England in the Age of Exploration

- [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.