This article investigates the existence in early Stuart Britain of a vibrant, conscious, and global imperial inheritance, as well as the meaning and significance of this legacy for British interactions with the wider world in the seventeenth century. It explores the ways in which a new, transnational and colonial approach to a still-stubbornly insular Tudor History unearths over a century of British experimentation from 1485 in Europe, the Isles, the Americas, Africa, and the East, mutually-reinforced by consolidation and identity-formation at home. I examine the tangible, enduring importance of these examples – that is, the continued relevance of ideology and practice forged in sixteenth-century interactions beyond England – to the subsequent development of Britain and its Empire. The New British History, New Imperial History, and Atlantic History have transformed and complicated our understanding of Britain and the connections between Britain and Empire. Yet these turns have had greater success in privileging the seventeenth century, the Isles, and Anglo-America, relegating Britain to latecomer status in the New World and elsewhere while reinforcing dynastic periodization and obscuring an essential basis of Jacobean and later global involvement. This article seeks to cross the historiographic divides between chronological boundaries, between Tudor and Stuart, insular and global, using 1603–1625 as a case study. With interests sparked, sustained, and legitimized by experience, British subjects active in Ireland, Newfoundland, Virginia, and Guiana in the first quarter of the new century carefully deployed, manipulated, even shucked elements of Tudor nation and empire. Continuity in personnel and the survival of popular texts merged with changes wrought by or circa the new dynasty, as Jacobean flatters and critics fashioned history to fit their ends. By recalling Tudor policy, they acknowledged and memorialized an extra-national past, perpetuating certain images, diction, objectives, and regions of interest across 1603 to influence Stuart global engagement. This paper demonstrates that we cannot understand the development of Britain in the transformative seventeenth century and beyond without looking back and overseas.
