Sir Walter Ralegh was the favourite of Queen Elizabeth, who
showered him estates, jewels, monopolies, and political
appointments earning him the reputation of "the most hated man in
England." A man of many talents, he helped convince Elizabeth she
should be empress of a great empire, on the condition that he be
the one to shape her realm from the first. In Walter Ralegh,
eminent historian Alan Gallay tells the fascinating story of how
Ralegh helped create the largest empire the world has ever seen. A
courtier, buccaneer, soldier, explorer, and statesman -- as well as
a poet, historian, naval strategist, and scientist -- Ralegh is
best known in the US for trying, and failing, to found Roanoke, the
first English colony in America. But that event does not even begin
to suggest the world-historical import of his adventures. Inspired
by the mystical religious philosophy of hermeticism, Ralegh
(popularly, and mistakenly, spelt "Raleigh") believed that England
could build an empire without the conquest of native peoples, an
empire in which English settlers and American Indians would live
together, or, alternatively, where natives became allies and
England would not interfere with their way of life. Playing a lead
role in England's simultaneous attempt to colonise North America,
South America, and Ireland, Ralegh shaped the English Empire at its
birth, motivated by the wild idealism that the answer to English
fears of national decline resided in the Americas, where natives
blessed by God would reveal the mysteries of the universe. In the
end, colonialism left a legacy of brutal exploitation far different
from Ralegh's idealisations. Examining Ralegh's life, Gallay
reveals that Elizabethans had complex and often contrary views on
colonisation, seeing it as a means of achieving transcendence or,
just as often, of achieving wealth and glory through war and
subjugation. From Ralegh's introduction of the potato to Ireland to
his creation of the most famous medicine of seventeenth-century
England, from his failed colonial experiment on Roanoke island to
his search for El Dorado, Gallay chronicles Ralegh's legendary life
and offers a new origin story for the English Empire.
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