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This article addresses immediate contexts for Hobbes's theories of war and empire: Anglo-Dutch rivalry over freedom of the seas, and the Virginia Company's mandate to colonize America as 'unclaimed land' (terra nullius). It stakes out new ground: first in maintaining that both Donne and Hobbes invoked the doctrine of terra nullius, following the Jamestown Massacre of 1622, shortly after it had been formulated by Grotius, and long before it was known by this name; and second, in making the case that Hobbes's 'nasty brutish and short' seems to refer specifically to the life of Virginian 'savages', rather than being a general description of the natural condition of humankind. Hobbes was present when John Donne preached to the Virginia Company in 1622, invoking terra nullius, and Donne's argument may be read as a template for Hobbes's 'Bulimia of Dominium'. Like Donne, Hobbes read Jamestown as the empire striking back.
