Between 1580 and 1745--Edmund Spenser's journey to an unconquered Ireland and the Jacobite Rebellion--the first British Empire was established. This ambitious book argues that England's culture during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was saturated with a geographic imagination fed by the experiences and experiments of colonialism. Using theories of space and its production to ground his readings, Bruce McLeod skillfully explores how works by Spenser, Milton, Aphra Behn, Mary Rowlandson, Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift imagine, interrogate and narrate the adventure and geography of empire.