Sir Walter Raleigh, the Elizabethan adventurer, believed that “Hee that commaunds the sea, commaunds the trade, and hee that is Lord of the trade of the world is Lord of the wealth of the worlde.” In the mid-16th century, England commanded little. Spain controlled the vast wealth of the New World, and when its monarch inherited Portugal in 1580, he added the world’s second-largest empire to its largest. France, for its part, had a population perhaps four times larger than England’s. for more click here
