Religion and Empire: The Alliance between Piety and Commerce in English Expansion, 1558-1625

No one can think intelligently about the British Empire unless he understands its ideational beginnings in the unquestioning belief of Elizabethans and Jacobeans that, if they sought first to extend the kingdom of God, all material blessings would be added to them. Wright proves that the main propagandists of the idea of empire as a divine mission were ships’ chaplains, company preachers, and such geographically minded clergymen as Hakluyt and Purchas.

Originally published in 1943.

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