The reign of Queen Elizabeth I ushered in an unprecedented age of exploration and discovery. It saw an island nation, hitherto a cultural backwater, begin for the first time to occupy a realm of innovation and imagination that had for centuries been the domain of China, India and the Arab nations of the Middle East.
With England’s ‘gathering greatness’ asserted by a swashbuckling generation of merchant warriors and adventurers, and with the epic voyages of Magellan, Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Francis Drake charting the ‘great beyond’, it became clear that a fortuitous position on the edges of Europe and the Atlantic offered ever-wider imaginative horizons. Indeed, what came next is described by historian Peter Watson as ‘the greatest expansion of ideas and knowledge the world has ever seen.’
The British Imagination is a lively and deeply researched history that encompasses the five centuries that formed the contemporary mindset, from Francis Bacon and the first Spectator to Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, James Clerk Maxwell and Maynard Keynes; from the Royal Society to the industrial revolution; and from the first New World landings to the eventual colonization of a quarter of the world by the reign of Elizabeth II. Are we still, Watson asks, even now, living in a British 'metaphysical empire'?
Breathtaking in scope, embracing literature, science, art, religion, philosophy and politics, The British Imagination offers a captivating and stimulating insight into the most influential personalities and ideas that have made a small island what it is today.
