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This book recasts one of the most well-studied and popularly-beloved eras in history: the tumultuous span from the 1485 accession of Henry VII to the 1603 death of Elizabeth I. Though many have gravitated toward this period for its high drama and national importance, the book offers a new narrative by focusing on another facet of the British past that has exercised an equally powerful grip on audiences: imperialism. It argues that the sixteenth century was pivotal to the making of both Britain and the British Empire. Unearthing over a century of theorizing about and probing into the world beyond England's borders, Tudor Empire shows that foreign enterprise at once mirrored, responded to, and provoked domestic politics and culture, while decisively shaping the Atlantic World. Demonstrating that territorial expansion abroad and national consolidation and identity formation at home were concurrent, intertwined, and mutually reinforcing, the author examines some of the earliest ventures undertaken by the crown and its subjects in France, Scotland, Ireland, and the Americas. Tudor Empire is a thought-provoking, essential read for those interested in the Tudors and the British Empire that they helped create.
List of contents
1. Introduction: "This Realme of Englond is an Impire".- 2. "The direction which they look, and the distance they sailed": The Birth of an Imperial Dynasty, 1485-1509.- 3. "Ungracious Dogholes": Experiments in Empire, Ca. 1513-1527.- 4. "More Fully Playnly and Clerely Set Fourth to All the World": England, Scotland, and "Thempire of Greate Briteigne" in the 1530s and 1540s.- 5. "Recouer thyne aunciente bewtie": Mid-Tudor Empire over Mid-Tudor Crisis, 1550-1570.- 6. "The very path trodden by our ancestors": The Elizabethan Moment, 1570-1588.- 7. "Travelers or tinkers, conquerers or crounes": Tudor Empire in the Last Decade, 1588-1603.- 8. Conclusion: "Such an honourable seruice".
About the author
¿Jessica S. Hower is Associate Professor of History at Southwestern University, USA, where she teaches courses on Britain and Ireland, comparative colonialism, gender, and memory. Her research has appeared in
Rethinking History,
To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic, and
Britain and the World. Jessica is also co-editor of a forthcoming two-volume collection of essays on Mary I.
