THE WEB OF EMPIRE ENGLISH COSMOPOLITANS IN AN AGE OF EXPANSION, 1560-1660: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660

by Alison Games

How did England go from a position of inferiority to the powerful Spanish empire to achieve global pre-eminence? In this important second book, Alison Games, a colonial American historian, explores the period from 1560 to 1660, when England challenged dominion over the American continents, established new long-distance trade routes in the eastern Mediterranean and the East Indies, and emerged in the 17th century as an empire to reckon with. Games discusses such topics as the men and women who built the colonial enterprise, the political and fiscal factors that made such growth possible, and domestic politics that fueled commercial expansion. Her cast of characters includes soldiers and diplomats, merchants and mariners, ministers and colonists, governors and tourists, revealing the surprising breath of foreign experiences ordinary English people had in this period. This book is also unusual in stretching outside Europe to include Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. A comparative
imperial study and expansive world history, this book makes a lasting argument about the formative years of the English empire.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

393 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Alison Games is the Dorothy M. Brown Distinguished Professor of History at Georgetown University.

Reviews

[Riku Sayuj · Rating 2 out of 5]

Intended to be a narrative of Empire told from the viewpoint of the merchants, soldiers and officers - the supposed “cosmopolitans”of the era - to highlight how the empire progressed through a mechanism of a weak English state and lack of experience to its emissaries gradually figuring out a hostile world, becoming cosmopolitan+educated first, thus learning to survive, and gradually learning to rule. If we envision the empire to be built akin to a hub-and-spokes model, with London at the center and the colonies at the rim, then these emissaries form the spokes that connected the two and their story can throw interesting light on the period overall. As far as a premise for a narrative history work goes, this is pretty alright.

However, it is my sad duty to report that it put me to sleep two days in a row and I struggled through the last 100 pages, skimming a bit here and there. The chapters feel loosely organized, the narrative flow is barely there, and most importantly the motley cast of characters never comes alive. For a book with a catchy title, cool cover and good premise, this is a disappointing end result.

[George Siehl · Rating 5 out of 5]

An outstanding contribution to the history literature dealing with the contributions of the common man and woman to the development of the world we know today. The research supporting this book is wide-ranging and detailed. The writing is deft, and the thesis strongly argued. That thesis is that individual world travelers, merchants, clerics, mariners, soldiers, administrators, and recreational travelers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries played a foundational role in creating the British Empire. Their travel required coping with people and environments that were alien and often hostile. Yet it was their successful encounters with these people and environments that allowed trade to begin between England and the Mediterranean, Africa, Asia, and North America. These travelers shared their knowledge and experience with other travelers and with people at home, including government officials. Eventually "the repeated movement of people wove a dense web with London at the center, and thickening linkages of personnel and knowledge continued to inform all subsequent ventures." What developed were several strategies for securing commercial access and profitable trade. Not all of these strategies could be easily applied due to local circumstances, but one that had great success was employing a cosmopolitan approach to the local officials and merchants by being open to new ways, different religions, and new modes of social interaction.

By the mid-seventeenth century, under Oliver Cromwell and his brutal war in Ireland, the policy changed from a private sector driven commercial enterprise to a state-centered effort to secure control of lands and people around the world. Even English citizens were viewed as pawns to be relocated around the world to populate colonies that did not want to be colonies. By this time England had obtained a position of some power globally, something it lacked at the beginning of this story, so was able to resort to force and violence to achieve its goals.

The discussion of travelers "before the Grand Tour" displays a sly wit as it describes the emerging publications in England to prepare travelers for their journey (much as we have tons of travel guides and tour books today). The traveler was instructed to keep copious notes (as we now keep a travel journal), and he was faced with the problem of making sense of his notes so as to share his
experiences with family, friends, and others upon his return. It is an image that might be recreated by holding a mirror to the modern "travel snob."

A book well worth reading.

[Boone Ayala · Rating 4 out of 5]

Research Question(s):

Games seeks to explain the most classic question in British Imperial history: why and how "did this constrained state [England circa 1560] manage to project itself outside of Europe, emerging in the 1660s as a real power in the Atlantic and with strong trade in the East Indies? How [and why] did this weak state become an empire?" (7)

Thesis:

Games looks at the "crucial years before an empire emerged" following the Restoration, and argues that in the century between the the coronation of Elizabeth I and the Restoration of Charles II (1560-1660) cosmopolitans "facilitated survival and success overseas... with their trips home and new voyages out, they fabricated connections over thousands of miles, linking ties of knowledge and custom and practice. Cumulatively, they wove a web of empire" (7, 11). She sums it up: "the English accomplished their own transition from a marginal European kingdom to a key player around the world by relying on men who served simultaneously their sovereign, their pocketbook, their employer, and whatever personal satisfaction they derived in their global ventures. The repeated migration of the people at the heart of English expansion reveals the webs of connection that first linked England to a wider world and then, through multiple voyages, tightened the web, and embedded England firmly in a world of uncertain and tantalizing opportunity" (14-15).

Games argues that the initial tone of English overseas activity was set in the Mediterranean. "It was in the Mediterranean that the English acquired their first significant experience with large-scale, long-distance trade in an alien and inhospitable environment. The crucial skills learned there anchored and shaped subsequent English enterprises around the world" (47). The most important way it did this was by instructing Englishmen in the value of accommodation. "The survival strategies of accommodation, adaptability, and deceit that the English cultivated in the Mediterranean from their position of political weakness and religious vulnerability provided one crucial style of expansion that anchored the trading ventures the English soon turned to around the world and would, in turn, help to animate an empire" (79).

Indeed, settler colonialism, Games argues, emerged in this period inadvertently. "In order for Virginia to succeed as a colony, it had to fail in all of its original goals" (120). Indeed, Englishmen's failure to act like traders, especially their failure to provide marketable goods and their lack of a shared mercantile conception with indigenous Cherokees, combined with internal and external pressures such as starvation, security, and investor demand, required the colony to depart from the trading model that had functioned so well in the Mediterranean and East Indies (134). This reflects the shift from a trading ideology to a colonizing ideology. "As was the case around the globe, wherever the English went, indigenous conditions - defined in Virginia's case by the failure of trade and the opportunity for agriculture - shaped how the English occupied new territory" (146).

Ironically, the two groups theoretically most capable of promoting a vision of centrally managed expansion, the consuls/ambassadors and the clergy, were both severely handicapped. Ambassadors, though appointed by the monarch, relied on local traders for their salaries, and were dependent on them for pay and on investors for their favor. At the same time, "the cosmopolitanism of governors and ambassadors was always constrained by their need to represent their employers and their crown, and to do so with visible signs of English office, whether their garb, their authority, or other trappings..." (174). For clergy, the problem was the lack of religious cohesion in the metropole. As a result, "religious practices contributed to the heterogeneity and localism of English life overseas even as travelling ministers themselves linked discrete places and transported new religious practices with them" (222-223).

Games is perhaps at her most daring when she claims that Ireland contra Canny, was not the proving ground for colonization but instead the culmination of prior experiences (256). The more significant transformation wrought in Ireland was the introduction of state power to overseas expansion in a tangible way. "State-sponsored and state-enforced migration in order to ensure national security and the viability of multiple overseas enterprises emerged as a coherent policy under Oliver Cromwell" (257). There was "a crucial shift in the 1650s toward a centralized state capable of imposing its will on subjects well outside of its domestic borders - and thus well on its way to becoming an empire" (258). English supremacy and xenophobia - hatred of the other as a contaminating force capable of degrading Englishmen - crystallized in Ireland, and the model of state-backed colonization introduced there became the typical structure employed by England in many other locales.

Remaining Questions

Did the shift to a more centralized and militaristic style of overseas expansion reflect accumulated wisdom, or was it simply a more accurate image of what England had wanted to do all along? If the only reason that the English overseas had adopted a policy of accommodation was because they entered late and weakly, did the shift to militarism result from the (perhaps largely internal) buildup of state strength?

To what extent was early English expansion unique in these circumstances? Why did some Western European nations establish colonies in places where the British did not, and why did some powerful nations pursue trade when they might otherwise have pursued colonization/the use of coercive force (Spain in Africa, Portugal during its glory days in Africa and India). (This question seems especially instructive because no western European state had the power of force projection in this period to seriously challenge the kingdoms of West Africa or Asia on their home turf.)

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent work on Atlantic World History. It's both well-researched and well written; despite the intense amount of information packed into each chapter, Dr. Games wrote in narrative format so it reads almost more like a story than a traditional work of history. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the English colonization of North America & the Caribbean!

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am reading this because alison was my college roommate junior and senior year, and my maid of honor. It's well-written, and has a sense of humor about its subject.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In The Web of Empire, Alison Games deftly explores the web of missionaries, merchants, and travelers that constituted the burgeoning English empire of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. By focusing on the interconnected network of repeat-travelers who traded and settled around the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Indian basins, Games highlights how the English and Scottish who traveled abroad developed an adaptive "Cosmopolitanism," a behaviour initially learned from trading ventures in the Mediterranean where the English (and Scottish) were politically weak and needed to conform to a dominant political, social, and religious environment. This cosmopolitanism then began a sequence of travel and settlement that led to colonial ventures of varying success and failure in North America, Africa, and Ireland. As these colonial ventures became larger and more numerous, the decentered, ad-hoc nature of English expansion began to change into state-centered campaigns of forced migration and resettlement.

Games is most persuasive when discussing the informative influence of past international experiences. Through exhaustive research spanning numerous continents, Games emphasizes the shared accumulation of knowledge gleaned from past colonial experiences that passed among the travelers, traders, governors, ambassadors, and missionaries that spurred the early English empire. By putting these developments in their correct context, The Web of Empire persuasively describes how trading ventures in the Mediterranean propelled the initial failures of Jamestown, and how both experiences led to failed plantations in Madagascar and policy of indigenous removal in Ireland. The cosmopolitanism mentioned in the subtitle, however, does not come across as effectively. While the early chapters give readers a strong idea of the varying forms that cosmopolitanism could take, this cosmopolitanism fades away into the background by her chapter on Virginia. While the purpose of the book is to witness this change, the sources and stories present a much more abrupt switch from cosmopolitans to conquerors. While weakness and danger led the English and Scottish to exhibit adaptive behavior in the Mediterranean, in places like Virginia around the same time it led them to exhibit violent and abrasive behavior.

[Matthew Gilmore · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating but falls down on the coverage of Ireland.

[Ex Libris · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit disappointing, actually. There are some good ideas ideas and angles here, but some very questionable ones, too. Most notably, her insistence that individuals, not longer historical trends, built the empire, while true enough on a certain level, doesn't really hold water. For instance, does anyone really want to believe that plantation slavery wouldn't have developed in the British Caribbean but for the particular experience and agenda of an early governor, as Games suggests?
Also, her chosen theme -- that a kind of cosmopolitan flexibility on the part of the English was central to their imperial success works much better in the East Indies than it does in the Western Hemisphere, where cosmopolitanism and flexible integration into native societies was replaced with a desire to separate native and European populations, and a long run aim of displacing them all. Zeroing in on cosmopolitanism, leaves her poorly positioned to discuss violence and coercion. She wants to see Virginia, and by extension, the other North American colonies, as kinds of exceptions to her theory, as a evidence of a different kind of flexibility in aim, but to retain the idea of cosmopolitianism as the core of the English imperial system. Yet, any idea that could serve as such a core is inadequate if it has to write off the whole of Colonial British America, the Caribbean, and probably Ireland as 'exceptions'. Those are awfully big exceptions.

[Janice Liedl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Games turns the tropes of British imperial history on their head in this well-researched and ably-argued study. She begins her story much earlier than most scholars with the many travellers of the early Elizabethan period providing a jumping-off point for understanding how their uncomfortable and dangerous experiences as minority figures in Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim and other communities nurtured an attitude of accommodation and adjustment that served successful English cosmopolitans well.

She plays off analytic chapters tackling travellers, traders, governors and clergy, etc., against case studies of different English establishments abroad. Games argues that the experiences of the 16th and 17th century was widespread thanks the interactions and moves of these cosmopolitan figures who featured in American, African and Asiatic spheres during the period. You may not buy all of her arguments about the causes and effects of failed or successful colonial and trade enterprises, but I think few would disagree with her demonstration that the British empire of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century was profoundly influenced by over a century of lively, diverse and memorable international experiences.

[JR Bricksfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Web of Empire is about England before it became an empire. How this book makes us think differently is in line with other arguments that have been emerging in the past couple decades; England did not intentionally seek a world empire, in a way it happened accidentally.

The central argument put forth by Games is that the English used “cosmopolitan” qualities to learn, adapt, and survive in foreign environments, and they had to do this because they were operating from a position of weakness, not strength. Put another way, merchants, traders, explorers, travelers, and diplomats had to adapt to foreign environments (North Africa, the Middle East, Asia, et cetera) to effectively blend in, assume local customs, and learn from those around them to survive and be successful. They did this because at the time (sixteenth – seventeenth century) England was not the global power it would become. Nevertheless, by assuming cosmopolitan qualities and being successful at it, in time, the English created a web that spanned the globe. Soldiers from Asia brought skills to North America, traders in North Africa utilized effective techniques in India, and so on. Eventually, this web would facilitate the rise of the British Empire.

[Bradley · Rating 3 out of 5]

After Mr. Wood's work, this is swiftly becoming my favorite of the pack of colonial histories crowding my brain of late. Games questions how England and Scotland, from a position of weakness in the sixteenth century emerged at the end of the seventeenth as, together, a world power. She argues that a unique strategy emerged from early British experience trading and fighting in the Mediterranean. This strategy, evolving over time, may best be called cosmopolitanism. Will write far more later.

[Josh · Rating 1 out of 5]

this bugged me as inane. i struggle to call these people cosmopolitan. as i mature, i think i'll open up to this.