Why Was England Late to Colonize?

No nation ever dominated global trade and geopolitics more than Great Britain from the mid 18th century until World War I. But the English, who united with the Scots to form Britain in 1707, arrived late to the scene of colonization. The Age of Discovery—when Western Europeans explored Africa, Asia, and the Americas—began in the early 15th century. The English, however, didn’t establish any permanent colonies until the early 17th century.

The English lawyer John Rastell lamented this development, in the 1510s, in a play he wrote about a failed expedition he took part in toward America. “Oh, what a thing,” he wrote, if “they that be Englishmen” had been the first to “take possession” and “make the first building and habitation” in the New World. 

So, what delayed the people who soon created the greatest empire the world has ever known?

Why did they sit back on their island and watch Spain conquer the most advanced peoples in the Americas and take South America’s riches for itself?

Why did they allow the Portuguese to gain the initial footholds in Africa and Asia and only much later wrest some of these regions from them?

To answer these questions, let’s first look at where the English were in their civilizational development when this exploration and colonization began.

England in the Age of Columbus

Although England never had to deal with Muslim occupation or invasion like the Spanish, Portuguese, and French, they had hardly ever been masters of the British Isles. After the Norman conquest in 1066, they fought viciously on and off with the Scots and Welsh and failed to fully conquer Ireland. 

When the Ottomans overran Constantinople, England’s Hundred Years War with France was just ending. As soon as this costly war concluded, the War of the Roses between the Yorks and Lancasters broke out, plunging the kingdom into another three decades of war. 

After defeating King Richard III, the victorious Lancastrian Henry VII of the new Tudor Dynasty heavily focused on establishing his throne and line of succession. His ancestral right to the throne was questionable, and he had to put down two usurpers. Although he finally secured his rule over the Yorks and executed all who might claim royal lineage, his government was cash-strapped. For a handsome dowry and alliance purposes, he married his eldest son to the Spanish princess and his daughter to the Scottish king, James IV.

Meanwhile, Portugal was close to reaching India around Africa, and the Columbus brothers were seeking underwriting for their plan to reach the East by sailing west. Bartholomew Columbus allegedly visited Henry’s court but was poorly received. 

After Christopher Columbus discovered the West Indies, Henry commissioned John Cabot of Genoa to sail west to reach the East. After Cabot discovered North America, Henry greatly rewarded him. Cabot sailed again, and others continued unsuccessfully to try to find a northwest passage to China. 

Motives for Exploration

To understand why England didn’t establish permanent colonies until more than a century later, it’s important to remember why Europeans were exploring in the 15th and 16th centuries. They didn’t sail specifically for conquest and colonization. If they discovered new lands with heathen peoples on the way, they intended to conquer those lands for their kings and introduce the peoples to Christianity. But these goals remained of secondary importance to trade with the Far East.

The Portuguese “colonies,” if one can call them that, for instance, consisted mostly of fortified trading posts. 

The Spanish conquered and colonized more extensively than the Portuguese because they faced less resistance. Unlike the Africans and Asians the Portuguese met, the American natives the Spanish encountered had no immunity to European and African diseases. 

The English, meanwhile, only found a cold, forested, foreboding continent. Besides fishing, they had no reason to linger there. Ship after ship sailed west out of Bristol in hopes of finding a quicker route to the real Indies, but each one found its path blocked by land and ice.

Private Capital Investment

Private funds almost entirely sponsored the English explorations. Portugal and Spain’s explorations, meanwhile, enjoyed deep-pocketed royal funding. Unlike England, Portugal had enjoyed a century and a half of relative peace when it started exploring, and its Prince Henry—known as Henry the Navigator—had the wealth of the Order of Christ from which to draw. Furthermore, there were no tales of a North American El Dorado to make extensive inland exploration worth it. Reaching Asia was the only reason the English had to explore.

In 1496, Henry issued Cabot his letters of patent. This allowed Cabot to sail under the English flag but limited all trade with the lands he discovered with England. Most importantly, Cabot and the sailors who accompanied him were responsible for finding funding for their voyage.

After failing in his first voyage, Cabot sailed again in 1497. He landed in North America, explored a stretch of the coast, and returned. 

Despite treating Cabot like a national hero, however, private, mostly Italian capital funded Cabot’s voyages. Besides a pension, the only money Henry provided was personal investment in one of the six ships he authorized for his third voyage. 

On this third and final voyage of Cabot’s, according to an Italian source, Henry planned to load the ships with criminals with whom to start a colony. The English hoped, according to the Duke of Milan’s ambassador, to use said colony “to make London a more important mart for spices than Alexandria.”

Cabot set sail in 1498. Most speculate he died at sea, as the historical record doesn’t mention him again.

Sebastian Cabot inherited his father’s letters of patent and tried to succeed where his father had failed in finding a passage to Asia. It’s believed he reached the Hudson Bay before his crew threatened mutiny if he didn’t return to England. When he returned, Henry VII had died, and Henry VIII had little interest in pursuing maritime exploration. 

Sebastian took employment in Spain but was approached in 1519 by England’s Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who offered him to “lead a voyage of discovery.” Henry had changed his mind and was willing to provide the ships if merchants supplied them and the sailors’ wages in return for a monopoly on any trade that came from the voyage.

The mission fell apart, however, because few merchants agreed to fund the trip. Many of them believed Sebastian to be a braggart, who simply repeated what his father and others had told him of what lay beyond the Atlantic.

England Was Still A Small Country

Although Henry VII was interested in finding a route to the Far East for England, he was primarily concerned with establishing and protecting his dynasty. Likewise, his son would be most concerned with establishing and protecting his realm. Neither could be accomplished by spending vast sums on long exploration voyages in hopes of striking it rich.

Had Henry VII lived longer, it’s conceivable that a few small fishing colonies could have been formed on the North American east coast. Bristol sailors even established a company similar to the future successful English colonization companies of the 17th century, the Company Adventurers to the New Found Land. 

But good fishing was really all that came of any of this. The English, like Columbus, wanted spices from the Far East, not cod. Although they were happy with the crumbs they found, the abundance of fish didn’t make it worthwhile to continue to sponsor voyages in search of a northwest passage.

But even if limited colonization had taken place under an extended rule of Henry VII, there is no scenario whereby England would have colonized in the 16th century to the extent that the Spanish did. Besides North America’s lack of gold and silver, temperate climates, and dense populations to exploit, a primary reason was England’s own sparse population. The Black Death had proved especially thinning to the British Isles in the mid-14th century, and the plague staged a comeback a few decades later. The continued wars that England fought also didn’t help its population growth.

In 1500, Spain’s population was roughly 7.5 million. England, meanwhile, had around two million. That this was only slightly more than Portugal’s population is telling for what 16th-century English colonization would have looked like. Although the Portuguese could monopolize trade, they didn’t have the numbers to build a large land-based empire. If a northwest passage existed and England had made it to Asia, the most it could have done was conquer islands and ports to use for trading posts.

England’s population doubled over the next century, so that when it planted Jamestown, the nation had around four million. Much of this population growth was fueled by the increased trade and foodstuffs from the Americas that the Iberians brought back. In the end, the English benefited more by sitting back and letting the Iberians enjoy the first fruits of Western European expansion.

. . . .

At the beginning of the Age of Discovery, England was ill-prepared to take part. Having been forced to abandon France in 1453, and then suffering three decades of civil war, the nation was in no geopolitical shape to build a global empire.