Sir Charles Lucas looked back at the role of the Government, the military and private enterprise during three centuries of British adventure overseas.
1914
Queen Elizabeth I 1558-1603 to Queen Mary II and King William III 1688-1694 to Queen Anne 1702-1714 to King George III 1760-1820 to Queen Victoria 1837-1901
To end the six-volume ‘Oxford Survey of the British Empire’, Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas looked back over the history of England’s overseas adventures from time of Queen Elizabeth I to the end of the Victorian Age. He concluded that there had been three quite distinct eras, and began by looking at the character of our enterprise during the upheavals of the seventeenth century.
THE seventeenth century for England was a time of great unrest at home. There was civil war, a king was beheaded, the monarchy was abolished, a republic was established which became a despotism, the Stuart kings were brought back, and finally they were turned out again.* It was a century of perpetually changing authority.
Over the seas it was a busy time for British trade and settlement, settlement taking place almost entirely in America and the West Indies, trade being much in evidence also on the West Coast of Africa, and the East Indies. British colonisation was in its origin almost entirely the outcome of trade and private initiative. The State gave charters, and so far licensed or favoured trade and settlement.* But the colonists, unless they were transported as criminals or political prisoners, were not sent out by the Government, and in large measure they went out to be rid of the Government.* The Government meanwhile, was constantly changing; there was therefore no continuity or system in colonial administration, and self-government for the colonies grew up in fact if not in name.
The British Civil Wars (1639-1660) included an Interregnum from the execution of King Charles I in 1649, when Parliament governed without a recognised monarch. Charles II was restored in 1660, but his brother James II was driven out in 1688, to be replaced by his daughter Mary II and her husband William III. See .
The most famous of the chartered companies is surely the East India Company, formed on December 31st, 1600, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The London (or Virginia) Company followed under James VI and I in 1606, with the Hudson’s Bay Company on May 2nd, 1670, under Charles II. More ‘joint stock’ companies were added in later years, including the ill-fated Darien Scheme and the infamous South Sea Company. The first, however, was the Russia Company that emerged in 1555 out of the voyage of Richard Chancellor. See Merchants of Muscovy.
See , where Adam Smith agrees that Government contributed very little to the enterprise of the early colonists, except to drive them out of hearth and home and to seek new lands.