In 1584, the clergyman Richard Hakluyt famously compiled a ‘particuler discourse’ setting out ‘the greate necessitie and manifolde comodyties’ which he presented to Queen Elizabeth I. Alarmed at the advantages the Spanish had gained at the expense of England and Protestantism by their head-start in America, Hakluyt and his patron, Sir Walter Ralegh, presented American colonization as a remedy for a variety of ills and so worthy of royal sponsorship: ‘Western discoveries’ would do everything from increasing trade and customs revenue to drawing Ireland ‘to more Civilitie’ to easing unemployment to curbing the ambitions of Felipe II. The queen received this brief, however, with rather less enthusiasm than its author had hoped; as we know, state support for imperial ventures remained intermittent until the middle of the seventeenth century. The prescience of Hakluyt's characterization of colonies as entities by which exotic, but useful, commodities could be obtained at lower cost and with much less hazard than through exchange with other countries, along with his conception of the English Empire as ‘a great bridle to the Indies of the kinge of Spaine’, has brought the tireless promoter considerable long-term significance despite the lack of impression his arguments made in the immediate term.

It would seem self-evident that the history of Anglo-American colonization arose from the history of early modern England itself.