setting the foundation for “true transplantation,” as Karen Kupperman has ar-
gued.^34 If Carole Shammas is right, only during James’s reign, and only after
the first wave of African ventures had ceased, did colonization start to become
“commercialized”—and the English, to place their bets on the development
of the new commodities, new markets, and new networks of exchange that
would eventually “require” a massive (slave) labor force.^35
In the broadest outlines, then these are the events and impulses that laid
the ground for Hakluyt’s representation of Africa as well as, in part, for the
staging of the Moor. What is particularly striking is the improvisational na-
ture, the political and ideological openness and uncertainty of these early ap-
proaches, which had no established scheme for colonial domination or for
economic development behind them. For clearly, English venturers did not
take on Africa as a “dark continent” in need of their (or Portugal’s) civilizing
light or even as a literal or figurative gold mine, there for their exploitation or
excavation. In fact, the English did not take on Africa as a continent at all.
Rather, when they headed first to Barbary and then to the Guinea coast, they
did so erratically and sporadically, with one eye on the Portuguese as well as,
in a different way, the Turks, and the other on the legendary trades and traf-
fic of the East—their exploits always contingent on the broader network of
global relations and prospects that surrounded, and so defined, Africa.
***When Richard Hakluyt brings this history into his expansive vision of En-
gland’s imperial power and promise in the Principal Navigations, he positions
Africa as a touchstone of Europe’s greatest achievements. In the preface to the
second edition ( 1598 ), he asks:
Wil it not in all posteritie be as great a renowme unto our English
nation, to have bene the first discoverers of a Sea beyond the North
cape (never certainly knowen before) and of a convenient passage into
the huge Empire of Russia...; as for the Portugales to have found a
Sea beyond the Cape of Buona Esperanza, and so consequently a passage
by sea into the East Indies...? Be it granted that the renowmed
Portugale Vasques de Gama traversed the maine Ocean Southward of
Africke: Did not Richard Chanceler and his mates performe the like
Northward of Europe? Suppose that Columbus that noble and high-
spirited Genuois escried unknowen landes to the Westward of EuropeImperialist Beginnings 51