- [Instructor] I think there's a strong argument
to be made that England was the most
powerful and successful imperial nation
of all time, but when you look back to the
Age of Exploration, it becomes clear that England
was actually pretty late to the imperial game.
As we know, Christopher Columbus,
backed by Spain, had arrived in
Hispaniola in the New World in 1492.
He was the first European to start
a colony in the New World.
England, by contrast, didn't actually have
a successful colonial venture in the
New World until 1607 with Jamestown.
Now from this distance it doesn't look
that far behind, but this is more than 100 years
later than Spain's first colonial ventures.
So what was England up to?
Why were they so late in the colonial game?
That's what I'd like to take a closer look at
in this video, and I'll also talk
a little bit more about what conditions
in England led that nation to start New World colonies.
Now I think the biggest reason why England
waited another 100 years to have a
New World colony is that England had
its own problems, and it had a number
of problems in this time period,
and we're talking about the 1500s here.
And the first of these was ongoing conflict
between Catholics and Protestants in England.
Now this is a very long story.
I don't have time to do justice to it here,
but suffice it to say that the trouble started
with Henry VIII, who we know from his
many wives and many beheadings,
and Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic Church
in Rome to start his own church,
the Church of England, also known as the Anglican Church.
Now this is a Protestant religion.
I'm gonna put P here for Protestant.
Now Henry had two daughters, Elizabeth
who like him was a Protestant,
and Mary, who was a Catholic, and Mary occupied
the throne for a number of years,
but Elizabeth managed to wrest it away from her
and once Elizabeth was on the throne
as Elizabeth I, England became a Protestant nation.
So it's hard to be involved in world affairs
when you've got kind of a crisis of succession
going on, so one factor here is religious conflict.
Another reason why England is not headed
over to the New World is that they have
colonial problems closer to home in Ireland.
England is trying to, and will succeed at,
subduing Ireland as one of its colonies,
and they're undertaking a very bloody
and costly war, and they think of this
Catholic Irish population almost as
barbarian savages who don't know
what's good for them and in the opinion of the English,
what's good for them is English rule
and Protestantism, when of course
what the Irish really want is self rule
and to be left alone, but they use
very brutal tactics against the Irish,
and we'll kind of see that again
when they're met with another hostile
colonial population in North America.
Another issue England is dealing with
is economic depression.
The Crown doesn't have a lot of money
and there's a great deal of crime
and poverty throughout the nation,
so while the Crown can't actually afford
to sponsor colonial exploits the way
that Spain sponsored Columbus, they still
managed to get some riches out
of the New World by giving ship captains
license to plunder Spanish ships
coming back with New World riches,
and these were called privateers,
the most famous of them here is this man,
Sir Francis Drake, and really, privateers are
just pirates with a fancy name,
but the logic here was, why bother
trying to set up a colony here in Mexico
or South America, the West Indies,
and do all the work of setting up housing
and trying to tame laborers and mining,
when instead you could just let the
Spanish do all of that and then put that
gold on a ship and then use your awesome navy,
'cause England is growing a very awesome navy,
to steal those riches.
So England doesn't have a strong incentive
to do all the labor when they can
just steal it from the ships along the way.
Alright, those are some of the reasons
why it took England so long to start
colonization in North America.
In the next video I'll talk about
the factors that led England to finally
join the race for New World colonies.