, we might now live under a very different governmental regime