How a humiliating defeat secured Britain its empire

Beneath a flinty church tower deep in the Kent marshes, ‘among putrid estuaries and leaden waters’, lies a monument to an Elizabethan man of business. It is not much to look at. David Howarth calls it ‘second rate… dull’ and ‘strangely provisional’, despite its expanse of glossy alabaster. Moreover, the name of the man commemorated will ring few bells, even among historians. But it is the only memorial erected to one of the most important men in English history.

Sir Thomas Smythe was perhaps the greatest businessman in Elizabethan England. He not only founded the East India Company; he also played a leading role in several other significant commercial and pioneering proto-colonial ventures of the age. He started off running the Muscovy Company, the first joint stock company in history; then sat at the helm of the Levant Company, engaged in trade with the Ottoman empire, and was treasurer of the Virginia Plantation, which supervised the early English colonies in the New World.