James Alexander Williamson was an English historian of the sea and of Britain's earliest overseas ventures. Born in 1886 and educated at the University of London, he taught history at Westminster City School for nearly three decades while producing a steady stream of scholarship on Tudor seafaring, the Cabot voyages and the making of empire. His books include Maritime Enterprise 1485-1558, Sir John Hawkins, The Voyages of the Cabots and The Tudor Age. A Short History of British Expansion, first issued in 1922 and revised across several editions, became a standard student survey; the volume offered here covers the modern empire and Commonwealth.
Williamson died in 1964. The first winner of the Julian Corbett Prize in Naval History and a vice-president of the Hakluyt Society, he remains a reference point for students of Elizabethan exploration.