The English overseas possessions, sometimes referred to as the English Empire, comprised a variety of overseas territories and colonies that were conquered or otherwise acquired by the Kingdom of England before 1707 when the Acts of Union joined England with the Kingdom of Scotland and created of the Kingdom of Great Britain. Formerly Scots were excluded from English overseas possessions, but following 1707 they could participate in the expanding British Empire.
The first English overseas settlements were established in Ireland and patterns of rule over a subordinated populated territory developed following the sixteenth-century Tudor conquest. There were initial English voyages of exploration during the reign of Henry VII of England, and further settlement in Ireland. During the reign of Elizabeth I(1558-1603) there were unsuccessful attempts at North American colonization. Not until the succession in 1603 of James VI of Scotland to the throne of England (ruling as James I) were permanent overseas settlements successfully established in North America, first at Jamestown, Virginia (1607), the West Indies, and the Plymouth Colony of religious dissenters in New England (1620). All these were in areas already occupied by indigenous populations and claimed by the Spanish Empire, but not settled by it. During the 17th century, Maine, Plymouth, New Hampshire, Salem, Massachusetts Bay, Nova Scotia, Connecticut, New Haven, Maryland, and Rhode Island and Providence were settled. In 1664, New Netherland and New Sweden were taken from the Dutch, becoming New York, New Jersey, and parts of Delaware and Pennsylvania.
In Asia, trading posts called "factories" in the East Indies, such as Bantam, and in the Indian subcontinent, beginning with Surat. In 1639, a series of English fortresses on the Indian coast was initiated with Fort St George. In 1661, the marriage of King Charles II to Catherine of Braganza brought him as part of her dowry new possessions which until then had been Portuguese, including Tangier in North Africa and Bombay in India.
Origins
The Kingdom of England is generally dated from the rule of Æthelstan from 927. During the rule of the House of Knýtlinga, from 1013 to 1014 and 1016 to 1042, England was part of a personal union that included domains in Scandinavia. In 1066, William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, conquered England, making the Duchy a Crown land of the English throne. Through the remainder of the Middle Ages the kings of England held extensive territories in France, based on their history in this Duchy. Under the Angevin Empire, England formed part of a collection of lands in the British Isles and France held by the Plantagenet dynasty. The collapse of this dynasty led to the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) between England and France. At the outset of the war the Kings of England ruled almost all of France, but by the end of it in 1453 only the Pale of Calais remained to them. Calais was eventually lost to the French in 1558. The Channel Islands, as the remnants of the Duchy of Normandy, retain their link to the Crown to the present day.
Ireland
The first English overseas expansion occurred as early as 1169, when the Norman invasion of Ireland began to establish English possessions in Ireland, with thousands of English and Welsh settlers arriving in Ireland. Friedrich Engels observed that "Ireland may be regarded as the first English colony." The Lordship of Ireland was claimed for centuries by the English monarch; however, English control mostly was resigned to an area of Ireland known as The Pale. Most of Ireland, large swaths of Munster, Ulster and Connaught remained independent of English rule until the Tudor and Stuart periods. It was not until the 16th century that the Tudor monarchs of England began to "plant" Protestant settlers in Ireland as part of the plantations of Ireland. These plantations included King's County, now County Offaly, and Queen's County, now County Laois, in 1556. A joint-stock plantation was established in the late 1560s at Kerrycurrihy near Cork city, on land leased from the Earl of Desmond. In the early 17th century the Plantation of Ulster began, and thousands of Scottish and Northern English colonists were settled in the province of Ulster. West Country men, including Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Ralph Lane, Sir Richard Grenville, and John White were involved in projects of plantation schemes in Ireland before then becoming involved in the New World and saw how individual wealth and power were enhanced by them. English control of Ireland fluctuated for centuries until Ireland was incorporated into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801, following the Irish Rebellion of 1798.
New World beginnings
Spanish success in exploration and colonization in the Western Hemisphere, beginning in the late 1400s and early 1500s, were an inspiration and a model for the English. The voyages of Christopher Columbus began in 1492, sailing west into the unknown with hopes of reaching Asia. He sighted land in the West Indies on 12 October that year, and in 1493 returned to colonize one of the islands he mistook for "the Indies" and named the indigenous peoples "Indians". The Spanish colonists sought riches, but except for gold the indigenous fashioned into ornaments, there was no great treasure. The Spanish essentially enslaved the indigenous populations. In 1496, excited by the successes in overseas exploration of the Portuguese and the Spanish, King Henry VII of England commissioned John Cabot to lead a voyage to find a route from the Atlantic to the Spice Islands of Asia, subsequently known as the search for the North West Passage. Cabot sailed in 1497, and made landfall on the coast of Newfoundland. There, he believed he had reached Asia and made no attempt to found a permanent colony. He led another voyage to the Americas the following year, but nothing was heard of him or his ships again.
Continued Spanish explorations in the circum-Caribbean region resulted in the world-altering Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire (1519-21) in which the expedition led by Hernán Cortés and supported by thousands of indigenous allies brought Central Mexico under Spanish control. Densely populated, hierarchical organized indigenous populations used to rending tribute and performing labor duties, transformed Europe's idea of the possibilities of these (to them) unknown lands and peoples. Then the Spanish repeated the feat in the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire. The discovery of vast deposits of silver in northern Mexico in the 1550s and in the highland Andes as well transformed Spain a major world power.
The English Reformation had made enemies of England and Catholic Spain. In 1562 Elizabeth sanctioned the privateers Hawkins and Drake to attack Spanish ships off the coast of West Africa. Later, as the Anglo-Spanish Wars intensified, Elizabeth approved further raids against Spanish ports in the Americas and against shipping returning to Europe with treasure from the New World. Meanwhile, the influential writers Richard Hakluyt and John Dee were beginning to press for the establishment of England's own overseas empire. Spain was well established in the Americas, while Portugal had built up a network of trading posts and fortresses on the coasts of Africa, Brazil, and China, and the French had already begun to settle the Saint Lawrence River, which later became New France.
The first English overseas colonies
The first English overseas colonies started in 1556 with the plantations of Ireland after the Tudor conquest of Ireland. One such overseas joint stock colony was established in the late 1560s, at Kerrycurrihy near Cork city Several people who helped establish colonies in Ireland also later played a part in the early colonization of North America, particularly a group known as the West Country men.
The first English colonies overseas in America was made in the last quarter of the 16th century, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The 1580s saw the first attempt at permanent English settlements in North America, a generation before the Plantation of Ulster and occurring a little bit after the plantation of Munster. Soon there was an explosion of English colonial activity, driven by men seeking new land, by the pursuit of trade, and by the search for religious freedom. In the 17th century, the destination of most English people making a new life overseas was in the West Indies rather than in North America.
Early claims
Financed by the Muscovy Company, Martin Frobisher set sail on 7 June 1576, from Blackwall, London, seeking the North West Passage. In August 1576, he landed at what he named Frobisher Bay on Baffin Island. This was marked by the first Church of England service recorded on North American soil. Frobisher returned to Frobisher Bay in 1577, taking possession of the south side of it in Queen Elizabeth's name. In a third voyage, in 1578, he reached the shores of Greenland and also made an unsuccessful attempt at founding a settlement in Frobisher Bay. While on the coast of Greenland, he also claimed that for England.
At the same time, between 1577 and 1580, Sir Francis Drake was circumnavigating the globe. He claimed Elizabeth Island off Cape Horn for his queen, and on 24 August 1578 claimed another Elizabeth Island, in the Straits of Magellan. In 1579, he landed on the north coast of California, claiming the area for Elizabeth as "New Albion". However, these claims were not followed up by settlements.
In 1578, while Drake was away on his circumnavigation, Elizabeth I granted a patent for overseas exploration to his half-brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert. That year Gilbert sailed for the West Indies to engage in piracy, plundering Spanish shipping, and to establish a colony in North America in an area not controlled by Spain. However, the expedition was abandoned before the Atlantic had been crossed. In 1583, Gilbert sailed to Newfoundland, where in a formal ceremony he took possession of the harbour of St John's together with all land within two hundred leagues to the north and south of it. His assertion of the claim was not reinforced by actual settlement by Englishmen. He did not survive the return journey to England.
The first overseas settlements
On 25 March 1584, Queen Elizabeth I granted Sir Walter Raleigh a charter for the colonization of an area of North America which was to be called, in her honour, Virginia. This charter specified that Raleigh had seven years in which to establish a settlement, or else lose his right to do so. Raleigh and Elizabeth intended that the venture should provide riches from the New World and a base from which to send privateers on raids against the treasure fleets of Spain. Raleigh himself never visited North America, although he led expeditions in 1595 and 1617 to the Orinoco River basin in South America in search of the golden city of El Dorado. Instead, he sent others to found the Roanoke Colony, later known as the "Lost Colony".
On 31 December 1600, Elizabeth gave a charter to the East India Company, under the name "The Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies". The first voyage took place in 1601 led by James Lancaster and established its first trading posts in the East Indies, at Bantam on the island of Java and another on the small Island of Run in the Spice Islands. Within ten years they had established other factories, with Surat, on the coasts of what are now India and Bangladesh.
Most of the new English colonies established in North America and the West Indies, whether successfully or otherwise, were proprietary colonies with Proprietors, appointed to found and govern settlements under Royal charters granted to individuals or to joint stock companies. Early examples of these are the Virginia Company, which created the first successful English overseas settlements at Jamestown in 1607 and Bermuda, unofficially in 1609 and officially in 1612, its spin-off, the Somers Isles Company, to which Bermuda (also known as the Somers Isles) was transferred in 1615, and the Newfoundland Company which settled Cuper's Cove near St John's, Newfoundland in 1610. Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts Bay, each incorporated during the early 1600s, were charter colonies, as was Virginia for a time. They were established through land patents issued by the Crown for specified tracts of land. In a few instances the charter specified that the colony's territory extended westward to the Pacific Ocean, was based on the claims to the Pacific coast arising from the explorations of Francis Drake. The charters of Connecticut, Massachusetts Bay, and Virginia each contained this "sea to sea" provision.
Bermuda, today the oldest-remaining British Overseas Territory, was settled and claimed by England as a result of the shipwreck there in 1609 of the Virginia Company's flagship Sea Venture. The town of St George's, founded in Bermuda in 1612, remains the oldest continuously-inhabited English settlement in the New World. Some historians state that with its formation predating the conversion of "James Fort" into "Jamestown" in 1619, St George's was actually the first successful town the English established in the New World. Bermuda and Bermudians have played important, sometimes pivotal, roles in the shaping of the English and British trans-Atlantic empires. These include roles in maritime commerce, settlement of the continent and of the West Indies, and the projection of naval power via the colony's privateers, among others.
Between 1640 and 1660, the West Indies were the destination of more than two-thirds of English emigrants to the New World. By 1650, there were 44,000 English people in the Caribbean, compared to 12,000 on the Chesapeake and 23,000 in New England. The most substantial English settlement in that period was at Barbados.