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THE IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS

OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE

The Ideological Origins of the British Empire presents the first compre-
hensive history of British conceptions of empire for more than half
a century. David Armitage traces the emergence of British imperial
ideology from the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the
eighteenth century, using a full range of manuscript and printed
sources. By linking the histories of England, Scotland and Ireland
with the history of the British Empire, he demonstrates the import-
ance of ideology as an essential linking between the processes of
state-formation and empire-building. This book sheds new light on
major British political thinkers, from Sir Thomas Smith to David
Hume, by providing novel accounts of the ‘British problem’ in the
early-modern period, of the relationship between Protestantism
and empire, of theories of property, liberty and political economy
in imperial perspective, and of the imperial contribution to the
emergence of British ‘identities’ in the Atlantic world.

          is Associate Professor of History at Columbia

University. He is the editor of Bolingbroke: Political Writings for
Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought () and
Theories of Empire – (), and co-editor (with Armand
Himy and Quentin Skinner) of Milton and Republicanism ().
 IDEAS IN CONTEXT

Edited by QUENTIN SKINNER (General Editor), LORRAINE DASTON,

DOROTHY ROSS and JAMES TULLY

The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectual traditions and
of related new disciplines. The procedures, aims and vocabularies that were
generated will be set in the context of the alternatives available within the
contemporary frameworks of ideas and institutions. Through detailed studies of
the evolution of such traditions, and their modification by different audiences,
it is hoped that a new picture will form of the development of ideas in their
concrete contexts. By this means, artificial distinctions between the history of
philosophy, of the various sciences, of society and politics, and of literature may
be seen to dissolve.

The series is published with the support of the Exxon Foundation.

A list of books in the series will be found at the end of the volume.
    
THE IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS
OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE
XXXXX
 THE
ID EO LOGI CAL ORI GINS
OF THE
B R I TI SH E MPI RE

DAVID ARMITAGE
Columbia University
         
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

  

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa

http://www.cambridge.org

© David Armitage 2004

First published in printed format 2000

ISBN 0-511-03898-4 eBook (Adobe Reader)

ISBN 0-521-59081-7 hardback
ISBN 0-521-78978-8 paperback
 For
DH, MRA, BGA and CFLA
XXXXXX
 Contents

Acknowledgements page x

 Introduction: state and empire in British history 

 The empire of Great Britain: England, Scotland and
Ireland c. – 
 Protestantism and empire: Hakluyt, Purchas and property 
 The empire of the seas, – 
 Liberty and empire 
 The political economy of empire 
 Empire and ideology in the Walpolean era 

Bibliography 
Index 

ix
 Acknowledgements

The origins of this book are tangled and extend back over a decade. I
have been very fortunate to receive material and moral assistance for it
from many generous institutions. For financial support, I am grateful to
the British Academy; the Commonwealth Fund of New York; the John
Carter Brown Library; Emmanuel College, Cambridge; and the
Columbia University Council on Research and Faculty Development in
the Humanities. For providing ideal conditions in which to work on the
book and a series of associated projects, I thank particularly the staff and
Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library; the Master and Fellows of
Emmanuel College; the staff and Director of the Institute for Advanced
Studies in the Humanities, Edinburgh University; the staff and Director
of the National Humanities Center; and the members of the History
Department at Columbia University.
Institutional obligations mask a host of personal debts. During my
tenure of a Harkness Fellowship at Princeton University, Sir John
Elliott, Peter Lake, John Pocock, David Quint and the late Lawrence
Stone offered crucial and lasting inspiration; back in Cambridge, Chris
Bayly, Peter Burke, Patrick Collinson, Istvan Hont and Anthony Pag-
den asked essential and abiding questions; later, John Robertson and
Blair Worden examined the doctoral dissertation from which this study
sprang. All have since provided indispensable support, for which I am
deeply grateful.
As the scope of the study, and of my other work, has expanded over
subsequent years, I have particularly appreciated the encouragement
and assistance of Richard Bushman, Nicholas Canny, Linda Colley,
Martin Dzelzainis, Andrew Fitzmaurice, Lige Gould, Jack Greene,
John Headley, Karen Kupperman, Elizabeth Mancke, Peter Marshall,
Roger Mason, Karen O’Brien, Jane Ohlmeyer and Jenny Wormald.
For vital support and confidence at crucial moments, I owe special debts
to David Kastan, Darrin McMahon, Nigel Smith and Dror Wahrman.
x
 Acknowledgements xi
For their friendship and hospitality, over many years and in many
places, I cannot adequately thank Catharine Macleod and Frank
Salmon, Jennifer McCullough and Peter McCullough or Melissa
Calaresu and Joan Pau Rubiés.
For their comments, I am happy to be able to thank a variety of
audiences on both sides of the Atlantic who have heard earlier versions
of parts of my argument. I must express particular appreciation to the
University Seminars at Columbia University for assistance in the pre-
paration of the manuscript for publication. Material drawn from the
book was presented to the University Seminars on Early American
History and Culture, Irish History and Culture, the Renaissance,
Eighteenth-Century European Culture, and Social and Political
Thought. For permission to reproduce and revise material which has
appeared elsewhere in print, I am also grateful to the editors of The
Historical Journal and The American Historical Review; the Past and Present
Society; Cambridge University Press; the University of North Carolina
Press; Oxford University Press; and K. G. Saur Verlag. Most of all, I
must thank the staff at Cambridge University Press for their patience
and care at every stage of writing and publishing this book. Richard
Fisher has exemplified these virtues, along with generosity and confi-
dence well beyond the reasonable expectations of any author; my thanks
also to Nancy Hynes for her excellent copy-editing and to Auriol
Griffith-Jones for compiling the index so efficiently.
It is a special pleasure to be able to acknowledge enduring debts to
Nick Henshall, without whose example, I should never have become an
historian, and to Ruth Smith, without whose lasting confidence, I could
not have remained one; her remarkable vigilance also greatly improved
this book at a very late stage. More recently, and no less importantly,
David Cannadine has been a model of collegiality, commitment and
comradeship.
Finally, my greatest debts are to Quentin Skinner and Joyce Chaplin.
Quentin has throughout been a reader, critic and interlocutor without
peer; many have had cause to thank him, but few can be as grateful as I.
Joyce has seen everything of this book and of its author but has not
flinched or faltered; for this faith and love, much thanks.
XXXXXX
  

Introduction: state and empire in British history

. . . the word, empire, conveys an idea of a vast territory, composed of

various people; whereas that of kingdom, implies, one more
bounded; and intimates the unity of that nation, of which it is
formed.
By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the British Empire
comprehended the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Ireland, the
islands of the Caribbean and the British mainland colonies of North
America. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by a
common religion and by the Royal Navy. The gentle, but powerful
influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the
provinces. Their free, white inhabitants enjoyed and produced the
advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was
preserved with a decent reverence. The Hanoverian kings appeared to
possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on their parliaments all
the executive powers of government. During a crucial period of almost
fourscore years (–), the public administration was conducted
by a succession of Whig politicians. It is the design of this, and of the
succeeding chapters, to describe the ideological origins of their empire,
though not to deduce the most important circumstances of its decline
and fall: the American Revolution, which dismembered the British
Atlantic Empire, lies beyond the immediate scope of this book.
The history of the rise, decline and fall of the British Empire has most
often been told as the story of an empire whose foundations lay in India
during the second half of the eighteenth century. That empire formally

John Trusler, The Difference, Between Words, Esteemed Synonymous, in the English Language,  vols.
(London, ), , .

C. H. Firth, ‘‘‘The British Empire’’’, Scottish Historical Review,  (), –; James Truslow
Adams, ‘On the Term ‘‘British Empire’’’, American Historical Review,  (), –.

From J. Holland Rose, A. P. Newton and E. A. Benians (gen. eds.), The Cambridge History of the
British Empire,  vols. (Cambridge, –) to Wm. Roger Louis (gen. ed.), The Oxford History of the
British Empire,  vols. (Oxford, –).


 The ideological origins of the British Empire
encompassed parts of South Asia, Australasia, Africa and the Americas.
Its ascent began with British victory at the battle of Plassey in ,
continued almost unabated in South Asia and the Pacific until the end of
the Napoleonic Wars, resumed momentum in the latter half of the
nineteenth century during the European ‘scramble for Africa’, and then
unravelled definitively during and after the Second World War. William
Pitt was its midwife, Lord Mountbatten its sexton and Winston Church-
ill its chief mourner in Britain. Its ghost lives on in the form of the
Commonwealth; its sole remains are the handful of United Kingdom
Overseas Territories, from Bermuda to the Pitcairn Islands. In this
account, the American Revolution and its aftermath divided the two
(supposedly distinct) Empires, chronologically, geographically and insti-
tutionally. The Peace of Paris that ended the Seven Years War in 
marked the end of French imperial power in North America and South
Asia. Twenty years later, in , the Peace of Paris by which Britain
acknowledged the independence of the United States of America
marked the beginnings of a newly configured British Atlantic Empire,
still including the Caribbean islands and the remaining parts of British
North America; it also signalled the British Empire’s decisive ‘swing to
the east’ into the Indian and Pacific oceans. Historians of the eight-
eenth-century British Empire have protested against any easy separ-
ation between the ‘First’ and ‘Second’ British Empires on the grounds
that the two overlapped in time, that they shared common purposes and
personnel, and that the differences between the maritime, commercial
colonies of settlement in North America and the military, territorial
colonies of conquest in India have been crudely overdrawn. Neverthe-
less, among historians, and more generally in the popular imagination,
the British Empire still denotes that ‘Second’ Empire, which was
founded in the late eighteenth century and whose character distin-
guished it decisively from the ‘Old Colonial System’ of the British
Atlantic world that had gone before it.
 For instance, most recently, in Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (London, ),
Denis Judd, Empire: The British Imperial Experience, From  to the Present (London, ) and P. J.
Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire (Cambridge, ); exceptions are
Angus Calder, Revolutionary Empire: The Rise of the English-Speaking Peoples from the Fifteenth Century to the
s (London, ) and T. O. Lloyd, The British Empire – (Oxford, ).

V. T. Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire, –,  vols. (London, –).
 Peter Marshall, ‘The First and Second British Empires: A Question of Demarcation’, History, 
(), –; Philip Lawson, ‘The Missing Link: The Imperial Dimension in Understanding
Hanoverian Britain’, The Historical Journal,  (), –; P. J. Marshall, ‘Britain and the
World in the Eighteenth Century: , Reshaping the Empire’, Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, th ser.,  (), –.

G. L. Beer, The Origins of the British Colonial System – (London, ).
 Introduction: state and empire in British history 
The conflation of British Imperial history with the history of the
Second British Empire has encouraged the separation of the history of
Britain and Ireland from the history of the Empire itself. ‘British’ history
is assumed to mean ‘domestic’ history; Imperial history implies extra-
territorial history. This distinction was at least understandable, if not
defensible, as long as the Empire was assumed to be divided from the
metropole by vast physical distances, to be overwhelmingly distinct in its
racial composition, and to be dependent upon, rather than formally
equal with, Britain itself. The attributed character of the Second British
Empire – as an empire founded on military conquest, racial subjection,
economic exploitation and territorial expansion – rendered it incompat-
ible with metropolitan norms of liberty, equality and the rule of law, and
demanded that the Empire be exoticised and further differentiated from
domestic history. The purported character of the First British Empire –
as ‘for the most part a maritime empire, an oceanic empire of trade and
settlement, not an empire of conquest; an empire defended by ships, not
troops’ – assimilated it more closely to the domestic histories of the
Three Kingdoms by making it the outgrowth of British norms, exported
and fostered by metropolitan migrants. The revolutionary crisis in the
British Atlantic world, between  and , revealed the practical and
theoretical limits of any such assimilation. Thereafter, the former colo-
nies became part of the history of the United States. This in turn
facilitated the identification of the history of the British Empire with the
history of the Second Empire and fostered the continuing disjuncture
between ‘British’ and ‘Imperial’ histories.
The Ideological Origins of the British Empire attempts to reintegrate the
history of the British Empire with the history of early-modern Britain on
the ground of intellectual history. This approach faces its own difficulties,
in that the history of political thought has more often treated the history
of ideas of the state than it has the concepts of empire, at least as that term
has been vulgarly understood. Political thought is, by definition, the

A note on terminology: ‘Britain’ is used either as a geographical expression, to refer to the island
encompassing England, Wales and Scotland, or as a shorthand political term, to denote the
United Kingdom of Great Britain created by the Anglo-Scottish union of ; ‘Britain and
Ireland’ is taken to be synonymous with the ‘Three Kingdoms’ of England, Scotland and Ireland
throughout the period before . ‘British Isles’ is only used when it expresses the vision of a
particular author – for example, Edmund Spenser; ‘British’ is likewise not held to include ‘Irish’,
except when particular authors employed it otherwise.
 Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, The New Cambridge History of India, . (Cambridge, ), .

For the emergence of concepts of the state in competition with ideologies of empire see Quentin
Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought,  vols. (Cambridge, ), , –; James Tully,
Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge, ), –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
history of the polis, the self-contained, firmly bounded, sovereign and
integrated community that preceded and sometimes shadowed the
history of empire and that paralleled and ultimately overtook that history
during the age of the great nation-states. For this reason, the British
Empire has not been an actor in the history of political thought, any more
than political thought has generally been hospitable to considering the
ideologies of empire. The very pursuit of an intellectual history for the
British Empire has been dismissed by historians who have described
seventeenth-century arguments regarding the British Empire as ‘intel-
lectually of no . . . commanding calibre’, and have counselled that ‘[t]o
look for any significant intellectual or ideological contribution to the
ordering of empire in the first two decades of George III’s reign would
seem at first sight to be a barren task’. This is symptomatic of a more
lasting unwillingness to consider ideologies of empire as part of political
theory or the history of political thought. However, the study of
imperial ideologies can clarify the limits of political theory studied on the
unexamined principle that it encompasses solely the theory of the state
and its ideological predecessors. It is therefore essential to recover the
intellectual history of the British Empire from the ‘fit of absence of mind’
into which it has fallen.
This study understands the term ‘ideology’ in two senses: first, in the
programmatic sense of a systematic model of how society functions and
second, as a world-view which is perceived as contestable by those who
do not share it. This latter sense does not imply that such an ideology
should necessarily be exposed as irrational because it can be identified as
simply the expression of sectional interests; rather, it implies that con-
temporaries may have seen such an interconnected set of beliefs as both

Klaus E. Knorr, British Colonial Theories – (Toronto, ), ; P. J. Marshall, ‘Empire
and Authority in the Later Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 
(), .
 Though for early attempts to consider this problem, from the dying decades of the British
Empire, see Sir Ernest Barker, The Ideas and Ideals of the British Empire (Cambridge, ), George
Bennett (ed.), The Concept of Empire: Burke to Attlee, – (London, ) and Eric Stokes, The
Political Ideas of English Imperialism: An Inaugural Lecture Given in the University College of Rhodesia and
Nyasaland (Oxford, ).

Tully, Strange Multiplicity, –.
 Compare Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-
Century Britain (Cambridge, ); Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in
Spain, Britain and France c.  – c.  (New Haven, ); David Armitage (ed.), Theories of
Empire, – (Aldershot, ).
 Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge, ),
; Keith Michael Baker, ‘On the Problem of the Ideological Origins of the French Revolution’,
in Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century
(Cambridge, ), –.
 Introduction: state and empire in British history 
argumentatively flawed and compromised by needs which they did not
share. This spirit of ideological critique could see such beliefs as ra-
tionally indefensible, or even false, just because they answered to a
particular set of needs; more importantly, rational disagreement about
the status of those beliefs rendered them the product of contemporary
political and philosophical argument. The purpose of this study is
therefore not to expose beliefs about the British Empire as either true or
false, but rather to show the ways in which the constitutive elements of
various conceptions of the British Empire arose in the competitive
context of political argument. It deploys resources from a wider tradition
of political thought, stretching back to classical sources in ancient Greece
and, especially, Rome, but also encompassing contemporary Spain and
the United Provinces, as part of a wider European dialogue within which
the various empires were defined and defended. Its purpose is therefore
not to claim that the origins of the British Empire can be found only in
ideology; rather, it seeks to locate the origins of the ideological definition
of empire in Britain, Ireland and the wider Atlantic world.
Any search for origins is, of course, fraught with a basic conceptual
ambiguity. An origin can be either a beginning or a cause, a logical and
chronological terminus a quo, or the starting-point from which a chain of
consequences derives. ‘In popular usage, an origin is a beginning which
explains’, warned Marc Bloch. ‘Worse still, a beginning which is a
complete explanation. There lies the ambiguity, there the danger!’ To
discover the etymology of a word does nothing to explain its present
meaning, though the gap between its etymological root and its current
usage can be historically revealing, but only if approached contextually.
‘In a word, a historical phenomenon can never be understood apart
from its moment in time.’ Similarly, the context within which a
concept emerges does not determine its future usage, though the history
of its usage across time will reveal a great deal about the history of the
later contexts within which it was deployed. The origins of a concept, as
of any other object of historical inquiry, are not necessarily connected to
any later outcome, causally or otherwise: aetiology is not simply tele-
ology in reverse. Conversely, present usage or practice offers no sure
guide to the origins of a concept or activity.
No matter how perfectly you have understood the usefulness of any physiological
organ (or legal institution, social custom, political usage, art form or religious

 On which see generally Pagden, Lords of All the World.


Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (New York, ), , –, .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
rite) you have not yet thereby grasped how it emerged . . . the whole history of a
‘thing,’ an organ, a tradition, can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs,
continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which
need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just
follow and replace one another at random.
Meaning cannot therefore be identified with purpose, least of all in the
case of a concept, of which ‘[t]he form is fluid, the ‘‘meaning’’ even
more so’.
Confusion between origins as beginnings and origins as causes has
bedevilled the history of the British Empire at least since the eighteenth
century. The chronological origins of the British Empire have most
often been traced back to the reign of Elizabeth I, and hence to the
maritime exploits of her English sailors. This chronology defined the
Empire as Protestant, Anglo-British, benign and extra-European, be-
cause it originated in post-Reformation, specifically English activities,
was the product of navies not armies, and was conducted across vast
oceanic expanses, far from the metropolis. This was the vision of
imperial origins emblematised in Millais’s ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’
(), itself inspired by the painter’s reading of J. A. Froude’s essay on
the Elizabethan sea-dogs, ‘England’s Forgotten Worthies’ ().
More recent historians have espoused a similar chronology but for
different reasons, by finding the origins of British imperialism in English
colonialism on the Celtic crescent surrounding the English core-state.
This was still an Anglo-British imperialism, though it was neither benign
nor exotic. External ‘imperialism’ was the offspring of ‘internal colonial-
ism’, as the English developed their ideologies of racial supremacy,
political hegemony, cultural superiority and divinely appointed civilis-
ing mission in their relations with a ‘Celtic fringe’, beginning in Ireland
in the sixteenth century. Maintaining the content, but disputing the
chronology, an alternative aetiology for English imperialism – defined
by its supremacist racism, its crusading national identity and its ideology
of conquest – has instead been traced to the twelfth century, and the
 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (), ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol
Diethe (Cambridge, ), .
 Cynthia Fansler Behrman, Victorian Myths of the Sea (Athens, Ohio, ), –, –.

[ J. A. Froude,] ‘England’s Forgotten Worthies’, The Westminster Review, n.s. ,  ( July ), ;
M. H. Spielman, Millais and His Works (Edinburgh, ), ; John Burrow, A Liberal Descent:
Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, ), –.
 Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development (London, );
Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution
(Oxford, ); Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations (Cambridge, ),
–.
 Introduction: state and empire in British history 
attempted anglicisation of Ireland, Scotland and Wales chronicled in
the works of William of Malmesbury and Gerald of Wales. This thesis
in turn disrupts any continuity between state-formation and empire-
building by making English imperialism a solely archipelagic phenom-
enon whose continuities with extra-British empire-building were
tenuous and analogical. In reaction, other historians, attempting to save
the chronology of origins but extend its scope forward from the six-
teenth century, have ‘unearthed in protestant religious consciousness a
root, perhaps even the taproot, of English imperialism’; even more
precisely, the ‘origins of Anglo-British imperialism’ have been located in
the Anglo-Scottish propaganda wars of the mid-sixteenth century.
This study reconsiders both the traditional and more recent accounts
of the ideological origins of the British Empire by tracing the histories
both of the concept of the British Empire and of the different concep-
tions of that empire from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-
eighteenth century. The ‘concept’ of the British Empire means the
idea that an identifiable political community existed to which the term
‘empire’ could be fittingly applied and which was recognisably British,
rather than, for example, Roman, French or English. It will be argued
that the emergence of the concept of the ‘British Empire’ as a political
community encompassing England and Wales, Scotland, Protestant
Ireland, the British islands of the Caribbean and the mainland colonies
of North America, was long drawn out, and only achieved by the late
seventeenth century at the earliest. This was not because the conceptual
language of Britishness was lacking; rather, it had been used in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to describe less expansive commu-
nities within the Three Kingdoms of Britain and Ireland. Nor was it
because the language of ‘empire’ was absent from British political
discourse: it too was used in more restricted senses. Only in the first half
of the eighteenth century, it will be argued, did the two languages
coincide to provide the conception of that larger community within

John Gillingham, ‘Images of Ireland –: The Origins of English Imperialism’, History
Today, ,  (Feb. ), –; Gillingham, ‘The Beginnings of English Imperialism’, Journal of
Historical Sociology,  (), –; Rees Davies, ‘The English State and the ‘‘Celtic’’ Peoples
–’, Journal of Historical Sociology,  (), –.

Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries (London, ), .

Roger A. Mason, ‘The Scottish Reformation and the Origins of Anglo-British Imperialism’, in
Mason (ed.), Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of  (Cambridge, ),
–.
 For the distinction between ‘concepts’ and ‘conceptions’ see, for example, Ronald Dworkin,
Taking Rights Seriously, rev. edn (Cambridge, Mass., ), –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
which the Three Kingdoms of Britain and Ireland and the English-
speaking islands, colonies, plantations and territories of the western
hemisphere were all members – albeit, unequal members – of a single
political body known as the ‘British Empire’.
The unifying concept of the British Empire left generous room for
different conceptions of that Empire. By the s, an integrated con-
cept of the British Empire could be found in the political writings of
creole elites and imperial officials throughout the British Atlantic world.
It was yoked to a particular conception of the Empire, espoused in
particular by oppositional politicians within Britain, that became domi-
nant (though it did not remain unchallenged). According to this concep-
tion, the British Empire had certain characteristics which distinguished
it both from past empires and from contemporary imperial polities such
as the Spanish Monarchy. Its inhabitants believed it to be primarily
Protestant, despite the variety even of Protestant denominations that
could be found within the Three Kingdoms and among the islands and
colonies; most importantly, it was not Catholic, despite the obvious
presence of a persistent Catholic majority in Ireland and of other
pockets of Roman Catholicism, for instance in Maryland.
The British Empire was an arena of hemispheric and international
trade. Its character was therefore commercial. The attachment to com-
merce – and the means by which commerce connected the various parts
of the Empire to one another – made the British Empire different from its
predecessors or its rivals, most of which (it was believed) had been
integrated by force, or had been operated more for reasons of power
(often over subject peoples) than plenty. For the far-flung British Empire
to be successful in its commerce, it had also to be maritime. The British
dominions were not all contiguous, and the richest parts of the Empire,
such as Barbados and Jamaica, were separated both from the Three
Kingdoms and from the mainland colonies by vast oceanic expanses.
The waters around Britain itself had always been defended by the Royal
Navy, and a series of naval myths provided the legendary foundations for
such maritime supremacy. Protestantism, oceanic commerce and mas-
tery of the seas provided bastions to protect the freedom of inhabitants of
the British Empire. That freedom found its institutional expression in
Parliament, the law, property and rights, all of which were exported
throughout the British Atlantic world. Such freedom also allowed the
British, uniquely, to combine the classically incompatible ideals of liberty
and empire. In sum, the British Empire was, above all and beyond all
other such polities, Protestant, commercial, maritime and free.
 Introduction: state and empire in British history 
The concept of a British Empire had its roots within the Three
Kingdoms of Britain and Ireland; however, to become elaborated in its
later, more expansive form, it had to overcome some formidable con-
ceptual and practical obstacles. The collision between an Erastian
English church and a Presbyterian Scottish kirk obviated the emergence
of a pan-British ecclesiology and exacerbated the denominational diver-
sity of the British Atlantic world. The British Empire therefore had no
unitary theological foundation, though the common Protestantism of
the majority of its inhabitants distinguished it sufficiently from the
Spanish and French monarchies. Secular political thought defined the
community in terms that could accommodate the contiguous territories
of a composite monarchy and even encompass an ethnic definition of
community that extended to Ireland, but nonetheless proved resistant to
imagining colonies and factories as members of the polity before the rise
of mercantilist thought in the period after the Restoration. Political
economy in turn redefined the nature of British maritime dominion,
which under the Stuarts had implied exclusive British imperium solely
over home waters; this was replaced by a conception of mare liberum on
the oceans which underpinned arguments for the free circulation of
trade around the Atlantic world.
The British Atlantic world could therefore only be conceived of as a
single political community once the intellectual limits to its growth had
been overcome in an era of expanding commerce and reform in colo-
nial government. The impetus of political contention helped to gener-
ate a distinctive ideology for the Empire, but only once a pan-Atlantic
conception of the British Empire had been generated by a cadre of
provincials and imperial officials beyond the metropolis itself in the
second quarter of the eighteenth century. That conception sprang
initially from Britain’s imperial provinces; when metropolitans took it
up later, theirs would be the derivative discourse, not the colonists’.
The ideological definition of the British state, and the conceptualisa-
tion of its relationship with its dependencies, was therefore neither a
solely metropolitan nor an exclusively provincial achievement: it was a
shared conception of the British Empire that could describe a commu-
nity and provide a distinguishable character for it. However, the in-
stabilities which marked both the concept and the conception from
their origins in debates within the Three Kingdoms would ultimately
create the ideological conditions for the debate preceding and sur-
rounding the American Revolution. The ideological origins of the
British Empire also constituted the ideological origins of the American
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
Revolution; the decline, fall and reconstruction of the British Atlantic
Empire can therefore be traced back to the limitations and instabilities
of the British state.

‘[H]istory devises reason why the lessons of past empire do not apply to
ours’, remarked J. A. Hobson in . The objects of his criticism were
those nineteenth-century English historians who denied the British
Empire any origins or antecedents at all and thereby left it suspended,
statically, outside history and beyond the reach of the conventional
compulsions of imperial decline and fall (or expansion and overstretch).
Hobson accurately diagnosed the fact that most of the major modes
within which British history has been written since the nineteenth
century had been inhospitable to Imperial history. This was partly the
result of the hegemony of English history and historians, for whom
England stood proxy for the United Kingdom, and who maintained a
willed forgetfulness about the rest of Britain, Ireland and the Empire.
Their grand narratives produced an English exceptionalism that sus-
tained an insular account of national history and proved increasingly
impregnable to the history of the Empire. For example, the historiogra-
phy of English religion told the history of the Church in England as the
story of the Church of England, a story that might begin with St
Augustine of Canterbury, Bede, or at least Wycliffe, but that found its
lasting incarnation in the Erastian Church founded under Henry VIII
at the English Reformation. That Church had, of course, expanded
across the globe to create a worldwide communion, but so had the
Dissenting and Nonconformist denominations. The Church of England
never became a unified imperial Church, least of all in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, and the existence of discrete Church establish-
ments in Scotland, Ireland and Wales meant that the English Church
remained but one ecclesiastical body within a more extensive Anglo-
British state (as constituted by the Anglo-Scottish Union of ). Eng-
lish ecclesiastical history could thus claim a lengthy pedigree, and even a
providential charter for insularity, but it did little to encourage an
ampler imperial perspective.

Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, nd edn (Cambridge, Mass., ).
 J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study, rd edn. (London, ), .

J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown
Subject’, American Historical Review,  (), –.

Michael Bentley, ‘The British State and its Historiography’, in Wim Blockmans and Jean-
Philippe Genet (eds.), Visions sur le développement des états européens: théories et historiographies de l’état
moderne (Rome, ), , –.
 Introduction: state and empire in British history 
The Whig history of the constitution proved similarly resistant to the
incorporation of Imperial history. That resistance can be traced back in
part to the Henrician Reformation, when the English Parliament had
declared in the preamble to the Act in Restraint of Appeals () that
‘this realm of England is an empire, entire of itself’, independent of all
external authority and free of any entanglements, whether in Europe or
further abroad. Though the exact import of those words has been much
debated, they were held to ‘assert that our king is equally sovereign
and independent within these his dominions, as any emperor is in his
empire’, in the words of William Blackstone. Regal independence
represented national independence, and therefore associated the consti-
tutional, statutary language of ‘empire’ with isolation and insularity.
From the era of the Huguenot historian Paul de Rapin-Thoyras, a
generation after the Glorious Revolution, until the age of Macaulay in
the mid-nineteenth century and beyond, the constitution was of greater
interest to Whig historians than expansion.
Constitutional liberty and imperial expansion seemed to be necess-
arily incompatible to many Whigs and to their ideological heirs. The
collision between empire and liberty lay at the heart of the debate
surrounding the American Revolutionary crisis, both for the Whiggish
supporters of American independence and for their sympathisers in
Britain. Yet even that was only one moment in a seemingly eternal
drama of the contention between imperium and libertas that was sure to
be played out again in the Second British Empire. ‘Is it not just
possible that we may become corrupted at home by the reaction of
arbitrary political maxims in the East upon our domestic politics, just
as Greece and Rome were demoralised by their contact with Asia?’
asked Richard Cobden in . ‘Not merely is the reaction possible,
it is inevitable’, replied Hobson: ‘the spirit, the policy, and the
methods of Imperialism are hostile to the institutions of popular

G. L. Harriss, ‘Medieval Government and Statecraft’, Past and Present,  ( July ), –; G. R.
Elton, ‘The Tudor Revolution: A Reply’, Past and Present,  (Dec. ), –; Harriss, ‘A
Revolution in Tudor History?’ Past and Present,  ( July ), –; G. D. Nicholson, ‘The
Nature and Function of Historical Argument in the Henrician Reformation’ (Ph.D. dissertation,
Cambridge, ), –; John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford, ), –.
 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England,  vols. (London, –), , .

Burrow, A Liberal Descent, , –.
 H. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American
Revolution (Chapel Hill, ).
 Miles Taylor, ‘Imperium et Libertas? Rethinking the Radical Critique of Imperialism during the
Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History,  (), –.
 Richard Cobden to William Hargreaves,  August , in John Morley, The Life of Richard
Cobden,  vols. (London, ), , .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
self-government’. Though most nineteenth-century Liberals and
even Radicals might not have shared these fundamentally classicising
fears of Asiatic luxury, such anxieties were symptomatic of a wider
unwillingness to admit the Empire within the history of the metropoli-
tan state itself, for fear of corrupting ‘domestic politics’. The poten-
tial for the incompatibility of empire and liberty was one of the great
legacies of the First British Empire to the Second; the genesis and
afterlife of the argument between these two values forms one of the
central strands of this study.
Whiggish indifference to the history of the Empire, and Radical
critiques of the threat posed by empire to the very fabric of English
liberty, might have rendered ‘the story of British expansion overseas . . .
the real tory alternative to the organization of English history on the
basis of the growth of liberty’, as Herbert Butterfield thought in .
Butterfield argued that ‘the shock of ’ had shown that the Whig
history of liberty and the Tory history of Empire were inseparable;
what he could not foresee in  was that the war itself would become a
major solvent of the Empire. Decolonisation rapidly rendered im-
plausible any attempt retrospectively to write the history of the British
Empire as the history of liberty: Winston Churchill’s History of the
English-Speaking Peoples (–), which he had first conceived in the
mid-s, and Arthur Bryant’s even more belated History of Britain and
the British Peoples (–), remained the monuments to hopes of effect-
ing such an historiographical reconciliation. The futility of this Tory
rapprochement was accompanied by the silence of the heirs of Whig
history. Historians on the Left were suspicious of the benign claims made
on behalf of the British Empire by paternalists, yet were also embar-
rassed by the part played by the Empire in creating a conservative strain
of patriotism. Accordingly, they perpetuated the separation of domes-
tic and Imperial history by overlooking the Empire almost entirely, as
the works of Christopher Hill, E. P. Thompson and Lawrence Stone, for

Hobson, Imperialism: A Study, .
 Compare Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal
Thought (Chicago, ), –.
 Herbert Butterfield, The Englishman and His History (Cambridge, ), –.

Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples,  vols. (London, –); Arthur
Bryant, The History of Britain and the British Peoples,  vols. (London, –).

Stephen Howe, ‘Labour Patriotism, –’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and
Unmaking of British National Identity, : History and Politics (London, ), –. Robert Gregg and
Madhavi Kale, ‘The Empire and Mr Thompson: Making of Indian Princes and English
Working Class’, Economic and Political Weekly, ,  (– September ), –, offers an
excellent case-study of such historical amnesia on the historiographical Left.
 Introduction: state and empire in British history 
instance, mutely testify. The history of the Empire – by which is still
meant, overwhelmingly, the ‘Second’ British Empire – has been left to
Imperial historians, who have followed their own trajectory from post-
Imperial diffidence to a measured confidence in the prospects for their
own subfield. Only belatedly have they acknowledged that their purview
should also include the history of the metropolis, and hence that ‘British
imperial history should be firmly rooted in the history of Britain’.
The persistent reluctance of British historians to incorporate the
Empire into the history of Britain is symptomatic of a more general
indifference towards the Empire detected by those same historians.
‘British historians may have some grounds for their neglect of empire’, it
has been argued, because in the modern period it only intermittently
intruded into British politics; the British state itself was little shaped by
imperial experiences; there was no single imperial ‘project’; rather,
‘empire performed a reflexive rather than a transforming role for the
British people’. The question of ‘Who cared about the colonies?’ in the
eighteenth century has been answered equally scrupulously: ‘A lot of
people did, though they were very unevenly distributed geographically
and socially and quite diverse in their approach to American questions.’
Few benefited directly from colonial patronage; merchants took an
abiding interest in the Atlantic trade but they, of course, were concen-
trated in mercantile centres; lobbying groups on behalf of American
interests had little impact upon British politics, while handfuls of Britons
visited or corresponded with the colonies, whether as traders, soldiers,
sailors or professionals. If the Empire had so little impact upon the


Each found some belated interest in the Empire: Thompson, for familial reasons in Thompson,
‘Alien Homage’: Edward Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore (Delhi, ), and the others more
generally, for example in Christopher Hill, Liberty Against the Law: Some Seventeenth-Century Controver-
sies (London, ), pt , ‘Imperial Problems’, and Lawrence Stone, ‘Introduction’, in Stone
(ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from  to  (London, ), –. The works of Eric
Hobsbawm and V. G. Kiernan are, of course, notable exceptions to this caveat, though neither
has been solely concerned with Britain.
 P. J. Marshall, ‘A Free Though Conquering People’: Britain and Asia in the Eighteenth Century, Inaugural
Lecture, King’s College London,  March  (London, ),  (quoted); David Fieldhouse,
‘Can Humpty-Dumpty Be Put Together Again? Imperial History in the s’, Journal of Imperial
and Commonwealth History,  (), –, ; John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The
Manipulation of British Public Opinion, – (Manchester, ); MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism
and Popular Culture (Manchester, ); A. G. Hopkins, The Future of the Imperial Past, Inaugural
Lecture,  March  (Cambridge, ), –.

P. J. Marshall, ‘Imperial Britain’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History,  (), , ,
, .

Jacob M. Price, ‘Who Cared About the Colonies? The Impact of the Thirteen Colonies on
British Society and Politics, circa –’, in Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (eds.),
Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill, ), –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
historical experience of metropolitan Britons, why would it be necess-
ary to integrate the history of the Empire with the history of the
metropolis?
This division between domestic history and extraterritorial history
was not unique to the history of Britain. The rise of nationalist historiog-
raphy in the nineteenth century had placed the history of the nation-
state at the centre of European historical enquiry, and distinguished the
state from the territorial empires that had preceded it, and in turn from
the extra-European empires strung across the globe. The classic nation-
state united popular sovereignty, territorial integrity and ethnic homo-
geneity into a single definition; it therefore stood as the opposite of
empire, in so far as that was defined as a hierarchical structure of
domination, encompassing diverse territories and ethnically diverse
populations. The nation-state as it had been precipitated out of a system
of aggressively competing nations nonetheless functioned as ‘the empire
manqué ’, which always aimed at conquest and expansion within Europe,
but which often had to seek its territorial destiny in the world beyond
Europe. ‘Nowadays’, as Max Weber put it, ‘we have to say that a state
is that human community which (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly
of legitimate physical violence within a certain territory, this ‘‘territory’’ being
another of the defining characteristics of the state.’ That association of
the state with territoriality – and hence, implicitly, with contiguity –
deliberately dissociated integral, legally bounded states from the less
well-demarcated empires, which could be defined either formally or
informally, which were separated by sometimes vast oceanic distances
from their metropoles, and within which legimitacy was incomplete and
physical violence more unevenly distributed.
The distinction between the ‘internal’ histories of (mostly) European
states and the ‘external’ histories of (exclusively) European empires
obscured the fact that those European states had themselves been
created by processes of ‘conquest, colonization and cultural change’ in
the Middle Ages. Outside the conventional heartland of Europe, the
westward expansion both of medieval Russia and of the nineteenth-
century United States, for example, proceeded by many of the same

Istvan Hont, ‘The Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind: ‘‘Contemporary Crisis of the Nation
State’’ in Historical Perspective’, Political Studies,  (), –; V. G. Kiernan, ‘State and
Nation in Western Europe’, Past and Present,  ( July ), .
 Max Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ (), in Weber: Political Writings, ed. Peter
Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge, ), –.
 Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change – (New
Haven, ).
 Introduction: state and empire in British history 
methods, yet the history of territorial ‘extension’ has been rigorously
distinguished from the history of maritime ‘expansion’: ‘sea space is
supposed to constitute the difference between the former, which is part
of the national question, and the colonial question as such’. This
would be true of the histories of Portugal, the Dutch Republic, France
and even Sweden, the bulk of whose empire lay close to home, around
the shores of the Baltic Sea. Sea-space lay between Aragon and
Naples, between Castile and the Spanish Netherlands, and between
Britain and Ireland. The sea could be a bridge or a barrier, whether
within states, or between European states and their possessions outre-mer.
The distinction between states and empires has rarely been a clear
one, least of all in the early-modern period. As Fernand Braudel ob-
served of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ‘a formidable newcomer
confronted the mere territorial or nation-state’: the new composite
monarchies of early-modern Europe, ‘what by a convenient though
anachronistic term one could call empires in the modern sense – for how
else is one to describe these giants?’ In this context, it is notable that
those European countries that accumulated the earliest overseas em-
pires were also those that earliest consolidated their states; conversely,
those weaker states that had not attempted extensive colonisation out-
side Europe – most obviously, Germany and Italy – only pursued
imperial designs after they had acquired the marks of statehood in the
later nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. Empires gave birth to
states, and states stood at the heart of empires. Accordingly, the most
precocious nation-states of early-modern Europe were the great empire-
states: the Spanish Monarchy, Portugal, the Dutch Republic, France
and England (later, Britain).
The United Kingdom of Great Britain (and, after , Ireland)
would become the most powerful among the composite states of
Europe, and would command the greatest of all the European overseas
empires. However – perhaps because of this conspicuous success in both
state-formation and empire-building – the disjuncture between British
history and the history of the British Empire has been peculiarly abrupt
and enduring. Even when the Empire has been construed more widely
than just the Thirteen Colonies, and its potential sphere of influence
broadened to encompass cultural, as well as political and economic,

Marc Ferro, Colonization: A Global History, trans. K. D. Prithipaul (London, ), .
 Michael Roberts, The Swedish Imperial Experience, – (Cambridge, ), –, –,
though see also C. A. Weslager, New Sweden on the Delaware – (Wilmington, Del., ).
 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân
Reynolds,  vols. (London, ), , .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
concerns, even the most modest assessment of who cared concludes in a
paradox. Though empire ‘was all-pervasive’ – as the far-fetched para-
phernalia on every tea-table in Britain could demonstrate by the late
eighteenth century – it ‘often went strangely unacknowledged – even by
those who benefited from it most’. In Britain, as in Italy, Germany or
France, for much of the time ‘empire simply did not loom all that large
in the minds of most men and women back in Europe’. Such a
paradox may make it easier to incorporate the fruits of empire into
social history, but it still encourages the belief that the Empire took
place in a world elsewhere, beyond the domestic horizons of Britons,
and hence outside the confines of British history.
Imperial amnesia has of course been diagnosed before. ‘We seem, as
it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence
of mind’, J. R. Seeley told his Cambridge audience in . ‘While we
were doing it, that is in the eighteenth century, we did not allow it to
affect our imaginations or in any degree to change our ways of think-
ing.’ Seeley hoped to provoke in his audience the realisation that they
were, and long had been, inhabitants not of little England but rather of a
‘Greater Britain’ that encompassed the colonies of white settlement in
North America, the Caribbean, the Cape Colony and Australasia, all
bound together into an ‘ethnological unity’ by the common ties of ‘race’,
religion and ‘interest’. Yet his aims were also more specifically historiog-
raphical, as he partook in the first stirrings of the reaction against insular
Whig constitutionalism which would culminate in Butterfield’s The Whig
Interpretation of History () half a century later. The grounds for Seeley’s
attack were not, like those of later Whig revisionists, anti-teleological, for
he wished to substitute the expansion of the Empire for the growth of the
constitution as the backbone of ‘English’ history since the eighteenth
century. Just as he wished to recall his Cambridge audience to their
responsibilities as members of a global community, so he wanted to
remind fellow-historians, who were transfixed by ‘mere parliamentary
wrangle and the agitations about liberty’, that in the eighteenth century
‘the history of England is not in England but in America and Asia’.
 Linda Colley, ‘The Imperial Embrace’, Yale Review, ,  (), , –.

James Walvin, Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, – (Basingstoke, ); Philip
Lawson, A Taste for Empire and Glory: Studies in British Overseas Expansion, – (Aldershot,
), chs. –.
 J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (London, ), .

Seeley, The Expansion of England, , , ; P. B. M. Blaas, Continuity and Anachronism: Parliamentary
and Constitutional Development in Whig Historiography and in the Anti-Whig Reaction between  and 
(The Hague, ), –.
 Introduction: state and empire in British history 
Seeley’s Expansion of England became one of the best-sellers of late
Victorian Britain, and remained in print until , the year of the
Suez crisis. Its very popularity ensured that its effects would be wide-
spread and enduring, even if they were not necessarily those sought by
Seeley himself. The work certainly failed in its positive agendas. The
Imperial Federation movement of the s, to which the lectures gave
succour, did not achieve its aim of bringing institutional union to the
‘ethnological’ entity he had described. Nor did the writing of domestic
history become any more noticeably hospitable to the matter of
Greater Britain, despite the brief vogue enjoyed by the term. Seeley
himself retreated from the imperial perspective he had encouraged in
The Expansion of England. His next major work, The Growth of British
Policy (), despite its title, chronicled the diplomatic history of Eng-
land alone from  to , but in this work the only empire in that
period was the Holy Roman Empire. It thereby confirmed the assump-
tion of his earlier book that England’s expansion to become a global
‘Commercial State’ was the creation of the eighteenth century: hence
the British Empire, in its classic and enduring form, had not en-
compassed the Atlantic empire of the seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries.
Instead of promoting a new imperial synthesis among British histor-
ians, Seeley’s work inspired the creation of the new and separate
subfield of Imperial history. This created a novel area of historical
inquiry, but it institutionalised the very separation between British
history and Imperial history that Seeley had deplored; it also identified
Imperial history almost exclusively as the history of the ‘Second’ British
Empire. Though Seeley had reserved particular scorn for those histor-
ians of eighteenth-century Britain who had failed to recognise the true
direction of British history in that century, and who overlooked the
Empire at the expense of the Whiggish history of liberty, even in The
Expansion of England the eighteenth century was important only as a
prelude to the Imperial grandeur of the nineteenth. It marked the
prologue to the Second British Empire, while the American Revolution

C. W. Dilke, Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in the English-Speaking Countries during  and ’, 
vols. (London, ); E. A. Freeman, Greater Greece and Greater Britain; and, George Washington, The
Expander of England (London, ); Dilke, Problems of Greater Britain (London, ); David
Armitage, ‘Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?’, American Historical Review,
 (), –.
 J. R. Seeley, The Growth of British Policy,  vols. (Cambridge, ), , –.

Peter Burroughs, ‘John Robert Seeley and British Imperial History’, Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History,  (), –; J. G. Greenlee, ‘A ‘‘Succession of Seeleys’’: The ‘‘Old
School’’ Re-examined’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History,  (), –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
(‘an event’, Seeley thought, ‘. . . on an altogether higher level of import-
ance than almost any other in modern English history’) was the regret-
table but instructive entr’acte between two largely distinct empires.
Seeley elsewhere remarked on the fragility of the First Empire, and its
failure to produce the kind of organic community united by strong ties
of nationality, religion and interest that he believed characterised
Greater Britain in the nineteenth century: ‘We had seen on the other
side of the Atlantic only tobacco and fisheries and sugar, not English
communities’, a ‘materialist’ (or mercantilist) empire created for the
benefit of the metropolis, but thereby doomed to dissolution as ‘[t]he
fabric of materialism crumbled away’. Some among Seeley’s contem-
poraries disagreed strongly with that verdict, most notably the man soon
to be his counterpart as Regius Professor at Oxford, E. A. Freeman, an
opponent of the Imperial Federation movement but a proponent of an
expansive community of the Anglo-Saxon and anglophone peoples,
including the United States, rather than the narrower Imperial commu-
nity of Greater Britain. Freeman effectively forgave the Americans for
their Revolution and pronounced them to be brethren sprung from the
same Anglo-Saxon stock, speakers of the same language, and inheritors
of the same patrimony of freedom as the English. His proselytising
Anglo-Saxonism, spread on a lecture-tour of the eastern United States
in – just as Seeley was delivering his lectures in Cambridge, had
an equal but opposite effect: as Seeley planted the seeds for Imperial
History, so Freeman helped to prepare the ground for the ‘Imperial
School’ of early – or colonial – American history. However, the
different premises on which the two syntheses rested, their almost
entirely exclusive chronologies, and their competing orientations – one
eastward, the other, westward from Britain – effectively confirmed the
divorce between the histories of the First and Second British Empires for
much of the following century.
For Seeley, ‘history has to do with the State’, just as the study of
history should be a ‘school of statesmanship’ for its practitioners and
 Seeley, The Expansion of England, .

Seeley, The Expansion of England, ; Seeley, ‘Introduction’, in A. J. R. Trendell, The Colonial Year
Book for the Year  (London, ), xx.

E. A. Freeman, ‘Imperial Federation’ (), in Freeman, Greater Greece and Greater Britain, –.
For an instructive comparison of Seeley and Freeman, see Stefan Collini, Donald Winch and
John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cam-
bridge, ), –.

E. A. Freeman, Lectures to American Audiences (Philadelphia, ); Freeman, Greater Greece and
Greater Britain, –; Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American
Historical Profession (Cambridge, ), –.
 Introduction: state and empire in British history 
their pupils. The state in his sense was defined functionally, by its
monopoly of force and its duty to uphold justice and defend its inhabit-
ants; more importantly, it was constituted as a community ethnically,
religiously and by commonality of interest. On these grounds, Seeley
argued, Greater Britain had as much of a claim to be called a state as
‘England’ itself: both were organic communities, united by common
interests, and not merely ‘composed of voluntary shareholders’ or for-
med by force into ‘inorganic quasi-state[s]’. The British Empire was
therefore not an empire in the ordinary sense at all, since it was not held
together by force (India of course excluded); it was simply ‘an enlarge-
ment of the English State’. Yet, if the British Empire was in fact the
‘English’ state writ large, many of the nation-states of Europe were in
fact empires in minuscule, since they had come into being by incorpor-
ating diverse peoples and scattered territories by conquest, annexation
and force. Indeed, in so far as most modern states contained huge
expanses of territory, and were inevitably divided by region and locality,
they all exhibited the kind of federal ‘double-government’, in the centre
and at the localities, that was a feature of imperial governance. In this
sense, all contemporary states – the United States, with its individual
states; England, with its counties; France, with its départements – were to a
greater or lesser degree federal and composite. In their structures of
governance, they approximated modern empires far more than they did
classical city-states; similarly, modern empires like ‘Greater Britain’
could be called states, if states were defined by the ‘ethnological’ unity
they displayed.
Seeley’s attention to the common features of state and empire led him
to consider as convergent and similar processes which later historians
have tended to treat as parallel or distinct. States had once had the
characteristics of empires; empires were now the enlarged versions of
states. State-building and empire-formation did not have to be treated
as if one were a centrifugal process, drawing everything inwards to a
governmental centre, and the other centripetal, extending metropolitan
governance into new territories and over new peoples. Seeley’s confla-
tion of state and empire of course had its limitations. The greatest of
these was the necessary omission of India from the community of
Greater Britain. This masked the fact that the British Empire in South
 Seeley, The Expansion of England, ; Seeley, ‘The Teaching of Politics’ (), in Seeley, Lectures and
Essays (London, ), .
 Seeley, Introduction to Political Science: Two Series of Lectures (London, ), , , , –; Seeley,
The Expansion of England, , .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
Asia was precisely the kind of ‘inorganic quasi-state’ Seeley deplored in
his Introduction to Political Science (). Nonetheless, it enabled him to
see continuities between the First and Second British Empires that other
historians had overlooked; more fruitfully, it allowed him to discern a
relationship between state-formation and empire-building that histor-
ians have yet to investigate comprehensively.
Seeley argued that two movements defined the history of Britain after
: ‘the internal union of the three kingdoms’, and ‘the creation of a
still larger Britain comprehending vast possessions beyond the sea’.
The recent construction of a ‘New British History’ by historians of
England, Scotland and Ireland has made it possible to perceive connec-
tions between these two processes that were invisible to Seeley, who
remained more concerned with the expansion of ‘England’ than with
the creation of Britain. This ‘New British History’ has taken its inspira-
tion from J. G. A. Pocock’s exhortations that the contraction of Greater
Britain should be the reason to rewrite the history of Britain in its widest
sense. Pocock initially called for a ‘new subject’ of British history in
New Zealand in , just after Britain’s decision to enter the European
Economic Community, and with it, the Common Agricultural Policy,
which had potentially devastating consequences for economies like New
Zealand’s, which had for over a century been the beneficiaries of
imperial preferences. This ‘New British History’ would not simply
treat the histories of the Three Kingdoms and four nations that had
variously interacted within ‘the Atlantic Archipelago’ of Britain, Ireland
and their attendant islands and continental neighbours. Those histories
would be central to its agenda, but Pocock’s inclusion of British America
before , and British North America (later, Canada) thereafter, as
well as the histories of Australia and New Zealand (and, presumably, of
other white settler communities of primarily British descent), ‘obliges us
to conceive of ‘‘British history’’ no longer as an archipelagic or even an
Atlantic-American phenomenon, but as having occurred on a planetary
scale’. Pocock therefore offered a vision of Greater Britain in light of
the contraction of ‘England’ rather than its expansion, and from the

Freeman, Greater Greece and Greater Britain, –; Deborah Wormell, Sir John Seeley and the Uses of
History (Cambridge, ), .

Seeley, The Expansion of England, –.
 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, New Zealand Historical Journal, 
(), –, rptd in Journal of Modern History,  (), –; Pocock, ‘The Limits and Divisions
of British History’.

J. G. A. Pocock, ‘History and Sovereignty: The Historiographical Response to Europeanization
in Two British Cultures’, Journal of British Studies,  (), –, –.

Pocock, ‘The Limits and Divisions of British History’, –.
 Introduction: state and empire in British history 
vantage point of a former imperial province rather than from that of the
metropole. The post-Imperial anxiety behind Pocock’s historiographi-
cal agenda is as obvious as the high-Imperial confidence behind
Seeley’s. These equal yet opposite motives nonetheless produce the
same historiographical conclusion: that it is essential to integrate the
history of state and empire if British history, not least in the early
modern period, is to be properly understood.
The New British History has concentrated on the ‘British problem’,
the recurrent puzzle faced especially by the political elites of England,
Wales, Scotland and Ireland of how to integrate four (or more nations)
into three (or, at times, fewer) kingdoms, or to resist absorption or
conquest by one or other of the competing states within Britain and
Ireland. It has become clear that some points in the histories of Britain
and Ireland were more ‘British’ than others. During these moments, the
problem of Britain – whether within Anglo-Scottish, Anglo-Irish,
Hiberno-Scottish or pan-archipelagic relations – came to the forefront
of political debate, and profoundly affected the interrelations between
the Three Kingdoms. These were all stages in a process of state-
formation construed teleologically as the history of political union with-
in the ‘British Isles’, from the Statute of Wales (), via the Irish
Kingship Act (), the attempted dynastic union between England and
Scotland under Henry VIII and Edward VI (, –), to the
personal union of England and Scotland under James VI and I and
Charles I (–), the creation of a British Commonwealth (–),
the Stuart Restoration, the Glorious Revolution and the Williamite
Wars in Ireland (–), the Anglo-Scottish Union () and on to
the Union of Great Britain and Ireland (–).
Concentration on the history of the British state has reproduced
many of the features of the whiggish histories of the Three Kingdoms
that preceded it. Above all, it has perpetuated the separation between
the history of Britain and the history of the British Empire. For all of its
avowed intentions to supersede the national historiographies of Eng-
land, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, the New British History has not
encompassed the settlements, provinces and dependencies of Greater
Britain, whether in the nineteenth century or, especially, earlier.
 Almost none of the major collections of essays on the New British History covers any British
territories, populations, or influences outside Britain and Ireland: Ronald Asch (ed.), Three
Nations – A Common History? England, Scotland, Ireland and British History c. – (Bochum,
); Alexander Grant and Keith Stringer (eds.), Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History
(London, ); Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (eds.), Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British
State – (London, ); Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (eds.), The British Problem:
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
Meanwhile, the history of the British Empire has remained in the hands
of Imperial historians. As a result, neither Seeley’s suggestive juxtaposi-
tion of the creation of the ‘English’ state and the expansion of ‘England’,
nor Pocock’s more comprehensive agenda for British history written on
a global scale, has yet been pursued to its logical conclusion by treating
the histories of Britain and Ireland and of the British Empire as necess-
arily conjoined rather than inevitably distinct.
The adoption of early-modern European models of state-formation
by practitioners of the New British History has had the effect of further
separating metropolitan from Imperial history. These historians have
rediscovered what J. R. Seeley realised a century ago: that England, like
France, was a composite monarchy, just as Britain, like the Spanish
Monarchy, was a multiple kingdom. In the former, a diversity of
territories, peoples, institutions and legal jurisdictions is cemented under
a single, recognised sovereign authority; in the latter, various kingdoms
were ruled by a single sovereign, while they maintained varying degrees
of autonomy. ‘All multiple kingdoms are composite monarchies, but not
all composite monarchies are multiple kingdoms’, as Conrad Russell has
put it. The various moments in the British – or British-and-Irish –
problem registered the tensions between these two predecessors of the
classically defined nation-state, but in doing so they also exemplified
pan-European processes whose consequences were felt in Burgundy,
Béarn, the Spanish Netherlands, Catalonia, Naples, the Pyrenees,
Bohemia and elsewhere during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The divisive consequences of these processes were sharpened when one
partner in a composite state successfully attempted overseas expansion:
‘imperialism and composite monarchy made uncomfortable bedfel-
lows’. Yet this assertion that ‘imperialism’ was somehow distinct from
state-formation, rather than continuous with it, further entrenches the
State-Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago c. – (Basingstoke, ); Laurence Brockliss and
David Eastwood (eds.), A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles c. –c.  (Manchester,
); Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts (eds.), British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of
Britain, – (Cambridge, ); S. J. Connolly (ed.), United Kingdoms? Ireland and Great Britain
from  – Integration and Diversity (Dublin, ); Glenn Burgess (ed.), The New British History:
Founding a Modern State, – (London, ). Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (eds.),
Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c. –c.  (Cambridge, ), is the sole
exception.
 H. G. Koenigsberger, ‘Dominium Regale or Dominium Politicum et Regale: Monarchies and Parlia-
ments in Early Modern Europe’, in Koenigsberger, Politicians and Virtuosi: Essays in Early Modern
History (London, ), –.

Conrad Russell, ‘Composite Monarchies in Early Modern Europe: The British and Irish
Example’, in Grant and Stringer (eds.), Uniting the Kingdom?, .

J. H. Elliott, ‘A Europe of Composite Monarchies’, Past and Present,  (Nov. ), –.
 Introduction: state and empire in British history 
assumption that states – even composite states – and empires – even
largely intra-European empires, like Sweden’s – belong to different
areas of historical inquiry because they were distinguishable, even
competing, historical processes.
The model of composite monarchy offers fruitful analogies with the
history of the European empires. Monarchies were compounded by the
same means that empires were acquired: by conquest, annexation,
inheritance and secession. The rulers of composite monarchies faced
problems that would be familiar to the administrators of any empire: the
need to govern distant dependencies from a powerful centre; collisions
between metropolitan and provincial legislatures; the necessity of im-
posing common norms of law and culture over diverse and often
resistant populations; and the consequent reliance of the central govern-
ment on the co-optation of local elites. It is important not to overstate
the similarities: after all, the extra-European empires were often ac-
quired and governed without any recognition of the political standing of
their inhabitants; composite monarchies and multiple kingdoms tended
to have a bias towards uniformity rather than an acceptance of diversity;
and the provinces of composite monarchies were not usually treated
both as economic and as political dependencies. However, it is equally
important not to underestimate the continuities between the creation of
composite states and the formation of the European overseas empires.
As the succeeding chapters of this study will show, ideology provided
just such a link between the processes of empire-building and state-
formation in the early-modern period.

H. G. Koenigsberger, ‘Composite States, Representative Institutions and the American Revol-
ution’, Historical Research,  (), –; Michael J. Braddick, ‘The English Government,
War, Trade, and Settlement, –’, in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British
Empire, : The Origins of Empire (Oxford, ), –.
  

The empire of Great Britain: England, Scotland

and Ireland c. –

. . . realmis ar nocht conquest be buikis bot rather be bluid.

The ideological history of the relations between the Three Kingdoms of

England, Scotland and Ireland in the sixteenth century reveals the
inseparability of – and, in many ways, the identity between – state-
formation and empire-building in the early modern period. For the last
half-century, historians have argued that the origins of English (and,
later, British) imperial ideology can be found in English policy towards
Ireland under the Tudors. The governing assumptions of the English
official mind, according to this argument, were that Ireland, though a
kingdom after , should be treated as if it were a colony, especially
during the ‘New English’ period of settlement beginning in the s;
that the Irish were barbarians, comparable to the inhabitants of the
western hemisphere encountered by the Spanish; and that the English
had a duty to civilise and to Christianise (that is, to Protestantise) both
the Gaelic Irish and the Catholic ‘Old English’ descendants of the
Anglo-Norman settlers of the twelfth century. The continuity of person-
nel, similarity of methods and justifications, and parallel relations be-
tween Ireland and the new settlements of the late Elizabethan and early
Jacobean periods together created a narrative of English colonialism
that runs in a straight line from England, through Ireland, to the
Caribbean and thence the eastern seaboard of North America. In this
account, maritime enterprise transformed state-formation into empire-
building in the British Atlantic world along a path running from east to
 [Robert Wedderburn,] The Complaynt of Scotland (c. ), ed. A. M. Stewart (Edinburgh, ), .

Howard Mumford Jones, ‘Origins of the Colonial Idea in England’, Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society,  (), –; D. B. Quinn, ‘Sir Thomas Smith (–) and the
Beginnings of English Colonial Theory’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society,  (),
–; Nicholas Canny, ‘The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America’,
William and Mary Quarterly, rd ser.,  (), –.


 England, Scotland and Ireland c. – 
west, and from England to America, with Ireland as the crux of a
comprehensive English ‘westward enterprise’.
Historians of early-modern Ireland have been both the most vigorous
proponents and the most sophisticated critics of this argument. In some
versions, it can be reduced to a crudely teleological narrative which
renders Ireland perpetually a colonial dependency of England and its
non-Protestant inhabitants the subdued ‘natives’ within an imperfectly
anglicised colony. However, the most persuasive critique of the argu-
ment for the Irish origins of English colonial ideology situates Ireland
not within the history of early-modern colonialism but within the
paradigm of composite monarchy. Ireland thereby appears as a prov-
ince of a composite state, comparable to Bohemia or Naples, for
example, rather than as a colony of an emergent hemispheric empire. It
possessed powerful elites on whom the English often needed to rely;
even when those elites had been rejected as partners in English govern-
ment after the Geraldine rebellion of –, they were sufficiently
powerful to pose major threats to the success of attempted English
hegemony. Ireland also had its own sovereign parliament, admittedly
constrained by the operation of Poynings’ Law (which since  had
subjected all of its decisions to the scrutiny of the English Privy Council),
and in that way it offered a parallel to the provincial estates of other
early-modern European composite monarchies. To capture the ambi-
guity of Ireland’s position – as juridically a kingdom, though treated
practically by the English as if it were a colony – demands seeing it ‘as a
mid-Atlantic polity having some of the features of both the Old World
and the New’. This allows the comparisons with the European overseas
empires to remain, but also links them more closely to the processes of
state-building that characterised the early-modern composite monar-
chies. Ireland can therefore still provide a crucial test case for any
attempt to link the histories of states and empires in the early-modern
period, without making any teleological assumptions about either its
later unwilling dependency or its ultimate independence.
The origins of British imperial ideology are therefore to be found in

D. B. Quinn, ‘Ireland and Sixteenth Century European Expansion’, in T. Desmond Williams
(ed.), Historical Studies,  (London, ), –; Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, );
K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny and P. E. H. Hair (eds.), The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in
Ireland, the Atlantic, and America – (Liverpool, ); Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the
Atlantic World – (Baltimore, ); Canny, Making Ireland British, – (Oxford,
forthcoming).

Hiram Morgan, ‘Mid-Atlantic Blues’, Irish Review,  (–), –; Raymond Gillespie,
‘Explorers, Exploiters and Entrepreneurs: Early Modern Ireland and its Context –’, in
B. J. Graham and L. J. Proudfoot (eds.), An Historical Geography of Ireland (London, ), .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
the problematics of composite monarchy. Both England and Scotland
were typical early-modern monarchies in that each was a composite
territorial state before it became a maritime and colonial power over-
seas. Each combined diverse territories acquired by inheritance, con-
quest, cession or incorporation under the rule of a single sovereign. Such
territories could either be absorbed juridically into the state or they
could remain more or less distinct from it by retaining their own laws,
claiming various immunities, possessing separate ecclesiastical establish-
ments or maintaining representative institutions within a federal or
confederal structure. These early-modern states were not always na-
tions, if nations are defined by their ethnic or cultural homogeneity.
Distinct peoples inhabited diverse territories, so that the problems raised
by composite states, though primarily juridical, were often also cultural.
Similar legal, political and cultural dilemmas lay at the origins of all the
states of medieval Europe, each of which was the product of warfare,
colonisation and cultural aggression. The early-modern manifestations
of these problems were distinctive only in that they arose simultaneously
within the process of European state-building and in the activity of
expansion beyond Europe. In Britain and Ireland they were continuous
with half-a-millennium of activity by both the English and the Scottish
monarchies since at least the twelfth century.
If the origins of a specifically British ideology of empire are to be
understood, it is necessary to construct an account that incorporates the
history of Scotland as well as the histories of England and Ireland.
Scotland, like England, was a composite monarchy; also, like the Eng-
lish monarchy, it could be described anachronistically as ‘colonialist’ in
that it used settlement, acculturation and economic dependency as a
means to ‘civilise’ its territorial margins and their inhabitants. It would
also be colonialist in that it chartered and encouraged overseas ventures
and settlements in the Atlantic world during the early seventeenth
century. Moreover, after , the Stuart composite monarchy created
in  by the accession of King James VI of Scotland to the English
throne as King James I became, for the first time, the agent of collective-
 Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies – (Oxford, ); Michael Perceval-
Maxwell, ‘Ireland and the Monarchy in the Early Stuart Multiple Kingdom’, The Historical
Journal,  (), –; Jenny Wormald, ‘The Creation of Britain: Multiple Kingdoms or Core
and Colonies?’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, th ser.,  (), –.
 Jane H. Ohlmeyer, ‘‘‘Civilizinge of Those Rude Partes’’: Colonization within Britain and
Ireland, s–s’, in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, : The Origins
of Empire (Oxford, ), –.

G. P. Insh, Scottish Colonial Schemes, – (Glasgow, ).
 England, Scotland and Ireland c. – 
ly British (that is, Anglo-Scottish) colonisation in the escheated lands of
Ulster. The process of transforming English state-building into British
empire-formation was therefore not solely linear, passing through Ire-
land on its passage eastwards to America. Instead, it was triangular,
encompassing Anglo-Scottish, Anglo-Irish, and Hiberno-Scottish rela-
tions from the s to the s.
The problems of composite monarchies had distinguished the connec-
tions between the British monarchs and their dominions since the early
Middle Ages. The English Crown, for example, at various times claimed
or held Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Normandy, Gascony, Aquitaine, the
Isle of Man and the Channel Islands among its possessions, while the
Scottish Crown incorporated the Western Isles, the Orkneys and the
Shetlands, and challenged English claims to land in the Anglo-Scottish
borders well into the sixteenth century. The assertion of these claims in
practice raised a host of problems that were to supply precedents for the
constitutional relations between metropolis and colonies in the early-
modern period. Chief among these were questions about the property
rights which the Crown (or the king, in his capacity as duke of Nor-
mandy, for example) had in its various territories; what jurisdiction it
held over them; what capacity it might have to legislate for its overseas
dominions; and how subject peoples should be treated. In dealing with
their possessions, both the English and the Scottish Crowns experienced
the dilemma of reconciling uniformity with diversity that would plague
later relations between the British state and the British Empire.
The first ‘British’ empire, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
imposed England’s rule over a diverse collection of territories, some
geographically contiguous, others joined to the metropolis by navigable
seas. The various peoples who inhabited those territories were not all
treated alike by English colonists, who extended their power by military
aggression. At first, a commission to evangelise pagan populations had
legitimated English expansion; subsequently, a cultural mission to
civilise the barbarian maintained the momentum of conquest; later still,
 Compare Jane E. A. Dawson, ‘Two Kingdoms or Three? Ireland in Anglo-Scottish Relations in
the Middle of the Sixteenth Century’, in Roger A. Mason (ed.), Scotland and England, –
(Edinburgh, ), –.

On which see Julius Goebel, Jr, ‘The Matrix of Empire’, in Joseph Henry Smith, Appeals from the
Privy Council from the American Plantations (New York, ), xiii–lxi; John T. Juricek, ‘English Claims
in North America to : A Study in Legal and Constitutional History’ (Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Chicago, ), , ‘The Constitutional Status of Outlying Dominions: King and
Crown’; A. F. McC. Madden, ‘,  and All That: The Relevance of the English Medieval
Experience of ‘‘Empire’’ to Later Imperial Constitutional Issues’, in John E. Flint and Glyndwr
Williams (eds.), Perspectives of Empire: Essays Presented to Gerald S. Graham (London, ), –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
an ideology of domination and an historical mythology together encour-
aged further English migration and the resettlement of native peoples
on the conquered lands. Though the English did export their govern-
ing institutions, the exigencies of colonial rule demanded that control of
the outlying territories be left in the hands of absentee proprietors or
entrusted to a creolised governing elite. That elite in time grew to
demand its independence, and appropriated legislative institutions to
affirm its autonomy. The English nonetheless remained the cultural
arbiters and commercial masters of what was formally an Anglo-British
empire over which they steadfastly asserted their sovereignty. They had
acquired this empire haphazardly and with little determining fore-
thought. Within two centuries of its inception, it had disintegrated,
apparently for good. Failure to enforce institutional uniformity, incom-
plete assimilation of subject peoples, the cultural estrangement of the
English settlers from metropolitan norms and monarchical indifference
together conspired to bring about its collapse.
This ‘British’ empire reached its apogee in the reign of Edward I
(–), not under George III. Its dependencies were not the colo-
nies of British North America, the western Atlantic and the Caribbean,
but rather Ireland, Wales and Scotland, the constituent kingdoms and
principalities of the north-west European archipelago. It extended the
claims of an even earlier empire within Britain, the Imperium Anglorum of
the Anglo-Saxon kings. Athelstan (–) occasionally used the title of
Imperator, meaning a supreme ruler over the diverse territories he ruled
within what are now the boundaries of England; more fulsomely, Edgar
I (–), ‘King of the Angles’ (Anglorum Basileus), proclaimed himself
‘Emperor and Lord’ (Imperator et Dominus) of the islands and the ocean
around Britain, including all of the kings and all of the nations within its
borders.
The ‘empire’ of the Anglo-Saxon monarchs was long remembered,
and its memory partly inspired the aggressive posture of the Angevin

James Muldoon, ‘Spiritual Conquests Compared: Laudabiliter and the Conquest of the Amer-
icas’, in Steven B. Bowman and Blanche E. Cody (eds.), In Iure Veritas: Studies in Canon Law in
Memory of Schafer Williams (Cincinnati, ), –; John Gillingham, ‘The English Invasion of
Ireland’, in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (eds.), Representing Ireland:
Literature and the Origins of Conflict, – (Cambridge, ), –.
 R. R. Davies, ‘The Failure of the First British Empire? England’s Relations with Ireland, Scotland
and Wales –’, in Nigel Saul (ed.), England in Europe – (London, ), –.
 James Campbell, ‘The United Kingdom of England: The Anglo-Saxon Achievement’, in
Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer (eds.), Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History
(London, ), ; compare John Dee, ‘HAKKASOJQASIA BQESSAMIJG’ (), BL Harl. MS , ff.
v–r.
 England, Scotland and Ireland c. – 
and Plantagenet kings towards Wales, Ireland and Scotland. Despite
the Anglo-Saxons’ success in creating a unified English kingdom be-
tween the seventh and the eleventh centuries, they were unable to
absorb the bordering territories of Scotland and Wales, which were left
as potential prizes for future rulers. The Scottish Crown similarly used
the language of empire to claim its independence and supremacy in the
fifteenth century, and for similar reasons. The collision between these
two imperial monarchies in the mid-sixteenth century would give rise to
the first claims (by the English Crown) to an ‘Empire of Great Britain’,
and would evoke the counterclaim, by defenders of Scottish autonomy,
that to become part of such an ‘empire’ would make Scotland into little
more than a ‘colony’ of England. These appeals to imperium and coloniae,
throughout the Three Kingdoms in the late medieval and early-mod-
ern period, indicated the Roman roots of British imperial ideology.
From those neo-Roman origins sprang the continuity between the
creation of a unitary, legally-bounded, independent conception of the
state and the later process of forming a multinational, extensive empire
in the Atlantic world.

Empire was always a language of power. In its original Roman sense,

imperium denoted the authority of a magistrate to act on behalf of Rome
and its citizens, whether at home (domi), in the city of Rome, or abroad
(militiae). The people donated imperium to their magistrates; they, in turn,
acted only in so far as they represented the people collectively. No one
but a magistrate could command such authority, and such authority
could only be vested in a magistrate. Imperium was thus formally restric-
ted, even though it was potentially unlimited in its extent outside the city
itself. In the early years of the Roman Republic, the exclusivity of
imperium was strengthened by the absolute distinction between imperium
domi and imperium militiae. Though each was temporary, and vested in a
particular agent, the latter was even more tightly restricted because it was
much more expansive in its powers. The boundary between imperium domi
and imperium militiae was the outer limit of the city of Rome itself, whether
defined (in the earliest days) as the walls of the city or (in later years) as the
furthest reach of Roman government. The barrier between the two was
absolute; to cross it meant the reversion of theoretically limitless power
over soldiers and subjects to the sphere of Romans and free people.

Andrew Lintott, ‘What was the ‘‘Imperium Romanum’’?’ Greece and Rome,  (), –; P. A.
Brunt, ‘Laus Imperii’, in Brunt, Roman Imperial Themes (Oxford, ), –; J. S. Richardson,
‘Imperium Romanum: Empire and the Language of Power’, Journal of Roman Studies,  (), –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
The scope of imperium expanded with Rome’s growth beyond the
bounds of the city and outward from the heartlands of northern Italy. It
gradually came to mean authority in any form, detached from any
particular holder of it; when it no longer applied solely to the strictly
defined authority of a magistrate, it also lost the restrictions that magis-
tratical authority had borne. This relaxation of the limits on imperium
accompanied the dissolution of the boundary between imperium domi and
imperium militiae. As the distinction between domestic and military auth-
ority was no longer recognised, imperium came to mean unlimited auth-
ority in any sphere. That dissolution of the boundary between the city
and the lands beyond it also allowed the two areas to become con-
founded. No longer was Rome itself distinct from the territory ruled in
the name of Rome by its magistrates wielding imperium. The city, its
colonies and its provinces now became a single territorial unit. This was
the Imperium Romanum or, at times, the Imperium Romanorum – the Roman
Empire, or the Empire of the Romans. By the time of the Principate, the
emperors carried the supreme authority over all of the peoples and
territories of that Imperium Romanum. Their authority did not go unchal-
lenged in practice, but in theory it could not be legitimately supplement-
ed, diluted or replaced. Imperium now denoted ultimate, self-sufficient,
indivisible authority over a territorial expanse formally known as the
Empire itself.
The Roman legacy of imperium to medieval and early modern Europe
was threefold. It denoted independent authority; it described a terri-
torial unit; and it offered an historical foundation for claims to both the
authority and the territory ruled by the Roman emperors. Imperium in
the sense of independent and self-sufficient authority offered a more
generally applicable precedent for later polities and, especially, their
rulers. To claim imperium was to assert independence, whether from
external powers or from internal competitors. The revival of the concept
of imperium as a conception of sovereignty has been traced to the twelfth-
century recovery of Roman law. According to this reformulation, the
sovereign – whether collective, or individual – within each polity could
claim the same independence of authority that had been enjoyed by the
Roman emperors at the height of their power. Sovereignty could not be
divided within the polity; neither could it be overridden from without.
Each ruler therefore claimed the same powers within his own domain as
the emperors had asserted over the Imperium Romanum; each rex therefore
in regno suo erat imperator.
All of these conceptions of imperium were territorially static. None of
 England, Scotland and Ireland c. – 
them necessarily encouraged any ruler to expand the boundaries of his
dominions or implied any spatial dimension of rule. The history of the
Roman Empire presented an obvious example of a polity whose rulers
possessed both independent and universal imperium, and whose territories
expanded by alliance, inheritance and conquest. The Roman example
could inspire future rulers to extend their own territories, but it did not
inevitably do so. Imperium in the sense of unlimited authority demanded
the fastening of boundaries and clarification of the limits of authority
within and beyond those boundaries; similarly, imperium as composite
monarchy denoted diversity within unity, but did not imply that such
diversity had to be multiplied by the acquisition of further dependencies.
The formula of particular sovereignty emerged from competing
claims to imperium. One result of the recovery of Roman law was the
reassertion of the universalist claims of the emperor to be dominus mundi,
as the Digest (. . ) had it. Since the Imperium Romanum at its height
had encompassed the whole of the world known to the Romans, the
authority of the emperor was ipso facto universal. Undeterred by the
tautology at the root of this claim, the emperor and his successors
continued to assert the universality of their imperium. The barbarian
invasions, the sack of Rome in  and the end of the Western Empire in
 had extinguished the Imperium Romanum. Out of its ruins rose two
empires – Eastern and Western – as well as the Papacy. Unabashed by
the diversity of claimants to the imperial succession, the Holy Roman
emperors, the Byzantine emperors and the popes all at times demanded
recognition of their universal authority. Though the tradition of Roman
universalism remained intact, albeit controversial, particular claims to
imperium more successfully challenged papal and Imperial pretensions to
universality.
Late medieval and early modern rulers made increasingly frequent
claims to independent imperium. Such claims were particular, rather than
universal; they did not suggest any intention to compete with the
emperor or the pope for supremacy, but asserted both independence
from external interference and ascendancy over internal competitors.
For example, lawyers for the French monarchy asserted that the king of
France was an imperator in regno suo from the fourteenth century on-
wards. This was not to claim parity with the pope or the emperor,
 Walter Ullmann, ‘The Development of the Medieval Idea of Sovereignty’, English Historical
Review,  (), –.
 André Bossuat, ‘La Formule ‘‘Le Roi est empereur en son royaume’’: son emploi au XVe siècle
devant le parlement de Paris’, Revue Historique de Droit Français et Etranger, th ser.,  (), –
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
since the French kings had long since abandoned their candidacy for the
headship of the Holy Roman Empire. Instead, it was an assertion of
the French kings’ power over the clergy and the nobility within France
itself, derived from the Roman law principle of plenitudo potestatis. This
was a claim to internal authority rather than external power, an asser-
tion of royal supremacy not national self-determination, and therefore a
statement not of independence from outside authority but rather of
predominance over internal competitors. For this reason, the French
crown’s imperial claims have been associated more with the origins of
French absolutism than with the beginnings of French national sover-
eignty. This would not always be true of other monarchical claims to
imperial status in the following centuries; nevertheless, the French case
does illustrate well the Janus face of imperium, as an authority which
could either be used to ensure the dependency of internal competitors or
to assert independence from external powers.
For those European rulers who claimed independent imperium for their
particular realms or cities, the greatest external threat came from those
supranational polities that claimed both universal authority in the
present and descent from the Roman Empire in the past. This was true,
in varying degrees, of both the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy. The
headship of the Empire remained the most prestigious attribute of secular
kingship in the early modern period. Though it was clearly no longer the
emblem of universal rulership, the multinational character of the Empire
endowed its holder with greater authority than any that could be held by
any particular ruler of a single realm. When Charles V of Spain became
Holy Roman Emperor in , the Empire was united with the Spanish
Monarchy under his rule to become the most far-flung monarchy the
world had ever known. Charles’s dominions could not encompass all of
the realms of Europe, but they did include territories unknown even to
the Romans, in the New World beyond the Pillars of Hercules. This was
the nearest the post-classical world would come to seeing a truly world-
wide monarchy, and hence the closest approximation to universal
imperium since the last days of the Imperium Romanum itself.
.
 Gaston Zeller, ‘Les Rois de France, candidats à l’empire: essai sur l’idéologie impériale en
France’, Revue Historique,  (): –, –.
 Jacques Krynen, L’Empire du roi: idées et croyances politiques en France XIIIe–XVe siècle (Paris, ),
–.
 Ramón Menendez Pidal, El Idea Imperial de Carlos V (Buenos Aires, ); Frances A. Yates,
‘Charles V and the Idea of the Empire’, in Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century
(London, ), –; Earl Rosenthal, ‘Plus Ultra, Non Plus Ultra, and the Columnar Device of the
Emperor Charles V’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,  (), –.
 England, Scotland and Ireland c. – 
The Papacy could not make such widespread territorial claims, but its
authority was deemed to be more truly universal, because uncon-
strained by territoriality. The spiritual authority of the popes theoreti-
cally united the whole of Christendom into a single flock with a single
shepherd. The Papacy could lay equal claim to historical continuity
from the Roman Empire because the Empire itself had become a
vehicle for the propagation of Christianity with the conversion of
Constantine, notwithstanding the shock of the Sack of Rome by the
Goths and Augustine’s meditation thereon in the City of God. Particular-
ist claims to imperium made by other European monarchs could therefore
have two universalist antagonists outside their own realms, the Empire
or the Papacy. Each was a supranational body, claiming descent from
the Roman Empire, and asserting its universality as the legatee of
Rome’s extension. In the struggle for imperium, all roads led back to
Rome, though they did not necessarily lead back to the same conception
of Rome. Few polities could legitimately claim direct descent from the
Roman Empire; only the emperor and the pope could plausibly claim
even a restricted form of universal rulership. However, the powerful
language of imperium could and did sustain many rulers in their battles,
both internal and external, for independence and supremacy.
Yet even when there was no competition for imperium, rulers could
claim imperial status on the grounds that they possessed a number of
distinct territories which were united only under their headship. This
conception of imperium as a compound of territories could, like the other
meanings of the term, be traced back to the Roman Empire. As later
commentators were aware, the Roman Empire at its greatest extent had
been composed of distinct provinces bound to the Empire by the
emperor himself, as the representative of the Populum Romanorum. Once
these provinces dissolved their allegiance and became barbarian king-
doms in the latter days of the Western Empire, the federative structure
of the Empire became clear, when previously it had been obscured by
the ever-expanding ambit of Roman law and citizenship. As Isidore of
Seville defined it in the seventh century, it had become ‘a Roman
Empire, of which other kingdoms are dependencies’: no longer a uni-
tary and integrative territorial imperium, but rather an imperium in the
form of a composite monarchy, linking disparate realms and territories
under a single, supreme head. This federal conception of imperium, and
of the emperor as the head of such a federation, began to be imitated
 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiæ (c. –), quoted in Robert Folz, The Concept of Empire in Western
Europe from the Fifth to the Fourteenth Century, trans. Sheila Ann Ogilvie (London, ), .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
beyond the boundaries of the contracted Empire itself from the tenth
century, as the king of Castile-Léon proclaimed himself an emperor in
this sense, as did Athelstan and Edgar. Any ruler of multiple territories
could therefore be an Imperator, whether or not it was necessary for him
to claim independence from other such rulers.
The language and symbolism of empire provided early-modern mon-
archies with the resources for the legitimation of their independence, just
as it had originally allowed Italian city-states in the fourteenth century to
assert their juridical independence from the Empire. Such resources
encompassed regal symbols, legislative enactments and the increasingly
widespread and self-conscious use of the language of empire in state-
ments of national purpose. Since the late fourteenth century, English
kings had been represented as wearing the ‘closed’ crown of a circlet
topped by two crossed bands, though it seems not to have been called an
‘imperial crown’ until the reign of Henry V in the s. The image of a
monarch wearing such a crown first appeared on Scottish coinage circa
, three years before the English king Henry VII issued a gold
sovereign which showed him wearing the closed, imperial crown.
The regal appurtenance of the closed crown symbolised the ‘imperial’
status of the monarch who wore it. The crown worn by the Holy Roman
Emperor himself in fact had only one band atop it; the closed crowns of
other monarchs did not seek to usurp the status of the emperor within
their own jurisdictions, but rather to assert a claim of independence and
superiority within a specific territory that was equivalent to the emperor’s
within his. For this reason, the physical crown came to be identified with
the authority implied by the claim to imperial status. For instance, when
Cuthbert Tunstall advised Henry VIII in  that the king could not be
proposed as a candidate to be emperor, because he was not a prince of the
Empire, he soothed the monarch with the observation that ‘the Crown of
England is an Empire of hitselff, mych better then now the Empire of
Rome: for which cause your Grace werith a close crown’.

Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought,  vols. (Cambridge, ), , –;
J. P. Canning, ‘Ideas of the State in th- and th-Century Commentators on the Roman Law’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, th ser.,  (), –.
 Philip Grierson, ‘The Origins of the English Sovereign and the Symbolism of the Closed
Crown’, British Numismatic Journal,  (), –; Dale Hoak, ‘The Iconography of the Crown
Imperial’, in Hoak (ed.), Tudor Political Culture (Cambridge, ), –.

Roger A. Mason, ‘Regnum et Imperium: Humanism and the Political Culture of Renaissance
Scotland’, in Mason, Kingship and the Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation
Scotland (East Linton, ), ; Grierson, ‘The Origins of the English Sovereign’, .
 Cuthbert Tunstall to Henry VIII,  February , in Original Letters Illustrative of English History,
ed. Henry Ellis, st ser.,  vols. (London, ), , .
 England, Scotland and Ireland c. – 
This statement of the English Crown’s imperial status anticipated the
language of the declaration in the preamble to the  Act of Appeals
that ‘this realm of England is an empire’; however, such language was
not otherwise unprecedented, even in England. Thomas Cromwell’s
claim, made on behalf of Henry VIII, implied that the king possessed
the same power over temporal and ecclesiastical (if not necessarily
spiritual) matters as the later Roman emperors, particularly (though this
can be exaggerated) the British Roman emperor, Constantine. The
implied territorial definition of empire, the inclusion of all members of
the community of England within its territorial bounds, and the inde-
pendent superiority of the monarch over his subjects, without any
jurisdictional interference from outside, had also been asserted after
Henry’s conquest of the French town of Tournai in . Coins for
Tournai bearing the closed imperial crown hammered the point
home. The Act of Appeals may have ‘inaugurated names and con-
cepts destined to be symbolic of political realities vastly outshining the
king’s authority in England’; it did so by providing a convenient
statutory statement of an attribute of English kingship that had been
recognised, theorised and supplemented for almost a century.
The fifteenth-century French arguments that the rex Christianissimus
was in regno suo imperator had travelled to Scotland (by way of Scottish
civilians trained in French law-schools) as they would, two generations
later, to England (by way of French legal sources). Looking back
from the s, William Blackstone distinguished the language of the
Act in Restraint of Appeals from the ‘ridiculous notion, propagated
by the German and Italian civilians, that an emperor could do many
things which a king could not (as the creation of notaries and the like)’.
Such a notion would not have seemed quite so ridiculous to either the
English or the Scottish Crown in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries.
Indeed, it was precisely a dispute regarding notaries in  that pro-
voked the Scottish Parliament to declare that James III possessed

Hoak, ‘The Iconography of the Crown Imperial’, in Hoak (ed.), Tudor Political Culture, ;
Richard Koebner, ‘ ‘‘The Imperial Crown of this Realm’’: Henry VIII, Constantine the Great,
and Polydore Vergil’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research,  (), –; Walter Ullmann,
‘ ‘‘This Realm of England is an Empire’’ ’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History,  (), –.

Thomas F. Mayer, ‘On the Road to : The Occupation of Tournai and Henry VIII’s Theory
of Sovereignty’, in Hoak (ed.), Tudor Political Culture, –.

Koebner, ‘ ‘‘The Imperial Crown of this Realm’’ ’, .
 Mason, ‘Regnum et Imperium: Humanism and the Political Culture of Renaissance Scotland’, in
Mason, Kingship and the Commonweal, ; Mayer, ‘On the Road to ’, in Hoak (ed.), Tudor
Political Culture, –.

William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England,  vols. (London, –), , .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
‘ful Jurisdictioune and fre Impire within his realm’, some sixty years
before the English Parliament made any similar enactment. These
claims may also have been related to the acquisition of the Orkney and
Shetland Islands after the marriage of James III to Margaret of Den-
mark in , to claims to territories in France (such as Saintonge), as
well as to James IV’s attempts to bring the Western Isles under the
control of the crown. The Scottish assertion of imperium was both
jurisdictional and territorial; it at once proclaimed the independence of
the Scottish monarchy and projected its authority throughout the di-
verse dominions that made up the kingdom of the Scots. Similarly,
Henry VIII’s parliamentary claim to empire in the s had territorial
as well as caesaropapal implications, and was intended not only to assert
the independent ecclesiastical authority of the Crown but also England’s
overlordship of its neighbours in Wales, Ireland and ultimately Scot-
land. Accordingly, it can be linked conceptually to the two Acts of
Union that incorporated Wales to the English Crown between  and
, to the Irish Parliament’s declaration in  that Henry VIII was
‘King of Ireland’, rather than merely its ‘lord’, and, finally, to English
aggression against the Scots in the s.

The vernacular language of British imperial ideology – of ‘Great Brit-

ain’, ‘empire’ and ‘colony’ – was forged in the context of Anglo-Scottish
relations in the s. Beginning in , and then again in –, a
group of English and Scottish writers associated with Henry VIII and
Protector Somerset offered a series of arguments in favour of Scottish
submission to England. Under Henry, and in the early stages of Ed-
ward’s reign, these arguments reinforced the necessity of a dynastic
marriage between the infant Mary, Queen of Scots, and the English
prince (later, king) Edward; when such a marriage became impossible,
they appeared to justify military invasion of Scotland by England. ‘The
idea of Henry the imperialist bent on the union of the British Isles is no
longer supportable’, though that idea was accepted by contemporary
Scots who responded in kind with arguments against English designs,
 Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, ed. Thomas Thomson and Cosmo Innes,  vols. (Edinburgh,
–), , .
 Norman Macdougall, James III: A Political Study (Edinburgh, ), , –. My thanks to Roger
Mason for advice on this point.
 Graham Nicholson, ‘The Act of Appeals and the English Reformation’, in Claire Cross, David
Loades and J. J. Scarisbrick (eds.), Law and Government under the Tudors (Cambridge, ), –.
 David M. Head, ‘Henry VIII’s Scottish Policy: A Reassessment’, Scottish Historical Review, 
(), .
 England, Scotland and Ireland c. – 
especially when they were revived under Edward VI. Somerset saw the
subjection of Scotland as a means to increase English power within
Britain and to effect the spread of Protestantism by solving the long-
standing ‘British’ problem of two adjacent and hostile monarchies
inhabiting a single island. Somerset’s announced aim was not to create a
new monarchy within Britain, but to restore the ancient one called
‘Great Britain’, ‘which is no new name but the old name to them
both’. However, English claims to feudal overlordship, the use of
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s ‘British’ history to justify those claims and the
prominence of ‘imperial’ language in the English propaganda of the
s, lent credibility to Scottish fears of English intentions.
Proponents of the English cause in the Anglo-Scottish wars of –
 and – located the origins of the British Empire in the early
history of Britain as it had been told by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the
twelfth century. That empire was ‘British’ because it had been founded
by Brutus, a refugee from the Trojan wars; it was an empire because it
became a composite monarchy after Brutus’s death, when it was ruled
by his three sons, Locrine, Albanact and Camber. Geoffrey’s Historia
Regum Britanniæ () enshrined a vision of English dominance over
Britain within his legendary history. Brutus’s eldest son, Locrine, ruled
England; the younger sons paid homage to him on account of his
seniority, just as their respective kingdoms of Scotland and Wales were
held to owe homage to England: seniority implied superiority within the
post-Brutan feudal composite monarchy.
Supporters of England’s claims over Scotland also used early British
history to affirm the longevity of an English civilising mission within
Britain. The Galfridian history of early Britain provided the basis for the
English assertion in  of feudal superiority over the Scottish Crown.
The Declaration, Conteyning the Just Causes and Consyderations of This Present
Warre with the Scottis () issued by Henry VIII before his invasion of
Scotland argued that such feudal submission had been affirmed uninter-

Public Record Office,  //, quoted in M. L. Bush, The Government Policy of Protector Somerset
(London, ), , n. ; S. T. Bindoff, ‘The Stuarts and their Style’, English Historical Review, 
(), –. The earlier history of the term is treated in Denys Hay, ‘The Use of the Term
‘‘Great Britain’’ in the Middle Ages’, Transactions of the Society of Antiquaries of Great Britain, 
(–), –.
 See generally Marcus Merriman, ‘War and Propaganda during the ‘‘Rough Wooing’’’, Scottish
Tradition, / (–), –, and, more specifically, Roger A. Mason, ‘The Scottish Refor-
mation and the Origins of Anglo-British Imperialism,’ in Mason (ed.), Scots and Britons: Scottish
Political Thought and the Union of  (Cambridge, ), –.
 Roger A. Mason, ‘Scotching the Brute: Politics, History and National Myth in Sixteenth-
Century Britain’, in Mason (ed.), Scotland and England, –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
ruptedly from the earliest times until the reign of the English king Henry
VI. Before the arrival of Brutus, the author of the Declaration argued,
Britain had been inhabited by a race of giants, ‘people without order or
civilitie’; Brutus and his sons had brought order to the ‘rude’ inhabit-
ants, and ensured the continuing administration of justice by the ap-
pointment of a single superior over the three kingdoms ‘of whom the
sayd astates should depend’. Justice and peace replaced disorder and
incivility as Scotland and Wales became dependent states within a
multiple monarchy headed by England. John Elder, a Highlander and
supporter of Henry VIII’s dynastic policies in ‘Scotland, a part of your
Highnes empyre of England’, appealed to Henry’s treatment of the
Gaelic lords of Ireland as a precedent for bringing civility to his own
‘rude and barbarous’ people in the Highlands of Scotland. Just as the
‘gyauntes and wilde people, without ordour, civilite, or maners’ were
brought to ‘ordour and civilitie’ by Albanact’s rule in Scotland, so
Henry could bring civility to Scotland’s Gaelic lords, and the true,
Protestant, religion in place of ‘the papistical, curside spiritualitie of
Scotland’. As would later be the case in Ireland, and in North Amer-
ica, civility and Christianity were closely associated as the foundations of
order within a ‘British’ empire. However, in Elder’s case, at least, the
association between civility and Protestantism was not enduring: in
, he looked forward to the return of the true, Catholic, religion to
‘this moste noble and holy yle of Britayn’ as he celebrated the marriage
of the English Queen Mary to the Spanish Prince Philip, a ruler for
whom God had foreordained a worldwide empire (Cui Deus imperium
totius destinat orbis), and who would ‘enriche [Mary’s] empyre of En-
glande’.
The renewed attempts between – by the Edwardian regimes to
enforce Anglo-Scottish dynastic union, whether by persuasion or by fire
and sword, generated a conception of a British empire that was Protes-
tant, commercially expansive, bounded by the sea, and inhabited by the
subjects of two free and independent kingdoms united under one head.
This monarchy could be called ‘British’ because it traced its origins back
 A Declaration, Conteyning the Just Causes and Consyderations of this Present Warre with the Scottis (
November ), in The Complaynt of Scotlande wyth an Exortatione to the Thre Estaits to be Vigilante in
Deffens of Their Public Veil, ed. J. A. H. Murray (London, ), .

John Elder, ‘A Proposal for Uniting Scotland with England, Addressed to King Henry VIII. By
John Elder, Clerke, a Reddshanke’ (c. ), BL MS Royal . . , in The Bannatyne
Miscellany, , ed. Sir Walter Scott and David Laing (Edinburgh, ), , , .
 [ John Elder,] The Copie of a Letter Sent in to Scotlande, of the Arivall and Landynge, and Moste Noble
Marryage of the Moste Illustre Prynce Philippe, Prynce of Spaine, to the Moste Excellente Princes Marye Quene of
England (), in The Chronicle of Queen Jane, and of Two Years of Queen Mary, and Especially of the
Rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyat, ed. John Gough Nichols (London, ), , , .
 England, Scotland and Ireland c. – 
to its first king, Brutus, and reunited the isle of Britain under a single
ruler. The inhabitants of the island over which Brutus had ruled were
the original, ethnic Britons, though in due course they became mingled
with the Scots and the English. The ‘one sole Monarchie, shalbee called
Britayn’, and its subjects would ‘take the indifferent old name of
Britaynes again’. It could also be called an empire for good historical
reasons. Though the earliest Britons had ‘lost their name and Empire’
through sin and discord, their English and Scottish descendants had
been reunited when Britain became a province of the Roman Empire,
and when the British-born Christian Constantine had become emperor,
‘al Britayn, was under one Emperor, and beeyng under one Emperor,
then was Scotlande and Englande but one Empire’. The symbols of that
British empire remained as emblems of the English monarchy: the red
cross, originally borne by Constantine, and ‘a close crowne Emperiall,
in token that the lande is an empire free in it selfe, & subject to no
superior but ’.
The most elaborate exposition of the Tudor claim to the Scots throne,
Nicholas Bodrugan’s Epitome of the Title That the Kynges Majestie of Englande,
Hath to the Sovereigntie of Scotlande (), recalled that Somerset’s supposed
ancestor, Eldulph de Samour, had repelled a Saxon invasion whereby
‘this Realme was delivered from the tyrany of Saxons, and restored to
the whole Empire & name of great Briteigne’. That empire had its origins in
Brutus’s monarchy, and had been affirmed later by the Scots’ reception
of English law, the ecclesiastical supremacy of the archbishop of York
over the Scottish bishops and the feudal submission of Scotland, a
nation ‘from the begynnyng inseparably appendaunt to the crowne of
this realm’. The centuries of civil strife between the kingdoms of
England and Scotland had renewed the divisions within Britain. It
would be the task of the English to restore unity to the island, as they had
done in the past. As the French ambassador reported, the different
kingdoms of England and Scotland would then be abolished, and ‘les
deux royaumes unys et réduictz en ung empire quy sera dict et nommé
tousjours l’empire de la Grande Bretaigne et le prince dominateur d’icelluy
empereur de la Grande Bretaigne’.
 James Henrisoun, An Exhortacion to the Scottes to Conforme Themselves to the Honourable, Expedient, and
Godly Union Betweene the Two Realmes of Englande and Scotland (), in The Complaynt of Scotlande (ed.)
Murray, –.

Nicholas Bodrugan, An Epitome of the Title That the Kynges Majestie of Englande, Hath to the Sovereigntie of
Scotlande (London, ), sigs. aiiiv, [av]v, giiiv–gvv (my emphasis).

‘Mémoire contenant les articles proposés au Comte de Huntley’ ( January ), in Correspondance
Politique de Odet de Selve, Ambassadeur de France en Angleterre (–), ed. Germain Lefèvre-
Pontalis (Paris, ),  (my emphasis).
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
The ‘Edwardian Moment’ of the s saw the birth of the concept of
the ‘empire of Great Britain’ (or ‘l’empire de la Grande Bretaigne’); it
also saw the beginnings of a Protestant conception of that empire.
Henry VIII’s Declaration did not specify any particular religious settle-
ment for the proposed union of England and Scotland, though some-
time Protestants like John Elder did see English hegemony as a means to
accelerate reformation in Scotland. The return to the reformist pro-
gramme of Protestantising England under Somerset offered new hope
for Scots sympathisers of the English like the Edinburgh merchant
James Henrisoun that ‘as these two Realmes should grow into one, so
should thei also agre in the concorde & unite of one religion, & the same
the pure, syncere & incorrupt religion of Christ’. William Patten, the
militantly Protestant judge of the Marshalsea Court who accompanied
Somerset’s expedition of , similarly promised the Scots deliverance
‘from the most servile thraldom and bondage under that hideous mon-
ster, that venemous aspis and very , the bishop of Rome’. The
Greeks, the Russians and other members of the Eastern Church would
not submit to his ‘insolent Impery’: why then should the Scots? English
intervention in  would in due course help to secure the Scottish
Reformation, and ensure the existence of Britain as a Protestant island;
however, the enduring differences in theology and church government
between the English and the Scottish Churches would render Protes-
tantism more of a bone of contention than a bond of union between the
two kingdoms.
A more immediate bond between the two kingdoms would be trade,
according to Somerset’s partisans, who tentatively conceived the em-
pire of Great Britain as a commercial, as well as a political and relig-
ious, union. Henrisoun, the Edinburgh merchant, hoped to persuade
his countryfolk that union with England would increase national secur-
ity and that ‘the marchaunt might without feare goo abrode, and bryng
in forreine commodities, into the realme’ and offered a set of economic
proposals, embracing wage-labour, the grain-trade, fishing, mining,
and poor relief to cement the union and benefit the ‘commonwealth’.

Henrisoun, Exhortacion to the Scottes, in The Complaynt of Scotlande, ed. Murray, ; on Henrisoun
see Marcus Merriman, ‘James Henrisoun and ‘‘Great Britain’’: British Union and the Scottish
Commonweal’, in Mason (ed.), Scotland and England, –.
 William Patten, The Expedition into Scotland of the Most Worthily Fortunate Prince Edward, Duke of
Somerset (), in Tudor Tracts –, ed. A. F. Pollard (London, ), , .
 Henrisoun, Exhortacion to the Scottes, in The Complaynt of Scotlande, ed. Murray, ; Henrisoun, ‘The
Godly and Golden Booke for Concorde of England and Scotland’ ( July ), in Calendar of State
Papers Relating to Scotland and Mary Queen of Scots –, ed. Joseph Bain et al.,  vols.
(Edinburgh, –), , –.
 England, Scotland and Ireland c. – 
Somerset’s Epistle or Exhortacion, to Unitie and Peace (), the regime’s
most widely-circulated piece of propaganda, concluded its appeal with
a promise to allow all Scots free access to English ports, and permission
to trade with England ‘as liberally and frely, & with the same, & no
other custome or paimentes therefore then Englishmen, & the Kynges
subjectes’. The Scots would demand such freedom of trade after
James VI’s accession to the English throne, in the early s, and
repeatedly throughout the seventeenth century as a precondition for
union with England, but they would only receive it – and access to the
English colonial trade – under the terms of the Treaty of Union of
.
As in the debate preceding the Union of , proponents of Anglo-
Scottish union appealed to geographical determinism. A single religion,
and a unified commercial system, were the necessary complements of
the natural unity of England and Scotland within the island of Britain.
Together, the Scots and the English were dwellers within a single land,
‘severed . . . from the reste of the worlde, with a large sea’, ‘separate by
seas from other nations’, and ‘of one nature tonge and bredd in one ile
compased with the sea’. Such arguments echoed Virgil’s first Eclogue,
in which the Britons appeared as the furthest-flung inhabitants of the
known world, cut-off from the rest of civilised humanity ( penitus toto
divisos orbe Britannos, Eclogues, . ). This Virgilian trope of Britain’s
isolation would be used later in the sixteenth century as an explanation
for the British kingdoms’ lack of overseas territorial possessions, and a
means whereby the English and the Scots alike could congratulate
themselves on their indifference to the demeaning scramble for trade
and land that the powers of continental Europe pursued. In the
context of the ‘Rough Wooing’, however, it offered an argument in
favour of a union to create a British empire conceived as an insular
composite monarchy. The conception of this British empire in the s
was therefore only maritime in so far as it was bounded by the sea; it was

[Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset,] An Epistle or Exhortacion, to Unitie and Peace, Sent from the Lord
Protector . . . To the Nobilitie, Gentlemen, and Commons, and Al Others the Inhabitauntes of the Realme of
Scotlande ( February ), in The Complaynt of Scotlande, ed. Murray, .
 Brian P. Levack, The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland, and the Union – (Oxford,
), –, –.
 Henrisoun, Exhortacion to the Scottes, in The Complaynt of Scotlande, ed. Murray, ; Patten, Expedition
into Scotland, in Tudor Tracts, ed. Pollard, ; Henrisoun, ‘Godly and Golden Booke’, in Calendar of
State Papers Relating to Scotland, ed. Bain, , .

Josephine Waters Bennett, ‘Britain Among the Fortunate Isles’, Studies in Philology,  (),
–; Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to the Tempest
(Berkeley, ), , , –, .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
insular, rather than expansionist; and nature set its limits, which the
empire of Great Britain would naturally fill but not overflow.
A Protestant union would bring with it independence from the
Papacy; a commercial union would be based on freedom of trade
between the two kingdoms. These advantages provided an English
promise to the Scots that even feudal dependency within a composite
monarchy would not imply their own personal dependency within the
new empire of Great Britain. All appearances to the contrary, the
English did not intend to secure Anglo-Scottish union by force or right
of conquest, but rather by dynastic union, ‘which title enduceth no
servitude, but fredome, libertie, concord and quietnesse’. The French
towns of Thérouanne and Tournai had indeed been conquered by force
of English arms in the reign of Henry VIII, argued Henrisoun, but the
Scots should instead be persuaded peaceably to join a union of equals.
There had historically been two methods by which two nations could be
joined under a single ruler, Somerset’s Epistle recalled: ‘Either by force &
superioritie whiche is conquest, or by equalitie & love, whiche is parent-
age and mariyng’. William Patten told the Scots, echoing Cicero, that
England sought ‘not the Mastership of you, but the Fellowship!’ Anglo-
Scottish union would restore the historic unity of Britain, and bring to
Scotland the clear advantages of peace, prosperity and Protestantism.
The Scots should therefore ‘laie doune their weapons, thus rashly
received, to fight against the mother of their awne nacion: I mean this
realm now called Englande the onely supreme seat of thempire of greate
Briteigne’.
The empire of Great Britain was therefore the invention of the
unionist pamphleteers who wrote on behalf of Henry VIII and Protec-
tor Somerset. Those English writers conceived of a composite mon-
archy (and hence, an empire) that would include both England and
Scotland. It would be British not only because it encompassed the whole
island of Britain, but also because it would restore the integrity of the
monarchy founded by Brutus, whose subjects had been named ‘Britons’
in his honour. The supporters of this new British monarchy, in both
England and Scotland, were overwhelmingly Protestants who envisaged
Anglo-Scottish union as the means to create a Protestant island. The
political and religious unity of Britain would render it secure from the
 Henrisoun, Exhortacion to the Scottes, in The Complaynt of Scotlande (ed.) Murray, ; [Somerset,]
Epistle, in The Complaynt of Scotlande (ed.) Murray, , ; Patten, Expedition into Scotland, in Tudor
Tracts (ed.) Pollard,  (compare Cicero, De Officiis, .); Bodrugan, Epitome of the Title, sig. [av]v
(my emphasis).
 England, Scotland and Ireland c. – 
designs of the French, and increase the British monarchy’s standing
within Europe. This would guarantee stability and prosperity, and
secure the religious and political freedom of the two British nations.
Though many Scots, especially in the Lowlands, signed assurances of
compliance with the English, the Scottish monarchy and the Scottish
Church resisted the pressure towards union, and in due course affirmed
their French allegiance with the betrothal of Queen Mary to the French
dauphin rather than the English king. The Scottish Crown produced no
official responses to Henry VIII’s Declaration, Somerset’s Epistle, or the
associated English propaganda. Two unofficial Scottish responses to the
English arguments did emerge from the intersection of courtly and
ecclesiastical circles. William Lamb, the author of ‘Ane Resonyng of
Ane Scottis and Inglis Merchand Betuix Rowand and Lionis’ (), was
a parson, a senator of James V’s College of Justice, and later a member
of Mary of Guise’s administration. Robert Wedderburn, the presumed
author of The Complaynt of Scotland (c. ), was a vicar in the Scottish
Church whose residence at Dundee had been burned by the English
army after their victory at the battle of Pinkie in . The two authors
evidently knew each other, and Lamb seems to have drawn upon the
Complaynt for elements of his counterargument to the English claims.
Though their rhetorical procedures and the emphases of their argu-
ments differed, Lamb and Wedderburn together provided a reasoned
case against the English conception of an Anglo-Scottish empire within
Britain that would be Protestant, commercial, insular, and free.
Lamb brought the techniques of humanist source-criticism to bear
upon the historical arguments for Scottish allegiance to England ar-
rayed in Henry VIII’s Declaration. As the English merchant in his
dialogue paraphrased the Declaration’s arguments for English suzerainty,
the Scottish merchant refuted them at even greater length with material
taken from the Scots historian, Hector Boece, but most often from the
Italian humanist, Polydore Vergil, ‘your awin liturate, autentik his-
toriciane’. Polydore had shown in his Anglica Historia () that there
was no good evidence for the existence of Brutus, let alone for the
division of the British monarchy after his death. The Romans, not
Brutus, had brought ‘literatoure and . . . civiliteis’ to Britain, as Tacitus


Marcus Merriman, ‘The Assured Scots: Scottish Collaborators with England during the Rough
Wooing’, Scottish Historical Review,  (), –.

William Lamb, Ane Resonyng of Ane Scottis and Inglis Merchand Betuix Rowand and Lionis (), BL
Cotton MS Caligula . vii, ff. r–v, ed. Roderick J. Lyall (Aberdeen, ), x–xvii; [Wedder-
burn,] Complaynt of Scotland (ed.) Stewart, xi–xvi.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
had shown in the Agricola. Later historians gave no credence to the
argument that the Scots had been vassals of the English crown. The first
king to have ruled ‘totius Anglie imperium’ was Athelstan, but he had never
held ‘totius Britanie imperium; be quhilk word Britanie wes than and also
now is contenit bayth Ingland and Scotland’. There had therefore never
been a British empire within Britain, and certainly none over which the
English monarch had ruled as a feudal superior. In the absence of any
good historical evidence, there could be no foundation for English
claims to suzerainty over Scotland. English arguments from history
could not be trusted any more than English intentions in the present. As
the merchants’ audience of three Catholic victims of Henry VIII (Sir
Thomas More, Bishop John Fisher, and ‘the Good Man of Sion’, a
Brigittine monk) pointed out, Henry had been a good king until ‘the new
leirnyng of Germanie’ had entered his court. The English attempt to
recover their specious British empire would bring with it persecutory
Protestantism; the refutation of claims to the former would be one
means of preventing the latter.
The Complaynt of Scotland placed Anglo-Scottish relations within the
larger context of universal history, told as the rise and fall of empires and
the consequent translatio imperii from Assyria to Rome and from Rome to
the multiplicity of contemporary polities. Lucan had foretold that the
weight of Rome would bring its downfall, ‘quhilk is the cause that the
monarche of it, is dividit amang mony diverse princis’, just as all such
‘dominions altris dechaeis ande cummis to subversione’. This was not
the effect of fortune, but of divine judgment. Just as God had used the
Assyrians as a scourge for Israel, so he had given victory to the English at
Pinkie to punish the Scots for their apostasy. The Scots had now ‘to
deffende the liberte and save the dominione’ of their homeland or fall
under the mastery of the English king: ‘fra the tyme that he get
dominione of the cuntre ye sal be his sklavis in extreme servitude’, like
the inhabitants of Ireland. Any Scot who did not adopt a precisely
Ciceronian conception of patriotism as the defence of ‘ther public veil,
& ther native cuntre, to perreis al to gyddir . . . ar mair brutal nor brutal
beystus’. Wedderburn therefore rejected any natural, historical or eth-
nic arguments for the unity of Great Britain which, he witheringly
pointed out, ‘is nou callit ingland’. Least convincing of all were English
appeals to ancient prophesies of British unity or to the history of Brutus.
Such fables were easily disproved, and the English only used them ‘to
 Lamb, Ane Resonyng (ed.) Lyall, ,  (citing Tacitus, Agricola, ),  (citing Polydore Vergil,
Anglica Historia (Basel, ), ), .
 England, Scotland and Ireland c. – 
preve that Scotland vas ane colone of ingland quhen it vas fyrst inhabit’.
This was the first vernacular use of the Latin colonia to mean a settlement
from a metropole in a foreign territory, but Wedderburn adopted the
term in the course of rebutting, rather than asserting, an imperial claim
derived from supposed ethnic homogeneity.
Both sides recognised that the debate of the s regarding Anglo-
Scottish union and Scottish independence was a dispute between expo-
nents of the classical art of rhetoric, the ‘oratours of our scottis nation’
ranging themselves against the ‘oratours of ingland’. With calculated
rhetorical irony, John Elder had called himself ‘a wretch destitude of all
good lernynge and eloquence’, James Henrisoun asserted that ‘there
needeth no subtile perswasions or finesse of woordes’ to convince the
Scots of the need for union, and Nicholas Bodrugan stated that ‘it was
not my mynde to trifle with the fine flowers of Rethorike but to bryng
rather faithfull, then painted gliteryng overture, unto thinges afflicted’.
All of the defences of the English stance towards Scotland were, in fact,
examples of deliberative oratory, fashioned to state the case in favour of
English sovereignty over the Scots, and for the restitution of the historic
‘empire of Great Britain’. In response, William Lamb adopted the
techniques of forensic oratory to refute the English Declaration of 
point by point, while Robert Wedderburn arrayed the Ciceronian
conception of patriotism as loyalty to the res publica as a defence against
English imperial claims; ‘the eloquent Cicero’ was the most frequently
cited source named in the Complaynt.

The Anglo-Scottish debate of the s introduced the concept of an

empire of Great Britain into British political thought, and associated it
for the first time with the Roman conception of a colony. Its sources lay,
on the English side, in the British history of Geoffrey of Monmouth and,
 [Wedderburn,] Complaynt of Scotland (ed.) Stewart, –, –, , –, – (citing Cicero, De
Officiis, .; De Finibus, .), , –,  (my emphasis).
 OED, s.v. ‘colony’, . ; Jones, ‘Origins of the Colonial Idea in England’, ; compare
[Wedderburn,] Complaynt of Scotland, ed. Stewart, : ‘it is necessair at sum tyme, til myxt oure
langage vitht part of termis drevyn fra lateen be rason that oure scottis tong is nocht sa copeus as
is the lateen tong’.
 [Wedderburn,] Complaynt of Scotland, ed. Stewart, , .

Elder, ‘Proposal for Uniting Scotland with England’, in Bannatyne Miscellany, , ed. Scott and
Laing, ; Henrisoun, Exhortacion to the Scottes, in The Complaynt of Scotlande, ed. Murray, ;
Bodrugan, Epitome of the Title, sig. [ai]v.
 Lamb, Ane Resonyng (ed.) Lyall, xxxiii; [Wedderburn,] Complaynt of Scotland, ed. Stewart, xxxiv, .
On the educational importance of Cicero in early sixteenth-century Scotland see John Durkan,
‘Education: The Laying of Fresh Foundations’, in John MacQueen (ed.), Humanism in Renaissance
Scotland (Edinburgh, ), –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
in the Scottish rebuttals, the humanist historiography of Polydore
Vergil. The use by both sides of the techniques of classical rhetoric
foreshadowed the prominence of the ars rhetorica in the promotional
literature later produced to encourage migration and settlement in the
Caribbean and North America, though in this debate neo-classical
conceptions of patriotism and the res publica were deployed in opposition
to the creation of a novel commonwealth cast in the form of a composite
monarchy, rather than as the inducements to create a multitude of new
commonwealths across the Atlantic Ocean. ‘The long struggle, intel-
lectual as well as military, against English territorial ambitions, had
ensured that the Scots were already the historical nation’, especially in
their use of the Roman historians begun by John Bellenden’s translation
of Livy’s first five books in the early s. Wedderburn had reinforced
his moral appeals to Ciceronian patriotism with a battery of historical
examples drawn from ‘Crisp Salust’ and Livy’s Histories, as well as from
other classical historians such as Valerius Maximus and Thucydides.
This was a response to the pro-English deployment of classical exempla,
as when Nicholas Bodrugan had appealed to Sallust to show the ill
effects of disunity, ‘as by the civill warres between Silla and Marius the
ruine of Rome is sufficient example to all the worlde’. He had argued
that the Scots should embrace true patriotism, ‘the love that Plato &
Cicero require in you to be borne to your countrey’, and follow the
English into the creation of that new res publica, the empire of Great
Britain.
The Edwardian conception of an ‘empire of Great Britain’ did live on
among Welsh and Scots antiquaries. The Welsh antiquary, Humphrey
Llwyd, in  described King Arthur’s pan-Britannic monarchy in its
declining years under the last British kings as the ‘Britannicum imperium’;
when his work appeared in English the following year, the translation
referred to ‘the  Empyre’ and its decadence. This Galfridian

 Andrew Fitzmaurice, ‘Classical Rhetoric and the Promotion of the New World’, Journal of the
History of Ideas,  (), –.
 John MacQueen, ‘Aspects of Humanism in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Literature’, in
MacQueen (ed.), Humanism in Renaissance Scotland, –; [Wedderburn,] Complaynt of Scotland, ed.
Stewart, , – (Sallust); –, –, –, , –, – (Livy);  (Thucydides).

Bodrugan, Epitome of the Title, sigs. [gviii]v, hivv–vr.
 Humphrey Llwyd, Commentarioli Britannicæ Descriptionis Fragmentum (Cologne, ), f. a; Llwyd,
The Breviary of Britayne, trans. Thomas Twyne (London, ), f. r; Bruce Ward Henry, ‘John
Dee, Humphrey Llwyd, and the Name ‘‘British Empire’’’, Huntington Library Quarterly,  (),
–; Peter Roberts, ‘Tudor Wales, National Identity and the British Inheritance’, in Brendan
Bradshaw and Peter Roberts (eds.), British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, –
(Cambridge, ), –.
 England, Scotland and Ireland c. – 
conception of an Arthurian British empire also lay at the heart of John
Dee’s appeals in the s to ‘this Incomparable Brytish Empire’ and its
inhabitants ‘the true and naturall born subjects of this Brytish Empire’.
Dee’s conception of the British Empire included among its dominions
Ireland (which he claimed had been settled by Arthur’s Britons), Ice-
land, Gotland, Orkney, Norway, Denmark and Gaul. Moreover, this
British empire encompassed the seas around Britain even as far as the
French and German coasts, and the recently rediscovered lands on the
north-east coast of America. However, at the heart of this enormous
monarchy lay ‘the Lawfull British, and English Jurisdiction over Scot-
land’; ‘the Lawfull Possession as well as the Proprietie of the Supremacy
over Scotland ’ had been vested in the English royal line from  CE
until , as Henry VIII’s ‘little Pamphlet’, the Declaration of , had
sufficiently proved. The Edwardian conception of the empire of Great
Britain would also be revived in , as proponents of Anglo-Scottish
union under James VI and I recalled approvingly Somerset’s arguments
in favour of a ‘perfect monarchie’ under ‘the comon name of Albion or
Brytane’.
The neo-Roman conception of Britain as a new res publica had been
strongly promoted by Sir Thomas Smith and William Cecil, two of the
prominent Cambridge humanists who had been drafted into Somerset’s
government in the s. Smith, the Regius Professor of Civil Law and
Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, had been Cecil’s tutor, and
became Clerk of the Privy Council in March . In that capacity, he
was put in charge of searching for the evidence of English suzerainty
over Scotland which would become the foundation of Bodrugan’s
argument in his Epitome, a work which the Imperial ambassador at-
tributed to Smith himself. In the autumn of , Smith, like Cecil, had
accompanied Somerset’s army as it marched northwards to meet the
 John Dee, General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (London, ), , ;
Gwyn A. Williams, Welsh Wizard and British Empire: Dr. John Dee and a Welsh Identity (Cardiff, ),
–, –; William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English
Renaissance (Amherst, Mass., ), –.
 John Dee, ‘Brytanici Imperii Limites’ ( July ), BL Add. MS , ff. r, v.

Robert Pont, ‘Of the Union of Britayne’ (), and Sir Henry Spelman, ‘Of the Union’ (),
in The Jacobean Union: Six Tracts of , ed. Bruce R. Galloway and Brian P. Levack (Edinburgh,
), , ; for further references to the Edwardian tracts see The Jacobean Union, ed. Galloway
and Levack, –, , –, –, , –; Sir Thomas Craig, De Unione Regnorum
Britanniæ Tractatus (), ed. C. Sanford Terry (Edinburgh, ),  (Latin)/ (English),
/, /; The Queen an Empress, and Her Three Kingdoms One Empire (London, ), ; Arthur
H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI (Edinburgh, ), , n. .
 On the Cambridge ‘Athenians’ generally see Winthrop S. Hudson, The Cambridge Connection and
the Elizabethan Settlement of  (Durham, NC, ), –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
Scots, though he was taken ill and had to sit out the campaign at York.
Despite Smith’s involvement with Somerset’s ideological offensive
against Scotland, the attempt to create an Anglo-Scottish union had
little effect on his political thought: that other English security problem
and territorial claim, Calais, absorbed more of his legal and historical
attention, though he did show awareness of the Anglo-Scottish context
within which the Treaty of Câteau–Cambrèsis had been concluded.
He made no reference to Scotland in either his Discourse of the
Commonweal of This Realm of England () or the De Republica Anglorum
(–), though he was instrumental in the attempt to break the Auld
Alliance during his time as ambassador in France in –. Among his
effects at his death was a painting of ‘England, Scotland, and Ireland’.
Such a depiction of the ‘British’ isles was much closer to Cecil’s own
vision of Britain, which had grown initially from his involvement in
Somerset’s campaign. Cecil, like William Patten, was a judge of the
Marshalsea Court who had fought at the battle of Pinkie. He main-
tained close and lasting relations with the Scots who wrote in support of
Somerset’s designs; he may also have been partly responsible for draft-
ing the Protector’s ‘Proclamation’ of September  and the Epistle of
. His experience in Scotland, his interest in cartography, and his
awareness of England’s strategic weakness, especially after Mary,
Queen of Scots’ marriage to the French dauphin, and the consequent
revival of French influence in Scotland, led him to form a uniquely
wide-ranging vision of England as the centre of a Protestant British
monarchy encompassing both Scotland and Ireland.
Once the Scottish Reformation of – had achieved Cecil’s aim
of creating a Protestant island, Smith and Cecil agreed on the necessity
of drawing Ireland closer to England. ‘In my mind’, Smith wrote to
Cecil in , ‘it needeth nothing more than to have colonies. To
augment our tongue, our laws, and our religion in that Isle, which three

Mary Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith: A Tudor Intellectual in Office (London, ), , ; compare John
Mason, ‘Instrumentorum Quorundam Authenticorum Exemplaria Aliquot . . . Ex quibus
planum fit . . . Reges Scociae in fide fuisse Regum Anglie, regnumque Scocie, Reges Anglie
tanquam superiores dicti regni Dominos, per sacramentorum fidelititatis [sic] agnovisse’ (),
BL MS Add. .
 [Sir Thomas Smith,] ‘A Collection of Certain Reasons to Prove the Queen Majesty’s Right to
Have the Restitution of Calais’ ( April ), BL MS Harl. , ff. –; Dewar, Sir Thomas
Smith, –.

John Strype, The Life of the Learned Sir Thomas Smith, Kt. D.C.L. Principal Secretary of State to King
Edward the Sixth, and Queen Elizabeth (London, ), –, ; Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith, –.

Jane E. A. Dawson, ‘William Cecil and the British Dimension of Early Elizabethan Foreign
Policy’, History,  (), –; Stephen Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the
British Succession Crisis – (Cambridge, ), –, –.
 England, Scotland and Ireland c. – 
be the true bands of the commonwealth whereby the Romans con-
quered and kept long time a great part of the world.’ A year later, Sir
Henry Sidney, the Lord Deputy of Ireland, also advised Cecil of the
necessity that ‘persuasion woolde be used emonges the nobiletie, and
principal gentlemen of England, that there might . . . be induced here
some Collany’ at private expense. The term ‘colony’ had first ap-
peared in Scots in the Complaynt of Scotland, where it had indicated
Wedderburn’s knowledge of early Roman history; it had appeared for
the first time in English in Smith’s pupil Richard Eden’s translation of
the Decades of Peter Martyr in , though Smith popularised it as a
practical rather than an historical term. In the Discourse of the
Commonweal, Smith affirmed that ‘among all nations of the world, they
that be politic and civil do master the rest’. This equation between
civility and superiority informed Smith’s own colonising ventures. Be-
tween  and , Smith and his son, Thomas, sent three abortive
expeditions to establish colonies in the north of Ireland, on the Ards
peninsula, ‘to make the same civill and peopled with naturall Englishe
men borne’. Land would be wrested from the native Irish by the sword,
cultivated in parcels by the English coloni, with the help of those Irish
‘churls’ who could be persuaded to join the English, and defended by
the arms-bearing soldier-farmers. Fortified towns would be planted
amidst these agricultural settlements as retreats for merchants and
strongholds against attack. The precedents for this were once again
Roman: ‘Mark Rome, Carthage, Venice and all other where notable
beginning hath been’, Smith advised his son.
Such appeals to the Roman model of colonisation through cultiva-
tion were not unprecedented in sixteenth-century England. In ,
Sir Thomas More had related that the Utopians settled colonies (co-
loniam . . . propagant) of their people on the adjacent mainland at times
 Sir Thomas Smith to William Cecil,  November , PRO  //, f. , quoted in
Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith, .
 Sir Henry Sidney to William Cecil, summer of , PRO  //, quoted in Quinn, ‘Sir
Thomas Smith (–) and the Beginnings of English Colonial Theory’, .
 D. B. Quinn, ‘Renaissance Influences in English Colonization’, Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, th ser.,  (), –; Peter Martyr, The Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India, trans.
Richard Eden (London, ),  (‘This ryver is called Darien, uppon the bankes whereof . . . they
entended to playnte their newe colonie or habitacion’).
 [Sir Thomas Smith,] A Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England (), ed. Mary Dewar
(Charlottesville, Va. ), –; ‘The Petition of Thomas Smythe and his Associates’ (c. ), in
Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of Lord de L’Isle and Dudley Preserved at
Penshurst Place, ed. C. L. Kingsford,  vols. (London, ), , –; Smith to Thomas Smith, 
May , in Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth January–June  and
Addenda, ed. Arthur John Butler and Sophie Crawford Lomas (London, ), .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
of overpopulation. They justified them on the grounds that the colon-
ists would make productive use of land that others had allowed to fall
vacant: if the colonists could live peacefully with the mainlanders, it
would be to the great advantage of both (utriusque populi bono); if not, the
Utopians could legitimately make war upon them for leaving their
land waste and uncultivated. The Ulsterman Rowland White revived
this agriculturalist argument in the s when he proposed that
four thousand English ploughmen should be sent to Ireland ‘to take
wast landes to inhabyte and tyll’, thereby to ‘profytt them selves
muche and also provoke other to the furtherance of the comon
welth’. Smith may have read White’s ‘Discors’, and, like More, ar-
gued that pressure of overpopulation necessitated the creation of colo-
nies. As he and his son stated in their pioneering pamphlet to persuade
English settlers to migrate, Ireland ‘lacketh only inhabitants, ma-
nurance, and pollicie’; the English coloni would be prevented from
degenerating into barbarousness because civility ‘encreaseth more by
keeping men occupyed in Tyllage, than by idle followyng of heards, as
the Tartarians, Arabians, and Irishe men doo’. The settlers would be
rewarded with their own ‘peculiar gain’, but there would be obvious
advantages to the ‘common profite’ in having Ireland ‘replenished
with building civill inhabitantes, and traffique with lawe justice, and
good order’. ‘How say you now have I not set forth to you another
Eutopia?’ the Smiths asked.
‘We live in Smith’s Commonwealth, not in More’s Utopia’, Smith’s
client Gabriel Harvey stated, as if in reply. Harvey had been present in
 or  at Hill House, Smith’s home in Essex, when Smith, his son,
Walter Haddon and Sir Humphrey Gilbert had debated the relative
merits of ruthless militarism and peaceful persuasion, with examples
drawn from Livy’s Histories. Smith and Haddon had argued on behalf of
Fabius’s gradualism; Gilbert and the younger Smith, for Marcellus’s use

Sir Thomas More, Utopia: Latin Text and English Translation, ed. George M. Logan, Robert M.
Adams and Clarence H. Miller (Cambridge, ), ,  (Latin)/,  (English); Quinn,
‘Renaissance Influences in English Colonization’, .
 Rowland White, ‘Discors Touching Ireland’ (c. ), PRO  //, ff. –, ed. Nicholas
Canny, Irish Historical Studies,  (), –.
 [Sir Thomas Smith and Thomas Smith,] A Letter Sent by I. B. Gentleman unto his Very Frende Mayster
R. C. Esquire (), in George Hill (ed.), An Historical Account of the MacDonnells of Antrim (Belfast,
), , , , ; Hiram Morgan, ‘The Colonial Venture of Sir Thomas Smith in Ulster,
–’, The Historical Journal,  (), –.
 ‘Vivimus in Smithi Rep: non in Mori Utopia; aut Platonis Politeia; aut regno Xenophontis.
Phantasticarum Rerumpublicarum Usus tantummodò phantasticus’: Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia,
ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford-upon-Avon, ), . On Harvey and Smith see Dewar, Sir
Thomas Smith, –.
 England, Scotland and Ireland c. – 
of force. Smith’s advice to his son in  to look to the examples of
Rome, Carthage and Venice was evidently part of a series of lessons in
which Smith had instructed his son in Roman history. His conception of
colonies was also only one of his attempts to introduce Roman policy
into the respublica Anglorum. He had hoped to create a college of civil law
at Cambridge, and a ‘College of Civilians’ to advise the royal council.
Smith the civilian and councillor may have been responsible for the
notorious Vagrancy Act of  ( Edw. , c. ) which imposed slavery
for able-bodied indigents who refused to work, in imitation of the
provision in the Corpus Iuris Civilis (XI. xxvi) condemning free-born
beggars to the forced labour of a ‘perpetual colonate’ (colonatu perpetuo).
His De Republica Anglorum analysed the English commonwealth as a
mixed monarchy with descriptive categories drawn from Aristotle,
Cicero, and Roman civil law, in order to distinguish England from the
countries of the civil law world. In the Discourse of the Commonweal, Smith
had in passing called England ‘this empire’, and in De Republica Anglorum
he referred to it as ‘great Brittaine, which is nowe called England’.
‘Edward College’ came to naught; the Vagrancy Act was never enforced
but rapidly repealed; Smith’s colonies in the Ards collapsed in the face of
resistance from the Irish and opposition from the Lord Deputy Sir
William Fitzwilliam. Yet, despite his promotion of the Roman model of
coloni in Ireland, and his conception of England as a new Rome for its
civilising mission, Smith firmly portrayed England ‘not in that sort as
Plato made his common wealth . . . nor as Syr Thomas More his Utopia
feigned common wealths’, but as it was on  March : the respublica
Anglorum, not an Imperium Britannorum.
There was no necessary connection between humanism and humani-
tarianism. However, classical humanism, of the kind practised by
Smith, Cecil and many of the mid-sixteenth-century proponents of
Anglo-Scottish union, did transmit important assumptions regarding
the superiority of civility over barbarism and the necessity for civilised

Lisa Jardine, ‘Mastering the Uncouth: Gabriel Harvey, Edmund Spenser and the English
Experience in Ireland’, in John Henry and Sarah Hutton (eds.), New Perspectives on Renaissance
Thought: Essays in the History of Science, Education and Philosophy in Memory of Charles B. Schmitt
(London, ), –.

C. S. L. Davies, ‘Slavery and Protector Somerset: The Vagrancy Act of ’, Economic History
Review, nd ser.,  (), –; Corpus Iuris Civilis, ed. Paul Krueger,  vols. (Berlin, ), ,
.
 [Smith,] Discourse of the Commonweal, ed. Dewar, ; Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum
(–), ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge, ), , .
 Anthony Pagden, ‘The Humanism of Vasco de Quiroga’s ‘‘Información en Derecho’’ ’, in
Wolfgang Reinhard (ed.), Humanismus und Neue Welt (Bonn, ), –, .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
polities to carry their civility to those they deemed barbarous. Though it
was true, as Robert Wedderburn noted in the Complaynt of Scotland,
‘euere nations reputis vthers nations to be barbariens quhen there tua
natours and complexions ar contrar til vtheris’, not all ‘nations’ de-
rived a charter for a civilising mission from this imputation of barbarity,
nor indeed did all humanists. Three major humanistic treatments of
colonisation in the s emerged from among the New English in
Munster. Sir William Herbert, Richard Beacon and Edmund Spenser
each produced a reform tract in the s: one a Latin treatise cast in the
idiom of classical moral philosophy (dedicated to a veteran of Somerset’s
Scottish wars, Sir James Croft); one an allegorical dialogue set in the
Athens of Solon; and the third an English dialogue set firmly in the
present of the s. Only Spenser provided an ethnological justifica-
tion for conquest; likewise, only he offered a vision of a unified British
monarchy within the Three Kingdoms, on ethnological as much as
political grounds.
Though Spenser made no explicit references to the British propa-
ganda of the s, he shared with the Edwardian proponents of
Anglo-Scottish union an historical genealogy and an ethnology. In his
View of the Present State of Ireland (c. ) and his uncompleted epic The Færie
Queene (–), Spenser adopted the conception of the British Empire
found in the works of Humphrey Llwyd and John Dee, to show that the
Protestant New English settlers were reviving the ‘British’ dominion in
Ireland which had originally been established by King Arthur. The New
English were therefore restoring ‘British’ rule over the Gaelic Irish and
the Old English, rather than attempting to create a novel polity in
Ireland. Yet it was also clear from Spenser’s works that this would be but
the first step towards the recreation of the Arthurian imperium in northern
Europe and across the Atlantic. Accordingly, he dedicated The Færie
Queene ‘To the Most High, Mightie and Magnificent Empresse Elizabeth

 [ Wedderburn,] Complaynt of Scotland, ed. Stewart, .


Sir William Herbert, Croftus sive De Hibernia Liber (c. ), ed. Arthur Keaveney and John A.
Madden (Dublin, ); Richard Beacon, Solon His Follie (), ed. Clare Carroll and Vincent
Carey (Binghamton, ); [Edmund Spenser,] A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. ), ed.
Rudolf Gottfried, in The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, Charles
Grosvenor Osgood, Frederick Morgan Padelford and Ray Heffner,  vols. (Baltimore, –),
, –.

Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Robe and Sword in the Conquest of Ireland’, in Cross, Loades and
Scarisbrick (eds.), Law and Government in Tudor England, –, emphasises Spenser’s differences
from Herbert and Beacon in this respect, but exaggerates the differences between the three
humanists, largely in response to the argument of Nicholas Canny, ‘Edmund Spenser and the
Development of Anglo-Irish Identity’, Yearbook of English Studies,  (), –.
 England, Scotland and Ireland c. – 
by the Grace of God Queene of England Fraunce and Ireland and of
Virginia’, a unique expansion of the royal style (in Elizabeth’s lifetime, at
least) to incorporate the new English province in North America.
The neo-Galfridian vision of the empire of Great Britain, when
combined with the Aristotelian foundations of classical moral philos-
ophy, provided the substance of Spenser’s Færie Queene. Spenser claimed
for his work the educational purpose of an ‘historical fiction’, and
compared it to Xenophon rather than Plato, ‘for that the one in the
exquisite depth of his judgement formed a Commune welth such as it
should be, but the other in the person of Cyrus and the Persians
fashioned a government such as might best be’. He envisaged a plan
for his poem that would carry his readers through a course of instruction
in the private ethical virtues and the public political virtues. No utopian
fiction, The Færie Queene would provide not only an example after which
‘to fashion a gentleman’ but, like More’s Utopia, also offer a vision of the
best state of the commonwealth (optimum status reipublicae), which in
Spenser’s case was the commonwealth of Britain, encompassing the
islands of both Britain and Ireland. Spenser’s ethical purposes were
accordingly at one with the aims English humanists hoped to achieve
through the study of the litteræ humaniores, while his political vision of
English domination throughout the British Isles presented perhaps the
most ambitious and hardline British imperial vision of its time.
Spenser’s conception of the British Empire remained strictly confined
to Britain and Ireland, within the historical limits set by Geoffrey of
Monmouth’s Historia, apart from that single flattering reference to the
new province across the Atlantic. The Galfridian history provided him
with the traditional genealogy underpinning the Tudor claim to the
British Isles which he presented in his epic poem. In Books  and  of The
Færie Queene, he traced the line of British kings from Brutus down to
Elizabeth I. In the beginning, ‘The land, which warlike Britons now
possesse,/ And therein have their mightie empire raysd,/ In antique
times was salvage wildernesse,/ Unpeopled, unmanured, unprov’d,
unpraysd’ until settled by Brutus and passed to his three sons (FQ , . x. ,
 Edmund Spenser, The Færie Queene (–), ‘Dedication’, in Works of Edmund Spenser, ed.
Greenlaw, Osgood, Padelford and Heffner, , ; Andrew Hadfield, ‘Briton and Scythian: Tudor
Representations of Irish Origins’, Irish Historical Studies,  (), –, –.

Edmund Spenser, ‘A Letter of the Authors Expounding his Whole Intention in the Course of
this Work’, in Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. Greenlaw, Osgood, Padelford and Heffner, , .

Compare the other political visions of Britain before  described in Hiram Morgan, ‘British
Policies Before the British State’, in Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (eds.), The British
Problem, c. –: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (Basingstoke, ), –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
–). According to Merlin’s prophecy, ‘a royall virgin’ would restore
the Arthurian empire in the British Isles, and ‘Thenceforth eternall union
shall be made/ Between the nations different afore’ (FQ , . iii. ).
There were ethnic Britons in England, Britons in Scotland and Britons in
Ireland. All traced their ancestry back to Brutus himself, and all would be
reunited into a unitary British monarchy under Elizabeth. The ‘British’
colonists of Ireland would be absorbed once more into their parent
monarchy, and the kingdoms formerly ruled by Albanact and Camber
would once again be rightly subdued to the senior kingdom of England.
Spenser’s conception of the British Empire appeared most forcibly in
his View of the Present State of Ireland, in which he used it to support his
argument for the cultural suppression of the Gaelic Irish and the reform
of the ‘degenerated’ Old English settlers. Spenser traced the common
origin of both the native Irish and the Scots to the migrations of the
Scythians, ‘for Scotlande and Irelande are all one and the same’ and
moreover ‘there are two Scottlandes’, one inhabited by migrants from
Ireland, the other peopled from England. Spenser saw the divisions
within the British Isles as both ethnic and cultural, ‘for the difference of
manners and Customes dothe followe the difference of nacions and
people’. The Old English could no longer be counted with the inhabit-
ants of England itself, for they were ‘now muche more Lawles and
Licentious then the verie wilde Irishe’, and would accordingly be subject
to the same treatment from the New English as the native Irish.
Spenser’s remedy for the barbarousness of the natives and the degener-
ation of the Old English was ‘the sworde’, that is, ‘the Royall power of
the prince’, in the form of garrison government. In adopting this
forcible solution to the problem of English government in Ireland,
Spenser placed himself at a distance from those among his contempora-
ries who argued for more gradual forms of pacification, such as colonisa-
tion, legal reform and education alone. Spenser demanded all of these
measures, too, but without fear of the sword, and even its exercise, they
would not be enough to restore civility and the rule of law within
Ireland. The extremity of some of his measures matched the uniformity
of his imperial vision: there could be as little compromise with cultural
difference as with administrative and legal incoherence.
A unified British monarchy of England, Scotland and Ireland re-
mained unachieved during Spenser’s lifetime, just as his epic of moral
and political education lay abandoned and truncated long before his
 Spenser, View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. Gottfried, in Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. Greenlaw,
Osgood, Padelford and Heffner, , , , , .
 England, Scotland and Ireland c. – 
death. The failure of both Spenser’s great designs was not coincidental.
The worsening situation in Ireland in the opening years of Tyrone’s
rebellion may have convinced him that he should offer more pointedly
practical advice to achieve the British pacification of Ireland than an
Aristotelian programme of moral re-education could provide. He may
also have lost faith in the effectiveness of such humanist ethical edifica-
tion during the darkening years of Elizabeth’s last decade, a desperate
period of Sturm und Drang on both sides of the Irish Sea. The political
alternatives were becoming starker and more circumscribed, and Spen-
ser handled them as directly as he could in the dialogic form of A View of
the Present State of Ireland. The tension in his own political theory between
civil-law arguments derived from rights of conquest and common-law
conceptions of property rights challenged the very foundations of Eng-
lish policy in Ireland and rendered his moral justifications for a British
empire unstable; as a result, few would follow him in finding an
ethnological, and neo-Galfridian, foundation for a monarchy to en-
compass ‘all that bear the British Islands name’ (FQ , . vi. ).
Even as Spenser was reaching his desperate intellectual impasse in
Munster, the Scottish Crown began to pursue its own programme of
civilising the barbarian just across the North Channel. Like the English
Crown in Ireland, it couched its claims to authority over its depend-
encies in the language of civility and barbarism, which was mapped
onto the divide between Celtic and non-Celtic. The origins of Scottish
colonial policies lay in these attempts by the Crown to enforce Lowland
norms of civility and legality onto its Gaelic provinces, and to consoli-
date its own monarchy. Scotland’s premier colonial theorist, James VI,
used just such language from the s in relation both to the Western
Islands and, later, to Ulster. James continued the attempts of his prede-
cessors to bring the clan elite on the fringes of his realm within the pale
of civility by means of pledges of security, military containment, and
cultural aggression against his Gaelic subjects. He echoed the recom-

Hiram Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion: The Outbreak of the Nine Years’ War in Ireland (Woodbridge, );
John Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge, ).

Ciaran Brady, ‘The Road to the View: On the Decline of Reform Thought in Tudor Ireland’, in
Patricia Coughlan (ed.), Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Cork, ), –;
Elizabeth Fowler, ‘The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Work of Edmund Spenser’, Represen-
tations,  (), –.

Arthur H. Williamson, ‘Scots, Indians and Empire: The Scottish Politics of Civilization,
–’, Past and Present,  (Feb. ), –.

Allan I. Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, – (East Linton, ), –;
Ohlmeyer, ‘‘‘Civilizinge of Those Rude Partes’’’, in Canny (ed.), Oxford History of the British
Empire, , –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
mendations of New English theorists in Ireland when in  he warned
his infant son, Henry, about those that ‘dwelleth in the Iles, and are
alluterly barbares, without any sort or shew of civilitie’ and recommen-
ded ‘planting Colonies among them of answerable In-lands subjects,
that within short time may reforme and civilize the best inclined among
them; rooting out or transporting the barbarous and stubborne sort, and
planting civilitie in their roomes’. Two attempts to settle the island of
Lewis with Lowland adventurers, in – and –, failed,
though ultimately more aggressive means were urged to pacify the
Islands by main force, and to suppress the ‘wilde savaiges voide of Godis
feare and our obedience’. Expeditions sent to the Islands in , ,
, and  culminated in two successive civilising missions, one
military, the other religious, in –, under the leadership of Andrew
Stewart, Lord Ochiltree (who had earlier operated a judicial commis-
sion in the Anglo-Scottish Borders), and Andrew Knox, the bishop of
the Isles. Ochiltree imprisoned Island chiefs, appointed outside commis-
sioners, and demanded strategies to civilise the Islands. The Statutes of
Icolmkill () legislated for such strategies, which were designed to
restore decayed religion, encourage hospitality, discourage idleness,
begging, drunkenness and the keeping of firearms, and thereby to
remedy the ‘grite crueltie and inhumane barbaritie’, ‘ignorance and
incivilitie’ in the Islands, at the expense of the clans’ traditions of
sociability and militarism.
The origins of Scottish colonial theory and practice in the seven-
teenth century lay in internal colonisation within the Stewart realm as
James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, continued the pacifica-
tion of Gaeldom initiated by his royal ancestors. His presumed suc-
cession to the English throne in the s evidently impelled him to
greater efforts of ‘civilising’ than might otherwise have been the case, so
that internal colonisation provided an emulative bond of union between
the two kingdoms. The debate over James’s proposals for closer union
between England and Scotland in  provided an opportunity for


James VI, Basilikon Doron (), in King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommer-
ville (Cambridge, ), ; compare Craig, De Unione Regnorum Britanniæ Tractatus, ed. Terry,
/ (‘in insulis Skia et Levissa . . . Colonia in eam deducta . . .’).
 Donald Gregory, The History of the Western Highlands and Isles of Scotland, From A.D.  to A.D. ,
nd edn (London, ), –; Maurice Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon: James VI and I in His Three
Kingdoms (Urbana, ), , –; James VI, ‘Instructions to the Commission to Improve the
Isles’ ( December ), in Collectanea de Rebus Albanicis (Edinburgh, ), .
 Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, .

Statutes of Icolmkill,  August , in The Register of the Privy Council of Scotland: IX A.D.
–, ed. David Masson (Edinburgh, ), –.
 England, Scotland and Ireland c. – 
theorists to redefine ‘Britain’ as an empire, and its monarch as a
potential emperor. When the question of the royal style was debated in
Parliament in , the Welsh MP Sir William Maurice of Clenennau
proposed that the king should proclaim himself ‘emperor of Great
Britain’, but the motion was rejected on the grounds that ‘The Name of
Emperor is impossible: – No particular Kingdom can make their King
an Emperor’. Undaunted, the Scottish mathematician Robert Pont
hailed the reduction of ‘this our Great Brittaine, Ireland and the adjoyn-
ing Brittish isles . . . to the monarchicall obedience of one emperor’, ‘a
compacting of all the Brittish isles and reducing them within the circle of
one diadem . . . so that the savadg wildnes of the Irish, and the barbarous
fiercenes of the other ilanders shall easily be tamed’.
The Gaels of Ireland and of Scotland had originally been separate
problems for their respective monarchs; once the regal union had
created a new British multiple kingdom, they became a single target for
that monarchy’s policies of security and ‘civility’. The fruit of this
anxiety is evident in the colonisation of Ulster, which James promoted
as a specifically British venture, an extension of his policies on the
western seaboard of Scotland, to be sure, but one in which both his
Scottish and his English subjects could participate as equal partners.
Francis Bacon echoed James’s aspirations when he reckoned the Ulster
plantation ‘a second brother to Union’, the first cooperative British
enterprise of James’s newly proclaimed Kingdom of Great Britain.
The Ulster planters were to be the first of a new race of Britons, whose
legal identities as Scots or English would be supplemented and, for
their children, replaced by their attachment to a new ethnic British-
ness. The revised articles of the plantation in  called them the
‘Brittish undertakers’ and a survey of – referred throughout to
Ulster’s ‘British families’, to the ‘British undertakers’ of ‘Brittish birth
and descent’ and to their ‘British tenants’. From the roots of James’s

Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry K.G.,
K.T., Preserved at Montagu House, Whitehall, ed. R. E. G. Kirk,  vols. (London, ), , –;
Journals of the House of Commons From November the th  . . . to March the d  (London, n.d.),
; Bindoff, ‘The Stuarts and their Style’, , –; Roberts, ‘Tudor Wales, National Identity
and the British Inheritance,’ in Bradshaw and Roberts (eds.), British Consciousness and Identity,
–.

Pont, ‘Of the Union of Britayne’, in The Jacobean Union, eds. Galloway and Levack, , ,  (cf.
).

Francis Bacon, The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding,  vols. (London, –),
, .

Conditions To Be Observed By the Brittish Undertakers, of the Escheated Lands in Ulster (London, );
Nicholas Pynnar’s survey (–), Lambeth Palace Library MS Carew , printed in George
Hill, An Historical Account of the Plantation in Ulster at the Commencement of the Seventeenth Century,
– (Belfast, ), –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
civilising mission in Scotland grew the first ‘British’ plantations in his
kingdoms.
James intended the Ulster plantation to provide a buffer zone of
civility and stability between the Gaels in Ireland and those in Scotland,
‘the people [there] being so easily stirred, partly through their bar-
baritie, and want of civilitie, and partly through their corruption in
Religion to breake foorth in rebellions’. It was therefore continuous
with the late Stewart monarchs’ campaigns to tame Gaeldom within
their own dominions. Community of personnel in the plantation re-
vealed that continuity of aim as, for example, Lord Ochiltree became
one of the major Scottish undertakers in the plantation, and Andrew
Knox continued his campaign of ‘civility’ in Ulster as bishop of Raphoe
in Donegal from  to . The majority of the Scottish under-
takers were Lowland gentry and aristocracy who brought followers with
them to settle the lands escheated after the Flight of the Earls in . As
an emblem of the cooperative Britishness of the enterprise, the parcels of
land offered to Scots and English alike were roughly equal in size, ,
acres in total for the Scots, , for the English. The Ulster plantation
offered opportunity and profit to Lowland Scots, as the earlier informal
plantation of East Ulster had to their southwestern compatriots, and
it had the backing of the Scottish Crown as a national enterprise, as well
as the aspiration of the new British king to be an undertaking to unite all
of his subjects under the name of Britain.
The Ulster plantation provided a middle ground for Scots and Eng-
lish alike to pursue common schemes of plantation and ‘civilisation’ in a
potentially pan-British enterprise. It also provided James with a testing-
ground for the creation of Britons. Before the uprising of , it became
the most successful fruit of James’s determination to create a united
British monarchy, with common British enterprises, in the interests of
generating mutual recognition among his subjects as Britons. Neverthe-
less, the fact that such self-identification only seems to have flowered
among a handful of his courtiers, and in colonial Ulster but not other-
wise on the mainland, is an indication of the practical limitations of such

On the process whereby this ‘British’ plantation was created on the ground see Nicholas Canny,
‘Fashioning ‘‘British’’ Worlds in the Seventeenth Century’, in Nicholas Canny, Joseph Illick and
Gary Nash (eds.), Empire, Society and Labor: Essays in Honor of Richard S. Dunn, Pennsylvania History,
, supplemental vol. (College Park, Pa., ), –.

James VI and I, speech to English Parliament,  March , in Political Writings, ed.
Sommerville, .

Hill, Historical Account of the Plantation in Ulster, ; Michael Perceval-Maxwell, The Scottish
Migration to Ulster in the Reign of James I (London, ), , , –.

Raymond Gillespie, Colonial Ulster: The Settlement of East Ulster – (Cork, ).
 England, Scotland and Ireland c. – 
a vision, even if colonisation did provide the only means to promote it.
Ulster provided the only serious prospects for emigration, profit and
civility, in contrast to the contemporaneous plantation of Virginia,
which English administrators looked upon as a wasteful folly. Writing in
, Francis Bacon expressed the widespread scepticism about Vir-
ginia in notably classical terms, calling it, ‘an enterprise in my opinion
differing as much from [Ulster], as Amadis de Gaul differs from Caesar’s
Commentaries’.
Like Gaul before the Roman invasion, Britain and Ireland before
 had been divided into three parts. Thereafter, the Three King-
doms of England, Scotland and Ireland were united under the kingship
of James VI, I and I, a British Caesar in his determined advocacy of his
civilising mission, though never (despite the hopes of some of his Welsh
subjects) a British emperor ruling a united British empire. James’s
interest in creating British plantations in Ulster immediately succeeded
his disappointment at failing to create a united kingdom of Great
Britain. Only a handful of his most immediate courtiers, and all of them
Scots, thought of themselves as Britons within Britain itself; otherwise, in
the seventeenth century, Britons would only be found overseas, in
Ireland and even in Virginia. In , John Speed in his account of what
‘The British Empire Containeth, and Hath Now in Actuall Possession’,
included England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the Isle of Man; though
he made no mention of Virginia among the King’s dominions, he did
note that ‘at this present in the new World of America a Colonie of 
is seated in that part now called ’. When Samuel Purchas
dedicated his Pilgrimes to Prince Charles in , he recognised that the
three British kingdoms (and even the principality of Wales) each par-
ticipated independently in the process of empire-building when he
foresaw ‘Englands out of England . . . yea Royall Scotland, Ireland, and
Princely Wales, multiplying of new Scepters to his Majestie and His
Heires in a New World’.
The creation of a British empire was the extension of the consolida-
tion of the two British monarchies in Britain and Ireland, but it was as
imperfect, contingent and various as the process of state-formation itself.

Francis Bacon, ‘Certain Considerations Touching the Plantation in Ireland, Presented to His
Majesty, ,’ in Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon, ed. Spedding, , ; compare Sir Arthur
Chichester, ‘I had rather labour with my hands in the plantation of Ulster than dance or play in
that of Virginia’, quoted in Philip Robinson, The Plantation of Ulster: British Settlement in an Irish
Landscape – (Belfast, ), .
 John Speed, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London, ), sig. []r, .

Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes,  vols. (London, ), , sig. ¶ v.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
As Purchas realised, just as there was no unitary British monarchy (of
the kind hoped for by the Anglo-Scottish unionists of the s, and
more expansively by Edmund Spenser in the s, or by James VI and
I in the early s), so there would only be a federative British Empire.
All of the parts of the Stuart composite monarchy would pursue ven-
tures across the Atlantic – the English in New England, Virginia, the
Caribbean and Newfoundland; the Scots in Newfoundland and Cape
Breton; the Welsh also in Newfoundland, or ‘Britanniol ’; the Irish on the
Amazon – but they could no more create a pan-British empire
abroad than they could create a pan-British monarchy at home, for the
same reasons, and with the same effects. British state-building and
British empire-building were therefore continuous with one another in
their origins as in their outcomes: out of continuity would come disag-
gregation, and with it an empire that retained the federative characteris-
tics of a multiple kingdom more than the integrated features of a
composite monarchy.
 On the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish, see John G. Reid, Acadia, Maine, and New Scotland: Marginal
Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Toronto, ), –; [William Vaughan,] The Golden Fleece . . .
Transported from Cambrioll Colchos, Out of the Southermost Part of the Iland, Commonly Called the
Newfoundland (London, ),  (quoted); English and Irish Settlements on the River Amazon –,
ed. Joyce Lorimer (London, ).
  

Protestantism and empire: Hakluyt,

Purchas and property

To plant Christian religion without conquest, will bee hard.

Trafficke easily followeth conquest: conquest is not easie.
Trafficke without conquest seemeth possible, and not uneasie.
What is to be done, is the question.
Protestantism should have been the solvent of difference within the
Three Kingdoms, and hence the solution to the problem of diversity
within the empire of Great Britain. The English proponents of Anglo-
Scottish union in the s, and their Scottish agents, argued that
together the two kingdoms of England and Scotland could be joined to
create a single Protestant island. The imposition of a post-Reformation
conception of an Anglo-British empire could thereby extend the process
of the Anglo-Welsh union to join another partly Celtic dominion to the
English state, and thus form an insular bulwark against Roman Ca-
tholicism. Similarly, the New English settlers in Ireland argued from the
s that the extension of Protestantism could secure Ireland against
invasion and even bring the Kingdom of Ireland into an archipelagic
Protestant triumvirate. The integrative force of Protestantism could
potentially serve as the bond of union between the civilised inhabitants
of the Three Kingdoms to create a uniquely post-Reformation
territorial and jurisdictional empire.
The judgments of later historians have followed the contours of these
arguments for Protestant integration, as the ideological origins of Eng-
lish nationalism, British nationhood and, in turn, British imperialism
have all been traced back to the Protestant Reformations in England
and Scotland. According to one recent student of primordial English

Richard Hakluyt the elder, ‘Inducements to the Liking of the Voyage Intended Towards
Virginia’ (), in The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, ed. E. G. R.
Taylor,  vols. (London, ), , .
 See, generally, Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (eds.), Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and
Ireland c.  – c.  (Cambridge, ).


 The ideological origins of the British Empire
nationalism, Protestantism in the sixteenth century was ‘perhaps the
most significant among the factors that furthered the development of
English national consciousness’. The obvious failure to unite the Three
Kingdoms around a consensual version of Protestantism left the devel-
opment of a broader British national identity as a task for the eighteenth
century: in this period, ‘Great Britain might be made up of three
separate nations, but under God it could also be one, united nation . . .
Protestantism was the foundation that made the invention of Great
Britain possible.’ Looking back from this period to discern the origins of
the eighteenth-century British Empire, ‘Christian providentialism’ has
been identified as ‘the ideological taproot of British Imperialism’.
Protestantism therefore provided Englishness, Britishness and the Brit-
ish Empire with a common chronology and a history stretching from the
English and Scottish Reformations, through the attempted religious
unification of the Stuart monarchies during the seventeenth century,
across the Anglo-Scottish Parliamentary Union of  and on to the
United Kingdom of Great Britain that sat at the heart of the expanding
British empire-state of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That
chronology was hardly continuous, nor the history seamless and unin-
terrupted; nonetheless, Protestantism was the only thread joining these
three mutually constitutive processes from state-formation to empire-
building.
Despite the efflorescence of interest in post-Reformation religious
history in recent years, little attempt has been made to relate the findings
of that historiography to the question of the origins of the British
Empire. Historians have investigated the effect of the New World
experience upon the religion of colonists; they have also inquired,
‘What did anticipation of overseas expansion do for religion as seven-
teenth-century Englishmen understood it?’ Nonetheless, they have
almost entirely failed to examine the question of the contribution made


Leah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., ), .
 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, – (New Haven, ), –.

Richard Drayton, ‘Knowledge and Empire’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British
Empire, : The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, ), ; for a more sceptical assessment of the
contribution of Christianity to the origins of the British Empire see Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade,
Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, – (Cambridge,
), –.
 David B. Quinn, ‘The First Pilgrims’, William and Mary Quarterly, rd ser.,  (), –;
Avihu Zakai, Exile and Kingdom: History and Apocalypse in the Puritan Migration to America (Cambridge,
).

David S. Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World (Cambridge, Mass., ), .
 Protestantism and empire: Hakluyt, Purchas and property 
by Protestantism to the ideological origins of the British Empire. This is
a specific manifestation of the fact that the history of Protestant theories
of empire more generally – in England, Scotland, the United Provinces,
Sweden and France – remains largely unwritten. The neglect of such
conceptions of empire has allowed Catholic theories to appear norma-
tive and Protestant theories exceptional; this has in turn helped to
confirm the impression that it was the Protestant empires like the British
that were acquired absent-mindedly: ‘what is there in English literature
that can compare to the letters of Hernán Cortés or the ‘‘true history’’ of
Bernal Díaz? . . . Where, in all the long centuries of European imperial-
ism, was there a scene to equal the public debate staged at Valladolid
between Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Las Casas?’
To return British imperial ideology to the context of theological
debate can help to answer such questions. The more one investigates the
relationship between these two bodies of thought, the harder it becomes
to trace any specifically and exclusively Protestant ideology of empire.
The visceral anti-Catholicism to which a unifying British identity has
been attributed in the eighteenth century was mostly negative in con-
tent, and hence could hardly be a source of positive arguments in favour
of a particular mission or foundation for the British Empire. Least of all
could it, or post-Reformation theology more generally, provide a sol-
ution to the problem of defining, justifying or correlating claims both to
sovereignty (imperium) and property (dominium) as the ideological basis for
the Empire. In light also of the fact that distinctions within Protestantism
could divide confessed Protestants as much as it had the potential to
unite them, and also that the national and international contexts within
which Protestant theorists operated shifted so dramatically and subtly
across the course of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it

For exceptions to this generalisation see Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World, ch. , ‘The
Finger of God: Religious Conceptions of the New World’; Alfred A. Cave, ‘Canaanites in a
Promised Land: The American Indian and the Providential Theory of Empire’, American Indian
Quarterly,  (), –; Paul Stevens, ‘‘‘Leviticus Thinking’’ and the Rhetoric of Early
Modern Colonialism’, Criticism,  (), –. The omission of any sustained treatment of
religion in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, ; The Origins of Empire
(Oxford, ) is striking.
 For hints of the possibilities see Arthur Williamson, ‘Scots, Indians and Empire: The Scottish
Politics of Civilization, –’, Past and Present,  (Feb. ), –; Simon Schama, The
Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (London, ); Frank
Lestringant, Le Huguenot et le sauvage: l’Amérique et la controverse coloniale, en France, au temps des Guerres de
Religion (–) (Paris, ); Michael Roberts, The Swedish Imperial Experience –
(Cambridge, ).
 D. A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State –
(Cambridge, ), .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
becomes almost impossible to discern any precise and undeniable Prot-
estant contribution to the ideological origins of the British Empire.
The two greatest memorialists in English of overseas enterprise,
Richard Hakluyt the younger and Samuel Purchas, provide ample
material for testing the hypothetical relationship between Protestantism
and the ideological origins of the British Empire. As the bishop of
Peterborough, White Kennett, noted with pride in , ‘Mr. 
and Mr.  (both Clergymen of the Church of England)’ were
indispensable providers of information and inspiration for the library he
had assembled under the auspices of the Society for the Propagation of
the Gospel. Hakluyt – the rector of Wetheringsett in Norfolk, preben-
dary of Bristol Cathedral and archdeacon of Westminster Abbey – and
Purchas – vicar of Eastwood, chaplain to archbishop George Abbot,
rector of St Martin’s, Ludgate, and of All Hallows, Bread Street – were
also not alone, of course, among the host of English Protestant clerics
who chronicled and promoted trade, colonisation and conquest in the
late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. For example, George
Benson, Patrick Copland, Richard Crakanthorpe, William Crashaw,
John Donne, Robert Gray and William Symonds all wrote on behalf of
the Virginia Company, and deployed sermons as one of the major
genres of promotional literature for the company. Moreover, the most
penetrating treatments of the question of English property rights in
North America came in the writings of the Rev. John White of Dorches-
ter and the Puritan leader John Winthrop. John Locke later expanded
upon such arguments, as he carefully distinguished between scriptural
 [White Kennett,] Bibliothecæ Americanæ Primordiæ (London, ), xii.

D. B. Quinn (ed.), The Hakluyt Handbook,  vols. (London, ); L. E. Pennington (ed.), The
Purchas Handbook: Studies of the Life, Times and Writings of Samuel Purchas –,  vols. (London,
).
 On the sermons preached for the Virginia Company see John Parker, ‘Religion and the Virginia
Colony –’, in K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny and P. E. H. Hair (eds.), The Westward
Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America – (Liverpool, ), –;
H. C. Porter, The Inconstant Savage: England and the North American Indian – (London, ),
–; Zakai, Exile and Kingdom, –; W. Moelwyn Merchant, ‘Donne’s Sermon to the
Virginia Company,  November ’, in A. J. Smith (ed.), John Donne: Essays in Celebration
(London, ), –; Andrew Fitzmaurice, ‘Every Man That Prints Adventures: The Rhet-
oric of the Virginia Company Sermons’, in Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter E. McCullough (eds.),
The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History – (Manchester, ), –.

Chester Eisinger, ‘The Puritans’ Justification for Taking the Land’, Essex Institute Historical
Collections,  (), –; Wilcomb E. Washburn, ‘The Moral and Legal Justification for
Dispossessing the Indians’, in James Morton Smith (ed.), Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in
Colonial History (Chapel Hill, ), –; Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians,
Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, ), –; Ruth Baynes Moynihan, ‘The
Patent and the Indians: The Problem of Jurisdiction in Seventeenth-Century New England’,
American Indian Culture and Research Journal,  (), –.
 Protestantism and empire: Hakluyt, Purchas and property 
justifications for possession and those derived from the presumed state
of the souls of the dispossessed. To trace these arguments from the s
to the s is to see just how small a part Protestant conceptions of the
millennium, of the church and of salvation played in the development of
Anglo-British conceptions of empire; it is also to realise that, though
Protestantism may not have been the only cause of imperial amnesia, it
was far from the well-spring of imperial identity some later historians
have discerned.
The British Empire was nevertheless obviously a post-Reformation
empire, even in the territorial and dynastic sense examined in the last
chapter. ‘Between the opening ages of Spanish and British transatlantic
colonization’, J. H. Elliott has noted, ‘fell the great divide of the Protes-
tant Reformation’. In particular, the institutional structure of the later
British Empire embodied the English and Scottish Reformations’ chal-
lenges to the universalist claims of the Roman Church. In the long run,
this made the British Empire institutionally weaker, more flexible, but
also finally more fragile than the Spanish Monarchy in the Indies, for
example. Ecclesiological dissension racked the Church of England and
doctrinal Protestantism penetrated unevenly throughout the English
territories. The English Crown recognised a Presbyterian established
Church in the Channel Islands after , even when it was most
ferociously attacking Presbyterianism within the English Church.
England after the Elizabethan Settlement and Scotland after its Refor-
mation remained ecclesiologically distinct after –, the one Epis-
copalian, the other Presbyterian; the pluralism of the Stuart composite
monarchy after  was likewise transmitted to its overseas possessions.
By the s, the Elizabethan state also effectively tolerated a powerful
Catholic minority (so long as they remained quiescent). Such pluralism
and de facto toleration of diversity can help explain the entrenchment of
ecclesiological diversity that characterised the British Atlantic Empire,
especially since it was enshrined in fundamental law by the Treaty of
Union in , which recognised the perpetual separation of the estab-
lished Churches of England and Scotland. One major consequence for
the later British Empire of the Protestant Reformations was therefore

J. H. Elliott, ‘Empire and State in British and Spanish America,’ in Serge Gruzinski and Nathan
Wachtel (eds.), Le Nouveau Monde – mondes nouveaux: l’expérience américaine (Paris, ), .

A. F. McC. Madden, ‘,  and All That: The Relevance of the English Medieval
Experience of ‘‘Empire’’ to Later Imperial Constitutional Issues’, in John E. Flint and Glyndwr
Williams (eds.), Perspectives of Empire: Essays Presented to Gerald S. Graham (London, ), ; C. S. L.
Davies, ‘International Politics and the Establishment of Presbyterianism in the Channel Islands:
The Coutances Connection’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History,  (), –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
disunity rather than unity. The common Protestantism of the Empire
was not based on any shared conception of doctrines of salvation, the
church or of Jesus’s divinity. Instead, and increasingly, it depended
upon a common anti-Catholicism that was more negative in content
than affirmative in structure.
Despite these obvious cracks in the facade of a common Protestant-
ism, history could be used to provide a continuous religious tradition for
the Empire. The traditional genealogy of the British Empire located its
beginnings in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I of England (though
not of James VI of Scotland). It was in this period that England – which
was assumed to be the primary and only seat of empire in Britain –
extended its commerce westwards across the Atlantic, began to send
settlers across the ocean and planted its first colonies and, with them,
laid the foundations of a British Empire. This chronology affirmed the
defining Protestantism of the British Empire by aligning its origins with
the period of the consolidation of the English Reformation in the wake
of the Elizabethan Settlement. Yet it also tended to displace the Scottish
contribution to the origins of a comprehensively British Empire by
assuming that the driving force behind both Protestantism and empire
came from England alone. Just as Scotland after  had become
subsumed into an Anglo-British state, this narrative implied, so it could
have made no contribution to the formation of the British Empire, nor
could there have been any relationship between the multiple monarchy
of the regal union (–) and the British Empire. Richard Hakluyt,
in particular, provided a useful resource for this simplifying narrative,
not least because he betrayed no interest at all in the British problem of
the relations between the Three Kingdoms. One reason for the oblivion
into which Samuel Purchas fell may indeed have been his own commit-
ment to the projects of British federalism and, later, British unionism in
the reigns of James VI and I and Charles I. It was always easier to
assume that Anglican Protestantism defined an Anglo-British Empire,
centred on London and superintended by London’s bishop. To accept
the diversity of the British kingdoms, or even the United Kingdom after
, would have been to admit a crucial fissure in the religious charac-
ter of the Empire. In this context, Hakluyt’s merely English accounts
served the ideological purposes of the later British Empire better than
Purchas’s.

For a rather different view of the religious character of the Empire see J. C. D. Clark, The
Language of Liberty –: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World
(Cambridge, ).
 Protestantism and empire: Hakluyt, Purchas and property 
The historical narrative of the Elizabethan, and hence English, ori-
gins of the British Empire necessarily effaced the ideological origins of
that empire in the period between Reformations. As we have seen, the
concept of an ‘Empire of Great Britain’ first emerged in the aftermath
of the English Reformation, in the context of Anglo-Scottish relations.
It therefore preceded the coincident crises of British Protestantism in
– that reaffirmed the Protestantism of the English state in the
first year of Elizabeth’s reign and asserted the Protestantism of the
Scottish Church by means of insurrection and coup d’état during the
Scottish Reformation of . These crises created two unstable and
potentially short-lived Protestant monarchies in Britain that with hind-
sight appeared as the harbingers of unification, as indeed some of the
supporters of Reformation in both England and Scotland during this
period hoped. As F. W. Maitland famously put it, ‘[a] new nation, a
British nation, was in the making’ in the aftermath of . That nation
was decidedly Protestant and incipiently British with a glorious, global
destiny ahead of it: ‘The fate of the Protestant Reformation was being
decided, and the creed of unborn millions in undiscovered lands was
being determined’.
If Protestantism was the bond of Britishness, and out of British
nationhood sprang British imperialism, the Reformation should logi-
cally have been the ideological forcing-house for the British Empire
itself. The British religious crises of – may have created two
Protestant kingdoms, and hence a Protestant island of Britain; however,
they did not produce a common Protestantism, nor could they thereby
have provided a mutual foundation for a Protestant empire beyond the
Three Kingdoms. ‘The great success of Anglo-Scottish Protestant cul-
ture in promoting a measure of cultural integration between the two
realms was deeply deceptive’, because England and Scotland retained
their particular religious and political institutions, and remained in
more respects divided by Protestantism than united by it. Even the
contemporary perception that Protestantism united England and Scot-
land, and distinguished them from their Catholic neighbours and adver-
saries, was undercut by the persistent institutional divergence between
the two kingdoms. As the versatile poet and governor of Newfoundland,
 F. W. Maitland, ‘The Anglican Settlement and the Scottish Reformation’, in A. W. Ward, G. W.
Prothero and Stanley Leathes (eds.), The Cambridge Modern History, : The Reformation (London,
), .

Jane Dawson, ‘Anglo-Scottish Protestant Culture and Integration in Sixteenth-Century Britain’,
in Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (eds.), Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State –
(London, ), .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
Robert Hayman, versified this problem when memorialising King
James in :
Our Ministers in their Evangeling,
Praying for thee, stile thee Great Brittaines King:
Our Lawyers pleading in Westminster Hall,
Of England, and of Scotland King thee call.
For what great mystery, I cannot see,
Why Law, and Gospell should thus disagree.
The same would be true of the later British Empire erected upon these
unstable foundations.
The narrative of the late sixteenth-century origins of the British
Empire suppressed the fact that the post-Reformation Empire was also a
post-Renaissance Empire. As we have also seen, both English propon-
ents of Anglo-Scottish union and their Scottish opponents employed
classical rhetoric in the dispute over the creation of an ‘empire of Great
Britain’ in the s. Both sides appealed to Roman precedents to
support their respective positions, and both used the neo-Roman lan-
guage of empire (imperium) and colony (colonia) to describe the territorial
consolidation they envisaged or the jurisdictional subordination they
feared. The Scots antagonists of English claims to suzerainty turned the
weapons of critical humanism against the historical foundations of those
claims in the multiple monarchy of Brutus, while an Anglo-Briton like
Edmund Spenser could later unabashedly draw on the British history in
tandem with a neo-Aristotelian scheme for his truncated epic.
Both Hakluyt and Purchas identified the sixteenth-century revival of
classical literature as a factor in encouraging commerce, colonisation
and English settlement overseas. In the preface to his Principal Navigations
(–), Hakluyt attributed the precedence of the Spanish and the
Portuguese in the process of discovery in the Indies to their intellectual
advantages, not least ‘those bright lampes of learning (I meane the most
ancient and best Philosophers, Historiographers and Geographers)’. A
quarter of a century later, Purchas located the origins of English expan-
sion in ‘the late eruption of captived learning in the former age, and
more especially in the glorious sunshine of Queene Elizabeth’. Pur-
 Robert Hayman, Quodlibets; Lately Come Over from New Britaniola, Old Newfound-Land (London,
), ; on Hayman see G. C. Moore Smith, ‘Robert Hayman and the Plantation of
Newfoundland’, English Historical Review,  (), –.

Richard Hakluyt (ed.), The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation,
 vols. (London, –), , sig. [*]v.

Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes,  vols. (London, ), , . To avert
the almost unavoidable confusion between this work and Purchas’s Pilgrimage () and his
Pilgrim (), it is hereafter cited as Hakluytus Posthumus.
 Protestantism and empire: Hakluyt, Purchas and property 
chas’s chronology of the origins of an Anglo-British empire in Eliza-
beth’s reign would later become conventional, particularly when an
emergent linguistic nationalism traced the origins of English literature
to the vernacular poetry and prose of this period. This association of
Englishness (transmitted through literature) and empire (rooted in Eliza-
bethan expansion) served at once to identify the origins of empire with
the late sixteenth century – and hence with activity outside the Three
Kingdoms – but also to efface the contribution of classical, pre-
Christian learning to the origins of an empire deemed Protestant be-
cause English, and Anglo-British by virtue of its Protestantism.
However, an enduring northern European myth of modernity sus-
tained the association between the discovery of ‘new worlds’ in the
Indies and the recovery of the Greek and Latin classics. The peculiar
English version of this myth added the Protestant Reformation to the
revival of ancient learning and the discovery of new worlds as a marker
of the modern era. It was of course hardly fortuitous that the Tudor
dynasty had presided over this conjunction: as Samuel Daniel noted in
, the Tudor reigns were ‘[a] time wherein began a greater improve-
ment of the Soveraigntie . . . The opening of a new world, which
strangely opened the manner of this . . . Besides strange alterations in the
State Ecclesiasticall: Religion brought forth to be an Actor in the
greatest Designes of Ambition and Faction’. Daniel’s assessment of the
conjunction was not entirely approving, but he did deem it decisive in
settling England’s place in the longer span of European history. Later in
the seventeenth century, the double conjunction of European recon-
naissance and the Reformation became a decisive event in hemispheric,
and even global, history: ‘the Reformation of Religion, and the Dis-
covery of the West Indies . . . two Great Revolutions, happening neer
about the same time, did very much alter the State of Affairs in the
World’. The most famous formulation of this conjunction was
Thomas Paine’s in : ‘The Reformation was preceded by the dis-
covery of America; As if the Almighty graciously meant to open a
sanctuary to the persecuted in future years’. Gradually, the association
with the Renaissance was forgotten in Protestant thought. It thereby
became possible to define the post-Reformation origins of the British
 David Armitage, ‘Literature and Empire’, in Canny (ed.), Oxford History of the British Empire, ,
–.
 Samuel Daniel, The First Part of the Historie of England (London, ), sig. Av.

A Declaration of His Highness . . . Setting Forth, On the Behalf of this Commonwealth, the Justice of their Cause
against Spain (London, ), .

Thomas Paine, Common Sense; Addressed to the Inhabitants of America (Philadelphia, ), .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
Empire as specifically Protestant, just as it became necessary to define
those origins as exclusively English, rather than collectively British.

Richard Hakluyt the younger was the major beneficiary of the narrative
that located the origins of the British Empire in the Elizabethan period.
In due course he was dubbed the intellectual progenitor of the Empire,
the person ‘to whom England [sic] is more indebted for its American
possessions than to any man of that age’, according to William Robert-
son. In the mid-nineteenth century, J. A. Froude succinctly combined
a similarly high estimation of Hakluyt’s place in the history of the British
Empire with an assessment of his position in the history of literature in
English, and hence in the history of Englishness itself: in these terms,
Froude memorably judged Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations to be nothing
less than the ‘Prose Epic of the modern English nation’. Classical epic
had been transformed into vernacular prose; colonial fact replaced
imperial fiction; modernity, nationhood and Englishness could all be
traced back to the reign of Elizabeth, where they had been plotted by
the pen of Hakluyt. Likewise, Hakluyt’s first scholarly biographer
argued that ‘[t]he history of Hakluyt’s career is in large part the
intellectual history of the beginnings of the British Empire’: much
therefore depends on an accurate assessment of that career in any
understanding of the ideological origins of an empire which later took
him to be its intellectual progenitor.
Hakluyt located the origins of his own vocation as the memorialist of
English overseas enterprise in the juxtaposition of theology and geogra-
phy. While he was ‘one of her Majesty’s scholars at Westminster’ in
c. , he recalled, he visited the rooms of his cousin, Richard Hakluyt
the elder, at the Middle Temple,
at a time when I found lying upon his board certeine bookes of Cosmographie,
with an universall Mappe: he seeing me somewhat curious in the view therof,
began to instruct my ignorance, by shewing me the division of the earth into
three parts after the olde account, and then according to the later & better
distribution, into more: he pointed with his wand to all the knowen Seas, Gulfs,
Bayes, Straights, Capes, Rivers, Empires, Kingdomes, Dukedomes and Terri-
tories of ech part, with declaration also of their speciall commodities, &
particular wants, which by the benefit of traffike & entercourse of merchants,

William Robertson, The History of America,  vols. (London, –), , .
 [J. A. Froude,] ‘England’s Forgotten Worthies’, The Westminster Review, n.s. ,  (July ), ; D.
B. Quinn, ‘Hakluyt’s Reputation’, in Quinn (ed.), Hakluyt Handbook, , –.
 Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, ), –,
–. 
George Bruner Parks, Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages (New York, ), .
 Protestantism and empire: Hakluyt, Purchas and property 
are plentifully supplied. From the Mappe he brought me to the Bible, and
turning to the [th] Psalme, directed mee to the [rd] & [th] verses, where
I read, that they which go downe to the sea in ships, and occupy by the great
waters, they see the works of the Lord, and his woonders in the deepe, &c.
Hakluyt represented this event in idiomatically Protestant terms, as an
encounter with a prophetic text, guided by a layman and applied to the
life of an individual reader and believer. The elder Hakluyt’s cosmog-
raphies revealed a world of discrete territories, each endowed with their
natural products but also connected by their mutual need for one
another’s goods. This confirmed the natural jurisprudential argument
that God had so disposed the world’s commodities that the reciprocity
of scarcity and abundance between states would promote ‘the benefit of
traffic and intercourse of merchants’. The Psalmists’ verses of course
offered no scriptural foundation for this principle of natural rather than
revealed religion; however, they did authorise Hakluyt’s own later
conception of his mission, both as an editor and as a cleric in the
Elizabethan Church. Nevertheless, Hakluyt’s account was somewhat
disingenuous for, as we shall see, his intellectual projects owed more to
his Oxonian Aristotelianism and Thomism than they did to any suppos-
edly unmediated Protestant experience of scripture.
Religion shaped little, if any, of Hakluyt’s corpus, either generically or
rhetorically. All of Hakluyt’s printed works derived from his self-
appointed task as the compiler of the English ‘voyages and discoveries’
and none from his position as rector, chaplain or prebendary. He
published no sermons, intervened directly in no religious polemics and
wrote no Biblical commentary. The most direct institutional source of
his commitments was not the Elizabethan Church but rather the Cloth-
workers’ Company. The company paid Hakluyt an annual pension
from  to  even when he was stationed in Paris as chaplain to the
English ambassador, Sir Edward Stafford, on and off between  and
. The company’s interest lay in replacing short-range European
and Mediterranean markets for English cloth with more expansive
arenas of trade. The geographical range of Hakluyt’s various histories
certainly encouraged such a reorientation of English exports, both to the
East Indies and increasingly across the Atlantic. Such a programme
 Richard Hakluyt, ‘Epistle Dedicatory to Sir Francis Walsingham’, in Hakluyt (ed.), The Principall
Navigations of the English People (London, ), sig. *r.
 Jacob Viner, The Role of Providence in the Social Order: An Essay in Intellectual History (Princeton, ),
–, –.
 G. D. Ramsay, ‘Clothworkers, Merchant Adventurers, and Richard Hakluyt’, English Historical
Review, nd ser.,  (), –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
may have been closer to Hakluyt’s intentions than his theological
commitments, but it is hardly sufficient to explain the shape and devel-
opment of his intellectual projects, both in manuscript and in print.
The extent – and the limits – of Hakluyt’s conception of England’s
national mission were most evident in his two longest and most closely
linked works, one the fruit of his position as an advisor to Sir Francis
Walsingham and Sir Walter Ralegh in the s, the other of his tutorial
responsibilities at Oxford. Since its first publication in the late nine-
teenth century, the so-called ‘Discourse of Western Planting’ has been
the major source for discussions of Hakluyt’s ideas and of Elizabethan
colonial ideology more broadly. Hakluyt’s own title for the work – ‘A
particuler discourse concerninge the greate necessitie and manifolde
comodyties that are like to growe to this Realme of Englande by the
Westerne discoveries lately attempted’ – is usually forgotten, as are its
genre and the context of its original reception. The ‘Discourse’ was a
position-paper, written at Walsingham’s request, and submitted to
Queen Elizabeth in . As such, it was simultaneously an act of
counsel, a rhetorical intervention into conciliar debate on policy and a
gift offered from suppliant to monarch in hopes of generating reciprocal
reward. Yet it is also forgotten that the ‘Discourse’ was not Hakluyt’s
only such work at this time. In September , Hakluyt had presented
‘a couple of bookes of myne in wryting, one in Latin upon Arystotles
politicks, the other in English concerning Mr Rawley’s voyage’. As an
attempt to influence conciliar policy, and to gain the Crown’s financial
backing for Ralegh’s Roanoke voyage, the ‘Discourse’ was clearly a
failure. However, in tandem with Hakluyt’s ‘wryting . . . in Latin upon
Arystotles politicks’, it was impressive enough to gain him ‘the next
vacation of a prebend in Bristol’ in October .
The simultaneous presentation of the ‘Discourse’ and the Latin
synopsis of the Politics – the ‘Analysis, seu resolutio perpetua in octo
libros Politicorum Aristotelis’ – was an attempt to frame English over-
seas activity within the context of classical civil philosophy. The
‘Analysis’ was prior to the ‘Discourse’, both logically and in the manner
 On the rhetorical culture of the Elizabethan council see Stephen Alford, The Early Elizabethan
Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, – (Cambridge, ), –.
 Hakluyt to Sir Francis Walsingham,  April , in Writings and Correspondence, ed. Taylor, ,
–; D. B. Quinn, ‘A Hakluyt Chronology’, in Quinn (ed.), Hakluyt Handbook, , .
 Richard Hakluyt, ‘Analysis, seu resolutio perpetua in octo libros Politicorum Aristotelis’, BL MS
Royal . . . The only extended treatment of the ‘Analysis’ does not draw any intellectual
connection between it and the ‘Discourse’: Lawrence V. Ryan, ‘Richard Hakluyt’s Voyage into
Aristotle’, Sixteenth Century Journal,  (), –.
 Protestantism and empire: Hakluyt, Purchas and property 
of its presentation to Elizabeth and her ministers. Like the ‘Discourse’, it
was a bid for patronage, and in this it was clearly successful. Unlike the
‘Discourse’, it might be added, the ‘Analysis’ was a supreme example of
its genre, ‘[p]erhaps the most significant of all the manuscript materials
relating to Aristotle coming from Oxford in the [Elizabethan] period’.
It was a characteristic product of the late sixteenth-century Oxford
curriculum, and of the ‘humanistic, Aristotelian culture’ it fostered. It
derived from Hakluyt’s lectures on Aristotle at Christ Church in ,
and he evidently continued to draw upon it beyond the time of his
composition of the ‘Discourse’, through the editing of his earliest geo-
graphical works, and almost up to the moment when he published the
first edition of the Principall Navigations, since he produced a second,
almost identical, manuscript of it in . The exposition of the Politics
was therefore the one consistent thread in Hakluyt’s intellectual life
from  to , a fact which confirms the importance of the ‘Analysis’
to elucidate the context of the ‘Discourse’ with which he paired it for
presentation to Elizabeth in .
The ‘Analysis’ presented a complete recension of the Politics into
Latin, broken down into books, chapters and questions. For Hakluyt’s
Oxford students, it provided a pedagogical tool, adequate to their need
to understand Aristotle’s work and to debate its meaning; for Elizabeth
and her counsellors, it functioned rather as an argument regarding the
nature, capacities and purpose of the commonwealth, and in that form
stood as a preface to the ‘Discourse’. Hakluyt’s summary of Aristotle’s
chapters entitled it ‘Octo librum Aristotelis de Republica’, and, as if to
nudge his readers further in the direction of considering the work as a
contribution to the Latin literature on the best state of the
commonwealth, he entitled Book , ‘De optima Republica’. Central
to the best state was Aristotle’s conception of self-sufficiency, recast in
Thomist terms as the defining feature of the communitas perfecta. In his
synopsis of Book  of the Politics, Hakluyt translated Aristotle’s definition
of the polis into just such Thomist terms: ‘Societas perfecta . . . est civitas.
Cuius finis est sufficientia omnium rerum necessarium & vita beata’ (‘the

Charles B. Schmitt, John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England (Kingston, Ontario, ),
, n. .

James B. McConica, ‘Humanism and Aristotle in Tudor Oxford’, English Historical Review, 
(), ; Schmitt, John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England, –, –.

BL MS Sloane . This copy is in Hakluyt’s own hand.
 Hakluyt, ‘Analysis’, BL MS Royal . . , ff. r, v; on the literature de optimo statu reipublicae,
see Quentin Skinner, ‘Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and the Language of Renaissance Humanism’,
in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, ),
–.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
city is the perfect society, whose end is a sufficiency of all necessities and
the blessed life’). He reaffirmed it in his translation of the definition of the
civitas in Book  as ‘multitudo . . . civium, ad vitae sufficientiam seipsa
contenta’ (‘a mass of citizens, self-sufficient in the necessities of life’).
The ‘protestant scholasticism’ of Hakluyt’s thought is also evident in the
fact that he cited Aquinas more often than any other modern commenta-
tor on Aristotle. Though Hakluyt referred to himself as ‘verbi Dei
Minister’ in his preface to Elizabeth, and dedicated the ‘Analysis’ on its
closing leaf, ‘Deo Opt. Max. Honor Laus et Gloria’, he made only one
explicit attempt to insert a Christian conception of religion into Aris-
totle’s analysis when he added a marginal note to the discussion of
rebellion in Book : ‘Religionem ad quam classem referas, tu videris.’
Hakluyt’s vocabulary elsewhere could be read as a gloss on the
‘Discourse’, as for example in the initial description of the building-
block of the polis: ‘Vicus est colonia quaedam domorum & familiarum:
ergo et vicus naturalis est’ (‘the village is a colony of some households and
families: therefore, the village is also the product of nature’). Such
meanings would be obvious in conjunction with the ‘Discourse’. To
trained and committed humanists like Sir William Cecil or Elizabeth
herself, the significance of the juxtaposition would have been clear: if
England were to be a civitas perfecta, and its citizens capable of living the
vita beata, they, like the citizens of the Aristotelian polis, would need to be
supplied with virtue, a physical sufficiency and an abundance of fortune
(‘Vita beata . . . est, quae cum virtute coniuncta, ea bonorum corporis et
fortunæ copia habet’). One way to supply that, and to found a new
commonwealth, would be through the ‘natural’ activity of founding
villages or coloniae, composed of families.
The ‘Discourse’ presented an argument both for the ‘necessitie’ of
planting colonies across the Atlantic and for the ‘manifolde com-
modyties’ that would arise from them. The necessity of colonisation
arose from simultaneous overpopulation at home, and the contraction

Hakluyt, ‘Analysis’, BL MS Royal . . , ff. r, r; Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World:
Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. – (New Haven, ), .

Hakluyt, ‘Analysis’, BL MS Royal . . , ff. r, r, r; Ryan, ‘Richard Hakluyt’s Voyage
into Aristotle’, , ; Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist
Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, ), .
 Hakluyt, ‘Analysis’, BL MS Royal . . , ff. r, v, v.

Hakluyt, ‘Analysis’, BL MS Royal . . , f. r (my emphasis).
 Richard Hakluyt, A Particuler Discourse Concerninge the Greate Necessitie and Manifolde Commodyties that
are Like to Growe to this Realme of Englande by the Westerne Discoveries Lately Attempted . . . Known as
Discourse of Western Planting (), ed. David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn (London, ). The
original manuscript, of which this edition contains a facsimile, is in the New York Public Library.
 Protestantism and empire: Hakluyt, Purchas and property 
of English markets abroad. The manifold commodities would therefore
be general and particular: general, in providing an outlet for surplus
population and production, and relief from those ‘very burdensome to
the common wealthe’; and particular, in the provision of new materials
and products for the English economy, ‘the vent of the masse of our
clothes and other commodities of England, and . . . receavinge backe of
the nedefull commodities that wee nowe receave from all other places of
the worlde’. The overall aim of the new colonies would be to return
the economy of England itself to self-sufficiency by balancing its produc-
tion, consumption and population. This could only be achieved by the
export of people, and the institution of new markets, all of which would
be conceived as parts of the commonwealth, albeit across an ocean,
rather than new commonwealths in themselves.
A solely economic reading of Hakluyt’s ‘Discourse’ would not do
justice to the connection of the good of the commonwealth with the
demands of the vita beata, and hence of religion, in that document. In the
preface to his collection of Divers Voyages (), Hakluyt condemned ‘the
preposterous desire of seeking rather gaine then God’s glorie’, and
counselled that, ‘lasting riches do wait upon them that are jealous for the
advancement of the Kingdome of Christ, and the enlargement of his
glorious Gospell’. Like his elder cousin, therefore, he linked trade,
religion and conquest as essential parts of the same enterprise, and
hence teloi towards which English action in the Americas should be
directed. Just as the Politics, and hence Hakluyt’s synopsis of it, ended
with the necessity of education for the pursuit of the good life, whether
defined as eudaimonia or beatitudo, so the ‘Discourse’ began with the
question of ‘the inlarginge the gospell of Christe, and reducinge of
infinite multitudes of these simple people that are in errour into the
righte and perfecte waye of their salvacion’.
The ‘Analysis’ of Aristotle and the ‘Discourse’ on western planting
therefore complemented each other, the ‘Discourse’ picking up in its
first chapter where Book  of the ‘Analysis’ left off, in its consideration
of the means necessary for promoting the good life, and the capacities of
 Hakluyt, Particuler Discourse, ed. Quinn and Quinn, , , .

Hakluyt’s conception was therefore distinct from that of the later promoters of the Virginia
Company and its colony: Andrew Fitzmaurice, ‘The Civic Solution to the Crisis of English
Colonization, –’, The Historical Journal,  (), –.
 Richard Hakluyt (ed.), Divers Voyages Touching the Discovenie of America (London, ), sig. ¶ r.

Richard Hakluyt the elder, ‘Inducements to the Liking of the Voyage intended towards Virginia’
(), in Writings and Correspondence, ed. Taylor, , .

Hakluyt, Particuler Discourse, ed. Quinn and Quinn, .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
those in whom it might be encouraged. In the ‘Discourse’, Hakluyt
moved between assessments of the native peoples of the Americas in
terms of their civil and religious capacities, as ‘Savages’ or ‘Infidells’.
Yet, like so many of his contemporaries, he ultimately deemed the two
conditions to be inseparable: without civilisation, and hence induction
into the classically-defined conception of life in the polis or the civitas,
Christianity could not be implanted. As Hakluyt assured Sir Walter
Ralegh in , ‘[n]ihil enim ad posteros gloriosius nec honorificentius
transmitti potest, quàm Barbaros domare, rudes & paganos ad vitae
civilis societatem revocare, . . . hominésq; atheos & à Deo alienos divini
numinis reverentia imbuere’ (‘for nothing more glorious or honourable
can be handed down to the future than to tame the barbarian, to bring
back the savage and the pagan to the fellowship of civil existence and to
induce reverence for the Holy Spirit into atheists and others distant
from God’). Civilisation, defined in Ciceronian terms as the life of the
citizen, was therefore prior to, and indispensable for, Christian salva-
tion. In just the same way Hakluyt’s conception of the civil life was prior
to his conception of Christianity, and sprang from it, just as one would
expect from one of the most distinguished exponents of humanist
Aristotelianism and Protestant scholasticism in late sixteenth-century
Oxford.
This classical conception of the good life, and the conception of time
as bound by the existence of the polis, has greater relevance for an
understanding of Hakluyt’s thought than any contemporary schemes of
eschatological history. There is little indication that Hakluyt conceived
of his own enterprise within the categories of sacred time, even though
the first edition of his Principall Navigations appeared in , in the
immediate aftermath of the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Hakluyt
celebrated the victory and understood it as evidence of God’s judgment
on the Spanish; however, his work shows none of the resurgent apoca-
lypticism that characterised English Protestant thought in the years
after . Even at this highly-charged and significant moment in
England’s relationship with God, therefore, Hakluyt showed little sign
that he believed ‘England was indeed the New Israel, God’s chosen
nation’. His sole reference to the Pope as ‘the greate Antechryste of
Rome’ in  was an entirely conventional expression of a Calvinist
binary, and did not betoken any larger apocalyptic scheme in Hakluyt’s

Richard Hakluyt (ed.), De Orbe Novo Peter Martyris (Paris, ), sig. [av]v.
 Pace Zakai, Exile and Kingdom, –; on the upsurge of English apocalypticism after  see
Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse (Abingdon, ), –.
 Protestantism and empire: Hakluyt, Purchas and property 
theology. Nor did he distinguish true and false churches from one
another, except on the grounds of their saving mission. In the sixteenth
century, and in the Americas, he noted, the Spanish had had greater
evangelical success, and hence had pressed a more convincing claim for
the truth of their church: now, it was time for the ‘Princes of the
Relligion’ (Elizabeth I pre-eminent among them) to catch up, and
reveal the truth of the Protestant Church through the active conversion
of souls. None of these passing references amounts to evidence that
Hakluyt reflected systematically upon eschatology, nor that the con-
clusions of his theology – regarding the nature of the true church, the
identity of the Antichrist or the divine economy of salvation and repro-
bation – provided the intellectual foundation for his historiography.
Hakluyt’s English nationalism (if such it was) may therefore have
owed more to his classicism than to his Protestantism. The evangelical
success of the Catholic monarchies in the New World confirmed his
lack of confidence in God’s particular favour for England, the most
belated of all European powers in its attempts at American colonisa-
tion. Hakluyt’s solution to overcome such belatedness lay in informa-
tion disseminated through editions. The inspiration and the technical
models for those editions came from classical and contemporary ge-
ography, particularly Ptolemy, Abraham Ortelius and the ‘perfect’
history of Lancelot de la Popeliniére, whose L’Amiral de France ()
appeared while Hakluyt was in Paris. Ptolemy encouraged the history
of travel (Peregrinationis historia) as the alternative to ‘universall cosmog-
raphie’; Ortelius urged the combination of time and space to create
geographical histories; and La Popeliniére added exhortations for
national enterprise to such geographical history. Hakluyt in turn
produced a Latin edition of Peter Martyr’s Decades de Orbe Novo () in
Paris, and experimented with adding chronology to geography in that
edition as the prelude to his two collections of travels in the Principal
Navigations.

Hakluyt, Particuler Discourse, ed. Quinn and Quinn, ; Peter Lake, ‘The Significance of the
Elizabethan Identification of the Pope as Antichrist’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History,  (),
–; Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, –.
 Hakluyt, Particuler Discourse, ed. Quinn and Quinn, .

Hakluyt, Principall Navigations (), sig. *v.
 Compare Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Antwerp, ), sig. Aiiiir, with Hakluyt
(ed.), De Orbe Novo Peter Martyris, sig. aiiiv–aiiiir, and Hakluyt (ed.), Principal Navigations (–),
, sig. (A)v.

For Hakluyt and La Popeliniére see Hakluyt, Principall Navigations (), sig. *v; Writings and
Correspondence, ed. Taylor, ,  and note, , ; Edward Arber (ed.), A Transcript of the Registers
of the Company of Stationers of London; – A.D.,  vols. (London, ), , .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
The specific models Hakluyt did acknowledge as sources for his own
historiography were three of ‘our owne Historians’: John Foxe, the
martyrologist and compiler of the Acts and Monuments; John Bale, the
apocalyptic historian, through his least apocalyptic work, the Scriptorum
Illustrium Majoris Britanniæ . . . Catalogus (–); and Richard Eden, the
mid-sixteenth-century translator of early Spanish works relating to the
Americas. Hakluyt also took material relating to northern Germany
from the Commentaries () of another notable European apocalyptic
historian, John Sleidan. However, his debts to these various works
were not evidently theological. The two works by Bale and Sleidan
from which he drew material were in each case the works of their
authors least obviously shaped by their apocalypticism. Eden’s transla-
tions had been produced mostly in the reign of the Catholic Queen
Mary, to whom he dedicated his translation of Peter Martyr’s Decades of
the New World as a gift on the occasion of her marriage to the Spanish
prince Philip, in celebration of the alliance of England with the Spanish
Monarchy. Finally, Hakluyt’s most evident debt to Foxe was his
treatment of personal narratives – of merchants and sailors in his case,
of martyrs in Foxe’s – rather than in any larger scheme of salvation or
reprobation within which they might be placed. None of his major
works therefore depended upon, or contributed to, theological debate
about the structure of the English Church, the relationship between
true and false churches, the doctrine of salvation or the status of the
English as agents in apocalyptic time.
Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations were in due course carried on board
the ships of the East India Company, alongside Foxe’s Acts and Monu-
ments and the works of the orthodox Calvinist divine William Perkins.
Foxe has long been taken to be the exemplar of English Protestant
particularism, the antiquarian martyrologist whose greatest vernacular
work supposedly sustained the vision of England as the ‘elect nation’
from the s into the eighteenth century, and beyond. But recent
scholars have challenged the idea that England could have been the
elect nation, rather than an elect nation, because election, within the
Calvinist scheme of double predestination, was no respecter of national
boundaries, and the true church of the elect was invisible and eternal
 Hakluyt (ed.), Principall Navigations (), sig. *v; Hakluyt, Particuler Discourse, ed. Quinn and
Quinn, , , .
 Peter Martyr, The Decades of the Newe Worlde of India, trans. Richard Eden (London, ), sig.
[Ai]v.
 Louis B. Wright, Religion and Empire (Chapel Hill, ), , .

William Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London, ).
 Protestantism and empire: Hakluyt, Purchas and property 
rather than visible and earthly. As a result, Foxe no longer stands as the
avatar of English elect nationalism. He clearly placed the history of the
English Church within a universal scheme of salvation and reproba-
tion, the small, persecuted, elect leaven within the lump of unregener-
ate mass humanity being as unequally distributed within his own na-
tion as anywhere else. Nor was he a millenarian, since he located the
millennium firmly in the past and not in the future, for England or
anywhere else. The fact that Francis Drake carried a copy of Foxe’s
book of martyrs on his circumnavigation – and amazed a Spanish
prisoner by colouring the woodcuts during the voyage – seems less
fraught with particular apocalyptic significance once Foxe’s universal-
ism, and Drake’s own instrumental, Machiavellian, approach to relig-
ion, are appreciated. The consensus among historians that elect na-
tionalism was a quite restricted, particular and contested argument
within English Protestantism also confirms the unlikelihood that it
would have been espoused by a writer like Hakluyt as a justification for
the promotion of English overseas trade and settlement. If the concep-
tion of the ‘elect nation’ were a taproot – even the taproot – of English
imperialism, then Hakluyt did not supply much nourishment for it to
grow and flourish.
Far from exulting in God’s special favour for England, Hakluyt
pointed to God’s greater care for the Catholic monarchies. The belated-
ness of the English in the competition for American colonies was a sign
to sixteenth-century English Protestants, at least, that Providence had
offered Protestants no privileges. It was often recalled – albeit mistaken-
ly – that Bartolomé Colon, Christopher Columbus’s brother, had of-
fered Henry VII the chance to sponsor a voyage in search of the Indies;
the English king rejected the opportunity, which was taken up instead
by the Castilian Crown. Hakluyt included two documents in the
Principal Navigations recording Colon’s proposal, but drew from the
episode the unsettling conclusion that ‘God had reserved the sayd offer

Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, –; Katherine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation
Britain – (Oxford, ), –; Jane Facey, ‘John Foxe and the Defence of the English
Church’, in Peter Lake and Maria Dowling (eds.), Protestantism and the National Church in Sixteenth
Century England (London, ), –; Palle J. Olsen, ‘Was John Foxe a Millenarian?’ Journal of
Ecclesiastical History,  (), –.
 New Light on Drake, ed. Zelia Nuttall (London, ), , –; Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, ;
Harry Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate (New Haven, ), –, –, .
 Sir Walter Ralegh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtifull Empyre of Guiana (London, ), ;
Lawrence Keymis, A Relation of the Second Voyage to Guiana (London, ), sig. [A]v; [Robert
Gray,] A Good Speed for Virginia (London, ), sig. B[]v; Daniel Price, Sauls Prohibition Staide
(London, ), sig. Fr; Sir William Alexander, An Encouragement to Colonies (London, ), .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
for Castile’. The subsequent success of the Catholic monarchies in
effecting conversion in South and Central America ‘may justly be
coumpted rather a perversion’; nevertheless, the Protestant princes
could offer no evidence that they had converted even one unbeliever to
refute the claim that ‘they are the true Catholicke Churche because they
have bene the onely converters of many millions of Infidells to Christi-
anitie’. Hakluyt’s writings show no evidence of any interest in the
primitive Church or the antecedents of Protestantism before the
European Reformations. He offered no answer to that vexing question
apocryphally asked by every Catholic to any Protestant: ‘Where was
your church before Luther?’ However, he was clearly troubled by the
fact that God had allowed Catholics to convert native Americans
unchecked, and had thereby endowed the Roman Church with the
mark of truth: a successful saving mission.
Hakluyt’s works remained thoroughly English and not British (let
alone, British and Irish) in scope. His aim was to chronicle the voyages,
traffics and navigations of the English nation alone. This in itself did not
necessarily make him an English nationalist, and there is no evidence in
his writings that he believed England to be the elect nation. However,
his work revealed the limits that contemporary nationhood placed on
his historiographical and geographical horizons. He set ‘Britain’ firmly
in the distant past, as when he stated that the scattering of colonies in
Roman Britain meant that the Romans did not ‘in effecte ha[ve] the
Brittishe nation at commaundement’. The last truly British king, for
Hakluyt as for other commentators like John Dee and later John Selden,
had been Edgar, ‘soveraigne lord of all the British seas, and of the whole
Isle of Britaine it selfe’. Beyond these references, there is no evidence
in Hakluyt’s works that he espoused the British history that had been so
prominent in Anglo-British propaganda in the s and that Spenser
deployed in the s to underpin his vision of a unified British mon-
archy within the Three Kingdoms. He presumably shared the scepti-
cism of sixteenth-century humanists regarding the Galfridian British
history. The use of that history in the Anglo-British propaganda of the
s had been something of a rearguard action, and Scottish oppo-
nents of its historiographical agenda countered it by appeals to human-
ist scholarship, especially Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia. A British
 Hakluyt (ed.), Principal Navigations (–), , .

Hakluyt, Particuler Discourse, ed. Quinn and Quinn, .
 Hakluyt, Particuler Discourse, ed. Quinn and Quinn, ; Hakluyt (ed.), Principal Navigations (–
), sig. **v, –.
 Protestantism and empire: Hakluyt, Purchas and property 
empire – let alone the British Empire – was inconceivable for Hakluyt.
Such a community lay neither in the past nor in the future; his concep-
tion of the English nation was at root Thomist and neo-Aristotelian, a
societas perfecta, or even a self-sufficient polis, not a composite monarchy
or the metropolis of an expansive territorial imperium on the late Roman
model. It was hardly surprising that William Robertson credited Hak-
luyt with the inspiration for planting English colonies, nor that Froude
identified him as the author of the English nation’s ‘prose epic’. It is
therefore entirely fitting that the term ‘British Empire’ did not appear in
any of his works.

With hindsight, and from the perspective of the mid-Victorian Angli-

canism, Samuel Purchas could be praised alongside Hakluyt as the
Protestant co-founder of a commercial empire:
Purchas . . . carried on most effectively . . . the work which Hakluyt had so well
begun; and to those two clergymen of the Church of England every one who
would desire to see the earliest steps by which the commercial greatness of this
nation has been attained must ever turn with gratitude.
However, attention to Hakluyt and Purchas’s differing conceptions of
Britain, national election, anti-Catholicism, and eschatology prevents
any facile assimilation of their respective projects. Purchas’s geographi-
cal histories, unlike Hakluyt’s, placed England firmly in the context of
the history of the Three Kingdoms, of Europe, and of a wider world
conceived within sacred time. Hakluyt took little interest in Ireland, and
none in Scotland; he made only the most glancing references to the
schemes of church history; and he presented no apocalyptic justification
for English trade and settlement. In contrast, Purchas’s attention to the
Three Kingdoms of the Stuart multiple monarchy, his cosmopolitan
historiography and his attempt to place British history within the wider
schemes of theological time made his works strictly incomparable to
Hakluyt’s. For all their superficial similarities as memorialists of English
overseas enterprise, and in spite of Purchas’s acknowledged debt to his
predecessor, their conceptions of Britain, of empire, of history and time
distinguished Hakluyt and Purchas sharply from one another. They
were linked most directly by their common effort to provide a natural
jurisprudential account of the legitimacy of English trade, conquest and
plantation, particularly in the Americas, as we shall see; however, even
 James S. M. Anderson, The History of the Church of England in the Colonies and Foreign Dependencies of the
British Empire,  vols. (London, ), , , n. .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
in this set of arguments, Purchas’s intellectual debts were wider, and his
sources more broad ranging than Hakluyt’s.
Hakluyt and Purchas have usually been contrasted in their editorial
methods, rather than their intellectual frameworks, most often to
Purchas’s disadvantage. Hakluyt, the scrupulous, logical editor whose
well-constructed narratives offered persuasive encouragement to Eng-
lish overseas enterprise, has always been preferred to Purchas, the
supposedly indiscriminate accumulator of theological compendia,
whose gargantuan collections, most especially Hakluytus Posthumus, or
Purchas His Pilgrimes () were far too unwieldy, indigestible and
archaic in their religious imperatives to provide any inspiration for
expansion. Even the most sympathetic comparison concludes that, ‘if
Richard Hakluyt was the historian of the early English colonial effort,
Samuel Purchas was its philosopher’, as if Hakluyt had no philosophy
(and hence no place in intellectual history) and Purchas no interest in
history (and, hence, no historical structure to his thought). Unlike
Hakluyt, it has been further argued, Purchas ‘was steeped in religion.
His symbols and allusions are biblical rather than classical for the most
part’; accordingly, he could be of little interest to secular intellectual
history, and his increasing marginality and irrelevance since the late
seventeenth century have been well earned.
The comparison between Purchas’s religiosity and Hakluyt’s classi-
cism – if that is understood to mean his humanist editorial methods and
his attention to civil philosophy – is not entirely misplaced. Purchas
stated in the introduction to his first major work, Purchas His Pilgrimage
() that ‘Religion is my more proper aime’, and this could stand as
the epigraph to any of his major works. His crowning achievement was
the four-volume compilation, Purchas His Pilgrimes, which he entitled
Hakluytus Posthumus, both to acknowledge the debt he owed to Hakluyt’s
manuscript legacy and to create a connection between their two enter-
prises. Hakluytus Posthumus was nonetheless the culmination of the theo-

C. R. Steele, ‘From Hakluyt to Purchas’, in Quinn (ed.), The Hakluyt Handbook, , –; James P.
Helfers, ‘The Explorer or the Pilgrim? Modern Critical Opinion and the Editorial Methods of
Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas’, Studies in Philology,  (), –.
 L. E. Pennington, ‘Hakluytus Posthumus: Samuel Purchas and the Promotion of English Overseas
Expansion’, Emporia State Research Studies, ,  (), .
 John Parker, ‘Samuel Purchas, Spokesman for Empire’, in Ton Croiset van Uchelen, Koerst van
der Horst and Günter Schilder (eds.), Theatrum Orbis Librorum: Liber Amicorum Presented to Nico Israel
on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday (Utrecht, ), ; L. E. Pennington, ‘Samuel Purchas: His
Reputation and the Uses of His Works’, in Pennington (ed.), Purchas Handbook, , .
 Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage. Or Relations of the World and the Religions Oberved in All Ages
and Places Discovered, from the Creation to the Present (London, ), sig. [¶]r.
 Protestantism and empire: Hakluyt, Purchas and property 
logically structured oeuvre he had elaborated over the preceding decade
and a half, from Purchas His Pilgrimage, via Purchas His Pilgrim () to the
least well-known of all his works, The Kings Towre (), a sermon
preached at St Paul’s Cross. In each of these works, Purchas situated the
Stuart composite monarchy of James VI and I and his heir, Prince
Charles, within the universal history of the struggle between the true
and the false churches, and in particular the history of the Protestant
cause in northern Europe. The salient dates in that history were ,
 and , the moments when the Protestant wind had scattered the
Spanish Armada, when James VI had escaped assassination at the
hands of the Earl of Gowrie and his brother at Perth, and when the
King, his family and his counsellors had been delivered from the
Catholic menace of the Gunpowder Plot. Two of his early works can be
tied directly to this chronology of the Protestant triumphs over ‘the
Paganisme of Antichristian Poperie’. Purchas dedicated his Pilgrimage to
his patron, the Calvinist archbishop, George Abbot, on  November
, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, ‘in thankfulnesse to 
for our later Deliverance’; meanwhile, he preached The Kings Towre on 
August , the anniversary of the foiling of the Gowrie Plot. Most
important in establishing Purchas’s anti-popish intent in his major work,
Purchas noted that Hakluytus Posthumus (like The Kings Towre) had been
compiled over four summers of ‘His Majesties College at Chelsea’,
which was ‘a place of argument to move me to enter these Lists’. This
was the college of controversial divinity led by the militant former dean
of Exeter, Matthew Sutcliffe, and the very arsenal of anti-Catholic
polemic during James’s reign.
The bulk of Purchas’s work between  and  can therefore be
linked directly to the purposes of polemical anti-Catholicism. This was
the period of James’s policy of religious irenicism in Europe, and
comprehension in England was under greatest strain. During this time,
English, and especially metropolitan, anti-Catholicism and opposition
to Spain peaked in the agitations surrounding the proposed ‘Spanish
Match’ between Prince Charles and the Spanish Infanta. Purchas
 Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage, sigs. [¶]r–v, ; Samuel Purchas, The Kings Towre, And Triumphant
Arch of London (London, ); Millar Maclure, The Paul’s Cross Sermons – (Toronto, ),
; Peter E. McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching
(Cambridge, ), –, .
 Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, , ii, ; D. E. Kennedy, ‘King James I’s College of Controversial
Divinity at Chelsea’, in Kennedy, Diana Robertson and Alexandra Walsham, Grounds of
Controversy: Three Studies in Late th and Early th Century English Polemics (Melbourne, ),
–.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
preached The Kings Towre at the height of these agitations, and two of his
fellow St Paul’s Cross preachers were imprisoned and reprimanded in
the following ten days for criticising the match. The four major
editorial discourses with which Purchas interlarded Hakluytus Posthumus
– ‘The Animadversions on the Said Bull of Pope Alexander’ (c. );
‘Virginia’s Verger’ (), written in the aftermath of the  ‘mass-
acre’ of English settlers in Virginia; ‘A Large Treatise of King
SALOMONS Navie sent from Eziongeber to Ophir’ (c. ); and ‘The
Churches Peregrination by this Holy Land way . . . or a Mysterie of
Papall iniquitie revealed’ (c. ) – all served the purposes of Purchas’s
anti-papal polemic. The last two, especially, provided the scheme of
sacred time within which English, British and more broadly Protestant
enterprise had to be placed.
Purchas’s sacred chronology placed the apocalyptic battle between
the True Church and the Antichrist firmly in the present rather than the
future. He followed post-millennial theologians like John Jewel, James
Usher and George Downame to locate the beginnings of the reign of
Antichrist in the eleventh century CE, with the succession of the Hilde-
brandine popes. At this point, Satan had been unbound from his
thousand-year captivity, and the temporal pretensions of the Papacy
had grown in Italy, in Christendom more generally (where the Papacy
asserted the powers of interdiction, excommunication and deposition of
princes), and beyond Europe (where it assumed jurisdiction over new-
found lands). Those pretensions were nothing less than the signs that the
‘mysticall Babylon’ of the Papacy wished to set itself up above those princes
whom God had enthroned, and hence that ‘the Man of sinne might exalt
himselfe above all that is called God ’. This could only be the ambition of the
Antichrist who, like Christ himself, embodied a church, the one, true,
the other, false. This apocalyptic scheme not only distinguished his
project qualitatively from Hakluyt’s; it may, in due course, have ac-
counted for its obsolescence, so closely tied was it to the religious
polemics of the later Jacobean period.
Purchas’s conception of England’s place within sacred history ren-
 Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought,
– (Cambridge, ), –.
 For an account of the manuscript of ‘Virginia’s Verger’ see D. R. Ransome (ed.), Sir Thomas
Smith’s Misgovernment of the Virginia Company by Nicholas Ferrar (Cambridge, ), xi–xii.
 Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, , i, –; , –; , –; , –.

Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, , , ; compare Richard Crakanthorpe, A Sermon at the
Solemnizing of the Happie Inauguration of our Most Gracious and Religious Soveraigne King James (London,
), sig. [G]r–v.
 Protestantism and empire: Hakluyt, Purchas and property 
dered his works at once more elect-nationalist and more cosmopolitan
than Hakluyt’s. Unlike Hakluyt, who had no conception of the supposed
place of England in the scheme of divine election, Purchas identified it
as a chosen nation, though not a uniquely chosen one, for it was only
one component of ‘this Israel of Great Britaine’, the Stuart multiple
monarchy. Purchas’s conception of that monarchy changed over the
course of the s and s, in light of British and Irish colonisation in
the Americas and in regard to the prospect of Prince Charles’s accession
to the thrones of the Three Kingdoms in . For example, in ,
Purchas hailed the Virginia settlement as a ‘New Britaine’ and ‘the
foundation of a New Britanian Common-wealth’. Ten years later, in The
Kings Towre, he marvelled ‘how great a part of wide and wilde America, is
now encompassed with this, and [ James’s] Crowne’. This was an
extension of the British monarchy that had been secured by the union of
the crowns in , and expanded in turn by the British plantations in
Ulster: ‘that Trinitie of England, Scotland, Ireland, [was] made an unitie’
and thereby lost ‘the Barbarisme of Borderisme’. Two years later, in
Hakluytus Posthumus, Purchas tempered this cultural unionism with a
federal vision of the British kingdoms’ extension across the Atlantic:
‘(not to mention the New Wales there discovered) England hath her
Virginia, Bermuda, New England; Scotland, a New Daughter of her owne
name; yea, Ireland by the care of the present Deputie is now multiplying
also in America, and his Majestie hath sowne the seedes of New King-
domes in that New World’. As in the dedication of the Pilgrimes to
Prince Charles, so here Purchas recognised the impossibility of creating
a conjunctively British empire that would encompass the Three King-
doms and their American plantations. The very fact that England,
Scotland, Ireland and even Wales were engaged in colonial ventures
would ensure their constitutional separation from one another, as their
differences were broadcast and transplanted. Nonetheless, they all re-
mained part of a common anti-Catholic bloc within northern Europe –
at least, if only the Protestant Irish were considered as loyal Stuart
subjects – and could therefore be joined as limbs in the common cause
of anti-popery, Christianity and European Christendom. If the British
Empire were to have any role in salvation history, it would achieve it
through the efforts of its individual members, united within interna-
tional Calvinism as adversaries of the Roman Church and the great
territorial monarchies of contemporary Europe, but not as an apocalyp-
 Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage, sig. [¶]r, , , .

Purchas, The Kings Towre, , –. 
Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, , .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
tic unit claiming a universal mission to be the last empire before the end
of sacred time.
Purchas in turn subsumed the Stuart kingdoms within a more cosmo-
politan vision of Europe, defined culturally and religiously. He at-
tributed Europe’s primacy over the rest of the world in ‘Men, Arts,
[and] Armes’ to its peoples’ possession and exploitation of the nova
reperta: stirrups, guns, the compass and long-distance navigation. These
were the features of a common European enterprise, shared by the
Spanish, the Portuguese, the French and the British in their commercial
and colonial activities: ‘Nature hath yeelded herself to Europaean
Industry’, just as the Americas were ‘almost every where admitting
Europaean colonies’. Yet Christianity – even, and perhaps particularly
the divided Christendom bequeathed by the Reformation – was the
fundamental marker of European distinction, and the guarantee of
Europe’s special place within sacred history: ‘Here are [God’s] Scrip-
tures, Oratories, Sacraments, Ministers, Mysteries. Here that Mysticall
Babylon, and that Papacie (if that bee any glory) which challengeth both
the Bishopricke and Empire of the World; and here the victory over that
Beast (this indeed is glory) by Christian Reformation according to the
Scriptures.’ This conception of European Christendom was neither
triumphalist nor optimistic. Instead, Purchas’s researches into the relig-
ions of the world, contained in Purchas His Pilgrimage and Purchas His
Pilgrim, convinced him that Christianity was in retreat compared to
Islam: ‘it is (in comparison) but a small part of the world, that soundeth
the sacred name of ’. The prospects for Christian renewal were bleak
so long as Christendom remained divided, and the Papacy powerful: ‘so
little a part of the World in name Christian! and so little not covered over
. . . with Antichristian Heresie!’
Protestants in general might be the saving remnant within a contract-
ing Christendom, but British Protestants had no special election among
them, and were as embattled as any. In the face of a Catholic league,
and in the knowledge that Christendom as a whole was contracting, it
was essential to maintain a common front among Protestants, and even
to recognise the commonalities among all members of the Catholic
Christian Church, whether Roman or otherwise. In pursuit of the first


Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, , –; Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, nd edn
(Edinburgh, ), –.

Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, , .
 Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage, , sigs. [¶]v–[¶]r; Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrim: Microcosmos, or The
Historie of Man (London, ), , .
 Protestantism and empire: Hakluyt, Purchas and property 
aim, Purchas had to exculpate the Protestant Dutch for their attacks on
English merchants in the East Indies. The Amboyna massacre of ,
in which Dutch officials in Indonesia executed ten English merchants,
provoked a major crisis in Anglo-Dutch relations and hence within
international Calvinism itself at the outset of the Thirty Years War.
Purchas added a preface to Hakluytus Posthumus to explain that the
English East India Company had made it necessary to mention the
regrettable incident; in the spirit of Jacobean Protestant irenicism, he
argued that the particular faults of individual Dutchmen could not be
taken as general failings of the Dutch as a whole: ‘these are personall
faults of that East Indie Company, or some Commanders there, not of
the whole Nation’.
In his treatments of Spain, the Dutch and the strategic competition
between the embattled forces of Protestantism and the threat of an
anti-Christian Catholic league, Purchas carefully traversed the treach-
erous and often contradictory arguments of Jacobean foreign policy.
During the last six years of James’s reign (–) – that is, in the period
when Purchas wrote, compiled and published almost all of his major
works – English foreign policy was markedly hispanophile, to the horror
of militant Protestants, such as Purchas’s patron, archbishop Abbot.
Support for the Protestant cause in Europe took on an ideological cast
that identified the supporter with the opposition to James. Purchas trod
the fine line of opposition to the Catholic cause and support for royal
policy by directing his polemical fire against the Papacy as the Anti-
christ, rather than against the Spanish Monarchy itself. In the same
way, his measured response to the Amboyna massacre upheld the
integrity of the fragile Protestant cause without any denial of guilt on the
part of the Dutch East India Company. The political subtlety of Pur-
chas’s negotiation of these disputes contrasts with the uninflected anti-
hispanism of Hakluyt. The intensely local complexity of late Jacobean
foreign policy, with its impact upon public opinion and thence upon
Purchas’s major works, may provide another reason for Purchas’s
inassimilability to later, starker narratives of the origins of the British
Empire in unadulterated Elizabethan opposition to Spain.
Purchas’s use of Spanish sources in fact strengthened his anti-popery.
 Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, , sig. [¶]v.

On the foreign policy of this period see especially Simon Adams, ‘Spain or the Netherlands? The
Dilemmas of Early Stuart Foreign Policy’, in Howard Tomlinson (ed.), Before the English Civil War:
Essays on Early Stuart Politics and Government (London, ), –, and for public reaction to it,
Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, – (Cam-
bridge, ).
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
This was not because he, like Hakluyt and others, could draw upon the
Black Legend of Spanish atrocities in the New World that was founded
in the writings of conscientious Spanish authors like Las Casas; rather,
it was because he found an ally against papal universalism – and, hence,
the juridical claims of the Spanish Monarchy – in the relectiones of the
Spanish Thomist theologian, Francisco de Vitoria. In fact, Purchas was
the early-modern British writer who showed the greatest familiarity with
Vitoria’s writings, and who made the most frequent use of them in his
assaults on the legitimacy of the papal authority by which Spanish rights
of dominium in the Americas had been asserted. In the Pilgrimage, he used
Vitoria’s relectio De Indis (), ., to argue for the injustice of the
Spanish presence in the Americas on the grounds that the ‘Christian
Religion had [not] beene propounded in a meet sort to the Indians’, and
hence the Spanish claim to dominium based on the mission to evangelise
was, for this and other reasons, illegitimate. Elsewhere, he cited
Vitoria’s relectio De Potestate Civili (), ., to prove that all power comes
from God, not from the community, and hence that resistance to the
powers that be was disobedience to divine command. Most decisively,
he twice cited Vitoria’s first relectio De Potestate Ecclesiæ (), ., to show
that the Pope has no dominium over the lands of the infidel, since he only
has power within the Church. This was the key to Vitoria’s case ‘[t]hat
the Pope is not Lord of the World, [and] That the Temporall Power
depends not of him’. This, in turn, provided a refutation of the
argument that dominion depends upon grace, and hence that infidelity
can justify dispossession, ‘as if all the world were holden of the Pope in
Catholike fee’, to which Purchas added the marginal note: ‘Read also a
Spanish divine Fr. à Victoria in his Relect. de Pot. Ecc. & de Indis, He with
many arguments confuteth this pretended power of the Pope’. Pur-
chas’s anti-popery was not therefore solely a reflex of his politics or a
conventional and unexamined puritan binary, nor was it simply a
function of his ecclesiology. It may have served political purposes in the
international turmoil of the early s, and confirmed his position as a
 Pace the dismissive comments in William S. Maltby, The Black Legend in England: The Development of
Anti-Spanish Sentiment, – (Durham, NC, ), –, –.
 Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage,  (compare Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, , ii, ); Francisco de
Vitoria, De Indis (), . , in Vitoria: Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy
Lawrance (Cambridge, ), .

Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, , ; Vitoria, De Potestate Civili (), . , in Vitoria: Political Writings,
ed. Pagden and Lawrance,  (quoting also Romans ).

Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, , ; , ii, ; Vitoria,  De Potestate Ecclesiæ (), . , in Vitoria:
Political Writings, ed. Pagden and Lawrance,  (quoting  Corinthians : ).

Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, , .
 Protestantism and empire: Hakluyt, Purchas and property 
defender of the Protestant cause in Europe. However, it was far from
unreflective and depended instead upon originally Thomist anti-papal
(and anti-Lutheran) arguments that could be turned as easily against
Protestants as Roman Catholics, in pursuit of conformity at home and
legitimate rights of possession abroad.
Purchas’s publications were therefore consistently anti-papal and
only incidentally anti-Spanish. To deny the legitimacy of papal dona-
tion was not to deny the legitimacy of Spanish possessions in the New
World. Purchas confessed, ‘I question not the Right of the Spanish
Crowne in those parts: Quis me constituit judicem? . . . I quarrell the Pope
onely’, thereby echoing Hakluyt, who nearly forty years earlier had
repeated Jesus’s question. This judicious reluctance to adjudicate was
of a piece with Purchas’s delicate compromises elsewhere in his works.
Though he shared the apprehension of his patron, archbishop Abbot,
that the Roman Catholic Church was not a true church, and was indeed
the embodiment of the Antichrist, he also tried to sustain a common
Christian front against infidelity, in Europe and in the wider world. The
expansion of commerce would be the conduit of Christianity, and would
aid the realisation of Purchas’s cosmopolitan vision, in which ‘so many
Nations as so many persons hold commerce and intercourse of amitie
withall . . . the West with the East, and the remotest parts of the world
are joyned in one band of humanitie, and why not also to Christian-
itie?’ Similarly, though Purchas successfully avoided giving offence to
the authorities during the bouleversements of late Jacobean foreign policy
towards the Dutch and the Spanish, he did attempt to open up juridical
space within which the subjects of the Three Kingdoms could make
their own claims both against competing European colonial powers and
against the native Americans. Moreover, he reconciled the potentially
colliding claims of those kingdoms by proposing a federal vision of a
British union that had been secured by the accession of the Stuarts to the
thrones of England and Ireland after . In all of these fraught
reconciliations, Purchas turned to a wide array of intellectual resources
to provide a theologically informed, politically nuanced and constantly
revised vision of Britain, its overseas possessions, and the wider context
of sacred and secular time within which they operated.


Purchas, ‘Animadversions on the Bull’, in Hakluytus Posthumus, , i, ; compare Hakluyt, Particuler
Discourse, ed. Quinn and Quinn, : ‘our saviour Christe beinge requested and intreated to make
a laufull devision of inheritaunce betwene one and his brother, refused to do yt, sayenge Quis me
constituit Judicem inter vos?’ (quoting Luke : –).

Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, , –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
The contextual complexity of Purchas’s political and theological
commitments proved inassimilable in later periods, just as his enormous
compilations became increasingly indigestible. His later position as a
progenitor of the British Empire owed more to his reputation as a
compiler of narratives than to his editorial arguments; however, those
arguments deserve to be taken more seriously, not only to recover
Purchas from the condescension of posterity, but also to reveal just how
little part an apocalyptic conception of the British Empire would play in
the future, as the theologically reticent Hakluyt would be consistently
preferred to the more intellectually eclectic Purchas. Each would be
assimilated to the other as editors rather than as colonial theorists, and
valued more as compilers than as philosophers. Only belatedly, in the
Victorian era, would they be recovered as progenitors of the British
Empire; for the intervening two centuries, John Locke’s lukewarm
commendation may stand: ‘To geography, books of travel may be
added. In that kind the collections made by our countrymen, Hakluyt
and Purchas, are very good.’

Despite their differing conceptions of history and of religion, of England

and of Britain, Hakluyt and Purchas did agree that the first task of any
argument in favour of English or British colonisation should be the
refutation of the papal donation of the Americas to Spain, and hence the
Papacy’s powers of disposing dominion more generally. The rebuttal of
such arguments for the scope of papal authority in secular matters both
of sovereignty and property was not, of course, an exclusively Protestant
enterprise, as Purchas’s use of Vitoria’s relectiones showed. However,
once Spanish claims to dominium on the basis of the papal bulls had been
refuted, it was still necessary for English (and Scottish) proponents of
colonisation to provide alternative justifications for their rights of prop-
erty and sovereignty in the Americas, especially. The effort to provide
such justifications demanded the elaboration of arguments for dominium
consistent with Protestant doctrine, but not solely reliant upon it; how-
ever, across the course of the seventeenth century, from Purchas to
Locke, such arguments consistently avoided any appeal to what Purchas
had seen as the ‘Anabaptist’ as much as Roman Catholic argument that
‘Dominion is founded in grace’ (as Locke put it), and hence that rights of
 John Locke, ‘Some Thoughts Concerning Study and Reading for a Gentleman’ (), in Locke:
Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge, ), . (My thanks to Daniel Carey for this
reference.) For Locke’s ownership of works by Hakluyt and Purchas see John Harrison and Peter
Laslett, The Library of John Locke, nd edn (Oxford, ), items , .
 Protestantism and empire: Hakluyt, Purchas and property 
property derived from the state of the possessor’s soul, just as the
soteriological state of the dispossessed could provide justification for
their dispossession. As the concluding section of this chapter will show,
the ideological origins of the British Empire were identifiably Protestant
only in so far as they related to rights of possession, and not as they
informed the empire with a saving mission, a particular place within
eschatological time or a distinctive location within what Locke called
‘the Sacred Geography’.
Hakluyt, in the ‘Particuler Discourse’, differed from his successors in
his espousal of a version of the argument that dominion depended upon
grace. In his refutation of the papal disposing power, Hakluyt charged
that Alexander VI had mistaken the order of his priorities in donating
the newly-discovered lands to the Spanish Monarchy: rather than
charge the Spanish king with a mission to evangelise the pagans, he
should first have preached to them himself; if they refused obstinately to
repent,
he mighte have pronounced the severe and heavie judgemente of God againste
them shewinge out of the worde of God that one kingdomme is translated from
another for the sinnes of the Inhabitantes of the same, and that God in his
justice woulde surely bring somme nation or other upon them to take ven-
geaunce of their synnes and wickednes.
In this form, Hakluyt’s argument was in part a version of the classic
Calvinist theory that God may send bad rulers as scourges to punish a
wicked people; however, he went on to support the papal claim to
depose kings and dispose kingdoms – just the power that Purchas, and
all later Protestant theorists, denied that the Papacy possessed, whether
in the New World or elsewehere. For Purchas, the papal assertion
of deposing made Protestants ‘more happy than baptized Kings: for
we may enjoy our Possessions, our Professions as more free, at least
not impaired by Baptisme’. With the threat of such power hanging
over Catholic princes, it might in fact be better not to be baptised
at all. Hypocrites and heathens might have only a ‘Naturall right’ to
their property, while Christians had ‘publike and private civill rights
and tenures’, argued Purchas, but that distinction did not empower
 Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, , ; , ; John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (), ed.
James H. Tully (Indianapolis, ), , ; Pagden, Lords of All the World, –.
 Hakluyt, Particuler Discourse, ed. Quinn and Quinn, –.

Hakluyt, Particuler Discourse, ed. Quinn and Quinn, : ‘the Popes can shewe goodd Recordes
that they have deposed Emperors, yt they have translated Empires from one people to another
. . . and that they have taken kingdommes from one nation and gaven them to another’.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
dispossession, ‘for they are villains not to us: but to our and their
Lorde’.
Hakluyt, Purchas and their contemporaries faced the dilemma of
justifying European possessions in the absence of any claims to papal
donation, or the derivation of dominium from grace. For both Hakluyt
and Purchas, the argument began with the authority of English land-
holders and the English Crown in Ireland, rather than comparable
claims in America. Roman Catholic critics of Protestant arguments for
dominium attempted to show that Spain’s claims in the New World were
as well grounded as English claims in Ireland because both relied upon
papal donation: the Spanish, upon the Alexandrine bulls of ; the
English, upon the bull Laudabiliter of . In reply, both Hakluyt and
Purchas denied that English rights of property or authority in Ireland
descended from such donation. As Hakluyt noted, the bull was promul-
gated after Henry II’s invasion, and had anyway been ignored by the
Irish kings. Those kings had voluntarily submitted in , added Pur-
chas, and the English conquest had been completed in : ‘by his
Sword’, added Purchas, ‘not the Popes Keyes . . . together with the
submission of the Irish, [the English] obtayned that Soveraigntie’.
English claims in Ireland had thereafter been based upon submission,
conquest and prescription, just as Spanish claims in the Americas
depended upon ‘Discoverie . . . the Sword, Prescription, subjection of the
Inhabitants, long and quiet Possession’. Purchas’s theoretical interest
in such claims extended only so far as they could be applied to European
– not least British – assertions of dominium in the New World, particularly
against the claims of the native population. Whether they could be
sufficient to ensure enduring title was another matter, for the case of
Ireland was hardly reassuring: as Sir John Davies had noted in , ‘the
conquest was but slight and superficial, so the pope’s donation and the
Irish submissions were but weak and fickle assurances’.
In comparison with five hundred years of English involvement in
Ireland, the halting attempts by the English to plant in Virginia since the
s demanded far more strenuous justification. The records of a
conciliar debate in utramque partem from the Council of the Virginia
Company in – reveal the constraints within which early seven-
 Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, , ii, ; ,  (marginal note: ‘Christians may not spoile
Heathens’).
 Hakluyt, Particuler Discourse, ed. Quinn and Quinn, ; Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, , ii, , .

Sir John Davies, A Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued [And] Brought
Under Obedience of the Crown of England Until the Beginning of His Majesty’s Happy Reign (), ed.
James P. Myers, Jr (Washington, DC, ), .
 Protestantism and empire: Hakluyt, Purchas and property 
teenth-century argument operated, especially in so far as such argument
had to be consonant with Protestant Christianity. Those who supported
the production of a document to reassure investors ‘of ye Justice of ye
action’ took their rhetorical task to be a twofold one, to show that English
justifications were ‘not only comparatively to be as good as ye Spaniards
. . . but absolutely to be good agaynst ye Naturall people’. This entailed
the refutation of the ‘Donation of Alexander, which is so grounded upon
the principles of theyr religion that some of their best authors have
pronounced yt Heresy to doubt yt’; it also demanded ideological justifi-
cations that, in turn, would provide a more secure foundation for English
rights of both imperium and dominium than those the Spanish had relied
upon. One participant recapitulated the history of Spanish arguments
for dispossession since the early sixteenth century to show that even the
battery of intellectual resources marshalled by the Spanish Church, the
religious orders, and civil and canon lawyers had been incapable of
providing secure justifications for both imperium and dominium. Originally,
the Spanish Crown had employed neo-Aristotelian arguments ‘to pros-
ecute ye Indians as Barbar’s, and therby Naturally slaves’:
When after  years his Fryars declyn’d him from that severe and unJust course,
and he labourd by men of all learninge to provide himselfe of a more acceptable
title, all ye reasons, which were prepared to him, by men of discourse, from ye
Indians transgressing ye Law of Nature; from his civilians for their denying
commerce: from his Canonists by ye Donation: and from his Devines, by
preparation of religion, . . . can be gathered for him no title, of Dominion or
Property, but only a Magistracy, and Empire, by which he is allowed to remove
such impediments, as they had agaynst ye knowledge of Religion.
This astute summary of the Spanish debate over dispossessing the
barbarian concluded with the dilemma that would also bedevil the
English and Scottish Crowns, and their chartered agents, in their efforts
to justify colonies in North America. Arguments derived from the civil
or religious incapacity of the Indians might be sufficient, under the
terms of a donation or charter which charged the necessity of conver-
sion, to support claims of ‘a Magistracy, and Empire’, but did so in the
face of almost universal agreement that grace does not confer ‘title, of
Dominion or Property’. In light of the Spanish example, the company
 ‘A Justification for Planting in Virginia’ (c. –), Bod. MS Tanner , f. , printed in D. B.
Quinn (ed.), New American World: A Documentary History of North America to ,  vols. (New York,
), , –.

Anthony Pagden, ‘Dispossessing the Barbarian: The Language of Spanish Thomism and the
Debate over the Property Rights of the American Indians’, in Pagden (ed.), Languages of Political
Theory in Early-Modern Europe, –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
decided not to offer a full-scale official defence of its dominium or its
imperium in Virginia. That task, at least in the case of the Virginia
settlement, would be left to an eclectic cast of promoters, preachers and
propagandists who would, in due course, like the Spanish, have to
retreat from their original arguments and search for an ideological
justification for settlement that could overcome the crisis generated by
that initial eclecticism. The problem of uniting dominium and imperium
would persist, however, as the fundamental and ultimately combustible
dilemma at the core of British imperial ideology.
Biblical precedents provided ambivalent charters for the Scots and
the English to oppose the papal donation. God’s commands in the book
of Genesis to subdue the earth and to go forth and multiply provided
justifications for emigration and settlement in the New World on the
grounds that they were issued to all mankind, not simply to Adam or to
Abraham and his seed (Genesis :, :). Combined with the other
two most frequently cited texts from the New Testament, Matthew
: (that the Gospel might be preached throughout the whole world to
prepare for the last days) and Mark : (that it should be published
among all nations), scriptural precedent could sanction the English to
‘plant as well as preach, and . . . subdue as well as teach’, in the words of
Richard Eburne. Protestant theorists, in particular, were keen to
prove from scripture the legitimacy of any emigration and plantation.
The first recorded ‘deduction and plantacion of a Colonie’ was that of
the Jews under Moses, though even that was only a divinely-aided
example of a process of multiplication and migration that had populated
the whole world since the Flood. The problem with such arguments,
reassuring though they may have been to those who doubted the
scriptural basis for colonisation, whether in Ireland or North America,
was that they were not solely applicable to Protestants. If there were
indeed a divine command to subdue the earth, to multiply and to

 Fitzmaurice, ‘The Civic Solution to the Crisis of English Colonization’, –.

John Cotton, God’s Promise to His Plantation (London, ), –; [John White,] The Planters Plea
(London, ), .

Richard Eburne, A Plaine Pathway to Plantations (London, ) ; compare George Benson, A
Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse the Seaventh of May, M.DC.IX (London, ), .

‘Certeyn Notes & Observations Touching the Deducing & Planting of Colonies’ (c. –),
BL MS Cotton Titus . , f. v; Alexander, Encouragement to Colonies, –; Eburne, Plaine
Pathway to Plantations, ed. Wright, –, –, , , ; [White,] The Planters Plea, –; Sir
Robert Gordon of Lochinvar, Encouragements. For Such as Shall Have Intention to Bee Undertakers in the
New Plantation of CAPE BRITON, Now New Galloway, in America (Edinburgh, ), sig. B[]r–v;
[William Vaughan,] The Golden Fleece . . . Transported from Cambrioll Colchos, Out of the Southermost
Part of the Iland, Commonly Called Newfoundland (London, ), pt , .
 Protestantism and empire: Hakluyt, Purchas and property 
exercise dominion over all creatures, that command had been ad-
dressed to all of humanity, not any particular portion of it. This did not,
of course, render such proofs untenable by British Protestant propon-
ents of colonisation; however, they were clearly insufficient as argu-
ments against the claims of other European monarchies, even if they
could be turned to account against the native populations.
Apprehensions of the eschatological significance of British settlement
remained largely distinct from justifications for possession or sover-
eignty. The most important early seventeenth-century English millen-
arian, Joseph Mede, speculated in his Clavis Apocalyptica () that the
armies of Gog and Magog of Revelation :– would rise up from ‘the
Hemisphere against us’, that is, from the Americas. When an anxious
clerical correspondent, William Twisse, asked Mede whether the New
World, lately revealed by providence, would be the New Jerusalem or
Gog and Magog, Mede replied to the query by distinguishing between
the legitimacy of the plantations and their place in sacred time: ‘Con-
cerning our Plantation in the American world, I wish them as well as any
body; though I differ from them far, both in other things, and in the
grounds they go upon.’ Mede expressed little hope that the native
peoples could be converted to Christianity, not least because he thought
them a colony of Satan’s choosing, brought from the north into Amer-
ica. It would be appropriate to ‘affront’ Satan in North America by
planting Protestants, but this in itself could not provide adequate
‘grounds’ for the English colonies to ‘go upon’. Even those, like the
Dorchester patriarch, John White, who did identify the New World as a
place to ‘raise a bulworke against ye kingdom of antichrist wch ye Jesuits
labour to rere in all parts of ye world’, did not suggest that the English
Church alone had an exclusive mission: ‘the church since christs tyme is
to be considered universall without respect of countrey’. To remove to
New England would not therefore be a desertion of the English Church,
but rather the edification of one ‘particular church’ as a branch of the
church universal. However justifiable such an action might be in
 Joseph Mede, The Works of the Pious and Profoundly-Learned Joseph Mede, B.D. (London, ), 
(‘A Conjecture Concerning Gog and Magog in the Revelation’),  (Twisse to Mede,  March
),  (Mede to Twisse,  March ). On the Mede–Twisse correspondence see
especially John Bowman, ‘Is America the New Jerusalem or Gog and Magog? A Seventeenth
Century Theological Discussion’, Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society,  (),
–, and J. A. de Jong, As the Waters Cover the Sea: Millennial Expectations in the Rise of
Anglo-American Missions – (Kampen, ), –.

[ John White,] ‘General Observations for ye Plantation of New England’ (?), PRO  /,
ff. r–r, printed in Frances Rose-Troup, John White, The Patriarch of Dorchester and the Founder of
Massachusetts – (London, ), , ; [White,] The Planters Plea, –, .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
order to spread the Gospel, it, too, did not provide any grounds for
English colonies to go upon.
Even John Winthrop, during his dispute with Roger Williams over
English land-claims in Massachusetts, admitted this in defence of Eng-
lish dominium and the Crown’s imperium in New England. Williams had
charged that all of the English settlers ‘lye under a synne of unjust
usurpation upon others possessions’, to which Winthrop replied: ‘our
title to what we possesse: it is not Religious (as he supposethe) neither
dothe our Kinge challenge any right heer by his Christianyty’. But, on
this point at least, Williams agreed with Winthrop: the ‘great sin’ in the
New England patents was the point ‘wherein Christian Kinds (so calld)
are invested with Right by Virtue of their Christianitie, to take and give
away the Lands and Countries of other men’.
The divine commands in Genesis, and the injunctions of the Gospels,
together encouraged and legitimated migration and even evangelisation.
However, neither argument could provide a foundation for exclusive
dominium, or the grounds for secular imperium, not least because they
applied in the first instance to all human beings, and in the second, to all
Christians. Christianity alone, as Winthrop and Williams agreed, could
not be a sufficient basis for title to land or sovereignty. The claim that
God’s grant of the earth to Adam (Genesis :) authorised all succeeding
humans to spread across the face of the earth paralleled Sir Robert
Filmer’s argument that this divine commission had made Adam monarch
of the whole world, and his successors absolute monarchs. Locke, in the
first Treatise of Government (c. ), accused Filmer of thereby confounding
imperium with dominium, and further denied that ‘by this Grant God gave
him not Private Dominion over the Inferior Creatures, but right in common
with all Mankind; so neither was he Monarch, upon the account of the
Property here given him’. Mere succession from Adam would not be
argument enough for either absolute monarchy or rights of dominion.

 John Winthrop to John Endecott,  January , in Winthrop Papers: III – (Boston,
), , ; John Cotton, Master John Cottons Reply to Master Roger Williams (), in The
Complete Writings of Roger Williams,  vols. (New York, ), , –; Williams, The Bloody Tenent
Yet More Bloody (), in Williams, Complete Writings, , . On the context of the Williams–
Winthrop dispute see Jennings, Invasion of America, –, and Moynihan, ‘The Patent and the
Indians’, –.
 Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha (c. ) and Observations Upon Aristotles Politiques (), in Filmer:
Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge, ), , – (citing John
Selden, Mare Clausum seu De Dominio Maris (London, ), Bk , ch. ).

John Locke, First Treatise of Government (c. ), §, in Locke: Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter
Laslett, rev. edn (Cambridge, ), ; James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and His
Adversaries (Cambridge, ), .
 Protestantism and empire: Hakluyt, Purchas and property 
The ‘naturall right to replenish the whole earth’ as derived from the
divine injunctions of Genesis could still provide a charter for settlement,
but only if such settlement took place in ‘vacant places’ (as Purchas put
it). This argument added a scriptural command to the agriculturalist
justification for colonisation first propounded by Sir Thomas More in
, and repeated by Rowland White and the Smiths in Elizabethan
Ulster. From the s to the s in Britain, and then in North
America, Australia and Africa well into the nineteenth century, the
argument from vacancy (vacuum domicilium) or absence of ownership (terra
nullius) became a standard foundation for English and, later, British
dispossession of indigenous peoples. On these grounds, God’s com-
mands to replenish the earth and assert dominion over it provided a
superior right to possession for those who cultivated the land more
productively than others, and hence who adopted a sedentary, agricul-
tural existence on the land.
The most extensive presentation of this argument was, of course,
John Locke’s, in the fifth chapter of the Second Treatise of Government. As
James Tully and others have shown, Locke was heir to the tradition of
agriculturalist theorising derived from his seventeenth-century Protes-
tant predecessors, as he elaborated a justification for rights of dominium
that would hold equally well in England and America. What other
commentators seem not to have noticed, however, is that one reason
Locke needed to provide such an argument was that he had also offered
a compelling refutation of the argument that dominion conferred grace
in the Letter Concerning Toleration (), when he argued that such a claim
depended upon the wider argument that the civil power has authority in
matters of conscience: admit that, and there could be no limit to the
powers of the civil magistrate. ‘No man whatsoever ought therefore to
be deprived of his Terrestrial Enjoyments, upon account of his Relig-
ion’, Locke argued,
Not even Americans, subjected unto a Christian Prince, are to be punished either
in Body or in Goods for not imbracing our Faith and Worship. If they are
perswaded that they please God in observing the Rites of their own Country,


Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, , .
 On the progress of this argument, and especially its relevance to Locke, see James Tully,
‘Rediscovering America: The Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights’, in Tully, An Approach to
Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge, ), –, –; Barbara Arneil, John Locke
and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford, ), –, –; Alan Frost, ‘New
South Wales as Terra Nullius: The British Denial of Aboriginal Land Rights’, Historical Studies, 
(), –; and, more generally, Kent McNeil, Common Law Aboriginal Title (Oxford, ).
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
and that they shall obtain Happiness by that means, they are to be left unto
God and themselves.
The application of such an argument was universal: ‘For the reason of
the thing is equal, both in America and Europe’. Just as there could be no
disposing power attributed to the Papacy, so no European prince could
be allowed any right of possession on grounds of religious belief alone,
not even the English. As Locke (and others) reaffirmed in ‘The Constitu-
tions of Carolina’ of , ‘since ye Natives of yt place who will be
concernd in or Plantation are utterly strangers to Christianity whose
Idollatry Ignorance or mistake gives us noe right to expell or use ym
ill’. Other foundations, and better justification, would have to be
found to justify rights of dominium in the New World, and the agricul-
turalist argument, with its scriptural foundations, and its apparent
applicability to the perceived social structure of the Amerindians, of-
fered just such an argument, with enduring effects for later theories of
property. Locke’s may therefore have been the first, and perhaps only,
theory of property in seventeenth-century England that was explicitly
Protestant in its orientation (without falling into the error of equating
grace with fitness for dominion) and applicable to colonial as well as
municipal contexts.
In the long run, ‘[t]he real issue . . . was not private ownership but
public sovereignty’, however, and hence imperium, not dominium. This
was not a question susceptible to a specifically Protestant answer,
though its solution was attempted by many Protestants, often ordained
ones, from the s to the s and beyond. Hakluyt’s exposition of
Aristotle and his Thomistic commentators, Purchas’s reliance on
Vitoria, and the Virginia Company’s intimate interests in the history of
Spanish colonial ideology together attested the impossibility of deriving
any specifically and exclusively Protestant origins for British imperial
ideology. Similarly, Hakluyt’s lack of interest in the dimensions of sacred
time, doctrines of election or eschatology more generally, and Purchas’s
cosmopolitan refusal to identify England, or Britain, as a peculiarly
‘elect’ nation, prevented any easy assimilation of their foundational

Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Tully, .
 [John Locke, et al.,] ‘The Constitutions of Carolina’ ( July ), PRO ///, ff. –,
printed in Locke: Political Essays, ed. Goldie, ; The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (n.p., n.d.
[London, ]), . On the authorship of the ‘Constitutions’, and the dating of the printed
version, see John Milton, ‘John Locke and the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina’, Locke
Newsletter,  (), –.

Thomas Flanagan, ‘The Agricultural Argument and Original Appropriation: Indian Lands and
Political Philosophy’, Canadian Journal of Political Science,  (), ; compare Jennings,
Invasion of America, –.
 Protestantism and empire: Hakluyt, Purchas and property 
works to a conception of the British Empire as a millennial vehicle or
even as a community defined by any precise definition of Protestantism.
Finally, the eclectic use of the Bible, as much as the impossibility of
finding any specifically Protestant justifications for migration and settle-
ment, provided only common Christian justifications for British colon-
isation. In sum, there were no identifiably and exclusively Protestant
origins of British imperial ideology, and a religious genealogy for the
British Empire would not emerge until the early eighteenth century, in
the bishop-bibliographer White Kennett’s Bibliothecæ Americanæ Primordiæ
(). Britons, as much as Europeans, had to face the disarming fact
that their sacred resources, as much as their secular ones, provided no
convincing means of squaring the circle by justifying imperium and
dominium at the same time, and interdependently. For this reason, the
ideological origins of the British Empire remained fissured and unstable
as much because of, as in spite of, the contribution of Protestantism.

[Kennett], Bibliothecæ Americanæ Primordiæ, ix, and passim; on Kennett’s enterprise see G. V.
Bennett, White Kennett, – (London, ), .
  

The empire of the seas, –

. . . who ever is Dominus Maris, may eo Titulo clayme dominion in

& over all ye Navigable waters of ye whole world, wch have com-
munication & Interfluence with each other.
Even more persistent and reassuring than the Protestant myth of the
origins of the British Empire was the belief that it was an empire of the
seas. The conventional chronology of the Empire’s origins, which
located them in the reign of Elizabeth I, nourished that belief and
anchored it in a particular maritime history. The originating agents of
empire were the Elizabethan sea-dogs, Gloriana’s sailor-heroes who
had circumnavigated the globe, singed the King of Spain’s beard, swept
the oceans of pirates and Catholics, and thereby opened up the sea-
routes across which English migrants would travel, and English trade
would flow, until Britannia majestically ruled the waves. The myth was
persistent not least because it enshrined an inescapable truth: the British
Empire was an empire of the seas, and without the Royal Navy’s
mastery of the oceans, it could never have become the global empire
upon which the sun never set. Yet that maritime mastery was not
complete until the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and the force of the
myth derives in large part from the nineteenth-century celebration of an
oceanic hegemony whose origins were traced back to the exploits of
Drake, Hawkins and Ralegh. The myth was reassuring, not least in the
two centuries before the Victorian zenith of the British Empire, because
it served to distinguish the Empire from the territorial empires of
antiquity (especially Rome’s) and from contemporary land-empires
such as the Holy Roman Empire or the Spanish Monarchy’s possessions
in the Americas. An empire of the seas would not be prey to the
overextension and military dictatorship which had hastened the col-

 Sir William Petty, [‘Dominion of the Sea’] (), BL Add. MS , f. r (also in BL MS
Lansdowne , f. r).


 The empire of the seas 
lapse of the Roman Empire, nor would it bring the tyranny, depopula-
tion and impoverishment which had hastened the decline of Spain. The
British empire of the seas was both historically novel and comparatively
benign; it could therefore escape the compulsions that destroyed all
previous land-based, and hence obviously military, empires. In short, it
could be an empire for liberty.
This enduring and encouraging myth was largely responsible for the
cordon sanitaire erected between the history of the metropolitan state and
the history of an empire defined by its ultramarine existence. It was
enduring precisely because it provided both metropolitans and provin-
cials with a bridge between the constituent parts of the Empire; it was
encouraging because it also divided the provinces and the metropole,
allowing the former a degree of autonomy and the latter a prophylactic
against the debilitating infections of extensive empire. These characteris-
tics may also explain why British maritime ideology has been so little
studied, and why its genesis has not been investigated historically. The
geographical fact of Britain’s insularity implied that it would naturally
become a maritime power, at once distinct from the ‘Continent’ of
Europe and linked oceanically to its extra-European empire. Because
Britain’s maritime destiny seemed compelled by nature, it was by
definition beyond historical analysis; similarly, because Britain’s natural
situation divided it physically from the rest of Europe, its history could be
seen as unavoidably exceptional. A fact so stubborn could hardly be
historical; a history so exceptional was inassimilable to other European
norms. British naval mastery came to seem as inevitable as the expansion
of the British Empire, and each would be subject to the same complacent
amnesia. If the myth indeed had a history, it would become more
contingent and hence less inspiring.
The conventional narrative of British maritime history has tended to
follow the history of the rise and fall of British naval mastery. It has
therefore been most often told as a story of the influence of sea-power
upon history, in the manner of Alfred Thayer Mahan, or, conversely, as a
study of the influence of history – meaning economics, politics and
strategy – upon sea-power. Only recently has the history of Britain itself
been considered as a naval history, tied to the chronology of the history of


The only book-length study of this mythology is Cynthia Fansler Behrman, Victorian Myths of the
Sea (Athens, Ohio, ); an important analysis of, and contribution to, the myth is Carl Schmitt,
Land and Sea (), trans. Simona Draghici (Washington, DC, ).
 A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History – (Boston, ); Paul Kennedy, The
Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London, ).
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
the Three Kingdoms and, not least, that of their territorial waters. To
rewrite British history in this way is idiomatic for the late sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, for it was then that debates about the extent and
form of the British kingdoms, and the limits of monarchical imperium and
dominium, often turned on disputes regarding maritime jurisdiction. Both
the realm of England and the kingdom of the Scots were defined
oceanically as well as territorially, and on occasion they collided with one
another in the definitions of their respective boundaries. Claims to
jurisdiction over the foreshore, home waters, fishing and navigation
around Britain were specifically British instances of wider European
debates which were conducted on a global scale, and most often in the
language of the laws of nature and of nations. Because such arguments
linked local disputes with cosmopolitan concerns, and because the history
of British maritime ideology extends from the most parochial issues of
coastal jurisdiction to the broadest questions of property, commerce and
the freedom of the seas, the ideological history of the British Empire can,
to a large extent, be reconstructed from the history of these maritime
disputes. Such a reconstruction depends upon the reintegration of British
arguments with pan-European debates, and therefore parallels the
process by which defining rule over the seas around Britain came, in due
course, to be the origins of British assertions of naval mastery.
The history of British maritime ideology in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries follows the history of the conception of Britain itself.
There could obviously not be any pan-British arguments in favour of
maritime supremacy until the state itself had been defined as a collectively
British kingdom; competing English and Scottish maritime ideologies
were either subsumed within, or survived alongside, comprehensively
British conceptions throughout the course of these centuries. A major
achievement in the ideological history of the British Empire would be the
creation of just such a pan-British conception of the Empire as an oceanic
entity, equipped with its own historical foundations and destiny, though
this would not come to full fruition until the late s, in Bolingbroke’s
Idea of a Patriot King () and James Thomson’s ‘Rule, Britannia’ (),
for instance. This demanded not only the integration of conflicting
English and Scottish conceptions of the empire of the seas, but also the
elaboration of a series of distinct yet interlocking arguments regarding
dominium over the foreshore and over territorial waters, and the extent and
limits of fishing and navigation on the high seas.


N. A. M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, I: – (London, ).
 The empire of the seas 
Such arguments provide an essential connection between the his-
tories conventionally deemed ‘domestic’ (and territorial) and ‘imperial’
(that is, trans-oceanic) because they depended upon the same funda-
mental incommensurability between imperium and dominium encoun-
tered by the theorists of real property examined in the last chapter.
They also provide a necessary link between the histories of the Three
Kingdoms and of Europe, because the arguments over maritime im-
perium and dominium were pan-European in scope, involving theorists
from England, Scotland, Spain, Portugal and the United Provinces,
and just as often derived from disputes over herring-fishery in the
home waters of European states as from competition between those
states and their trading-companies in the East or West Indies. The
relationship between British arguments in these disputes therefore fol-
lows the contours of the ideological history of Britain as closely as it
tracks the relationship of that history to the narrative of extra-
European rivalry. It also reveals the indissoluble ideological connection
between the two.
Arguments for or against particular conceptions of dominium or im-
perium over the seas were far from exclusively English, and had Cicero-
nian and Stoic roots. As Cicero put it early in De Officiis, in a passage
cited at some point by almost every later theorist of property, ‘there is no
private property by nature’ (sunt autem privata nulla natura) (De Officiis, . .
). Property becomes private ‘either by ancient usurpation, men find-
ing them void and vacant, or by victory in warre, or by legall condition
or composition in peace’ (aut vetere occupatione, ut qui quondam in vacua
venerunt, aut victoria . . . aut lege, pactione, condicione). However, he con-
tinued, everything produced by the earth is for the benefit of humanity
as a whole, and humans are born to help one another (De Officiis, . . ).
On such Stoic principles, private property would be sanctioned, and
should be protected, but the maxim of mutual assistance also provided
the basis for rights of traffic and commerce, to facilitate reciprocity and
to strengthen the cosmopolitan bonds between peoples. The air and the
sea, ‘so farre as they have not by possession of other men before, or
otherwise by their own Nature cannot be appropriated, are Natures
Commons’, Samuel Purchas argued; by the law of nature and of
nations, ‘Nature within and without us, by everlasting Canons hath
decreed Communitie of trade the World thorow whereas by Nature all
the Earth was common Mother, and in equall community to be enjoyed


Cicero, De Officiis, . . ; Richard Eburne, A Plaine Pathway to Plantations (London, ), .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
of all hers’. On such grounds, commerce should be free and the seas
open to all. This natural jurisprudential claim would become the basis of
all later British assertions of the freedom of the seas.
Purchas’s claims echoed those of Francisco de Vitoria in De Indis that
the ius gentium guaranteed rights of travel, hospitality and commerce
throughout the world. Vitoria had argued that the apparent contradic-
tion between the division of property (divisio rerum) and these rights of
universal visitation and communication was only apparent, since ‘it was
never the intention of nations to prevent men’s free mutual intercourse
with one another by this division’. The denial of such intercourse could
be grounds for just war. To uphold that right against those who denied it
would be the Spaniards’ first just title in the New World. Likewise,
according to the Institutes, . . –, the high seas, rivers and ports were
the common property of all, from which no one could be barred. By the
determination of the natural, divine and human law, freedom of com-
merce, and travel were as certain as the common right of all humanity to
the seas, whose products as res nullius become the property of the first
appropriator, as the Institutes, . . , recorded in the law Feræ Bestiæ.
Vitoria’s argument was intended to challenge both the universalism of
the papacy and the supposedly Protestant claim that only grace confer-
red dominium. As such, it proved useful to Purchas, for example, in his
counterclaims to the papal donations and as the positive basis for
freedom of trade and navigation.
Vitoria’s attempted resolution of the tension between the necessity of
private property and the natural bond created by commerce was not
sufficient to prevent debate regarding the relative merits of closed seas
(mare clausum) and free seas (mare liberum), and hence over the extent of
both imperium and dominium in the foreshore, territorial waters and the
high seas. Disagreements between the Stuart monarchy and its North
Sea neighbours over the extent and limits on fishing rights converged on
the same problems, as did the juridical collisions between the English
and the Dutch trading companies over rights of navigation in the East
Indies. The extent of royal dominium generated some of the fiercest
political arguments in the years preceding the English Civil Wars, not
least when that dominium was claimed over the foreshore, and imperium
 Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes,  vols. (London, ), ,  (marginal
note, ‘Sunt autem privata nulla natura. Cic.’), .
 Francisco de Vitoria, De Indis (), . , in Vitoria: Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and
Jeremy Lawrance (Cambridge, ), –, quoted in marginal note to Purchas, Hakluytus
Posthumus, , : ‘Barbari sunt veri domini & publicè & privatim. Jus autem gentium ut quod in nullius bonis est,
occupanti cedat. d §. fere best.’
 The empire of the seas 
was likewise asserted over the inland counties for the support of the navy
in the Ship-Money cases. These various arguments precipitated com-
peting conceptions of England, Scotland, Britain and the British Empire
as maritime communities. In due course, such conceptions also under-
lay the ideological definition of Britain as a maritime power, with a
commercial destiny based on its natural insularity. Britons would sup-
port freedom of trade even as they ring-fenced the British Atlantic
Empire with the Navigation Acts; they would also assert the freedom of
the seas while they claimed to rule the waves. This squaring of the circle
to assimilate the conception of mare liberum with that of mare clausum was
one of the greatest ideological underpinnings of the later British Empire.
The origins of that achievement lay in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, in debates of local significance within Britain that also par-
ticipated in wider arguments of European and even global scope, from
the reign of Elizabeth I to the eve of the Glorious Revolution.

The link between maritime ideology and the history of Britain first
appeared in the writings of John Dee. As we have seen, Dee’s concep-
tion of the ‘Brytish Empire’ revived the Galfridian genealogy deployed
in the propaganda for the ‘Rough Wooing’ and appealed to that
propaganda in support of England’s claim to suzerainty over Scotland.
Dee’s expansion of the Edwardian ‘empire of Great Britain’ to include
‘the Royalty and Soverainty of the seas adjacent, or environing this
Monarchy of England, Ireland, and (by right) Scotland, and the Or-
knayes allso’ marked a novel advance beyond the strictly territorial
conception of the British Empire found in the earlier period. This
addition of maritime imperium in itself helps to explain the prominence
Dee later assumed in accounts of the origins of the British Empire, and
also the oblivion into which the mid-sixteenth-century proponents of an
exclusively territorial, Anglo-British empire fell. So long as the British
Empire was defined oceanically more than territorially, the search for its
ideological origins would have to begin with those who explicitly con-
ceived it as an empire of the seas. Though Dee was certainly not the first
to use the concept of the British Empire – and acknowledged his debt to
those among his predecessors who were the originators of the vernacu-
lar term – he was the first to theorise the maritime conception of the
British Empire.

John Dee, General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (London, ), .
 On which see especially William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the
English Renaissance (Amherst, Mass., ), –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
Dee expanded and elaborated his conception of the maritime dimen-
sions of the British Empire over two decades, until it became the
defining feature of the empire itself. In his earliest extensive discussion of
the boundaries of the British Empire (‘Brytanici Imperii Limites’ (),
Dee was most concerned to establish the legality of Elizabeth’s claims to
the islands of the northern Atlantic (including Britain, Ireland, Iceland,
Greenland and Friesland) on the basis of her descent from King Arthur,
the last emperor of these isles, to reaffirm her claim to the sovereignty of
Scotland and to prove her rights of imperium over the eastern seaboard of
North America, ‘partlie Jure Gentium, partlie Jure Civilis; and partlie Jure
Divino’. This entailed the refutation of Spanish and Portuguese claims
made on the basis of first discovery and papal donation, but did not
include the assertion of the dominium maris over the intervening oceans.
The following year, Dee supplemented these territorial claims with
maritime ones in the General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte
of Navigation (), which advised Elizabeth to institute a ‘Petty Navy
Royal’ for the protection of the British seas, cited Pericles and Pompey
the Great on, respectively, Athenian naval supremacy and the Roman
recovery of the imperium maris, and concluded with what would become,
for later writers, a standard aetiological appeal to the sea-sovereignty of
King Edgar, ‘one of the perfect Imperiall Monarchs of this Brytish
Impire’, over all of the oceans adjoining Britain, Ireland and the British
isles. Yet even this was modest in comparison with the all-encompass-
ing conception of maritime dominion Dee presented in his culminating
work on the subject, the ‘HAKKASOJQASIA BQESSAMIJG’ (). On the
basis of Edgar’s ‘Title Imperiall’, the English claim to the French throne,
the fealty-oath of the Scottish kings and ‘the Law of Nature; The Law of
Nations; The Law of true and constant Amitie: Yea the Law of God’,
Dee asserted Elizabeth’s ‘Sea Jurisdiction and soveraigntie absolute’ over the
seas for one hundred miles around England’s coasts, the English Chan-
nel, the western shore of Scotland and ‘a mighty portion of the Sea
Sovereigntie in that Ocean’ between Scotland and North America, as
well as over the ‘ : or  ’ between
England and Denmark, Friesland and Holland. No one until Sir
William Petty (a century later) would claim such an expansive domain


John Dee, ‘Brytanici Imperii Limites’ ( July ), BL Add. MS , ff. r, r, r.
 Dee, General and Rare Memorials, –,  (quoting Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, .
), , , –.
 John Dee, ‘HAKKASOJQASIA BQESSAMIJG ( September ), BL MS Harl. , ff. v–r, r, r,
v–r, r; Sherman, John Dee, –.
 The empire of the seas 
for an English or British mare clausum in European waters, and not until
the s would even non-legal assertions of the oceanic ambit of the
British Empire extend so far.
Dee’s conception of the British Empire as a compact territorial core
at the heart of a far-reaching Atlantic and northern European mare
clausum was anomalous in Elizabeth’s reign, and entirely at odds with the
otherwise consistently maintained Tudor commitment to the freedom
of the seas. Before the regal union of , the English and Scottish
Crowns defined the maritime dimensions of their realms differently, and
promoted competing and incompatible conceptions of their imperium
and dominium. Thus, the English Crown argued for mare liberum on the
natural jurisprudential grounds that ‘all are at liberty to navigate the
vast ocean, since the use of the sea and the air are common to all. No
nation or private person can have a right to the ocean, for neither the
course of nature nor public usage permits any occupation of it’. This
conception of negative community in which all could claim a common
right of navigation, because none could exercise exclusive dominion,
was used in  to refute Spanish claims of maritime imperium in the
West Indies. The Spanish ambassador had appealed for restitution of
property seized by Sir Francis Drake from Spanish settlements and ships
in the Americas, to which the English replied that it was against the law
of nations (contra ius gentium) for the Spanish to have excluded foreigners
from commerce in the Indies; the papal donation was invalid since
‘prescription without possession is not valid’ (præscriptio sine possessione
haud valeat); because the sea, like the air, could not be possessed, the
Spanish could not therefore exclude the English from any part of it.
Like the more general arguments for British maritime supremacy, these
particular assertions of the insufficiency of prescription to guarantee
possession and the freedom of the seas for navigation would become
staples of later British imperial ideology.
In the late s, Richard Hakluyt used the same natural jurispruden-
tial grounds to refute Spanish claims in the Indies based on the Alexan-
drine bulls. The English could by right travel and trade in the Indies,
 William Camden, Annales (), Eng. trans. (London, ), , quoted in Edward P. Cheyney,
‘International Law under Queen Elizabeth’, English Historical Review,  (), ; Thomas
Wemyss Fulton, The Sovereignty of the Sea (Edinburgh, ), –. Compare Patricia Seed,
Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World – (Cambridge, ), , who
truncates her citation of the same passage in order to show that the English mode of legal
argument was different from the Spanish, and indeed any other European power’s, though the
argument in favour of mare liberum (which Seed does not quote) was of course far from being
exclusively English.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
and not even the Pope could deprive rulers and their subjects of this
‘righte of navigation in the sea, & the right of traffique’ which was
available to everyone by the law of nations; ‘[s]eing therfore, that the sea
& trade are common by the lawe of nature and of nations, it was not
lawfull for the Pope, nor is it lawfull for the Spaniard, to prohibite other
nations from the communication & participation of this lawe’. Hakluyt
specifically cited Drake’s case as an example of the lawful pursuit of
trade and navigation, and concluded, in line with the English Crown’s
case, that he and other English sailors had a right to ‘defend themselves,
& lawfully continue traffique wth the Indians’. In this, Hakluyt’s
assumption of mare liberum was more representative of Elizabethan
policy than Dee’s vision of an English Atlantic mare clausum. The same
English argument in favour of mare liberum appeared in  in the
context of fishing rights in the northern seas, over which the Danish
Crown asserted mare clausum in an attempt to exclude the English. Once
again, the English Crown claimed that the seas were open to all persons
and hence all nations, and that the king of Denmark, like any other ruler
or realm, might exercise jurisdiction over the sea adjacent to his terri-
tory, in the interests of securing navigation against piracy and enemy
action; however, he could not claim dominium over it: the sea was as free
as the air, and all might therefore resort to it.
While the English Crown before the regal union of  supported
mare liberum on the high seas, the Scottish monarchy asserted the oppo-
site principle of mare clausum in home waters. Compared to the English,
the Scots were more dependent on their fisheries than on their agricul-
ture for subsistence, and hence were more protective of their coastal and
oceanic fishing grounds. They also made comparatively little investment
in inter-oceanic trade beyond northern Europe, and therefore had less
cause than the English to dispute the freedom of the oceans. While the
English made common fishing agreements with their neighbours, the
Scots instead asserted their right to ‘reserved waters’, an exclusion zone
around the realm of  or  miles from the shore. Soon after his
accession to the English throne in , James began to enforce Scottish
policies of mare clausum in all of the ‘British’ seas around the coasts of
England and Scotland, and thus reversed the more liberal Elizabethan
policies that had allowed foreign access to English waters for both
 [Richard Hakluyt,] ‘Whither an Englishman may trade into the West Indies with certain
answers to the Popes Bull’ (c. –), PRO  /, f. r, printed in The Original Writings and
Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, ed. E. G. R. Taylor,  vols. (London, ), , , .

Cheyney, ‘International Law under Queen Elizabeth’, .
 The empire of the seas 
fishing and navigation. This change of policy marked a shift both
towards a pan-British conception of the adjacent seas, and hence one
closer to the earlier vision of John Dee in the s, and towards a
conception of the British empire based on the royal prerogative, and
including the territory of the Three Kingdoms as well as the seas around
and between them.
The first major legal dispute involving James’s Kingdom of Great
Britain over this new policy immediately put this specifically Scoto-
British assertion of mare clausum at the heart of the global argument over
rights of dominion precipitated by the publication of Hugo Grotius’s
Mare Liberum in . In that year, James issued a proclamation banning
unlicensed foreigners (meaning, particularly, the Dutch) from the
coastal fisheries around Britain and Ireland. This reversal of the English
policy of mare liberum in favour of the Scottish practice of mare clausum has
been authoritatively described as ‘the beginning of the English preten-
sion to the sovereignty of the sea’. It seemed hardly coincidental to
James’s subjects that an anonymous tract upholding mare liberum in
favour of the Dutch appeared in Leiden in the same year. Though the
East Indian context was uppermost in Grotius’s argument, this did not
prevent Britons from imagining that his claims to freedom of the seas
were made at the expense of their own demands for new restrictions on
Dutch fishing-rights: ‘K[ing] James coming in the Dutch put out Mare
Liberum, made as if aimed at mortifying the Spaniards’ usurpation in the
W. and E. Indyes, but aimed indeed at England’, noted one commenta-
tor in . Grotius’s work, a fragment of the larger treatise De Jure
Prædæ (On the Law of Plunder), had been written as an apology for the
capture in  of the Portuguese carrack St Catharine by the Dutch East
India Company. Chapter  was published as Mare Liberum at the
insistence of the Dutch East India Company in the context of the
negotiations towards what would become the Twelve Years’ Truce
between Spain and the United Provinces. Grotius justified Dutch rights
of trade and navigation in the East Indies against the claims of the
Portuguese by arguing from natural law principles that anything pub-
licum – such as the air, the sea and the shore of that sea – was the
common property of all, and hence could be the private property of
none. The polemical purpose of this was clear: to deny that any state
could make the sea an accessory to its realm, and to enforce freedom of

Fulton, Sovereignty of the Sea, –, –, –. 
Fulton, Sovereignty of the Sea, .
 Material prepared for the English ambassadors to the Congress of Cologne, , quoted in
Fulton, Sovereignty of the Sea, , n. .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
navigation throughout the ocean, as a Dutch counterblast to Portuguese
claims of dominium over the seas on grounds of first discovery, papal
donation, rights of conquest or title of occupation.
The international debate on the sovereignty of the sea inspired by
Grotius’s Mare Liberum provoked the most important ideological
counter-definitions of the European overseas empires of the early
seventeenth century. It drew predictably hostile responses from Justo
Seraphim de Freitas in Portugal and Juan Solórzano y Pereira in
Spain. However, the first response to the work came from neither
Spain nor Portugal but from Scotland. William Welwod, the Professor
of Civil Law at the University of St Andrews, had produced the first
independent treatise on sea law in Britain in ; his chapter ‘Of the
Communitie and Proprietie of the Seas’, in An Abridgement of All Sea-
Lawes (), answered Grotius by supporting British fishing rights and
mare clausum, and indeed was the only response to Mare Liberum to which
Grotius himself replied. If God had meant the sea to be free, Welwod
argued, he would not have charged humanity to subdue the earth and
rule over the fish (Genesis :), ‘which could not be, but by subduing
of the waters also’. As God had divided the earth after the Flood, so he
had divided the sea, which therefore could be distinguished by bound-
aries, despite its fluidity. On these grounds, Welwod argued, princes
might claim dominium over the sea around their coasts, to reserve their
fishing stocks to their own kingdoms, even while the wider ocean
remained ‘mare vastum liberrimum’. At the instigation of Anne of Den-
mark, Welwod pressed his argument further in De Dominio Maris (),
albeit in ignorance of Grotius’s unpublished reply to his earlier


Hugo Grotius, Mare Liberum: Sive De Jure quod Batavis Competit ad Indicana Commercia (Leiden, ).
On the work and its context see C. G. Roelofsen, ‘Grotius and the International Politics of the
Seventeenth Century’, in Hedley Bull, Benedict Kingsbury and Adam Roberts (eds.), Hugo
Grotius and International Relations (Oxford, ), –; Roelofsen, ‘The Sources of Mare Liberum:
The Contested Origins of the Doctrine of the Freedom of the Seas’, in Wybo P. Heere (ed.),
International Law and its Sources: Liber Amicorum Maarten Bos (The Hague, ), –; Richard
Tuck, Philosophy and Government, – (Cambridge, ), –.
 On Welwod see Fulton, Sovereignty of the Sea, –; T. Callander Wade, ‘Introduction’, in The Sea
Law of Scotland (), ed. Wade, in Scottish Texts Society, Miscellany Volume (Edinburgh, ),
–; David M. Walker, The Scottish Jurists (Edinburgh, ), –.

William Welwod, An Abridgement of All Sea-Lawes (London, ), –; Hugo Grotius, ‘Defensio
Capitis Quinti Maris Liberi Oppugnati a Guilielmo Welwodo . . . Capite XXVII ejus Libri . . .
cui Titulum Fecit Compendium Legum Maritimarum’ (), printed in Samuel Muller, Mare
Clausum: Bijdrage tot de Geschiedenis der Rivaliteit van Engeland en Nederland in de Zeventiende Eeuw
(Amsterdam, ), –, and translated as ‘Defence of Chapter V of the Mare Liberum’, in
Herbert F. Wright, ‘Some Less Known Works of Hugo Grotius’, Bibliotheca Visseriana,  (),
–.
 The empire of the seas 
work. Welwod’s arguments foreshadowed the Portuguese response to
Grotius by Seraphim de Freitas, as well as those of Selden’s Mare
Clausum. Selden in fact owned both of Welwod’s works, and drew on De
Dominio Maris when writing Mare Clausum to affirm ‘the Dominion or
Ownership of the Sea, incompassing the Isle of Great Britain, as belonging
to the Empire of the same’. That claim to the freedom of the seas was
therefore originally a Scoto-British maritime ideology, in which Scottish
theories were expanded to justify Anglo-British practices.
The British reception of Grotius’s Mare Liberum, not all of it as
adversarial as Welwod’s, abounded with ironies. Grotius’s contentions
were obviously applicable to British arguments in their disputes with the
Dutch about fishing in northern waters. In , apparently in prepara-
tion for renewed negotiations with the Dutch over coastal fishing rights,
a member of the English delegation took ‘Notes out of a book called
Mare liberum’ and appended citations from Welwod’s De Dominio Maris
to show that the Scotsman had ‘materially’ refuted Grotius. Thus
forearmed, it might be possible to rebut Dutch claims, based on Grotian
arguments, for freedom of fishing in the British seas. Grotius’s argu-
ments could also easily be turned against the Dutch in pursuit of
freedom of navigation in the East Indies. In this context it is notable that
the first English translation of the Mare Liberum, ‘The Free Sea’, was also
the last surviving work by Richard Hakluyt, and it was presumably
undertaken at the instigation of the East India Company. Relations
between the English and Dutch in the East Indies reached an impasse in
–, which could only be broken by negotiations between represen-
tatives of the two companies. This offered the English an opportunity to
 [William Welwod,] De Dominio Maris, Juribusque ad Dominium Præcipue Spectantibus Assertio Brevis et
Methodica (London, ); J. D. Alsop, ‘William Welwood, Anne of Denmark and the Sovereignty
of the Sea’, Scottish Historical Review,  (), –.

Justo Seraphim de Freitas, De Justo Imperio Lusitanorum Asiatico Adversus Grotii Mare Liberum
(Valladolid, ); C. H. Alexandrowicz, ‘Freitas Versus Grotius’, British Yearbook of International
Law,  (), –.
 [John Selden,] Of the Dominion, Or, Ownership of the Sea, trans. Marchamont Nedham (London,
), . Selden’s annotated working copies of Welwod’s Abridgement and De Dominio Maris are
Bodleian Library shelfmarks o G. . Jur. Seld.,  and ; the latter is quoted in Selden, Mare
Clausum seu De Dominio Maris (London, ), –.
 [Sir Julius Caesar,] ‘Notes Out of a Book Called Mare Liberum, sive De Jure Quod Batavis
Competit ad Indicana Commercia Dissertatio’ (c. ), BL MS Lansdowne , ff. r–r;
Fulton, Sovereignty of the Sea, –, n. .

Hugo Grotius, trans. Richard Hakluyt, ‘The Free Sea or A Disputation Concerning the Right
wch ye Hollanders Ought to Have to the Indian Marchandize for Trading’ (post ), Inner
Temple Library, MS . Hakluyt translated other Dutch material (in Latin) relating to the East
Indies for the Company in : D. B. Quinn, ‘A Hakluyt Chronology’, in Quinn (ed.), The
Hakluyt Handbook,  vols. (London, ), , .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
turn the principle of the freedom of the seas, which the Dutch had
recently asserted against the Spanish and the Portuguese, against the
Dutch themselves; most ironically of all, that principle was thrown in the
face of Hugo Grotius himself, who was one of the four Dutch commis-
sioners sent to negotiate with the English East India Company.
The English had no compunction in demanding mare liberum in the
East Indies though they had earlier asserted mare clausum in the British
seas, as the Dutch, ‘contrary to the generall law of nations which
admitteth a communion and liberty of commerce, would seek as much
as lyes in them to hinder [the English] from tradeing in those parts’.
Their argument was, in effect, Grotian, though the English commis-
sioners may have been unaware that they were addressing Mare
Liberum’s author, because the work had remained anonymous since its
publication four years earlier. The English rebuttal concluded with a
quotation from the ‘assertor Maris liberi ’ to the effect that, under the ius
gentium, freedom of trade (commercandi libertas) cannot be restricted with-
out the consent of all peoples: the source of the principle was, of course,
Grotius, in the eighth chapter of his Mare Liberum. To this, Grotius
himself replied that Dutch commercial restrictions relied upon treaties
with the Indian rulers, and (citing the fifth chapter of Mare Liberum) ‘the
proponent of mare liberum does not disagree with this, and establishes
liberty everywhere before agreement has been given’ (ubique libertatem
statuit ante consensum praestitum). Grotius’s self-defence (though he did not
acknowledge it as such) was shrewd, not least because it left the larger
natural jurisprudential claim to freedom of navigation and commerce
unchallenged. It also marks a stage in the transition towards Grotius’s
mature theory of property in De Jure Belli ac Pacis (), in which he
established the role of consent as fundamental to the transition from
universal community to private property. As this Anglo-Dutch dispute
revealed, particular claims to imperium and dominium over seas and ports
established by law or treaty remained in tension with the more general
assertion of mare liberum, in accordance with the law of nature and of
nations. Such claims also gained a more general significance as part of
 G. N. Clark, ‘Grotius’s East India Mission to England’, Transactions of the Grotius Society,  (),
, –; English Commissioners to Dutch Commissioners,  May  (O.S.), and Dutch
Commissioners’ reply,  May  (O.S.), in G. N. Clark and W. J. M. van Eysinga, The Colonial
Conferences between England and the Netherlands in  and , Bibliotheca Visseriana,  (), ,
. Curiously, Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Hugo Grotius and England’, in Trevor-Roper, From
Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution (London, ), –, overlooks Grotius’s role in these
discussions.

Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, ), .
 The empire of the seas 
the wider European revival of natural law, especially as it was used to
establish rights of property, both for individuals and for states.
Anglo-Dutch rivalry later inspired the most famous Grotian response
to Grotius’s theory of mare liberum in John Selden’s Mare Clausum. Selden
originally drafted his work in , in response to the crisis in Anglo-
Dutch fishing relations that year, but it did not appear in print until
. By the time it was published, Selden had been able to digest
Grotius’s De Jure Belli ac Pacis, and was therefore able to produce ‘a
deeply Grotian work’. Selden, like so many of his predecessors, began
from the premise that God’s commission in Genesis :– had left the
earth in common to all humanity, and also cited Cicero De Officiis,
. . , to the effect that in nature there was no private property. Only
when men tired of this negative community did they wish to establish
rights of individual possession; they did so by agreement, as Grotius had
shown in De Jure Belli ac Pacis, . . . Selden’s task was to prove, contra
the Mare Liberum, that the dominion over the sea could be demonstrated
in law and had been established in fact. Selden showed at length that ‘by
the Customs of almost all and the more noble Nations that are known to
us, such a Dominion of the Sea is every where admitted’, and hence that
the sea was as capable of possession as the land or moveable goods, pace
Grotius and the only other defender of the freedom of the seas Selden
acknowledged, the Spanish humanist jurist, Fernando Vásquez de
Menchaca. Once this had been established, he could go on to the
argument from fact, which proved that ‘the Britains were Lords of the
Northern Sea, before they were subdued by the Romans. And that the Sea
and the Land were made one entire Bodie of the British Empire’ (‘. . . Et Mare
& Tellurem unicum Imperii Britannici corpus constituisse’); that ‘[t]he
Empire of the waters ever followed the Dominion of the Island’ (‘Un-
darum imperium insulae dominium semper secutum est’); and that the dominium
maris had been continuously exercised by the English kings since Edgar,
as even Grotius had admitted, in his panegyric verses celebrating the
accession of James VI and I to the English throne.
Selden’s argument from law, and the theory underlying his concep-
tion of the British Empire of the seas, was more novel, and hence

Tuck, Philosophy and Government, .
 Selden, Mare Clausum, , , ; Selden, Of the Dominion, Or, Ownership of the Sea, trans. Nedham,
, , . On Vásquez see especially Annabel Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in
Later Scholastic Thought (Cambridge, ), –, and Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World:
Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.  – c.  (New Haven, ), –.
 Selden, Mare Clausum, , , –, –; Selden, Of the Dominion, Or, Ownership of the Sea, trans.
Nedham, , , , –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
controversial (though Grotius himself never replied to it at length). The
main precedent for the conception of the Crown’s prerogative implied
by Selden’s conception of mare clausum derived from the English Crown’s
property in the foreshore. From time immemorial until , the Eng-
lish common law presumed that every man’s manor extended down to
the low-water mark, and hence that the Crown could claim no property
(dominium) in the foreshore though it could rightfully assert its jurisdiction
(imperium) there, as over anything else public. In , however, Thomas
Digges argued that the original negative community did not prevent any
assumption of dominium over nature’s commons, such as the sea or the
foreshore:
True it is that Jure naturali the seaes are common so likewise is the earth and
everye other thinge whatsoever, for as Cicero saithe privatum natura nihil est [De
Officiis, . . ]. But the Civile Lawes and all such as comment on them confesse
that even as of olde time private men, eyther by first discoverie or antique
possession, might purchase propertie in such particular tenements as theye
possessed and by lawe of nature were common, even so maie kings absolute princes
and comon-weales does in the Seas adjacent to their Territories.
Digges maintained that, like ship-wrecks, treasure-trove, and waifs and
strays, the foreshore could not become the property of any particular
subject, and therefore fell under the dominium of the Crown. By this
argument for the extensive power of the royal prerogative, any waste
lands became the property of the Crown. However, as Digges hastened
to point out, such a claim over the foreshore did not entail an extension
of royal imperium, ‘forasmutche as the princes Jurisdiction is as well on
the sea as on the lande, but it were an ill exchandge to lose Proprietye, for
Jurisdiction, where bothe of duetye to the Prince therein are due’. Such
‘taking away of men’s right, under the colour of the King’s title to land,
between high and low water marks’, would become in due course one
of the grievances complained of in the Grand Remonstrance of ,
along with the ‘new unheard-of tax of ship-money’, which was also
justified with reference to prerogative claims in Selden’s Mare
Clausum.
 Thomas Digges, ‘Arguments Prooving the Queenes Majesties Propertye in the Sea Landes, and
Salt Shores Thereof, and that No Subject Can Lawfully Hould Eny Parte Thereof but by the
Kinges Especiall Graunte’ (c. –), BL MS Lansdowne , printed in Stuart A. Moore, The
History of the Foreshore and the Law Relating Thereto (London, ), –, , , .
 ‘The Grand Remonstrance’ ( December ), in Samuel Rawson Gardiner (ed.), The Constitu-
tional Documents of the Puritan Revolution –, rd edn (Oxford, ), , ; Moore, History
of the Foreshore, xxxi; W. P. Drever, ‘Udal Law and the Foreshore’, Juridical Review,  (),
–.
 The empire of the seas 
Ship-Money was one of two major political test cases that compelled
the English and the Scots to define their relative and mutual claims to
mare clausum in the s, as Charles I demanded ‘British’ fishing rights
against the Dutch and as he simultaneously pressed his claim to marine
taxation over the inland counties of England. In the first case, the status
of the island of Britain as a maritime unit was denied; in the second, and
relatedly, the inescapably maritime nature of the English realm was
defiantly asserted. Charles’s attempt to exclude the Dutch from British
fishing grounds revealed the limitations of Anglo-Scottish maritime
co-operation. The Scottish royal burghs had originally petitioned
Charles to prevent Dutch incursions into their coastal waters, to which
Charles responded with a plan for a British fishery allowing English,
Scots, Irish and naturalised subjects equal access to all of the waters
adjacent to the British Isles on the prerogative grounds that fishing
rights in all of the Three Kingdoms ‘properlie belong to our imperiall
crowne’. The confederation of fishing associations – set up to monop-
olize all the catching, processing and marketing of fish around the coasts
of Britain and Ireland – collapsed under the impact of local Scottish
resistance, especially in the western Isles, as the Scots objected to being
‘confound[ed]’ with the English ‘under the name of great Britane altho
ther be no unioun as yitt with England nor the style of Great Britane
receaved there’. The prerogative claim in this case to mare liberum
clearly benefited the English more than the Scots, who therefore turned
the traditional Scottish claim to mare clausum against English encroach-
ments, in opposition to the presumption of a common British fishery.
Simultaneously, the English Crown invoked the same principle
against the Dutch with the revision and publication of John Selden’s
Mare Clausum in . According to the Kentish antiquarian Sir Roger
Twysden, the coincidence of the publication of Mare Clausum with the
increased exaction of Ship-Money led people to ‘imagin that booke was
not set out so much to justyfy the clayme abroad, as the actyon of
raysing the money at home’. Twysden claimed that ‘[t]he booke itself
is in every man’s hands’; it was clearly in the hands of the judges who
tried the Ship-Money case against the Buckinghamshire resister, John
Hampden, in , for they cited it six times to show that the king was


Allan I. Macinnes, Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement, – (Edinburgh, ),
 (quoted); Fulton, Sovereignty of the Sea, –; John R. Elder, The Royal Fishery Companies of the
Seventeenth Century (Glasgow, ), –.
 The Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, nd ser.,  (–), ed. P. Hume Brown (Edinburgh,
), .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
lord of the sea as well as of the land, that he had dominium as well as
imperium over it, and that it had been customary in England for the
inland counties to be taxed for the defence of the sea in cases of
necessity, according to the king’s determination. However, Selden’s
arguments from law were more notorious, because of their association
with the Ship-Money trial, and would be rendered obsolete by the
Crown’s insistence on mare liberum after the Restoration.
The Crown justified the levying of Ship-Money, and its extension to
the inland counties, on grounds of national defence against the imminent
threats presented by ‘certain thieves, pirates, and sea-robbers, as well as
Turks, enemies of Christianity, and others confederated together’. The
security of the realm was therefore at stake, and the judgment that this
was a case of sufficient danger to allow extraordinary taxation was left to
the king to make. The argument between Hampden’s lawyers and the
judges of the Court of Exchequer turned on the scope and limits of the
king’s discretionary power when deciding what provisions should be
made for the national defence. Historians of political thought have
accordingly treated it as an episode in the history of reason-of-state
argument, or as a moment in the definition of the respective powers of
king and parliament on the eve of the Civil Wars. It was, of course, both,
but it was also a central episode in the ideological definition of England
(though not ‘Britain’ in this case) as a maritime realm.
The judges who ruled in favour of the crown in Hampden’s case
insisted that the king had both dominion and jurisdiction over the seas
around England. The dominion of the sea had to be upheld, argued
Lord Coventry, ‘for safety sake . . . The Wooden Walls are the best walls
of the kingdom; and if the riches and wealth of the kingdom be respected
for that cause, the Dominion of the Sea ought to be respected’. He
thereby conflated two separate arguments, which defined both the
 Sir Roger Twysden, quoted in Kenneth Fincham, ‘The Judges’ Decision on Ship Money in
February : The Reaction of Kent’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research,  (), ;
‘Proceedings in the Case of Ship-Money, between the King and John Hampden, Esq., in the
Exchequer,  Charles I. A.D. ’, in A Complete Collection of State Trials . . . From the Earliest Period
to the Year , ed. T. B. Howell,  vols. (London, ), , cols. , , , , , .
On the context of the Ship-Money dispute, and Selden’s place within it, see especially Martin
Dzelzainis, ‘The Case of Ship-Money and its Aftermath’, in Dzelzainis, The Ideological Origins of
the English Revolution (Cambridge, forthcoming). My thanks to Dr Dzelzainis for the opportunity
to read this chapter in typescript.

Writ of  May , in Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. Howell, , col. .
 Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain
(Cambridge, ), –; Michael Mendle, ‘The Ship Money Case, The Case of Shipmony, and the
Development of Henry Parker’s Parliamentary Absolutism’, The Historical Journal,  (),
–.
 The empire of the seas 
rights of the English Crown and the nature of the English nation. Since
the prosperity and the safety of the nation depended upon the security of
its defences, those defences ought to be maintained by all necessary
means. The greatest of those defences was the sea, and the sea was an
appurtenance of the Crown of England, according to the Stuart prin-
ciple of mare clausum. Decisions regarding the welfare of the realm were
judgments to be made according to the royal prerogative, and so the
judgment that England’s maritime safety was in danger, and hence that
extraordinary fiscal measures should be taken to protect it, was entirely
in the hands of the king. On the canonistic principle that what affects all
should be borne by all (quod omnes tangit, per omnes debet supportari),
Coventry and his fellow-judges argued that the burden of maritime
defence should be carried by all the counties of England, whether
coastal or inland, so that even taxpayers in Buckinghamshire, like John
Hampden, would be liable for the cost of equipping and maintaining a
ship for the defence of the realm.
The justices who ruled against Hampden adjudged that all subjects of
the Crown were liable for maritime defence because all benefited from
the security and prosperity of the seas around England. Yet in doing so
they, like John Selden and earlier Thomas Digges, defined England as a
maritime polity on the basis of the royal prerogative. By this argument,
the English were necessarily a maritime nation in so far as they were
subject to a king whose dominions included the seas around his realm.
Such a prerogative definition of dominium was questioned early in the
Civil War, when those among Hampden’s judges who had decided in
favour of the Crown were impeached in the Long Parliament. As
Edmund Waller argued in his speech against Sir Edward Crawley, the
invasion of the property-rights of Englishmen in the name of national
defence, when decided by the king alone without consulting Parliament,
was a threat to liberty rather than the means to protect it: ‘God and
nature have given us the sea’, he argued, ‘as our best guard against our
enemies; and our ships, as our greatest glory above other nations . . . how
barbarously would these men [the judges who had ruled against Hamp-
den] have let in the sea upon us at once, to wash away our liberties; . . .
making the supply of our navy a pretence for the ruin of our nation!’


Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. Howell, , cols. , ,  (compare cols. , , writ
of  May ).

Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. Howell, , col.  (compare Henry Parker, The Case of
Ship-Mony Briefly Discoursed (London, )). Waller’s copy of the  translation of Selden’s Mare
Clausum is Folger Shakespeare Library shelfmark S.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
There was therefore no necessary connection between the empire of the
seas and the liberty of Englishmen, especially when that liberty was
defined as security of property, the nation’s naval defence provided the
expedient for extraordinary fiscal exactions, and the maritime definition
of the realm depended on the extent of prerogative power.
These arguments in favour of the English Crown’s dominion over the
seas nonetheless proved essential for the Rump Parliament just before
the outbreak of the Anglo-Dutch War of . The Commonwealth
printed or reprinted tracts written to support the Stuart monarchy’s
sovereignty of the seas in support of their own arguments against the
Dutch. For example, Sir John Boroughs’s The Soveraignty of the British Seas
(c. ) appeared in print for the first time in , to show that both by
fact (factum) and right (ius), princes possessed dominium in, and imperium
over, the seas around their realms. Boroughs cited a series of precedents,
from the Romans and Saxons through to Bracton (via Edgar, the
‘Imperator & dominus’ of the British seas), to show ‘that the Kings of
England by immemorial prescription, continuall usage, and possession . . .
have ever held the Soveraigne Lordship of the Seas of England’, while
King Charles had now ‘enlarged his Dominions over a great part of the
Westerne Indies; by meanes of which extent of Empire . . . the trade, and
persons of all Nations . . . must of necessitie, first, or last, come within
compasse of his power, and jurisdiction’. A year later, in , the
Council of State paid Marchamont Nedham £ to translate the fullest
version of these arguments, in the form of Selden’s Mare Clausum. By
adopting Boroughs’s and Selden’s arguments, in the sovereignty of the
seas, as in so many other matters, the Commonwealth and the Protector-
ate republicanised the appurtenances of the Stuart monarchy. Though
Nedham admitted that Selden had revised his work ‘at the command of
the late Tyrant ’, he nevertheless left his arguments from both law and fact
untouched, and hence derived the Rump’s claim to dominion over the
Narrow Seas from his claim that ‘the King of Great Britain is Lord of the
Sea flowing about, as an inseparable and perpetual Appendant of the
British Empire’ (‘Serenissimum Magnae Britanniae Regem maris circumflui, ut
individuæ ac perpetuæ Imperii Britannici appendicis, Dominum esse’).

Steven C. A. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy,
– (Cambridge, ), , .

Sir John Boroughs, The Soveraignty of the British Seas (London, ), –, , –, –; compare
[Donald Lupton,] Englands Command on the Seas, Or, The English Seas Guarded (London, ), –.

Calendar of State Papers, Domestic: –, ed. Mary Everett Green (London, ), .
 Selden, Mare Clausum, sig. br; Selden, Of the Dominion, Or, Ownership of the Sea, trans. Nedham, sig.
(e)v.
 The empire of the seas 
The prefatory poem prefixed to Nedham’s translation of Mare Clausum
revealed ambivalence about the project of defending a republican regime
on the basis of a ‘British Empire’ defined by the extent of royal preroga-
tive. ‘Neptune to the Common-Wealth of England’ elucidated the work’s
accompanying engraving – the first representation of Britannia as the
ruler of the waves – as if it were part of an emblem-book. A submissive
and imploring Neptune begs assistance from the victorious Britannia,
who is helmed and breast-plated as Minerva, treading the standards of
Scotland and Ireland beneath her feet in the wake of Cromwell’s military
conquest of the British Isles in –, and carrying a tiny Nike, like the
Athena of the Parthenon, tutelary deity of the Athenian empire of the
seas. Neptune implores Britannia not simply to preserve but to extend
her sea-dominion, in order to claim the sovereignty of seas by right of
conquest rather than simply by inheritance from England’s kings: ‘For
Sea-Dominion may as well bee gain’d/ By new acquests, as by descent
maintained’. This acknowledged the prerogative claim to Britain’s
coastal waters which the Rump maintained, but also imagined the
extension of sea-dominion in the name of the ‘Angliae Respub.’ beyond
the Narrow Seas and at the expense of the Dutch. This poem contrib-
uted to the burgeoning maritime mythology of the eighteenth century in
various musical settings, including a truncated one by Haydn from ,
but without acknowledgement of its republican roots.

Selden’s work provided the foundation for later claims to dominion over
the seas in the name of a ‘British Empire’. In May , rumour in Paris
had it that Oliver Cromwell wanted to become ‘emperor of the seas
occidentalis . . . an old pretension of the kings that were heretofore of
England’ on the basis of Selden’s arguments in Mare Clausum. This
echoed claims that circulated in – that Cromwell would become
emperor of Great Britain, or even in one especially extravagant

On the Stuart transformation of Britannia into Pallas Athene/Minerva see Madge Dresser,
‘Britannia’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism,  vols. (London, ), : National Fictions, –.

‘Neptune to the Common-Wealth of England’, in Selden, Of the Dominion, Or, Ownership of the Sea,
trans. Nedham, sig. [b]r–v. David Norbrook has ingeniously suggested Thomas Chaloner as the
possible author of the poem, on the basis of the anagrammatic signature, ‘K
oo’:
Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, – (Cambridge, ),
, n. .
 [Marchamont Nedham,] ‘Invocation of Neptune, and His Attendant Nereids, to Britannia, on
the Dominion of the Sea’ (n.p., n.d. [London, ?]), BL shelfmark . d.  () (libretto for
setting by Friedrich Hartman Graf, ); Joseph Haydn, Mare Clausum (), ed. H. C. Robbins
Landon (Vienna, ), Hoboken  a: .
 Letter of intelligence,  May , in A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, ed. Thomas
Birch,  vols. (London, ), , .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
account, emperor of the West Indies, and recalled King Edgar’s style
as emperor of the British seas (revived by Selden and Boroughs, among
others). This flurry of rumour came in the aftermath of the military
pacification of Ireland, the conquest of Scotland in – and the
elevation of Cromwell to the position of Protector in December .
The Cromwellian union achieved what the Stuart kings had failed to
provide: the consolidation of England, Ireland, Scotland and all the
territories belonging thereto into a political unit with a single head.
However, it did so not least by relying on the prerogative powers of
dominium over the seas inherited from the Stuarts. An earlier Protector,
the Duke of Somerset, had attempted to create an empire of Great
Britain by conquering Scotland, but it took Cromwell, another hammer
of the Scots turned Protector, to fulfil his aim. Though the title of
‘Emperor’, or ruler over multiple dominions, was never formally
awarded to Cromwell, the rumour that it might be hinted at a desire for
equality with the other rulers of Europe, and a recognition of the
Commonwealth’s unique achievement in creating an archipelagic state
within the British Isles and over the seas adjacent to them. When the
Protectoral warship, the Naseby (also known as the Great Oliver) was
launched, the effigy on its prow depicted Cromwell trampling Scottish,
Irish, Dutch, French, Spanish and English victims under his horse’s feet,
in an image derived from the portrait of King Edgar on the sovereign.
However, the commingling of regal and republican claims on which
these images relied was inevitably inflammatory after the Restoration.
Cromwell’s image was torn from the Naseby, and the ship was renamed
the Royal Charles. Selden’s Mare Clausum itself had to be ‘restored’ to its
monarchical purity by James Howell in , who warned readers that
Nedham had foisted the translation upon them ‘in the name of a
Commonwealth, instead of the kings of England ’. This was a relief to at
least one early reader, Samuel Pepys, who took his copy of Nedham’s
 Arnold Oskar Meyer, ‘Der Britische Kaisertitel zur Zeit des Stuarts’, Quellen und Forschungen aus
italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken,  (), –; David Armitage, ‘The Cromwellian Protec-
torate and the Languages of Empire’, The Historical Journal,  (), –.

Dee, General and Rare Memorials, ; Boroughs, Soveraignty of the British Seas, ; Selden, Mare
Clausum, ; William Ryley, Sr, ‘The Soveraigntie of the English Seas Vindicated and Proved,
by Some Few Records . . . Remayning in the Tower of London’ (c. ), BL MS Harl. , f.
r; John Evelyn, Navigation and Commerce, Their Original and Progress (London, ), .

Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy: The Fleet and the English Revolution (Oxford, ), –, , ;
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews,  vols. (London, –),
, , .
 John Selden, Mare Clausum; The Right and Dominion of the Sea in Two Books, ed. James Howell
(London, ), sig. a[]r; for Howell’s earlier concern about using monarchical prerogative to
support republican sovereignty of the seas, and proposing a replacement for Selden’s Mare
Clausum, see Howell to Council of State, [May ,] BL Add. MS , f. r.
 The empire of the seas 
translation to his bookseller in  ‘to cause the title of my English Mare
Clausum to be changed and the new title, dedicated to the King, to be put
to it, because I am ashamed to have the other seen dedicate[d] to the
Commonwealth’.
Anyone who discoursed on the sovereignty of the sea after Selden,
‘will certainly incurr the whole censure of writing an Iliad after Homer’,
wrote Sir Philip Meadows, a diplomat and former Latin Secretary to
the Commonwealth. In his highly Seldenian ‘Observations Concern-
ing the Dominion and Sovereignty of the Seas’ (), which Meadows
originally presented to Charles II during the Third Anglo-Dutch War,
he remarked that various peoples had historically claimed dominion
over several seas, including the Athenians, the Carthaginians, the Rho-
dians and the Romans, but ‘this was Force and Empire, without Prop-
erty, an Usurpation, not a Right’; only the ‘Feudists’ in later times had
held that kings could claim dominium directum because they possessed the
imperium over them. In his dedication of his manuscript to Samuel
Pepys, Meadows situated his work in the context of the Anglo-Dutch
Wars, and stated his aim as the prevention of any excessive assumptions
by others regarding the powers of the Crown, not least by enemies like
the Dutch, who would construe expanded claims to the empire of the
seas as advances towards universal monarchy. When he came to
publish it in , he offered it as a means to prevent any misunder-
standing between the Dutch and the English, in order to defend the
British seas against the encroachments of ‘the Continent’ (meaning,
presumably, France). Like Selden, he assumed the original community
of the earth on Ciceronian grounds; also like Selden, he attributed the
origins of private property to consent, as Grotius had argued; like Sir
William Petty (as we shall see), he identified complete sea-sovereignty as
the amalgamation of dominium and imperium, property and supreme rule
and jurisdiction, based on law, rather than fact or force alone: ‘’tis one
thing to be Master of it in an Historical and Military sense, by a
Superiority of Power and Command, as the General of a Victorious
Fleet is, another thing to be Master of it in a legal sense, by a Possessory
Right, as the true Owner and Proprietor is’.

Pepys, Diary, ed. Latham and Matthews, , .
 Sir Philip Meadows, ‘Observations Concerning the Dominion and Sovereignty of the Seas’
(), BL Add MS , ff. r–v (copy dedicated to Samuel Pepys,  January /).
 Meadows, ‘Observations Concerning the Dominion and Sovereignty of the Seas’, BL Add MS
, ff. v, v, v–r; Meadows, Observations Concerning the Dominion and Sovereignty of the Seas:
Being an Abstract of the Marine Affairs of England (London, ), sig. [B]r; Fulton, Sovereignty of the
Seas, –, greatly downplays Meadows’s Seldenian arguments.
 Meadows, Observations Concerning the Dominion and Sovereignty of the Seas, ‘To the Reader’; sig. Bv, 
(quoting Cicero, De Officiis, . . ), , , –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
Meadows’s assimilation of dominium and imperium over the British seas
was perhaps the last such assertion of a whole-heartedly Seldenian
conception of the empire of the seas. Both at the time of its composition,
and at the moment of its publication in , his treatise captured the
shifting associations of the empire of the seas in the post-Restoration era.
The geopolitical competition between England and its continental
neighbours was cast in the idiom of universal monarchy, the attempt by
either Holland or France to achieve the hegemony of Europe by
maritime supremacy and commercial monopoly. In , Meadows had
attempted to allay any possibility that English pretensions to the sover-
eignty of the seas could be interpreted as such an ambition for universal
monarchy in the era of Anglo-Dutch rivalry. When the treatise ap-
peared in print, it also fit the temper of the times for, in the aftermath of
the Glorious Revolution, such rivalry had ceased, as the decade and a
half between  and  had seen the focus of English fears of
universal monarchy shift from the Dutch to the French. Any English
assumptions of mare clausum were also abandoned in pursuit of a policy of
mare liberum across the oceans of the world. As a matter of law, Selden’s
arguments in Mare Clausum were effectively irrelevant by . How-
ever, his historical arguments from fact for English dominium and im-
perium over the British seas became a locus classicus for later students of the
subject; as late as , James Oglethorpe, the promoter of the Georgia
colony, recommended that ‘Whoever would be fully informed concern-
ing the Figure which England has made in all Ages, in Maritime Affairs,
may find abundance of curious matter in Selden’s Mare Clausum’.
Meadows was not alone in attempting to resolve the theoretical
conundrum of combining imperium and dominium, over the sea as over
land. Among the last seventeenth-century theorists to attempt a recon-
ciliation in relation to the sea rather than for landed property was the
political economist Sir William Petty, who turned not to John Selden
but rather to Thomas Hobbes (an early admirer of Mare Clausum) for
assistance. The key to Petty’s theory was his Hobbesian understanding
 Compare Sir Philip Meadows, ‘Reflections upon a Passage in Sr William Temple’s Memoirs
Relating to our Right of Dominion in the British Seas’ (), BL Add. MS , ff. r–v.
 Steven C. A. Pincus, ‘The English Debate over Universal Monarchy’, in John Robertson (ed.), A
Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of  (Cambridge, ), –.
 Fulton, Sovereignty of the Seas, , .

[James Edward Oglethorpe,] A New and Accurate Account of the Provinces of South-Carolina and Georgia
(), in The Publications of James Edward Oglethorpe, ed. Rodney M. Baine (Athens, GA, ), .

On Hobbes’s reading of Selden’s Mare Clausum see Hobbes to Mr Glen, / April , and
Hobbes to William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, / June , in The Correspondence of
Thomas Hobbes, ed. Noel Malcolm,  vols. (Oxford, ), , , .
 The empire of the seas 
of the commensurability of dominium and imperium. As he put it in the
opening to his major tract on the dominion of the sea ():
The Words Soveraignity & Empire doe signify even as Large a Power as Mr
Hobs attributes to his Leviathan That is to say, a Power & Right of doing all
things that are naturally possible. So as Empire in & over any certain scope or
circuit of Ground whether dry or covered with water signifies a Right & power
over ye lives Liberties & fortunes of all that Live within ye same & a right to all
Things being or produced therein. Dominion over ye same Land or ground,
signifies onely such a Right as Landlords have to their Estates of Inheritance . . .
So as ye Dominus Maris hath ye same right to all ye fish & other productions of
ye seas as any Landlord hath to ye Corne & Cattle accrewing from his
Lands . . .
Petty’s plan offered the monarchy of James II the chance to become the
arbiter of European affairs by asserting its dominance over the
European seas; the British monarch would thereby emerge as a
Hobbesian sovereign, guaranteeing protection in return for obedience,
at least upon the seas. Petty argued that this was necessary because the
various maritime states of northern Europe ‘are as to sea-affaires in ye
state of Nature and there is bellum omnium contra Omnes betweene
them . . . Whereas if all and every of them did transferre their Rights
unto some One of their Number, Peace & profitt would ensue’. Petty
consistently maintained the necessity of a mare clausum as an essential
defence for the Three Kingdoms in many of his reformative projects for
the restoration of Britain and Ireland, particularly in the s. This
would be an essential alternative to territorial conquest, and hence the
means to prevent military overstretch for the Stuart monarchy; it would
also not face the costs of continental commitments, and avoid the
nuisance of internal disputes about sovereignty. Petty presented the
alternatives in : ‘Whether it bee to ye King of Englands Interest to
acquire More Territory then hee now hath or rather to bee Effectuall
Soveraine of a reall Mare Clausum attaineable only to himself’. Though
theoretically potent, Petty’s plan was practically impossible: it might be
plausible to combine imperium and dominium in the figure of a Leviathan-
like dominus maris, but providing the rows of signal-ships – manned by
convicts who also busily knitted stockings and manufactured fishing-
 Petty, ‘Dominion of the Sea’, BL Add. MS , f. r; BL MS Lansdowne , f. r.

Petty, ‘Dominion of the Sea’, BL Add. MS , ff. v–r; BL MS Lansdowne , f. v.
 Sir William Petty, ‘Ten Tooles for Making ye Crowne & State of England More Powerfull Then
Any Other in Europe’ (), BL Add. MS , ff. r–v; Petty, ‘Of ye Mare Clausum,’ BL
Add. MS , f. r; Petty, ‘Of a Mare Clausum’ (), BL Add. MS , f. r.

Sir William Petty, ‘A Probleme’ (), BL Add. MS , f. v.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
nets, and moored between the north of Ireland and Scotland, from
Kinsale to the Scilly Islands, the Scillies to the French coast, between
northern Scotland and Norway, the Isle of Wight and Cap le Hague,
and between Dover and France – was not.
Petty presented his conception of ‘a reall Mare Clausum’ not as an
alternative to the plantation of colonies in North America, but rather
as a warning against English territorial ambitions in Europe. Yet his
suggestion was both backward looking and belated, because William
III’s successful invasion of England and Ireland in – would
ultimately eliminate the Anglo-Dutch rivalry which had done so much
to encourage English attachment to a European mare clausum, and open
an era in which the freedom of the seas again came to distinguish
English ideology and policy. However, Petty’s opposition between land
and sea, and the armies and navies necessary to exercise dominium and
imperium over them, also looked forward, as did his political-economic
conception of Britain and Ireland as a unit within Northern Europe and
the wider Atlantic world. Both the navalist ideology implicit in Petty’s
work and the coincident commitment to commerce would become
crucial components of British imperial ideology in the decades following
the Restoration. Not least, their confluence could provide a possible
solution to one of the greatest of the historical conundrums that bedevil-
led British conceptions of empire since the late sixteenth century: how to
reconcile empire with liberty. The answer was clear, according to Petty.
He quoted a Dutch student of naval architecture, who in turn had
appealed to a more eminent ancient authority: ‘Such as Desire Empire
& Liberty says Aristotle let Them Encourage the Art of Ship-building’.
Petty had turned to Hobbes in search of a means to reconcile imperium
and dominium; the rapprochement between imperium and libertas, two
classically opposed but equally admired values, would be no less chal-
lenging. The empire of the seas and freedom of commerce would be the
major solutions to this dilemma, as the next two chapters will show.
 Sir William Petty, ‘Of a Mare Clausum’, BL Add. MS , ff. r–v.

Compare Petty, ‘Ten Tooles’, BL Add. MS , f. : ‘ That American Colonyes, The East
India & African Trades as also a Mare clausum may bee considered.’

‘Die heerschen wil, zegt Aristoteles, en vry zijn, rechte t’zijnent een vaerdige Scheeps-bouw op’:
Nicolaes Witsen, Aeloude en Hedendaegsche Scheeps-bouwen Bestier: Waer in Wijtloopigh wert Verhandelt, de
Wijze van Scheeps-timmeren, by Grieken en Romeynen (Amsterdam, ), sig. *r, quoted in Sir William
Petty, ‘A Treatise of Navall Philosophy in Three Parts’, BL Add. MS , f. v.
  

Liberty and empire

Empire is of two kinds, Domestick and National, or Forrain and

Provinciall.
The dilemma of providing simultaneous and equally persuasive justifi-
cations of both dominium and imperium bedevilled theorists of real prop-
erty and of maritime law. The dilemma was not necessarily insoluble,
because there was no paradox involved in making such parallel claims
to property and jurisdiction: the one did not necessarily threaten the
other, though, as the Spanish Monarchy had discovered decades before
the English and Scottish Crowns would, the two claims were not
dependent upon one another, and each needed a separate and distinct
argument. A more intractable dilemma arose from the tension between
the competing demands of two overwhelmingly desirable but ultimately
irreconcilable goals, liberty and empire. A variety of solutions to this
dilemma had emerged by the later seventeenth century and, as William
Petty noted in the s, it may have been more apparent than real.
However, for the classical – above all, Roman – historical and moral
traditions within which the majority of early-modern British theorists
had been educated, libertas and imperium remained seemingly incompat-
ible values. This was hardly confined to those who asserted the primacy
of Roman moral and political thought as a means of contemporary
self-understanding. So widespread was knowledge of classical history,
among the generally educated as well as the more technically learned,
that the problem of how to achieve empire while sustaining liberty
became a defining concern of British imperial ideology from the late
sixteenth century onwards. This resulted in part from the reception of
Machiavelli’s Discorsi, but even the attention to the moral lessons de-
livered by that Florentine would not have aroused such interest had
 James Harrington, The Common-Wealth of Oceana (London, ), ; The Political Works of James
Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, ), .


 The ideological origins of the British Empire
there been no prior concern with the historical and theoretical di-
lemmas that underlay them. Machiavelli did present the most compell-
ing modern dissection of the problem of sustaining empire while main-
taining liberty, and it was to him that British thinkers most frequently
turned. Nonetheless, they relied, as did Machiavelli himself, on Roman
historians such as Sallust for their understanding of this persistent
dilemma.
Both classical and contemporary history showed that liberty gave
birth to republics and that republics strove to safeguard that liberty both
internally, for the flourishing of their citizens, and externally, for the
security and grandeur of the republic itself. Theory reinforced the
historical connection between republican government and liberty. The
commitment to liberty under the law, a liberty with responsibility for the
collective well-being of the community, has distinguished the republican
tradition from its classical origins through to its contemporary revival.
Though the Machiavellian branch of the early-modern republican
tradition affirmed this central commitment to liberty, it insisted equally
strongly on the primacy of greatness (grandezza) in defining the character
of the commonwealth. Machiavelli began his analysis of grandezza his-
torically with the expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome and theoreti-
cally from the origins of that greatness in republican liberty. ‘It is truly
remarkable to observe the grandezza which Athens attained in the space
of a hundred years after it had been liberated from the tyranny of
Pisistratus,’ he remarked in Discorsi, . : ‘But most marvellous of all is it
to observe the grandezza Rome attained after freeing itself from its kings.’
The reason for this rapid acquisition of greatness was not far to seek.
Only when the good of the commonwealth was paramount would cities
become great, for ‘it is beyond question that it is only in republics that
the common good (il bene comune) is looked to properly in that all that
promotes it is carried out’.
Machiavelli inherited this equation between greatness and republican
liberty from Sallust, the most popular of all classical historians in
early-modern Europe. In the opening chapters of the Bellum Catilinæ,

Philip Pettit, ‘Liberalism and Republicanism’, Australian Journal of Political Science,  (),
Special Issue, –; Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford, ), –.

Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, ed. Giorgio Inglese (Milan, ), 
(Discorsi, . ): ‘Ma sopra tutto maravigliosissima è a considerare a quanta grandezza venne Roma
poi che la si liberò da’ suoi Re. La ragione è facile a intendere, perché non il bene comune è
quello che fa grandi le città’; compare Discorsi, . . On the Romans’ own dating of their civic
liberty from the abolition of the monarchy see Chaim Wirszubski, Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome
during the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cambridge, ), .

Peter Burke, ‘A Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians, –’, History and Theory, 
 Liberty and empire 
, Sallust argued that the establishment of the Republic in Rome had
released the talents of the Roman people which had formerly been
repressed under the rule of the kings. So great was the popular thirst for
glory that it was indeed remarkable (incredibile) how the civitas grew once
it had recovered its liberty. This passage from Sallust became the locus
classicus for the equation between republican liberty and the greatness of
a free state. Augustine cited it in his discussion in the City of God, . , of
the divine favour which had allowed Rome to be the vehicle for the
expansion of Christianity; following Augustine, the author of the De
Regimine Principum, . . –, also quoted it and remarked further, in
Sallustian vein, that under republican government ‘when [persons] see
that the common good is not in the power of one, each attends to it as if
it were their own, not as if it were something pertaining to someone
else’. Closer to Machiavelli’s own time and to his immediate political
concerns, both Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni deployed the
same passage in praise of the greatness of republican Florence.
This Sallustian and Machiavellian tradition encouraged the belief
that the greatness of the republic derived originally from its liberty.
However, Sallust’s continuation of his narrative showed that the conse-
quences of pursuing such grandezza would lead inevitably to the loss of
that liberty both for the republic and for its citizens. The martial virtue
and concern for the public good that the citizens exhibited when they
had been freed from the repressions of monarchy may have propelled
the remarkable growth of the Roman Republic, but (as Sallust regret-
fully reported) fortune then turned against Rome. The virtuous and the
courageous became greedy, ambitious and impious; the character of the
republic was changed, and the government itself became cruel and
intolerable (Bellum Catilinæ, . –). Sallust located this declension quite
precisely in Roman history during the dictatorship of Lucius Sulla.
From that point onward, the pursuit of individual advantage replaced
the effort to protect the good of the community, the army which had
been sent to conquer distant lands became debilitated by luxury, and all
of the former virtues that had sustained Rome in its acquisition of
(), –; Patricia Osmond, ‘Sallust and Machiavelli: From Civic Humanism to Political
Prudence’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies,  (), –.

Sallust, Bellum Catilinæ, . , in Sallust, ed. and trans. J. C. Rolfe (London, ), –; Quentin
Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge, ), –.

Augustine, De Civitate Dei, Libri XII, eds. B. Dombart and A. Kalb,  vols. (Leipzig, –), , ;
Ptolemy of Lucca, On the Government of Princes: De Regimine Principum, trans. James M. Blythe
(Philadelphia, ), –; Osmond, ‘Sallust and Machiavelli’, –.
 Sallust, Bellum Catilinæ, . –, in Sallust, ed. and trans. Rolfe, –; Skinner, Liberty Before
Liberalism, –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
territory and greatness were scorned and abandoned (Bellum Catilinæ, .
–, . –).
Machiavelli followed Sallust not only in his account of the origins of
Roman grandezza but also in his analysis of Roman declension. Rome
had used two methods to facilitate its territorial expansion. It had armed
the plebs and admitted foreigners to citizenship, but these methods had
led to tumults and hence to internal instability (Discorsi, . ). Though
Machiavelli’s defence of such tumults marked his greatest departure
from pre-humanist republicans’ attachment to internal peace, his argu-
ment that such tumults contributed to the decline of the Roman Repub-
lic was merely one part of his analysis of the contribution of expansion
towards the destruction of Roman liberty. Rome’s grandezza could not
have been achieved without the necessary extension of military com-
mands, he argued, but this had led directly to servitude (servitù) for the
Roman people; the liberty which had been won with the expulsion of
the monarchy ended during the dictatorships of Sulla and Marius,
which in turn provided the precedent for the tyranny of Julius Caesar
and the loss of popular liberty under the emperors (Discorsi, . ).
Machiavelli’s major advance beyond the limits of Sallust’s argument
was to show that it would be impossible for any state to avoid the
compulsions of expansion, and hence to escape the loss of its liberty.
Rome could never have achieved grandezza without instituting the practi-
cal measures that had led to internal dissension and hence to the
destruction of its republican liberty; likewise, those states that did not
follow the expansionist policies of the Romans rendered themselves
vulnerable to conquest by others and would still lose their liberty as their
competitors overran them in due course. Machiavelli’s counter-
examples were Venice and Sparta, the states that had, respectively,
refused in the interests of internal harmony to arm the plebs and declined
to increase population by admitting foreigners to citizenship. Each had
hoped thereby to resist the temptation to expand in order to safeguard
the liberty of the commonwealth. Sparta remained stable for eight
hundred years until the Theban revolt checked its ambitions to occupy all
the cities of Greece; Venice similarly lost its liberty along with all of its
territories on the terraferma in one day at the battle of Agnadello in .
 Sallust, Bellum Catilinæ, . –, . –, in Sallust, ed. and trans. Rolfe, –.

Machiavelli, Discorsi, . , ed. Inglese, –.
 Machiavelli, Discorsi, . , ed. Inglese, –.

Niccolò Machiavelli, Legazione e commissarie, ed. Sergio Bertelli,  vols. (Milan, ), , –
; Felix Gilbert, ‘Machiavelli e Venezia’, Lettere Italiane,  (), –; Innocenzo Cervelli,
Machiavelli e la Crisi dello Stato Veneziana (Naples, ).
 Liberty and empire 
‘What will happen to the others if this [republic] burned and froze in a
few days only?’ Machiavelli asked. ‘And if justice and force and union for
so great an impero did not avail?’ (Decennale, , –). The alternatives
were stark: a republic could pursue grandezza, or it could safeguard its
liberty and maintain tranquil but temporary security. Such security
could not be guaranteed, because the republic would be forced to expand
and all would be lost. Machiavelli’s recommendation was unequivocal:
grandezza was a greater good than stability. ‘Wherefore’ (in the words of
James Harrington), ‘you are to take the course of Rome’.
Once Machiavelli had shown that attack was the best form of de-
fence, and that Roman ordini would be the essential base for a successful
martial republic, he defined more precisely the means by which an
impero should be enlarged, and the conditions that would make expan-
sion possible. A territory could be augmented by leagues of confederacy,
as the Tuscans had done; by unequal confederations, with the expansive
power keeping the headship of any league to itself, as Rome had done;
or, least effectively of all, by simply annexing conquered territory
without confederation, thus bringing instability and collapse upon re-
publics like Athens and Sparta which could not support the weight of
new conquest (Discorsi, . ). To hold such acquisitions, many soldiers
and settlers would be needed, so every effort should be made to increase
the population. A small root could not support a great trunk, so ‘who-
ever would make any City great, and apt for Dominion ( faccia grande
imperio), must endeavour with all industry to throng it with inhabitants,
otherwise it will be impossible to bring it to any great perfection’. The
‘true ways of enlarging an empire’ (acquistare imperio) were therefore to
increase the population; to ally with, and not to subject, other states; to
dispatch colonies into conquered territory; to put war-booty into the
public coffers; to campaign by means of battles not sieges; to keep
individuals poor in order to increase public wealth; and to maintain
military discipline. The only viable alternative to taking the course of

Niccolò Machiavelli, Decennale, in Machiavelli, Il teatro e gli scritti letterari, ed. Franco Gaeta (Milan,
), : ‘Che fia degli altri se questo arse ed alse/ in pochi giorni? e se a cotanto impero/
iustizia e forza e unione non valse?’; Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, trans. Allan H. Gilbert,
 vols. (Durham, NC, ), , . Compare Machiavelli, Dell’asino d’oro, , –, in
Machiavelli, Il teatro e gli scritti letterari, ed. Gaeta, –.
 Harrington, Oceana, in Political Works, ed. Pocock, .

Machiavelli, Discorsi, . , ed. Inglese, : ‘Quegli che disegnono che una città faccia grande
imperio, si debbono con ogni industria ingegnare di farla piena di abitori’; trans. Henry Neville,
in The Works of the Famous Nicholas Machiavel (London, ), . Henry Neville’s English
translation of Machiavelli was the one most frequently quoted by British authors of the
eighteenth century, and is therefore the one used here.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
Rome would be to rein in ambition, prohibit expansion, adopt a
defensive posture, and make good internal laws, like the
commonwealths of Germany: ‘whoever takes any other course, rather
ruines than advantages himself, for new Conquests are prejudicial a
thousand ways, and especially when your force does not encrease with
your Territory, and you are not able to keep what you conquer’ (Discorsi,
. ).
Machiavelli’s analysis of expansion therefore offered three possibili-
ties. A state could follow the course of Rome and order itself internally to
be capable of mastering its external environment. It would be shaken by
popular dissent, its life span would be limited, but it would nonetheless
be glorious and would ride the flux of time. The German republics
presented the second possibility, that of defensive stability and curbed
ambition, which seemed to have been successful, at least temporarily.
Finally, the model of Sparta, Athens or Venice, which guaranteed
internal tranquillity and stability, could be followed, but only if neither
necessity nor greed forced the state to expand (Discorsi, . –). Machia-
velli’s recommendation to follow the ordine romano instead was not
unequivocal. The main reason to prefer the course of Rome was not
glory but security in a world of change and ambition. The Roman
model would incur the cost of dissent between the nobility and the
people; most damagingly, the further the marches of the empire ext-
ended away from the centre, the greater was the need to prolong
military commands. This would lead to partisanship in the army, giving
such men as Marius, Sulla and Caesar the means to effect constitutional
overthrow. The empire might not have expanded so rapidly without
that prolongation of commands, but it would not thereby have fallen so
quickly into servitude (servitù) (Discorsi, . ). Imperio and libertà would,
at last, be incompatible.
As Maurizio Viroli has suggested, ‘in recommending the Roman
model, Machiavelli was actually sacrificing the substance of the vivere
politico in the pursuit of greatness’. One of Machiavelli’s most hostile
critics, the Venetian Paolo Paruta, made just such a charge. Paruta’s

Machiavelli, Discorsi, . , ed. Inglese, : ‘E chi si governa altrimenti, cerca non la sua vita ma
la sua morte e rovina; perché in mille modi e per molte cagioni gli acquisti sono dannosi. Perché
gli sta molto bene insieme acquista imperio e non forze; e qui acuista imperio e non forze
insieme, conviene che rovini’; trans. Neville, in Works of . . . Machiavel, . Compare Maurizio
Viroli, Machiavelli (Oxford, ), –.
 Machiavelli, Discorsi, . –, . , ed. Inglese, –, .

Maurizio Viroli, ‘Machiavelli and the Republican Idea of Politics’, in Gisela Bock, Quentin
Skinner and Maurizio Viroli (eds.), Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge, ), –;
compare Viroli, Machiavelli, .
 Liberty and empire 
Discorsi Politici () dismissed the Florentine’s Discorsi as ‘already buried
in oblivion’, and asked, contrary to Machiavelli:
who can doubt but that the true end of a City is to have her Citizens live
vertuously, not the inlarging of her Empire? . . . the perfection of Government
lies in making a City vertuous, not in making her Mistress of many Countries.
Nay the increasing of Territories, as it is commonly coupled with some
injustice, so it is remote from the true end of good Laws, which never part from
what is honest. Governments which aim at Empire are usually short lived;
which denotes their imperfection.
Machiavelli would have answered Paruta’s charge by invoking the
inescapable compulsions of necessità, ambizione and the flux of human
affairs (Discorsi, . ). His crucial insight was to link the strength of
internal institutions to the pressures of external policy, thereby to show
that ‘[t]he Conquests of Common-wealths that are ill Governed, and
contrary to the Mould of the Romans, do conduce more to the Ruine,
than Advancement of their Affairs’ (Discorsi, . ). This was the lesson
taught by Venice, Sparta and the Athenian commonwealth; the
commonwealths of contemporary Germany had not yet been tested in
this way, but Machiavelli believed that all rulers demand ever larger
dominions, however aware they might be of the costs, and that they too
would be tried before too long.
Machiavelli’s distinction between the stable, defensive yet ultimately
vulnerable commonwealth for preservation, and the tumultuous, ag-
gressive, and finally servile commonwealth for expansion drew upon
Polybius’s discussion of the peculiar fate of the Roman Republic. Poly-
bius had also contrasted Rome with Sparta, wherein Lycurgus’s legisla-
tion had ensured harmony among the citizens, kept the territory intact
and preserved his country’s liberty by equally dividing landed property
and banning money, as well as by instituting military training. However,
Lycurgus had not left any safeguards against territorial aggrandisement
on the part of the Spartans, so that ‘when the Lacedaemonians attem-
pted to win supremacy in Greece it was not long before they were in
danger of losing their liberty’. Polybius’s conclusion was therefore the
one that Machiavelli followed: ‘the Spartan constitution is deficient, and

 Paolo Paruta, Politick Discourses, trans. Henry, Earl of Monmouth (London, ), , .

Machiavelli, Discorsi, . , ed. Inglese, : ‘Che gli acquisti nelle republiche non bene ordinate,
e che secondo la romana virtù non procedano, sono a ruina, non a esaltazione di esse’; trans.
Neville, in Works of . . . Machiavel, .
 Machiavelli, Decennali, , –, and Dell’Asino d’Oro, , –, in Il teatro e gli scritti letterari, ed.
Gaeta, –, –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
. . . the Roman is superior and certainly better devised for the attain-
ment of power’ (Historiæ, . –). Rome was best fitted for empire,
Sparta for liberty, but in the end neither could endure. Sparta would be
tempted to expand, and Rome would be debilitated by the seductions of
petty competition for public office and the pleasures of indolent luxury.
Machiavelli faced this pessimism squarely, but saw no alternative to the
servitude compelled by overambitious expansion: that way destruction
lay, but at least the bitter pill of servitude would be sweetened by the
brief taste of glory that came with grandezza.

The Machiavellian compound of Sallust’s moral account of Roman

decline and Polybius’s constitutional analysis provided an enduring
model for later republicans to understand the competing pressures of
liberty at home and expansion abroad. British republicans, in particu-
lar, attempted to reconcile the convergent, but antagonistic, claims of
empire and liberty in the century between the Elizabethan fin-de-siècle
and the Glorious Revolution, and beyond. The Machiavellian typology
of republics for expansion and those for stability first appeared as a tool
to analyse English policy in  when Richard Beacon, the disaffected
former Queen’s Attorney for the Irish county of Munster, published his
Machiavellian ‘Politique Discourse’ on the state of Ireland, Solon His
Follie (). In a paraphrase of Discorsi, . , one of the interlocutors
in Beacon’s dialogue argued that a ‘peaceable & permanent’
commonwealth should follow the example of the Spartans, in not
admitting foreigners, and that of the Venetians, in fortifying a naturally
defensible site; however, ‘such as shall ayme at honour and glory’, must
take the course of Rome, and naturalise foreigners, arm the people, and
make alliances. Yet neither form of commonwealth ‘may be founde so
happy and permanent, but at the last . . . they fall with their owne weight
and poyse to the ground’, the difference being that the state aiming at
honour (or, in Machiavelli’s terms, the commonwealth for expansion)
‘leaveth the image of true glory, as a lively picture, to invest a perpetuall
memory of a worthy and excellent Institution’. In these terms, to be a
commonwealth for preservation was fit only for ‘servile common-
weales’, like Pisa, Cremona or Ireland under English subjection. It was,
of course, possible that Machiavelli’s dilemma was a false one, and
hence that it might be possible for a commonwealth to combine the

Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (Harmondsworth, ), ; on
Machiavelli’s debt to Polybius see especially Gennaro Sasso, ‘Polibio e Machiavelli: costituzione,
potenza, conquista’, in Sasso, Studi su Machiavelli (Naples, ), –.
 Liberty and empire 
liberty of a free state with territorial expansion. As one character in Solon
His Follie asked, ‘may not one selfesame common-weale, ayme at the one
and the other?’ ‘No, verily’, came the reply in the form of a paraphrase
of Discorsi, . : a commonwealth for preservation was like a tree with a
slender root – it could not stay upright for long if it extended itself too far
or too fast. There could be no escape from the compulsions of Machia-
velli’s categories. The dilemma remained: which form of state should be
imitated, and hence in the end which form of destruction or decline to
face?
The challenge of maintaining liberty while pursuing empire re-
turned prominently in republican thought after . Sallust and
Machiavelli in particular provided republicans with the means to
understand the military successes of the Rump in Britain, Ireland and
Europe, as well as with a series of warnings regarding the consequences
of territorial expansion for hard-won republican liberty. The republi-
can moment of – – from the declaration of the Commonwealth
to Cromwell’s forcible dissolution of the Long Parliament – inspired a
variety of Englishmen to apply the lessons learnt from the classical
republics to their own political situation. John Lilburne, in exile, first
read Machiavelli, Livy and Plutarch in these years. In the same
period Marchamont Nedham’s The Case of the Commonwealth of England
Stated (), and his editorials for the government organ Mercurius
Politicus in –, applied ancient history to modern politics, and
drew upon a wide range of classical and contemporary sources to
celebrate the successes of the Rump and to point the way forward for
republican regeneration. During these years, John Milton acted as
licenser of Mercurius Politicus during the period when most of Nedham’s
republican editorials were published, and he seems to have begun
reading Machiavelli’s Discorsi seriously in November , just as the
first of them began to appear. He was soon applying the Roman

Richard Beacon, Solon His Follie (), ed. Clare Carroll and Vincent Carey (Binghamton, ),
, . On Beacon’s debt to Machiavelli see generally Sydney Anglo, ‘A Machiavellian Solution
to the Irish Problem: Richard Beacon’s Solon His Follie ()’, in Edward Chaney and Peter
Mack (eds.), England and the Continental Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J. B. Trapp (Woodbridge,
), –; Markku Peltonen, ‘Classical Republicanism in Tudor England: The Case of
Richard Beacon’s Solon His Follie’, History of Political Thought,  (), –; and specifically
on his debt to Discorsi, . , Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political
Thought, – (Cambridge, ), –.

Perez Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London, ), .
 William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biographical Commentary, nd edn, ed. Gordon Campbell,  vols.
(Oxford, ), , , , –; James Holly Hanford, ‘The Chronology of Milton’s Private
Studies’, Publications of the Modern Languages Association of America,  (), –; Maurice Kelley,
‘Milton and Machiavelli’s Discorsi’, Studies in Bibliography,  (–), –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
example to the analysis of the English constitution, as Herman Mylius
reported in January .
The relevance of Sallust’s analysis was not lost on either Milton or
Nedham. In the immediate aftermath of the regicide, they had high
hopes of the potential for liberty to foster greatness, and both cited
Sallust to affirm this belief. In , on the title-page of Eikonoklastes,
Milton displayed Sallust’s opinion that the monarchy had declined into
tyranny, and hence that good men became suspect and their virtue a
danger (Bellum Catilinæ, . , . –), a passage to which he had also
alluded at the opening of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates a few months
earlier. The following year, Nedham continued Sallust’s narrative on
the title-page of The Case of the Commonwealth of England Stated () with
the epigraph, ‘Incredibile est memoratu, quantum adeptâ libertate, in
brevi Romana civitas creverit’ (Bellum Catilinæ, . ), a verdict he repeat-
ed elsewhere in The Case. Sallust’s words clearly informed Nedham’s
most ringing endorsement of the Rump’s foreign policy in January :
just as the loss of liberty debilitates a people morally, he told the readers
of Mercurius Politicus, ‘so on the other side, the People ever grow mag-
nanimous & gallant upon a recovery; witness at present the valiant
Swisses, the Hollanders, and also our own Nation; whose high atchiev-
ments may match any of the Ancients, since the extirpation of Tyranny,
and a re-establishment of our Freedom in the hands of the People’.
The republican confidence of the years under the Rump evaporated
during the course of the Cromwellian Protectorate. Both Nedham and
Milton came to believe that the story of moral decline, from freedom
with greatness to servitude wrought by ambition, narrated by Sallust
and warned against by Machiavelli, had – perhaps inevitably – run its
course in Britain between  and . The evidence for Nedham’s
disillusionment comes from the version of his republican editorials
published as The Excellencie of a Free State in . When first published in
Mercurius Politicus in –, these articles presented a set of warnings to
the infant republic along with his celebrations of its fortitude. Liberty for
the people, its most effective guardians, could only be secured once
 Leo Miller, John Milton and the Oldenburg Safeguard (New York, ), .

John Milton, Complete Prose Works, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe,  vols. (New Haven, –), , .
On Milton’s reading of Sallust, his favourite historian, see especially Nicholas von Maltzahn,
Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford, ), –;
Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Milton’s Classical Republicanism’, in David Armitage, Armand Himy and
Quentin Skinner (eds.), Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge, ), –.
 Marchamont Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth of England Stated (London, ), .

Mercurius Politicus,  ( January ), .
 Liberty and empire 
kingship had been thoroughly uprooted; it could only be maintained if
the exercise of power could be limited by rotation of civil and military
office-holders. The reward for liberty and free assemblies would be
power abroad and the extension of the empire. Yet, like Machiavelli and
Sallust, Nedham warned that Rome’s expansion had brought in luxury,
a standing army, and the extension of military commands. A succession
of tyrants ensued. Liberty was lost, and with liberty, the Empire itself.
When reprinted in , these warnings looked like predictions, and
they became a stick with which to beat the Protector.
Sallust’s awed account of the achievements of Rome’s new-won
liberty had been celebratory when cited in The Case of the Commonwealth in
, but it became bitterly nostalgic when repeated in ; similarly,
Nedham’s praise of the Rump’s foreign policy in , when amended
in The Excellencie of a Free State, became a lament for the republican
opportunity which had been squandered by the Protector: ‘the People
ever grow magnanimous & gallant upon a recovery [of freedom];
witness at present the valiant Swisses, the Hollanders and not long since
our own Nation when declared a Free-State, and a Re-establishment of
our Freedom in the hands of the people procured, (though not secured)
what noble Designs were undertaken and prosecuted with Success?’
Likewise, in  Milton echoed Nedham’s frustration with the failure
to secure the free-state in The Readie and Easie Way, as he put the
achievement of republican grandezza firmly in the English past: ‘Nor
were our actions less both at home and abroad then might become the
hopes of a glorious rising Commonwealth; nor were the expressions
both of the Army and of the People . . . other than such as testifi’d a spirit
in this nation no less noble and well fitted to the liberty of a Comon-
wealth, then in the ancient Greeks or Romans’. Like Nedham, he
thought that the Dutch had not squandered their chance to be ‘a potent
and flourishing Republick’, though England had conspicuously failed to
become ‘another Rome in the west’.

Mercurius Politicus,  ( November ), ;  ( October ), ;  ( December ),
 (compare Mercurius Politicus,  ( December ), ;  ( December ), ;  (
March ), ;  ( May ), ;  ( May ), ).
 Mercurius Politicus,  ( January ), , –;  ( January ), , ;  (
February ), –;  ( February ), ‘’ (sc. );  ( May ), ‘’ (sc. ).
 Harrington, Political Works, ed. Pocock, ; Blair Worden, ‘Milton and Marchamont Nedham’,
in Armitage, Himy and Skinnner (eds.), Milton and Republicanism, .
 Marchamont Nedham, The Excellencie of a Free State (London, ),  (which reprints the passage
from Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth, ),  (my emphases).
 Milton, Complete Prose Works, , ; in the second edition of The Readie and Easie Way, ‘our
actions’ became ‘their actions’: Milton, Complete Prose Works, , .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
Milton and Nedham’s jaundiced realisation that the British republic
had failed in its promise to secure liberty sprang from their common
disillusionment with the Cromwellian Protectorate. As Nedham’s allu-
sions to Sallust and the pointed revisions of his editorials from Mercur-
ius Politicus indicated, that declension had taken place between 
and ; its agent was Cromwell himself, who played the role of the
dictator, Sulla, within the revival of the Sallustian and Machiavellian
narrative. Other opponents of the Protector thought him as bad as, or
even worse than, Sulla, a military dictator whose office had been
made permanent, and had thereby paved the way for the return of
monarchy. Milton seems to have shared this assessment. On the
title-page of the second edition of The Readie and Easie Way, in April
, he quoted Juvenal: ‘et nos/consilium dedimus Syllae, demus
populo nunc’ (‘we, too, gave advice to Sulla; now we give it to the
people’). Milton had offered counsel to the Protector in the quite
practical sense that he had been one of his Latin Secretaries, but also
in that he had warned against the temptations of expansion, for in-
stance, in the Defensio Secunda (). That advice had gone un-
heeded; Cromwell had revealed himself as a Sulla; the great tower of
the Commonwealth had fallen and, by , the Sallustian decline
had clearly been repeated.
The failure of Cromwell’s so-called Western Design against the
Spanish Caribbean in – was a crucial moment in the decline of
republican faith in the Protectorate, just as it seems to have accelerated
the Protector’s own loss of self-confidence. To many former adherents
of the ‘Good Old Cause’, it illustrated the declension predicted by Sallust
and Machiavelli whenever any commonwealth for preservation tried to
become a commonwealth for expansion. Henry Vane saw the Spanish
victory as a punishment for national sin brought in by the corrupted
agent, Cromwell. Milton conspicuously failed to herald the foreign
policy achievements of either Rump or Protectorate in verse, unlike

Cromwell’s Conspiracy. A Tragy-Comedy, Relating to our latter Times . . . Written by a Person of Quality
(London, ), sig. [A]v; P. W. Thomas, Sir John Berkenhead – (Oxford, ), .

Juvenal, Satires, . –, adapted in Milton, Complete Prose Works, , .
 Milton, Complete Prose Works, , , .

See generally Blair Worden, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Sin of Achan’, in Derek Beales and
Geoffrey Best (eds.), History, Society and the Churches (Cambridge, ), –; Karen Ordahl
Kupperman, ‘Errand to the Indies: Puritan Colonization from Providence Island through
the Western Design’, William and Mary Quarterly, rd ser.,  (), –; David Armitage,
‘The Cromwellian Protectorate and the Languages of Empire’, The Historical Journal,  (),
–.

Sir Henry Vane, A Healing Question (London, ), , –, –, –.
 Liberty and empire 
Andrew Marvell or Edmund Waller, for example. Nedham repub-
lished the editorials from Mercurius Politicus, in which he lamented the
waste of the Rump’s achievements, to coincide with the Second Protec-
toral Parliament in , where Cromwell attempted to justify his
proceedings against Spain. That Parliament also provided the opportun-
ity for James Harrington to publish The Commonwealth of Oceana, another
major republican work critical of the Protectorate. The challenge of
combining liberty and empire was central to the argument of the Oceana.
Harrington’s solution to the dilemma implicitly criticised the Protector
for his failure to provide the constitutional settlement which would have
guaranteed that the British republic secured under the Rump success-
fully pursued its military designs beyond Britain and Ireland.
The Machiavellian distinction between Rome and Sparta (or Venice)
was fundamental to Harrington’s presentation of the options that the
British republic faced under the Protectorate. Harrington paraphrased
the whole of Machiavelli’s discussion from Discorsi, . , on the grounds
that ‘he that will erect a commonwealth against the judgment of Mach-
iavel, is obliged to give such reasons for his enterprise as must not go on
begging’. The Oceana constituted an attempt to break free from com-
pulsions of the Machiavellian categories that afflicted both static and
expansive republics by proposing measures that could maintain the
internal stability of an externally expanding commonwealth. Harring-
ton proposed measures to prevent the kind of strife between the plebs
and the nobility that had destroyed Roman liberty, thereby making
Oceana ‘a commonwealth for increase, and upon the mightiest founda-
tion that any hath been laid from the beginning of the world’. Harring-
ton’s solution was, like Machiavelli’s, based upon the Roman model of
unequal leagues, in which the metropolitan state retained the leader-
ship, rather than the subordination of conquered territory (like the
Athenians or the Spartans) or confederation on the Tuscan model. To
‘take the course of Rome’ would ensure the maintenance of liberty
and the achievement of grandezza; Oceana might then became what
Harrington (contra Machiavelli) thought Rome to have been, ‘a
commonwealth . . . both for increase and preservation’, as he put it in
The Prerogative of Popular Government ().
 On which see especially Margarita Stocker and Timothy Raylor, ‘A New Marvell Manuscript:
Cromwellian Patronage and Politics’, ELR,  (), –, and the important correction in
Elsie Duncan-Jones, ‘Marvell, R. F. and the Authorship of ‘‘Blake’s Victory’’’, in Peter Beal and
Jeremy Griffiths (eds.), English Manuscript Studies,  (London, ), –.
 Harrington, Oceana, in Political Works, ed. Pocock, –.

Harrington, Oceana, in Political Works, ed. Pocock, , .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
Harrington’s Oceana could be a commonwealth both for increase
and preservation because it was theoretically and practically distinct
from the territorial empires of the past. By adopting a policy of unequal
leagues, Oceana could avert the dangers of military conquest. Those
dangers would be even easier to avoid because Oceana would primarily
be a maritime republic, as its name suggested. Yet, as Machiavelli had
recalled, even the greatest of maritime commonwealths, like Venice,
had been tempted to expand, and had thereafter suffered swift collapse.
Oceana would escape this destructive compulsion by virtue of its mas-
tery of the sea, rather than by allowing the sea to master it: ‘The sea
giveth law unto the growth of Venice, but the growth of Oceana giveth
law unto the sea’. Moreover, Oceana would pursue a tutelary mission
whose purpose had been carefully defined by Cicero in De Officiis to
distinguish it from a conquering and martial empire:
This is a commonwealth of the fabric that hath an open ear, and a public
concernment. She is not made for herself only, but given as a magistrate of God
unto mankind, for the vindication of common right and the law of nature.
Wherefore saith Cicero of the . . . Romans, Nos magis patronatum orbis terrarrum
suscepimus quam imperium, we have rather undertaken the patronage than the
empire of the world.
Following Cicero further, Harrington noted that the Romans planted
colonies, but also preserved the liberties of the territories they colonised;
thus Rome, ‘in confirming of liberty, . . . propagated her empire’. This
Ciceronian reconciliation of libertas and imperium could be the model for
any well-ordered republic to expand without endangering the liberty of
its own citizens, and would therefore be inspiration enough ‘to take the
course of Rome’.
Harrington’s argument that power followed property – and hence
that imperium sprang from dominium – was more immediately successful
than his attempted solution to the dilemma of protecting libertas while
also extending imperium. His critics in the last years of the Protectorate
ironically compared Harrington’s republican utopia to Jamaica – the
sole prize left from Cromwell’s Western Design – as the greatest white
elephants of the British republic. One squib against the Harringtonian
Rota Club ordered ‘That Harrington’s Aphorisms and other political slips
be recommended to the English Plantation in Jamaica, to try how they

Harrington, Oceana, in Political Works, ed. Pocock, ,  (quoting Cicero, De Officiis, . , with
patronatum substituted for Cicero’s patrocinium), –.

‘. . . there is no maxim more infallible and holding in any science, than this in politics: that empire
is founded in property’: Henry Neville, Plato Redivivus (c. ), in Two English Republican Tracts, ed.
Caroline Robbins (Cambridge, ), .
 Liberty and empire 
will agree with that Apocryphal Purchase’; Samuel Butler thought that
Harrington himself should be sent to Jamaica, to see whether Oceana
could be planted there. Such contemporary criticism makes it all the
more remarkable that Harrington would later be identified as a thor-
oughgoing imperialist, who had successfully reconciled liberty and em-
pire, and thereby provided a prophecy of the British Empire as it gave
laws to the sea and exported liberty across the globe. For example, J. A.
Froude entitled his federalist travel-narrative Oceana; or England and Her
Colonies () in homage to Harrington’s supposed vision of the British
Empire as maritime and free. Historians have since rarely questioned
Froude’s assessment of Oceana’s contribution to British imperial ideol-
ogy, nor doubted that Harrington was ‘an important determinant in the
intellectual pedigree of that system of colonies, dominions, and
‘‘leagues’’ by which Britain came in time in truth to give ‘‘law unto the
Sea’’’, ‘a rip-roaring England-firster’, and ‘a prophet of the rule of the
propertied and of the British Empire’ after . Yet only in retrospect
did Harrington’s work become so fundamental to the Empire’s ideologi-
cal origins. His work began as part of the republican critique of the
Protectorate’s failure to safeguard liberty while expanding its imperium,
and was consigned to oblivion by Harrington’s critics. Only when read
out of context could Oceana’s counterfactual counsel to Cromwell ap-
pear to be the solution to the dilemma of empire and liberty.

Harrington’s solution to that dilemma was not so conclusive that his

successors abandoned the typology of expanding and non-expanding
commonwealths, ignored Machiavelli’s own account of the methods
and results of expansion, or ceased their own search for the means to
reconcile liberty and empire. After the Restoration, Algernon Sidney
shared the republican analysis of the declension of the Commonwealth.
He rehabilitated Machiavelli’s typology during the mid-s in his
Court Maxims (c. –). Sidney’s spokesman for republicanism in the
dialogue judged the condition of England to be ‘without discipline,
poor, discontented, . . . [and] easily subdued’, and hence peculiarly
 Decrees and Orders of the Committee of Safety of the Commonwealth of Oceana (London, ), ; [Samuel
Butler,] The Acts and Monuments of Our Late Parliament (London, ), ; see also Democritus Turned
Statesman (London, ), ; Eight and Thirty Queries Proposed (London, ); H. F. Russell Smith,
Harrington and His Oceana (Cambridge, ), –.
 J. A. Froude, Oceana; or England and Her Colonies (London, ), –.

Zera S. Fink, The Classical Republicans, nd edn (Evanston, ), –; Judith Shklar, ‘Ideology-
Hunting: The Case of James Harrington’, American Political Science Review,  (), –;
Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (London, ), .
 Blair Worden, ‘English Republicanism’, in J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (eds.), The Cambridge
History of Political Thought – (Cambridge, ), –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
vulnerable to Europe’s aspiring universal monarch, Louis XIV. In such
a condition, any nation that could not aspire to hegemony must resist it
at all costs, for ‘[f ]reedom is the greatest advantage next to dominion’.
The spokesman for the court argues that it is not dominion alone that
should be sought but rather that ‘enlargement of dominion and increase
of riches and power by conquest’ benefit a nation, to which the
commonwealthman makes the Machiavellian reply that only a nation
constituted for enlargement can profit, even temporarily, from expan-
sion; moreover, ‘if government be constituted for other ends, that in a
society we may live free, happy and safe’, conquest would only be an
advantage if it promoted those quite precise goals. Conquests destroyed
Sparta and put an end to its ‘liberty and glory’; Venice and the Swiss
Confederation would be vulnerable if they expanded; even the Spanish
Monarchy had been ‘weakened, dispeopled, and ruined by its own
conquests’. Only conquests that did not tend to corrupt the manners of a
nation could be justified. Once again, Rome was the great historical
example. In the ‘fullness of liberty’, the law safeguarded the freedom of
individuals, since ‘[t]he Roman virtue was the effect of their good laws
and discipline’, and Rome’s enemies proved no match for it. Neverthe-
less, ‘[l]ess glory might have been more permanent’, and ‘success fol-
lowed with a prodigious affluence of riches, introduced ambition and
avarice, raising some citizens above the power of the law. Then did that
victorious people turn its conquering hand into its own bowels, and fell
by its own sword.’
Sidney’s resuscitation of Machiavelli’s warnings about the moral
dangers of expansion without adequate constitutional precautions was
intended less to school the readers of his manuscript in the best methods
to acquire a territorial empire, let alone a universal monarchy, than to
affirm the necessity of upholding fragile liberty in a world dominated by
reason of state politics. When Sidney returned to the problems of liberty
and empire in the Discourses Concerning Government (–), he refused to
adjudicate between states like Sparta that found ‘felicity rather in the
fullness and stability of liberty, integrity, virtue and the enjoyment of
their own than in riches, power, and dominion over others’ like Rome.
This could be illustrated by the history of the commonwealths of Italy
that fought so valiantly against Rome before they were absorbed into
the Republic: ‘[t]he power and virtue of the Italians grew up, decayed
and perished with their liberty’, but once ‘they were all brought under
 Algernon Sidney, Court Maxims, ed. Hans W. Blom, Eco Haitsma Mulier and Ronald Janse
(Cambridge, ), , , –, –.
 Liberty and empire 
the Romans, either as associates or subjects, they made the greatest
strength that ever was in the world’. Sidney also repeated the Sallustian
maxim that the institution of republican liberty in England would lead
to the same outburst of courage and industry that the ancient republics
had experienced on the recovery of their liberty: ‘Men would have the
same love to the publick as the Spartans and the Romans had, if there
was the same reason for it’ – witness the English Commonwealth in the
early s, the Swiss Confederation, and the Dutch Republic.
Despite his admiration for classical republics, Sidney accepted one of
the major tenets of modern reason of state, that trade provided the
sinews of war: ‘the best judges of these matters have always given the
preference to those constitutions that principally intend war, and make
use of trade as assisting to that end’, since ‘those only can be safe who are
strong’. As late seventeenth-century commentators noted, earlier re-
publican theorists’ admiration for Sparta – which had banned negoti-
able currency under the laws of Lycurgus, in order to prevent commerce
– was now unsustainable in a world where commerce was a major
reason of state. The political economists of the s agreed that
European states, whether republics or monarchies, could no longer
afford to choose whether they would be self-sufficient or expansive, nor
whether they should be trading or war-making commonwealths. They
were all now interdependent, so that the Spartan option of economic
autarchy was no longer viable: even Harrington had recognised that,
though ‘the Spartan could have no trade, the Oceaner may have all’.
War and trade were now inextricably linked in ways that challenged
some of the most cherished tenets of the republican tradition, but which
might yet allow the reconciliation of liberty and empire. Charles Dav-
enant, for one, expressed the moralistic concern that commerce would
bring in luxury, and luxury, debility, but recognised that the commer-
cial conditions of contemporary Europe rendered trade a ‘necessary
evil’ for every state. Commerce would now be the only guarantee of
either stability or greatness, and since a nation could no longer be a
Sparta, it should take the course of Venice (and other commercial
republics) in order to reach the eminence of Rome – but with one major
proviso, that it should not lead to the military expansion that had caused
the collapse of Roman liberty: ‘if trade cannot be made subservient to
 Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, ed. Thomas G. West (Indianapolis, ), ,
, .
 Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, ed. West, –.

Harrington, Oceana, in Political Works, ed. Pocock, .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
the nation’s safety, it ought to be no more encouraged here than it was
in Sparta: And it can never tend to make us safe, unless it be so managed
as to make us encrease in shipping and in the breed of seamen’. An
empire of the seas could provide grandezza without the need for large
armies, extended military commands, or the takeover of civilian govern-
ment by overmighty generals. Instead, maritime empire could enrich
the nation, render it stable in the arena of international power politics,
and offer greatness without endangering liberty.
The empirical observation that republics like Florence, Venice and
the Dutch Republic had been so economically vibrant in the early-
modern period strengthened the theoretical connection between liberty
and commerce. For instance, Henry Parker in his Of a Free Trade ()
had attributed that connection to the influence merchants had over the
administration in ‘popular states’, while Davenant later argued, with a
crucial revision of Sallust’s analysis of the origins of greatness in liberty,
that ‘industry has its first foundation in liberty’, and that the absolute
monarchies of contemporary Europe would fail in achieving commer-
cial greatness just as their predecessors in ancient times had failed to
gain the glory of grandezza: ‘They who are either slaves, or who believe
their freedoms precarious, can neither succeed in trade nor meliorate a
country’; the territorial monarchies of Europe, for all their designs on
universal monarchy, would inevitably fail because their hegemonic
power would lead to institutional absolutism and hence economic
decay: ‘all these great monarchies degenerate into tyranny, with which
trade is incompatible’. Empire could only be compatible with liberty if
it were redefined as maritime and commercial, rather than territorial
and military. As George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, had argued in the
late s, ‘Our Scituation hath made Greatnesse abroad by land
Conquests unnaturall things to us’, as the collapse of the cross-channel
Angevin monarchy in the fifteenth century had shown. ‘[T]he reason-
able enjoyments of a free people’, such as the English, had to be
distinguished from ‘one by which Empire is to bee extended at such an
unnaturall price’. The only natural course for a state like England to

Charles Davenant, An Essay upon the Ways and Means of Supplying the War () and An Essay upon the
Probable Methods of Making the People Gainers in the Balance of Trade (), in The Political and
Commercial Works of Charles Davenant LL.D., ed. Charles Whitworth,  vols. (London, ), , , ,
. On Davenant see especially Istvan Hont, ‘Free Trade and the Economic Limits to National
Politics: Neo-Machiavellian Political Economy Reconsidered’, in John Dunn (ed.), The Economic
Limits to Modern Politics (Cambridge, ), –.

Henry Parker, Of a Free Trade (London, ), , ; Davenant, Discourses on the Public Revenues ()
and Davenant, An Essay upon Universal Monarchy (), in Davenant, Political and Commercial Works,
ed. Whitworth, , , , .
 Liberty and empire 
take would be one which sprang from its geographical situation and
historical experience: ‘wee are a very little spot in the Map of the World,
and made a great figure onely by trade, which is the Creature of
Liberty’. On this analysis, not only would empire be at last reconciled
with liberty, but liberty would be its essential foundation.
If liberty were the precondition for successful commerce, and com-
merce was the cause of greatness, then liberty would be the guarantee of
commercial grandezza. This syllogism demanded the redefinition of
empire. As Nicholas Barbon put it in , ‘Trade may be Assistant to
the Inlarging of Empire; and if an Universal Empire, or Dominion of
very Large Extent, can again be raised in the World, It seems more
probable to be done by the help of Trade; By the Increase of Ships at Sea,
than by Arms at Land’. Any state aspiring to universal empire, whether
benign or malign, should therefore look to the sea for its dominion, ‘For
those Things that Obstruct the Growth of Empire at Land, do rather
Promote its Growth at Sea’: the sea has enough room for a great
population, fortifications cannot hinder shipping, the diffusion of knowl-
edge has ‘added an Unlimited Compass to the Naval Power’ and Gothic
liberty ‘best argues with such an Empire’. Though Barbon gave the
Dutch their due for their seaborne challenge to Spanish and French
attempts ‘to Raise an Universal Empire upon the Land’, he affirmed
that England was the true seat of the empire of the sea. As an island, it
needed no military force for its defence; it was well supplied with
harbours; and the people were naturally courageous. ‘The Monarchy is
both fitted for Trade and Empire.’ England could thus ‘extend its
Dominion over all the Great Ocean: An Empire not less glorious, and of
a much larger Extent, than either Alexander’s or Caesar’s’.
The argument that trade depended upon liberty, and that liberty
could therefore be the foundation of empire, became especially promi-
nent in the so-called Standing Army debate that arose after the Treaty
of Ryswick in . Though a large standing army had proved its worth
as a check to the expansionist ambitions of that aspiring universal
monarch, Louis XIV, the nub of the debate was what should be done
with the victorious army in peacetime. Those who favoured its disband-
ment, now that its contingent purpose had been served, juxtaposed the
liberty of the citizen militia to the potential tyranny and slavery of a
standing army such as that King William possessed. According to John

George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, ‘A Rough Draft of a New Modell at Sea’ (c. –), in The
Works of George Savile Marquis of Halifax, ed. Mark N. Brown,  vols. (Oxford, ), , , .

N[icholas] B[arbon], A Discourse of Trade (London, ), –, , , .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
Trenchard and Walter Moyle, in the germinal pamphlet of the debate,
the example of Rome presented a dire warning to Britain. Instead of a
standing army, England should ‘give Laws to the Universe’ with her
hardy sailors and sturdy ships because ‘[t]he Sea is our element’.
Trenchard later encapsulated this argument in one of the Cato’s Letters
(–), on which he collaborated with Thomas Gordon: ‘Trade and
Naval Power the Offspring of Civil Liberty only, and cannot subsist
without it’. Trenchard agreed with Davenant that the whole commer-
cial infrastructure of an absolute monarchy was precarious because it
was not protected from the depredations of the monarch by laws that
secured property, and he also argued that the luxurious demands of the
court necessarily distorted the productive capacity of the nation. How-
ever, in a commonwealth where law did safeguard liberty, property
would be secure, republican moderation would drive consumption, and
the demands of trade would ensure that the nation’s military needs were
upheld not by soldiers (who might be the tools of tyranny) but by sailors,
who presented no threat to the liberty that their duty defending com-
merce could only promote. For these reasons, liberty would guarantee
success in the competition for commercial grandezza, because ‘despotick
monarchs, though infinitely powerful at land, yet could never rival
Neptune, and extend their empire over the liquid world’.
The vision of a maritime trading empire, and the diagnosis of Eng-
land’s fitness to capture it, identified the success of a trading nation with
the liberty of its government, distinguished territorial conquest from the
unlimited potential of empire upon the sea, and thus laid the founda-
tions for a blue-water policy designed to enrich England while defeating
universal monarchy in Europe. A typology thereby emerged which
would hold sway for at least half a century. The Bourbon monarchies
were ambitious for universal monarchy, their designs lay on the conti-
nent of Europe, their monarchies were absolute, and hence they could
not flourish as commercial powers. England (and, after , Great
Britain) was a free government, which encouraged rather than depress-
ed trade, and its destiny lay in the empire of the sea rather than in
territorial conquest, which was a danger to liberty itself, as well as a
diversion from the nation’s true commercial interests. Such arguments


[John Trenchard with Walter Moyle,] An Argument, Shewing that a Standing Army is Inconsistent with a
Free Government, and Absolutely Destructive to the Constitution of the English Monarchy (London, ),
, .
 John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters: Or, Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and
Other Important Subjects, ed. Ronald Hamowy,  vols. (Indianapolis, ), , , –, .
 Liberty and empire 
could, however, cut in two directions when applied to the competitive
relations among the Three Kingdoms themselves. They were adopted
by the Scottish republican, Andrew Fletcher, in his contribution to the
debate on the relative merits of militias and a standing army in ,
when he counselled his countrymen: ‘The Sea is the only empire which
can naturally belong to us. Conquest is not our interest’. This in turn
provided inspiration for the Scots to pursue their own commercial
reason of state by attempting to create a maritime, commercial empire
centred on the isthmus of Darien. Yet the pursuit of independent
commerce by Scotland inevitably collided with the imperatives of Eng-
lish trade. Three years later, at the beginning of the War of the Spanish
Succession, Fletcher warned the Scots of the dangers of English (and
Dutch) appeals to these same arguments: ‘Might they not for ever
establish in themselves the empire of the sea, with an entire monopoly of
Trade?’ The empire of the seas could therefore provide a threat to
liberty for a dependent or unequal province within a composite mon-
archy; it could also guarantee the liberty of the monarchy as a whole.
The Sallustian and Machiavellian dilemma of how to combine liberty
and empire remained incompletely resolved, even in an era of commer-
cial reason of state and maritime expansion. The possibility that empire
now consisted of trade, and the wealth it generated, seemed to offer the
chance for liberty to remain intact, as ships, rather than armies, and
sailors, not soldiers, safeguarded the empire of the seas. Such a maritime
regime seemed naturally fitted to the situation of England – perhaps
even of Britain – and would ensure that the corruptions and debilities
which had beset classical and modern republics (as they threatened their
stability by attempting expansion) need no longer destroy the liberty of
its citizens. Yet, because commercial compulsions were competitive
rather than integrative, the ideological contribution of this argument
necessarily remained limited until well after the British union of . It
could only be applied to the British monarchy as a whole once that
monarchy was conceived of as possessing a single set of commercial
interests, and could only be extended to the wider anglophone Atlantic
world when it, too, was perceived as possessing a similar community of
interests.

Andrew Fletcher, A Discourse of Government With Relation to Militia’s (Edinburgh, ), in Andrew
Fletcher: Political Works, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge, ), .

[Andrew Fletcher,] A Speech Upon the State of the Nation; In April  (), in Political Works, ed.
Robertson, .
  

The political economy of empire

. . . the Theory of  is a Princely Science, and the true Regula-

tion of it the Key of Empire.
In the decades following the Stuart Restoration, it became increasingly
clear that the dilemma classically formulated by Sallust and pointedly
revived by Machiavelli was coming under challenge as a prescription for
modern Europe and its overseas possessions. The growth of commerce
marked a novel epoch in human affairs, in which the Roman and
neo-Roman apprehension that liberty might be threatened by empire
was less relevant, and less revealing, because the very definition of
‘empire’ itself was changing. The warnings of classical and modern
republicans, in this regard at least, might be of only limited guidance to
understanding contemporary politics. As Nicholas Barbon argued in
,
Livy, and those Antient Writers . . . have been very exact in describing the
several forms of Military Discipline, but take no Notice of Trade; and Machiavel a
Modern Writer, and the best, though he lived in a Government, where the
Family of Medicis had advanced themselves to the Sovereignty by their Riches,
acquired by Merchandizing, doth not mention Trade, as any way interested in
the Affairs of State.
Writing fifty years later, David Hume agreed: ‘Trade was never es-
teemed an affair of state till the last century; and there is scarcely any
ancient writer on politics, who has made mention of it. Even the
 have kept a profound silence with regard to it, though it has
now engaged the chief attention, as well of ministers of state, as of
speculative reasoners.’ The most prominent of those Italians had been
 [William Wood,] A Survey of Trade (London, ), vi.

N[icholas] B[arbon], A Discourse of Trade (London, ), sig. Ar–v.
 David Hume, ‘Of Liberty and Despotism’ (), in Hume, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, ed.
Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, ), –.


 The political economy of empire 
Machiavelli, whose supposed silence on the matter of commerce Hume
remarked upon in the late s: ‘There is not a word of Trade in all
Matchiavell, which is strange considering that Florence rose only by
Trade’. This note is found among Hume’s early memoranda, sand-
wiched between quotations from Cicero’s De Officiis and Sir Josiah
Child’s A New Discourse of Trade (), as if Hume were passing intellec-
tually from an ancient world of republican mores to the more modern
compulsions of commercial society. Such a transition had been under
way in the British republican tradition at least since the work of Alger-
non Sidney. That transition marked an important stage in the ideologi-
cal history of the British Empire, as it became more persuasive, because
now more intellectually plausible, to argue that liberty and empire
might be reconciled, both theoretically and historically, within the
discourse of political economy.
Political economy as a distinct discipline, with a canon of classic texts
and a set of definite problems, was the child of the nineteenth century;
however, it had a longer heritage as a theoretical language that defined
the polity itself in terms of its fiscal, financial and commercial capacities
rather than exclusively in relation to its constitution, the civic personal-
ity of its citizens or its teleology. Karl Marx agreed with Hume that its
origins could be found in the seventeenth century, and attributed its
paternity to Sir William Petty, and hence, by extension, to the emerg-
ent disciplines of statistics and ‘political arithmetic’. However, Hume’s
description of late seventeenth-century economic discourse was more
idiomatic to the period than Marx’s. The fundamental principle of late
seventeenth-century political economy was the recognition that com-
merce was now, in Hume’s words, ‘an affair of state’ for every European
polity. As the Irishman, Richard Lawrence, noted in , for all states
 National Library of Scotland, MS , item , f. , printed in ‘Hume’s Early Memoranda,
–: The Complete Text’, ed. Ernest Campbell Mossner, Journal of the History of Ideas, 
(), .

Though for Machiavelli’s passing remarks on the subject of trade see Niccolò Machiavelli, The
Prince, ed. Russell Price and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, ),  (Principe, ); Machiavelli,
Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, ed. Giorgio Inglese (Milan, ),  (Discorsi, . );
Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, trans. Laura F. Banfield and Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. (Princeton,
),  (Istorie Fiorentine, . ).
 Tony Aspromourgos, ‘The Life of William Petty in Relation to his Economics: A Tercentenary
Interpretation’, History of Political Economy,  (), . Terence Hutchison, Before Adam Smith:
The Emergence of Political Economy, – (Oxford, ), , is sceptical of Marx’s attribution of
paternity to Petty; Neal Wood, Foundations of Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Views on State and
Society (Berkeley, ), proposes instead mid-sixteenth-century English parentage.

Istvan Hont, ‘Free Trade and the Economic Limits to National Politics: Neo-Machiavellian
Political Economy Reconsidered’, in John Dunn (ed.), The Economic Limits to Modern Politics
(Cambridge, ), –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
it had become ‘a principal Piece of State-policy to know how to encrease
their own and lessen their neighbours Trade . . . espousing the Interest of
Trade as the Darling of State’. ‘Is there anything in the World, that
should be thought a Matter of State more than Trade, especially in an
Island . . .?’, asked Charles Davenant in . ‘It’s now beyond all
Controversie’, affirmed a Scottish commentator in the same year, ‘that
it is the Interest of all Nations to increase their Trade; the Increase of
which begetteth Wealth, and Riches, which now in the time of Warr
doth more contribute to the Preservation of a Nation, then the multi-
tude and the valour of it’s Men’. With this central maxim, political
economy provided the arguments with which the competing interests of
England, Scotland and Ireland could be promoted, as well as a broader
framework within which economic competition and integration could
be understood.
Political economy was therefore not merely a technical discipline, but
provided the means to describe and explain the relationships among the
Three Kingdoms, in the context of the wider Atlantic economy. It
was both intellectually integrative and ideologically disintegrative: as
economics linked the interests of the Three Kingdoms and the Atlantic
world, so politics sharpened the competition between those interests,
especially in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution. This language
of interest and policy presented a new means to understand the
relations among the Three Kingdoms, and to define their connections
with the wider Atlantic world. Economic interests defined states and
nations as well as empires, but they defined them competitively. As
J. H. Elliott has noted, empire – in the modern sense of commerce,
supported by independent fleets and plantations – could provide the
alternative to subordination within a composite monarchy for a
kingdom like Scotland, as it had earlier for Portugal or the United
Provinces. In such circumstances, differing definitions of empire col-
lided, and conceptual, as well as political, solutions had to be found for
novel dilemmas.
The triangular relations between England, Ireland and Scotland
provided the shifting contexts for the economic redefinition of empire in
the decades following the Restoration. Ireland’s ambiguous status in
English policy, as constitutionally a kingdom with its own legislature,
 Richard Lawrence, The Interest of Ireland in Its Trade and Wealth Stated (Dublin, ), pt , .

[Charles Davenant,] An Essay on the East-India Trade (London, ), .
 A Letter from a Gentleman in the Country to His Friend at Edinburgh (Edinburgh, ), .

J. H. Elliott, ‘A Europe of Composite Monarchies’, Past and Present,  (Nov. ), .
 The political economy of empire 
but economically a colonial dependency, generated a series of debates
on the status of the Irish commerce, the powers of the Irish Parliament
and Ireland’s place in the Atlantic economy in which discussions of
statehood and nationality were cast in the language of colony and
empire. These discussions paralleled and at times intersected with those
around Anglo-Scottish relations, especially in the aftermath of the
Glorious Revolution. In this context, there was no doubt on either side
that Scotland was an ancient kingdom and that its Parliament was
sovereign; the precise nature of its relation to England was more
debatable, as feudal conceptions of dependency (reminiscent of those
appealed to in the s) in the name of the English imperial crown were
deployed against economic arguments for independence, based on the
imperium of the Scottish Parliament and the advantages of a separate
commercial empire for the Scots. These interlocking arguments
reached a climax early in the reign of Queen Anne during the debate on
Anglo-Scottish Union. By the resulting Treaty of Union, England
joined Scotland in the United Kingdom of Great Britain with a
common legislature, a single crown and access to the commerce of an
empire now British rather than just English. However, neither Ireland
nor the American colonies were offered admission to the Union, and
they remained dependencies of a British state that stood at the heart of a
transatlantic composite monarchy of unequal communities defined by
the Navigation Acts and, increasingly, by mercantilist legislation from
the British Parliament. The Union of  sharply distinguished a range
of different available conceptions of empire, from the incorporating
union of Great Britain, through the semi-colonial dependency of Ire-
land to the colonial semi-autonomy enjoyed by the American and
Caribbean colonies. It thus incorporated a yet sharper form of disunity
within the British Empire than had existed before, even as it also
enshrined diversity between the Churches and legal systems of England
and Scotland.

Before the British Union of , the Navigation Acts had regulated
political-economic relations between the Three Kingdoms as they had
also formally defined the limits of the English commercial empire.
Under the terms of the Acts, Scotland and Ireland had been treated
differently, according to English assessments of their respective threats
to English commerce. Scotland had been strictly excluded from the
 William Ferguson, ‘Imperial Crowns: A Neglected Facet of the Background to the Treaty of
Union of ’, Scottish Historical Review,  (), –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
mercantile system defined by the Acts because it was held to be a
potential rival to English commerce; Ireland, meanwhile, had been
included within the ambit of the Acts, as a docile dependency of
England, rather than a commercial competitor. This double standard
was evident to contemporaries. ‘[A]re we not all the Subjects of one
King, and Members of the same Commonwealth?’ Richard Lawrence
asked rhetorically. ‘We may be the first’, he answered, ‘and not the
second, though the Scots are Subjects to the same King’. All might be
subjects within the Stuart composite monarchy, but that would not
render them equal citizens of the same commonwealth, let alone part-
ners within a comprehensively British empire: commercial reasons of
state dictated otherwise. In terms of political economy, the various
communities of Britain and Ireland were considered as economically
and constitutionally distinct. The main question for English protection-
ists was whether Ireland or Scotland could command an independent
commerce; for their Irish and Scottish counterparts, the question was
instead whether such economic independence demanded the sover-
eignty of an independent legislature as its guarantee and foundation.
The decades after the Glorious Revolution brought these two argu-
ments together into the single question of whether it was possible to have
economic union without institutional – meaning, above all, parliamen-
tary – union. This would, in due course, become a central question in
relations between the American colonies and Great Britain in the
mid-eighteenth century.
The dictates of economic reason of state ensured that the English
Parliament judged Ireland’s commercial expansion to be a threat to
England’s prosperity. The English Parliament’s Cattle Acts of  and
 had restricted one of the most vibrant areas of Ireland’s com-
merce and thereby depleted the supplies of bullion that might have
fuelled the economy. Ireland lacked banks and a mint, and hence both
cash and credit; the consequently high rates of interest stifled commer-
cial enterprise. Though the Irish economy was expanding in the later
seventeenth century, these factors nonetheless limited the rate of its
growth and the nature of change. Recent scholarship has tended to
downplay the impact of English legislation on Irish economic perform-


See [Sir Walter Harris,] Remarks on the Affairs and Trade of England and Ireland (London, ), –,
for a report of contemporary Irish complaints.

Lawrence, The Interest of Ireland, .
 Raymond Gillespie, The Transformation of the Irish Economy –, Studies in Irish Economic and
Social History,  (Dublin, ), –.
 The political economy of empire 
ance, at least in so far as that legislation is seen as the expression of a
determined state policy of mercantilist regulation in favour of Eng-
land. Ireland was subject to discriminatory English legislation
throughout the latter half of the seventeenth century, however imper-
fectly applied. It had been specifically included within the ambit of the
Navigation Acts, but the inadequate enforcement of the  Staple
Act (which required that all enumerated articles be landed in England
before re-export to Ireland) led in turn to the  Staple Act, which
effectively ended the direct legal flow of sugar and tobacco to Ireland.
That Act lapsed in  and was not restored until , when English
trading interests demanded that Ireland be treated not simply as a
colonial dependency of the English economy but rather as a potential
competitor with England, especially in the Atlantic staple trade to the
sugar islands of the Caribbean.
It was in this context that Sir William Petty conceived his Hobbesian
solution to the problem of competing sovereignties as a northern
European mare clausum centred on England. This maritime amalgama-
tion of imperium and dominium was not his only attempt to reconceive the
relations between England and Ireland in these years. His most drastic
answer to the dilemma of the unequal relationship between the two
kingdoms came in his last major work, the ‘Treatise of Ireland’ (), in
which he proposed the transplantation of the majority of the Irish
population into England. This would have left some , people in
Ireland to administer the country as a cattle-ranching dependency of
England. It would also deny Ireland the institutional autonomy it had
fitfully claimed through its own Parliament: ‘Whereas there are Disputes
concerning the Superiority of Parliament; now there will need no
Parliament in Ireland to make Laws among the Cow-Herds and Dairy-
Women’. Petty’s proposal cut across the religious and ethnic divisions of
contemporary Ireland by treating its inhabitants solely according to their
economic relations with the Crown, their tenants and landlords,
whether as employers or employees. His briefer version of the plan, ‘A
Probleme’ (), omitted some of the features which made the ‘Treatise’
 Compare Hugh Kearney, ‘The Political Background to English Mercantilism, –’,
Economic History Review,  (), –, with Patrick Kelly, ‘The Irish Woollen Export
Prohibition Act of : Kearney Revisited’, Irish Economic and Social History,  (), –.

Thomas M. Truxes, Irish-American Trade, – (Cambridge, ), –.
 On Petty’s unionism see James Kelly, ‘The Origins of the Act of Union: An Examination of
Unionist Opinion in Britain and Ireland, –’, Irish Historical Studies,  (), –.
 Sir William Petty, ‘A Treatise of Ireland’ (), BL Add. MS , in The Economic Writings of Sir
William Petty, ed. Charles Henry Hull,  vols. (Cambridge, ), , , .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
a comprehensively British vision of population, power and profit, such as
the parallel proposal to depopulate the Scottish Highlands and leave
them to the care of , herdsmen, to the benefit of lowland Scotland
and England. Nevertheless, both redactions concluded with similar
warnings for the English empire as a whole – that it would not be in
England’s interests to contemplate any further territorial expansion, and
that the substitute for a territorial empire (with all of the military, and
hence fiscal, commitments that it raised) should be ‘a reall Mare Clausum’
between and around the islands of Britain and Ireland.
Petty’s conception of the English empire firmly included the Ameri-
can colonies, though his perception of their place within that empire
variously emphasised political and economic factors. For example, he
speculatively proposed a ‘grand House of Peers’ for a federal Parliament
including members from England, Ireland, Scotland and ‘ more out
of ye rest of his Matys Dominions in Asia, Affrica & America, all men out
of the best Estates within yr respective Provinces’. This was not intended
as a substitute for the various legislatures within the Three Kingdoms,
or, indeed, for the colonial assemblies, ‘but doth equally superintend
them all’. He also envisaged a colonial council, with representation from
Ireland, Scotland, the American colonies, Asia and Africa, to advise the
English Parliament. This would not have had the powers of his ‘House
of Peers’, but, like that grander constitutional conception, it would have
assumed the equal dependence of the two British kingdoms and the
various English overseas possessions upon the English Parliament. Petty
designed colonial settlements which could readily be planted in either
Ireland or America, and debated with himself ‘Whether It bee better to
transplant out of England into Ireland or America’? In the context of the
s, his plans were visionary, but his speculations remained private.
However, they did indicate, albeit precociously, the possibilities for
reconsidering the relations between the Three Kingdoms and the
American colonies. In a stray note, Petty located the four parts of ‘The
King of Englands Empire’ in ‘His European Islands’, the American
islands and mainland colonies, and the Asian and East Indian trades.
Such a comprehensive vision of empire – as territorial, colonial and
commercial – was novel in its extent, though conservative in that it


Sir William Petty, ‘A Probleme’ (), BL Add. MS , ff. r–r, in The Petty Papers, ed.
Marquis of Lansdowne,  vols. (London, ), , –; Petty, ‘A Treatise of Ireland’, in Economic
Writings, ed. Hull, .
 Petty, ‘A Probleme’, in Petty Papers, ed. Lansdowne, , ; Petty, ‘A Treatise of Ireland’, in
Economic Writings, ed. Hull, .
 The political economy of empire 
encompassed all of these elements within the regal imperium of the
English (not even yet a British) Crown.
Petty did not live to see the effects of the Glorious Revolutions on the
Three Kingdoms. If he had, the experience might have dampened his
enthusiasm for non-sectarian, rationally-calculated solutions to the
problem of Anglo-Irish political and economic relations. However, he
would not have been surprised to see that the Three Kingdoms did not
benefit equally from the settlements of –. Only in England (and,
possibly, some colonies on the American mainland) did the Glorious
Revolution represent the victory of law, liberty and localism against
absolutism, subordination and centralisation, and ‘Ireland did not
experience the Glorious Revolution in the sense in which the term is
understood in the history of England and Scotland’. The English
Parliament reaffirmed its claims to supremacy over the Irish Parliament,
as it also reimposed and extended the post-Restoration restrictions on
Irish trade. As the Anglo-Irish Williamite Richard Cox put it aphoristi-
cally in a pamphlet addressed to the Convention Parliament in ,
‘Ireland is part of the Dominions of England, and a Kingdom subordi-
nate to it . . . Without the Subjection of Ireland, England cannot flourish,
and perhaps subsist’. This may have been partly intended to reassure
the Convention that the ‘English’ in Ireland knew to whom they owed
their dutiful obedience at this contested moment, but admissions like
this opened the way more broadly for the assertion of English parlia-
mentary supremacy not solely over the settler population in Ireland, but
over their own Parliament and over their economy too.
The Revolution Settlement in Ireland had restored the Irish Parlia-
ment as a semi-permanent part of government there. This in turn
encouraged the potential for collision between the newly self-confident
legislatures in England and Ireland. That English Whiggism would
 Sir William Petty, ‘Of a grand House of Peers’, BL Add. MS , ff. r, r; Petty, ‘Of a
generall Council for Plantation, Manufactures, Trade, Religion & appointments,’ BL Add. MS
, f. r; Petty, ‘Questions concerning American Plantations’ (), BL Add. MS ,
f. r; Petty, untitled fragment, BL Add. MS , f. r.
 Jack P. Greene, ‘The Glorious Revolution and the British Empire, –’, in Lois G.
Schwoerer (ed.), The Revolution of –: Changing Perspectives (Cambridge, ), –.
Greene’s use of ‘Britain’ where he in fact means ‘England’ in this essay obscures the differences
between the Revolutions in England, Scotland and Ireland, and makes his Whiggish account of
the ‘Glorious Revolution’ as a single ‘British’ event untenable, at least for the period –.

Patrick Kelly, ‘Ireland and the Glorious Revolution’, in Robert Beddard (ed.), The Revolutions of
: The Andrew Browning Lectures  (Oxford, ), .

[Sir Richard Cox,] Aphorisms Relating to the Kingdom of Ireland (London, ), –.
 Patrick Kelly, ‘Ireland and the Glorious Revolution’, in Beddard (ed.), The Revolutions of ,
–.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
also bring no immediate advantage to Ireland was evident from the brief
burst of unionist sentiment aroused by the uncertainties of the Jacobite
War after . The ‘Remarks shewing that it is not to the interest of
England that Ireland should remain a separate kingdom’ () argued
in the language of English whiggery that Ireland was the home of
arbitrary government and passive obedience, and that these Jacobite
corruptions could easily be reintroduced into England. The author was
less concerned with the potential benefits of union for Ireland than with
the political and moral dangers of maintaining the then current dispen-
sation of domination and dependency between England and Ireland.
Even Poynings’ Law provided no defence against the influx of arbitrary
government from Ireland into the ‘English empire’, since it placed the
ultimate decision-making power in the hands of king and council rather
than parliament. The only solution could be complete and incorporat-
ing union between England and Ireland on the model of the Anglo-
Welsh union of the early sixteenth century which had incorporated the
English and the Welsh into one polity, with a single defining ‘interest’.
Such a union would also allow for the more direct economic exploita-
tion of Ireland than had previously been possible, so that the newly
absorbed kingdom ‘might be made more profitable to England than all
the foreign plantations’. The author presented the Irish economy less as
a threat to the English, by virtue of its cheaper costs for labour,
production and raw materials, than as the backdoor through which
hostile European powers might enter to oppose English economic
interests. This analysis was accordingly cast in a comparative geopoli-
tical and historical framework, from the Anglo-Welsh union to the
contemporary Williamite wars in Europe; by specifically comparing the
profits from Ireland with those to be made from the ‘foreign planta-
tions’, it intimated that the political-economic context for considering
Ireland now encompassed the Atlantic as well as the Three Kingdoms.
The analogy between the economic benefits to be derived from the
American and Caribbean colonies and those from Ireland only encour-
aged the belief among the English that Ireland should be treated less as a
kingdom than as a colony. In the aftermath of the Jacobite War, and in
the face of the fact that Ireland had been pacified by force of arms, it also
 James Kelly, ‘The Origins of the Act of Union’, –; Jim Smyth, ‘ ‘‘No Remedy More
Proper’’: Anglo-Irish Unionism before ’, in Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts (eds.),
British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, – (Cambridge, ), –.

‘Remarks shewing that it is not to the interest of England that Ireland should remain a separate
kingdom’ (), in Calendar of State Papers, Domestic: –, ed. W. J. Hardy (London, ),
–.
 The political economy of empire 
became easier for the English and the Anglo-Irish to claim that Ireland
had been conquered, and hence that it should be held in subjection to
England. The distinction elaborated by Francis Annesley in , be-
tween a ‘Colony for Trade’ and a ‘Colony for Empire’, was a telling one
in the case of Ireland. The plantations of the West Indies and the forts
and factories of Africa and the East Indies were ‘Colonies for Trade’ in
Annesley’s terms, and comprised small groups of metropolitans, either
‘sent forth to plant Commodities which your native Country does not
produce’ or ‘to negotiate a Trade with the Natives’. Their trade would
therefore be reserved to the metropolis, in return for which the colonists
would be defended by the home country and enriched by their risk-
taking; such colonists would continue to identify themselves as metro-
politans and would thereby present no danger by claiming indepen-
dence. ‘Colonies for Empire’, however, were closer to the neo-classical
model, and were designed ‘to keep great Countries in subjection, and
prevent the charge and hazard of constant Standing Armies’. Their
commerce would be unrestrained by the metropolis as a necessary
reward for the emigrants’ commitment to maintaining the dependency
of the conquered territory and its inhabitants.
Annesley’s two models were each inflected by post-Machiavellian
commercial concerns, though only the model of a ‘Colonies for Trade’
could be usefully applied to Ireland or, more specifically, to the ‘English’
community in Ireland. ‘They are Englishmen sent over to conquer
Ireland, your Countrymen, your Brothers, your Sons, your Relations,
your Acquaintance’, he informed the English House of Lords: should
they then be subject to economic restrictions that had never even been
applied to the ‘Irish and Popish’ population in Ireland? There were
only two ways to keep a conquered country in subjection, by arms or by
colonies. The former was always too dangerous and too costly; the latter
had the sanction of history, and had not only been the method adopted
by Rome, but also what ‘our Ancestors did to secure Ireland, and is the
easiest, least chargeable, and least dangerous Method’. Annesley clearly
drew upon neo-classical and Machiavellian analyses of territorial ex-
pansion, and warned with a Machiavellian metaphor that Rome’s
conquests extended so far ‘that their Government grew top-heavy, the


[Francis Annesley,] Some Thoughts on the Bill Depending Before the Right Honourable the House of Lords,
For Prohibiting the Exportation of the Woollen Manufactures of Ireland to Foreign Parts (Dublin, ), –.
Though the pamphlet is usually attributed to Sir Richard Cox, I follow Kelly, ‘The Irish
Woollen Export Prohibition Act of ’, , n. , in attributing it instead to Annesley.

[Annesley,] Some Thoughts on the Bill, , .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
Trunk was not large enough to support its branches’; however, his
deviations from Machiavelli’s prescriptions in the Discorsi were as signifi-
cant as his additions. Though Machiavelli had indeed recommended in
both the Discorsi and the Principe that conquered territories should be
held by force of arms or, preferably, by colonies, he had also counselled
that the best way for a state to expand and maintain its impero would be
by leagues, whether equal or unequal (Discorsi, . ; . ; . ; Principe, ).
In the context of Anglo-Irish relations, this would have implied the
necessity of viceregal government or, at best, progress towards ever-
closer incorporating union. This latter option entailed a recognition
that Ireland was a separate but equal kingdom with sovereign institu-
tions capable of making alliances; at least, it demanded the admission
that Ireland and England should be partners in a British composite
monarchy, joined under the same head, albeit unequal in their relations.
As the progress of the union debates in Ireland and Scotland would
show, this became increasingly implausible as a solution to the problems
of Anglo-Irish relations, even as it became the most realistic option for
England and Scotland to pursue.
The continuing relevance of Machiavelli’s analysis of provincial gov-
ernment, even in the age of political economy, reinforced the tendency
to think of Ireland as a colony, and hence to distinguish it from
Scotland. Henry Maxwell’s Essay upon an Union of Ireland with England
() argued that there were three ways of ‘maintaining Conquests, or
annexed Governments’: colonies; unequal leagues; or military occupa-
tion. The latter option was the policy most suitable for absolute govern-
ments, and was most fraught with danger, as Roman history taught. If
the metropolitan state failed to change its military commanders, then
overmighty generals, like Sulla, Marius, Julius Caesar and Augustus,
would destroy ‘the Liberty of the Commonwealth’. In light of these neo-
Roman, and neo-Machiavellian, warnings, the case of Ireland was
clear: either ‘England must suffer Ireland to live in liberty, or else they
must maintain it in subjection to a constant force’, though this would
contradict and threaten England’s constitutional principles as a limited
monarchy. There remained only three options: direct rule by England;
strict regulation of Irish commerce to render it entirely dependent on
England; and incorporating union, on the Welsh model. Maxwell
recommended the last course of action, as the one likely to be most

[Annesley,] Some Thoughts on the Bill, ; compare Machiavelli, Discorsi, . .
 For a Machiavellian analysis of the necessity for viceregal goverment (derived explicitly from
Discorsi, . ), see The Present State of Ireland, –.
 The political economy of empire 
economically and politically beneficial to England: ‘as the wealth of
England Centres in London, so must the Wealth of Ireland Centre in
England’.
William Molyneux, in The Case of Ireland . . . Stated (), had as-
similated Ireland to Scotland as equal dominions under the English
crown, and therefore denied that Ireland should be conceived of in the
same terms as the plantations of the Americas: ‘Do not the Kings of
England bear the Stile of Ireland amongst the rest of their Kingdoms? Is this
Agreeable to the nature of a Colony? Do they use the Title of Kings of
Virginia, New-England, or Mary-Land?’ On such constitutional grounds,
Ireland was not of course a colony in the strict meaning of the term,
unlike the plantations on the North American continent. But that did
not mean that it was impossible to imagine that the status of Ireland and
of the plantations could be considered as constitutionally, politically or
economically equal. Even after the Anglo-Scottish Union of , the
continuing Anglo-Irish disputes over judicial appeals and Wood’s
Halfpence exacerbated the tensions generated by the failure to extend
to Ireland the union that incorporated Scotland with the Anglo-Welsh
state. The Anglo-Scottish Union in fact made it even harder to imagine
Ireland as a kingdom, and (in the words of Patrick Kelly) ‘the tendency
to think of Ireland as merely the first of England’s colonies was greatly
reinforced’.

Against the English proponents of mercantilist restraint, Francis Annes-

ley had argued that the Anglo-Irish had no desire to compete directly
with the English in the European race for commercial pre-eminence:
‘They are not contending for Power or great Riches; they neither Trade
to the East Indies, Turkey, or Africa; they have neither Hamborough, Hud-
sons-Bay, Green-land, or Russia Companies; they have no Fleets or Planta-
tions; they ask only the common Benefits of Earth and Air.’ In the
context of the late s, this was intended not simply as a reassurance
to the English Parliament, and to the economic interests represented
therein, that Ireland presented no threat to English colonial trade; it was
also intended to drive a wedge between the perceived interests of
Ireland and those of Scotland. In the years following the Revolution, the


[Henry Maxwell,] An Essay upon an Union of Ireland with England (Dublin, ), –, , , –, .
 William Molyneux, The Case of Ireland . . . Stated (), ed. J. G. Simms (Dublin, ), –, .

Patrick Kelly, ‘Ireland and the Glorious Revolution’, in Beddard (ed.), The Revolutions of ,
.

[Annesley,] Some Thoughts on the Bill, .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
Scots had begun to pursue their own independent colonial ventures, in
direct competition with the English and in contravention of the Navi-
gation Acts. ‘Fleets and plantations’ would be the alternative to depend-
ency within a composite monarchy ruled from London, and hence an
economic solution to the inequalities enshrined in the Union of the
Crowns. The failure to create a Scottish colonial empire changed the
terms of the problem and narrowed the political possibilities until
incorporating union seemed the only viable option.
Compared to England’s experience, the Glorious Revolution in Scot-
land was much more radical in the contractarian obligations it imposed
on the monarchy, and in the overhaul of the institutions of church and
state which accompanied it. In due course, the assertion of Scottish
sovereignty set the English and the Scottish Parliaments against each
other, as each promoted the commercial reasons of state of their
respective kingdoms. The Revolution Settlement in Scotland put the
Scottish Parliament on the defensive in support of its national interests
in the mid-s, especially when those interests were construed in the
prevailing discourse of national wealth and independence. Scottish
political economists had come to realise in the wake of the Revolution
that ‘Colonies for Trade’ offered an escape from the unequal relations of
composite monarchy as much as the means by which a province could
be bound into it. They had learned their lessons from the English and
the Dutch, and argued that the best way to avoid provincial subjection
within the Williamite composite monarchy would be for Scotland to
pursue an independent colonial trade of its own by instituting its own
mercantile fleet and colonies. The Scottish Privy Council had begun
investigating mercantilist means to promote national prosperity after
the appointment of James, Duke of York, as lord high admiral of
Scotland, and to this end they proposed a carrying trade, supported by
the protection of domestic shipbuilding and the expansion of the Scot-
tish fleet. This inevitably implied a challenge to the Navigation Acts,
though that challenge only threatened Anglo-Scottish relations with the
resurgence of English Parliamentary mercantilism after . The
revival in  of plans for an independent Scottish trade to challenge
the English Acts initially made common cause with English merchants
who wished to evade the East India Company’s monopoly, so that an
 On the state of the Scottish economy in the s see Richard Saville, Bank of Scotland: A History
– (Edinburgh, ), chs. –.
 Eric J. Graham, ‘In Defence of the Scottish Maritime Interest, –’, Scottish Historical
Review,  (), –.
 The political economy of empire 
Anglo-Scottish trading group proposed setting up a joint-stock com-
pany. The East India Company compelled its allies in the English
Parliament to oppose the move; thus, Scottish investment alone fi-
nanced the newly founded Company of Scotland trading to Africa and
the Indies.
The economic hardships of the s, including famine and the
restrictive effects of the Navigation Acts, led the Scots into their first
encounter with the literature of economic improvement, and the Com-
pany of Scotland’s proposed commercial empire centred on the isthmus
of Panama was the most striking fruit of this encounter. The company’s
Darien colony was intended to be the alternative to provincial depend-
ency within the Williamite composite monarchy, as well as an economic
defence against the aspiring universal monarchs of contemporary
Europe. It was justified as a necessity in a world where the longest
purse and the largest population guaranteed military success, and in
which the greatest empire to be captured was the empire of the seas. ‘It
is the interest and policy of all Governments to improve the naturall
product of a Country and to encourage foreign trade . . . the experience
of all Nations makes appear that nothing contributes so effectually to
these ends as foreign plantations’. In an era of standing armies fi-
nanced by public debt, money was now the sinews of war, and trade was
the most reliable means of creating national wealth: ‘For as Trade is a
richer and more dureable Mine than any in Mexico or Peru . . . so in
proportion to its plenty of Money, will . . . [a nation] flourish at Home,
and be terrible Abroad’. The main promoter of the colony, William
Paterson, justified the settlement as a free port, sustained by general
naturalisation, its commercial wealth providing the key to the empire of
the seas. With the large population such policies would create, Paterson
argued, Scotland need have no fear of depopulation, ‘Trade will in-
creass Trade, . . . money will begett money’ and, he concluded (echoing
both James Harrington and Nicholas Barbon): ‘[t]hus this Door of the

G. P. Insh, ‘The Founding of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies’, Scottish
Historical Review,  (), –; Insh, ‘The Founders of the Company of Scotland’, Scottish
Historical Review,  (), –.
 David Armitage, ‘The Scottish Vision of Empire: Intellectual Origins of the Darien Venture’, in
John Robertson (ed.), A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of  (Cambridge,
), –.

‘Memoriall in behalf of the Scots Company Trading to Africa and the Indies’, National Archives
of Scotland, Dalhousie Muniments,  //, ff. r–v; also in NAS, Leven and Melville
Muniments,  //.
 C. K., Some Seasonable and Modest Thoughts Partly Occasioned By, and Partly Concerning the Scots
East-India Company (Edinburgh, ), .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
Seas, and the key of the universe with any thing of a Reasonable
management will of Course enable its proprietors to give Laws to both
Oceans and to become Arbitrators of the Commerciall world, without
being lyable to the fatigues, expences and dangers, or contracting the
Guilt and blood of Alexander and Cesar’.
The attempt to settle a commercial emporium at Darien, and with it
to bring Scottish commercial independence from England, ended in
defeat, disaster and despair. However, the debate surrounding the
Company of Scotland was the most sophisticated and wide ranging
controversy before the debate on the Union, and marked the beginnings
of what would become the Scottish Enlightenment’s peculiarly creative
engagement with political economy. The shifting national and inter-
national contexts created by the disputed successions to the Spanish,
English and Scottish thrones in the opening years of the eighteenth
century raised the strategic necessity of incorporating union between
England and Scotland and lent the isthmus of Panama a new geopoliti-
cal significance. Scottish pamphleteers executed an expedient volte-face
in order to show the English that it was now in their interests to support
and participate with the Scots in their isthmian venture. Under the
shadow of a potential Bourbon universal monarchy encompassing both
the French and Spanish dominions, argued one memorialist, the Scot-
tish settlement provided strategic and financial defences and the way to
‘be ready at hand to seize on Antichrists pouch’, the Spanish bullion-
mines in the Americas. All of the historic differences between England
and Scotland – from the Wars of Independence to the divergence in
church government – could be smoothed over by the profits of trade, for
‘an union of Interest is the likeliest way to procure ane union of
affections’. Thus bound together by economic interest, and with tradi-
tional dissensions tamed, the advantages of union would be clear: ‘we
are united under the same crown, and together make the greatest
Bulwark of the Protestant Religion’.
On similar grounds, Paterson proposed that a free port at Darien
could help to unite the British kingdoms profitably and indissolubly.
Under Paterson’s new plan for a pan-British enterprise, the Scottish

William Paterson to the Company of Scotland,  January , National Library of Scotland,
MS Adv. . . , f. r.

John Robertson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, Rivista Storica Italiana,  (), –.
 National Library of Scotland, Dunlop Papers, MS  (c. ), ff. v, r, r (endorsed
‘That its the Interest of England to joyn with the Scots in their Colony of Caledonia’); compare
[William Seton of Pitmedden,] The Interest of Scotland in Three Essays (n.p., ), ; [George
Ridpath,] The Great Reasons and Interests Consider’d Anent the Spanish Monarchy (n.p., ), –.
 The political economy of empire 
emporium would benefit the Anglo-British imperium: united ‘into one
empire, whereof England [is] to be the centre country, and London to
be the centre city’ and ‘by means of these storehouses of the Indies, this
island, as it seems by nature designed, will of course become the
emporium of Europe’. A monarchy with a single crown, a state with a
single representative assembly, and a market with a single metropolitan
emporium might safeguard the interests of both England and of Scot-
land. Yet since the crown was to pass in a line of succession originally
chosen by the English, the Parliament of Great Britain was to be held in
Westminster, and the emporium based in London, it became clear that
this was to be a British Empire founded on English terms, if not
exclusively to England’s advantage.
Such an argument for the benefits of union to the metropolis rather
than the province was anathema to the Scottish republican Andrew
Fletcher of Saltoun, an investor in the Company of Scotland and a
dyspeptic student of modern political economy, particularly in his last
works in which he argued against the incorporating union of England
and Scotland. As Fletcher lamented in , ‘trade is now become the
golden ball, for which all the nations of the world are contending, and
the occasion of so great partialities, that not only every nation is
endeavouring to possess the trade of the whole world, but every city to
draw all to itself ’. The logic of political economy compelled every
nation to strive for the profits of a colonial empire; equally, that ruthless
logic determined that some nations would remain, or at worst become,
colonies, in so far as they and their populations were subordinated to the
overmastering and unchallengeable economic interests of other nations.
Fletcher feared that too ready a capitulation to this political-economic
logic by the Scots would lead them to cede their historic status as a
separate kingdom, only to be bullied and impoverished into dependency
as Ireland had been by England for centuries past. Fletcher drew many
of his arguments in the Account of a Conversation from the work of Sir
William Petty, William Molyneux and Henry Maxwell. From Petty,
Fletcher appropriated the ironic argument that the population of

William Paterson, ‘Proposal for settling on the Isthmus of Darien, releasing the nations from the
Tyranny of Spain by throwing open the Trade of S[ou]th America to all Nations’ ( Jan. ),
BL Add. MS , in The Writings of William Paterson, ed. Saxe Bannister,  vols. (London, ),
, , .

John Robertson, ‘Union, State and Empire: The Britain of  in its European Setting’, in
Lawrence Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from  to  (London, ), –.

Andrew Fletcher, An Account of a Conversation Concerning a Right Regulation of Governments for the
Common Good of Mankind (), in Andrew Fletcher: Political Works, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge,
), .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
Ireland should be transplanted to England to prevent any further
economic competition; from Molyneux, he drew the arguments that
Ireland was founded on union, not conquest, and that the native Irish
were conquered, but the English colony was not, so that Ireland was still
a kingdom, and not a colony; and from Maxwell, Fletcher apparently
took the Machiavellian arguments that the English ‘have never shown
the least disposition to unite with any other nation, though such as either
stood upon equal terms with them, or such as they conquered, or even
planted’.
This would be an enduring lesson from the era of the Glorious
Revolution, the rise of political economy and the Anglo-Scottish and
Anglo-Irish union debates, as the arguments from that era would set the
terms of the debate for relations between Great Britain and its overseas
possessions for much of the succeeding century. Though there had been
various plans for a union among the English colonies in North America
during the seventeenth century, there were none for specifically im-
perial union until the turn of the eighteenth century. For example, the
English man-midwife and economic projector, Hugh Chamberlen, pro-
posed in  incorporating not only England and Scotland but ‘also
Ireland, and the American Plantations, into one and the same Body, under
the same Liberties, and Legislative, as well as Executive Power’. Because
Chamberlen wrote five years before the Treaty of Union went into
effect, he did not identify this legislative and defensive union as a
specifically ‘British’ empire. The anonymous author of The Queen an
Empress, and Her Three Kingdoms One Empire () did, however, and
proposed an incorporating union of all Three Kingdoms under one
monarch, with a single legislature, a British Protestant church with a
patriarchal seat in London, and a pan-British nobility headed by the
eldest sons of the monarch, who would be the subordinate kings of
England, Scotland and Ireland and hold the titles of ‘Princes of the British

Fletcher, Account of a Conversation, in Political Works, ed. Robertson, , , –: compare Petty,
‘A Treatise of Ireland’; Molyneux, The Case of Ireland, –; [Maxwell,] An Essay upon an Union of
Ireland with England, – (cf. Machiavelli, Discorsi, . ). The parallels with Petty and Molyneux are
noted in Fletcher, Political Works, ed. Robertson, , n. ; , n. . The copy of Maxwell’s
Essay in the Folger Shakespeare Library (shelf-mark DA  M Cage), its cover inscribed
‘For Mr Fletcher’, is presumably Andrew Fletcher’s.

Frederick D. Stone, (comp.) ‘Plans for the Union of the British Colonies of North America,
–’, in Hampton L. Carson (ed.), History of the Celebration of the One Hundredth Anniversary of
the Promulgation of the Constitution of the United States,  vols. (Philadelphia, ), , –; An Essay
upon the Government of the English Plantations on the Continent of America (London, ).

[Hugh Chamberlen,] The Great Advantages to Both Kingdoms of Scotland and England By an Union (n.p.,
), ; Chamberlen also suggested that the United Provinces should join this defensive union
against the French: Great Advantages to Both Kingdoms, .
 The political economy of empire 
Empire’. This ‘Empire of Great Britain’ could then be the Protestant
counterweight to French universal monarchy in Europe, an argument
whose force was not lost on those who negotiated the Treaty of Union
between England and Scotland, but who left Ireland out of the newly-
united kingdom and retained diversity-in-unity in Anglo-Scottish ec-
clesiology and law. However, only the ‘Three Kingdoms’ would
become one empire; the transatlantic colonies would be no part of this
new ‘British Empire’. Only after the Union of  was it possible to
imagine that the English would communicate their rights of parliamen-
tary representation and free trade to anyone other than themselves.
Even then, the anomalous position of Ireland – dependent but not
united – presented a great stumbling-block to any integrative concept of
a British Empire.

English political economists in the s had seen both Ireland and
Scotland as threats to the supremacy of their own economy, but for very
different reasons. The possibility that Scotland’s potential success in the
plantation trade might lead that kingdom to open up Ireland as its
primary market made it imperative that Ireland be more closely subjec-
ted to English economic regulation and thus treated as a ‘Colony for
Trade’ as much as a ‘Colony for Empire’. If the Scots proposed to use
the sovereignty of their Parliament and the relative maturity of their
financial institutions to promote a colonial empire that might allow
them to declare their independence of the English Parliament and even
the English Protestant succession, then Ireland must more firmly be
regulated as a colony and not allowed to pursue its own independent
economic destiny as yet another competitive kingdom. This line of
argument was pursued by the Bristol merchant John Cary, who perhaps
did more than any other English writer of the s to present the
political economy of England and its dependencies as a single, interde-
pendent system. As Cary put it in his Essay on the State of England (),
‘I take England and all its Plantations to be one great Body, those being so
many Limbs or Counties belonging to it’, though he saw this English
colonial empire as being in competition with the Scots to the North and
held that Ireland was simply one of those plantations, and should be


The Queen an Empress, and Her Three Kingdoms One Empire (London, ), , .
 For a succinct overview of Cary’s political economy in its Bristolian context see David Harris
Sacks, The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, – (Berkeley, ), –.
 John Cary, An Essay on the State of England in Relation to its Trade, its Poor, and its Taxes, For Carrying on
the Present War Against France (Bristol, ), –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
treated as such. The two major recommendations of the Essay struck at
Ireland particularly, as Cary insisted that the plantation-trade should be
made more dependent upon England than hitherto, and that England
should become ‘a Market for all the Wool of Christendom’ in order that
England should have the economic capacity to continue the Williamite
war against France. Ireland should be treated on the same terms as the
American plantations by repealing the Cattle Acts, since they had only
encouraged the Irish to seek foreign outlets for their products, and hence
to become dangerously industrious. It should also have its woollen trade
confined to the export of raw material to England so that, like the other
colonies, its interests could be entirely subordinated to England’s.
Cary became in due course one of the major proponents of the
English Parliament’s bill to restrict the exportation of Irish wool and was
one of five English authors to offer replies to William Molyneux’s The
Case of Ireland . . . Stated. However, his prominence in these debates has
distracted attention from his wider political-economic vision, particular-
ly the connections he made between Ireland, Scotland and the Ameri-
can plantations. These connections were made clearer for his metropoli-
tan English readership by the separate publication in  of those
sections of his Essay that concerned not only Irish but also Scottish
trade. This publication suggests that Cary’s target was not solely the
Irish woollen manufactory, but also the Scottish Parliament with its
plans for a joint-stock company. Cary notoriously used the reprint of the
Essay to reaffirm his argument that the kingdom of Ireland should be
reduced to the status of a colony and its products harnessed for the
benefit of England. He also drew his English readers’ attention to the
stirrings of economic innovation in Scotland, where woollen manufac-
tures, a fishery company and plantations were being proposed. Though
he discouraged the idea that any nation like Scotland which lacked a
vibrant manufacturing base could raise the capital to finance a planta-
tion trade, he nonetheless realised the dangers of a second British
kingdom’s possession of colonies for trade:

Cary, An Essay on the State of England, sigs. Av–[A]r; –, –; compare [Cary,] To the
Freeholders and Burgesses of the City of Bristol (n.p., n.d. [Bristol, ?]), . A similar point about the
Cattle Acts was made by the Board of Trade,  April : PRO  /, f. v.
 John Cary, A Vindication of the Parliament of England, In Answer to a Book Written by William Molyneux of
Dublin, Esq. (London, ); Patrick Kelly, ‘The Irish Woollen Export Prohibition Act’, –.
Molyneux, The Case of Ireland . . . Stated, ed. Simms, –, lists the English replies, to which should
be added Charles Davenant, An Essay upon the Probable Means of Making a People Gainers in the Balance
of Trade (), in The Political and Commercial Works of Charles Davenant LL.D., ed. Charles
Whitworth,  vols. (London, ), , –.
 John Cary, A Discourse Concerning the Trade of Ireland and Scotland (London, ), comprises Cary,
An Essay on the State of England, –.
 The political economy of empire 
I cannot see what advantage the Scotch can make at this time of day, by setling
Plantations; which if they do attempt we must be sure to take care of Ireland, and
by reducing it to the terms of a Colony, prevent their selling their Product there,
which I am apt to think is the main thing they aim at.
Cary was not alone in perceiving the interconnections between Eng-
lish, Scottish, Irish and colonial commerce. His antagonist Francis
Brewster saw that the success of Scotland’s East India trade would only
deprive England of such advantages as it had in the Irish market.
Cary’s ally and interlocutor, John Locke, from his vantage point on the
English Board of Trade, had at least as expansive a vision of the British
Atlantic world’s commerce, even if he did not present a single, compre-
hensive survey of its interrelations in the way that Cary did. Though
Locke’s writings on interest and coinage form the most important part
of his economic legacy, he also deserves respect for his attention to the
workings of the post-Revolutionary Atlantic economy. Locke was the
official on the Board of Trade who paid closest heed to the progress of
the Company of Scotland’s activities in the late s, and it was
Locke who co-ordinated the board’s efforts to promote linen manufac-
ture in Ireland as an alternative to the Irish woollen industry. Locke’s
interest in the prospects for the English woollen industry had been a
central concern of his brief position-paper, ‘For a Generall Naturali-
zation’ (), in which he had also shown himself aware of the dangers
that depopulation had posed to the Spanish monarchy’s possessions in
the Indies. In line with the prescriptions of other contemporary political
economists, Locke argued that wealth no longer lay in land, but rather
in trade and hence also in the population necessary for extensive
manufactures. In the words of the manuscript addition he made to the
Second Treatise in the late s, ‘[t]his shews, how much numbers of men
are to be preferd to largenesse of dominions, and that the increase of
 Cary, Discourse, –; Cary, Essay, –.

[Sir Francis Brewster,] A Discourse Concerning Ireland and the Different Interests Thereof, In Answer to the
Exon and Barnstaple Petitions (London, ), –.

Locke on Money, ed. Patrick Hyde Kelly,  vols. (Oxford, ).
 On which see especially Louise Fargo Brown, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (New York, ), chs.
IX–X.
 Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (London, ), –; Armitage, ‘The Scottish Vision
of Empire’, in Robertson (ed.), A Union for Empire, . For Board of Trade documents relating
to the Darien venture see Bod. MS Locke c. , ff. r, r–v, r, r–v, r–v, r,
r–v.
 See especially [ John Locke,] report of the Board of Trade,  August , in H. R. Fox Bourne,
The Life of John Locke,  vols. (London, ), , –, which was the scheme ‘pitched upon’ by
the Board of Trade: PRO  /, f. v. For Board of Trade documents relating to the Irish
woollen dispute see Bod. MS Locke c. , ff. r–v, r–vv, r, r–v, r–v, r–v,
ff.

John Locke, ‘For a Generall Naturalization’ (), in Locke on Money, ed. Kelly, , –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
lands [sc., hands] and the right employing of them is the great art of
government’. This would be a problem for an extended and composite
commonwealth, such as that formed by England and Ireland, as much
as for a unitary polity.
Locke’s arguments in the s showed his awareness of the larger
archipelagic and Atlantic context within which political-economic argu-
ment was now necessarily being played out. Yet, as the disputes over the
Woollen Bills and the Company of Scotland showed, economic argu-
ment in the British Atlantic world after the Glorious Revolution readily
became political and constitutional argument. The existence of three
legislatures within the Three Kingdoms, each of which could be used as
the instrument for the promotion of competing economic interests,
inevitably led to collisions and confrontations, especially when the most
powerful of them, the English Parliament, had such a freshly renewed
sense of its own supremacy. An all-encompassing vision of political
economy such as Cary’s or Locke’s at once allowed all of the British
dominions to be seen as part of a single economic system, while the
compulsions of contemporary political-economic theory revealed that
the parts of that system would necessarily remain in tension with each
other so long as they pursued separate economic interests.
Metropolitan analyses of the place of the colonies within an empire
now increasingly defined by the terms of political economy converged
on a series of common theoretical assumptions and historical lessons,
many of which seemed to have been reaffirmed by recent Anglo-Irish
and Anglo-Scottish relations. The three most influential analysts of the
political economy of the plantations were Josiah Child, Charles Dav-
enant and William Wood. All three agreed with Locke that popula-
tion, rather than territory – and hence ‘hands’, not ‘lands’ – was the
most important commodity for a flourishing polity, whether a state or
an empire. The historical experience of the Dutch and the Spanish
supported this contention: the Dutch, a landless people, had increased
their wealth enormously by commerce, and had encouraged population
by means of religious toleration; over the course of a century, the
 John Locke, Second Treatise, § , ll. –, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, rev. edn
(Cambridge, ), –.
 Sir Josiah Child, A New Discourse of Trade (London, ), –, ch. , ‘Concerning Planta-
tions’; Charles Davenant, Discourses on the Public Revenues and on the Trade of England (),
‘Discourse III: On the Plantation Trade’, in Davenant, Political and Commercial Works, ed.
Whitworth, , –; [William Wood,] Survey of Trade, –, pt , ‘The Great Advantages of
our Colonies and Plantations to Great Britain, and our Interest in Preserving and Encouraging
them, and how they may be further Improved’.
 Child, New Discourse of Trade, , ; Davenant, ‘On the Plantation Trade’, in Davenant,
Political and Commercial Works, ed. Whitworth, , , ; [Wood,] Survey of Trade, .
 The political economy of empire 
Spanish, their former governors, had become impoverished and de-
populated in Europe, so that their colonies had been a cause of decline
rather than a source of greatness. All three authors therefore found it
necessary to refute the charge that England’s colonies would destroy the
metropolis by drawing migrants across the Atlantic. On the contrary,
they argued, the flourishing colonies encouraged manufactures, ship-
ping and employment at home, to the advantage of England. However,
this could only be sustained by firm regulation of the colonies, under the
terms of the Navigation Acts: mercantilist protection, for the benefit of
the metropolis, was the key to a flourishing empire, and any signs of
colonial independence would have to be quashed, as they had been in
Ireland, in order to continue the favourable relationship between Eng-
land (after , Britain) and its colonies. In , all three writers’
discourses on colonies would be collected to provide an argument for
conciliation between the colonies and the metropolis, ‘with a View of
showing the Americans the Stake they risque in the present Contest’,
thereby confirming the apparent utility of this mercantilist analysis to
the metropolitan conception of the British Empire.
Politics and economics converged to provide the analytical frame-
work within which the relations between England, Ireland, Scotland
and the American colonies would be understood for at least half a
century after the Glorious Revolution, an event that had not only
‘deliver’d the People of Great Britain from Popery and Slavery’, as Wood
noted, but also ‘gave them that which is inseparable from their being
Freemen, a Liberty of Trading to any Part of the known World ’. Despite the
unequal effects of the Glorious Revolution for the Three Kingdoms and
for the colonies, and despite the constitutional differences that were
made all the more obvious by the Union of , that association of
religious and civil liberty with freedom of trade became an enduring
ideological foundation of the British Empire.
This argument found graphic expression in Sir James Thornhill’s
decoration of the Upper Hall at Greenwich Hospital between  and
. Though less elaborate than the spectacular allegory of William
 Child, New Discourse of Trade, –, –; Davenant, ‘On the Plantation Trade’, in Davenant,
Political and Commercial Works, ed. Whitworth, , ; [Wood,] Survey of Trade, .
 Child, New Discourse of Trade, , ; Davenant, ‘On the Plantation Trade’, in Davenant,
Political and Commercial Works, ed. Whitworth, , , –; [Wood,] Survey of Trade, .
 Select Dissertations on Colonies and Plantations, ed. Charles Whitworth (London, ), v, – (Child),
– (Davenant), – (Wood).
 [Wood,] Survey of Trade, .

Jack P. Greene, ‘Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revol-
ution’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, : The Eighteenth Century
(Oxford, ), –, –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
and Mary spreading peace and liberty throughout Europe that covers
the ceiling of the Lower Hall of the Hospital, the Upper Hall’s paintings
aptly depicted the post-Revolutionary, and post-Union, Anglo-British
imperial ideology. Neptune and Britannia, ‘attended by Reason of State
and Love of her Country’, greet William III at Torbay; the four continents
and all the gods of the sea acclaim Queen Anne; justice and peace
accompany George I’s landing at Greenwich, alongside St George
crushing the dragon of ‘Popery’ and the cringing figure of Jacobite
‘Rebellion’. The argument of this suite of paintings concludes in two
paintings to show ‘that our Trade, Commerce, and Publick Wealth are chiefly
owing to our ’, in the form of allegories of ‘Salus Publica’ and
‘Securitas Publica’, each linking naval power, commerce and the good of
the res publica. Thornhill’s neo-classical celebration of commercial
reason of state showed that the discourse of political economy was not
incompatible with neo-Roman conceptions of the res publica, nor was it
necessary to counterpose them. Reason of state could be cast as salus
publica, and public safety readily redefined in economic terms to suit the
demands of a modern state.
Confirmation that Barbon and Hume had been premature in their
announcement of the irrelevance of Machiavelli to the modern, com-
mercial world came from James Edward Oglethorpe. Oglethorpe con-
tributed to the creation of an informal eighteenth-century canon of
colonial writings by combining Machiavellianism with political econ-
omy in his Select Tracts Relating to Colonies (). The work was part of his
campaign to promote the new settlement of Georgia, and justified the
colony with testimony from Francis Bacon’s essay ‘On Plantations’, the
Dutch political economist Pieter de la Court, William Penn, Josiah
Child and Machiavelli. Oglethorpe skilfully excerpted ‘the Florentine
Historian’ to show that he recommended a plan remarkably similar to
Oglethorpe’s own for Georgia, a colony founded on a plan of ‘Religion,
Liberty, good Laws, the Exercise of Arms, and Encouragement of Arts’,
particularly after the Roman model recommended in Discorsi, . .
 [Sir James Thornhill,] An Explanation of the Painting in the Royal Hospital at Greenwich (London, n.d.),
, ; Edward Croft-Murray, Decorative Painting in England –,  vols. (London, ), , ,
–.

[James Edward Oglethorpe,] Select Tracts Relating to Colonies (London, n.d. []), sig. A[]r, –
(Bacon); – (Machiavelli, Istorie Fiorentine, ; Principe, ; Discorsi, .; .; .; .; .; .; .);
– (de la Court); – (Penn); – (Child); for Oglethorpe’s sources see [Leigh and
Sotheby,] A Catalogue of the Entire and Valuable Library of General Oglethorpe, Lately Deceased (London,
), items , , , ; on the authorship and dating of the work see Rodney M. Baine,
‘James Oglethorpe and the Early Promotional Literature for Georgia’, William and Mary
Quarterly, rd ser.,  (), –. Compare James Edward Oglethorpe, Some Account of the Design
of the Trustees for Establishing Colonys in America (), ed. Rodney M. Baine and Phinizy Spalding
(Athens, Ga., ), –.
 The political economy of empire 
Machiavelli may have been mostly silent regarding commerce as a
reason of state, but he could certainly still supply pointed advice for the
promotion of a modern colony; such counsel could also be aptly com-
bined with the most modern analyses of commercial compulsions, to
offer a rounded, and persuasive, account of the means and reasons for
settling new plantations at such a late date. Oglethorpe’s subtle rap-
prochement between Machiavellianism and political economy offered
one resolution of the ancient dilemma of imperium and libertas, in line
with the recommendations of modern reason of state. It seemed from
this, as also from Thornhill’s prominent representations of the post-
Revolutionary British salus publica, that Barbon’s and Hume’s
announcements of the death of Machiavellianism in the modern com-
mercial world were, perhaps, somewhat exaggerated.
  

Empire and ideology in the Walpolean era

When Britain first, at heaven’s command,

Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sung this strain –
‘Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves’.
It is now an historiographical commonplace that the s and early
s marked a watershed in the history of the British state and empire.
Both British and American historians take the decade on either side of
 as a pivotal moment in the histories of nationalism, patriotism and
national identity. They do so because this seems to be the moment at
which British identity began to coalesce within Britain itself, a gener-
ation after the Anglo-Scottish Union of , to mark ‘the birth of a
powerfully self-confident British nationalism’. ‘It was precisely during
these early conflicts in the formation of British markets that the symbols
of the British nation came into being’: the Union flag, ‘God Save the
King’, ‘Rule, Britannia’, the rules of cricket and Edmund Hoyle’s
codification of whist, quadrille, backgammon and chess. At the same
time, it has been argued,  marked the end of the period – roughly
corresponding to the length of a single lifetime – in which communica-
tions around the British Atlantic world had changed substantially and
irreversibly. From this point onward, a British Atlantic community
became conceivable in practice as ‘colonial leaders initiated changes in
the meaning of the word ‘‘empire’’ to include themselves and their
localities in an organic union with the British Isles in what, by , was


James Thomson, Alfred: A Masque (London, ), –.
 T. H. Breen, ‘Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once
More in Need of Revising’, Journal of American History,  (), .
 Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge,
), –.


 Empire and ideology in the Walpolean era 
coming to be called the ‘‘British Empire’’’. All the British Empire
needed to overcome its institutional heterogeneity was a common ideol-
ogy. This could readily be supplied in the form of the burgeoning British
nationalism generated in the metropolis. However, the exchange from
the metropolis to the provinces ultimately fostered dissolution rather
than integration. In due course, the aggressiveness of that nationalism,
the unredeemable promises made to the colonists in the form of the
rights of Englishmen, and the fissile consequences of the export of
British political theory together ensured that the British Atlantic Empire
would sunder and then be refashioned in the decades after the Seven
Years War. It was in that period that, although ‘new concepts of empire
were slow to emerge, language and terminology began to change, as
those associated with the dominion of the seas based on liberty no longer
seemed appropriate’.
During the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the anglophone
inhabitants of the Atlantic world began for the first time habitually to
describe their community as the ‘British Empire’. This British Empire
included the United Kingdom of Great Britain and its dependencies
within Europe; Britain’s insular possessions in the West Indies; and the
continental colonies of British North America. Sometimes, though not
always, it also encompassed the slave-stations, factories and forts of
Africa and the East Indies, and it was increasingly acknowledged that
‘the general  of Great Britain owes all its Encrease and Splendor to
the Commerce of its American and African Colonies’, and hence to the
slave-trade, ‘the next valuable Branch of Trade belonging to the British
Empire’. Such a conception of a united British Empire demanded the
union of a substantive idea of Britishness with a redefinition of inherited
ideas of empire. That idea of a ‘British Empire’ also had to be sufficiently
broad to encompass the pluralism of a multinational and multi-
denominational polity, while necessarily narrow enough to exclude
those deemed unworthy of its political benefits. As we have seen, the
concept of the British Empire – as a particular kind of political community
that incorporated various peoples and territories and which could be
described as British, rather than English or Scottish alone, for example –
had a long history, stretching back to the mid-sixteenth century.
 Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic: –: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New
York, ), ; compare Richard Koebner, Empire (Cambridge, ), ch. .
 P. J. Marshall, ‘Britain and the World in the Eighteenth Century: I, Reshaping the Empire’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, th ser.,  (), .
 [Malachy Postlethwayt,] The African Trade, The Great Pillar and Support of the British Plantation Trade in
America (London, ), , .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
However, various conceptions of the British Empire continued to offer
competing ideological descriptions of that community. ‘The concepts we
have settle for us the form of the experience we have of the world’, the
philosopher Peter Winch has noted. ‘That is not to say that our concepts
may not change; but when they do, that means that our concept of the
world has changed too’. This is perhaps especially true when such
concepts define the nature and limits of the polity itself. Accordingly, if it
is possible to pinpoint the emergence of a new language to describe the
British Empire, then the examination of that language should reveal the
existence of a new conception of the Empire itself.
That the British Empire was conceived as a political community
incorporating Britain, Ireland and the plantations during the s can
be seen from the works of moral philosophers, historians, pamphleteers
and poets across the whole range of private and public discourse. By
being conceived at this time – during the years of Sir Robert Walpole’s
tenure as chief minister – the British Empire acquired a distinctive
history, genealogy and ideology. This conception was criticised and
challenged even at the moment it emerged. It was therefore originally
an ideology, not an identity; that is, it was a contribution to political
argument, and not a normative self-conception. It may have become an
identity later, but that development should not obscure its beginnings in
political ideology, or the causes that ideology promoted. Both the
ground-breaking work of Kathleen Wilson and the recent magisterial
survey of British imperial ‘identity’ in the long eighteenth century by
Jack P. Greene have each assumed the category of identity as an
idiomatic and unproblematic one in this period. However, this begs the
question of how it became possible for Britons to conceive of the
Anglo-British monarchy and its overseas dependencies as members of a
single community at all, let alone how they adopted that conception as a
distinctive ‘identity’. Clearly, such a conception demanded something
more geographically expansive than the perception of a contiguous
territorial unit: it depended on a conception of the state and its author-
ity, whether embodied in the monarchy or legislated by Parliament,

Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, nd edn (London, ), .
 Quentin Skinner, ‘Language and Social Change’, in James Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin
Skinner and His Critics (Princeton, ), –; Terence Ball, James Farr and Russell L. Hanson
(eds.), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge, ).

Kathleen Wilson, ‘Empire, Trade and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian Britain: The Case of
Admiral Vernon’, Past and Present,  (Nov. ), –; Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics,
Culture and Imperialism in England, – (Cambridge, ); Jack P. Greene, ‘Empire and
Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The
Oxford History of the British Empire, : The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, ), –.
 Empire and ideology in the Walpolean era 
though not contained within a British imperial church; it also had to be
extended to encompass a more expansive conception of the nation.
The conception that emerged in the s defined Britain and the
British Empire (at least for the generation after the War of Jenkins’s Ear)
as Protestant, commercial, maritime and free. ‘This vision, predicated
on a mixture of adulterated mercantilism, nationalistic anxiety and
libertarian fervor, was clearly both rose-colored and self-serving’ and
(no doubt for this reason) proved ‘immensely attractive to domestic
publics’ – and, it might be added, to many provincial publics, too. It
found its greatest purchase in the oppositional polemics of the s and
early s, where it provided a counter-argument to the supposed
pusillanimity of Walpole’s government, which had patiently refused to
be drawn into a commercial war with Spain until . James Thom-
son’s ode ‘Rule, Britannia’ was the most lasting expression of this
conception. As might be expected from the aggressively Anglicising
son of a Scottish Whig mother and a Lowland Presbyterian minister
father, Thomson defined the polity as ‘Britain’, the divinely-ordained
island lifted from the sea ‘at heaven’s command’, destined to rule the
waves, whose people were promised both positive and negative liberty
(‘Britons never will be slaves’; ‘thou shalt flourish great and free’). This
commercial thalassocracy would be home to the ‘Muses’, the liberty-
loving women who would be protected, like the feminised isle herself, by
‘manly hearts to guard the fair’. Thomson’s Britannia therefore ruled an
empire of difference, defined by its oppositions, where men would
defend women, freemen would not be slaves, liberty would defeat
tyranny, and the empire of the seas would outlive, outfight and outpros-
per military monarchies with territorial dominions.
The popularity of ‘Rule, Britannia’ kept alive this conception of the
British Empire. Nonetheless, according to the best recent student of
early eighteenth-century oppositional patriotism, Thomson’s ‘apparent-
ly straightforward expression of patriotism . . . proves resistant to analy-
sis’. The same might be said of the larger conception transmitted by
 Wilson, The Sense of the People, ; compare Nicholas Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the
Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, ), –.
 For a defence of Walpole’s actions see R. W. Harding, Amphibious Warfare in the Eighteenth Century:
The British Expedition to the West Indies – (Woodbridge, ), ch. .
 On the genesis and reception of ‘Rule, Britannia’, see William Hayman Cummings, Dr. Arne and
Rule, Britannia (London, ), –.
 Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: History, Politics, and National Myth, –
(Oxford, ), ; though compare Clement Ramsland, ‘Britons Never Will Be Slaves: A Study
in Whig Political Propaganda in the British Theatre, –’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 
(), –; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, – (New Haven, ), .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
the ode. The prevalence during the anti-Walpolean agitations and long
thereafter of the conception of the character of Britain and its empire as
Protestant, commercial, maritime and free has rendered it seemingly
natural and inarguable, as no doubt its proponents intended it should
be. Though this conception persisted throughout the eighteenth cen-
tury and has endured since, it did not stand alone or unchallenged as a
conception of empire, either then or now. For these reasons, ‘God Save
the King’ – a product of the years of the War of the Austrian Succession,
but more martial, more monarchical and more obviously hierarchical
than ‘Rule, Britannia’, as befit its anti-Jacobite rather than precisely
anti-Walpolean or anti-Spanish origins – would be the preferred
anthem during the British Empire’s late eighteenth-century period of
aristocratic authoritarianism. In light of these alternatives, and in the
knowledge that the competition between conceptions of empire would
burgeon in the years following the Peace of Paris of , it is more
important to historicise this conception, rather than accept that it
became normative (as many historians have effectively done). Thereby
it might be possible to understand where it came from, how it came to
be attached to a particular concept of the British Empire as an Atlantic
community, and indeed what were the effects of its endurance.

The limits to the emergence of an integrative conception of the British

Empire beyond the Three Kingdoms can be seen in the early topo-
graphical histories of the English – later, British – empire. Such histories
assumed the economic importance of overseas possessions to England,
but largely failed to see them as integral parts of a single polity. For
example, Nathaniel Crouch’s The English Empire in America () traver-
sed the mainland colonies from Newfoundland to Carolina, then travel-
led the islands from Bermuda to Jamaica, an arrangement that re-
mained unchanged in six later editions up to . His aim was to
‘discover the Acquisitions and Dominions of the English Monarchy in
America’, thereby to delineate the ‘empire’ in the western hemisphere
as a set of political communities distinct from, though subordinate to,
the English monarchy. In , Crouch’s successor as an imperial
topographer, John Oldmixon, described ‘the British Empire in Amer-
 Gerald Berkeley Hertz, British Imperialism in the Eighteenth Century (London, ), –.

William H. Cummings, God Save the King: The Origin and History of the Music and Words of the National
Anthem (London, ), –, ; on the supposed origins of ‘God Save the King’ as also a
celebration of Vernon’s victory at Portobello, see Cummings, God Save the King, –.
 ‘R. B.’ [Nathaniel Crouch,] The English Empire in America: Or a Prospect of His Majesties Dominions in
the West-Indies (London, ), .
 Empire and ideology in the Walpolean era 
ica’, to show the economic advantages of a commercial (rather than a
territorial) empire to Britain. Oldmixon acknowledged that it was diffi-
cult ‘for an exact History of all the British Empire in the West-Indies to be
fram’d by one Man in America or Europe’. He adopted the mercantilist
analysis of Child and Davenant to confirm that migrants were not lost to
Britain, that the plantations saved rather than expended money by
virtue of import-substitution, and that neo-classical anxieties about
colonisation were now analytically irrelevant: ‘the Arguments brought
from Antiquity will be of no use to the Enemies of Colonies’. Rome may
have secured its conquests by colonies, but the British colonies were
even more advantageous for the simple reason that ‘the Safety of a
Nation is of greater Consequence than its Extent of Empire’. These
arguments remained largely unchanged when Oldmixon published a
new edition of his work during the ‘present Juncture’ of the Anglo-
Spanish War, even as the extent of the ‘British Empire on the Continent’
had expanded to include Oglethorpe’s recently settled and strategically
vulnerable Georgia colony.
The concepts of the British Empire propagated by Crouch and
Oldmixon were firmly transatlantic, at least from the perspective of the
metropolis. Their object of inquiry was the ‘British Empire in America’
or the ‘British Empire of America’, not a collective or even collaborative
British Empire that incorporated the British plantations and colonies
into a single community alongside the Three Kingdoms of Britain and
Ireland. Metropolitan attempts to rationalise the structure of the
Hanoverian dominions remained transatlantic. The first major survey
of the ‘State of the British Plantations in America’ since the Dominion
of New England, produced for the Board of Trade in , had delin-
eated George I’s ‘Plantations on the Continent of America’ colony
by colony (though omitting Newfoundland and Hudson’s Bay, because
not under ‘civil government’) rather than attempt to describe an
integrated and pan-Atlantic British Empire. The report assumed no
unity between the plantations and the metropolis, except in so far as all
were joined under the sovereignty of the crown. Yet if imperium was
unitary, dominium was divided, as various proprietors, patentees and
royal governments claimed separate rights of property, based on the
right of first discovery, occupation or cession. The report recommended
 [John Oldmixon,] The British Empire in America, Containing the History of the Discovery, Settlement,
Progress and Present State of All the British Colonies, on the Continent and Islands of America,  vols. (London,
), , xiv, xix–xx, xxxv–xxxvi, xxxvii.

[John Oldmixon,] The British Empire in America, nd edn,  vols. (London, ), , v, xii, –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
that the Crown reassume all the proprietary governments to ensure that
‘all the British Colonies in America hold immediately of one Lord, &
have but one joint purpose to pursue’. This recommendation that
imperium and dominium should be conjoined was not, of course, taken up.
Its failure perpetuated a necessarily unstable conception of the British
Empire whose internal contradictions could be adroitly exploited by
those like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who could easily show
that, since first discovery had been undertaken by individuals and not by
the British state, Parliament could make no claims over the colonists
who were encompassed only by royal imperium.
The emergence of a pan-Atlantic conception of the British Empire
coincided with the next wave of reform of the colonial administration in
the s, and sprang initially from a cadre of imperial officials and
provincials, some of whom had been involved in the drafting of the 
report. ‘In the decade preceding the renewal of war with Spain and
France, the home government took the first steps in conceiving and
implementing a theory of empire suitable for a mature colonial sys-
tem’. Such a theory had to reconcile the paradox of a mercantilist
colonial system informed by post-Revolutionary political ideology,
which promised the Anglo-British ‘rights of Englishmen’ to all free
inhabitants of the colonies while subordinating their economic activities
to the needs of the metropolis. That it failed to do so had as much to do
with the abrupt termination of the experiment in the face of Anglo-
Spanish conflict at the end of the s as it did with the unwillingness of
Walpole’s government to relax the demands of metropolitan mercantil-
ism in favour of greater autonomy for the colonists. The failure of
Walpole and his ministers to square the circle and fashion a suitable
theory of empire nonetheless had two important consequences. The
very attempt encouraged various Britons throughout the Atlantic world
to conceive of themselves as partners in a single polity; meanwhile, the
failure of it left the responsibility for fashioning a mutually acceptable
ideology of empire to the opposition; anything as systematic as a theory
would have demanded the resolution of contradictions, as well as the

‘State of the British Plantations in America’ ( September ), in Documents Relative to the Colonial
History of the State of New-York, ed. E. B. O’Callaghan,  vols. (Albany, –), , –.

Thomas Jefferson, ‘Refutation of the Argument that the Colonies Were Established at the
Expense of the British Nation’ (), in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, I: –, ed. Julian P.
Boyd (Princeton, ), –; [John Adams and Daniel Leonard,] Novanglus and Massachusetten-
sis: or Political Essays (Boston, ), ; Michael Kammen, ‘The Meaning of Colonization in
American Revolutionary Thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas,  (), –.
 James A. Henretta, ‘Salutary Neglect’: Colonial Administration under the Duke of Newcastle (Princeton,
), .
 Empire and ideology in the Walpolean era 
necessary reforms – whether to strengthen metropolitan control, or to
allow greater colonial autonomy – to overcome the paradoxes.
A Scottish baronet and former deputy governor of Pennsylvania, Sir
William Keith presents a good example of the shift that took place
between the s and the late s. In , he had been one of the
informants behind the Board of Trade’s report, and in , in another
survey of the British American colonies, he firmly subordinated the
interests of the colonies to those of Britain, on the grounds that ‘a lesser
publick Good must give place to a greater’. Yet by , the impover-
ished Keith had thrown in his lot with the opposition to Sir Robert
Walpole. He dedicated his History of the British Plantations in America – the
first volume of a projected series anatomising all of the British pos-
sessions in the western hemisphere – to Frederick, Prince of Wales, and
later endorsed the ‘universal Satisfaction’ at the declaration of war with
Spain in . In the introduction to his History, Keith offered a
broadly civic-humanist account of the origins and development of civil
government in the British colonies. In line with the often-quoted pre-
scriptions of the th of Cato’s Letters, Keith argued that only gentle
treatment of the colonies by the metropolis could ensure that the
benefits of mercantilism would be sustained. He identified liberty as the
promotion of the common good, and by assuming that it was ‘altogether
impracticable to separate and divide the Interest of the Subject in the
British Plantations from that of the whole State’, he defined that good as
common both to the metropolis and to the plantations. As he affirmed
elsewhere in , ‘the common Interest of the British State or
Commonwealth, most certainly includes the Subjects of America’. This
conjunctive concept of the ‘British State or Commonwealth’ as including
the subjects in the plantations sprang from Keith’s experience in the
colonies; it also reflected the priorities of the Opposition, for whom
those colonies were integral parts of the British possessions threatened

On the general problem illustrated by this particular instance see Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and
Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States
– (Athens, Ga., ).
 [Sir William Keith,] ‘A Short Discourse on the Present State of the Colonies in America’
(November ), PRO  /, f. r; printed in Keith, A Collection of Papers and Other Tracts,
Written Occasionally, nd edn (London, ), .

[Sir William Keith,] Some Useful Observations on the Consequences of the Present War with Spain (London,
n.d. []), –.

Sir William Keith, The History of the British Plantations in America (London, ), –, , ; Roy N.
Lokken, ‘Sir William Keith’s Theory of the British Empire’, The Historian,  (), –.

[Sir William Keith,] ‘Proposal for the Establishing by Act of Parliament the Duties upon Stampt
Paper and Parchment in All the British American Colonies’ (), in [Keith,] Two Papers on the
Subject of Taxing the British Colonies in America (London, ), .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
by Spain which should therefore be defended against Spanish depreda-
tion, even at the cost of transatlantic war.
The creation of a pan-Atlantic concept of the British Empire emerged
at the same time in the Caribbean, as can be seen from the pamphlets of
the Barbadian planter John Ashley. Ashley’s words from  have often
been cited as evidence of the emergence of a concept of ‘the British
Empire, taking all together as one body, viz. Great Britain, Ireland, and the
Plantations and Fishery in America, besides its possessions in the East-Indies
and Africa’. Though this may have been a precocious example of a
concept that would become widespread in the aftermath of the Seven
Years War, it was in fact somewhat belated among Ashley’s own
changing concepts of the British Empire. For example, in  he had
argued for increased metropolitan attention ‘to protect and cherish its
West-India colonies, confound their Enemies, and assert and gloriously
maintain The British Empire in America’. If his concept in  was
pan-Atlantic, in  it had been firmly transatlantic, locating the British
Empire in the western hemisphere, as perhaps one among many con-
centric British empires, though certainly as a British empire detached
from, albeit superintended by, the metropolis. By , in the third of his
interventions into debate on West Indian tariffs and revenues, Ashley
defined the sugar colonies as ‘a Branch of the British Dominions on
which the Wealth and Naval Power of Great Britain does in great
measure depend’, linked by British shipping, supplied with British
goods, and enriching Britain by its products, and hence inextricably
bound together by a set of common interests to form one ‘British
Nation’. His remark of  was therefore a restatement of this vision
of pan-imperial interests in the British Atlantic world; only at that point
did he define that congeries of interests as the British Empire.
The major dependency of the ‘British Empire in Europe’ was, of
course, Ireland. However, the emergent British Empire of the Wal-
polean era was relatively little celebrated by patriot opinion in Ireland.
Instead, the Irish concept of the British Empire had always sprung from
various strands of unionism. For example, the anonymous author of The

John Ashley, The Second Part of Memoirs and Considerations Concerning the Trade and Revenues of the British
Colonies in America (London, ),  (compare ibid., sigs. Av–Ar, ), cited in, for example,
Koebner, Empire, , and P. J. Marshall, ‘Introduction’, in Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the
British Empire II: The Eighteenth Century, .

[John Ashley,] The British Empire in America, Consider’d (London, ), .
 [John Ashley,] Memoirs and Considerations Concerning the Trade and Revenues of the British Colonies in
America (London, ), , .
 Jean Louis de Lolme, The British Empire in Europe: Part the First, Containing an Account of the Connection
Between the Kingdoms of England and Ireland, Previous to the Year  (Dublin, ).
 Empire and ideology in the Walpolean era 
Present State of Ireland () described Ireland as ‘one of the chiefest
members of the British Empire’ and ‘like to prove profitable to the
Prince, and at all times a good additional strength to the Brittish Empire’,
by which was meant the Anglo-British monarchy based in London.
From the other side of the confessional divide, Father Peter Walsh
argued in  for the transnational community of British and Irish
Catholics, ‘those in this famous Empire of Great Britain, that continue in
Ecclesiastical Communion with the Catholick Bishop of old Rome’.
Walsh denied that there was any necessary collision between allegiance
to the Stuart monarchy and communion with Rome, but such an
imperial perspective sat more comfortably with the Protestant Anglo-
Irish argument in the s ‘that we are of one Religion, that we are a
Province of their Empire, and have neither Laws nor Governors but of
their sending us’.
Though ‘[t]he s and s . . . represent the nadir for pro-union
sentiment on both sides of the Irish Sea’, Irish unionists did appeal to a
conception of the British Empire cast in the idiom of political econ-
omy. For example, Samuel Madden lamented the fact that Ireland
had failed to benefit from British prosperity, liberty and civility, and
hence to profit from ‘the Inheritance of our Ancestors, who were sent
hither to enlarge the British Empire and Commerce’. He proposed,
among other solutions, internal colonisation of the country to increase
population and production to ‘put our selves a Degree or two above the
Savage Indians’, the strenuous avoidance of luxury goods, and, ultimately,
incorporating union with England, rather than immiserating depend-
ency, to make Ireland ‘a vast Support and encrease to the English
Empire, wealth and strength in the World’. Madden drew upon the
work of the Ulsterman, Arthur Dobbs, who, as a colonial governor and
promoter of the North-West Passage, elaborated one of the most com-
prehensive concepts of the British Empire in the mid-eighteenth cen-
tury, ranging from Ireland to Hudson’s Bay. In , Dobbs promoted

The Present State of Ireland: Together with Some Remarques Upon the Antient State Thereof (London, ),
sigs. Av–r, .

Peter Walsh, A Letter to the Catholicks of England, Ireland, Scotland, and All Other Dominions under His
Gracious Majesty Charles II (London, ), .

[John Hovell,] A Discourse upon the Woollen Manufactury of Ireland and the Consequences of Prohibiting its
Exportation (London, ), .

James Kelly, ‘The Origins of the Act of Union: An Examination of Unionist Opinion in Britain
and Ireland, –’, Irish Historical Studies,  (), .

[Samuel Madden,] Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlement of Ireland (Dublin, ), ,
–, , .

For Madden’s use of Dobbs see [Madden,] Reflections and Resolutions, , , , .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
the comparative ability of Ireland to ‘add considerably to the Power of
the British Empire’ by its trade and manufactures, not as a competitor to
‘the Seat of Empire’ in Britain, but as ‘the choicest Jewel and Acquisi-
tion of the Crown and People of England’. In the same year, he
presented Sir Robert Walpole with a comprehensive scheme for the
economic development of the British American colonies, and he pro-
posed British settlements in California and Easter Island as the key to
British trade in the South Seas. Anglo-Irish union was the commercial
and constitutional cornerstone of Dobbs’s concept of the British Em-
pire, though that in itself revealed the range of concentric empires
within the British Empire, each of which maintained different relations
with the metropolis.
The emergence of a pan-Atlantic concept of the British Empire was
the product of an epistemological as much as a conceptual shift. Before
it became necessary to conceive the nature of the connection between
the metropolis and the plantations, that connection had to be perceived.
Progress towards such an apprehension of the nature of the British
Empire as a unity had undoubtedly been made during the course of the
seventeenth century, whether in the creation of various British Atlantic
communities by migration and communication, by the rise of mercan-
tilist thought, or by the statutory prescriptions of Parliament which had
bound the colonies to the metropolis within a single trading system since
promulgation of the first Navigation Acts. However, the precise nature
of that epistemology of empire was not described until David Hume’s
Treatise of Human Nature (–), which he researched and wrote during
the latter years of Robert Walpole’s regime and published at the open-
ing of the War of Jenkins’s Ear.
In his discussion ‘Of Contiguity, and Distance in Space and Time’
(Treatise, . . –), Hume noted that though distance both in space and
in time affects the strength of our imagination, and hence the force of
our passions, ‘the consequences of a removal in space are much inferior
to those of a removal in time’. Thus, twenty years in the lifetime of one
person would greatly diminish the acuity of memory; with that dimin-

Arthur Dobbs, An Essay on the Trade and Improvement of Ireland (Dublin, ), sig. a[]v, [a]r, ; on
Dobbs see Desmond Clarke, Arthur Dobbs, Esq., – (London, ); Raymond Gillespie,
‘The Ulster of Arthur Dobbs’, in D. Helen Rankin and E. Charles Nelson (eds.), Curious in
Everything: The Career of Arthur Dobbs of Carrickfergus – (Carrickfergus, ), –.

Dobbs, ‘Memorial on the Northwest Passage’ (), in William Barr and Glyndwr Williams
(eds.), Voyages in Search of a Northwest Passage,  vols. (London, ), , –; Dobbs, An Account of the
Countries Adjoining to Hudson’s Bay, in the North-West Part of America (London, ), –; Trevor
Parkhill, ‘Arthur Dobbs: Colonial Undertaker and Governor of North Carolina’, in Rankin and
Nelson (eds.), Curious in Everything, –.
 Empire and ideology in the Walpolean era 
ution would come a parallel abatement of our sentiments regarding
actions distant in time. However, a distance of a thousand leagues will
not have an effect proportional to a similar distance in time. Hume’s
example, though passing, was significant in the context of the emerg-
ence of a pan-Atlantic concept of the British Empire: ‘A West-India
merchant will tell you’, he reported, ‘that he is not without concern
about what passes in Jamaica; tho’ few extend their views so far into
futurity, as to dread very remote accidents’. As we will see, Hume was
both the acutest analyst of the concept of identity in British philosophy
of the s and the sharpest critic of the emergent ideology with which
the British Empire was being equipped at the same time. By this
example, though, he showed, even fleetingly, that action at a distance –
specifically, action at an imperial distance – could excite the passions and
create intellectual connections. As Thomas Haskell, among others, has
argued, just such a conception of ‘action at a distance’ helps to provide
an epistemological explanation for the emergence of the abolitionist
movement in the s: without such an expansive conception of causa-
tion, it was literally inconceivable that humanitarian sentiment could
have acted effectively on a global, or at least hemispheric, scale. Hume
revealed the connection between distance and sentiment that the econ-
omic connections within an imperial community could create. He did
not share the sentiment of passionate connection he diagnosed in the
West India merchant, but he was aware that a concept of imperial
contiguity, even across Atlantic spaces, had emerged, and that it was
associated in particular with those who had specific financial and com-
mercial interests in the colonies, like the merchants of Glasgow and, no
doubt, planters like John Ashley.

The concept of the British Empire as a congeries of territories linked by

their commerce, united with common interests and centred politically
upon London, was therefore originally provincial, and arose among
unionists in Ireland, planters in the Caribbean and officials in the
mainland colonies over the course of the first quarter of the eighteenth
century. It was the product above all of a group of colonial administra-
tors, merchants and politicians, for whom an appeal to a common
 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (–), ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch, nd
edn (Oxford, ),  (. . , ‘Of Contiguity, and Distance in Space and Time’); Carlo
Ginzburg, ‘Killing a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance’, in Olwen Hufton
(ed.), Historical Change and Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures  (New York, ), .
 Thomas Bender (ed.), The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical
Interpretation (Berkeley, ).
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
interest with Britain was a necessary strategy to encourage equal treat-
ment for their compatriots, whether under the terms of the Navigation
Acts or within the constitutional framework of the United Kingdom.
Their concept of the British Empire, projected from the provinces back
to a metropolitan audience, was both the expression of their own
interests and the means to develop a coincident appreciation of a
common interest among their British audiences. This strategic use of the
British Empire as the conceptual realisation of these interests explains
the widespread use among these provincials of the language of the
common good, frequently cast (as in the work of Sir William Keith, for
example) in the idiom of neo-Roman republicanism. When metropoli-
tans adopted their concept of the British Empire, as they began to do
with increasing frequency in the late s, theirs would be the deriva-
tive discourse, not that of the provincials. The metropolitan contribu-
tion was to add to this provincial concept of the British Empire the
classic conception of that empire as Protestant, commercial, maritime
and free.
The crucible of that conception was the agitations preceding the
Anglo-Spanish War of Jenkins’s Ear, and the oppositional circles which
encouraged them. As Horatio Walpole later noted:
the depredations of the Spaniards upon the british Commerce in the West
Indies . . . had given a handle to the disaffected and discontented party en-
creased by the accession of those in Parliament who belonged to the Court of
the late weak, imprudent and undutiful prince of Wales, to raise a great ferment
in the Nation to occasion warm debates in Parliament and strong resolutions
and addresses to the Crown . . .
As Adam Smith also pointed out, the succeeding conflict was in essence
a ‘colony war’, fought to defend British possessions overseas and to
protect rights of free navigation on the high seas. The War of Jenkins’s
Ear became notorious in the later eighteenth century as an example of
popular pressure overcoming governmental resolve and hence, one
might say, as a triumph of ideology over policy. In , Edmund
Burke used the example of the war for his own special pleading, and
 [Horatio Walpole,] ‘Mr Walpole’s Apology’, BL Add. MS , f. r.

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Causes and Nature of the Wealth of Nations (), ed. R. H. Campbell,
A. S. Skinner and W. B. Todd,  vols. (Oxford, ), , ; Smith, ‘Thoughts on the State of
the Contest with America, February ’, in The Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. E. C. Mossner
and J. S. Ross, rev. edn (Oxford, ), .

Compare Isaac De Pinto, Letters on the American Troubles (London, ), ; Alexander Hamilton,
Federalist, , in James Madison, Hamilton and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (), ed. Isaac
Kramnick (Harmondsworth, ), –.
 Empire and ideology in the Walpolean era 
moralised the force of public opinion in the opening stages of the war
and in the push towards Walpole’s fall as a cynical process which had
backfired on its perpetrators: ‘There has not been in this century any
foreign peace or war, in its origin, the fruit of popular desire, except this
war that was made with Spain in ’. The execration of Walpole for
caving in to the opposition’s demands for war, and the opposition’s later
admission that their conduct was insincere, showed that ‘[t]hey who
stir up the people to improper desires, whether of peace or war, will
be condemned by themselves. They who weakly yield to them will be
condemned by history.’
History fostered ideology. In the pamphlets preceding the war, the
origins of the British Empire were traced back to the Welsh Prince
Madoc and the discoveries of John and Sebastian Cabot to refute
Spanish claims of first discovery in the Americas, and Bartolomé de Las
Casas was liberally quoted as evidence of Spain’s destructive policies
there. Anti-Spanish propaganda opposing the Spanish Match in ,
which itself had made use of Elizabethan precedent, was reprinted as
evidence of England’s long-standing defence of the Protestant religion
and position as arbiter of Europe, keeping the balance of power in
check. The dangers of peace between France and Spain and the
claims of England’s West India trade were recalled in speeches given by
Sir Thomas Roe and Sir Benjamin Rudyerd in . Sir John Bor-
oughs’s treatise defending Britain’s right to the seas from the time of the
first Anglo-Dutch War was reprinted: ‘There needs no Apology for
Republishing, at this Time, the following excellent little Treatise’, wrote
its editor. Anglo-Spanish tensions in  and – were also
brought to mind with the first publication of manuscript memoranda
recommending an attack on Buenos Aires and a West Indian offen-
sive. Elizabeth I was consistently hailed as the founder of the British
 Edmund Burke, First Letter on a Regicide Peace ( October ), in The Writings and Speeches of
Edmund Burke IX, ed. R. B. McDowell (Oxford, ), , .
 The British Sailor’s Discovery (London, ), , –, , reprinted in Old England For Ever, Or,
Spanish Cruelty Display’d (London, ); [Micaiah Towgood,] Spanish Cruelty and Injustice a
Justifiable Plea for a Vigorous War with Spain (London, ), –.

[John Reynolds,] Vox Coeli (London, ), sig. Ar–*r, –, –, reprinted in The Merchant’s
Complaint Against Spain (London, ), –, –, –. On Vox Coeli see Thomas Cogswell,
The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, – (Cambridge, ), .
 [Sir Thomas Roe,] A Speech Delivered in Parliament by a Person of Honour (London, ), originally
published as Sir Thomas Roe His Speech in Parliament (London, ); ibid., –, [Sir Benjamin
Rudyerd,] A Speech Concerning a West-India Association (London, ).

Sir John Boroughs, The Soveraignty of the British Seas (London, ), sig. Ar.
 A Proposal for Humbling Spain (London, ), –; [John Campbell (ed.),] Memoirs of the Duke of
Ripperda, nd edn (London, ), –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
Empire, for ‘it was owing, in a great Measure, to that Great and
Glorious Princess Queen Elizabeth . . . that Great-Britain, at present, is not
only so Rich a Kingdom, but so powerful at Sea, and Master of so
considerable a Number of Islands and such vast Tracts of Land in
America’; her supposed speech at Tilbury was revived, and the Armada
of  held before the public as a sign of lost valour.
The war had begun with patriot demands for a blue-water war in the
West Indies: ‘The Empire of the Seas is ours; we have been many Ages
in Possession of it; we have had many Sea-Fights, at a vast Effusion of
Blood, and Expences of Treasure, to preserve it; and preserve it we still
must, at all Risks and Events, if we have a Mind to preserve ourselves’.
The first victory of the conflict seemed to confirm this policy, as Admiral
Edward Vernon destroyed the fortifications of Porto Bello in November
, the news of which was greeted with a flood of poems, pageants and
medals that extolled the achievements of an admiral who had long been
an oppositional figure himself, and boosted the wider opposition to
Walpole by inflaming public opinion against his half-hearted policies
and indifference to Britain’s true interests. ‘Rule, Britannia’ was first
sung just as Vernon was preparing a second fleet in August . Such
blue-water triumphalism was effective mainly as a response to the
threats of territorial universal monarchy in Europe, and the passage of
the war was widely conceived in such terms, especially as the theatre of
conflict moved decisively from the Caribbean to central Europe. One
cynical commentator even suggested that the Anglo-Spanish War and
the war in Europe were both fomented by France, ‘the first with a view
to exhaust and impoverish the power and wealth of Britain; and the
 Reasons for Giving Encouragement to the Sea-Faring People of Great-Britain, in Times of Peace or War
(London, ), .
 Reasons for a War Against Spain (London, ; rptd ), , –; The British Sailor’s Discovery,
–. [Philip Morant,] The Tapestry Hangings of the House of Lords: Representing the Several Engagements
between the English and Spanish Fleets in the . . . Year MDLXXXVIII (London, ) presented
engravings of the Armada tapestries in the House of Lords at an expedient moment.
 C. Ferguson, A Letter Address’d to Every Honest Man in Britain (London, ), .

On the significance of the Vernon agitation, see Wilson, ‘Empire, Trade and Popular Politics’,
and Gerald Jordan and Nicholas Rogers, ‘Admirals as Heroes: Patriotism and Liberty in
Hanoverian England’, Journal of British Studies,  (), –.
 For graphic representations see, for example, Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum
. . . Political and Personal Satires, ed. Dorothy George,  vols. (London, –), , item  (in
which the Spanish Queen is seen proclaiming ‘France is my aid, the Universe my right’, and is
opposed by Admiral Vernon with the motto ‘Thus we chastise our Insolent oppressors’ on a
representation of the siege of Portobello), item , ‘The European Race, Heat IIId’, (in which
Fleury is dressed as ‘Universal Monarchy’) and item , ‘The European State Jockies Running
a Heat for the Ballance of Power’ (in which Fleury tries to catch smoke, inscribed ‘Universal
Monarchy’, in a sack).
 Empire and ideology in the Walpolean era 
latter, to subjugate the Austrian opponent, who had long blocked up the
passage between France and universal empire’.
The public agitations which preceded the war formed the context for
Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke’s Idea of a Patriot King () which,
like Thomson’s ‘Rule, Britannia’, was originally written for the private
circle of Frederick, Prince of Wales. Bolingbroke skilfully deployed the
shibboleths of mercantilist libertarianism to argue that Britain was
naturally a maritime and hence a commercial nation whose interests
would be best protected by the blue-water patriarchalism of a Patriot
King. Bolingbroke had elsewhere followed the Sallustian and Machia-
vellian narrative that located the origins of Roman greatness in the
acquisition of liberty after the expulsion of the Tarquins, but warned
that ‘[a] wise and brave people will neither be cozened, nor bullied out
of their liberty, but a wise and brave people may cease to be such; they
may degenerate’. In light of such a possibility, it would be necessary to
erect a constitution that could prevent such corruption by protecting
popular liberty, while bearing in mind the compulsions of mercantilist
political economy. This was the task that Bolingbroke set himself while
writing The Idea of a Patriot King. The Patriot King would hold the
balance between Britain’s political parties in order to prevent the
corruption of Parliament; Bolingbroke had argued throughout the early
s that such corruption would threaten liberty by denying popular
political participation, undermine property rights in pursuit of invasive
taxation and raise the spectre of permanent standing armies that might
be turned against the British people rather than their enemies.
The Patriot King’s external policies would be consonant with these
internal procedures by acknowledging the interests of Britain as an
island nation, and hence as a commercial republic, thereby providing
the foundations for prosperity and the survival of liberty. The sea was
Britain’s natural element and a navy its natural defence force. Conti-
nental commitments in Europe would only encourage the growth of a
standing army, while concentrating resources upon the navy would
render Britain ‘the guardian of liberty’ throughout Europe. The sources
 Richard Rolt, An Impartial Representation of the Conduct of the Several Powers of Europe, Engaged in the Late
General War,  vols. (London, –), , xiii; compare Impartial Representation, , –: ‘. . . while
the house of Austria flourished in a condition to oppose the designs of France, the ballance of
power was preserved, and the liberty of Europe remote from the destruction of an arbitrary and
universal monarchy’. The volume was dedicated to Admiral Vernon.

Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole, , –.
 Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, A Dissertation Upon Parties (–), in Bolingbroke: Political
Writings, ed. David Armitage (Cambridge, ), .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
of greatness would be commercial, not territorial: ‘To give ease and
encouragement to a manufactory at home, to assist and protect trade
abroad, to improve and keep in heart the national colonies, like so many
farms of the mother country, will be the principal and constant parts of
the attention of such a prince’. Bolingbroke concluded that if such a
prince could be found – or trained – nothing could be more inspiring
than ‘[a] king, in the temper of whose government, like that of Nerva,
things so seldom allied as empire and liberty are intimately mixed,
co-exist together inseparably, and constitute one real essence’. The
Patriot King’s reign would therefore reconcile the traditionally opposed
ideals of imperium and libertas, as the ruler of a free and prosperous people
whose colonies were farms of the mother-country and whose fleets ruled
the waves.
The allusion to ‘Rule, Britannia’ is not accidental, of course, because
Thomson may have had access to Bolingbroke’s manuscript through
the medium of Alexander Pope. All that separated the two works was
the news of naval victory in the Caribbean, which allowed Thomson to
buttress Bolingbroke’s confident counsel with the fact of amphibious
triumph. What they shared, of course, was the conception of the British
Empire as commercial, maritime and free – perhaps not explicitly
Protestant in the deistical Bolingbroke’s work, but certainly anti-
Catholic, and hence Protestant enough for mid-eighteenth-century pur-
poses. The Idea of a Patriot King went unscathed by the later attacks on
Bolingbroke’s heterodoxy, but it lost favour during the British Empire’s
late eighteenth-century, counter-revolutionary, authoritarian phase, as
did ‘Rule, Britannia’ – further evidence of the contingency of the
conception of the British Empire contained therein, and of the competi-
tion it faced later in the century. Bolingbroke’s solution to the dilemma
of empire and liberty was historically speculative and theoretically
unstable. It was speculative because it depended so heavily on the
unreliable reversionary interest of the heir to the throne, Frederick,
Prince of Wales; moreover, it was unstable because it required the
emergence of a monarch committed above all to the public good, who

Bolingbroke, The Idea of a Patriot King (, rev. ), in Bolingbroke: Political Writings, ed.
Armitage, , , : compare Tacitus, Agricola, . : ‘Nerva Caesar res olim dissociabiles
miscuit, principatum et libertatem’, crucially revised by Francis Bacon in the Advancement of Learning
as ‘divus Nerva res olim insociabiles miscuisset, imperium et libertatem,’ in Bacon, Francisci Baconis
. . . Opera Omnia, ed. John Blackbourne,  vols. (London, ), ,  (my emphases).
 James Sambrook, James Thomson –: A Life (Oxford, ), –.

Linda Colley, ‘The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation, –
’, Past and Present,  (Feb. ), ; David Armitage, ‘A Patriot for Whom? The Afterlives
of Bolingbroke’s Patriot King’, Journal of British Studies,  (), .
 Empire and ideology in the Walpolean era 
would hence be that republican oxymoron, a patriot king. Though the
authority of monarchs was never deemed decisively incompatible with a
neo-Roman conception of liberty, later British thinkers within the
republican and neo-Roman traditions found it increasingly difficult to
identify a patriot king or to endorse any particular monarch for their
Nerva-like combination of empire and liberty.
The crisis of Walpole’s ministry provided the occasion for other
philosophers to consider the relationship between a metropolitan state
and its colonies as a legitimate topic for moral and civil philosophy. For
example, the anonymous author of the Essay on Civil Government ()
apologised retrospectively for the prominence of colonial questions in
his treatise, but admitted that the work had been completed in –,
during the anti-Spanish and anti-Walpolean agitations. The Essay ar-
gued that the end of civil government was the protection of property,
and took a whiggish turn in allying property with liberty. More novel,
but characteristic of the period, was the expansive conception of prop-
erty, both national and personal, that the author expounded. The
right to real property, for instance, derived from first occupation, and
‘[a] long continuance of possession without interruption from the for-
mer proprietor, gives a just right to the present occupier’, as in the case
of the formerly ‘uninhabited and unpossessed places of America’. This
right to property also authorised national defence of colonial possessions
against any ‘prince [who] aims at universal monarchy’ (as the Spanish
Monarchy was repeatedly accused of planning to do before the War of
Jenkins’s Ear). Commerce as much as land required such defence, the
author continued, even if a true care for this crucial component of
national wealth was lacking under the premiership of Walpole: ‘In some
countries, the navy is a chief strength’ for such defence; such was the
case in Britain. The author thus provided blue-water Lockeanism as a
foundation for the British Empire, as a justification for war against
Spain, and as a stick with which to beat the Walpolean government. In
just such works lay the origins of the ‘Whig imperialism’ of the later
 Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge, ), –.

For an immediately contemporary discussion of ‘the Right of the Dominion of Lands in
America’, derived from the ius gentium, see Harman Verelst, ‘Some Observations on the Right of
the Crown of Great Britain to the North West Continent of America’ ( April ), PRO 
/, ff. –.

An Essay on Civil Government: In Two Parts: Part I. An Enquiry into the Ends of Government, and the Means of
Attaining Them. Part II. Of the Government and Commerce of England; with Reflections on Liberty and the
Method of Preserving the Present Constitution (c. –) (London, ), viii–ix, , , –, ;
compare [Alexander Campbell,] APETE-KOCIA or An Enquiry into the Original of Moral Virtue
(London, ), –, ‘Moral Virtue Promotes Trade and Aggrandizes a Nation’.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
eighteenth century – a vision of the British Empire as Protestant,
commercial, maritime and free founded on the sanctity of property as
much at home as abroad, in the metropolis and in the colonies.
Alongside the mercantilist and metrocentric strain in civil philosophy
in the s, there was also an anti-imperial and philocolonial strand.
This was represented most notably by the Hiberno-Scot Francis
Hutcheson’s A System of Moral Philosophy, which he composed between
 and , in the period before the anti-Spanish agitations but in the
aftermath of the Excise Crisis and the darkest days of Walpole’s pre-
miership. Hutcheson questioned the very foundations in rights of
dominium upon which the British Empire rested, and argued that ‘[n]o
person or society . . . can by mere occupation acquire such a right in a
vast tract of land quite beyond their power to cultivate’. This denial of
the juridical basis on which the British Empire in America was claimed
was in its own way as Lockean as that of the author of the Essay on Civil
Government, but took seriously Locke’s sufficiency condition for legitimate
possession. Hutcheson went even further, and proposed colonial inde-
pendence should the mother-country impose ‘severe and absolute’
power over its provinces. ‘The insisting on old claims and tacit conven-
tions’, he concluded, ‘to extend civil power over distant nations, and
form grand unwieldy empires, without regard to the obvious maxims of
humanity, has been one great source of human misery’.
Hutcheson’s critique of ‘grand unwieldy empires’ and of property
rights derived from first occupation formed the basis of David Hume’s
sceptical response to the conception of the British Empire that was
becoming normative during the Anglo-Spanish War. Hume’s Treatise on
Human Nature and the first two volumes of his Essays, Moral and Political
(–) appeared during the last years of the Walpolean regime and
the first of the Anglo-Spanish War as it bled into the War of the Austrian
 P. J. Marshall, ‘Parliament and Property Rights in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire,’ in
John Brewer and Susan Staves (eds.), Early Modern Conceptions of Property (London, ), –.
 Compare Guido Abbattista, Commercio, colonie e impero alla vigilia della Rivoluzione Americana: John
Campbell pubblicista e storico nell’Inghilterra del. sec. XVIII (Florence, ).
 W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson: His Life, Teaching and Position in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge,
), –, –.
 Gopal Sreenivasan, The Limits of Lockean Rights in Property (Oxford, ), –; compare
[William Wood,] A Survey of Trade (London, ), –.
 Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy (c. –),  vols. (Glasgow, ), , –, ,
–; Caroline Robbins, ‘‘‘When It Is That Colonies May Turn Independent’’: An Analysis of
the Environment and Politics of Francis Hutcheson (–)’, in Absolute Liberty: A Selection from
the Articles and Papers of Caroline Robbins, ed. Barbara Taft (Hamden, Conn., ), –, –;
David Fate Norton, ‘Francis Hutcheson in America’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century,
 (), –.
 Empire and ideology in the Walpolean era 
Succession. Hume judged foreign policy to be one of the major dividing
issues between ministry and opposition. ‘Unnecessary wars, scandalous
treaties, profusion of public treasure, oppressive taxes, every kind of
mal-administration is ascribed to [Walpole]’ by the opposition, while
the panegyrics on the minister show that ‘[t]he honour and interest of
the nation supported abroad, public credit maintained at home, perse-
cution restrained, faction subdued; the merit of all these blessings is
ascribed solely to the minister’. Yet in relation to foreign affairs in the
years immediately preceding the publication of the Essays, Hume’s
typology may be seen as deliberately muddying the waters, because it
was the opposition which had called for ‘[t]he honour and interest of the
nation [to be] supported abroad’, and the government which had stood
firm against ‘[u]nnecessary wars’, especially against the Spanish. Hume
referred even more pointedly to the battle over public opinion of the
period as an illustration of the matter likely to cause most surprise to a
foreigner on visiting Britain, the freedom of its press: ‘If the administra-
tion resolve upon war, it is affirmed, that, either wilfully or ignorantly,
they mistake the interests of the nation, and that peace, in the present
situation of affairs, is infinitely preferable. If the passion of the ministry
lie towards peace, our political writers breathe nothing but war and
devastation, and represent the pacific conduct of the government as
mean and pusillanimous’ – as had been done by the opposition during
the anti-Spanish agitations. The only hint of Hume’s partiality over the
question of the war came in ‘A Character of Sir Robert Walpole’, in
which he affirmed that ‘[d]uring his time trade has flourished, liberty
declined, and learning gone to ruin’. When asked to defend this
judgement, Hume wrote that trade had flourished ‘so far as the adminis-
tration has been pacific, and private property has been preserved
inviolate’, thereby implicitly aligning himself with those who had urged
conciliation with Spain.
In his early memoranda from the late s, in his Essays and in the
Treatise on Human Nature, Hume challenged the ideological foundations
of the anti-Walpolean, pro-imperial campaign. He questioned the basis

David Hume, ‘That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science’ (), in Hume, Essays, Moral,
Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, ), .

David Hume, ‘Of the Liberty of the Press’ (), in Hume, Essays, ed. Miller, . On ministerial
meanness and pusillanimity, compare [ Joseph Trapp,] The Ministerial Virtue: Or, Long-Suffering
Extolled in a Great Man (London, ), an ironic sermon on Walpole’s ability to ‘turn the other
cheek’.

David Hume, ‘A Character of Sir Robert Walpole’ (), in Hume, Essays, ed. Miller, .
 Robert C. Elliott, ‘Hume’s ‘‘Character of Sir Robert Walpole’’: Some Unnoticed Additions’,
Journal of English and Germanic Philology,  (), .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
of the whiggish view that ‘commerce can never flourish but in a free
government’, an argument which others had extended to the flourishing
of the arts and sciences. Hume’s answer was to adduce the example of
France, even as a counter to the evidence that trade has always estab-
lished itself in free governments from Tyre and Athens through to
modern Holland and England, the maritime powers whose rise had
largely invalidated Machiavellian maxims. Politeness arises in monar-
chies and courts, not in republics, and in particular the new ‘civilised
monarchies’ of Europe (so different from the ‘little disorderly principali-
ties of ’ that were Machiavelli’s concern) were great nurseries of
the civilised arts, France among them, because favour comes from the
sovereign, who must be impressed by the pleasant cultivation of any
supplicant. If commerce were less vibrant in an absolute monarchy,
Hume argued, it was for much the same reason: under such a mon-
archy, the pursuit of commerce would be not less secure (for all of the
reasons presented by Trenchard and Gordon in Cato’s Letters, for
example), but rather less honourable, because ‘[b]irth, titles, and place,
must be honoured above industry and riches’. Hume thus steered a
course away from a whiggish determinism that placed trade solely as the
child of liberty. ‘Multitudes of people, necessity, and liberty, have
begotten commerce in ’, but if those conditions were not
essential for its growth, nor would they be sufficient to foster polite arts.
Hume shared none of the misgivings of those who saw in commerce a
conduit of corruption; the target of his concern was extensive territorial
empire, not trade. Though he admitted that ‘no probable reason can be
assigned for the great power of the more ancient states above the
modern, but their want of commerce and luxury’, a return to the
ancient maxims of policy in the interests of reason of state rather than
the happiness of a state’s subjects would be impossible. To abolish
commerce would be both unnatural and demand violent restraints upon
the inclination of subjects: ‘Now, according to the most natural course of
things, industry and arts and trade encrease the power of the sovereign
as well as the happiness of the subjects’. Under these changed condi-
tions, only the unequivocal testimony of history could persuade anyone
that the government of Sparta was anything other than ‘a mere philo-
sophical whim or fiction’. So small a number of helots had been able to
 Hume, ‘Of Liberty and Despotism’ (), and ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and
Sciences’ (), in Hume, Essays, ed. Miller, , , –.
 Hume, ‘Of Liberty and Despotism’, in Hume, Essays, ed. Miller, .

Hume, ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, in Hume, Essays, ed. Miller, .
 Empire and ideology in the Walpolean era 
support so many Spartans only because there was no desire for luxury
items. Thereby, one part of the population had been condemned to
abject submission under the authoritarian rule of another. As Hume
pointed out in ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, this meant that a free
government could never have been maintained, because the demand
for luxury items was the first link in a chain which ultimately fastens
liberty. The demand for luxury stimulated commerce and industry; the
peasants who cultivate the land can become ‘rich and independent’
while the balance of property shifts also to the tradesmen and mer-
chants. By the Harringtonian mechanism of authority following land-
holding, the ‘middling rank of men’ are empowered and since such
men are ‘the best and firmest basis of public liberty’, that liberty is
strengthened.
Hume commended the ‘agreeable entertainment’ to be derived from
reading history, not least of which was ‘[t]o remark the rise, progress,
declension, and final extinction of the most flourishing of empires’. In
one of his early memoranda he signalled his own interest in the pathol-
ogy of empires in the comprehensive account he gave of the mechanism
by which empires naturally expand and die:
There seems to be a natural Course of Things, which brings on the Destruction
of great Empires. They push their Conquests till they come to barbarous
Nations, which stop their Progress, by the Difficulty of subsisting great Armies.
After that, the Nobility & considerable Men of the conquering Nation & best
Provinces withdraw gradually from the frontier Army, by reason of its Distance
from the Capital & barbarity of the Country, in which they quarter: They
forget the Use of War. Their barbarous Soldiers become their Masters. These
have no Law but their Sword, both from their bad Education, & from their
distance from the Sovereign to whom they bear no Affection. Hence Disorder,
Violence, Anarchy, & Tyranny, & Dissolution of Empire.
Elsewhere in his essays, Hume warned against the consequences of
imperial overstretch, both for the metropolis and the provinces. Free
governments in particular are ‘ruinous and oppressive’ to their prov-
inces, he argued, because such governments discriminate against their
new subjects and turn a blind eye to the egregious abuses of provincial
governors, as absolute monarchs do not: ‘What cruel tyrants were the
 over the world during the time of their commonwealth!’

Hume, ‘Of Commerce’, in Hume, Essays, ed. Miller, , , , .
 Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, in Hume, Essays, ed. Miller, .

David Hume, ‘Of the Study of History’ (), in Hume, Essays, ed. Miller, ; National Library
of Scotland MS , item , f. , printed in ‘Hume’s Early Memoranda, –: The
Complete Text’, ed. Ernest Campbell Mossner, Journal of the History of Ideas,  (), .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
Empire, like commerce, was a self-regulating system, however – once it
had reached its point of furthest extension, it must inevitably contract
and collapse.
Hume also argued in the Treatise that first discovery could not pro-
vide a legitimate justification for dominion over a whole continent.
To take possession of the part did not create property in the whole.
After all, what would this imply if an invader were to land on one of the
British Isles, and claim it? ‘The empire of Great Britain seems to draw
along with it the dominion of the Orkneys, the Hebrides, the isle of Man,
and the isle of Wight; but the authority over those lesser islands does not
naturally imply any title to Great Britain’. This effectively only de-
prived the British colonists of their claims to dominium in the Americas,
by denying that their first discoveries could provide solid claims for
current occupation. Hume’s strictly archipelagic usage of the term
‘empire of Great Britain’ also implicitly questioned the emergent pan-
Atlantic concept of the British Empire by harking back to sixteenth-
century conceptions of the British monarchy as a strictly contiguous
empire, and by avoiding the concept of the British Empire as a com-
mercial, or maritime, entity.
Hume’s affront to the more extensive concept of the British Empire
was not unparalleled at the time. The security demands of the Anglo-
Spanish War led Walpole’s chief adviser on colonial policy (and, ear-
lier, translator of Caesar’s Commentaries), Martin Bladen, to propose a
common defence structure for the colonies, along with a ‘Plantation
Parliament’: ‘That we might be better secured, of their Dependance,
and they, better intitled, to our Protection’, though all under the
authority of the Crown, ‘for the general protection and advantage of
the British Empire in America’ in . This was, again, a transatlan-
tic, not a pan-Atlantic conception. Meanwhile, and delving even fur-
ther back into the earliest conceptions of Britain’s empire, the ‘Brutan’
history of the origins of Britain was still being played out poetically by

Hume, ‘That Politics May be Reduced to a Science’ (), in Hume, Essays, ed. Miller, –.
 Compare Verelst, ‘Some Observations on the Right of the Crown of Great Britain . . .,’ PRO 
/, f. v: ‘this Right arising from the first discovery is the first and fundamental Right of all
European Nations, as to their Claim of Lands in America’.

Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Selby-Bigge and Nidditch, , , note; compare Hume to
William Strahan,  March , in The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig,  vols. (Oxford,
), , –.
 Martin Bladen, ‘Reasons for Appointing a Captain General for the Continent of North
America’ ( December ), in Jack P. Greene, ‘Martin Bladen’s Blueprint for Colonial
Union’, William and Mary Quarterly, rd ser.,  (), , ; Julius Caesar, Commentaries, trans.
Martin Bladen (London, ).
 Empire and ideology in the Walpolean era 
the aesthetic theorist Hildebrand Jacob in Brutus the Trojan; Founder of the
British Empire (). In this poem, the British Empire was the Imperium
Britannicum, the monarchy of Great Britain bequeathed by Brutus to his
sons. It was therefore strictly archipelagic in extent, and did not even
encompass Ireland, let alone the transatlantic colonies. In , Alex-
ander Pope was also planning an epic on the theme of Brutus’s civilis-
ing mission to conquer Britain, which would have been not only an
allegory of the British deliverance from tyrannous subjection – Brutus
lands at Torbay, as had William III in  – but also a recommenda-
tion of colonisation as improvement ‘without the guilt of a conquest’.
Hume’s sceptical Whiggism led him to doubt that there was any
historical link between the peculiar constitutional and legal character
of the British state and the success of its overseas trade, and generated a
subtle but sweeping critique of the whole enterprise of empire up to the
mid-eighteenth century, and with it, of the emergent conception of the
British Empire itself. He questioned the very juridical basis upon which
the English, the Scots and hence the British after  based their
territorial claims, especially in the supposedly ‘waste’ lands of North
America. He challenged the very denotation of the term ‘British Em-
pire’, and returned it to a solely archipelagic construction which denied
the incorporation or even the association of the other territories, prov-
inces, colonies and factories that contemporaries increasingly en-
compassed within the term. He would even have denied the very
possibility of such an entity’s possessing any unitary character, ideology
or identity, because even Britain itself lacked the necessary ‘moral’
foundations he thought essential to any definition of national charac-
ter. If this were true of post-Union Britain, then not only was the
Anglo-British state still something less than a nation, but any wider
conception of a British Empire beyond the island of Britain would have
an even weaker claim to a settled or common identity. Yet if Hume
feared for the ascendancy of the ‘British Empire’, he need not have
worried. The classic conception of the British Atlantic Empire as Prot-
estant, commercial, maritime and free flourished for little more than
three decades, from the mid-s (when Hume began his philosophi-

Hildebrand Jacob, Brutus the Trojan; Founder of the British Empire (London, ).
 Pope, ‘Brutus’ (c. ), BL MS Eg. , ff. r–v; synopsis paraphrased in Owen Ruffhead, The
Life of Alexander Pope, Esq. (London, ), , ,  (footnote). On ‘Brutus’, see Friedrich Brie,
‘Pope’s Brutus’, Anglia,  (), –; Donald J. Torchiana, ‘Brutus: Pope’s Last Hero’, in
Maynard Mack (ed.), Essential Articles for the Study of Alexander Pope (Hamden, Conn., ), –;
Miriam Leranbaum, Alexander Pope’s ‘Opus Magnum’ – (Oxford, ), –.

Hume, ‘Of National Characters’ (), in Hume, Essays, .
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
cal career) to the mid-s, when the Atlantic Empire began to un-
ravel in the aftermath of the Seven Years War. Indeed, Hume rejoiced
at its dissolution even in his dying days.
Notwithstanding Hume’s scepticism, the ideological redefinition of
the British Empire which took place in the late Walpolean era provided
an enduring conception of that empire that was not confined to British
observers. Hume might have appreciated the fact that one of the most
resilient accounts of that concept came from Bordelais magistrate
Charles Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, in the twenty-seventh chap-
ter of Book  of Esprit des Lois (). This work was also, in part,
the result of the War of Jenkins’s Ear, because British embargoes on
French wine during the War of the Austrian Succession had forced the
vigneron to retreat to his study, and complete his treatise. Montes-
quieu argued that the compulsions diagnosed by Machiavelli were no
longer applicable to modern politics: ‘One has begun to be cured of
Machiavellianism (machiavélisme), and one will continue to be cured.’
Princes had gradually abandoned this machiavélisme as they realised that
only moderation brings prosperity, and that commerce was now the
sole source of such prosperity. Trade, for Montesquieu, not only ren-
dered Machiavelli’s maxims outdated; it made his principles harmless.
Britain was the only nation in Europe whose constitution was construc-
ted to promote liberty – just as Rome was built for expansion, Sparta
for war, Israel for religion, Marseilles for trade, China for natural
tranquillity, and Rhodes for navigation. In particular, the separation of
powers between the executive and the legislative branches of govern-
ment prevented any toppling over into arbitrary power, whether mon-
archical or oligarchical, and the citizens rested secure in the knowledge
that they had nothing to fear from one another. Britain retained its
liberty at home by constitutional separation, while it maintained its
integrity abroad by eschewing overseas conquest, which would weaken
it, by planting colonies ‘to extend its commerce more than its domina-
tion’, and by being defended by a navy, not by a standing army. ‘As
one likes to establish elsewhere what is established at home’, Montes-

Hume to Sir Gilbert Elliot of Minto,  July ; Hume to William Strahan,  October ;
Hume to Strahan,  March ; Hume to Strahan,  October ; Hume to Strahan, 
November , in Greig (ed.), Letters of David Hume, , , , , –, –; J. G. A.
Pocock, ‘Hume and the American Revolution: The Dying Thoughts of a North Briton’, in Virtue,
Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cam-
bridge, ), –.

Charles Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (), trans. Anne Cohler, Basia
Miller and Harold Stone (Cambridge, ), –.

Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Biography (Oxford, ), , .
 Empire and ideology in the Walpolean era 
quieu continued, ‘it would give the form of its government to the
people of its colonies’:
The dominant nation, inhabiting a big island and being in possession of a great
commerce, would have all sorts of facilities for forces upon the seas; and as the
preservation of its liberty would require it to have neither strongholds, nor
fortresses, nor land armies, it would need an army on the sea to protect itself
from invasions; and its navy would be superior to that of all other powers,
which, needing to employ their finances for a land war, would no longer have
enough for a sea war.
A naval empire has always given the peoples who have possessed it a natural
pride, because, feeling themselves able to insult others everywhere, they believe
that their power is as boundless as the ocean.
If its terrain were fertile, then the people would be self-sufficient, not
ambitious for conquest, and hence secure in the liberty their constitu-
tion guaranteed for them. ‘This is the people’, he concluded, ‘who have
best known how to take advantage of these three great things at the same
time: religion, commerce, and liberty’. Liberty would foster com-
merce, and Britain could become everything that the aspirant universal
monarchies of seventeenth-century Europe were not, and could not be –
an empire for liberty.

The origins, the transferability and the contestability of the conception

of the British Empire as Protestant, commercial, maritime and free are
what mark it as an ideology – rather than as an identity. Only by
studying it as an ideology is it possible to understand why it failed to
provide an enduring and stable identity. This fact seems to have been
realised, in two rather different ways, by John Adams, in the context of
the American controversy of the s, and by G. W. F. Hegel a
generation after American Independence. As Adams famously pointed
out in , ‘the terms ‘‘British Empire’’ are not the language of the
common law, but the language of newspapers and political pamphlets’.
The possessions of the British Crown could not be an empire, said
Adams, because that term smacked both of Imperial Rome and of the
civil law; nor could they be strictly called ‘British’, because most of
the colonies in North America had been planted long before the Treaty
of Union created the United Kingdom of Great Britain in .
 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws,  (. ), – (. ), – (. ); John Robertson,
‘Universal Monarchy and the Liberties of Europe: David Hume’s Critique of an English Whig
Doctrine,’ in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse in Early Modern
Britain (Cambridge, ), –.
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
He thereby threw down a challenge to the ideological origins of the
British Empire as they had appeared in the s and s, a chal-
lenge almost as devastating as Hume’s, but more direct. The concept
of the British Empire was a fiction, and not even a legal fiction at that.
The pamphlets in which the language of the ‘British Empire’ had first
appeared were more often provincial than metropolitan originally, but
during the Seven Years War the concept had been more widely dis-
seminated, even if the prevailing conceptions of that empire changed
and proliferated.
Hegel likewise understood the ideology of the British Empire not as a
concept but as a conception. In a crucial passage of his introductory
lectures on the philosophy of world history, Hegel argued that the true
history of a nation consists in the process whereby the Geist’s conception
of itself is realised in the various, interconnected activities of that nation,
such as the state, religion, art, justice and foreign affairs. All of these
spheres of life were not connected in all nations, he stated (citing China
and India), but where they were, the informing activity of the Geist could
be felt in every area. Where these spheres were completely integrated,
the self-consciousness of the nation would be realised in the lives of the
members of the state. The nation’s history would nourish that self-
consciousness, just as that self-consciousness would be the realisation of
the Geist itself. To illustrate this central point, Hegel turned to ‘England’
for evidence. ‘If he is asked’, Hegel reported, ‘any Englishman will say of
himself and his fellow citizens that it is they who rule the East Indies and
the oceans of the world, who dominate world trade, who have a
parliament and trial by jury, etc. It is deeds such as these which give the
nation its sense of self-esteem’ (Selbstgefühl).
Hegel’s illustration is remarkable for so accurately capturing what
had been a dominant, but not unchallenged, British conception of
empire in the long eighteenth century: as derived from Britain’s his-
toric achievements as a maritime power, as a commercial economy,
and as a parliamentary democracy with a common-law tradition. He-
gel omitted only Protestantism from his account of British national
self-consciousness, but this was perhaps less a ‘deed’ expressive of the
British Geist than it was a direct expression of the informing Geist
 [Adams and Leonard,] Novanglus and Massachusettensis, , .

‘Frägt man einen Engländer, so wird jeder von sich und seinen Mitbürgen sagen, sie seien die,
die Ostindien und das Weltmeer beherrschen, den Welthandel besitzen, Parlament und Ges-
chworenengerichte haben usf. Diese Taten machen das Selbstgefühl des Volkes aus’: G. W. F.
Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg, ), ; Hegel,
Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, ), –.
 Empire and ideology in the Walpolean era 
itself. This conception of ‘English’ identity could be traced back in its
classic form to the anti-Walpolean ideology of the s and early
s, when it became attached for the first time to a concept of the
British Empire as a single pan-Atlantic community. It was therefore the
dominant conception during the formative years of Samuel Johnson,
William Pitt and Edmund Burke and hence of the generation of politi-
cians and writers around the British Atlantic world who would debate,
defend, decry and administer the British Empire during the Seven
Years War, the aftermath of the Peace of Paris and through the Ameri-
can Revolution.
This conception found new leases of life in nineteenth-century arenas
as varied as the cult of Nelson and the evangelical missionary move-
ment. The expansion of British trade seemed to confirm Britain’s
commercial destiny, especially since this was bolstered by the indispens-
able and universally acknowledged supremacy of the Royal Navy on the
sea-routes of the world after : ‘the magnitude and splendour of the
resources which have been thus developed cannot fail to fill the mind of
every British subject with exultation and gratitude to the Supreme Being
for the numerous blessings conferred on this highly favoured nation’.
The success of the coincident campaigns for Parliamentary reform and
the abolition of slavery within the Empire merely confirmed what
Britons had known about themselves at least since : that they were
the greatest defenders of liberty within Europe, and throughout the
wider British imperial world. Even rule over India came gradually to
be cast as benign, progressive tutelage expressive of Britain’s historically
unique combination of empire and liberty – now increasingly cast as
liberalism, especially in the imperial context. Under these conditions,
the conception of the British Empire fostered the imperial amnesia
diagnosed by J. R. Seeley. The various British Empires of the nineteenth
 Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, ed. Hoffmeister, –.

Jordan and Rogers, ‘Admirals as Heroes’, –; Andrew Porter, ‘‘‘Cultural Imperialism’’ and
Protestant Missionary Enterprise, –’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 
(), –.
 Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Wealth, Power, and Resources of the British Empire, In Every Quarter
of the World, Including the East Indies, nd edn (London, ), .
 Seymour Drescher, ‘Cart Whip and Billy Roller: Antislavery and Reform Symbolism in
Industrializing Britain’, Journal of Social History,  (), –; Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of
Colonial Slavery – (London, ), –; Colley, Britons, –.

Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, The New Cambridge History of India, :  (Cambridge, ),
ch. ; Bhikhu Parekh, ‘Liberalism and Colonialism: A Critique of Locke and Mill’, in J. P.
Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh (eds.), The Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge,
and Power (London, ), –; Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-
Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, ).
 The ideological origins of the British Empire
century were multiethnic and multidenominational, polyglot and poly-
morphous, and defied capture within any single definition. However,
the conception of the British Empire as Protestant, commercial, mari-
time and free lingered, vestigially but reassuringly. As Hegel perhaps
recognised, more than many recent historians, this conception of the
British Empire was a classic example of an identity that was originally an
ideology.
 Bibliography

           
         
Bodleian Library, Oxford
MS Locke, c. .
MS Tanner , ‘A Justification for Planting in Virginia’ (c. –), f. .

British Library, London

Add. MS : John Mason, ‘Instrumentorum Quorundam Authenticorum
Exemplaria Aliquot . . . Ex quibus planum fit . . . Reges Scociæ in fide
fuisse Regum Anglie, regnumque Scocie, Reges Anglie tanquam superior-
es dicti regni Dominos, per sacramentorum fidelititatis [sic] agnovisse’
().
Add. MS : [Horatio Walpole,] ‘Mr Walpole’s Apology’, ff. –.
Add. MS : Sir Philip Meadows, ‘Observations Concerning the Dominion
and Sovereignty of the Seas’ (), ff. –.
Add. MS : Sir Philip Meadows, ‘Reflections upon a Passage in Sr William
Temple’s Memoirs Relating to our Right of Dominion in the British Seas’
(), ff. –.
Add. MS : Malet Collection, State Papers and Historical Documents,
–May : James Howell to Council of State, f. .
Add. MS : John Dee, ‘Brytanici Imperii Limites’ ( July ).
Add. MS : Sir William Petty, ‘A Treatise of Navall Philosophy in Three
Parts’, ff. –.
Add. MS : Sir William Petty, [‘Dominion of the Sea’] (c. ), ff. –.
Add MS : Sir William Petty, ‘Ten Tooles for Making ye Crowne & State
of England More Powerfull Then Any Other in Europe’ (), f. .
Add. MS : Sir William Petty, ‘Of a Mare Clausum’, ff. –.
Add. MS : Sir William Petty, ‘A Probleme’ (), f. .
Add. MS : Sir William Petty, ‘Of ye Mare Clausum’ (), f. .


 Bibliography
Add. MS : Sir William Petty, ‘Of a Mare Clausum’ (), f. .
Cotton MS Titus . : ‘Certeyn Notes and Observations Touching the Deduc-
ing and Planting of Colonies’ (c. –), ff. –.
Eg. : Alexander Pope, ‘Brutus’, ff. r–v.
Harl. MS : [Sir Thomas Smith,] ‘A Collection of Certain Reasons to Prove
the Queen Majesty’s Right to Have the Restitution of Calais’ ( April
), ff. –.
Harl. MS : John Dee, ‘HAKKASOJQASIA BQESSAMIJG’ (), ff. –.
Harl. MS : William Ryley, Sr., ‘The Soveraigntie of the English Seas
Vindicated and Proved, by Some Few Records . . . Remayning in the
Tower of London’ (c. ), ff. –.
Lansdowne : [Sir Julius Caesar,] ‘Notes Out of a Book Called Mare
Liberum, sive De Jure Quod Batavis Competit ad Indicana Commercia
Dissertatio’ (c. ), ff. –.
Lansdowne : Sir William Petty, ‘Dominion of the Sea’, ff. –.
Royal MS . . : Richard Hakluyt, ‘Analysis, seu resolutio perpetua in octo
libros Politicorum Aristotelis’.
Sloane MS : Richard Hakluyt, ‘Analysis, seu resolutio perpetua in octo
libros Politicorum Aristotelis’.

Inner Temple Library, London

MS : Hugo Grotius, trans. Richard Hakluyt, ‘The Free Sea or A Disputa-
tion Concerning the Right wch ye Hollanders Ought to Have to the Indian
Marchandize for Trading’ (post ).

National Archives of Scotland (formerly Scottish Record Office), Edinburgh

 //: Leven and Melville Muniments, ‘Memoriall in behalf of the
Scots Company trading to Africa and the Indies’.
 //: Dalhousie Muniments, ‘Memoriall in behalf of the Scots Com-
pany trading to Africa and the Indies’.

National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh

MS : Dunlop Papers.
MS , item : David Hume, ‘Early Memoranda, –’.
MS Adv. . . : Company of Scotland Papers.

Public Record Office, Kew

///: [John Locke, et al.,] ‘The Constitutions of Carolina’ ( July
).
 /: [Richard Hakluyt,] ‘Whither an Englishman may trade into the West
Indies with certain answers to the Popes Bull’ (c. –), f. .
 Bibliography 
 /: [John White,] ‘General Observations for ye Plantation of New England’
(?), ff. –.
 /: [Sir William Keith,] ‘A Short Discourse on the Present State of the
Colonies in America’ (November ), ff. –.
 /: Harman Verelst, ‘Some Observations on the Right of the Crown of
Great Britain to the North West Continent of America’ ( April ), ff.
–.
 /: Board of Trade Journals, .

        
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impériale en France’, Revue Historique,  (), –, –.
 Index

abolitionist movement,  Austrian Succession, War of (-), –

Act in Restraint of Appeals (), , 
Act of Union () (Anglo-Scottish), , , Bacon, Francis, , 
, , , – ‘On Plantations’, 
Adams, John, , – Bale, John, 
Africa,  barbarism
agriculture, as means of colonisation, –, perception of, , –, , 
,  see also native inhabitants
Alexander VI, Pope, bull (), , , ,  Barbon, Nicholas, , , , 
Amboyna massacre (),  Beacon, Richard, , –
American colonies Benson, George, 
Board of Trade report (), – Bible
compared with Ireland,  and commonality of earth and sea, –,
proposals for union, ,  
relationship to Great Britain, ,  and precedents for colonisation, –, –
American Revolution, , , –,  Blackstone, William, , 
Americas Bladen, Martin, 
Spanish claim to, , , ,  Board of Trade (English), 
Spanish evangelical success in, , – report on ‘Plantations on the Continent of
Anglo-Dutch rivalry, – America’ (), –
and mare clausum theories, , ,  Bodrugan, Nicholas, , , , 
Anglo-Dutch Wars, ,  Bolingbroke, Henry St John, Viscount, Idea of
Anglo-Saxon empire, – a Patriot King (), , –
Anglo-Scottish debate (s), , –, – Boroughs, Sir John, , 
Annesley, Francis, colonial models, –,  Brewster, Francis, 
anti-Catholicism, , ,  Britain, term derived from mythical king
Purchas’s polemical, –, – Brutus, , 
apocalypticism, –,  Britannia, earliest representation, 
Aquinas, St Thomas,  British Commonwealth, 
Aristotle, Hakluyt’s ‘Analysis’ of Politics, –, British Empire, –
– association of liberty with free trade, –
armies challenged by Hume, –
standing, , –,  chronological origins, –
as threat to liberty, ,  as commercial, maritime and free, , ,
Arthur, King, pan-Britannic monarchy, –, , –, 
 concept of, –, –, –
Ashley, John,  effect on metropolis, –
Assyrian Empire,  as enlargement of English state, , –,
Athelstan, King (-), , ,  
Athens, republican model, ,  extent (s), , 
Augustine, St,  federative nature of, 


 Index 
ideological origins of, –, , –, , Charles I, King, , , 
– Charles V of Spain, Holy Roman Emperor, 
institutional weakness of,  Child, Sir Josiah, , , 
as maritime, , , –, ,  Christianity
nature of connection of colonies and and claim to land and sovereignty, 
metropolis, – and primacy of Europe, 
nineteenth-century conception of, –, see also Bible; Catholicism; Protestantism
– Church of England, , 
as pan-Atlantic, , , –,  Churchill, Winston, , 
as Protestant, , , , –,  Cicero
provincial concept of, – conception of good life, 
Spenser’s conception of, –, , ,  conception of patriotism, , 
as transatlantic, , – on private property, , 
Tudor concept of, –, – reconciliation of libertas and imperium, 
under Brutus (mythical), , , , – civilisation
use of term,  mission to spread, , , , –, 
see also England; Great Britain as precondition for Christian salvation, 
British Empire, ‘First’, ,  civility, assumption of superiority of, , –
fragility of, , – classical literature, knowledge of, , , 
British Empire, ‘Second’, , ,  Clothworkers’ Company, 
continuities with First British Empire,  Cobden, Richard, 
imperial history as exclusive to, – Colon, Bartolomé, 
Britons, term used in Ulster plantations, –, colonia, use of term, , 
 colonial council, Petty’s proposed, 
Bruni, Leonardo,  colonial elites
Brutus of Troy, mythical British king, , demand for autonomy, 
–, ,  perception of ‘empire’, , –
in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, – colonial rule
Bryant, Arthur,  administrative reforms (s), 
Burke, Edmund, –,  nature of, –, , , –
Butler, Samuel,  Petty’s concept of, –
Butterfield, Herbert,  colonialism, internal, , , –, –
colonies
Cabot, John and Sebastian,  claims to independence, 
Calais, English claim to,  economic benefits of, , 
Calvinism, and notion of elect nation, – nature of connection with metropolis,
Caribbean,  –
Cromwell’s Western Design against, , for trade or empire, –
 colonisation
and pan-Atlantic British Empire,  of conquered countries, 
see also West Indies economic argument for (Hakluyt), –
Carolina, Constitutions of (),  humanist conception of, –
Carthage, colonial model, ,  militarism versus gradualism, –
Cary, John, Essay on the State of England (), as mission to civilise, , , , , –
– Roman model of, –, –
Câteau-Cambrésis, Treaty of,  see also dominium; property rights
Catholic church, evangelical success in Columbus, Christopher, 
Americas, , – commerce see trade
Catholicism Commonwealth (–), 
and theories of empire,  disillusionment with, –
universalist claims of, , – and dominion over the seas, –
Cato’s Letters (-), ,  foreign policy of Rump Parliament (),
Cattle Acts ( and ), ,  , , –
Cecil, William, ,  influence of Machiavelli and Sallust on,
Chamberlen, Hugh,  –
 Index
Company of Scotland,  and fishing rights, 
Darien Scheme, – hegemonic ambitions, 
composite monarchies, – and mare liberum policy, –
early-modern states as, ,  maritime expansion, , 
Stuart, , ,  rivalry with England, –, , 
confederacy, as means of expansion, , 
confederations, unequal, , – earth, in common for all men, –, –, 
conquest see military conquest East India Company (Dutch), , 
consent, to private property rights, –,  East India Company (English), , , ,
Constantine, Emperor, , ,  –
context, and concept, – East Indies
Copland, Patrick,  Anglo-Dutch relations in, , –
cosmography, Hakluyt the elder’s interest in, as colonies for trade, 
– Eden, Richard, , 
Cox, Richard,  Edgar I, King (-), , , 
Crakanthorpe, Richard,  maritime dominium, , 
Crashaw, William,  education, moral and political, , 
Crawley, Sir Edward,  Edward I, King, 
Croft, Sir James,  Edward VI, King, , –, 
Cromwell, Oliver,  Elder, John, , , 
as Protector, – elect nation, concept of, –, 
Cromwell, Thomas,  Elizabeth I, Queen, 
Crouch, Nathaniel, The English Empire in maritime jurisdiction, , 
America (),  and origins of British Empire, –, , –
Crown Elizabethan Settlement (–), , , 
imperium over foreshore, – empire
property rights, ,  concept of Great Britain as, –, –
rights of English,  defined, 
crowns, imperial (closed), ,  economic redefinition of, , 
effect of state on, –, –
Daniel, Samuel,  incompatible with liberty, –, , 
Darien Scheme, , – language and symbolism of, 
Davenant, Charles, , , ,  novelty of British maritime, –
Davies, Sir John,  Protestant theories of, –
Dee, John reconciled with liberty, –, –
conception of British Empire (s), , , Roman legacy of imperium, –
 territorial definition of, , –
maritime dimensions of empire, –,  see also British Empire; imperium; Roman
Denmark, fishing rights,  Empire
Digges, Thomas, dominium over nature’s empire-building, and state-formation, –
commons, ,  empires, fate of classical, , 
Dobbs, Arthur, – England
dominium as centre of empire, , , 
attempts to combine with imperium, –, claim to overlordship of Ireland, , 
 as composite monarchy, , , 
claims to,  defined as maritime nation, –
divided,  emergent linguistic nationalism, 
and imperium, –, – Galfridian history of, –, , 
over nature’s commons, ,  identified as trading nation with free
over territorial waters,  government, –
Donne, John,  maritime jurisdiction, 
Downame, George,  Tudor commitment to freedom of seas,
Drake, Francis, ,  –
Dutch Republic, , , – see also British Empire; Great Britain; Three
claims to navigation rights,  Kingdoms
 Index 
Essay on Civil Government (anon. ), – concept of empire of, –, –, –,
ethnology, ,  –
Europe Cromwellian union of, 
Britain’s place in (Purchas), – earliest use of term, , 
hegemonic ambitions in, ,  growth of nationalism, –
and maritime jurisdictions, ,  Jacobean foreign policy, 
nature of nation-states,  Stuart composite monarchy, , , 
states and empires, –,  territorial waters, 
expansion see also British Empire; England; Scotland;
compulsions to, , ,  Three Kingdoms
Machiavelli’s analysis of, – Greater Britain, concept of, –
need for constitutional safeguards, – greatness
exploration, of new worlds, ,  from commerce, –, 
greater good than stability, 
Filmer, Sir Robert,  primacy of (Machiavelli), , –
fishing rights,  and republican liberty, –, 
confederated British,  Greenwich Hospital, Thornhill’s paintings,
Scots claims to, , ,  –
Fletcher, Andrew, , – Grotius, Hugo
Florence, ,  Anglo-Dutch rivalry and, –
foreign policy, and political opposition,  Mare Liberum (), –
foreshore, jurisdiction over, , – Scottish response to, –
mare clausum concept derived from,  Selden’s response, –, 
Foxe, John, Acts and Monuments, – Gunpowder Plot (), 
France, , , , 
alliance with Scotland, ,  Haddon, Walter, 
Bourbon universal monarchy, , , , Hakluyt, Richard (the elder), –
 Hakluyt, Richard (the younger), , –, 
claim to independent imperium, –,  ‘Analysis . . .’ of Aristotle’s Politics, –, –
as composite state, ,  Anglo-centric view, , , , –
hegemonic ambitions, , , , – assumption of mare liberum, –
Frederick, Prince of Wales, ,  classical influences on, , , 
Freeman, E.A.,  compared with Purchas, –
Freitas, Seraphim de, ,  ‘Discourse of Western Planting’, –, –
Froude, J.A., on Hakluyt, ,  and justification of property rights, , 
Principall Navigations (-), , , ,
Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum –
Britanniae (c.), –, ,  scant reference to religion, , –
geography, sixteenth-century and classical, translation of Grotius’s Mare Liberum, 
 Halifax, George Savile, Marquis of, 
Georgia, settlement, ,  Hampden, John, Ship-Money case, –
Gerald of Wales,  Harrington, James, , 
Geraldine rebellion (-),  The Commonwealth of Oceana (), –
German republics, ,  Harvey, Gabriel, 
Germany, empire,  Hayman, Robert, 
Gilbert, Sir Humphrey,  Hegel, G.W.F., , 
Glorious Revolution (), ,  Henrisoun, James, , , 
unequal effects of, ,  Henry VII, King, 
‘God Save the King’, ,  Henry VIII, King
good life, classical conception of, ,  attempts at dynastic union with Scotland,
Gordon, Thomas, ,  , –
Gowrie, Earl of, plot against James VI,  claim to imperial status, –, , 
Grand Remonstrance (),  Declaration: . . . [on] Warre with the Scottis
Gray, Robert,  (), –, , 
Great Britain invasion of Scotland, –
 Index
Herbert, Sir William,  imperium domi, 
historiography, – imperium militiae, 
of British sea-power, – India, place in British Empire, –, –, 
of English religion,  Ireland, , , 
Imperial history as subfield,  ambiguous status of, –, –, 
‘New British History’, , – autonomous Parliament, , , , 
Seeley’s conflation of state and empire, colonial status of, , –, , –, ,
– –
separation of Imperial and national history, contribution to British Empire, –
–, , – Cromwellian pacification of, 
Whig interpretations, –, ,  discriminatory trade laws against, –, 
Hobbes, Thomas, combination of dominium economic expansion, –, 
and imperium, –,  options for union, , –
Hobson, J.A., history of empire, , – Petty’s proposals for, –, –
Holland, commerce in,  place in pan-Atlantic British Empire,
Holy Roman Empire, , ,  –
Howell, James,  proposed agricultural colonisation of, –
humanism Protestant New English settlers in, , 
and conception of colonisation, – as province of composite state, 
and use of classical models, –,  and Spenser’s concept of British Empire,
Hume, David, –, , – –
Essays, Moral and Political, –, – Ulster plantations, , –
opposition to empire, – Union with Great Britain (–), 
Treatise of Human Nature (–), –, unionism in, –
–,  Williamite Wars (–), 
Hutcheson, Francis, A System of Moral Philosophy Irish
(c.–),  as barbarians, , , 
as colonists, , 
identity Irish Kingship Act (), , 
concept of, ,  Isidore of Seville, 
conception of national, – Italian city-states, 
and ideology, –, – Italy, empire, 
ideology
as contestable world-view, –,  Jacob, Hildebrand, Brutus the Trojan (), 
fostered by history, – Jacobite War (), 
and identity, –, – Jamaica, –
of maritime history, – James III, King of Scotland, –
as model of society,  James IV, King of Scotland, 
and political theory,  James VI and I, King, 
Imperial Federation movement (s),  and Anglo-Scottish union, , –, 
imperium colonial policy in Ireland, –, –
attempts to combine with dominium, –, foreign policy, 
 policy of mare clausum, –
and claim to universalism,  Jefferson, Thomas, 
and claims to dominium (property), , –, Jenkins’s Ear, War of (-), , –,
– –, –
as concept of sovereignty, –,  Jewel, John, 
federal conception of, – Johnson, Samuel, 
as incompatible with liberty, –, , 
independent claims to, – Keith, Sir William, –, 
maritime, , – Kennett, White, , 
original sense, – kingdoms
reconciled with liberty, –, ,  defined, 
unitary,  see also composite monarchies; multiple
see also empire kingdoms
 Index 
Knox, Andrew, bishop of the Isles, ,  Selden’s, –, –, 
theories of, –
la Court, Pieter de,  mare liberum, , –, , –
La Popelinière, Lancelot de,  maritime empire
Lamb, William, –,  and commercial greatness, –
Las Casas, Bartolomé de,  exceptionalism of British, , –
Lawrence, Richard, –,  nature of Tudor empire of Great Britain,
Left (political), and history of empire, – –, 
Lewis, Isle of,  preferred to military, , 
liberalism,  see also navies
liberty, ,  maritime expansion, , –
British perceptions of,  maritime supremacy, , , 
and compulsions of expansion, , – blue-water policy, , –
and concept of Patriot King, – Martyr, Peter, Decades of the New World, ,
incompatible with empire, –, ,  
and nature of British constitution, – Marvell, Andrew, 
as precondition for commerce, – Marx, Karl, 
as promotion of common good, ,  Mary I, Queen, 
reconciled with empire, –, –, , Mary, Queen of Scots, , , 
 Massachusetts, land-claims in, 
and republican greatness, –, – Maurice, Sir William, Welsh MP, 
and royal prerogative,  Maxwell, Henry, 
and rule of law,  Essay upon an Union of Ireland with England,
as security of property, –,  –
Lilburne, John,  Meadows, Sir Philip, ‘Observations
literature Concerning the Dominion and
classical, – Sovereignty of the Seas’, –
English, ,  Mede, Joseph, Clavis Apocalyptica, 
Livy, ,  mercantilism, 
Llwyd, Humphrey, Welsh antiquary, –,  Scottish, –
Locke, John,  of Walpole’s government, 
First Treatise of Government (c.),  see also Oldmixon
Letter Concerning Toleration (),  militarism
on property, –, –, –, ,  as means of colonisation, –, 
Second Treatise of Government (c.), , – and territorial empire, –, 
Louis XIV, King of France, ,  military conquest, , , , 
Lucan, Marcus Annaeus,  incompatible with liberty, –
luxury of Ireland, –
as debilitating, ,  as means of expansion, , 
demand for,  millenarianism, –
see also apocalypticism; time, sacred
Machiavelli, Niccolò Milton, John, The Readie and Easie Way, 
compulsions of expansion, –, – Molyneux, William, 
continuing influence of, –,  The Case of Ireland . . . Stated (), 
Discorsi, – monarchies, ideal of Patriot King, –
influence on Commonwealth republicans, monarchies, absolute, and commerce, ,
– 
influence on Sidney, – monarchies, composite, –, , 
reliance on Sallust,  Montesquieu, Charles Secondat, baron de,
trade largely ignored by, – –
Madden, Samuel, – More, Sir Thomas, –, 
Madoc, Welsh Prince,  Mountbatten, Earl, 
Mahan, Alfred Thayer,  Moyle, Walter, 
mare clausum, – multiple kingdoms, , , 
Scottish claims to, , , –, ,  Britain under James VI and I, , 
 Index
nation, conception of identity (Hegel), – proposals to transplant Irish population,
nation-states –, –
federal nature of modern,  ‘Treatise of Ireland’ (), 
in historiography, – Pinkie, Battle of, , 
nationalism, British, – Pitt, William, , 
nations, defined,  Plassey, Battle of (), 
native inhabitants Pocock, J.G.A., ‘New British History’, –
civil incapacity of,  political economy, , 
and claims to ownership of colonies, – and Anglo-Scottish union debate, –
dispossession of,  and classical models of colonisation, –
see also barbarism origins of, –
navies of plantations, –
and commercial wealth,  political thought
for defence of trade, ,  and concepts of empire, –, 
as no threat to liberty, , –,  development of British, –
Navigation Acts (, , , ), , Polybius, on Roman republic, –
–, ,  Pont, Robert, 
navigation rights, ,  Pope, Alexander, , 
Nedham, Marchamont population increase, to maintain colonial
Mercurius Politicus, –,  settlements, , –
The Case for the Commonwealth of England Stated populations, proposals to transplant, –,
(), , , – –
The Excellencie of a Free State (), ,  Portugal, , , 
translation of Mare Clausum (), –, Poynings’ Law, , 
 Presbyterianism, 
Nelson, Admiral, cult of,  press, freedom of British, 
property rights
Ochiltree, Andrew Stewart, Lord, ,  of Crown, , 
Oglethorpe, James, , ,  Grotius’s theory of, –, 
Oldmixon, John, topographer,  and liberty, –
origin, conceptual ambiguity of, – Locke’s theory of, –, –, –, 
Orkney Islands, ,  in nature, –
Ortelius, Abraham,  over colonies, –, –, , 
in Protestantism, –, , 
Papacy Protestantism, 
as Antichrist, ,  and Anglo-Scottish union, –, 
claim to universalism, , ,  as characteristic of British Empire, , , ,
Papal Bulls –, 
Alexander VI (), , , ,  diversity within, , , –, –
Laudabiliter (),  and Elizabethan Settlement, , 
Paris, Peace of (), ,  of New English settlers in Ireland, , 
Paris, Peace of (),  and Presbyterianism, 
Parker, Henry, Of a Free Trade (),  Purchas’s chronology of, –
Paruta, Paolo, Discorsi Politici (), – and rights of property, –, , 
Paterson, William, Darien Scheme, – in Scotland, , 
Patriot King, ideal of, – and status of Ireland, –
patriotism, , , , – theories of empire, –
Patten, William, , ,  see also anti-Catholicism; Reformation
Penn, William,  Ptolemy, 
Pepys, Samuel, – public opinion, and War of Jenkins’s Ear,
Perkins, William,  –, 
Petty, Sir William, , ,  Purchas, Samuel, , –, 
conception of English empire, – anti-popery, –, –
and Hobbesian theory, –,  compared with Hakluyt, –
and origins of political economy,  Hakluytus Postumus (), –, , , 
 Index 
importance of revival of classical literature, Salutati, Coluccio, 
– Scotland, , , 
and justification of property rights, , –, alliance with France, , 
– ambiguous relationship with England, –,
nature of British monarchy, –, , , , –, 
, –, – attempts at dynastic union with, , –,
Purchas His Pilgrim (),  –, 
Purchas His Pilgrimage (), ,  claim to independent commerce, , ,
religiosity of, – 
The Kings Towre (), –,  claim to independent imperium, –
use of Spanish sources, – colonial ambitions, , –, –
as composite monarchy, –, 
Radicalism,  excluded from Navigation Acts, –
Ralegh, Sir Walter, ,  internal colonialism, –, –
Rapin, Thoyras, Paul de,  maritime jurisdiction (mare clausum), , ,
reason of state, , , , – –, , 
Reformation, English, , , ,  opposition to Tudor pressures for union,
and Renaissance,  –
Reformation, Scottish (–), , ,  Presbyterian Protestantism of, , 
religion see Catholicism; Christianity; relationship with Ireland, –, 
Protestantism see also Act of Union (); Three
Renaissance, European, ,  Kingdoms
res publica Scots, as colonists, , 
and commercial reason of state,  Scottish Enlightenment, 
patriotism towards, ,  Scottish Reformation (–), , , 
Restoration, anti-republican reaction, – sea(s)
rhetoric, use of classical techniques of, , , attempt to combine dominium and imperium,
 –, , –
rights and maritime expansion, 
of travel and trade,  as natural common, –, , 
see also fishing rights; property rights Tudor commitment to freedom of, –
Robertson, William,  see also mare liberum; territorial waters, mare
Roe, Sir Thomas,  clausum
Roman Empire, – Seeley, J.R., Expansion of England (), –,
Britain as province of, , –,  , 
decline of, –, –,  Selden, John, , 
liberty equated with greatness (Sallust), historical arguments for English imperium,
– 
as model of colonisation, –, –,  legal arguments, –, , , 
as model of expansion, –, , , Mare Clausum (), , –
–, – Nedham’s translation (), –, –
and Papacy,  used to justify Ship-Money, –
as precedent, ,  self-sufficiency, Aristotelian concept of, , 
Roman Law, and imperium as sovereignty, Seven Years’ War (-), , , , 
–,  Shetland Islands, , 
Roman political thought, influence of, , , Ship-Money cases
–,  and extent of royal dominium, –
Rome, imperium in City of,  ideological definition of England as
Royal Navy,  maritime state, 
Rudyerd, Sir Benjamin,  justified by Selden’s Mare Clausum, –
‘Rule Britannia’ (), , , –, , Sidney, Algernon, , –, 
 Sidney, Henry, Lord Deputy of Ireland, 
Ryswick, Treaty of (),  slavery
abolition of, 
Sallust, , –, – imposed by Vagrancy Act (), 
 Index
Sleidan, John, Commentaries,  Sweden, empire, , 
Smith, Adam,  Swiss Confederation, , 
Smith, Sir Thomas, – symbolism
De Republica Anglorum (-),  of empire, 
and Ireland, –, –,  national, 
Smith, Thomas, colonies in Ireland, , –, Symonds, William, 

Solórzano y Pereira, Juan,  Tacitus, Agricola, –
Somerset, Edward, Duke of, Lord Protector territorial waters
and English claim to Scotland, –, , , defined by Dee, 
– dominium over, , 
Epistle . . . to Unitie and Peace (), ,  territoriality
space, and time, – of empires, –
Spain, and War of Jenkins’s Ear (-), , of states, –
– Thompson, E.P., 
‘Spanish Match’ crisis (), –,  Thomson, James, ‘Rule Britannia’ (), ,
Spanish Monarchy, , ,  , –, 
claims based on Donation of Alexander, , Thornhill, Sir James, allegorical paintings,
, ,  –
claims to maritime imperium in West Indies, Three Kingdoms
– competitive economic interests, –,
empire, , , –,  –, –
evangelical success in Americas, , – and concept of empire, , –
legitimacy of claims, –, – confederated fishing grounds, 
Spanish Succession, War of,  internal union (after ), , 
Sparta interrelations between, , , , 
lack of trade, , – Purchas’s conception of, , , 
safeguard of liberty, , , – time, and space, –
Speed, John,  time, sacred, , –
Spenser, Edmund Purchas’s conception of, –
conception of British empire, –, , , see also millenarianism
 toleration, –
Faerie Queene (-), – topographical histories, 
View of the Present State of Ireland (), , , Toryism, interpretation of history, 
 Tournai, conquest of (), , 
stability trade, , 
defensive,  and colonisation, –, –
or expansion, –, – freedom of, , , , 
Stafford, Sir Edward,  and liberty, –, , , –
Standing Army debate (s),  naval defence for, 
Staple Acts ( and ),  and origins of political economy, –
state as reason of state, , , , –
and concept of empire, – as sinews of war, –, 
constituted as community,  and Tudor proposals for Anglo-Scottish
definitions, , ,  Union, –
effect of empire on, –, – Trenchard, John, , 
as perfect society, – Tunstall, Cuthbert, 
see also composite monarchies; nation-states Twisse, William, 
state-formation, models of, – Twysden, Sir Roger, 
Statute of Wales (), ,  tyranny, and loss of liberty, –
Statutes of Icolmkill (),  Tyrone’s rebellion, 
Stone, Lawrence, 
Stuart Restoration,  Ulster, Anglo-Scottish colonisation of, , –
Sulla, dictatorship of,  United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
Sutcliffe, Matthew,  (post-), –
 Index 
United States of America, , , ,  opposition to, , –, , 
universalism Walsh, Father Peter, 
claimed by Roman Church, , – Walsingham, Sir Francis, 
of imperium,  Wedderburn, Robert, The Complaynt of Scotland
of Papacy, , ,  (), , –, , 
Usher, James,  Welsh, as colonists, , 
Welwod, William, –
Vagrancy Act (),  West Indies, –, 
Vane, Henry,  discovery of, , 
Vasquez de Menchaca, Fernando,  see also Caribbean
Venice, , , ,  Western Isles, , 
as model of colonial settlement, ,  Whig party, 
Vernon, Admiral Edward,  Whiggism
Vergil, Polydore, –, ,  and constitutional history, –, 
Virginia, colony, , , , ,  and Ireland, –
Virginia Company, , –,  and property rights, –
Vitoria, Francisco de, Political Writings White, Rev. John, , 
(-), ,  White, Rowland, , 
William III, King, , , 
Wales, , ,  William of Malmesbury, 
Wales, Statute of (), ,  Williams, Roger, 
Waller, Edmund, ,  Winthrop, John, , 
Walpole, Horace,  Wood, William, , 
Walpole, Sir Robert, ,  Wood’s Halfpence, 
 Ideas in context

Edited by       (General Editor),         ,     and
     
        , . .      and        (eds.)
Philosophy in History
Essays in the historiography of philosophy
pb:    
  . . .   
Virtue, Commerce and History
Essays on political thougth and history, chiefly in the eighteenth century
pb:    
  .  .     
Private Vices, Public Benefits
Bernard Mandeville’s social and political thought
hb:    
       (ed.)
The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe
pb:    
      
The Judgement of Sense
Renaissance nationalism and the rise of aesthetics
pb:    
     
Hegel: Religion, Economics and the Politics of Spirit, –
pb:    
     
Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order
hb:    
        
Gassendi the Atomist
Advocate of history in an age of science
hb:    
         (ed.)
Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe
hb:    
      
Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology
pb:    
      ,            .    (eds.)
Political Innovation and Conceptual Change
pb:    
         et al.
The Empire of Chance
How probability changed science and everyday life
pb:    X
      
That Noble Dream
The ‘objectivity question’ and the American historical profession
pb:    
        
The Province of Legislation Determined
Legal theory in eighteenth-century Britain
hb:    
      
Faces of Degeneration
A European disorder, c.–c.
pb:    X
    
Inventing the French Revolution
Essays in French political culture in the eighteenth century
pb:    
      
The Taming of Chance
pb:    
      ,       and          (eds.)
Machiavelli and Republicanism
pb:    
     
The Origins of American Social Science
pb:    X
         
The Rise of Neo-Kantianism
German Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivism
hb:    
      
Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance
The Case of Law
hb:    
       
From Politics to Reason of State
The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics –
hb:    
          
The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt –
hb:    
                    (eds.)
Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain
hb:    X
      
An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Context
pb:    
    
Philosophy and Government –
pb:    
     .  
Defining Science
William Whewell, Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britian
hb:    
      
The Court Artist
The Ancestry of the Modern Artist
hb:    
     .     
Defining the Common Good
Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britian
hb:    
      .  
The Idea of Luxury
A Conceptual and Historical Investigation
pb:    
  .  .   
The Enlightenment’s ‘Fable’
Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society
hb:    
         
Englishness and the Study of Politcs
The Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barker
hb:    
      
Strategies of Economic Order
German Economic Discourse, –
hb:   
        
The Transformation of Natural Philosophy
The Case of Philip Melancthon
hb:    
       ,       and       (eds.)
Milton and Republicanism
pb:    
      
Classical Humaism and Republicanism in English Political Thought
–
hb:    
       
The Social and Political Thought of Bertrand Russell
The Devolopment of an Aristocratic Liberalism
hb:    
        ,     ,      and    .   
Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politics
hb:    
     
Riches and Poverty
An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, –
pb:    
       
A History of Sociological Research Methods in America
pb:   
       (ed.)
Enlightenment and Religion
Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britian
hb:    
  .  .  .   
Adversaries and Authorities
Investigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese Science
pb:    
       
The Reportage of Urban Culture
Robert Park and the Chicago School
hb:    
     
Liberty, Right and Nature
Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought
hb:    
    .    (ed.)
William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire
hb:    
        
Rousseau and Geneva
From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, –
hb:    
       
Pluralism and the Personality of the State
hb:    
       
Early Modern Liberalism
hb:    
       
Equal Freedom and Utility
Herbert Spencer’s Liberal Utilitarianism
hb:    
      and            (eds.)
Pedagogy and Power
Rhetorics of Classical Learning
hb:    
    
The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics
A Study in Cognitive History
hb:    
        and         (eds.)
Models as Mediators
pb:    
       
Measurement in Psychology
A Critical History of a Methodological Concept
hb:    
         .      
The American Language of Rights
hb:    
               
The development of Durkheim’s Social Realism
hb:    
      
Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I
Queen and Commonwealth –
hb:    
       (ed.)
Renaissance Civic Humanism
Reappraisals and Reflections
hb:    X
 .  .     
Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment
hb:   
      
The Ideological Origins of the British Empire
hb:   