William & Mary’s Nottoway Quarter: The Political Economy of Institutional Slavery and Settler Colonialism

This essay examines the sources of two historical funding streams used to establish and support the College of William & Mary in Virginia, an institution founded in 1693 to educate elite English colonials and “Western Indians” in North America. Initially, the College was funded, in part, by taxation of colonized Indian lands, Virginia and Maryland colony tobacco exports, and the lucrative trade in hides and furs obtained from Native Americans. Expropriated labor from enslaved persons on tobacco plantations, and their profits, made substantive contributions to the maintenance and support of the college. With new research on William & Mary as a direct financial beneficiary of institutional slavery and the colonization of indigenous territory by non-Native settlers, we examine the intersection of slave labor and Indian treaty land through the documentary evidence about the College’s historical plantation, known as Nottoway Quarter.