By the early nineteenth century the British empire included many islands in the Mediterranean and Asia as well as the Caribbean and Pacific. In 1808 this drew from G. F. Leckie another rumination upon Britain's accomplishment in emulating the maritime achievements of Athens and Rhodes. If maritime empire was not new, after 1815 the scale of British naval power was. We should thus not be surprised to see the imperial archipelago further reimagined as a fleet. This floating archipelago had a specific genesis in English republican experience and its intellectual and cultural anticipations. In 1627–8 it was a swarm of bees. Under the republic it was ‘Of floting Islands a new Hatched Nest; A Fleet of Worlds, of other Worlds in quest.’ Acts 10 and 11 of the reign of William and Mary referred to Newfoundland as ‘a great English ship moored near the Banks’.

To describe the empire as a fleet was not simply to emphasize its global – the equivalent today would be planetary – reach (‘A Fleet of Worlds’). It was to set it again, against the empire of Sparta, and with that of Athens, as a thing in motion. Michel Foucault captured this mobile universality thus: ‘The boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea.