John Dee's 'Brytish Impire': 'A Laborious Treatise' on Ophir of 1577

This paper seeks to establish the importance of the Pacific for John Dee's imperial plan, which he regarded in 1577 -when he was aged fifty- as the culmination of his life's work to date. It reconstructs Dee's lost treatise on Ophir, the legendary source of Solomon's riches, and reassesses the geographical extent of the empire he proposed. For Dee, the Pacific was a source of wealth on which to found his programme, intended to establish British global dominance. He argued strongly for contact between Britain and the Far East, making a case for access to the Pacific by way of the North-East Passage, particularly in "Famous and Rich Discoueries", the fourth volume of his tetralogy, the "General and Rare Memorials". The Ophir text, which comprised the opening section of "Famous and Rich Discoueries", became datached from the main manuscript and was subsequently lost, but not before Samuel Purchas had incorporated its contents in his description of Ophirian voyages in "Purchas his Pilgrimes", a collection of accounts of travel and exploration, on which the present reconstruction draws. Dee's imperialist design is placed in the context of his astrological, angelological and providential views of universal history, his study of which had led him to conclude that cosmic forces had created an opportunity between 1576 and 1583 which, if seized, would enable Britain to replace the existing Spanish hegemony. The scale of his ambitions and his objetives have sometimes been misconstrued and underestimated. Furthermore, Dee's researches into natural philosophy connect with his promotion of commerce and empire, thereby demonstrating the interrelatedness of many of his activities and the reconciliation he was able to achieve between disparate occult and mundane interests. The imperialist design highlights the way in which he sought to convert abstruse ideas into practical courses of action.