Under One (Inherited) Imperial Crown: The Tudor Origins of Britain and its Empire, 1603–1625

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-180
Author(s):  
Jessica S. Hower

This article investigates the existence in early Stuart Britain of a vibrant, conscious, and global imperial inheritance, as well as the meaning and significance of this legacy for British interactions with the wider world in the seventeenth century. It explores the ways in which a new, transnational and colonial approach to a still-stubbornly insular Tudor History unearths over a century of British experimentation from 1485 in Europe, the Isles, the Americas, Africa, and the East, mutually-reinforced by consolidation and identity-formation at home. I examine the tangible, enduring importance of these examples – that is, the continued relevance of ideology and practice forged in sixteenth-century interactions beyond England – to the subsequent development of Britain and its Empire. The New British History, New Imperial History, and Atlantic History have transformed and complicated our understanding of Britain and the connections between Britain and Empire. Yet these turns have had greater success in privileging the seventeenth century, the Isles, and Anglo-America, relegating Britain to latecomer status in the New World and elsewhere while reinforcing dynastic periodization and obscuring an essential basis of Jacobean and later global involvement. This article seeks to cross the historiographic divides between chronological boundaries, between Tudor and Stuart, insular and global, using 1603–1625 as a case study. With interests sparked, sustained, and legitimized by experience, British subjects active in Ireland, Newfoundland, Virginia, and Guiana in the first quarter of the new century carefully deployed, manipulated, even shucked elements of Tudor nation and empire. Continuity in personnel and the survival of popular texts merged with changes wrought by or circa the new dynasty, as Jacobean flatters and critics fashioned history to fit their ends. By recalling Tudor policy, they acknowledged and memorialized an extra-national past, perpetuating certain images, diction, objectives, and regions of interest across 1603 to influence Stuart global engagement. This paper demonstrates that we cannot understand the development of Britain in the transformative seventeenth century and beyond without looking back and overseas.

Itinerario ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-37
Author(s):  
Zoltán Biedermann

Scattered as it was over thousands of miles of African and Asian coastline, the Portuguese empire in the East had a peculiar shape when compared to the Spanish one in the New World. As one author of the early seventeenth century put it, ‘the king our lord does not have more than twenty leagues of land in all Asia, from Macao to the Cape of Good Hope’. Portugal was a small country with a population of one and a half million people, and it is no surprise that the Portuguese presence in Asia - a ‘network’ rather than an ‘empire’, as some authors claim - had to rely heavily on diplomacy. The wholesale ‘conquest’ (conquista) of the East was perceived as a theoretical right of the Portuguese crown, but in practice most relations with Eastern polities rested on a complex set of negotiated links of ‘friendship’ (amizade) or indirect submission (uassalagem).


Author(s):  
A S Shngreiyo

<div><p><em>T</em><em>he origin of the Saint Thomas, who is believed to be buried at Mylapur gradually led to the emergence of San Thome as an important trading post for the Portuguese in the Coromandel Coast. The Portuguese discovered the remnants of the Saint when they excavated the place and it become a major influence in their settlement of the town called San Thome. San Thome slowly developed as an urban center in the sixteenth century. The chapter also attempts to show the crucial role that the Portuguese played in the process of urbanization and in the social and political spheres as well. Down the coast lies another Portuguese port called Nagapattinam probable it was the first Portuguese to settle at Coromandel Coast in the 1520s. The first Portuguese settlers were mostly private traders interested in the rice trade to Sri Lanka. Later it become one of the flourishing ports as many individual Portuguese settle down and do commerce.  It is said that more than seven hundred sailing vessels were frequently docked at the same time on the river. Every year these vessels carried more than twenty thousand measures of rice from here to the western Coast of India. The trade here attracted merchants from all parts of India as well as from Pegu, Malacca and Sumatra. However, both the port did not enjoy for long as it sweep away by the coming of other European countries in the following centuries.</em></p></div>


Author(s):  
Martin Christ

Chapter 8 centres on the Bautzen preacher Friedrich Fischer (1558–1623) and shows how the changing political and religious landscape of the early seventeenth century led to a repositioning of Lutheranism. A particularly valuable case study, Fischer demonstrates how Lutherans and Catholics constantly influenced each other, and how the complex mix of power resulted in negotiations with a wide range of actors: town councils, Lutheran preachers, Catholic deans, other clerics, representatives of the king of Bohemia, and sometimes even the king himself. The situation in these towns was never stagnant and councillors and clerics negotiated agreements throughout the sixteenth century. Fischer’s sermons show that this kind of continual compromise found its way into what was preached in Lusatia. Depending on the purpose and the audience, individuals like Fischer could criticize Calvinism or Catholicism, change their religious outlook, and leave out elements associated with Lutheranism, while at other times polemicizing against Catholics.


2021 ◽  
pp. 114-138
Author(s):  
Craig Lamont

This chapter considers the story of emigration from Glasgow across the Atlantic. Looking back to the religious persecutions of the seventeenth-century that drove Scots overseas, as well as the Darien Scheme to set up a Scots colony, it is shown how opportunities in the ‘New World’ were exploited via the British Empire. The work of writer and colonist John Galt is used as a case study.


2008 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yigal Bronner ◽  
Gary A Tubb

AbstractThe last active period in the tradition of Sanskrit poetics, although associated with scholars who for the first time explicitly identified themselves as new, has generally been castigated in modern histories as repetitious and devoid of thoughtfulness. This paper presents a case study dealing with competing analyses of a single short poem by two of the major theorists of this period, Appayya Dīkṣita (sixteenth century) and Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja (seventeenth century). Their arguments on this one famous poem touch in new ways on the central questions of what the role of poetics had become within the Sanskrit world and the way in which it should operate in relation to other systems of knowledge and literary cultures.


Author(s):  
Andrew Hadfield

Advances in technology had dramatically improved mapping and navigational possibilities that made travel within Europe easier, more comfortable, and more feasible. In the early seventeenth century, writers such as Fynes Moryson, Thomas Coryat, and William Lithgow began to provide accounts of their extensive travels. However, the ethnological models that were used by Europeans in the sixteenth century were hardly modern. While the discovery of the New World showed the scope and diversity of the known universe, it also encouraged a heightened xenophobia and racism. There are also other more practical considerations implying that change was not as rapid as might be expected. This article examines travel in the context of cultural history and how the Reformation became a key impediment to travel. It looks at travelers who were prepared to go beyond what was generally expected or even acceptable despite the obvious dangers and discomforts, focusing on the experiences of Margery Kempe and William Lithgow.


Itinerario ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-277
Author(s):  
Gayle K. Brunelle

Of all of France’s early modern colonial ventures, the least studied and most obscure are the French efforts to establish settlements, missions, and plantations in Guiana. Still, the seventeenth-century French colonies in Guiana had much in common with the sixteenth-century French efforts to colonize Florida and Brazil, and their trajectories were every bit as dramatic and their outcomes equally dismal. Although not sponsored as Huguenot refuges in the New World from Catholic oppression in the Old, and thus not burdened with the fierce competition between Protestant and Catholic colonists that plagued the sixteenth-century ventures, the Guiana colonies were also prey to deep internal divisions over piety and morality, and even more over power and the purpose of the colony. Were they primarily missions to the Native peoples, plantations, or commercial ventures focused on locating sources of precious metals or establishing plantations? This paper examines the role of clerics in the genesis, financing, trajectories, and collapse of the earliest French colonies in Guiana, in particular two colonies founded about ten years apart, in 1643 and 1652. I will the argue that whereas historians have often assumed that missionaries and evangelizing were often little more than an encumbrance to early colonial ventures, useful mostly for raising funds in France, in reality clerics played a central role in shaping chartered colonial companies and the colonies they founded, for good and for ill.


Itinerario ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-465
Author(s):  
Rachel Winchcombe

AbstractThis article takes a fresh approach to Walter Ralegh's published account of his voyage to Guiana, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana (1596), using it as a case study through which to explore the fragility of sixteenth-century processes of knowledge production about new lands. The article revisits this famous account in order to scrutinise in more detail the types of evidence Ralegh used to support his claims that a rich and powerful empire lay ready to be conquered by the English in the Amazon. This new analysis of Ralegh's narrative highlights the continued centrality of reputational models of authority in early modern travel literature and examines the types of evidence that could be employed by writers to support their suppositions when witness testimony was lacking. Ralegh's narrative illustrates that systems of knowledge production centred on the New World were, at the end of the sixteenth century, still in a state of flux. New ideas about what constituted credible knowledge, from firsthand experience to the collection of material artefacts, competed with older frameworks of authentication and authority. By examining knowledge production in frustration, and by dissecting Ralegh's failure to present a believable vision of El Dorado, this article throws into starker relief the many pitfalls and difficulties that beset those who attempted to present new and credible knowledge about the New World.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-122
Author(s):  
Anil Paralkar

South Asian pickles, or achar, were the first processed food to arrive from the subcontinent to Europe. While the earliest European references stem from Portuguese texts of the sixteenth century, evidence of cooking instructions date from the second half of the seventeenth century. Utilizing sources like botanical literature, travelogues, and recipes, this paper focuses on the introduction of achar to England in between 1600 to 1750. The first part investigates the initial trade of these pickles to Europe, in particular to England. The second part discusses how English authors developed an understanding of achar, which promoted the use of certain ingredients and preparation methods. This understanding did not account for the multiple diverging types of achar in South Asia, but represented an essentialized concept of the dish, which found its expression in English achar-recipes. The third part argues that this style of achar constituted an appropriation of the food, as it was adapted to European tastes and made ‘exotic’ enough but not too ‘exotic’ for the English palate. Thus, this article offers a case study on the introduction of South Asian food to England, which shows the power structures involved in global culinary exchanges.


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