In the first half of the seventeenth century, several foreign plantations were established on wetlands drained during a wave of ambitious state-led projects across eastern England. The lines of solidarity and separation forged by this little-known episode in the history of migration pose important questions about how emergent notions of nationhood intersected with local and transnational, religious and economic communities. This article investigates the causes and consequences of the settlement of Calvinist refugees on drained commons in Hatfield Level. It argues that fen plantation expands understanding of the relationship between English agricultural improvement and imperial expansion in the British Atlantic, as migrant communities acted in the service of empires and states while forging transnational Protestant networks. As Calvinists and cultivators, however, the settlers were met with hostility in England. While the crown encouraged foreign plantation as a source of national prosperity, Laudian church authorities identified it as a threat to religious conformity, the state, and society, muddying depictions of English governors as guarantors of refugee rights. Local efforts to violently expel settlers from Hatfield Level, meanwhile, were rooted in fen commoners’ defense of customary rights, as parallel communities sought to enact rival environmental and economic models. The settler community interpreted these experiences through the lens of transnational Protestant adversity, entangling their quest for religious freedoms with their remit as fen improvers. Moving beyond dichotomous arguments about xenophobia, this article traces the transnational imaginaries, national visions, and emplaced processes through which collective identities and their sharp edges were constituted in early modern England.

十七世纪上半叶，在英格兰东部雄心勃勃的国家主导项目浪潮中，湿地被排干，在湿地上建立了几个外国种植园。移民史上这一鲜为人知的事件所形成的团结与分离的界线提出了关于新兴的民族观念如何与地方和跨国、宗教和经济社区相交叉的重要问题。本文调查了加尔文教难民在哈特菲尔德水平的枯竭公共土地上定居的原因和后果。它认为，沼泽种植园扩大了人们对英国农业改良与英属大西洋帝国扩张之间关系的理解，因为移民社区在为帝国和国家服务的同时，还建立了跨国新教网络。然而，作为加尔文主义者和耕种者，这些定居者在英格兰遭到了敌意。虽然国王鼓励外国种植园作为国家繁荣的源泉，但劳德教会当局认为这是对宗教整合、国家和社会的威胁，混淆了英国总督作为难民权利保障者的描述。与此同时，当地用暴力将定居者驱逐出哈特菲尔德水平的努力根源于沼泽地平民对习惯权利的捍卫，因为平行社区试图制定相互竞争的环境和经济模式。定居者社区通过跨国新教逆境的视角来解释这些经历，将他们对宗教自由的追求与他们作为沼泽改良者的职责联系在一起。 本文超越了关于仇外心理的二分论点，追踪了跨国想象、国家愿景以及在近代早期英国构成集体身份及其尖锐边缘的既定过程。