Mapping the World at the Dawn of the British Empire

Abstract This book provides a snapshot of the ways in which British men and women imagined and conceived the world in the early seventeenth century. It shows how they envisaged the different areas and their significant, defining features, and what boundaries they saw that divided them. Britain interacted with a religiously fractured Europe, with travel to the continent restricted despite the significance of trade, and had a complicated relationship with the powerful Islamic empires of Asia. There was a keen interest in travelling north to open up new trade routes, and accessing the riches of the diverse countries to the east, China, Japan and the islands that now form the Philippines and Indonesia, as well as Africa, with its abundant resources, real and imagined. The world the British saw was an intoxicating combination of trading possibilities and island constellations in distant seas; similar and different peoples; resources to be exploited, and strange wonders. The book shows Britain on the verge of establishing an empire, possessing a few colonies in the Americas but not yet with any understanding that it would soon rule a quarter of the earth’s surface.