Alison Games's newest book is a work of great range and depth that draws on a considerable breadth and variety of sources. Games describes 1560–1660 as a crucial period during which the small weak kingdom of England grew into a powerful state that could “project itself ” (7) outside Europe, emerging as a strong power in the Atlantic and East Indies. The key to this transformation, she argues, was the fundamental cosmopolitanism and adaptability of English travelers during the early modern period, bringing into being the development of a global perspective coupled with a fundamental flexibility that created a template for the later practice of domination. Thus, adaptability to difference was central to the eventual English ability to formulate a global network spanning Europe, America, and Asia. Men, and occasionally women, who had begun their career in one part of the world often transferred the knowledge and understanding they had gained in the course of colonial or mercantile activities to new experiences in regions thousands of miles away.

It was in the Mediterranean, Games demonstrates, where the English were initially weak, that they first developed a “model of cultural interaction defined by dissimulation and accommodation” (12). While travelers freely criticized Catholics and Muslims in their writing, they were more circumspect in their day-to-day dealings, often exceeding mere politeness by making a pretense of being a coreligionist. In fact, Games points out, travelers often went to great lengths to be taken for one of the locals, even pretending not to speak English. Such strategies, she shows, were necessary for survival because of the relative political and military weakness of the English. However, this “style of dissimulation” (79) produced a tool kit of skills, as well as a cultural competence, that the English were later able to employ in their expansion around the world.

Games fruitfully employs Tony Ballantyne's concept of “webs of empire” to describe the connections made by English travelers, merchants, ambassadors, and the like as they traveled great distances from home, creating global networks that eased the encounters for those that followed them and paved the way for English diplomatic and mercantile preponderance in many areas. There was, Games reveals, no single colonial template but, rather, a mixture of forms of interaction and governance, informed by practicality and innovation. Games provides insights into the lives and experiences of the often idiosyncratic individuals who traveled in the early modern era and the particularities of their experiences, such as the significant differences between employment in the East India Company and in the Levant Company. Her sources range from travel literature to diplomatic reports, letters, internal business memos, minute books, inventories, and a variety of images.

This book veers alternately between chapters that examine specific regions of English overseas activity, such as Virginia, Ireland, and Madagascar, and chapters focusing on the behaviors, expectations, and practices of the varied cohorts of English travelers, such as merchants, consuls, and clergy. This has the effect of illustrating the tremendous variability of experiences among the assortment of individuals and locales involved in the English traveling enterprise between 1560 and 1660. But it also simultaneously demonstrates similarities in their experiences and shows the intersection of seemingly separate spheres such as commerce and colonization and how they interconnected within the web of empire. In particular, Games emphasizes the fundamental cosmopolitanism of traders, who exhibited exceptional willingness to put up with hardships, learn languages, adjust to foreign customs, and gather knowledge from travelers of other European countries. These were men with global interests, and like more official government envoys, many of them possessed truly global careers. All travelers, whether officially employed by the government or the English merchant companies or traveling for more personal reasons, felt it their duty to represent British interests when they could, sending reports back to the government, supporting their compatriots, and attempting to uphold certain norms of behavior.

Games contradicts the established notion, put forward by Nicholas Canny and others, that Ireland was the model for subsequent colonization ventures, particularly North America. It is her contention that the English often viewed the Irish colonization project differently from other imperialistic ventures because it was both unique and unsuccessful. Instead, she sees North American and Irish colonization as contemporary ventures with a flow of both people and ideologies moving both westward and eastward across the Atlantic. Her exploration of the parallelism of the conquests is a fruitful one. Indeed, she maintains, by the time of the settlement of Virginia, the English were well accustomed to foreign life and prepared for its challenges. Games argues that, rather than Ireland, it was the Virginia colony that by 1622 represented England's first dominion by force and provided a model of aggression that helped shape English behavior in later ventures around the world, although Ireland, too, provided such a model after the quelling of the insurrections of the 1650s.

Games acknowledges that by the end of the seventeenth century, the cosmopolitanism and pragmatism of English travelers gave way to an increasing predilection for coercive violence in the service of colonization. However, it was the practice of a mode of accommodation in the early days that facilitated this style of domination later. This comprehensive study is meticulously researched and points to a new direction for considering English global activities in this era as well as for understanding the eventual development and growth of the British Empire.