Tudor and Stuart Foundations of the British Empire
The British Empire did not arrive fully formed. It emerged gradually, over more than a century, from a series of ventures that the Tudor and Stuart monarchs pursued with varying degrees of enthusiasm and skepticism. The first English attempts at overseas colonization were private, risky, and often disastrous, but they established the legal, commercial, and ideological foundations on which the later empire would be built.
This article examines the period from roughly 1580 to 1688, during which the English state, English merchants, and English settlers began the long process of building an overseas empire. The articles linked throughout explore specific events, people, and themes in greater depth. Together, they offer a detailed picture of how the foundations of the history of the British Empire were laid.
The Elizabethan Awakening
The reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) is often treated as the starting point of English imperial history. Although English ships had ventured into the Atlantic before Elizabeth’s accession, it was only in the latter half of the sixteenth century that English overseas ambitions became systematic. The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, the flowering of English maritime power, and the rise of a class of wealthy merchants and adventurous aristocrats created the conditions for sustained English engagement with the wider world.
Elizabethan expansion was driven by several intersecting motivations. The search for trade routes, particularly the hoped-for North-West Passage to Asia, attracted the support of geographers and merchants. The pursuit of Spanish and Portuguese colonial wealth, which the English could not match in peace, encouraged the development of privateering and piracy. The desire to establish Protestant settlements in the New World, in opposition to Catholic Spain, attracted the support of evangelicals. And the personal ambition of figures such as Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Humphrey Gilbert gave the projects the political energy they needed to overcome the considerable practical difficulties.
The earliest English colonial venture of any note was Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s 1583 expedition to Newfoundland, which claimed the territory for Elizabeth I but ended in Gilbert’s death at sea. Sir Walter Raleigh’s subsequent ventures in the 1580s, including the disastrous Roanoke colony in present-day North Carolina, are among the most famous stories in American colonial history. The “Lost Colony” at Roanoke, whose inhabitants disappeared between 1587 and 1590, has become a permanent fixture of American folklore.
The English experience of the early modern Atlantic is examined in more detail in the article on the first English overseas ventures. The Elizabethan period also saw the foundation of the East India Company in 1600, a turning point in the English presence in Asia. The company’s first factory at Surat was established in 1612, and over the following century the company would become the principal instrument of English commercial and, eventually, political power in India.
The Stuart Colonies
The Stuart monarchs — James I (1603–1625), Charles I (1625–1649), Charles II (1660–1685), and James II (1685–1688) — presided over the establishment of the first permanent English colonies in the Americas. Unlike the Elizabethan ventures, which were largely private, the Stuart colonies were chartered joint-stock companies or proprietary colonies with substantial royal involvement.
The Virginia Company, chartered in 1606, established the colony at Jamestown in 1607. The early years of the colony were extraordinarily difficult. The “starving time” of 1609–1610 nearly destroyed the settlement, and the colony struggled for years to find a viable economic basis. The introduction of tobacco cultivation by John Rolfe around 1612 provided the economic foundation on which the colony would thrive, and the introduction of the headright system, which granted land to settlers who paid for their own passage or that of others, encouraged the rapid growth of the population.
The Pilgrims’ voyage on the Mayflower in 1620 and the founding of Plymouth Colony in present-day Massachusetts marked the beginning of English settlement in New England. Over the following decade, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Connecticut Colony, the Rhode Island Colony, and others were established, each with its own distinctive political and religious character. The Puritans who founded these colonies had fled religious persecution in England, and their social and political experiments would have a profound influence on the later development of the United States.
The English Civil War (1642–1651) and the Interregnum disrupted but did not halt English colonial expansion. The execution of Charles I in 1649, the rule of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector (1653–1658), and the eventual restoration of Charles II in 1660 produced a complex set of political changes that affected the colonies in various ways. The Navigation Acts of 1651, 1660, and 1663 attempted to bind the colonies more tightly to England through a system of enumerated commodities and protected shipping.
The Caribbean and the West Indies
The Caribbean was another major focus of Stuart-era English expansion. The capture of Jamaica from Spain in 1655, by an expedition led by Admiral William Penn and General Robert Venables, was a major strategic prize. Jamaica became the center of English power in the Caribbean and the principal base for the English slave trade in the region. The island’s sugar plantations, worked by enslaved Africans, made it one of the most valuable colonial possessions in the empire.
The English also established colonies in the Lesser Antilles during the seventeenth century. Barbados, colonized in 1627, was the first successful English Caribbean colony and the model for the sugar-plantation system that would spread throughout the region. Other English colonies in the Caribbean included Antigua, Montserrat, Nevis, St. Kitts, and the Bahamas. The settlement of these islands, often at the expense of indigenous Carib populations, established patterns of colonial exploitation that would last for two centuries.
The English experience in the Caribbean during this period is inseparable from the history of the slave trade in the British Empire. The number of enslaved Africans transported to the Caribbean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reached into the millions, and the plantation economy of the region depended on this forced labor. The history of the British West Indies explores these developments in more detail.
The English in West Africa and the Slave Trade
The Stuart era also saw the beginnings of significant English commercial activity in West Africa. The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa, chartered in 1660 and reorganized in 1672 as the Royal African Company, established trading forts along the West African coast from which it conducted the slave trade and other commerce. The English slave trade in this period was smaller than the Dutch or Portuguese trades, but it was growing rapidly, and it would expand enormously in the eighteenth century.
The West African trading forts — at Cape Coast Castle, Elmina, and other locations — were centers of immense cruelty. The enslaved Africans were held in dungeons until they could be transported across the Atlantic, and the mortality rate during the Middle Passage was very high. The economic importance of the slave trade to the British economy was enormous. The profits of the trade helped to finance the development of Bristol, Liverpool, and London, and the slave-grown sugar, tobacco, and cotton of the Caribbean and American South were central to the development of British industry. The triangular trade that linked Britain, West Africa, and the Americas is examined in detail in a separate article.
The East India Company and the Beginnings of the Asian Trade
While the English were establishing their presence in the Americas and the Caribbean, they were also beginning to build a commercial empire in Asia. The East India Company, chartered by Elizabeth I in 1600, was given a monopoly on English trade with the East Indies. The company established its first factory at Surat in 1612, and over the following decades it built a network of trading posts at Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta.
For the first 150 years of its existence, the East India Company was primarily a trading operation, focused on the importation of spices, textiles, and other Asian goods into the European market. The political and territorial ambitions of the company developed only gradually, in response to the breakdown of Mughal authority in the eighteenth century and the opportunities presented by European rivalry. The transformation of the company from a trading concern into a territorial power is one of the central stories of the history of the British Empire.
The Restoration Settlements and the Glorious Revolution
The later Stuart period saw the consolidation of the English colonial system. The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 brought a renewed royal interest in the colonies, and the Navigation Acts attempted to enforce a system of mercantilist trade. The establishment of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670 opened up the Canadian fur trade. The founding of the College of William and Mary in Virginia in 1693 represented one of the first attempts to provide higher education in the colonies.
The Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which James II was replaced by William III and Mary II, had significant effects on the English colonies. The 1689 Bill of Rights limited the powers of the monarch and affirmed the supremacy of Parliament, principles that would be exported to the colonies. The overthrow of the Dominion of New England in 1689 and the eventual establishment of a new royal charter for Massachusetts in 1691 marked the beginning of a new era in English colonial governance.
The end of the Stuart period coincided with the beginning of a new phase in the history of the British Empire. The establishment of the Bank of England in 1694, the introduction of a permanent national debt, and the development of the financial and administrative apparatus of the modern British state would provide the institutional foundation on which the later empire would be built. The rise of the second British Empire after 1750 would build on these Tudor and Stuart foundations.