Failure
Roanoke, Pensacola, Sainte-Roy, and Ajacan were sixteenth-century American settlements abandoned quickly after they were founded. The buildings fell into ruin or disappeared, the inhabitants massacred, starved, or enslaved. While the “failure” of these settlements continues to muddle origin-myths of the United States, their fate seems to represent a far more typical – but little examined – mode by which Europeans engaged the world. Failure – political, economic, social, or cultural - has not been a part of most considerations of early globalization and this brief paper proposes to raise the issue of failure as a concept for writing about the art and history of the early modern world.