While the events surrounding Bacon’s Rebellion have been considered through social and political lenses, one element has been neglected. This is the possibility that Bacon’s Rebellion occurred after the Virginia colony proved to be too unwieldy for the mercantile makeup of the British Empire while the colonists broadened their capitalistic ideals through localization. This smaller human scale resulted from decades of migration with the goal of expanding economic opportunity. When those opportunities were frustrated by colonial policy and the existing civilizations, Bacon’s rebels responded with violence honed by prejudice against anyone that they felt was denying them access to their capitalistic goals. Thus, Bacon’s Rebellion was an explosive effort to carve out a new capitalist order on the margins of the British mercantilist empire.

            This topic bears historic significance as much of the conversation surrounding Bacon’s Rebellion has centered around two issues. Much of the previous investigations have concentrated on the resulting expansion of political opportunity. Historians have correctly traced the expanding participation in the voting process and how Virginia’s government had persuaded the rebellion to cool by opening more opportunities for people to be able to win election into Virginia’s House of Burgesses. While that was an important development as American colonists began to shape their relationships with and expectations from government, it ignores a more fundamental need that the colonists were pursuing. This was especially an access to a more robust lifestyle, or the grounds to pursue that goal without feeling harassed on all sides of their pursuits.

            That harassment leads to the second primary historic conversation surrounding Bacon’s Rebellion. That the rebels’ policy toward the neighboring Native American communities was murderous, or at the least driven by a bloodlust. The more recent history has been drawn toward the socio-ethnic backgrounds between the Indigenous communities and the colonists, while placing a greater degree of interest in the extreme nature of the vengeance sought by the colonists for slights suffered by the Native Americans. Much of this research takes on a more genocidal tone as the indiscriminate nature of the violence is outlined. This research does not consider the economic implications that the colonists’ losses may have inspired. While this is not an effort to excuse potentially murderous behavior, it is an effort to better understand the psychology that would have made those retributions seem warranted to the rebels.

            In order to most effectively pursuit an understanding of that psychology, a trend in the colonists’ developing economics within the British mercantilist system needs to be established. This would begin by considering the economic motivations from the colony’s first settlers. The primary means of establishing this trend would be first-hand accounts from people like John Smith and those he commanded. Once the colony had become sustainable, the poverty-stricken lifestyles that many of the colonists endured will be established. Journalized descriptions of the day-to-day will provide the texture for this conversation, but a special interest in the development of Virginia’s infrastructure will demonstrate the overall state of want most of the colonists existed within.

            As part of their effort to escape that state of need, Governor William Berkeley’s background and policies will be highlighted. Of primary interest will be the inspiration behind much of his policies toward the Native Americans and how they influenced the colonists for better or worse. Berkeley’s papers will provide a bulk of the source material, and will begin to emphasize the nature of the shrinking human scale as the colonists’ capitalist goals meet the intransigent imperial expectations. This conversation would segue into a history of the interactions between the colonists and neighboring Native Americans, especially how those interactions shrunk the human scale within which the colonists were attempting to operate.

            These elements of the research would operate to set up the Nathaniel Bacon’s introduction and influence over the disaffected colonists. Primary sources produced by those who were active in either the rebellion or its suppression will drive the narrative. Much more than rehashing the rebellion’s events, this will connect the previously established shrinking scale, and the colonists effort to expand into their capitalistic goals. In that way, Bacon’s Rebellion is not necessarily the central point that the research revolves around, but the culmination of a lengthy series of events that had shifted the colonists’ scale away from the broad imperial arc and into their locality.

            This research’s methodology will strongly resemble the other investigations into Bacon’s Rebellion. The source material will bear many similarities. The only definitive difference will be shifting the narrative to consider how much more narrow the colonists human scale had become as a result of their economic duress.