English Overseas Empire

The English (after the Union of England, Scotland, and Wales in 1707, the British) Overseas Empire famously encompassed the globe. The range of scholarship related to this phenomenon stretches accordingly. This article focuses on contributions that consider the period prior to c. 1700 but provides links to other Oxford Bibliographies articles that include entries on non-English perspectives on the expansion of English overseas interests more fully, entries on the cultural interactions generated by that expansion, entries that relate to the later period, and entries that provide additional references to the topics discussed here. The emergence of an English Overseas Empire might be regarded as one of the most significant yet one of the more unlikely consequences of the Reformation and the Renaissance. In the fifteenth century, England suffered civil war and had its overseas territory reduced to Calais and the Pale of Dublin while its foreign mercantile sphere concentrated on the Baltic region, Antwerp, and Seville. The English break with Rome severed longstanding Anglo-Iberian economic ties and provided the religious-ideological frame for trading, plundering, and colonizing forays against the “popish” Iberians the success of whose initiatives had left the English scandalously behind in the minds of early imperial cheerleaders. By the 1640s, English “private” initiatives had established presences in Africa, America, and Asia, although the scale of these operations eventually proved beyond the capacity of these projectors, thus necessitating governmental intervention. After 1689, France replaced Spain as the imperial bogey, but an anti-Catholic imperial ideology, which employed a language of liberty and virtue derived from humanism, intensified as English political and economic ambitions expanded and direct government involvement in empire increased. Both this expansion and the cultural interactions it generated tracked changing English cultural and political sensibilities: contemporary authors and artists acclaimed English overseas endeavor as a hallmark of civilization, modernity, capitalism, and progress; the stridency of this celebratory view accompanied a seemingly inexorable coloring of the globe pink prior to World War II. English overseas expansion also entailed deep involvement in the enslavement of Africans—in terms of both exporting enslaved persons from sub-Saharan Africa throughout the Western Hemisphere and importing these people to labor on English plantations—a reality that has begun to receive significant attention only recently. It also involved the often-nasty subjugation of societies in situ, another reality that has also received a recent intensive rethink in the postcolonial era that began in the 1960s. The careful treatment of the responses of those societies to British incursions has become another recent and welcome development.

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