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(More customer reviews)This is an important new book on the question of how the English crafted their imperial strategy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: How did they learn to work with foreigners and foreign governments? How did they learn to organize complex trading ventures and move goods across long distances? How did they cope with England's decentralized state and limited financial resources, tailoring an imperial strategy that would make weakness a strength? What role did religion play in English imperialism? Who provided the leadership? What did the English learn from their failures and from their successes? Games explores these questions through 300 dense but beautifully written pages. She skips lightly around the world, weaving an argument that jumps from the Mediterranean basin to Japan to Madagascar to Virginia and the Caribbean, and she seems equally expert on each locale. Her analysis of mid-seventeenth-century Ireland as a place in which the English applied lessons learned abroad and carried out an innovative new strategy of colonization developed elsewhere is particularly original. A must-read for anyone interested in the history of English imperialism.
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How did England go from a position of inferiority to the powerful Spanish empire to achieve global pre-eminence? In this important second book, Alison Games, a colonial American historian, explores the period from 1560 to 1660, when England challenged dominion over the American continents, established new long-distance trade routes in the eastern Mediterranean and the East Indies, and emerged in the 17th century as an empire to reckon with. Games discusses such topics as the men and women who built the colonial enterprise, the political and fiscal factors that made such growth possible, and domestic politics that fueled commercial expansion. Her cast of characters includes soldiers and diplomats, merchants and mariners, ministers and colonists, governors and tourists, revealing the surprising breath of foreign experiences ordinary English people had in this period. This book is also unusual in stretching outside Europe to include Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. A comparative imperial study and expansive world history, this book makes a lasting argument about the formative years of the English empire.
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