In the early sixteenth century, a new period began in the history of the British Isles. It was characterised by the emergence of an ‘English empire’, or, more precisely, an empire based on the wealth, population and resources of southern England over the rest of the British Isles, and, in due course, over the east coast of North America and the West Indies. In purely English terms this was ‘the Age of the Tudors’ marked by the victory of Henry Tudor at Bosworth Field in 1485 followed in due course by the long reigns of Henry VIII (1509–47) and Elizabeth (1558–1603). From our perspective of ‘British Isles’ history, 1603 was a key date in that it marked ‘the Union of the Crowns’ of England and Scotland and confirmed the defeat of Hugh O'Neill at the battle of Kinsale in 1601.The early decades of the seventeenth century also witnessed the plantation of Ulster as well as the establishment of English colonies in North America. By the end of the seventeenth century a new English empire had come into existence, based upon naval power, a neglected aspect of the story but now the topic of a master work by Professor N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Sea (London, 2002).

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, after the decline of the ‘post-Norman empire’, independent centres of local power existed in many areas of the British Isles.