BOME

London, the capitol of the island empire has always been a city of all ends. Culture, language, and wealth, all seem to proliferate from its limits, and spread across Britain, and the world. Long before the modern era, London’s rulers have been preparing this city for the capitol of an empire. London’s first documented history was as the Roman fort of Londinium. The site of London was originally chosen for its tidal coasts along the Thames suitable for mooring ships and quick access to the ocean. The Romans originally settled what today is known as the City of London and the Docklands. Roman Britannia however was always under constant threat from the Anglo-Saxons and therefore it never really grew economically compared to other already established cities in the empire, simply because it was being destroyed every so often.
During the Middle Ages, advances in technology, while few, helped London to become the economic center of Britain. Bakers, tailors, and butchers slowly started appearing in London in the late Middle ages, as guilds of certain commodities began to take shape in Europe. London’s economy prospered under the many guilds it had joined with other towns of northern Europe, and because the people of London had already had more civil liberties granted to them compared to other cities in Europe, the city had a burgeoning merchant class even during the Middle Ages.
By the time of the reign of the Tudors in the early seventeenth century, London was incredulously prosperous. The Royal Exchange, so named by Elizabeth I in 1571, had earlier sought to revitalize London as a European economic center, which had by then shifted to the cities of Antwerp and Amsterdam. By the year 1600 London’s population had jumped from 75,000 thirty years ago to more than half-a-million inhabitants, unprecedented for any city at the time, especially for those on the continent.
London was now looking beyond Europe for acquiring wealth. This was the birth of the Empire. The Monarchy set up monopolies across the globe to compete with other European powers, the Virginia Company is the more famous one, and the East India Company was the more profitable one. The East India Company set up trading posts in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras. All of these overseas ventures established under the Tudors and flourishing under the Stuarts, brought the bounty of other nations to the docks on the Thames.
London had now grown to such a size that the actual ‘city’ of London now stretched out far from the original Roman settlement known as the ‘City’ and Westminster, the distinction was now made between the ‘city’ and the ‘City.
The Stuart reign for London was dominated by two great disasters, one could argue three. At the start of the Stuart reign, there actually was a plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament, an omen perhaps for things to come. The Plague seemed to have never left England, and in 1665 a resurgence of Plague gripped the city. It is estimated that some 100,000 people died. London’s second major calamity was the Great fire of 1666, much of the old City and many Churches were destroyed. While this may have given London a chance to rebuild itself grander that before, since the economy was on such a downswing, it was thought too expensive to change the plan of streets and architecture.
During the reign of Lord protector Cromwell, London’s economy suffered even more. Major industries in the city, such as theatre, were outlawed. The Victorian age, and the Modern Era however would be a much brighter period for London