###Answer the question from the input provided. Please answer from input only.

###Input: The concept environmental determinism served as a moral justification for domination of certain territories and peoples. It was believed that a certain person's behaviours were determined by the environment in which they lived and thus validated their domination. For example, people living in tropical environments were seen as "less civilized" therefore justifying colonial control as a civilizing mission. Across the three waves of European colonialism (first in the Americas, second in Asia and lastly in Africa), environmental determinism was used to categorically place indigenous people in a racial hierarchy. This takes two forms, orientalism and tropicality.

According to geographic scholars under colonizing empires, the world could be split into climatic zones. These scholars believed that Northern Europe and the Mid-Atlantic temperate climate produced a hard-working, moral, and upstanding human being. Alternatively, tropical climates yielded lazy attitudes, sexual promiscuity, exotic culture, and moral degeneracy. The people of these climates were believed to be in need of guidance and intervention from the European empire to aid in the governing of a more evolved social structure; they were seen as incapable of such a feat. Similarly, orientalism is a view of a people based on their geographical location. 

Britain's imperialist ambitions can be seen as early as the sixteenth century. In 1599 the British East India Company was established and was chartered by Queen Elizabeth in the following year. With the establishment of trading posts in India, the British were able to maintain strength relative to others empires such as the Portuguese who already had set up trading posts in India. In 1767 political activity caused exploitation of the East India Company causing the plundering of the local economy, almost bringing the company into bankruptcy.

France took control of Algeria in 1830 but began in earnest to rebuild its worldwide empire after 1850, concentrating chiefly in North and West Africa, as well as South-East Asia, with other conquests in Central and East Africa, as well as the South Pacific. Republicans, at first hostile to empire, only became supportive when Germany started to build her own colonial empire. As it developed, the new empire took on roles of trade with France, supplying raw materials and purchasing manufactured items, as well as lending prestige to the motherland and spreading French civilization and language as well as Catholicism. It also provided crucial manpower in both World Wars.

It became a moral justification to lift the world up to French standards by bringing Christianity and French culture. In 1884 the leading exponent of colonialism, Jules Ferry declared France had a civilising mission: "The higher races have a right over the lower races, they have a duty to civilize the inferior". Full citizenship rights – ‘’assimilation’’ – were offered, although in reality assimilation was always on the distant horizon. Contrasting from Britain, France sent small numbers of settlers to its colonies, with the only notable exception of Algeria, where French settlers nevertheless always remained a small minority.



###Question: When is the earliest Britain had an imperialist policy?

###Answer: {'answer':'the sixteenth century'}