The Web of Empire

Alison Games. The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolians in an Age of Expansion 1560-1660. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008

Games has written a provocative history of the English traders, ministers, ambassadors, adventurers, merchants, and colonists of a period spanning the rise of the English state as a rival--at first an underdog, but then increasingly a formidable foe--to the other centralized European trading and colonizing powers during the century indicated in the title. In doing so, she has implicitly taken American colonial history beyond Atlantic history into a more global arena. She also refutes the conventional wisdom regarding the centrality of the Irish experience to the colonial enterprise in North America. This study forces Americanists to reconsider the early colonial experience within a broader framework than most histories have conceptualized.

Her argument covers a lot of ground both spatially and temporally, but the central theme is this--during the rise of English expansionism, the English state was weak relative to other Western European powers, meaning that the English lacked the robust military and naval resources to confront imperial rivals directly or to impose their wishes on various foreign peoples and entities. The English were late to the game in establishing trading connections in the Mediterranean, in Africa, the Indian Ocean, East Asia, and the Western Hemisphere. Time and time again, the English found themselves operating from a position of weakness--forced to rely on the expertise of other Europeans, and to accommodate to local conditions and mores to a degree which was quite troubling at a time when concerns over English sovereignty and threats to Protestant sanctity made the very act of travelling suspect. Let alone a willingness to engage foreigners and non-Protestants on their own terms. The cosmopolitanism of these Englishmen was hard-won and fraught with dangers both foreign and domestic.

This era ends with the rise of a more centralized state which was far more willing and able to expend resources on the tools of imposing its will on other peoples as well as its own subjects--particularly a larger standing army and a state-controlled navy. This process was started by Cromwell, and ironically continued by Charles II. The reliance on private militias and armed merchant ships would be a thing of the past, as would (eventually) the cosmopolitanism of the time. The English would eventually come to rely on coercion and force to impose their will as the growing power of their state allowed them to develop new tools of empire.

However, the transition did not happen immediately, meaning that the British North American colonies were largely founded by men working in the early dynamic that Games articulates. The fact that the later, more centralized mode of British imperialism post-dated the establishment of the thirteen mainland colonies surely influenced the American colonists expectations over their relationship to the mother country. That is another story, but while Games does not look ahead to the eventual break, the implication is there in the final pages. While this book is immediately a study of an important stage in the growth of the British state and its global role, American historians will benefit from this opportunity to see the British founding of the colonies in a new context.