Walter Ralegh
Architect of Empire
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Walter Ralegh
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Narrated by:
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Paul Hodgson
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By:
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Alan Gallay
About this listen
From a Bancroft Prize-winning historian, a biography of the famed poet, courtier, and colonizer, showing how he laid the foundations of the English Empire
Sir Walter Ralegh was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth. She showered him with estates and political appointments. He envisioned her becoming empress of a universal empire. She gave him the opportunity to lead the way.
In Walter Ralegh, Alan Gallay shows that, while Ralegh may be best known for founding the failed Roanoke colony, his historical importance vastly exceeds that enterprise. Inspired by the mystical religious philosophy of hermeticism, Ralegh led English attempts to colonize in North America, South America, and Ireland. He believed that the answer to English fears of national decline resided overseas - and that colonialism could be achieved without conquest. Gallay reveals how Ralegh launched the English Empire and an era of colonization that shaped Western history for centuries after his death.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2019 Alan Gallay (P)2019 Basic BooksCritic Reviews
"If Americans know of Sir Walter Ralegh today, it is as the founder of the "Lost Colony" of Roanoke, which disappeared without a trace a few years after it was established on the North Carolina coast. Some, perhaps, associate him with his quixotic quest for the golden city of "El Dorado" in the South American jungle. But such wispy associations fail to do justice to the colonial visionary, swashbuckling pirate, poet, courtier and alleged traitor whom Alan Gallay has vividly conjured in "Walter Ralegh : Architect of Empire," a richly researched and engagingly written biography." (Wall Street Journal)
"A good choice for those already familiar with the broad strokes of Elizabethan England, and for readers seeking to expand their knowledge of Ralegh's life and works." (Library Journal)
"[Gallay] manages to convey the enormous sense of how the gallant courtier, alchemist, humanist, and author helped create the cult of the goddess queen-who summarily ejected him out of her orbit. An enriching, sympathetic consideration of an extraordinary character in the fraught time of Tudor England." (Kirkus Reviews)