SOURCE: "Ralegh—Science, History, and Politics," in Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1965, pp. 154-62.

Hill is an important Marxist historian whose work focuses on the English Civil War. In the following excerpt, Hill considers Hakluyt's work as publicist and foreign policy propagandist for Sir Walter Ralegh.

Ralegh's foreign policy was not his private affair, but was the policy of a whole group, whose main publicists were the two Richard Hakluyts. Ralegh was intimately connected with them. The younger Hakluyt's Discourse of Western Planting was written in 1584 'at the request and direction of Ralegh', to whom most of Hakluyt's works were dedicated. The policy of the Hakluyts was at once patriotic and imperialist. England had got left behind in the grab for the New World by Spain and Portugal, whose empires were menacingly united in 1580. After a rapid expansion of English cloth exports...