Over the last two centuries, the origins of England's overseas expansion and its evolution into the British Empire have been the subject of intensive scrutiny by scholars. Writing in the 1850s, J. A. Froude argued that the modern English nation was to be found in Elizabethan seafarers and their dreams of colonization, motivated by Protestantism, commerce, and free thought (“England's Forgotten Worthies,” The Westminster Review 58 [1852], 18–36, at 22). Since J. R. Seeley's remark that the English acquired an empire “in a fit of absence of mind” (The Expansion of England [1883], 8), historians have challenged the pan-Atlantic designs of sixteenth-century contemporaries, suggesting that any idea of empire or imperial projects were incoherent and inchoate until the eighteenth century. In Tudor Empire: The Making of Early Modern Britain and the British Atlantic World, 1485–1603, Jessica Hower argues for a via media between these two approaches and combines three different strands of historiography: British, imperial, and Atlantic. Past historians have framed British history as that of the development of a constitutional mixed monarchy, but Hower suggests that a sort of mixed historiography is necessary for understanding the foundations of the British Empire.

Across eight chapters, she argues that the House of Tudor had imperial designs that encompassed territories in the Atlantic world and Western Europe. After Henry VII seized the English crown in 1485, he presented himself as British—that is, he highlighted his Welsh and English roots—and crafted an expansionist agenda focused on subduing Ireland and pursuing territories in the New World. His son and heir, Henry VIII, acted on the dynastic claim to the French crown, established a language for English empire via the 1533 Act in the Restraint of Appeals, a “critical tool of Tudor statecraft” (3), and oversaw the creation of the concept of a British Empire encompassing England, Wales, and Scotland during the 1540s. During Mary's and Elizabeth's reigns, England continued to fashion itself as an imperial power that ruled over an ideologically expanding empire, now comprehending extensive territories in the New World, and continued to dress itself in a British garb. James VI and I had to do little once he crossed the border in 1603 but style himself “King of Great Britain,” keep calm, and carry on British overseas expansion, all pioneered by the Tudors.

The greatest strength of Hower's study is taking early Tudor expansionist endeavors in France seriously, and contextualizing the attempts to settle Ireland and explore the Americas. Hower builds on works by Kenneth R. Andrews, David Armitage, and Ken MacMillan, and she connects scholarship on the English Atlantic in the sixteenth century to work on the medieval relationship between England and France and the Anglocentric concepts of Britain extant during the fifteenth century, leaving it not just to sixteenth-century Scots to invent Britain. Chapters 2 and 3, covering the period from 1485 to 1527, are especially valuable for Hower's discussion of early Tudor imperialism and early ideas of Britain. It would be interesting to link Henry VII and Edward IV, who situated himself within prophecy and considered himself the king of Britain—Henry VII, when considered within this context, seems more imitator than innovator.

Alison Games's influence is apparent in Hower's attempt to avoid a bifurcated approach to English expansion based on distinguishing between East and West (Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 [2008]). Instead, Hower adopts Games's “web” model of empire in the sixteenth century, and she shows the interplay of officials, such as Edward Poynings and William Cecil, both of whom served in multiple geographies and accrued experiences that were applied to new situations. Empire, in this account, was a collective experience that was developed, implemented, and inflicted upon several participants, who drew upon narratives derived from Ireland, France, the New World, and ideas of Asia.

Less convincing is Hower's argument regarding the coherence of an idea of Britishness and the application of the term “empire” during the sixteenth century. Aside from Henry VII, Tudor monarchs seemed ambivalent regarding any sustained agenda for building a British state. Though Protestant Scots and Edward Seymour were integral in pushing for a British union in the 1540s, Henry VIII was more focused on pressing his claims to the French throne, making him more of an Henri than an Arthur. It was left to James VI and I to embrace an idea of Britain that encompassed England and Scotland, alter his royal style, and attempt a (failed) political and religious union. Hower amalgamates two definitions of “empire” in her introduction—“casesaropapal authority,” and “rule over multiple territories” (3)—to argue that the Tudor possessions were viewed as a collective polity. The Tudors reigned over disparate political units that did not consider themselves a single political community, and the idea of a British Empire was limited to, at its most expansive, Britain and its surrounding islands into the seventeenth century. Ireland's place in the schema is ambiguous—at one point, Humphrey Gilbert refers to Elizabeth's “Irish empire” (260). John Dee had a rather expansive vision of the British Empire: He was distinctively forward looking in claiming vast territories in North America, but his emphasis on European possessions was outdated. By the second half of the sixteenth century, English expansion looked to the western horizon rather than north (Scotland) or east (France); Hower reflects this tendency by rarely mentioning either of the two latter regions in the final three chapters of Tudor Empire, and she recognizes the loss of Calais in 1558 as “rock-bottom” and a “mid-Tudor watershed and touchstone” (242).

Even with these definitional contentions, Hower achieves success in synthesizing England's sixteenth-century colonial and commercial schemes, and she demonstrates that the early Tudors considered both Old and New World as venues for dynastic expansion and conquest. The amount of archival research is admirable, with illustrative quotes and exhaustive details for each of her case studies. Hower clearly shows that the Tudors were “critical in the making of both” Britain and the British Empire (25). She is also successful in showing a transition from medieval ideas of Britain and the English monarchy—grounded in the Brutus myth and still possessing a toehold in Calais—to a Protestant seafaring kingdom increasingly oriented towards commerce and colonization. Far from being members of an isolated island nation in the sixteenth century, English contemporaries were active participants in the Atlantic world, planting the seeds of future colonization and becoming actors in what would become the history of the British Empire.