Making the Imperial Nation - Colonization, Politics, and English Identity, 1660-1700

How did the creation of an overseas empire change politics in England itself?

After 1660, English governments aimed to convert scattered overseas dominions into a coordinated territorial power base. Stuart monarchs encouraged schemes for expansion in America, Africa, and Asia, tightened control over existing territories, and endorsed systems of slave labor to boost colonial prosperity. But English power was precarious, and colonial designs were subject to regular defeats and failed experimentation. Recovering from recent Civil Wars at home, England itself was shaken by unrest and upheaval through the later seventeenth century. Colonial policies emerged from a kingdom riven with inner tensions, which it exported to enclaves overseas.

Gabriel Glickman reinstates the colonies within the domestic history of Restoration England. He shows how the pursuit of empire raised moral and ideological controversies that divided political opinion and unsettled many received ideas of English national identity. Overseas ambitions disrupted bonds in Europe and cast new questions about English relations with Scotland and Ireland. Vigorous debates were provoked by contact with non-Christian peoples and by changes brought to cultural tastes and consumer habits at home. England was becoming an imperial nation before it had acquired a secure territorial empire. The pressures of colonization exerted a decisive influence over the wars, revolutions, and party conflicts that destabilized the later Stuart kingdom.

About the author

Gabriel Glickman is a university lecturer in early modern British history and a fellow of Fitzwilliam College at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of The English Catholic Community, 1688-1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology.

Product details

• Authors: Gabriel Glickman, Glickman Gabriel
• Publisher: Yale University Press Ltd
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 14.02.2023
• EAN: 9780300255065
• ISBN: 978-0-300-25506-5
• No. of pages: 416
• Series: The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Modern era up to 1918; European History, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, POLITICAL SCIENCE / World / European, HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / Stuart Era (1603-1714), Colonialism & imperialism, Politics & government, British & Irish history, United Kingdom, Great Britain, Politics and government, Colonialism and imperialism, Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700, C 1600 To C 1700, 1660 to 1714 (Restoration and the Later Stuart period), 1603–1649 (Jacobean and Early Stuart period)