ABSTRACT. The definition of oceans as international politicized space is an integral but little analyzed aspect of early modern European expansion, which took place between about 1450 and 1800. In this essay I explore the implications of thinking about the development of European imperialism and global dominance in oceanic terms. I argue that oceanic, rather than terrestrial, dominance characterized early modern European empires, particularly in relation to Africa and Asia, where indigenous political and economic control prevailed. The long apprenticeship in mastering oceanic space contributed to the ability of Europeans to build land‐based empires in Asia and Africa in the nineteenth century. As well, the international relationships worked out by Europeans in the nonstate but militarized arena of the high seas contributed to an emergent global order.

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For the last three decades, scholars of Canadian political culture have favoured ideological explanations for state formation with the starting point being the American Revolution and Loyalist resettlement in British North America. This article challenges both the ideological bias and the late eighteenth-century chronology through a reassessment of early modern developments in the British imperial state. It shows that many of the institutional features associated with the state in British North America and later Canada—strong executives and weak assemblies, Crown control of land and natural resources, parliamentary funding of colonial development and accommodation of non-British subjects—were all institutionalized in the imperial state before the American Revolution and before the arrival of significant numbers of ethnically British settlers to Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Quebec. Ideological discourses in the British North American colonies that became Canada, unlike those that became the United States, traditionally acknowledged the presence of a strong state in its imperial and colonial manifestations. Rather than challenging its legitimacy, as had Americans, British North Americans, whether liberals, republicans or tories, debated the function of the state and the distribution of power within it.

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