Britain and Empire, 1685–1730

The half century that followed the coronation of James II brought an escalation in English interest in the possibility of empire outside Europe. Through the seventeenth century, 300,000 Englishmen had advanced across the Atlantic, seating themselves within uncharted American spaces and among unfamiliar native peoples. The creation of trading depots, forts, and encampments in parts of India and the Guinea Coast offered further glimmerings of global ambition. Repeatedly, strategic and commercial interests ushered the Crown into the occupation of Mediterranean cities, islands, and peninsulas. Throughout most of the century, hopes of global empire had appeared chimerical: the congeries of scattered settlements, commercial outposts, and private fiefdoms offered unpromising materials for international hegemony. The period between 1685 and 1730 can be identified, therefore, as a formative phase in the trajectory of English imperial expansion. Frontiers were stretched northward into Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and the Hudson’s Bay basin and extended through the southern plantation world. Simultaneously, the Crown intensified its measures to control and exploit the established settlements. Proceeding in the background was the cultural and demographic transformation of great tracts of the dominions through unfree African labor. Stuart and, latterly, Hanoverian monarchs ruled a political community expanding in its terrain and its subject population, with far-reaching implications for the religion, culture, society, and economy of the domestic realm. Modern scholarship has sought increasingly to recover connections between the pressures of a nascent empire and the politics of the domestic realm, in a time of warfare and revolution. Fresh insights into early modern overseas expansion have been embedded in new accounts of Stuart and Hanoverian politics, examinations of overseas trade, and studies of the Protestant religion. The subject has given rise to an especially fertile field of intellectual history. The repositioning of Scotland and Ireland as “Atlantic nations” has uncovered linkages between the growth of dominion in America and the problems of managing a “multiple kingdom” monarchy within the British Isles. This article concentrates on works that have examined the influence of overseas expansion over the domestic kingdoms governed by Stuart and Hanoverian monarchs.

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