ABSTRACT
In glancing over the progress of foreign trade in the time of Elizabeth, we noticed that our war with Spain was due to commercial as well as to religious causes. The opening up of the New World had made a struggle for power in the West now almost inevitable among European nations; the new route to India round the Cape of Good Hope, discovered by Vasco di Gama, made another struggle for commercial supremacy as inevitable in the far East. But England was certainly slow in entering the field. As a matter of fact, she was hardly yet ready either in industry, commerce, or political power. In the reign of Henry VIII. English seamen had not yet ventured far into the Mediterranean, 1 and even in the last years of Queen Elizabeth England had absolutely no possessions outside Europe, for every scheme of colonial settlement had failed. 2 For a century or more after the discoveries of Columbus and di Gama, Spain and Portugal, and a little later on Holland, had practically a monopoly both of the Eastern and Western trade. But now a change had come. The Englishmen of the Elizabethan age cast off their fear of Spain, and entered into rivalry with Holland, till their descendants finally made England the supreme commercial power of the modern world. The history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is a continuous record of their struggles to attain this object. War is, in fact, their characteristic feature, and it had everywhere the same purpose. 3
