ELIZABETH I

1533-1603 The Virgin Queen sent explorers to the New World to found the first colonies

During the Tudor period, Spain was the dominate colonial power, establishing viceroys in 1521 that covered the conquered lands of the Aztec Empire in Central America and many of the Caribbean islands.

England wanted in on the action. The geographer and travel writer Richard Hakluyt argued that empire was an important way of spreading Christianity and defending Protestantism against a Catholic world. Equally, the wealth that could be accrued by setting up trading posts in Asia, the Far East and the Americas was too lucrative not to pursue.

In 1585, Elizabeth I sent Walter Raleigh to establish a colony on Roanoke Island (in modern-day

North Carolina) but the settlers had all but disappeared by 1591, never to be heard from again. Miranda Kaufmann explains, “I don’t think the [empire] project really gets going in Elizabethan England […] a lot of the proto-imperial things that were happening were really because of the war with Spain. Even the early colonies were seen as a base for attacking Spain.”

In 1600, Elizabeth I established a royal grant for the East India Company; this was not officially colonisation as such but it granted the company a monopoly over all English trade. This allowed England to economically dominate India for the next few centuries.