Hakluyt's Promise

An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America

Mancall Peter C.

Richard Hakluyt the younger, a contemporary of William Shakespeare, advocated the creation of English colonies in the New World at a time when the advantages of this idea were far from self-evident. This book describes in detail the life and times of Hakluyt, a trained minister who became an editor of travel accounts. Hakluyt's "Promise" demonstrates his prominent role in the establishment of English America as well as his interests in English opportunities in the East Indies. The volume presents nearly 50 illustrations – many unpublished since the sixteenth century – and offers a fresh view of Hakluyt's milieu and the central concerns of the Elizabethan age. Though he never travelled farther than Paris, young Hakluyt spent much of the 1580s recording information about the western hemisphere and became an international authority on overseas exploration. The book traces his rise to prominence as a source of information and inspiration for England's policy makers, including the queen, and his advocacy for colonies in Roanoke and Jamestown. Hakluyt's thought was shaped by debates that stretched across Europe, and his interests ranged just as widely, encompassing such topics as peaceful coexistence with Native Americans, the New World as a Protestant Holy Land, and in, his later life, trade with the Spice Islands.

About the Author

Peter C. Mancall is professor of history, University of Southern California, and director, USC – Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.

Reviews

"Peter Mancall follows Richard Hakluyt through the crooked streets and paneled private rooms of late Renaissance London and Paris – and shows for the first time how this scholar and writer, who rarely left the south of England, became his country's most eloquent impresario of travel, trade and colonization" – Anthony Grafton, Princeton University

"The most approachable and digestible account of intellectual and cultural life in the age of Shakespeare that I have read. This is an engaging, thoughtful, and important book. Mancall uses all of the tools of the cultural and social historian to recreate Hakluyt's life and his world. He provides an account of the origins of the Atlantic World and the British Empire that will challenge current paradigms" – Steven Pincus, Yale University

"... what Mancall's accumulated erudition succeeds in showing us is the sheer difficulty of persuading the recalcitrant English, worn down by the bloody and expensive wars of conquest in Ireland, into larger imperial ambitions" – Fintan O'Toole, The Guardian

"Mancall uses Hakluyt's scholarly turn of mind to his advantage. He becomes Hakluyt's student, reading the titles that Hakluyt read. What might have been narrow work thus becomes an impressive intellectual history of how Elizabethans attempted to explain a new world" – T. H. Breen, Times Literary Supplement

"Beautifully written and illustrated... Mancall's pacy narrative traces Hakluyt's career from Oxford academic to the man who inspired Elizabethan policy makers to take up the queen's rights in North America" – BBC History Magazine

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