Hello everyone and welcome to the History of England, episode 365 of Empire.

Last time I made a rather feeble attempt to draw a very broad picture of the world

into which the English would have blunder in the 17th century. Today I have three objectives.

Firstly, to think about where the English got their ideas about colonisation from, did the idea

simply come to them in their pajamas one night? This would be a jolly good idea,

and here was how they'd do it, and if not, from where? Then we'll move on to ask the question

by what right. We've got all these Europeans trampling all over the crops and planting.

Well, you might ask, as Edward I did of his nobles, I think, quo-warn-to.

Was the answer effectively the same as the Warren Earl of Surrey smashing his rusty sword down

on the Clarks table by writer of conquests? Or was there something more complicated going on?

That will take us roughly half the episode, and then we'll really start getting down to brass

stacks and we'll turn to the hub of Empire the Caribbean. Okay, Alice Clark, are you sitting comfortably?

Then I shall begin. I'm going to assume that we all know a certain amount of stuff which,

to be fair, we have kind of covered in the podcast. So, the Elizabethan Void's of Discovery,

John Hawkins, West Africa, and the abortive experiment in the slave trade, the Spanish and Portuguese

empires we've spoken of many times, Rowanote, and its mysterious disappearance, the Spanish

domination of the Caribbean. Already, the Spanish and Portuguese empires are well-established,

and even the French and Dutch were further advanced in the English. So, the question has been asked,

well, why were the English so slow to get going after all? The Elizabethans had done the

discovering stuff. So, why so slow with exploitation? One thing is to explode the implied assumption

that exploration in ever-spleement exploitation would follow. The number of English merchants

interested in the Atlantic, Asian, and African trade was relatively low, and the state,

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