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The extraction of wealth from British colonial territories would be justified by the ingenious combination of ideas about improvement and chattel slavery. While the establishment of the Atlantic settlements was an affair of colonial companies and private proprietors, they were gradually taken into direct government by Westminster. But the conflict between settlers’ defence of their autonomy under the theory of the ancient rights of Englishmen and metropolitan sovereignty would eventually push the settlements into statehood – a result that could be understood to open a wholly new global commercial order. By contrast, the East India Company continued to operate as a lucrative, though diminishing source for private enrichment until crown sovereignty was given formal imprimatur in 1813. Not keen to expand Britain’s administrative duties across the world, British lawyers and political leaders would reimagine their empire in terms of occasional interventions to protect private investments and to enforce the system of international rules they held valid all over the world.
This (highly selective) survey of the various kinds of travel writing circulating in both manuscript and print between 1557 and 1695 begins with the development of mid-sixteenth-century domestic travel writing as an offshoot of the growing antiquarian fascination with the history (as opposed to the legends) of the British Isles. William Petty, the Physician General of the British troops in Ireland, completed the first scientific map survey ofIreland, called the 'Down survey' not for the use of travellers but primarily for the carving up of the land among Cromwell's supporters. Fetherstone reprinted much of Hakluyt's material, along with more recent Virginia and East India voyages, enabling Purchas to lend his support to the now well established English colonialist activities in the New World and India. When considering narratives of individual voyages, it is also important to note that several (sometimes conflicting) accounts of the same voyage might well be circulated, sometimes simultaneously, in both manuscript and print.
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