The Elizabethan Idea of Empire

This paper argues that the English idea of empire in the reign of Elizabeth I was derivative, belated and incoherent. Its sources were classical and continental rather than indigenous. It arose more than a century after the Scottish monarchy had elaborated its own conception of empire. Moreover, it expressed a sense of backwardness, isolation and anxiety that mirrored the English failure to establish any permanent settlements in the Atlantic world. As a result, any balance sheet of empire drawn up on Elizabeth’s death in  would have valued prospects in the Mediterranean and the East Indies more highly than possibilities in the Americas. ‘Between  and , . . .England, without realizing it at the time, became (if I may be forgiven the expression) an island, in other words an autonomous unit distinct from continental Europe’, wrote Fernand Braudel.  was a terminus ad quem less for the accession of a Protestant queen to the English throne than for the loss of Calais, the English crown’s last territorial toehold on the European Continent. Braudel’s remark obviously ignored Scotland, England’s insular neighbour to the north. It overlooked Ireland, England’s semi-independent dependency to the west. And it also assumed that England’s formal geographical displacement from ‘Europe’ could be taken to imply its geopolitical disengagement as well. However, Braudel’s point was not that ‘England’ became wholly isolated from the rest of the world and sufficient unto itself; rather, its detachment from its traditional trading links with Europe opened it up to a grander destiny as a central player in the emergent Atlantic and global economy. Insularity thereby became the precondition for ever-expanding interchange. Braudel was not alone among post-war commentators in noting ‘English’ insularity and its relation to maritime expansion. For example, the German jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt remarked in his astonishing opus, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (), that, after the late fifteenth-century division  Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism (;  vols., trans. Siân Reynolds, New York, –), III, . My thanks to David Harris Sacks for this reference.