The Expansion of England

Abstract

England is amongst the oldest of the European imperial powers. Her imperial expansion is often assumed to have begun with the voyages of discovery in the sixteenth century; but her experience of dominion over other lands and people, with its catalogue of war, conquest, treaty, settlement, administrative and legal innovation, and governance began not overseas, but in the British Isles. The temptation to intervene in, dominate, and if need be to conquer, the Celtic lands of Wales, Ireland and Scotland proved too strong to resist, though not always easy to accomplish. This long process of conquest and settlement lasted from the twelfth century to the eighteenth, and England drew upon her even earlier history of consolidation and domination of the Anglo-Saxon lands, with King Alfred promoted as the ancestor of an English and English—British imperial ancestry (and with reference even to ‘an ancestry at once British and Roman Imperial’).1 England was a state and nation answerable only to God. From such confidence, from this early experience of dominion or aspiration to dominion, sprang the early modern British Empire, with its complex English—British identity, and with the prime mover, England, bent on pursuing its destiny in lands outside the ‘British island of England’.2