David Beers Quinn on Walter Raleigh

“In the history of the formative period of English overseas expansion, Raleigh occupies an enduring place. He does so, not because of his long protagonism of English as against Spanish imperialism, nor from any lasting achievement in the establishment of English authority overseas. His contribution was made rather to English colonial theory. In the first place, he did as much as any other individual of his age to place American colonization in the public mind as a fixed and continuing objective. Only Richard Hakluyt the younger can stand at his side in this respect, and only his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, can claim any importance among the other Elizabethan colonial enthusiasts.”

“Most of his contemporaries regarded the Spanish empire as something to be robbed: Raleigh thought of it as something to be replaced by an English empire... What he did do in this respect was to introduce the concept of tropical imperialism into English colonial thinking... It was the social dynamics of the England of the late Tudor and early Stuart period which made English overseas colonization possible, but Raleigh's ideas and experiments helped in its realization. That is his principal claim to an important position in the making of an English overseas empire.”