"Most of his contemporaries regarded the Spanish empire as something to be robbed: Raleigh thought of it as something to be replaced by an English empire... What he did do in this respect was to introduce the concept of tropical imperialism into English colonial thinking... It was the social dynamics of the England of the late Tudor and early Stuart period which made English overseas colonization possible, but Raleigh's ideas and experiments helped in its realization. That is his principal claim to an important position in the making of an English overseas empire."