showing traces of uncertainty and ambivalence within the cross-cultural mis-
sion, of mutuality and mimicry within exchange relations, or of hybridity, in-
termixing, or the blurring of boundaries between or within encountered
cultures (and I have taken on some of this elsewhere), Hakluyt’s hope was to
give England the license and the leeway to establish its dominance across the
world, especially in newly “discovered” domains.^4 Hence, if there is any place
that we expect to find an ideology of English domination producing an iden-
tifiable Other, to find Moors racialized and codified in relatively consistent
terms, or to find Africa transformed into an homogeneous “heart of darkness”
in need of England’s light, it is here, in Hakluyt’s propagandistic documenta-
tion of England’s “principal navigations, voyages, traffiques [and] discoveries.”
Yet while the Navigations“would live on as the founding text of the
British Empire,” it was not because the England of Hakluyt’s era had an im-
perialist agenda, but in spite of the fact that it did not, as David Armitage has
argued.^5 For if the English were already dreaming of empire by the late six-
teenth century, those dreams had neither a definitive shape nor a discernible
purchase on reality, which was being improvised overseas, venture by venture.
The New World, where Hakluyt pinned his expansionist hopes, would grad-
ually become a viable site for colonization. Signal developments there, how-
ever, were only the tenuous starting points of uncertain, uneven, and not
inevitable “progress.” Years after the founding of Jamestown in 1607 , for ex-
ample, William Strachey and John Smith continued to anticipate its failure,
with Strachey advocating in 1610 for stricter governance of unruly colonists
and Smith in 1622 for the institution of a “running Army” against ever-
growing Indian aggression.^6 Moreover, and more important to my focus here,
the continent of Africa was no more the unified object of clearly cut imperi-
alist ambitions than England was an imperialist state. However much En-
gland may have been anticipating an “economic future” in Barbary, that
future was unquestionably sketchy.^7 Although English ventures to Barbary
started in the 1550 s, there was no attempt to regulate the trade officially until
the 1580 s, when the Barbary Company was chartered (in 1585 ), and when the
charter expired (in 1597 ) after little more than a decade, there was no attempt
to renew it.^8 Indeed, its powerful leader, the Earl of Leicester, was more inter-
ested in the Low Countries, and he meant to route the Barbary profits into
expeditions there.
Try as Hakluyt might to craft the records of English exploits overseas into
persuasive testimony that England “excelled all the nations and people of the
earth,” historically and currently, “in compassing the vaste globe of the
46 chapter two