ABSTRACT
In the age of Elizabeth, the British Empire included just Ireland, Wales, Scotlandand several surrounding islands. Calais, England’s last vestige of its medieval empire on the Continent, was lost to France in 1558. By this time, the voyages of John Cabot and others to America in the early Tudor period were a distant memory. Thus, when Elizabeth came to the throne and throughout her reign, Britain was, in the words of the imperial proponent John Dee, an ‘islandish monarchy’.1 Yet it was during the Elizabethan age that many of England’s best-known explorations took place. English knights such as Francis Drake, Martin Frobisher, Humphrey Gilbert, John Hawkins and Walter Ralegh travelled the oceans in search of new lands and trading opportunities. They circumnavigated the globe, explored the coasts of Africa, America, the Caribbean and Russia, engaged in trade, piracy and slavery, and attempted to establish English colonies in North America. Despite these efforts, by 1603, when Elizabeth died, England controlled no New World territory, had abandoned the slave trade and any interest in Africa and had established only a few risky and expensive trading networks in eastern Europe and Asia. For these reasons, many modern scholars dismiss Elizabethan exploration as a time of trial and failure, of plunder and piracy, and argue that the origins of the British Empire are to be found in later centuries. Even so, important lessons were learned during this period that facilitated the successful expansion of England in the seventeenth century and the remarkable success of the British Empire thereafter.
