Empire began as piracy and commerce, not policy

Ferguson traces British imperial expansion back to freelance operators — pirates, privateers, and joint-stock trading companies chartered by the Crown but run largely for private profit — rather than any grand state design. Figures like Francis Drake operated with only loose royal sanction, and the Caribbean colonies grew initially around the brutal profitability of sugar, tobacco, and the slave labor that sustained both.

This origin matters because it complicates any simple story of the empire as either a coherent civilizing project from the start or a purely state-directed conquest. For its first two centuries, Ferguson argues, the empire was largely an ad hoc commercial enterprise, driven by merchants and adventurers chasing profit, with the British state mostly following commercial expansion rather than leading it, chartering companies after the fact to formalize footholds already carved out by buccaneers and planters.

Takeaway: the empire wasn't planned in Whitehall — it was improvised by pirates and sugar barons, and the state caught up later.