Agents of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660

FAIN: FT-51556-03

Alison Games
Georgetown University (Washington, DC 20057-0001)

With a summer grant, I plan to undertake archival research in Great Britain and to begin to draft a chapter which explores the careers of merchants and factors who served in English trade factories all around the globe. The larger project explores the origins of the British empire by focusing on men who participated in successive colonial and commercial ventures around the globe. They possessed overlapping and intertwined experiences in different oceanic basins and cultures, some shaped by models of conquest, others by models of trade and accommodation: I am interested in delineating the intersection of these different cultures as men ventured from one to another and, in the process, forged a larger (if embryonic) imperial culture.