Speculation and Scientific Method: Thomas Harriot’s Virginia IPO

Abstract This article proposes that Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of 1588 is the first initial public offering (IPO) in history and that understanding it as such provides new insight into how plantation capitalism and scientific method were conceptualized in a mutually constitutive Anglo-American discourse. First, the author traces how the practical exigencies posed by the anomalous form of English New World colonization that Walter Ralegh pursued, commodity plantation by private enterprise, provoked a conceptual and discursive shift in how knowledge was defined and instrumentalized. Next, she reads Harriot’s Report to show that the IPO itself constitutes an episteme. To rationalize an enormously speculative venture, Harriot assumed a recognizable empirical method: he isolated and presented verifiable, reproducible data that would allow prospective investors to gauge their likelihood of financial return. But because the enterprise Harriot promoted was predicated on territorial dispossession of Indigenous people, the author next shows that he conceived of instrumentalized knowledge in his formative text not only as a tool but also as a weapon. She closes with a brief consideration of how Francis Bacon, himself deeply involved in Virginia plantations by 1620, rendered Harriot’s intervention into philosophy, in his famous pronouncement in the New Organon that “knowledge and power . . . really come to the same thing.”