Monday, January 25, 2010

Origins (1497–1583)


A replica of The Matthew, John Cabot's ship used for his second voyage to the New World

The foundation for the British Empire was laid when England and Scotland were separate kingdoms. In 1496 King Henry VII of England, following the successes of Portugal and Spain in overseas exploration, commissioned John Cabot to lead a voyage to discover a route to Asia via the North Atlantic.[4] Cabot sailed in 1497, and though he successfully made landfall on the coast of Newfoundland (mistakenly believing, like Christopher Columbus five years earlier, that he had reached Asia),[5] there was no attempt to found a colony. Cabot led another voyage to the Americas the following year but nothing was heard from his ships again.[6]

No further attempts to establish English colonies in the Americas were made until well into the reign of Elizabeth I, during the last decades of the 16th century.[7] The Protestant Reformation had made enemies of England and Catholic Spain.[4] In 1562, the English Crown sanctioned the privateers John Hawkins and Francis Drake to engage in slave-raiding attacks against African towns and Portuguese ships off the coast of West Africa[8] with the aim of breaking into the Atlantic trade system. This effort was rebuffed and later, as the Anglo-Spanish Wars intensified, Elizabeth lent her blessing to further piratical raids against Spanish ports in the Americas and shipping that was returning across the Atlantic, laden with treasure from the New World.[9] At the same time, influential writers such as Richard Hakluyt and John Dee (who was the first to use the term "British Empire")[10] were beginning to press for the establishment of England's own empire, to rival those of Spain and Portugal. By this time, Spain was firmly entrenched in the Americas, Portugal had established a string of trading posts and forts from the coasts of Africa and Brazil to China, and France had begun to settle the Saint Lawrence River, later to become New France.

Plantations of Ireland

Though a relative late comer in comparison to Spain and Portugal, England had been engaged in colonial settlement in Ireland, drawing on precedents dating back to the Norman invasion in 1171.[11][12] The 16th century Plantations of Ireland, run by English colonists, were a precursor to the colonies established on the North Atlantic seaboard,[13] and several people involved in these projects also had a hand in the early colonisation of North America, particularly a group known as the "West Country men", which included Humphrey Gilbert, Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake, John Hawkins, Richard Grenville and Ralph Lane.

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