Lend-Lease had much older strategic precedents

Did the Royal Navy invent something like Lend-Lease before the United States existed?

Broadly similar arrangements are much older; Elizabethan Anglo-Dutch agreements and earlier foreign examples shared assets in ways that resemble the concept, though not the later US program exactly.

Lend-Lease is a modern label for a much older strategic practice rather than a wholly new invention. Under Elizabeth I, England and the Dutch made agreements involving the provision and use of assets that can be compared broadly with lending matériel to an ally. Similar concepts appeared in other states even earlier, although their law, finance, and administration differed from the American program of 1941. Wartime aid belongs to a long history of coalitions sharing ships, weapons, money, and access without a simple cash sale.