SOURCE: MacKenthun, Gesa. “Books for Empire: The Colonial Program of Richard Hakluyt.” In Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492-1637, pp. 22-70. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997.

In the following excerpt, MacKenthun argues that English adventurers and colonists, like the Spanish before them, became fixated on images of American Indians as cannibals to justify conquest, and perhaps, to even mask their own cruelty and savagery.

My analysis of the Madoc story has shown the function of narrative in the historical legitimation of a national-colonial project, while my reading of the golden-age trope has traced its connections with the larger context of the colonial labor problematic. The present section examines the various mutations of the most prominent trope of colonial discourse in America—the trope of cannibalism—by connecting its appearance in the Principall Navigations to the larger discursive field of early European colonialism.¹ Its...