Britain and Empire, 1685-1730 (Atlantic History)

Introduction
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 17th 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.

General Overviews
The alterations in scholarly thinking on the early British Empire have gained expression in a series of wide-ranging monographs, surveys, and anthologies. The essays in Greene and Pole 1984 present chronologically-broad overviews of colonial America, with a focus on underlying themes, including politics, religion, class, and gender. Armitage and Braddick 2009 adopts a similar structure, bringing together the scholarly products of a 2001 Harvard seminar on the history of the Atlantic world. The emergence of “Atlantic history” has corresponded with an increasingly vibrant turn in the study of early modern communication. Steele 1986 provides one of the landmark works of this genre, re-examining the politics of colonial societies through a close study of the circulation of news and information along the g maritime networks that connected England and America. Canny 1998 and Marshall 2001 combine thematic chapters with analyses of particular regions and provinces under British authority. Lenman 2001 focuses on the wars unleashed by overseas expansion, placing military struggles in America and India in the context of political strains within the early modern British Isles. The essays in Wilson 2004 emphasize the metropolitan alterations and insecurities induced through colonization. English overseas expansion is here delineated in terms of an “exchange,” “encounter,” or “accommodation” rather than simply an “invasion” or “imposition” upon cultures outside Europe. Burnard 2012 outlines the particular importance of the half century that followed the 1688 Revolution in shaping the principles and practice behind British imperialism.

Armitage, David, and Michael J. Braddick, eds. The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800. 2d ed. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

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Collection of thematic essays showing how the study of “Atlantic history” has reformulated perspectives on the British Empire. Identifies the emergence of the Atlantic world as a phenomenon distinct to preindustrial “early modernity” and represents British expansion as one component within a transnational environment, in which state authority was visible but limited.

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Burnard, Trevor. “Making a Whig Empire Work: Transatlantic Politics and the Imperial Economy in Britain and British America.” William and Mary Quarterly 69.1 (2012): 51–56.

DOI: 10.5309/willmaryquar.69.1.0051Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Challenges the past neglect of the later 17th and early 18th centuries in studies of the early British Empire. Reviews modern attempts to reposition these decades as a formative phase in colonial history. Suggests that political and intellectual shifts in the 1690s carried major repercussions for relations between Old England and its overseas outworks.

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Canny, Nicholas, ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 1, The Origins of Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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Comprehensive introduction to the beginnings of the colonization process. Links the origins of English America to political and economic changes within the three kingdoms. Combines region-by-region studies with analysis of overarching themes, including trade, literature and ideas, state development, and the influence of European power politics.

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Greene, Jack P., and J. R. Pole, eds. Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era. Papers presented at a conference held 1–7 August 1981 at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.

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Ten chapters addressing long-running themes in colonial development, ranging across political, social, economic, and cultural history. Brings together the core arguments of a generation of scholarship, recovering the history of colonial British America as more than simply an antecedent to the War of Independence. Presses for the colonies to be more closely integrated into the history of early modern Britain.

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Lenman, Bruce P. Britain’s Colonial Wars, 1688–1783. Modern Wars in Perspective. Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2001.

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Offers close analysis of colonial military campaigns, placing them against the background of strains on the state at home. Argues that ministers were unfamiliar with the colonial environment and were frequently unprepared for the conflicts that followed territorial expansion. Contends that the politics of the metropole were informed and disrupted by the pursuit of conquest overseas.

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Marshall, P. J., ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

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Twenty-six largely thematic chapters providing proportionate coverage over the designated period. Places colonial developments against the background of political changes that flowed from the 1688 Revolution. Key chapters show how the consolidation of British rule in America was paralleled by the growth of strategic interests in India and Africa.

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Steele, Ian K. The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

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Pioneering study that adumbrated many of the principal concerns of “Atlantic history.” Investigates the transmission of news, commodities, opinions, and ideas between England and its colonies. Shows how the investigation of maritime routes, oceanic currents, and developments in navigation can offer new perspectives on the political history of the Atlantic world.

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Wilson, Kathleen, ed. A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

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Interdisciplinary collection discussing the impact of overseas expansion on politics, culture, and society in Britain and its colonies. Chapters on race, gender, the visual arts, and popular politics indicate the cultural pressures brought about by the reach of the kingdom into unfamiliar parts of the world.

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Conceptual and Theoretical Discussions
In 1975, J. G. A. Pocock urged historians to reassess early modern Britain and Ireland as constituent parts of an “Atlantic archipelago,” formed in politics and culture by its position on the edge of an increasingly busy ocean (Pocock 1975). As a subsequent generation of scholarship showed, he was pushing at an open door. Yet, common consensus over the importance of the Atlantic to England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales conceals some uncertainty over how to conceptualize the subject. As Robertson 1995 shows, closer analysis of the contemporaneous “languages of empire” challenges the application of models drawn out of later imperial history to describe the westward expansion of the three kingdoms. Attaining “imperium,” in early modern discourse, alluded to sovereignty or autonomy rather than geographical outgrowth; accordingly, contemporaries doubted that England’s loose sphere of New World interests could be meaningfully referred to as an empire. The search for a new way of approaching British expansion has thrown up a number of alternative paradigms. The first sprang from challenges in American historiography to the old master narratives centered on the march toward independence. Characterizing this approach, the chapters in Greene and Pole 1984 seek to reinstate the English colonies more firmly within the early modern world. The authors argue that the relationship between the provinces and the Crown can be located within the pattern of “negotiated” power structures common to “composite monarchies” on the European continent. The second major influence on modern scholarship stems from a “new imperial history” concerned as much with cultural identity as with politics. This approach, discussed in Wilson 2004, collapses the divide between “metropole” and periphery, paying greater attention to shifts and transformations induced in Britain as the result of overseas expansion. Finally, approaches toward the early British Empire have been reframed by the discovery of the Atlantic as, itself, a legitimate unit of study. In a method heavily indebted to Braudels’ history of the Mediterranean, the creation of American settlements has been captured as part of a complex interplay of cultures, ideas, and commercial operations in an oceanic melting pot that changed adjoining regions of Europe no less than the colonial world. Armitage 1999 and Elliott 2009 survey the challenges created by the Atlantic turn. As indicated in Canny 1999, the transnational assumptions of “Atlantic history” sit in some tension with Greene and Pole’s recovery of a distinctive “colonial British America.” However, the combined effect has been to foster a radically decentered interpretation of English colonization, raising new debates over the impact of empire on the mother kingdom.

Armitage, David. “Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Analysis?” American Historical Review 104.2 (1999): 427–445.

DOI: 10.2307/2650373Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Investigates as separate but corresponding developments the scholarly “discovery” of the Atlantic world and the emergence of a “New British History” that emphasized the interaction between the peoples of the three Stuart kingdoms. Argues that events in America, as in Scotland and Ireland, should be seen as central to the shaping of politics and national identity in England.

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Canny, Nicholas. “Writing Atlantic History; or, Reconfiguring the History of Colonial British America.” In Special Issue: The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History. Journal of American History 86.3 (1999): 1093–1114.

DOI: 10.2307/2568607Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Examines the attempts to reposition colonial history as a transatlantic, rather than exclusively American, field of study. Considers affinities and tensions between revisionist studies of colonial America and the emergence of Atlantic history. Looks at how changing interpretations of 17th-century politics have affected the dialogue between colonial historians and scholars of the British Isles.

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Elliott, J. H. “Atlantic History: A Circumnavigation.” In The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800. 2d ed. Edited by David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, 253–270. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

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Defines Atlantic history as the study of “the creation, destruction and re-creation of communities as a result of the movement, across and around the Atlantic basin, of people, commodities, cultural practices and ideas” (p. 259). Argues that the Atlantic Ocean represented at once a unifying force, connecting peoples and events, and a divisive agent: fragmenting and distancing communities and promoting a spectrum of responses in different environments.

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Greene, Jack P., and J. R. Pole. “Reconstructing British-American Colonial History: An Introduction.” Paper presented at a conference held 1–7 August 1981 at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. In Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era. Edited by Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, 1–17. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.

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A survey of the ideas that have informed the study of the English colonies since 1945. Shows how changing methodologies have altered perspectives on the period before American independence. Highlights the importance of a wider geographical focus encompassing the West Indies, for a fuller understanding of early American history, alongside recognition of the cultural pull exerted by the metropole.

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Pocock, J. G. A. “British History: A Plea for a New Subject.” Journal of Modern History 47.4 (1975): 601–621.

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Far-reaching attempt to shift the focus, narrative, and nomenclature of British and Irish history. Challenges the study of Ireland, England, and Scotland as separate entities and proposes “Atlantic archipelago” as a more appropriate appellation than “British Isles.” Suggests that the geography of the kingdoms encouraged integrative processes, in a context defined by dynamic maritime activity.

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Robertson, John. “Empire and Union: Two Concepts of the Early Modern European Political Order.” In A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707. Edited by John Robertson, 3–36. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

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Investigates the changing meaning of “empire” in European thought, showing how the term gradually gained association with the establishment of sovereignty over an expanded terrain. These alterations are linked to shifts in international politics through the 17th century, as rival powers pursued the goal of attaining “universal monarchy” over the Continent and dominions overseas.

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Wilson, Kathleen. “Introduction: Histories, Empires, Modernities.” In A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840. Edited by Kathleen Wilson, 1–26. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

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Makes the case for a “new imperial history” of early British expansion. Challenges past analytical boundaries set up between “colony and metropole” and critiques scholarly overemphasis on the projection of imperial power onto subject peoples. Argues that an interdisciplinary approach, engaging with the history of visual, literary, and material culture, shows the equally transformative impact of empire on European states and societies.

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Reference Works
“. . . British colonial policy was essentially economic in character . . . any presentation of the application of that policy in the colonies must concern itself first of all with trade, commerce, and finance” (Andrews 1913, p. 509). Charles McLean Andrews’s review of Beer 1912 exemplifies the reasons why both authors have enjoyed lasting scholarly influence, but have also incited significant challenges Their contention that the British dominions developed primarily as a trading system stabilized by commercial laws and semiautonomous local institutions, has been accused by modern scholars of underplaying the social, political, and ideological tensions experienced on both sides of the Atlantic over colonization. Yet, in treating the development of British America resolutely on its own terms, neither as simply a stepping stone to an independent state nor as a model comparable to 19th-century European empires, Andrews and George Beer adumbrated many ideas that drove the enlargement of colonial historiography in the later 20th century. Their stated preference for the term “colonial” over “imperial” foreshadowed concerns among intellectual historians over premature use of the label “empire.” Both authors produced studies of immense detail, grounded on investigations into the Colonial Office paper. Their narratives of early colonial politics remain invaluable as points of reference. Other works provide rewarding information on the families and personalities that dominated the colonial landscape. Oliver 1910–1919 amasses extensive material on the political and landholding elites of the West Indies. Hundreds of full and detailed biographies are contained within the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Matthew and Harrison 2004). Extensive primary resources are now accessible electronically for the study of early modern Britain, its colonies, and contemporaneous reactions to overseas expansion. The listed databases (America’s Historical Imprints, British History Online, Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Empire Online, European Views of the Americas 1493 to 1750, State Papers Online 1509–1782) offer printed transcripts of original sources, alongside facsimiles of printed documents, manuscripts, and images, and all the collections contain effective search engines.

America’s Historical Imprints.

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A collection of early American printed materials, including books, pamphlets, broadsides, and official records. Covers the period 1639–1800.

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Andrews, Charles M. “Review of The Old Colonial System, 1660–1754, Part I, The Establishment of the System, 1660–1688, by George Louis Beer.” American Political Science Review 7.3 (1913): 509–511.

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Sets out the thinking that shaped the works of Beer and Andrews himself, highlighting the conceptual distinction both authors made between early modern English colonization and British “imperialism’ in later centuries. Shows how colonial historiography developed through close investigations of the extant state papers. Posits the implications of Beer’s conclusions for the narrative of early American history.

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Andrews, Charles M. The Colonial Period of American History. 4 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1934–1938.

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Pulitzer Prize–winning magnum opus by a Yale historian who produced over one hundred articles and books. A detailed overview of a colonial “system” that the author argues worked coherently and with relative harmony. Contends that settlers acquired habits of self-government not through a visionary lunge toward an independent future, but because they were required to do so by the Crown, which was concerned primarily with the support and control of commerce.

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Beer, George Louis. The Old Colonial System, 1660–1754. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1912.

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Beer worked contemporaneously with Andrews and struck similar conclusions. His study accentuates the importance of ties to England in the institutional architecture of early modern America. Pays close attention to the economics of overseas expansion and provides a detailed starting point for study of the customs and duties regime introduced by the Navigation Acts.

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British History Online.

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Large assemblage of sources for early modern Britain. Incorporates the Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, extending up to 1739. Other important sources include the Journal of the House of Commons, Journal of the House of Lords, and Anchitel Grey’s Debates of the House of Commons.

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Early English Books Online.

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E-book collection giving access to over 100,000 titles, including the vast majority of works published in the British Isles, Ireland, and North America between c. 1475 and 1700.

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Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

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E-book platform hosting digital facsimile page images of printed works published in the British Isles from 1700 to 1800. Incorporates over 45,000 titles.

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Empire Online.

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Searchable database of printed documents, images, and manuscript facsimiles relating to regions colonized by Europeans after 1492. Organized according to themes (e.g., religion, race, and class). Accompanied by essays from scholars of imperial history.

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European Views of the Americas 1493 to 1750.

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Comprehensive bibliography and guide to printed records about the Americas written in Europe before 1750. Features over 32,000 entries, with extensive English, French, and Dutch material.

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Matthew, H. C. G., and Brian Harrison, eds. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000. Rev. ed. 62 vols. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

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A vital springboard for study of the dominant personalities involved in the making of colonial policy and the English settlement of the New World. Hundreds of full scholarly biographies, with detailed insights into primary and secondary sources for further study.

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Oliver, Vere Langford, ed. Caribbeana: Being Miscellaneous Papers Relating to the History, Genealogy, Topography, and Antiquities of the British West Indies. 6 vols. London: Mitchell, Hughes and Clarke, 1910–1919.

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Wide-ranging collection of notes and records illuminating the development of the British Caribbean. Originally produced with a genealogical focus but provides detailed information on the families and leading personalities who dominated the islands. Brings into print important contemporaneous accounts of West Indian politics and society.

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State Papers Online 1509–1782.

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Searchable archive of early modern State Papers Domestic, Foreign, Scotland, Ireland and Registers of the Privy Council. Facsimile images of all selected documents.

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Rival and Comparable Empires
By 1700, zones in America and Asia were subject to increasingly intense commercial and territorial competition. The English Empire was conditioned by military struggles, but also by cultural, commercial, and political interaction—with other expansionist powers. Rival states drew on a shared discourse of empire and appropriated each other’s colonial strategies, symbols, ideas, and institutional forms. British historians have revised their approaches to colonization by playing closer attention to the scholarship surrounding other European empires. Insights into expansion among England’s competitors can be found in Moogk 1989 and Bethencourt and Curto 2007. Stein and Stein 2000 shows how international pressure pried open the economy of Spanish America in the later 17th century, creating a major locale for commercial and imperial rivalry. The development of Atlantic history has stimulated new comparative studies, showing how the construction of the English dominions fell within the common context of an expanding Europe. Elliott 2006 uses a combined assessment of English and Spanish expansion to shed light on the alternative but overlapping cultural zones established in the New World. Ormrod 2003 examines the global joust between England and the United Provinces in the arena of world trade. Benton 2010 and Roper and Van Ruymbeke 2007 flag up commonalities in the decentralized institutional structures that underpinned early modern European empires. The essays in Canny and Pagden 1989 allow for a comparison of Creole societies, showing English settlers to be slower than their counterparts in fashioning an identity separate from the metropole.

Benton, Lauren. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

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Expansive study of the legal foundations laid down by Europeans in far-flung territories and ambiguous jurisdictional spaces. Examines indigenous peoples together with mobile communities and marginal individuals—pirates, merchants, transported prisoners—and their interactions with French, English, and Iberian officials. Argues that uneven levels of authority compelled rulers to adopt flexible conceptions of sovereignty and subjecthood.

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Bethencourt, Francisco, and Diogo Ramada Curto, eds. Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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Wide-ranging portrait of Portuguese colonialism, incorporating lusophone Asia, Africa, and America. Thirteen chapters together cover economics, culture, religious and political strategies, and legal institutions, showing the centrality of Portugal to the enlargement of the European world. Outlines the power of state structures but also emphasizes the flexible adaptability of the empire as grounds for its longevity.

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Canny, Nicholas, and Anthony Pagden, eds. Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800. Papers presented at a seminar held in 1982 at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.

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Collection of essays exploring the emergence of Creole cultures in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese dominions. Studies the social, ideological, and environmental influences that informed colonial self-consciousness, and assesses the implications for future movements toward independence. The essays suggest that English America was slower than comparative domains in developing an identity distinct to its metropole.

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Elliott, J. H. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.

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Highly influential work of comparative history, reassessing the creation of the British Atlantic Empire through a focus on the contrasts and parallels with Spanish imperialism. Shows how the export of values and assumptions from Europe collided with the needs of adaptation to a new environment, to establish enduring cultural divides within the New World.

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Moogk, Peter N. “Reluctant Exiles: Emigrants from France in Canada before 1760.” William and Mary Quarterly 46.3 (1989): 463–505.

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Extensive discussion of the problems and limits of colonization in New France. Shows how Canadian conditions acted as a deterrent to voluntary settlement, but also frames contrasts with England. Unsupported by regal enthusiasm or public mobilization, the prospect of the New World failed to sink into the French imagination.

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Ormrod, David. The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650–1770. Cambridge Studies in Modern Economic History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

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How did the English manage to overhaul their Dutch competitors and establish themselves as the supreme power in European overseas trade? This work studies the shifting patterns of Anglo-Dutch rivalry and co-operation in merchant operations throughout Europe, Asia, and the New World. Links English success to state support and innovations in commercial practice, built on the foundations of increasing colonial productivity.

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Roper, Louis H., and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, eds. Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500–1750. Atlantic World 11. Boston: Brill, 2007.

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Locates the English Empire within the European pattern of dominions constructed by legally privileged private initiative. English proprietors, Spanish encomenderos, Dutch patroons, French companies, and donator captains in Brazil enabled monarchs to contain the financial risks of empire building. The resilience of proprietary institutions challenges older narratives of a smooth pathway toward imperial state formation and commercial individualism.

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Stein, Stanley J., and Barbara H. Stein. Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

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Ties together Spanish expansion with shifts in the tectonic plates of “Old World” politics, diplomacy, and society. Traces the ripple effect of precious metals across Europe, showing how the inflow from Spanish America galvanized market economies and processes of state formation. Looks at how international pressures forced adjustments in Spanish imperial strategy.

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English, Scottish, and Irish Settlement and the British Empire
The term “British Empire” was, up until 1707, a misnomer. Prior to the Anglo-Scottish union, the dominions in America were, legally and politically, English—and vigorously defended as such by vested interests on both sides of the Atlantic. These laws, however, were subject to contention. In the Americas, official and extralegal pressures challenged English hegemony: the extent of 17th-century Scottish and Irish settlement meant that some provinces developed a “British” character more rapidly than the three kingdoms themselves. In the Old World, Scottish demands for access to the dominions imposed severe strains on later Stuart politics, tensions brought to a head in the expedition to Darien in 1698, and, latterly, in the passage of the Articles of Union. The essays in Robertson 1995 explore the interaction between domestic Anglo-Scottish pressures and the growth of “Greater Britain.” Armitage 1997 locates Darien within a long skein of Scottish attempts to establish a stronghold in the Americas, either within or outside the umbrella of English authority. Macinnes 2007 contests the idea that exclusion from empire condemned Scotland to political and economic stagnation, highlighting the contending opportunities provided by European commercial connections and Dutch routes into the New World. The Irish relationship with empire was more ambiguous. Historians of Elizabethan and Jacobean expansion argued that English rule over Ireland itself engendered models of colonization for the New World. Conversely, scholars of the later Stuart and Hanoverian periods have suggested that the Irish were not simply a colonized people, but represented increasingly willing and active partners in the plantation process. Block and Shaw 2011 examines the shifting status of Irish migrants within the British Atlantic world, and Truxes 1988 argues that commercial penetration gave the kingdom’s mercantile elites genuine agency within the colonial realm. Bartlett 2001 shows how the increase in Irish military and political involvement in the overseas provinces affected relations between kingdoms within the British Isles.

Armitage, David. “Making the Empire British: Scotland in the Atlantic World 1542–1707.” Past & Present 155 (May 1997): 34–63.

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Shows how Scottish colonial ventures raised contention within the three kingdoms, heightening problems of economic competition and rival national interests. Links the failure to establish lasting Scottish colonies to imbalances within the composite monarchy, and outlines the 1707 union as the prerequisite for constructing an empire “whose benefits could be shared equally by all Britons” (p. 63).

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Bartlett, Thomas. “‘This Famous Island Set in a Virginia Sea’: Ireland in the British Empire, 1690–1801.” In The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century. Edited by P. J. Marshall, 253–275. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

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Full examination of the political, constitutional, and commercial dimensions to the Irish position within the British Empire. Shows how overseas expansion exposed the ambiguities of Ireland’s status as part kingdom and part dependency in relation to England. Argues that 18th-century Anglo-Irish tensions were exacerbated by the push for greater involvement in the expansionist projects.

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Block, Kristen, and Jenny Shaw. “Subjects without an Empire: The Irish in the Early Modern Caribbean.” Past & Present 210.1 (2011): 33–60.

DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtq059Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Examines the cultural and political complexity of the Irish place within the Caribbean. Shows how emigres continually flitted across Anglo-Spanish borders and provided an object of suspicion for Protestant governors. Argues that the transition toward an economy based on African slavery marked out the Irish more clearly as upholders of the ruling social order in the English West Indies.

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Cullen, L. M. “The Irish Diaspora of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” In Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500–1800. Edited by Nicholas Canny, 113–150. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

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Frames Irish movement into the colonies as one element in a diverse early modern diaspora, taking in a higher proportion of the country’s population than the better-known migrations of the 19th century. Argues that Irish mobility was the product of decisions “more conscious and less involuntary” than in later centuries, guided by elite military and commercial strategies.

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Devine, Thomas M. Scotland’s Empire, 1600–1815. London: Penguin, 2004.

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Provides comprehensive insights into the development of Scottish imperialism and migration into the New World. Shows how these expeditions changed the profile of politics within the British Isles. Argues that, prior to 1707, Scottish interest in the Americas was limited, due to the competing influence of military and commercial affinities in northern Europe.

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Macinnes, Allan I. Union and Empire: The Making of the United Kingdom in 1707. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511495892Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Places the 1707 Act of Union in the context of conflicting pulls toward convergence or separation in Anglo-Scottish relations. Draws attention to the variety of ways in which Scots obtained agency in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world =. Emphasizes the significance of Dutch trading connections in extending the commercial landscape of the northern kingdom.

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Robertson, John, ed. A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

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Thirteen chapters offer close analysis of the debates behind the 1707 Act of Union. Argues that the unionist case was formed in the interests of establishing a secure overseas dominion. Studies the evolution of the British Empire in the context of international competition, as European wars placed pressures on the structure of early modern composite monarchies.

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Truxes, Thomas M. Irish-American Trade, 1660–1783. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

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Detailed analysis of Irish economic expansion. Discusses the freedoms available to Irish traders within the British Empire, and shows how commercial opportunities arose partly within the parameters of the Navigation Act, but also due to limits in the state’s power of enforcement. Comments on the increasing diversity of Irish engagement, through imports and exports, in the economics of empire.

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British Domestic Politics
A growing body of works have aimed to tie the historic development of colonial America more closely to the disputes of the British domestic arena. The creation of empire has been recaptured less as a coherent form of state building, transcending national politics, than an uneven process, repeatedly dictated by shifts in metropolitan opinion. Bliss 1981 presents the most comprehensive account of how overseas expansion intersected with political divisions in 17th century England. Pincus 2012 and Greene 2013 highlight the vigorous debate over empire within the British Isles, showing how questions of strategy and political economy were intertwined with rival “party” ideologies, persistent moral anxiety, and alternative visions of national identity. Wilson 1995 links the emergence of “popular imperialism” to the political consciousness of the urban “middling sort” as patriotic champions of expansion and beneficiaries of its trade and profit. Into the 18th century, as indicated in Bowen 1996, competition between political and commercial lobbies still affected the shape of empire as strongly as the strategies mapped out in government committees. Olson 1992 looks at how contending colonial interest groups made interventions in Whitehall and Westminster and influenced the outcome of public discussions over imperial affairs. Colley 1992 provides vital background reading on alterations in the structure of the state, changing relations between the three kingdoms, and emerging ideas of national identity, all of which are identified as decisive influences on British colonial expansion.

Bliss, Robert M. Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century. Studies in Imperialism. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1981.

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Connects the development of the English Empire to the overturnings in 17th-century domestic politics. Considers century-long transatlantic debates over the way to support and control the colonial apparatus, and looks at the disruptions forced by successive regime changes in England. Suggests that ministerial approaches toward America were conditioned by rival ideas of correct governance at home.

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Bowen, H. V. Elites, Enterprise and the Making of the British Overseas Empire, 1688–1775. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230390195Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

A broad-based examination of the shaping of the empire by networks, lobbyists, and entrepreneurial private agents inside the metropole. Argues that the increasing sophistication and coordination of London-based interest groups lent a coherence to English overseas expansion that belied its scattered geography.

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Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.

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Widely acclaimed work positing British national identity as a construct emerging from a distinct set of 18th-century political conditions. Argues that imperial expansion animated new ideas of national interest and national destiny, by calling on the shared endeavor of subjects across the three kingdoms. Shows how the Protestant, anti-French preoccupations of domestic politics informed the representation of British conquests overseas.

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Greene, Jack P. Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139343831Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Shows how an increased awareness of empire sharpened the critical faculties of domestic public opinion. Considers the debate over how far colonial practices could be made compatible with the traditions of English liberty and constitutionalism. Emphasizes the role of moral anxieties in framing views of overseas expansion, and draws attention to a growing genre of anti-imperial commentary.

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Olson, Alison Gilbert. Making the Empire Work: London and American Interest Groups, 1690–1790. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

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Studies the intervention of colonial interest groups in British politics. Explores the formation of transatlantic lobbying groups and shows how they influenced internal debates over the affairs of empire. Presses the case for seeing colonial America and the British Isles as part of a common political community.

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Pincus, Steve. “Addison’s Empire: Whig Conceptions of Empire in the Early 18th Century.” In Special Issue: Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell. Parliamentary History 31.1 (2012): 99–117.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1750-0206.2011.00280.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Close study of the relationship between party politics and overseas expansion. Argues that while Tories focused on potential conquests in Spanish America, their opponents evaluated the colonies according to a different calculus. Shows how Whig authors writing during the War of the Spanish Succession expounded the alternative vision of an empire centered on the growth of commerce and the more productive use of English labor.

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Wilson, Kathleen. The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785. Past and Present Publications. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

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Brings the imperial context into a wider study of Hanoverian “public opinion.” Connects debates over empire to the emergence of stronger forms of provincial civic politics. Shows how the concerns of overseas expansion became central to the development of a “patriot” ideology that critiqued oligarchic tendencies in Whitehall and Westminster.

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British Foreign Policy
Domestic partisanship over questions of empire interacted with international pressures. In England, the importance of the overseas dominions accelerated not just due to pursuit of glory and riches, but through a wider set of diplomatic circumstances, as European dynastic, territorial, and commercial competition burst into the New World. Between 1689 and 1713, successive and prolonged conflicts with France dominated the landscape of domestic and colonial politics, forcing the clarification of competing imperial visions and giving rise to alternative conceptions of the national interest. Mancke 2009 and Black 1991 discuss the reciprocal relationship between events in Continental Europe and the increasing involvement of the British state in contested parts of Asia and America. Historians have however, reached contending judgments over the primacy of imperial considerations in the ever-widening latticework of British strategic and ideological interests abroad. Baugh 1988 contends that an Atlanticist, “blue water” policy, based on the protective strength of the Royal Navy, became the orthodox line in foreign-policy considerations after 1689, with ministers focused on the attainment of global maritime lordship, as the means to gain a stranglehold over European rivals. Conversely, Simms 2008 asserts that the greater priority for British ministers lay in the preservation of the balance of power on the European continent, suggesting that policy toward the colonies evolved as the byproduct rather than the rationale of clashes with France and Spain. Jeremy Black and Brendan Simms agree that Whig/Tory partisanship inflected debates over the strategic and commercial merits of empire, and introduced visible discontinuities in foreign policy under the Hanoverian crown.

Baugh, Daniel A. “Great Britain’s ‘Blue-Water’ Policy, 1689–1815.” International History Review 10.1 (1988): 33–58.

DOI: 10.1080/07075332.1988.9640467Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

A powerful argument for the importance of maritime “grand strategy” in 18th-century British foreign policy. Contends that “blue water” policies appealed in part as the most cost-effective way to provide for the defense of the realm. Suggests that the resultant approach tended to be “defensive” in European waters and “aggressive overseas.”

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Black, Jeremy. A System of Ambition? British Foreign Policy, 1660–1793. Studies in Modern History. Harlow, UK: Longman, 1991.

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Examines the ascent of the kingdom toward “great power” status. Considers the commercial, diplomatic, and parliamentary pressures acting on successive ministries and shows how the growth of empire was affected by fluctuations in European geopolitics. Looks at the growing influence of parliament and the press as arenas for expressing ideological divisions over foreign policy.

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Israel, Jonathan I. “The Emerging Empire: The Continental Perspective, 1650–1713.” In The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 1, The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century. Edited by Nicholas Canny, 423–444. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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Shows how British maritime and territorial advances changed European politics. Argues that the defense of the empire depended on maintaining a pattern of Continental alliances, notably with the Dutch during the 1690s. Suggests that British grand strategy began to focus more clearly during the War of the Spanish Succession on outflanking colonial rivals.

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Mancke, Elizabeth. “Empire and State.” In The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800. 2d ed. Edited by David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, 193–213. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

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Suggests that British empire building was stimulated by a series of multistate maritime negotiations, which defined oceanic regions as potential spheres of sovereignty. Argues that rising levels of conflict at sea propelled the state toward greater involvement in overseas ventures, with merchants increasingly reliant on the protective bulwark of royal power.

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Simms, Brendan. Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783. London: Penguin, 2008.

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Examination of the debates that forged Hanoverian strategic culture. Traces the roots of divisions over foreign policy back to competing understandings of the country’s place in the world, kindled by the Reformation. Argues for the primacy of European interests over “blue water” concerns in determining, shaping, and qualifying British ideas of empire.

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Colonial Policy and Administration
The authority of the English Crown outside Europe was at best uneven. Though the apparatus of central government expanded over the later 17th century, state-sponsored enterprises on American soil were entangled with a matrix of local interest groups who proved tenacious in defense of their privileges. An older historiography explained this disjuncture by characterizing the “first British Empire” as more limited in scope and ambition than its European rivals focused instead on sustaining a self-sufficient, complementary, and commercially focused dominion. Since the late 20th century, this interpretation has been brought into question due to growing awareness of the contested and mutable nature of “mercantilism” and the reality of a wide-ranging contemporaneous debate over questions of “empire” within the British Isles. Greene 1987 and Braddick 2000 demonstrate the influence of the European composite monarchy and the culture of domestic state formation on relations between colonists and the Crown. Imperial power structures were “negotiated” due to geographical distance, the limits of coercive authority, and the transference of a philosophy of collaboration and mutuality that had informed governance in 17th-century England. Within this context, historians have tried to make sense of sporadic attempts by the Crown to exert greater control over its dominions. At what point, if at all, can we identify changes in the vision of empire entertained within the metropole? How far did the Crown develop attachment to more centralized and militaristic models of dominion? Jack Greene argues that serious thought about empire did not develop in England until the wars of the mid-18th century. Conversely, Mancke 2002 and Steele 1968 identify an earlier attempt to centralizes. Webb 2013 contends that the militarizing impulse was embedded within the processes of English colonization from its Jacobean genesis.

Braddick, Michael J. State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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Argues that colonial government was “analogous to that of English localities closer to home,” with the Crown reliant on the cooperation of networks of local agents. Identifies an expansion in the fiscal power and reach of Whitehall after 1660 but suggests that royal authority in America was still mediated through corporate bodies jealously protective of their privileges.

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Greene, Jack P. Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788. Richard B. Russell Lectures 2. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987.

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Detailed anatomy of the political relationship between the colonies and the mother kingdom. Shows how the Crown was compelled by the limits of its own coercive power toward accepting wide degrees of provincial autonomy. Argues that structures of government were created by trial and error among the colonists themselves but proved adaptive and resilient.

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Mancke, Elizabeth. “Negotiating an Empire: Britain and Its Overseas Peripheries, c. 1550–1780.” In Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820. Edited by Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, 235–265. New York and London: Routledge, 2002.

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Contends that the focus of English ministers rested on the regulation of maritime space rather than territorial empire. Argues that before the later 18th century, cash-strapped governments concentrated on trying to establish a more integrated sphere of oceanic influence and delegated control of the colonies to local political and commercial interests.

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O’Brien, Patrick K. “Inseparable Connections: Trade, Economy, Fiscal State, and the Expansion of Empire, 1688–1815.” In The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century. Edited by P. J. Marshall, 53–77. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

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Looks at how British governments acquired a greater understanding of the value of the dominion outside Europe and kept the idea alive through successive international wars. Shows how colonial expansion was underwritten by commercial outgrowth, advances in the domestic economy, and state development in Britain after 1689.

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Steele, Ian K. Politics of Colonial Policy: The Board of Trade in Colonial Administration 1696–1720. Oxford: Clarendon, 1968.

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Close study of the new Board of Trade. Emphasizes the role of English domestic politics rather than bureaucratic evolution in determining the scope of colonial administration in Whitehall. Disputes the emergence of any systematic program for colonial expansion and subordination but shows the success of the board in tackling the problem of piracy in North American waters.

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Webb, Stephen Saunders. Marlborough’s America. Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.

DOI: 10.12987/yale/9780300178593.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

The concluding part of a quartet of works exploring the principles and practices behind English overseas expansion. Argues that the early empire was more martial and territorial than most historians have recognized and that the dominions were extended through a system of “garrison government” that imposed absolute royal authority. A provocative counterblast to older narratives of an empire conditioned by merchant interests and commercial precepts.

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Colonial Development and Identity Formation
Many of the salient writings addressing colonial development have invited new reflections on the Early Modern three kingdoms. Colonial identity, as set out in Greene 1988, matured not through rising pressures toward American autonomy but a complex mediation between settler ideologies, the demands of environmental adaptation, and the cultural magnetism of the Old World. Legal forms, gender relations, and cultural practices imported from the British Isles stabilized nascent communities; conversely, many of the discontents within the colonies came out of preexisting conflicts transplanted across the Atlantic. Games 2009 explores the way in which social and political dynamics within the three kingdoms entered into migration and settlement. The study of colonial development has been unsettled in the 21st century by new approaches, from authors seeking to liberate American historiography from the old narrative of national exceptionalism. Modern scholarly shifts have recaptured British America as a cacophony of different cultures, languages and identities, formed through exposure to other empires, by compromise with indigenous peoples, and by multinational movements of people. Fuller Continental histories have exposed the porous reality of borders, both cultural and territorial, within the New World. Taylor 2001 pioneered this trend, incorporating environmental history and ethnohistory alongside the study of politics and religion. Richter 2011 puts forward a longue durée narrative sensitive to the role of human agency, memory, and motivation alongside ecological and economic pressures. This work, together with Tomlins 2010, shows the importance to American history of political and economic developments in the later 17th century, emphasizing the massive growth of transoceanic trade and the escalating inflows of fashion and ideas in fortifying the powers of a new colonial elite.

Games, Alison. “Migration.” In The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800. 2d ed. Edited by David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, 33–52. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

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Succinct but full analysis of the changing demographic patterns in North America, as the colonies matured through the 17th century. Considers the increasing diversity of the colonial population, and the growing visibility of Scottish and Irish migrants. Accentuates the impact of European warfare and political instability within the British Isles.

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Greene, Jack P. Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

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Widely considered the classic account of pre-1776 British America. Offers a transatlantic framework for studying colonial development and weighs the extent of influences from mother country against the innovations induced by the New World environment. Critiques the primacy allocated to New England in older accounts of American history.

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Richter, Daniel K. Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011.

DOI: 10.4159/harvard.9780674061248Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Sweeping history of pre-independence North America, investigated within a global context. Sees the culture of the continent as built on premodern foundations, both European and Amerindian. Captures the early 18th century as the point of transition from an age of imperialists to that of “Atlanteans,” when a more autonomous transoceanic world was created through new movements of peoples, commodities, and ideas.

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Taylor, Alan. American Colonies: The Settling of North America to 1800. Penguin History of the United States. London: Allen Lane, 2001.

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Comprehensive study of change within colonial America. Places politics within a material and environmental context, covering cultures, diseases, flora, and fauna. Accentuates the “human diversity” caught up in the disruption and reconstruction of the continent, surveying the contributions of disparate African and native groups alongside European settlers, in encounters that were “stressful for all.”

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Tomlins, Christopher. Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511778575Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Looks at the evolution of colonial civic identity through a study of the laws concerning household and labor regulation. Argues that local elites stabilized the provinces through increasingly restrictive statutes conceived to place control over the domestic and immigrant workforce. Suggests that British America reached prosperity due to the curtailment, not the expansion, of individual freedom.

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Empire and Revolution
The British colonial environment was susceptible to social and political instability. Many of these strains broke out in 1689 as ramifications of the revolution that toppled James II, now seen as one the decisive events in the evolution of British America. The concerns of overseas empire are increasingly recognized as intrinsic both to the causes and consequences of the 1688 Revolution. James II had possessed a personal interest in the colonies: administrative reforms pursued in America before and after 1685 shaped important aspects of his political opinions. But these innovations were as contentious in the New World as in Old England, and in 1689, news of the king’s downfall precipitated a wave of colonial revolts against governors and proprietors aligned with the old regime. In the post-revolution climate, planters lobbied successfully for the overthrow of the Royal African Company monopoly—a principal instrument of the Stuart Empire—bringing a consequent boom in the Caribbean slave trade. Yet, contrary to the hopes of at least some insurgents, the effect of the Revolution was to highlight the fragility of the overseas dominions, and so increase the level of intervention from English governments. Historians have disagreed about the nature and meaning of the revolutions in the colonies. Pincus 2009 and Stanwood 2011 stress the interactions among English, American, and European agents. Lovejoy 1972 foregrounds the ideological component to the uprisings, while Sosin 1982 emphasizes disparate local sources of conflict. Dunn 1998 suggests that religious concerns weighed more heavily than disputes over the shape of empire, leaving a complex legacy to the revolution. On the one hand, colonists forced the modification of Crown policy. Yet, the wars that followed brought certain regions—especially the West Indies—into greater dependence on the protective power of the Crown. Johnson 1981 shows how these divided impulses entered into the politics of the New England colonies, as monarchs sought first to intensify then to regularize relations with some of the most stridently autonomous outworks of the realm. A different perspective is offered in Linebaugh and Rediker 2003, which places the tumults of the later 17th century within a continuum of revolutionary stirrings through the Atlantic world, propelled by long-term social as well as political tensions.

Dunn, Richard S. “The Glorious Revolution and America.” In The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 1, The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century. Edited by Nicholas Canny, 445–466. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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Emphasizes the primacy of religious over constitutional tensions in the revolutions in North America. Shows how the result was to shift but not substantially loosen transatlantic relationships: the Crown and the colonial elites moved toward closer on cooperation, while the West Indian colonies fell into greater economic dependence.

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Johnson, Richard R. Adjustment to Empire: The New England Colonies, 1675–1715. Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1981.

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Explores how political communities in New England responded to the changes in English domestic politics and the growing reach of the Crown. Outlines the northern provinces as part of a greater Atlantic community. Argues that the 1688 Revolution reinforced ideological ties between New and Old England and stabilized a relationship based on cooperation and shared interests.

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Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon, 2003.

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Original and influential study of the social tensions that destabilized the Atlantic world. Argues that European states stirred unrest by compressing a series of different groups—slaves, privateers, transported prisoners, and indentured laborers—into service at sea and within the colonies. Suggests that an undercurrent of protest and dissent produced cyclical outbreaks of insurrection. Second edition published in 2013.

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Lovejoy, David S. The Glorious Revolution in America. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

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The classic modern account of the 1689 revolts in America, which are identified as a large-scale colonial crisis. Provides a close analysis of the unrest in the mainland colonies, stressing the ideological and international content. Asserts that political and religious dissent bound colonial leaders to opponents of the Crown within the British Isles.

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Pincus, Steve. 1688: The First Modern Revolution. Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.

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Powerful and provocative argument, showcasing the violent, divisive, and popular elements in the 1688 Revolution. Integrates the overseas dominions into English domestic politics and shows how rival ideas of the kingdom’s place in the world animated both contending parties. Sees the centralizing innovations of the Crown in America as an antecedent to James II’s vision for the modernization of his domestic realm.

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Sosin, Jack M. English America and the Revolution of 1688: Royal Administration and the Structure of Provincial Government. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

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A study of the colonial administration, continuing onward from an earlier volume by Sosin on North America under Charles II. Deemphasizes the ideological element to the revolution, foregrounding local governmental pressures. Argues that the disturbances in 1689 demonstrated the limits of royal authority over America. The result was to safeguard a substantial degree of political autonomy.

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Stanwood, Owen. The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution. Early American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

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Broad analysis of the causes, course, and consequences of the 1688 Revolution. Exhibits the competing visions of empire that motivated Stuart governors and their opponents. Locates the instability of English America within a British and European perspective, linking the unrest to the international spread of anxieties over the future of the reformed religion.

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Webb, Stephen Saunders. Lord Churchill’s Coup: The Anglo-American Empire and the Glorious Revolution Reconsidered. New York: Knopf, 1995.

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Links events within the colonies to a conservative interpretation of the 1688 Revolution as driven by a circle of officers who opposed the king’s Catholic policies but aimed to stifle radical constitutional opposition. Argues that these interest groups acted to preserve the structures of “garrison government” that maintained English rule in the Americas.

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Ideas and Political Thought
Since the late 20th century, scholars have uncovered the rich intellectual history of British overseas expansion. Colonization in America was subject to far-reaching ideological debates, as contemporaries searched for the language to describe, understand, and evaluate the plantation process. As Kupperman 1995 illustrates, these discussions were overshadowed by moral and religious ruminations stemming from the “age of discovery,” as the New World concurrently continued to stimulate and disturb the European mind. Pagden 1995 also frames English colonization in a European intellectual context, revealing how the example of Catholic territorial empires invited both emulation and repudiation from subjects of the Stuart monarchy. Armitage 2000 shows English authors wrestling with the problem of how to sustain an empire as “Protestant, commercial, maritime and free,” when territorial expansion threatened by its very nature to subvert such virtues. The textual lineage of the Renaissance, with its warnings against the imperial snares of despotism and luxury, still exerted a significant grip on the English political imagination. Other influences, however, began to enter into linguistic currency. Arniel 1994 reveals how plantations overseas could be sanctioned by the language of Lockean liberalism—a justification centered not on the redemption of pagan people, like that of the Spanish Empire, but on the conversion of an uncultivated wilderness into productive, propertied landholdings. Irving 2008 looks at how authors within the Royal Society called upon precepts of natural philosophy to situate English expansion within a providential scheme of human history. Conquest in the New World was envisaged as a vessel for bringing man’s about dominion over the earth, attaining for Charles II an empire not simply of power, but also of knowledge.

Armitage, David. The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. Ideas in Context 59. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511755965Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

The most comprehensive and authoritative account of the intellectual foundations to the first British Empire. Shows how authors on both sides of the Atlantic imagined and debated the possibility of creating an empire that was “Protestant, commercial, maritime and free.” Explores the competing influences arising from religion, political economy, constitutional thought, and the classical inheritance.

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Arniel, Barbara. “Trade, Plantations and Property: John Locke and the Economic Defense of Colonialism.” Journal of the History of Ideas 55.4 (1994): 591–609.

DOI: 10.2307/2709924Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

How did Whig thinkers reconcile themselves to the idea of dominion over the New World? Arniel argues that Locke’s reflections encouraged colonists to claim rights over American soil on the basis of cultivating a vacant wasteland. The effect was to nourish an “agriculturalist” defense of empire, made separate from Iberian Catholic claims over the souls of New World natives.

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Irving, Sarah. Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire. Empires in Perspective 5. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008.

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Studies the connection between English natural philosophy and overseas expansion. Shows how imperialism was shot through with visions for the development of society, government, and the human mind. The conquest of the New World was envisaged within the Royal Society as a means to bring about man’s dominion over the earth: an empire of knowledge as well as power.

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Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, ed. America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

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Eleven essays examining the imprint made by the Americas on European cultural and intellectual life. Reveals Europeans caught between openness to novelty and attempts to locate America within their preexisting worldviews. Studies of travel literature, cartography, natural philosophy, and religion connect and compare the responses in Protestant and Catholic parts of Europe.

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Pagden, Anthony. Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500–c. 1800. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.

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Influential account of the early modern understanding of empire. Examines the interplay, correspondence, and divergences in the ideologies that sanctioned colonization in England, France, and Spain. Shows how authors drew on Roman precedent but offered different responses to the religious, moral, and economic questions stimulated by conquest and settlement in the New World.

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Commerce and Political Economy
Questions over the nature of “mercantilism” in theory and in practice have configured much of the debate over the later Stuart and early Hanoverian Empires. A stream of early-21st-century works have refocused attention on English attempts to bind the colonies within a transatlantic commercial system” oriented around the principal ports of the kingdom. Zahedieh 2010 considers the transformative effects of territorial outgrowth on the domestic economy, and on the profile of London in particular. Overseas trade grew more rapidly than the British economy as a whole over the 18th century, and the American sector flourished through the export of English manufactures as well as by flooding the domestic markets with colonial produce. Growing commercial connections reduced the remoteness of the colonies in the English imagination. Building on these arguments. Bradburn 2011 explores the role of merchant lobbyists in constructing the economic relationship between the provinces and the metropole, mobilizing the resources of the state to limit competition, protect the colonies in times of war, and secure their own commercial powerbase. While Nuala Zahedieh and Douglas Bradburn concentrate on London, David Harris Sacks uses a case study of Bristol to examine the civic and intellectual culture behind English commercial expansion (Sacks 1991). A functioning transatlantic economy was not the same as a “mercantilist consensus.” The essays in Stern and Wennerlind 2014 discuss the variety of visions for extending wealth and commerce that emerged from disparate interest groups in the political nation. Pincus 2012 shows how the failure to establish a pirate empire of conquest or to unearth precious metals beneath North American soil awakened disputes over the economic value of the dominions and released alternative manifestos for their development. Swingen 2015 ties the contemporaneous understanding of empire to enduring disagreements over the correct management of the English population. Political pressures ebbed and flowed between calls for closer regulation or more-open trading conditions. Swingen 2015 and Pettigrew 2013 demonstrate how the growing dependence of the Caribbean on unfree labor placed pressures on the imperial apparatus, dealing a fatal blow to the monopoly grant conferred upon the Royal African Company over the traffic in slaves.

Bradburn, Douglas. “The Visible Fist: The Chesapeake Tobacco Trade in War and the Purpose of Empire, 1690–1715.” William and Mary Quarterly 68.3 (2011): 361–386.

DOI: 10.5309/willmaryquar.68.3.0361Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Argues that the wartime regulation set lasting precedents for metropolitan intervention in colonial trade. London-based tobacco barons lobbied to determine the size and scope of protective naval convoys, harnessing their interests to the power of the English state. Their success shaped the politics and society of the Chesapeake, and influenced the character of English merchant capitalism into the following century.

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Gauci, Perry. The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Society, 1660–1720. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199241934.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Assesses many of the mid-17th- to early-18th-century debates provoked by colonization, as part of a larger study focusing on commercial interests in English politics. Looks at the connections among merchants, Members of Parliament, and voices within the wider public sphere. Argues that overseas traders proved skillful at accommodating themselves to the values of a political nation that was overwhelmingly dominated by the landed gentry.

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Pettigrew, William A. Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672–1752. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469611815.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Analyzes the debates that cemented and then overthrew the slave-trading monopoly of the Royal African Company. Shows how the 1688 Revolution hastened the paradoxical outcome of Englishmen establishing the “liberty” to enslave in deregulated markets. Emphasizes the role of political contingencies alongside economic pressures in laying the foundations for an empire grounded on unfree labor.

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Pincus, Steve. “Rethinking Mercantilism: Political Economy, the British Empire, and the Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 69.1 (2012): 3–34.

DOI: 10.5309/willmaryquar.69.1.0003Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Critiques the idea that attitudes toward empire were constrained by a “mercantilist consensus” or were determined by the nature and timing of English New World discoveries. Suggests that shifts in English policy were dictated by a clash of political economies that split the contemporaneous imagination as profoundly as disputes over religion and the constitution.

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Sacks, David Harris. The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450–1700. New Historicism 15. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

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Comprehensive analysis of the commercial shifts that established Bristol as a powerhouse of the British Atlantic economy. Shows how the civic and trading community around the port was restructured in response to burgeoning New World opportunities. Argues that the switch toward Atlantic business benefited smaller entrepreneurs within the city, fomenting challenges to the commercial elites.

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Stern, Philip J., and Carl Wennerlind, eds. Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

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A collection of essays exploring the meaning of mercantile doctrines in Britain, written in response to 21st-century revisionist perspectives on the nature and functions of the early modern state. Argues that alternative models of the link between commerce, power, and political legitimacy developed to serve the needs and interests of different communities. Includes chapters focusing on churchmen, privateers, and natural philosophers.

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Swingen, Abigail L. Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015.

DOI: 10.12987/yale/9780300187540.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Connects the development of slavery in the Caribbean to a larger theater of seventeenth-century political and economic debate. Examines the impact of rising concerns over slackening population growth within the domestic realm. Suggests that disputes over the most productive use of English labor imbued rival understandings of the meaning and purpose of empire.

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Zahedieh, Nuala. The Capital and the Colonies: London and the Atlantic Economy, 1660–1700. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

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Study of the role of merchants in the City in the formation of an Atlantic commercial empire. Argues that the growing financial and technological professionalism of overseas traders carried greater consequence than the Navigation Acts in creating the “durable mercantile system” that tied the commerce of the American colonies to the infant metropole.

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Slavery and Slave Societies
The British Atlantic world was built upon foundations of human bondage. The strengthening of slavery as a trade and a social institution was one of the transformative influences acting on the colonial domain at the beginning of the 18th century. Between 1698 and 1708, over 85,000 unfree laborers were transported along the notorious Middle Passage. Slavery became the engine room of the imperial economy, spurring the sugar and tobacco markets, galvanizing the British export sector with new demand, and raising up Liverpool and Bristol as counterweights to the City. The traffic shaped diplomatic relations with rival powers, as the Crown pushed for the monopoly license to shift Africans into Spanish America. By 1700, slave ownership had reconfigured entire societies in the Caribbean and much of the Chesapeake. Fresh debate over the timing, the economic consequences, and the intellectual apparatus behind the transition to slavery in the British colonies has arisen in works since the late 20th century. The linkage between slave labor and British commerce and manufacturing is assessed in Morgan 2000. The essays in Solow 1991 look closely at the operation of the trade, and its economic repercussions in the Old and New World, framing comparisons with the commercial systems supporting rival empires. While Dunn 1973 remains the authoritative text on the social history of the slave-owning colonies, the recovery of neglected archives has enlarged the picture. Tracing the trajectory of one Barbados family through two centuries, Smith 2006 investigates how the plantocracy gained wealth, power, and social purchase through the yields of bonded labor. Burnard 2015 offers an expansive chronological and geographical coverage, extending into the politics of the nascent United States. Eltis 2000 explores the values animating the slave trade, weighing the balance between economic exigencies and emerging notions of the ethnoracial hierarchy. Amussen 2007 shifts the focus back onto the British Isles, positing the ramifications of slavery for contemporaneous national identities, visual and material culture, and the domestic moral economy.

Amussen, Susan Dwyer. Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640–1700. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

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Examines the meaning of slavery for the metropolitan imagination. Shows how Caribbean commodities, portraiture, and sightings of Africans in London increased the visibility and physicality of empire. Argues that the moral accommodation of the English toward their plantations initiated wider changes in attitudes toward race, authority, and the organization of domestic labor.

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Burnard, Trevor. Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820. American Beginnings, 1500–1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226286242.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Wide-ranging, provocative study, examining the development of the slave plantation system across colonial America and exploring the political implications. Identifies Jamaica as the hub of the British Empire into the later 18th century. Argues that slavery was accepted because it generated a level of colonial prosperity that had been fragile before the 1680s.

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Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713. London: Cape, 1973.

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Now the classic text on the social and cultural history of the early Caribbean. Accentuates the socioeconomic needs of the planters, rather than the will of the Crown, in laying down the architecture of empire. Shows how landowners formulated a society based on large-scale sugar plantations and slave labor, which diverged in values from the mother kingdom.

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Eltis, David. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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Transnational study, arguing for the primacy of European attitudes and values in driving the expansion of slavery. Argues that English and Dutch governments were informed by a philosophical rejection of bondage for fellow Europeans. Emphasizes the agency of African rulers in influencing the scope and geography of the slave trade.

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Morgan, Kenneth. Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 1660–1800. New Studies in Economic and Social History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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Comprehensive introduction to the subject and its attendant scholarly debates. Examines the profits of slavery and the effects on the wider British economy, focusing on capital accumulation, investment in manufacturing, and regional development. Contends that by raising demand in transatlantic markets, slavery provided an impetus for innovation and industrialization within the domestic realm.

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Morgan, Philip D. “The Black Experience in the British Empire, 1680–1810.” In The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century. Edited by P. J. Marshall, 465–486. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

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Explores the elevenfold rise in the black population of the empire through the 18th century. Argues that the institution of slavery contained manifold conditions, structures, and experiences. Examines patterns of cultural accommodation and resistance by slave laborers in an empire that became increasingly “more an extension of Africa than of Europe.”

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Smith, S. D. Slavery, Family and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic: The World of the Lascelles, 1648–1834. Cambridge Studies in Economic History, 2d ser. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511497308Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Detailed anatomy of a Barbados planter dynasty. Follows the ascent of the Lascelles family from their Yorkshire origins through Caribbean society, into the imperial administration and the ranks of the peerage. Argues that the interplay of business strategies with family structures and political interventions shaped a distinctive culture of patrician capitalism.

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Solow, Barbara L., ed. Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System. Papers presented at a conference held 4–5 September 1988 at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.

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Edited collection giving fresh insights into the formative debates over early modern slavery. Aims to place the study of slavery in “the mainstream of international history,” evaluating its impact on geopolitical relations and the global economy. Examines the English Caribbean alongside mainland North America and the economic practices of rival European empires.

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Religion
The relationship between the early British Empire and the “Protestant interest” was surprisingly and persistently problematic. While Counter-Reformation Catholicism had functioned as the essential if not uncritical ally of Spanish conquests, the Church of England was a much-weaker force within Stuart and early Hanoverian America. Instead, the religious life of the colonies provided a new theater for the divisions that had undermined Protestant unity within the three kingdoms. Early-21st-century literature on “empire and religion” has explored a multiplicity of different themes: the organization of colonial churches, their links with congregations in the Old World, and their interaction with non-Christian native peoples. Porter 2004 probes the scope for tension between the advocates of missionary work in the colonies and the politique interests of the Crown, showing how secular and clerical authorities mobilized competing relationships with the native populations under English rule. Pestana 2009 concentrates on the settler communities, arguing that, despite its spiritual and theological diversity, Protestantism came to provide a common identity for colonists, which rose above geographical and denominational boundaries. Peterson 2009 shows how changes in self-image of Boston Congregationalists flowed from an understanding of the duties that connected them to a wider Christian community. Devotional literature in New England evinced growing concern with missionary activities in America and Asia and in the struggles of persecuted brethren abroad. Gregory 2012 and Sirota 2014 provide positive, revisionist assessments of Anglican activities overseas, locating the pastoral and evangelical work of the church in America in the context of shifting devotional cultures within the three kingdoms.

Gregory, Jeremy. “The Later Stuart Church and North America.” In The Later Stuart Church, 1660–1714. Edited by Grant Tapsell, 150–172. Politics, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2012.

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Connects the work of the Church of England in the colonies to developments in the three kingdoms. Highlights the growing adaptability of the church to American conditions. Argues that material support from England laid down pastoral and organizational structures that enabled ministers to compete more effectively with rival Protestant congregations.

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Pestana, Carla Gardina. Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

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Account of the connection between the Reformation and the religious cultures of colonial America. Argues that religion was central to the way in which contemporaries envisaged English expansion over the New World. Suggests that a common Protestantism created ideological bonds that transcended the denominational and geographical divides within English America.

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Peterson, Mark A. “Theopolis Americana: The City-State of Boston, the Republic of Letters, and the Protestant International, 1689–1739.” In Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830. Edited by Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault, 329–370. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

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Looks at how the culture of New England Puritanism expanded in response to political and social change. Through a study of printed literature and epistolary networks, shows how divines in Massachusetts structured their engagement with a wider religious world. Suggests that growing engagement with the welfare of foreign Protestants was paralleled by rising interest in global Christian missions.

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Porter, Andrew. Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004.

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Capacious study of the place of missionaries in the workings of the British Empire. Shows how the relationship between churchmen and imperial authorities was disrupted by conflicting goals and divergent ideas of how to shape relationships with native peoples. Illustrates divisions among the clergy over how to respond to the enlargement of secular empires.

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Sirota, Brent S. The Christian Monitors: The Church of England and the Age of Benevolence, 1680–1730. Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.

DOI: 10.12987/yale/9780300167108.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

A study of the devotional culture of the Church of England after the 1688 Revolution. Locates Anglican work in the colonies within an emerging ethos of voluntarism, in which ministers sought to establish themselves more fully within civil society. Evangelical initiatives centered on merchants, slaves, mariners, and Indians characterized an embrace of the “age of benevolence.”

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Encounters with Indigenous Peoples
The collision between English colonists and native peoples outside Europe has been integral to the historiography of empire. Though most major studies have centered on the early phase of colonization, a selection of works have cast the lens over the later 17th century. Colley 2002 and the essays in Daunton and Halpern 1999 offer up a comparative framework, setting English relations with Amerindians against parallel experiences in Africa and Asia. These works reflect a growing revision of the old view of a relationship defined largely by chauvinism, subjection, and coercion. Native peoples are increasingly situated within the web of colonial relations, not merely as the victims of encroachment but as captors, adversaries, commercial partners, and potentially decisive actors in the course of European imperial rivalry. James Merrell’s essay, “‘The Customes of Our Countrey’: Indians and Colonists in Early America,” in Bailyn and Morgan 1991 reveals how aboriginal societies in North America showed a culturally adaptive talent, preserving themselves as a force within the colonial environment by a selective incorporation of English habits and customs. Pulsipher 2005 also accentuates Indian political agency within the complicated triangular relationships that developed among native peoples, colonists, and the English Crown. Linda Colley uses these encounters to reframe existing narratives of the early empire. Across the globe, the experience of defeat by or dependency on native powers illustrated “. . . the scale of the disparity between Britain’s massive imperial pretensions on the one hand and its modest domestic size and resources on the other . . .” (Colley 2002, pp. 5–6). Kidd 2006 places these confrontations within a far-reaching intellectual framework, showing the instability in Christian perceptions of pagan societies, and the difficulty in sustaining ideas of European superiority, when “race” did not amount to “a central organising concept of intellectual life or political culture” (p. 54).

Axtell, James. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. Cultural Origins of North America 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

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A comparative focus on English and French relations with Amerindians. Suggests that English efforts to convert, assimilate, and co-opt native peoples into the empire were limited by a failure of adaptability and adherence to an unbending idea of Christian civilization, which the Jesuits, by contrast, were prepared to moderate.

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Bailyn, Bernard, and Philip D. Morgan, eds. Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire. Papers presented at a conference held in September 1985 in Williamsburg, VA. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

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An innovative collection of essays assessing English encounters with indigenous peoples comparatively against the experience of other “marginal” communities within the empire, including Scots, Germans, Irishmen, and women. The essays argue that the weaknesses of state authority and the porousness of the imperial frontiers gave these groups agency in dictating and disrupting the progress of overseas expansion.

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Colley, Linda. Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850. London: Jonathan Cape, 2002.

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Reassessment of relations between British imperialists and native peoples outside Europe. Sets out through regional case studies the experiences of the substantial number of colonists who endured captivity at the hands of local powers. Stresses the continual dependence of British authorities on the support of indigenous communities in extending the writ of crown authority

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Daunton, Martin J., and Rick Halpern, eds. Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850. Neale Colloquium in British History. London: UCL, 1999.

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Eighteen essays bringing an expansive chronological and geographical study of the relationships among metropolitan audiences, British colonists, and native peoples. The editors argue that awareness of racial difference became more central to imperial attitudes through the 18th century and played an increasingly pronounced role in representations of British nationhood.

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Kidd, Colin. The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511817854Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

An intellectual history of the encounter between Protestants and non-European peoples. Shows how the language of “race” was not merely inchoate in early modern thought, but subversive, when scriptural narratives affirmed common descent from Noah. Explores competing ideas put forward to explain the origins of the Amerindians and to outline their place in world history.

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Pulsipher, Jenny Hale. Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England. Early American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

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Studies the politics of Anglo-Indian relations in New England. Argues that a simple dichotomy of Englishman and native represents an incomplete way of understanding colonial development. The Crown, colonial magnates, and Indian leaders possessed separate but overlapping interests, which at different moments pushed any two groups into an alliance in an attempt to outmaneuver the other.

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Empire beyond America
Measured by the volume of settlement and the extent of governed landmass, the early British Empire was predominantly “American.” However, the later Stuart and early Hanoverian decades saw a growth or reinvigoration of interests in other parts of the world. In select regions of Asia and West Africa, English claims over territory or commerce created an alternative geopolitical focus for monarchs and ministers. Benton 2009 makes the case for loosening the “Atlantic world” paradigm. The British Atlantic was subject to constant commercial and political intrusions from other oceanic zones; cross-regional dialogues and analogies informed the study of newly discovered peoples and commodities, and the nature of English settlement in America was paralleled by embryonic footholds established on other continents. Rectifying a prolonged scholarly neglect, Fusaro 2015 provides new insight into the association between England and the Mediterranean that was crystallized by the acquisition of Gibraltar and Minorca in 1713. Up to this point the region vied with the Americas as a source of wealth and far exceeded the New World in its familiarity to English and Irish merchants. English involvement in India was shaped by an unstable conjunction of long-term merchant interests and sovereign claims leveled sporadically and inconsistently over dispersed areas. Chaudhuri 1978 provides the leading analysis of English commercial outgrowth within the Asian maritime world. Stern 2011 examines the ambiguities in the relationships among the Crown, the East India Company, and the local powers that officially licensed European settlement, showing how legal disputes, military conflict, and the shifting temper of political negotiations altered English interests in the region.

Benton, Lauren. “The British Atlantic in Global Context.” In The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800. 2d ed. Edited by David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, 271–289. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

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Argues that the Atlantic world was not, for any kingdom, an exclusive or self-contained zone. Suggests that the character of English expansion in America can be compared to concurrent patterns of settlement and commercial exploitation in India and West Africa, where all colonists had to work without the protection of a supervisory state authority.

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Chaudhuri, K. N. The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511563263Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Closely analyzed account of how the East India Company rose to become the primary European power in the Indian Ocean. Shows how the trading environment in Asia was formed through competitive relationships between local magnates and the various European companies. Examines the business practices of the East India Company through extensive and original quantitative analysis.

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Fusaro, Maria. Political Economies of Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Decline of Venice and the Rise of England, 1450–1700. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781107447158Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Examines the supersession of Venice by England in the domination of Mediterranean commerce. Contends that the republic incarnated a model of maritime dominion that was emulated and exceeded by the English trading community. Subscribes to a decentralized model of empire, showing how both states extended their influence through partnership with autonomous actors possessing regional expertise.

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Hair, P. E. H., and Robin Law. “The English in Western Africa to 1700.” In The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 1, The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century. Edited by Nicholas Canny, 241–263. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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Shows how the Guinea Coast became a zone of conflict between rival European powers, accompanied by sporadic English settlement. Argues that English strategic interests in West Africa were reslanted when the region emerged as the main supplier of the transatlantic slave trade, constraining alternative forms of commerce and curtailing ideas of territorial conquest.

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Stern, Philip J. The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195393736.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Revisionist account of the growth of English interests in India. Contends that sovereign claims were part of the discourse and mentality of the East India Company. However, suggests that merchants sought to uphold not the absolute authority of the English Crown, but the quasi-autonomous powers of a “company state claiming liberties comparable to the privileges of domestic corporate institutions.

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Literary, Visual, and Material Culture
Modern scholarship has looked increasingly beyond the political and economic history of empire to show how the reach of the nation outside Europe inscribed itself on the broader cultural life of the British Isles. Studies of colonial trade and the domestic economy have been followed, by a stream of works examining the impact of overseas expansion on the physical and visual profile of the kingdom, the effect on the senses and tastes of British consumers, and the moral and cultural debates that were, in consequence, opened up. Cowan 2005 shows how the burgeoning trade in exotic goods fostered new connections that bound wider sections of English society into the experience of empire. Breen 1986 looks at the process from the opposite perspective, recovering the effect of imported materials from the Old World on changes in colonial society and identity. Walvin 1997 explores the shifting cultural meanings and associations of foreign commodities, looking at how products of an unfamiliar world became appropriated as emblems of Englishness. Throughout the reign of Charles II, patriotic authors had exhorted merchants and the crown toward the creation of an English “empire of the seas,” exerting control over global trading networks. But the belief that English power was signaled by the relentless inflow of exotic materials was tested in a succession of political and scholarly debates, probing the effect of luxury goods, and attendant oriental influences, on the civil domain. Orr 2001 and O’Brien 2002 show how discussions over the commercial and political dimensions of empire entered into the Augustan theater, alongside contemporaneous verse and prose romance. English territorial enlargement was evaluated by poets and playwrights through an increased engagement with the precedents of other empires, past and present, their histories seen as salutary portents for the changes set afoot within later Stuart England.

Breen, T. H. “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690–1776.” Journal of British Studies 25.4 (1986): 467–499.

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Shows how the increased pace of navigation heightened American connections with England and brought a flood of manufactured consumer products onto the provincial markets. Colonial emulation of the mother kingdom served to extend English influence and created the appearance of a culturally homogenous empire, despite the limits in the reach of metropolitan governments.

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Cowan, Brian. The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.

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Intertwines close analysis of the emerging English coffee markets with discussion of the moral and ideological responses raised in the public domain. Highlights contemporaneous disputes over whether the expansion of the kingdom was a sign of empowerment or made England liable to corruption, through exposure to manners and morals originating outside Christendom.

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O’Brien, Karen. “Poetry against Empire: Milton to Shelley.” In Proceedings of the British Academy. Vol. 117, 2001 Lectures. Edited by British Academy, 269–296. London: British Academy, 2002.

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Examines the skein of hostility toward overseas expansion that entered into English imaginative literature in the middle of the 17th century. Argues for the longevity of humanist moral and intellectual objections in framing English debates over empire, and in informing both Enlightenment and romantic critiques of European colonization.

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Orr, Bridget. Empire on the English Stage, 1660–1714. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

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Contends that the possibility of empire was registered in an increased engagement by Restoration playwrights with the theme of colonization and, simultaneously, with the histories of the Asiatic and oriental domains encountered by English travelers. Suggests that the stage became a key locale for the moral, cultural, political, and intellectual debates that accompanied the expansion of the realm.

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Walvin, James. Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660–1800. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1997.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-25451-4Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Comprehensive study of the transformations in English consumer markets, tastes and fashions induced by overseas expansion. Considers the cultural appropriation of foreign commodities by domestic audiences, so that one-time symbols of the exotic and the unfamiliar gathered distinctively English associations.

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