The Invention of Colonialism

This Element brings together intellectual history, the rise of the British Empire, and medieval and early modern literature.

This Element argues that medieval texts conveyed the essence of expansionist mercantilism and colonialism, which shaped early English exceptionalism. The argument is threefold: Hakluyt and contemporaries understood medieval texts better than credited, colonialism's ideology shaped in the late medieval period, and periodisation faces pressure.This Element argues that it was not just the application of medieval texts by Richard Hakluyt that made them relevant for England's budding colonial ideology; rather, it shows that these premodern texts already conveyed the essence of the expansionist mercantilism and colonialist imperialism that would characterise early English exceptionalism and the Elizabethan reach for the Americas. The upshot of the author's argument is threefold. First, Hakluyt and his contemporaries were much better and closer readers of medieval travel texts than we give them credit for; second, the ideology behind English colonialism was shaped in the late medieval period, not in Elizabethan England; and third, another facet of periodisation, with its epistemological emphasis on rupture rather than continuity, comes under pressure.