From the earliest chronicles of Viking explorers through the reports of post-Columbian explorers like Giovanni de Verrazano and Jacques Cartier, travel accounts from eastern North America relayed one consistent finding: the people there were ruled by konungar, re, or rois—kings. This paper reconstructs European concepts of kingship across this chronological span and surveys the deployment of these ideas in prescriptive strategies for conquest, vassalization, and colonial planting, particularly in the context of English Virginia.

Peter Jakob Olsen-Harbich is Associate Director at The McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania. Peter earned his Ph.D. in History from William & Mary. He is Editor of The New American Antiquarian, co-author of Native America: A History, 3rd ed. (Wiley, 2022), and author of a 2021 article in Early American Studies. Peter’s in-progress monograph seeks to reconstruct the constitution of North America’s coastal Algonquian regimes in the early historic era and to assess the significance of these governments in planned and executed English colonial ventures.

Pre-Circulated Paper

The pre-circulated paper will be available one-week prior to the workshop. The paper will be available to the Princeton University community via SharePoint. All others should request a copy of the paper by emailing Augustus Mosse.