ABSTRACT
More promising still, but only belatedly brought to fruition, were England’s colonial beginnings. Yet the country enjoyed most of those advantages which elsewhere produced imperial success. England’s association with the wider world was not, broken. Trade, though much of it overland, continued to the Mediterranean, whilst in 1555 a cargo shipped from Portuguese India to the west was insured in London. But with the political and economic crises of the mid-sixteenth century came renewed expansion and the generally armed and aggressive beginnings of what was to end as the most extensive of all empires. In England, they had little prospect other than starving in the overpopulated countryside or in some crowded and disease-ridden town. In England, as in Europe, the opening of the oceans and the discovery of new lands brought an accumulation of new information and some interest in newly revealed objects.
