Book excerpt: The origins of the United States' distinct approach to war and military power are found in the colonial experience. Long before 1776 or 1619, Englishmen understood themselves to be a part of a larger, lost "British" empire that might disappear forever in the globe-girdling shadow of the Spanish Hapsburgs and their drive to extirpate Protestantism. A combination of geopolitical ambition and fear of Philip II propelled Elizabethan expansion into North America. During the queen's five decades on the throne, the British imperial impulse jelled into a distinct and widely shared strategic culture, anchored in a deeply held faith and political ideology that legitimized Tudor rule; increasingly centralized Tudor power across England, Scotland, and Ireland; forced attention to the continental European balance of power; and drew adventurers to explore the world and claim a toehold in North America. In Empire Imagined, Giselle Frances Donnelly traces the development of these enduring habits through a series of vignettes that reveal the interaction of a maturing strategic consensus and the contingencies inevitable in international politics and offers a unique perspective for understanding the current debate about America's role in the world.