The Ideological Origins of the British Empir

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THE IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINSOF THE BRITISH EMPIRE

The Ideological Origins of the British Empire presents the first compre-hensive history of British conceptions of empire for more than halfa century. David Armitage traces the emergence of British imperialideology from the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of theeighteenth century, using a full range of manuscript and printedsources. By linking the histories of England, Scotland and Irelandwith the history of the British Empire, he demonstrates the import-ance of ideology as an essential linking between the processes ofstate-formation and empire-building. This book sheds new light onmajor British political thinkers, from Sir Thomas Smith to DavidHume, by providing novel accounts of the ‘British problem’ in theearly-modern period, of the relationship between Protestantismand empire, of theories of property, liberty and political economyin imperial perspective, and of the imperial contribution to theemergence of British ‘identities’ in the Atlantic world.

is Associate Professor of History at ColumbiaUniversity. He is the editor of Bolingbroke: Political Writings forCambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought () andTheories of Empire – (), and co-editor (with ArmandHimy 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 andof related new disciplines. The procedures, aims and vocabularies that weregenerated will be set in the context of the alternatives available within thecontemporary frameworks of ideas and institutions. Through detailed studies ofthe 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 theirconcrete contexts. By this means, artificial distinctions between the history ofphilosophy, of the various sciences, of society and politics, and of literature maybe 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 ORIGINSOF THE BRITISH EMPIRE

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THE

IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINSOF THE

BRITISH EMPIRE

D A V I D A R M I T A G E

Columbia University

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First published in printed format

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David Armitage 2004

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Contents

Acknowledgements page x

Introduction: state and empire in British history

The empire of Great Britain: England, Scotland andIreland 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

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Acknowledgements

The origins of this book are tangled and extend back over a decade. Ihave been very fortunate to receive material and moral assistance for itfrom many generous institutions. For financial support, I am grateful tothe British Academy; the Commonwealth Fund of New York; the JohnCarter Brown Library; Emmanuel College, Cambridge; and theColumbia University Council on Research and Faculty Development inthe Humanities. For providing ideal conditions in which to work on thebook and a series of associated projects, I thank particularly the staff andLibrarian of the John Carter Brown Library; the Master and Fellows ofEmmanuel College; the staff and Director of the Institute for AdvancedStudies in the Humanities, Edinburgh University; the staff and Directorof the National Humanities Center; and the members of the HistoryDepartment at Columbia University.

Institutional obligations mask a host of personal debts. During mytenure of a Harkness Fellowship at Princeton University, Sir JohnElliott, Peter Lake, John Pocock, David Quint and the late LawrenceStone offered crucial and lasting inspiration; back in Cambridge, ChrisBayly, Peter Burke, Patrick Collinson, Istvan Hont and Anthony Pag-den asked essential and abiding questions; later, John Robertson andBlair Worden examined the doctoral dissertation from which this studysprang. All have since provided indispensable support, for which I amdeeply grateful.

As the scope of the study, and of my other work, has expanded oversubsequent years, I have particularly appreciated the encouragementand 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 debtsto David Kastan, Darrin McMahon, Nigel Smith and Dror Wahrman.

x

For their friendship and hospitality, over many years and in manyplaces, I cannot adequately thank Catharine Macleod and FrankSalmon, Jennifer McCullough and Peter McCullough or MelissaCalaresu and Joan Pau Rubies.

For their comments, I am happy to be able to thank a variety ofaudiences on both sides of the Atlantic who have heard earlier versionsof parts of my argument. I must express particular appreciation to theUniversity Seminars at Columbia University for assistance in the pre-paration of the manuscript for publication. Material drawn from thebook was presented to the University Seminars on Early AmericanHistory and Culture, Irish History and Culture, the Renaissance,Eighteenth-Century European Culture, and Social and PoliticalThought. For permission to reproduce and revise material which hasappeared elsewhere in print, I am also grateful to the editors of TheHistorical Journal and The American Historical Review; the Past and PresentSociety; Cambridge University Press; the University of North CarolinaPress; Oxford University Press; and K. G. Saur Verlag. Most of all, Imust thank the staff at Cambridge University Press for their patienceand care at every stage of writing and publishing this book. RichardFisher has exemplified these virtues, along with generosity and confi-dence well beyond the reasonable expectations of any author; my thanksalso to Nancy Hynes for her excellent copy-editing and to AuriolGriffith-Jones for compiling the index so efficiently.

It is a special pleasure to be able to acknowledge enduring debts toNick Henshall, without whose example, I should never have become anhistorian, and to Ruth Smith, without whose lasting confidence, I couldnot have remained one; her remarkable vigilance also greatly improvedthis book at a very late stage. More recently, and no less importantly,David Cannadine has been a model of collegiality, commitment andcomradeship.

Finally, my greatest debts are to Quentin Skinner and Joyce Chaplin.Quentin has throughout been a reader, critic and interlocutor withoutpeer; 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 notflinched or faltered; for this faith and love, much thanks.

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. . . the word, empire, conveys an idea of a vast territory, composed ofvarious people; whereas that of kingdom, implies, one morebounded; and intimates the unity of that nation, of which it isformed.

By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the British Empirecomprehended the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Ireland, theislands of the Caribbean and the British mainland colonies of NorthAmerica. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by acommon religion and by the Royal Navy. The gentle, but powerfulinfluence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of theprovinces. Their free, white inhabitants enjoyed and produced theadvantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution waspreserved with a decent reverence. The Hanoverian kings appeared topossess the sovereign authority, and devolved on their parliaments allthe executive powers of government. During a crucial period of almostfourscore years (–), the public administration was conductedby a succession of Whig politicians. It is the design of this, and of thesucceeding chapters, to describe the ideological origins of their empire,though not to deduce the most important circumstances of its declineand fall: the American Revolution, which dismembered the BritishAtlantic Empire, lies beyond the immediate scope of this book.

The history of the rise, decline and fall of the British Empire has mostoften been told as the story of an empire whose foundations lay in Indiaduring 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 TruslowAdams, ‘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 theBritish Empire, vols. (Cambridge, –) to Wm. Roger Louis (gen. ed.), The Oxford History of theBritish Empire, vols. (Oxford, –).

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 ofthe Napoleonic Wars, resumed momentum in the latter half of thenineteenth century during the European ‘scramble for Africa’, and thenunravelled definitively during and after the Second World War. WilliamPitt was its midwife, Lord Mountbatten its sexton and Winston Church-ill its chief mourner in Britain. Its ghost lives on in the form of theCommonwealth; its sole remains are the handful of United KingdomOverseas Territories, from Bermuda to the Pitcairn Islands. In thisaccount, 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 SouthAsia. Twenty years later, in , the Peace of Paris by which Britainacknowledged the independence of the United States of Americamarked the beginnings of a newly configured British Atlantic Empire,still including the Caribbean islands and the remaining parts of BritishNorth America; it also signalled the British Empire’s decisive ‘swing tothe 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 groundsthat the two overlapped in time, that they shared common purposes andpersonnel, and that the differences between the maritime, commercialcolonies of settlement in North America and the military, territorialcolonies 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 wasfounded in the late eighteenth century and whose character distin-guished it decisively from the ‘Old Colonial System’ of the BritishAtlantic world that had gone before it. For instance, most recently, in Lawrence James,TheRise 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 IllustratedHistory of the British Empire (Cambridge, ); exceptions areAngus Calder,Revolutionary Empire: The Rise of the English-Speaking Peoples from the Fifteenth Century to thes (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 UnderstandingHanoverian Britain’, The Historical Journal, (), –; P. J. Marshall, ‘Britain and theWorld in the Eighteenth Century: , Reshaping the Empire’, Transactions of the Royal HistoricalSociety, th ser., (), –.

G. L. Beer, The Origins of the British Colonial System – (London, ).

The ideological origins of the British Empire

The conflation of British Imperial history with the history of theSecond British Empire has encouraged the separation of the history ofBritain and Ireland from the history of the Empire itself. ‘British’ historyis assumed to mean ‘domestic’ history; Imperial history implies extra-territorial history. This distinction was at least understandable, if notdefensible, as long as the Empire was assumed to be divided from themetropole by vast physical distances, to be overwhelmingly distinct in itsracial composition, and to be dependent upon, rather than formallyequal with, Britain itself. The attributed character of the Second BritishEmpire – 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, anddemanded that the Empire be exoticised and further differentiated fromdomestic history. The purported character of the First British Empire –as ‘for the most part a maritime empire, an oceanic empire of trade andsettlement, not an empire of conquest; an empire defended by ships, nottroops’ – assimilated it more closely to the domestic histories of theThree Kingdoms by making it the outgrowth of British norms, exportedand fostered by metropolitan migrants. The revolutionary crisis in theBritish Atlantic world, between and , revealed the practical andtheoretical limits of any such assimilation. Thereafter, the former colo-nies became part of the history of the United States. This in turnfacilitated the identification of the history of the British Empire with thehistory of the Second Empire and fostered the continuing disjuncturebetween ‘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 onthe ground of intellectual history. This approach faces its own difficulties,in that the history of political thought has more often treated the historyof ideas of the state than it has the concepts of empire, at least as that termhas 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 islandencompassing England, Wales and Scotland, or as a shorthand political term, to denote theUnited Kingdom of Great Britain created by the Anglo-Scottish union of ; ‘Britain andIreland’ is taken to be synonymous with the ‘Three Kingdoms’ of England, Scotland and Irelandthroughout the period before . ‘British Isles’ is only used when it expresses the vision of aparticular 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,TheNewCambridge 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, ), –.


history of the polis, the self-contained, firmly bounded, sovereign andintegrated community that preceded and sometimes shadowed thehistory of empire and that paralleled and ultimately overtook that historyduring the age of the great nation-states. For this reason, the BritishEmpirehas not been an actor in the history of political thought, any morethan political thought has generally been hospitable to considering theideologies of empire. The very pursuit of an intellectual history for theBritish Empire has been dismissed by historians who have describedseventeenth-century arguments regarding the British Empire as ‘intel-lectually of no . . . commanding calibre’, and have counselled that ‘[t]olook for any significant intellectual or ideological contribution to theordering of empire in the first two decades of George III’s reign wouldseem at first sight to be a barren task’. This is symptomatic of a morelasting unwillingness to consider ideologies of empire as part of politicaltheory or the history of political thought. However, the study ofimperial ideologies can clarify the limits of political theory studied on theunexamined principle that it encompasses solely the theory of the stateand its ideological predecessors. It is therefore essential to recover theintellectual 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 theprogrammatic sense of a systematic model of how society functions andsecond, as a world-view which is perceived as contestable by those whodo not share it. This latter sense does not imply that such an ideologyshould necessarily be exposed as irrational because it can be identified assimply 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, ‘Empireand 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 BritishEmpire, see Sir Ernest Barker, The Ideas and Ideals of the British Empire (Cambridge, ), GeorgeBennett (ed.), The Concept of Empire: Burke to Attlee, – (London, ) and Eric Stokes, ThePolitical Ideas of English Imperialism: An Inaugural Lecture Given in the University College of Rhodesia andNyasaland (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 inSpain, Britain and France c. – c. (New Haven, ); David Armitage (ed.), Theories ofEmpire, – (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, ), –.


argumentatively flawed and compromised by needs which they did notshare. This spirit of ideological critique could see such beliefs as ra-tionally indefensible, or even false, just because they answered to aparticular set of needs; more importantly, rational disagreement aboutthe status of those beliefs rendered them the product of contemporarypolitical and philosophical argument. The purpose of this study istherefore not to expose beliefs about the British Empire as either true orfalse, but rather to show the ways in which the constitutive elements ofvarious conceptions of the British Empire arose in the competitivecontext of political argument. It deploys resources from a wider traditionof political thought, stretching back to classical sources in ancient Greeceand, especially, Rome, but also encompassing contemporary Spain andthe United Provinces, as part of a wider European dialogue within whichthe various empires were defined and defended. Its purpose is thereforenot to claim that the origins of the British Empire can be found only inideology; rather, it seeks to locate the origins of the ideological definitionof empire in Britain, Ireland and the wider Atlantic world.

Any search for origins is, of course, fraught with a basic conceptualambiguity. An origin can be either a beginning or a cause, a logical andchronological terminus a quo, or the starting-point from which a chain ofconsequences derives. ‘In popular usage, an origin is a beginning whichexplains’, warned Marc Bloch. ‘Worse still, a beginning which is acomplete explanation. There lies the ambiguity, there the danger!’ Todiscover the etymology of a word does nothing to explain its presentmeaning, though the gap between its etymological root and its currentusage can be historically revealing, but only if approached contextually.‘In a word, a historical phenomenon can never be understood apartfrom its moment in time.’ Similarly, the context within which aconcept emerges does not determine its future usage, though the historyof its usage across time will reveal a great deal about the history of thelater contexts within which it was deployed. The origins of a concept, asof any other object of historical inquiry, are not necessarily connected toany later outcome, causally or otherwise: aetiology is not simply tele-ology in reverse. Conversely, present usage or practice offers no sureguide to the origins of a concept or activity.

No matter how perfectly you have understood the usefulness of any physiologicalorgan (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, ), , –, .


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 whichneed not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes justfollow and replace one another at random.

Meaning cannot therefore be identified with purpose, least of all in thecase of a concept, of which ‘[t]he form is fluid, the ‘‘meaning’’ evenmore so’.

Confusion between origins as beginnings and origins as causes hasbedevilled the history of the British Empire at least since the eighteenthcentury. The chronological origins of the British Empire have mostoften been traced back to the reign of Elizabeth I, and hence to themaritime exploits of her English sailors. This chronology defined theEmpire 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 vastoceanic expanses, far from the metropolis. This was the vision ofimperial origins emblematised in Millais’s ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’(), itself inspired by the painter’s reading of J. A. Froude’s essay onthe Elizabethan sea-dogs, ‘England’s Forgotten Worthies’ ().

More recent historians have espoused a similar chronology but fordifferent reasons, by finding the origins of British imperialism in Englishcolonialism on the Celtic crescent surrounding the English core-state.This was still an Anglo-British imperialism, though it was neither benignnor 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 Irelandin the sixteenth century. Maintaining the content, but disputing thechronology, an alternative aetiology for English imperialism – definedby its supremacist racism, its crusading national identity and its ideologyof conquest – has instead been traced to the twelfth century, and the

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (), ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. CarolDiethe (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, ),–.


attempted anglicisation of Ireland, Scotland and Wales chronicled inthe works of William of Malmesbury and Gerald of Wales. This thesisin 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 weretenuous and analogical. In reaction, other historians, attempting to savethe chronology of origins but extend its scope forward from the six-teenth century, have ‘unearthed in protestant religious consciousness aroot, perhaps even the taproot, of English imperialism’; even moreprecisely, the ‘origins of Anglo-British imperialism’ have been located inthe Anglo-Scottish propaganda wars of the mid-sixteenth century.

This study reconsiders both the traditional and more recent accountsof the ideological origins of the British Empire by tracing the historiesboth 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 theidea 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 arguedthat the emergence of the concept of the ‘British Empire’ as a politicalcommunity encompassing England and Wales, Scotland, ProtestantIreland, the British islands of the Caribbean and the mainland coloniesof North America, was long drawn out, and only achieved by the lateseventeenth century at the earliest. This was not because the conceptuallanguage of Britishness was lacking; rather, it had been used in thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries to describe less expansive commu-nities within the Three Kingdoms of Britain and Ireland. Nor was itbecause the language of ‘empire’ was absent from British politicaldiscourse: it too was used in more restricted senses. Only in the first halfof the eighteenth century, it will be argued, did the two languagescoincide to provide the conception of that larger community within

John Gillingham, ‘Images of Ireland –: The Origins of English Imperialism’, HistoryToday, , (Feb. ), –; Gillingham, ‘The Beginnings of English Imperialism’, Journal ofHistorical 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 andSeventeenth Centuries (London, ), .

Roger A. Mason, ‘The Scottish Reformation and the Origins of Anglo-British Imperialism’, inMason (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., ), –.


which the Three Kingdoms of Britain and Ireland and the English-speaking islands, colonies, plantations and territories of the westernhemisphere were all members – albeit, unequal members – of a singlepolitical body known as the ‘British Empire’.

The unifying concept of the British Empire left generous room fordifferent conceptions of that Empire. By the s, an integrated con-cept of the British Empire could be found in the political writings ofcreole elites and imperial officials throughout the British Atlantic world.It was yoked to a particular conception of the Empire, espoused inparticular 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 distinguishedit both from past empires and from contemporary imperial polities suchas the Spanish Monarchy. Its inhabitants believed it to be primarilyProtestant, despite the variety even of Protestant denominations thatcould be found within the Three Kingdoms and among the islands andcolonies; most importantly, it was not Catholic, despite the obviouspresence of a persistent Catholic majority in Ireland and of otherpockets of Roman Catholicism, for instance in Maryland.

The British Empire was an arena of hemispheric and internationaltrade. Its character was therefore commercial. The attachment to com-merce – and the means by which commerce connected the various partsof the Empire to one another – made the British Empire different from itspredecessors or its rivals, most of which (it was believed) had beenintegrated by force, or had been operated more for reasons of power(often over subject peoples) than plenty. For the far-flung British Empireto be successful in its commerce, it had also to be maritime. The Britishdominions were not all contiguous, and the richest parts of the Empire,such as Barbados and Jamaica, were separated both from the ThreeKingdoms and from the mainland colonies by vast oceanic expanses.The waters around Britain itself had always been defended by the RoyalNavy, and a series of naval myths provided the legendary foundations forsuch maritime supremacy. Protestantism, oceanic commerce and mas-tery of the seas provided bastions to protect the freedom of inhabitants ofthe British Empire. That freedom found its institutional expression inParliament, the law, property and rights, all of which were exportedthroughout the British Atlantic world. Such freedom also allowed theBritish, uniquely, to combine the classically incompatible ideals of libertyand empire. In sum, the British Empire was, above all and beyond allother such polities, Protestant, commercial, maritime and free.


The concept of a British Empire had its roots within the ThreeKingdoms of Britain and Ireland; however, to become elaborated in itslater, more expansive form, it had to overcome some formidable con-ceptual and practical obstacles. The collision between an ErastianEnglish church and a Presbyterian Scottish kirk obviated the emergenceof a pan-British ecclesiology and exacerbated the denominational diver-sity of the British Atlantic world. The British Empire therefore had nounitary theological foundation, though the common Protestantism ofthe majority of its inhabitants distinguished it sufficiently from theSpanish and French monarchies. Secular political thought defined thecommunity in terms that could accommodate the contiguous territoriesof a composite monarchy and even encompass an ethnic definition ofcommunity that extended to Ireland, but nonetheless proved resistant toimagining colonies and factories as members of the polity before the riseof mercantilist thought in the period after the Restoration. Politicaleconomy in turn redefined the nature of British maritime dominion,which under the Stuarts had implied exclusive British imperium solelyover home waters; this was replaced by a conception of mare liberum onthe oceans which underpinned arguments for the free circulation oftrade around the Atlantic world.

The British Atlantic world could therefore only be conceived of as asingle political community once the intellectual limits to its growth hadbeen 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-Atlanticconception of the British Empire had been generated by a cadre ofprovincials and imperial officials beyond the metropolis itself in thesecond quarter of the eighteenth century. That conception spranginitially from Britain’s imperial provinces; when metropolitans took itup 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 asolely metropolitan nor an exclusively provincial achievement: it was ashared 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 fromtheir origins in debates within the Three Kingdoms would ultimatelycreate the ideological conditions for the debate preceding and sur-rounding the American Revolution. The ideological origins of theBritish Empire also constituted the ideological origins of the American


Revolution; the decline, fall and reconstruction of the British AtlanticEmpire can therefore be traced back to the limitations and instabilitiesof the British state.

‘[H]istory devises reason why the lessons of past empire do not apply toours’, remarked J. A. Hobson in . The objects of his criticism werethose nineteenth-century English historians who denied the BritishEmpire any origins or antecedents at all and thereby left it suspended,statically, outside history and beyond the reach of the conventionalcompulsions of imperial decline and fall (or expansion and overstretch).Hobson accurately diagnosed the fact that most of the major modeswithin which British history has been written since the nineteenthcentury had been inhospitable to Imperial history. This was partly theresult of the hegemony of English history and historians, for whomEngland stood proxy for the United Kingdom, and who maintained awilled 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 increasinglyimpregnable to the history of the Empire. For example, the historiogra-phy of English religion told the history of the Church in England as thestory of the Church of England, a story that might begin with StAugustine of Canterbury, Bede, or at least Wycliffe, but that found itslasting incarnation in the Erastian Church founded under Henry VIIIat the English Reformation. That Church had, of course, expandedacross the globe to create a worldwide communion, but so had theDissenting and Nonconformist denominations. The Church of Englandnever became a unified imperial Church, least of all in the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries, and the existence of discrete Church establish-ments in Scotland, Ireland and Wales meant that the English Churchremained 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 aprovidential charter for insularity, but it did little to encourage anampler 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 developpement des etats europeens: theories et historiographies de l’etatmoderne (Rome, ), , –.


The Whig history of the constitution proved similarly resistant to theincorporation of Imperial history. That resistance can be traced back inpart to the Henrician Reformation, when the English Parliament haddeclared in the preamble to the Act in Restraint of Appeals () that‘this realm of England is an empire, entire of itself ’, independent of allexternal authority and free of any entanglements, whether in Europe orfurther abroad. Though the exact import of those words has been muchdebated, they were held to ‘assert that our king is equally sovereignand independent within these his dominions, as any emperor is in hisempire’, in the words of William Blackstone. Regal independencerepresented 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, ageneration after the Glorious Revolution, until the age of Macaulay inthe mid-nineteenth century and beyond, the constitution was of greaterinterest to Whig historians than expansion.

Constitutional liberty and imperial expansion seemed to be necess-arily incompatible to many Whigs and to their ideological heirs. Thecollision between empire and liberty lay at the heart of the debatesurrounding the American Revolutionary crisis, both for the Whiggishsupporters of American independence and for their sympathisers inBritain. Yet even that was only one moment in a seemingly eternaldrama of the contention between imperium and libertas that was sure tobe played out again in the Second British Empire. ‘Is it not justpossible that we may become corrupted at home by the reaction ofarbitrary political maxims in the East upon our domestic politics, justas 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 themethods 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, ‘ARevolution in Tudor History?’ Past and Present, ( July ), –; G. D. Nicholson, ‘TheNature 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 AmericanRevolution (Chapel Hill, ).

Miles Taylor, ‘Imperium et Libertas? Rethinking the Radical Critique of Imperialism during theNineteenth Century’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, (), –.

Richard Cobden to William Hargreaves, August , in John Morley, The Life of RichardCobden, vols. (London, ), , .


self-government’. Though most nineteenth-century Liberals andeven Radicals might not have shared these fundamentally classicisingfears of Asiatic luxury, such anxieties were symptomatic of a widerunwillingness 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 greatlegacies of the First British Empire to the Second; the genesis andafterlife of the argument between these two values forms one of thecentral strands of this study.

Whiggish indifference to the history of the Empire, and Radicalcritiques of the threat posed by empire to the very fabric of Englishliberty, might have rendered ‘the story of British expansion overseas . . .the real tory alternative to the organization of English history on thebasis of the growth of liberty’, as Herbert Butterfield thought in .Butterfield argued that ‘the shock of ’ had shown that the Whighistory of liberty and the Tory history of Empire were inseparable;

what he could not foresee in was that the war itself would become amajor solvent of the Empire. Decolonisation rapidly rendered im-plausible any attempt retrospectively to write the history of the BritishEmpire as the history of liberty: Winston Churchill’s History of theEnglish-Speaking Peoples (–), which he had first conceived in themid-s, and Arthur Bryant’s even more belated History of Britain andthe British Peoples (–), remained the monuments to hopes of effect-ing such an historiographical reconciliation. The futility of this Toryrapprochement was accompanied by the silence of the heirs of Whighistory. Historians on the Left were suspicious of the benign claims madeon behalf of the British Empire by paternalists, yet were also embar-rassed by the part played by the Empire in creating a conservative strainof patriotism. Accordingly, they perpetuated the separation of domes-tic and Imperial history by overlooking the Empire almost entirely, asthe 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 LiberalThought (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 andUnmaking of British National Identity, :History and Politics (London, ), –. Robert Gregg andMadhavi Kale, ‘The Empire and Mr Thompson: Making of Indian Princes and EnglishWorking Class’, Economic and Political Weekly, , (– September ), –, offers anexcellent case-study of such historical amnesia on the historiographical Left.


instance, mutely testify. The history of the Empire – by which is stillmeant, overwhelmingly, the ‘Second’ British Empire – has been left toImperial historians, who have followed their own trajectory from post-Imperial diffidence to a measured confidence in the prospects for theirown subfield. Only belatedly have they acknowledged that their purviewshould also include the history of the metropolis, and hence that ‘Britishimperial history should be firmly rooted in the history of Britain’.

The persistent reluctance of British historians to incorporate theEmpire into the history of Britain is symptomatic of a more generalindifference towards the Empire detected by those same historians.‘British historians may have some grounds for their neglect of empire’, ithas been argued, because in the modern period it only intermittentlyintruded into British politics; the British state itself was little shaped byimperial experiences; there was no single imperial ‘project’; rather,‘empire performed a reflexive rather than a transforming role for theBritish people’. The question of ‘Who cared about the colonies?’ in theeighteenth century has been answered equally scrupulously: ‘A lot ofpeople did, though they were very unevenly distributed geographicallyand socially and quite diverse in their approach to American questions.’Few benefited directly from colonial patronage; merchants took anabiding interest in the Atlantic trade but they, of course, were concen-trated in mercantile centres; lobbying groups on behalf of Americaninterests had little impact upon British politics, while handfuls of Britonsvisited 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 moregenerally, 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 EricHobsbawm and V. G. Kiernan are, of course, notable exceptions to this caveat, though neitherhas been solely concerned with Britain.

P. J. Marshall, ‘A Free Though Conquering People’: Britain and Asia in the Eighteenth Century, InauguralLecture, King’s College London, March (London, ), (quoted); David Fieldhouse,‘Can Humpty-Dumpty Be Put Together Again? Imperial History in the s’, Journal of Imperialand Commonwealth History, (), –, ; John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: TheManipulation of British Public Opinion, – (Manchester, ); MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialismand Popular Culture (Manchester, ); A. G. Hopkins, The Future of the Imperial Past, InauguralLecture, 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 onBritish 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, ), –.


historical experience of metropolitan Britons, why would it be necess-ary to integrate the history of the Empire with the history of themetropolis?

This division between domestic history and extraterritorial historywas 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 thestate from the territorial empires that had preceded it, and in turn fromthe 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 ofempire, in so far as that was defined as a hierarchical structure ofdomination, encompassing diverse territories and ethnically diversepopulations. The nation-state as it had been precipitated out of a systemof aggressively competing nations nonetheless functioned as ‘the empiremanque ’, which always aimed at conquest and expansion within Europe,but which often had to seek its territorial destiny in the world beyondEurope. ‘Nowadays’, as Max Weber put it, ‘we have to say that a stateis that human community which (successfully) lays claim to the monopolyof legitimate physical violencewithin a certain territory, this ‘‘territory’’ beinganother of the defining characteristics of the state.’ That association ofthe state with territoriality – and hence, implicitly, with contiguity –deliberately dissociated integral, legally bounded states from the lesswell-demarcated empires, which could be defined either formally orinformally, which were separated by sometimes vast oceanic distancesfrom their metropoles, and within which legimitacy was incomplete andphysical violence more unevenly distributed.

The distinction between the ‘internal’ histories of (mostly) Europeanstates and the ‘external’ histories of (exclusively) European empiresobscured the fact that those European states had themselves beencreated by processes of ‘conquest, colonization and cultural change’ inthe Middle Ages. Outside the conventional heartland of Europe, thewestward 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 NationState’’ in Historical Perspective’, Political Studies, (), –; V. G. Kiernan, ‘State andNation in Western Europe’, Past and Present, ( July ), .

Max Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ (), inWeber: Political Writings, ed. PeterLassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge, ), –.

Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change – (NewHaven, ).


methods, yet the history of territorial ‘extension’ has been rigorouslydistinguished from the history of maritime ‘expansion’: ‘sea space issupposed to constitute the difference between the former, which is partof the national question, and the colonial question as such’. Thiswould be true of the histories of Portugal, the Dutch Republic, Franceand even Sweden, the bulk of whose empire lay close to home, aroundthe shores of the Baltic Sea. Sea-space lay between Aragon andNaples, between Castile and the Spanish Netherlands, and betweenBritain and Ireland. The sea could be a bridge or a barrier, whetherwithin states, or between European states and their possessions outre-mer.

The distinction between states and empires has rarely been a clearone, least of all in the early-modern period. As Fernand Braudel ob-served of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ‘a formidable newcomerconfronted the mere territorial or nation-state’: the new compositemonarchies of early-modern Europe, ‘what by a convenient thoughanachronistic term one could call empires in the modern sense – for howelse is one to describe these giants?’ In this context, it is notable thatthose 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 pursuedimperial designs after they had acquired the marks of statehood in thelater nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. Empires gave birth tostates, and states stood at the heart of empires. Accordingly, the mostprecocious nation-states of early-modern Europe were the great empire-states: the Spanish Monarchy, Portugal, the Dutch Republic, Franceand England (later, Britain).

The United Kingdom of Great Britain (and, after , Ireland)would become the most powerful among the composite states ofEurope, and would command the greatest of all the European overseasempires. However – perhaps because of this conspicuous success in bothstate-formation and empire-building – the disjuncture between Britishhistory and the history of the British Empire has been peculiarly abruptand enduring. Even when the Empire has been construed more widelythan just the Thirteen Colonies, and its potential sphere of influencebroadened 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. Sian

Reynolds, vols. (London, ), , .


concerns, even the most modest assessment of who cared concludes in aparadox. Though empire ‘was all-pervasive’ – as the far-fetched para-phernalia on every tea-table in Britain could demonstrate by the lateeighteenth century – it ‘often went strangely unacknowledged – even bythose who benefited from it most’. In Britain, as in Italy, Germany orFrance, for much of the time ‘empire simply did not loom all that largein the minds of most men and women back in Europe’. Such aparadox may make it easier to incorporate the fruits of empire intosocial history, but it still encourages the belief that the Empire tookplace 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, asit were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absenceof mind’, J. R. Seeley told his Cambridge audience in . ‘While wewere doing it, that is in the eighteenth century, we did not allow it toaffect our imaginations or in any degree to change our ways of think-ing.’ Seeley hoped to provoke in his audience the realisation that theywere, and long had been, inhabitants not of little England but rather of a‘Greater Britain’ that encompassed the colonies of white settlement inNorth America, the Caribbean, the Cape Colony and Australasia, allbound 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 insularWhig constitutionalism which would culminate in Butterfield’sTheWhigInterpretation of History () half a century later. The grounds for Seeley’sattack were not, like those of later Whig revisionists, anti-teleological, forhe wished to substitute the expansion of the Empire for the growth of theconstitution as the backbone of ‘English’ history since the eighteenthcentury. Just as he wished to recall his Cambridge audience to theirresponsibilities as members of a global community, so he wanted toremind fellow-historians, who were transfixed by ‘mere parliamentarywrangle 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: Parliamentaryand Constitutional Development in Whig Historiography and in the Anti-Whig Reaction between and (The Hague, ), –.


Seeley’s Expansion of England became one of the best-sellers of lateVictorian Britain, and remained in print until , the year of theSuez crisis. Its very popularity ensured that its effects would be wide-spread and enduring, even if they were not necessarily those sought bySeeley himself. The work certainly failed in its positive agendas. TheImperial Federation movement of the s, to which the lectures gavesuccour, did not achieve its aim of bringing institutional union to the‘ethnological’ entity he had described. Nor did the writing of domestichistory become any more noticeably hospitable to the matter ofGreater Britain, despite the brief vogue enjoyed by the term. Seeleyhimself retreated from the imperial perspective he had encouraged inThe Expansion of England. His next major work, The Growth of BritishPolicy (), despite its title, chronicled the diplomatic history of Eng-land alone from to , but in this work the only empire in thatperiod 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: hencethe British Empire, in its classic and enduring form, had not en-compassed the Atlantic empire of the seventeenth and early eighteenthcenturies.

Instead of promoting a new imperial synthesis among British histor-ians, Seeley’s work inspired the creation of the new and separatesubfield of Imperial history. This created a novel area of historicalinquiry, but it institutionalised the very separation between Britishhistory and Imperial history that Seeley had deplored; it also identifiedImperial history almost exclusively as the history of the ‘Second’ BritishEmpire. Though Seeley had reserved particular scorn for those histor-ians of eighteenth-century Britain who had failed to recognise the truedirection of British history in that century, and who overlooked theEmpire at the expense of the Whiggish history of liberty, even in TheExpansion of England the eighteenth century was important only as aprelude to the Imperial grandeur of the nineteenth. It marked theprologue 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, TheExpander of England (London, ); Dilke, Problems of Greater Britain (London, ); DavidArmitage, ‘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 andCommonwealth History, (), –; J. G. Greenlee, ‘A ‘‘Succession of Seeleys’’: The ‘‘OldSchool’’ Re-examined’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, (), –.


(‘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 itsfailure to produce the kind of organic community united by strong tiesof nationality, religion and interest that he believed characterisedGreater Britain in the nineteenth century: ‘We had seen on the otherside of the Atlantic only tobacco and fisheries and sugar, not Englishcommunities’, a ‘materialist’ (or mercantilist) empire created for thebenefit of the metropolis, but thereby doomed to dissolution as ‘[t]hefabric of materialism crumbled away’. Some among Seeley’s contem-poraries disagreed strongly with that verdict, most notably the man soonto be his counterpart as Regius Professor at Oxford, E. A. Freeman, anopponent of the Imperial Federation movement but a proponent of anexpansive 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 fortheir Revolution and pronounced them to be brethren sprung from thesame Anglo-Saxon stock, speakers of the same language, and inheritorsof the same patrimony of freedom as the English. His proselytisingAnglo-Saxonism, spread on a lecture-tour of the eastern United Statesin – just as Seeley was delivering his lectures in Cambridge, hadan equal but opposite effect: as Seeley planted the seeds for ImperialHistory, so Freeman helped to prepare the ground for the ‘ImperialSchool’ of early – or colonial – American history. However, thedifferent premises on which the two syntheses rested, their almostentirely exclusive chronologies, and their competing orientations – oneeastward, the other, westward from Britain – effectively confirmed thedivorce between the histories of the First and Second British Empires formuch of the following century.

For Seeley, ‘history has to do with the State’, just as the study ofhistory 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 YearBook 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 andJohn 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 andGreater Britain, –; Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the AmericanHistorical Profession (Cambridge, ), –.


their pupils. The state in his sense was defined functionally, by itsmonopoly 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, Seeleyargued, Greater Britain had as much of a claim to be called a state as‘England’ itself: both were organic communities, united by commoninterests, and not merely ‘composed of voluntary shareholders’ or for-med by force into ‘inorganic quasi-state[s]’. The British Empire wastherefore not an empire in the ordinary sense at all, since it was not heldtogether 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 infact empires in minuscule, since they had come into being by incorpor-ating diverse peoples and scattered territories by conquest, annexationand force. Indeed, in so far as most modern states contained hugeexpanses of territory, and were inevitably divided by region and locality,they all exhibited the kind of federal ‘double-government’, in the centreand at the localities, that was a feature of imperial governance. In thissense, all contemporary states – the United States, with its individualstates; England, with its counties; France, with its departements – were to agreater or lesser degree federal and composite. In their structures ofgovernance, they approximated modern empires far more than they didclassical city-states; similarly, modern empires like ‘Greater Britain’could be called states, if states were defined by the ‘ethnological’ unitythey displayed.

Seeley’s attention to the common features of state and empire led himto consider as convergent and similar processes which later historianshave tended to treat as parallel or distinct. States had once had thecharacteristics of empires; empires were now the enlarged versions ofstates. State-building and empire-formation did not have to be treatedas if one were a centrifugal process, drawing everything inwards to agovernmental centre, and the other centripetal, extending metropolitangovernance into new territories and over new peoples. Seeley’s confla-tion of state and empire of course had its limitations. The greatest ofthese was the necessary omission of India from the community ofGreater Britain. This masked the fact that the British Empire in South

Seeley,The Expansion of England, ; Seeley, ‘The Teaching of Politics’ (), in Seeley, Lectures andEssays (London, ), .

Seeley, Introduction to Political Science: Two Series of Lectures (London, ), , , , –; Seeley,The Expansion of England, , .


Asia was precisely the kind of ‘inorganic quasi-state’ Seeley deplored inhis Introduction to Political Science (). Nonetheless, it enabled him tosee continuities between the First and Second British Empires that otherhistorians had overlooked; more fruitfully, it allowed him to discern arelationship 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 astill larger Britain comprehending vast possessions beyond the sea’.

The recent construction of a ‘New British History’ by historians ofEngland, Scotland and Ireland has made it possible to perceive connec-tions between these two processes that were invisible to Seeley, whoremained more concerned with the expansion of ‘England’ than withthe creation of Britain. This ‘New British History’ has taken its inspira-tion from J. G. A. Pocock’s exhortations that the contraction of GreaterBritain should be the reason to rewrite the history of Britain in its widestsense. Pocock initially called for a ‘new subject’ of British history inNew Zealand in , just after Britain’s decision to enter the EuropeanEconomic Community, and with it, the Common Agricultural Policy,which had potentially devastating consequences for economies like NewZealand’s, which had for over a century been the beneficiaries ofimperial preferences. This ‘New British History’ would not simplytreat the histories of the Three Kingdoms and four nations that hadvariously interacted within ‘the Atlantic Archipelago’ of Britain, Irelandand their attendant islands and continental neighbours. Those historieswould be central to its agenda, but Pocock’s inclusion of British Americabefore , and British North America (later, Canada) thereafter, aswell as the histories of Australia and New Zealand (and, presumably, ofother white settler communities of primarily British descent), ‘obliges usto conceive of ‘‘British history’’ no longer as an archipelagic or even anAtlantic-American phenomenon, but as having occurred on a planetaryscale’. Pocock therefore offered a vision of Greater Britain in light ofthe contraction of ‘England’ rather than its expansion, and from the Freeman, Greater Greece and Greater Britain, –; Deborah Wormell, Sir John Seeley and the Uses ofHistory (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 Divisionsof British History’.

J. G. A. Pocock, ‘History and Sovereignty: The Historiographical Response to Europeanizationin Two British Cultures’, Journal of British Studies, (), –, –.

Pocock, ‘The Limits and Divisions of British History’, –.


vantage point of a former imperial province rather than from that of themetropole. The post-Imperial anxiety behind Pocock’s historiographi-cal agenda is as obvious as the high-Imperial confidence behindSeeley’s. These equal yet opposite motives nonetheless produce thesame historiographical conclusion: that it is essential to integrate thehistory of state and empire if British history, not least in the earlymodern 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 orconquest by one or other of the competing states within Britain andIreland. It has become clear that some points in the histories of Britainand Ireland were more ‘British’ than others. During these moments, theproblem of Britain – whether within Anglo-Scottish, Anglo-Irish,Hiberno-Scottish or pan-archipelagic relations – came to the forefrontof political debate, and profoundly affected the interrelations betweenthe 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 IrishKingship Act (), the attempted dynastic union between England andScotland under Henry VIII and Edward VI (, –), to thepersonal union of England and Scotland under James VI and I andCharles I (–), the creation of a British Commonwealth (–),the Stuart Restoration, the Glorious Revolution and the WilliamiteWars in Ireland (–), the Anglo-Scottish Union () and on tothe Union of Great Britain and Ireland (–).

Concentration on the history of the British state has reproducedmany of the features of the whiggish histories of the Three Kingdomsthat preceded it. Above all, it has perpetuated the separation betweenthe history of Britain and the history of the British Empire. For all of itsavowed intentions to supersede the national historiographies of Eng-land, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, the New British History has notencompassed the settlements, provinces and dependencies of GreaterBritain, whether in the nineteenth century or, especially, earlier.

Almost none of the major collections of essays on the New British History covers any Britishterritories, populations, or influences outside Britain and Ireland: Ronald Asch (ed.), ThreeNations – 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 BritishState – (London, ); Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (eds.), The British Problem:


Meanwhile, the history of the British Empire has remained in the handsof 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 ona global scale, has yet been pursued to its logical conclusion by treatingthe 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-formationby practitioners of the New British History has had the effect of furtherseparating metropolitan from Imperial history. These historians haverediscovered what J. R. Seeley realised a century ago: that England, likeFrance, was a composite monarchy, just as Britain, like the SpanishMonarchy, was a multiple kingdom. In the former, a diversity ofterritories, peoples, institutions and legal jurisdictions is cemented undera single, recognised sovereign authority; in the latter, various kingdomswere ruled by a single sovereign, while they maintained varying degreesof autonomy. ‘All multiple kingdoms are composite monarchies, but notall composite monarchies are multiple kingdoms’, as Conrad Russell hasput it. The various moments in the British – or British-and-Irish –problem registered the tensions between these two predecessors of theclassically defined nation-state, but in doing so they also exemplifiedpan-European processes whose consequences were felt in Burgundy,Bearn, 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 onepartner in a composite state successfully attempted overseas expansion:‘imperialism and composite monarchy made uncomfortable bedfel-lows’. Yet this assertion that ‘imperialism’ was somehow distinct fromstate-formation, rather than continuous with it, further entrenches the

State-Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago c. – (Basingstoke, ); Laurence Brockliss andDavid 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 ofBritain, – (Cambridge, ); S. J. Connolly (ed.), United Kingdoms? Ireland and Great Britainfrom – 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 soleexception.

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 ModernHistory (London, ), –.

Conrad Russell, ‘Composite Monarchies in Early Modern Europe: The British and IrishExample’, in Grant and Stringer (eds.), Uniting the Kingdom?, .

J. H. Elliott, ‘A Europe of Composite Monarchies’, Past and Present, (Nov. ), –.


assumption that states – even composite states – and empires – evenlargely intra-European empires, like Sweden’s – belong to differentareas of historical inquiry because they were distinguishable, evencompeting, historical processes.

The model of composite monarchy offers fruitful analogies with thehistory of the European empires. Monarchies were compounded by thesame means that empires were acquired: by conquest, annexation,inheritance and secession. The rulers of composite monarchies facedproblems that would be familiar to the administrators of any empire: theneed to govern distant dependencies from a powerful centre; collisionsbetween metropolitan and provincial legislatures; the necessity of im-posing common norms of law and culture over diverse and oftenresistant populations; and the consequent reliance of the central govern-ment on the co-optation of local elites. It is important not to overstatethe similarities: after all, the extra-European empires were often ac-quired and governed without any recognition of the political standing oftheir inhabitants; composite monarchies and multiple kingdoms tendedto have a bias towards uniformity rather than an acceptance of diversity;and the provinces of composite monarchies were not usually treatedboth as economic and as political dependencies. However, it is equallyimportant not to underestimate the continuities between the creation ofcomposite states and the formation of the European overseas empires.As the succeeding chapters of this study will show, ideology providedjust 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 BritishEmpire, : 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 ofEngland, Scotland and Ireland in the sixteenth century reveals theinseparability of – and, in many ways, the identity between – state-formation and empire-building in the early modern period. For the lasthalf-century, historians have argued that the origins of English (and,later, British) imperial ideology can be found in English policy towardsIreland under the Tudors. The governing assumptions of the Englishofficial mind, according to this argument, were that Ireland, though akingdom after , should be treated as if it were a colony, especiallyduring the ‘New English’ period of settlement beginning in the s;that the Irish were barbarians, comparable to the inhabitants of thewestern hemisphere encountered by the Spanish; and that the Englishhad a duty to civilise and to Christianise (that is, to Protestantise) boththe Gaelic Irish and the Catholic ‘Old English’ descendants of theAnglo-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 earlyJacobean periods together created a narrative of English colonialismthat runs in a straight line from England, through Ireland, to theCaribbean and thence the eastern seaboard of North America. In thisaccount, 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 AmericanPhilosophical Society, (), –; D. B. Quinn, ‘Sir Thomas Smith (–) and theBeginnings 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., (), –.

west, and from England to America, with Ireland as the crux of acomprehensive English ‘westward enterprise’.

Historians of early-modern Ireland have been both the most vigorousproponents and the most sophisticated critics of this argument. In someversions, it can be reduced to a crudely teleological narrative whichrenders Ireland perpetually a colonial dependency of England and itsnon-Protestant inhabitants the subdued ‘natives’ within an imperfectlyanglicised colony. However, the most persuasive critique of the argu-ment for the Irish origins of English colonial ideology situates Irelandnot within the history of early-modern colonialism but within theparadigm of composite monarchy. Ireland thereby appears as a prov-ince of a composite state, comparable to Bohemia or Naples, forexample, rather than as a colony of an emergent hemispheric empire. Itpossessed 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 sufficientlypowerful to pose major threats to the success of attempted Englishhegemony. Ireland also had its own sovereign parliament, admittedlyconstrained by the operation of Poynings’ Law (which since hadsubjected 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 otherearly-modern European composite monarchies. To capture the ambi-guity of Ireland’s position – as juridically a kingdom, though treatedpractically by the English as if it were a colony – demands seeing it ‘as amid-Atlantic polity having some of the features of both the Old Worldand the New’. This allows the comparisons with the European overseasempires to remain, but also links them more closely to the processes ofstate-building that characterised the early-modern composite monar-chies. Ireland can therefore still provide a crucial test case for anyattempt to link the histories of states and empires in the early-modernperiod, without making any teleological assumptions about either itslater 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 inIreland, the Atlantic, and America – (Liverpool, ); Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in theAtlantic 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 –’, inB. J. Graham and L. J. Proudfoot (eds.), An Historical Geography of Ireland (London, ), .

England, Scotland and Ireland c. –

the problematics of composite monarchy. Both England and Scotlandwere typical early-modern monarchies in that each was a compositeterritorial 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. Suchterritories could either be absorbed juridically into the state or theycould 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 orconfederal 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 raisedby composite states, though primarily juridical, were often also cultural.Similar legal, political and cultural dilemmas lay at the origins of all thestates of medieval Europe, each of which was the product of warfare,colonisation and cultural aggression. The early-modern manifestationsof these problems were distinctive only in that they arose simultaneouslywithin the process of European state-building and in the activity ofexpansion beyond Europe. In Britain and Ireland they were continuouswith half-a-millennium of activity by both the English and the Scottishmonarchies since at least the twelfth century.

If the origins of a specifically British ideology of empire are to beunderstood, it is necessary to construct an account that incorporates thehistory 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’ inthat it used settlement, acculturation and economic dependency as ameans to ‘civilise’ its territorial margins and their inhabitants. It wouldalso be colonialist in that it chartered and encouraged overseas venturesand settlements in the Atlantic world during the early seventeenthcentury. Moreover, after , the Stuart composite monarchy createdin by the accession of King James VI of Scotland to the Englishthrone 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 HistoricalJournal, (), –; Jenny Wormald, ‘The Creation of Britain: Multiple Kingdoms or Coreand Colonies?’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, th ser., (), –.

Jane H. Ohlmeyer, ‘‘‘Civilizinge of Those Rude Partes’’: Colonization within Britain andIreland, s–s’, in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, : The Originsof Empire (Oxford, ), –.

G. P. Insh, Scottish Colonial Schemes, – (Glasgow, ).


ly British (that is, Anglo-Scottish) colonisation in the escheated lands ofUlster. The process of transforming English state-building into Britishempire-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 earlyMiddle Ages. The English Crown, for example, at various times claimedor held Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Normandy, Gascony, Aquitaine, theIsle of Man and the Channel Islands among its possessions, while theScottish Crown incorporated the Western Isles, the Orkneys and theShetlands, and challenged English claims to land in the Anglo-Scottishborders well into the sixteenth century. The assertion of these claims inpractice raised a host of problems that were to supply precedents for theconstitutional relations between metropolis and colonies in the early-modern period. Chief among these were questions about the propertyrights which the Crown (or the king, in his capacity as duke of Nor-mandy, for example) had in its various territories; what jurisdiction itheld over them; what capacity it might have to legislate for its overseasdominions; and how subject peoples should be treated. In dealing withtheir possessions, both the English and the Scottish Crowns experiencedthe dilemma of reconciling uniformity with diversity that would plaguelater 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, somegeographically contiguous, others joined to the metropolis by navigableseas. The various peoples who inhabited those territories were not alltreated alike by English colonists, who extended their power by militaryaggression. At first, a commission to evangelise pagan populations hadlegitimated English expansion; subsequently, a cultural mission tocivilise the barbarian maintained the momentum of conquest; later still,

Compare Jane E. A. Dawson, ‘Two Kingdoms or Three? Ireland in Anglo-Scottish Relations inthe 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 thePrivy Council from the American Plantations (New York, ), xiii–lxi; John T. Juricek, ‘English Claimsin North America to : A Study in Legal and Constitutional History’ (Ph.D. dissertation,University of Chicago, ), , ‘The Constitutional Status of Outlying Dominions: King andCrown’; A. F. McC. Madden, ‘, and All That: The Relevance of the English MedievalExperience of ‘‘Empire’’ to Later Imperial Constitutional Issues’, in John E. Flint and GlyndwrWilliams (eds.), Perspectives of Empire: Essays Presented to Gerald S. Graham (London, ), –.


an ideology of domination and an historical mythology together encour-aged further English migration and the resettlement of native peopleson the conquered lands. Though the English did export their govern-ing institutions, the exigencies of colonial rule demanded that control ofthe outlying territories be left in the hands of absentee proprietors orentrusted to a creolised governing elite. That elite in time grew todemand its independence, and appropriated legislative institutions toaffirm its autonomy. The English nonetheless remained the culturalarbiters and commercial masters of what was formally an Anglo-Britishempire over which they steadfastly asserted their sovereignty. They hadacquired 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 theEnglish settlers from metropolitan norms and monarchical indifferencetogether 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 andprincipalities of the north-west European archipelago. It extended theclaims of an even earlier empire within Britain, the Imperium Anglorum ofthe Anglo-Saxon kings. Athelstan (–) occasionally used the title ofImperator, meaning a supreme ruler over the diverse territories he ruledwithin what are now the boundaries of England; more fulsomely, EdgarI (–), ‘King of the Angles’ (Anglorum Basileus), proclaimed himself‘Emperor and Lord’ (Imperator et Dominus) of the islands and the oceanaround Britain, including all of the kings and all of the nations within itsborders.

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 inMemory of Schafer Williams (Cincinnati, ), –; John Gillingham, ‘The English Invasion ofIreland’, 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, Scotlandand Wales –’, in Nigel Saul (ed.), England in Europe – (London, ), –.

James Campbell, ‘The United Kingdom of England: The Anglo-Saxon Achievement’, inAlexander 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.


and Plantagenet kings towards Wales, Ireland and Scotland. Despitethe Anglo-Saxons’ success in creating a unified English kingdom be-tween the seventh and the eleventh centuries, they were unable toabsorb the bordering territories of Scotland and Wales, which were leftas potential prizes for future rulers. The Scottish Crown similarly usedthe language of empire to claim its independence and supremacy in thefifteenth century, and for similar reasons. The collision between thesetwo imperial monarchies in the mid-sixteenth century would give rise tothe 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 littlemore 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 thecreation of a unitary, legally-bounded, independent conception of thestate and the later process of forming a multinational, extensive empirein 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 Romeand 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 onebut a magistrate could command such authority, and such authoritycould only be vested in a magistrate. Imperium was thus formally restric-ted, even though it was potentially unlimited in its extent outside the cityitself. In the early years of the Roman Republic, the exclusivity ofimperium was strengthened by the absolute distinction between imperiumdomi and imperium militiae. Though each was temporary, and vested in aparticular agent, the latter was even more tightly restricted because it wasmuch more expansive in its powers. The boundary between imperium domiand imperium militiaewas the outer limit of the city of Rome itself, whetherdefined (in the earliest days) as the walls of the city or (in later years) as thefurthest reach of Roman government. The barrier between the two wasabsolute; to cross it meant the reversion of theoretically limitless powerover 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 scope of imperium expanded with Rome’s growth beyond thebounds of the city and outward from the heartlands of northern Italy. Itgradually came to mean authority in any form, detached from anyparticular holder of it; when it no longer applied solely to the strictlydefined authority of a magistrate, it also lost the restrictions that magis-tratical authority had borne. This relaxation of the limits on imperiumaccompanied the dissolution of the boundary between imperium domi andimperium 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 cityand the lands beyond it also allowed the two areas to become con-founded. No longer was Rome itself distinct from the territory ruled inthe name of Rome by its magistrates wielding imperium. The city, itscolonies and its provinces now became a single territorial unit. This wasthe Imperium Romanum or, at times, the Imperium Romanorum – the RomanEmpire, or the Empire of the Romans. By the time of the Principate, theemperors carried the supreme authority over all of the peoples andterritories 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 theEmpire itself.

The Roman legacy of imperium to medieval and early modern Europewas threefold. It denoted independent authority; it described a terri-torial unit; and it offered an historical foundation for claims to both theauthority and the territory ruled by the Roman emperors. Imperium inthe sense of independent and self-sufficient authority offered a moregenerally applicable precedent for later polities and, especially, theirrulers. To claim imperium was to assert independence, whether fromexternal powers or from internal competitors. The revival of the conceptof imperium as a conception of sovereignty has been traced to the twelfth-century recovery of Roman law. According to this reformulation, thesovereign – whether collective, or individual – within each polity couldclaim the same independence of authority that had been enjoyed by theRoman emperors at the height of their power. Sovereignty could not bedivided within the polity; neither could it be overridden from without.Each ruler therefore claimed the same powers within his own domain asthe emperors had asserted over the Imperium Romanum; each rex thereforein regno suo erat imperator.

All of these conceptions of imperium were territorially static. None of


them necessarily encouraged any ruler to expand the boundaries of hisdominions or implied any spatial dimension of rule. The history of theRoman Empire presented an obvious example of a polity whose rulerspossessed both independent and universal imperium, and whose territoriesexpanded by alliance, inheritance and conquest. The Roman examplecould inspire future rulers to extend their own territories, but it did notinevitably do so. Imperium in the sense of unlimited authority demandedthe fastening of boundaries and clarification of the limits of authoritywithin and beyond those boundaries; similarly, imperium as compositemonarchy denoted diversity within unity, but did not imply that suchdiversity had to be multiplied by the acquisition of further dependencies.

The formula of particular sovereignty emerged from competingclaims to imperium. One result of the recovery of Roman law was thereassertion of the universalist claims of the emperor to be dominus mundi,as the Digest (. . ) had it. Since the Imperium Romanum at its heighthad encompassed the whole of the world known to the Romans, theauthority of the emperor was ipso facto universal. Undeterred by thetautology at the root of this claim, the emperor and his successorscontinued to assert the universality of their imperium. The barbarianinvasions, the sack of Rome in and the end of the Western Empire in had extinguished the Imperium Romanum. Out of its ruins rose twoempires – Eastern and Western – as well as the Papacy. Unabashed bythe diversity of claimants to the imperial succession, the Holy Romanemperors, the Byzantine emperors and the popes all at times demandedrecognition of their universal authority. Though the tradition of Romanuniversalism remained intact, albeit controversial, particular claims toimperiummore successfully challenged papal and Imperial pretensions touniversality.

Late medieval and early modern rulers made increasingly frequentclaims to independent imperium. Such claims were particular, rather thanuniversal; they did not suggest any intention to compete with theemperor or the pope for supremacy, but asserted both independencefrom external interference and ascendancy over internal competitors.For example, lawyers for the French monarchy asserted that the king ofFrance 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 HistoricalReview, (), –.

Andre Bossuat, ‘La Formule ‘‘Le Roi est empereur en son royaume’’: son emploi au XVe siecledevant le parlement de Paris’, Revue Historique de Droit Francais et Etranger, th ser., (), –


since the French kings had long since abandoned their candidacy for theheadship of the Holy Roman Empire. Instead, it was an assertion ofthe French kings’ power over the clergy and the nobility within Franceitself, derived from the Roman law principle of plenitudo potestatis. Thiswas a claim to internal authority rather than external power, an asser-tion of royal supremacy not national self-determination, and therefore astatement not of independence from outside authority but rather ofpredominance over internal competitors. For this reason, the Frenchcrown’s imperial claims have been associated more with the origins ofFrench absolutism than with the beginnings of French national sover-eignty. This would not always be true of other monarchical claims toimperial status in the following centuries; nevertheless, the French casedoes illustrate well the Janus face of imperium, as an authority whichcould either be used to ensure the dependency of internal competitors orto assert independence from external powers.

For those European rulers who claimed independent imperium for theirparticular realms or cities, the greatest external threat came from thosesupranational polities that claimed both universal authority in thepresent and descent from the Roman Empire in the past. This was true,in varyingdegrees, of both the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy.Theheadshipof the Empire remained themost prestigiousattributeof secularkingship in the early modern period. Though it was clearly no longer theemblem of universal rulership, the multinational character of the Empireendowed its holder with greater authority than any that could be held byany particular ruler of a single realm. When Charles V of Spain becameHoly Roman Emperor in , the Empire was united with the SpanishMonarchy under his rule to become the most far-flung monarchy theworld had ever known. Charles’s dominions could not encompass all ofthe realms of Europe, but they did include territories unknown even tothe Romans, in the New World beyond the Pillars of Hercules. This wasthe nearest the post-classical world would come to seeing a truly world-wide monarchy, and hence the closest approximation to universalimperium since the last days of the Imperium Romanum itself.

. Gaston Zeller, ‘Les Rois de France, candidats a l’empire: essai sur l’ideologie imperiale en

France’, Revue Historique, (): –, –. Jacques Krynen, L’Empire du roi: idees et croyances politiques en France XIIIe–XVe siecle (Paris, ),

–. Ramon 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 theEmperor Charles V’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, (), –.


The Papacy could not make such widespread territorial claims, but itsauthority 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 singleshepherd. The Papacy could lay equal claim to historical continuityfrom the Roman Empire because the Empire itself had become avehicle for the propagation of Christianity with the conversion ofConstantine, notwithstanding the shock of the Sack of Rome by theGoths and Augustine’s meditation thereon in the City of God. Particular-ist claims to imperiummade by other European monarchs could thereforehave two universalist antagonists outside their own realms, the Empireor the Papacy. Each was a supranational body, claiming descent fromthe Roman Empire, and asserting its universality as the legatee ofRome’s extension. In the struggle for imperium, all roads led back toRome, though they did not necessarily lead back to the same conceptionof Rome. Few polities could legitimately claim direct descent from theRoman Empire; only the emperor and the pope could plausibly claimeven a restricted form of universal rulership. However, the powerfullanguage 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 couldclaim imperial status on the grounds that they possessed a number ofdistinct territories which were united only under their headship. Thisconception of imperium as a compound of territories could, like the othermeanings of the term, be traced back to the Roman Empire. As latercommentators were aware, the Roman Empire at its greatest extent hadbeen composed of distinct provinces bound to the Empire by theemperor himself, as the representative of the Populum Romanorum. Oncethese provinces dissolved their allegiance and became barbarian king-doms in the latter days of the Western Empire, the federative structureof the Empire became clear, when previously it had been obscured bythe ever-expanding ambit of Roman law and citizenship. As Isidore ofSeville defined it in the seventh century, it had become ‘a RomanEmpire, of which other kingdoms are dependencies’: no longer a uni-tary and integrative territorial imperium, but rather an imperium in theform of a composite monarchy, linking disparate realms and territoriesunder a single, supreme head. This federal conception of imperium, andof 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 WesternEurope from the Fifth to the Fourteenth Century, trans. Sheila Ann Ogilvie (London, ), .


beyond the boundaries of the contracted Empire itself from the tenthcentury, as the king of Castile-Leon proclaimed himself an emperor inthis sense, as did Athelstan and Edgar. Any ruler of multiple territoriescould therefore be an Imperator, whether or not it was necessary for himto 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, justas it had originally allowed Italian city-states in the fourteenth century toassert their juridical independence from the Empire. Such resourcesencompassed regal symbols, legislative enactments and the increasinglywidespread and self-conscious use of the language of empire in state-ments of national purpose. Since the late fourteenth century, Englishkings had been represented as wearing the ‘closed’ crown of a circlettopped 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 amonarch wearing such a crown first appeared on Scottish coinage circa, three years before the English king Henry VII issued a goldsovereign 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 RomanEmperor himself in fact had only one band atop it; the closed crowns ofother monarchs did not seek to usurp the status of the emperor withintheir own jurisdictions, but rather to assert a claim of independence andsuperioritywithin a specific territory that was equivalent to the emperor’swithin his. For this reason, the physical crown came to be identified withthe authority implied by the claim to imperial status. For instance, whenCuthbert Tunstall advised Henry VIII in that the king could not beproposedas a candidate to be emperor, because he was not a prince of theEmpire, he soothed the monarch with the observation that ‘the Crown ofEngland is an Empire of hitselff, mych better then now the Empire ofRome: 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 ClosedCrown’, British Numismatic Journal, (), –; Dale Hoak, ‘The Iconography of the CrownImperial’, in Hoak (ed.), Tudor Political Culture (Cambridge, ), –.

Roger A. Mason, ‘Regnum et Imperium: Humanism and the Political Culture of RenaissanceScotland’, in Mason, Kingship and the Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and ReformationScotland (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, ), , .


This statement of the English Crown’s imperial status anticipated thelanguage of the declaration in the preamble to the Act of Appealsthat ‘this realm of England is an empire’; however, such language wasnot otherwise unprecedented, even in England. Thomas Cromwell’sclaim, made on behalf of Henry VIII, implied that the king possessedthe same power over temporal and ecclesiastical (if not necessarilyspiritual) matters as the later Roman emperors, particularly (though thiscan be exaggerated) the British Roman emperor, Constantine. Theimplied territorial definition of empire, the inclusion of all members ofthe community of England within its territorial bounds, and the inde-pendent superiority of the monarch over his subjects, without anyjurisdictional interference from outside, had also been asserted afterHenry’s conquest of the French town of Tournai in . Coins forTournai bearing the closed imperial crown hammered the pointhome. The Act of Appeals may have ‘inaugurated names and con-cepts destined to be symbolic of political realities vastly outshining theking’s authority in England’; it did so by providing a convenientstatutory statement of an attribute of English kingship that had beenrecognised, theorised and supplemented for almost a century.

The fifteenth-century French arguments that the rex Christianissimuswas in regno suo imperator had travelled to Scotland (by way of Scottishcivilians trained in French law-schools) as they would, two generationslater, to England (by way of French legal sources). Looking backfrom the s, William Blackstone distinguished the language of theAct in Restraint of Appeals from the ‘ridiculous notion, propagatedby the German and Italian civilians, that an emperor could do manythings 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 theEnglish 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 Theoryof 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.), TudorPolitical Culture, –.

William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, vols. (London, –), , .


‘ful Jurisdictioune and fre Impire within his realm’, some sixty yearsbefore the English Parliament made any similar enactment. Theseclaims may also have been related to the acquisition of the Orkney andShetland Islands after the marriage of James III to Margaret of Den-mark in , to claims to territories in France (such as Saintonge), aswell as to James IV’s attempts to bring the Western Isles under thecontrol of the crown. The Scottish assertion of imperium was bothjurisdictional and territorial; it at once proclaimed the independence ofthe 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 territorialas well as caesaropapal implications, and was intended not only to assertthe independent ecclesiastical authority of the Crown but also England’soverlordship of its neighbours in Wales, Ireland and ultimately Scot-land. Accordingly, it can be linked conceptually to the two Acts ofUnion 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 Englishaggression 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-Scottishrelations in the s. Beginning in , and then again in –, agroup of English and Scottish writers associated with Henry VIII andProtector Somerset offered a series of arguments in favour of Scottishsubmission to England. Under Henry, and in the early stages of Ed-ward’s reign, these arguments reinforced the necessity of a dynasticmarriage between the infant Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Englishprince (later, king) Edward; when such a marriage became impossible,they appeared to justify military invasion of Scotland by England. ‘Theidea of Henry the imperialist bent on the union of the British Isles is nolonger supportable’, though that idea was accepted by contemporaryScots 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 RogerMason for advice on this point.

Graham Nicholson, ‘The Act of Appeals and the English Reformation’, in Claire Cross, DavidLoades 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, (), .


especially when they were revived under Edward VI. Somerset saw thesubjection of Scotland as a means to increase English power withinBritain and to effect the spread of Protestantism by solving the long-standing ‘British’ problem of two adjacent and hostile monarchiesinhabiting a single island. Somerset’s announced aim was not to create anew monarchy within Britain, but to restore the ancient one called‘Great Britain’, ‘which is no new name but the old name to themboth’. However, English claims to feudal overlordship, the use ofGeoffrey of Monmouth’s ‘British’ history to justify those claims and theprominence of ‘imperial’ language in the English propaganda of thes, 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 earlyhistory of Britain as it had been told by Geoffrey of Monmouth in thetwelfth century. That empire was ‘British’ because it had been foundedby Brutus, a refugee from the Trojan wars; it was an empire because itbecame a composite monarchy after Brutus’s death, when it was ruledby his three sons, Locrine, Albanact and Camber. Geoffrey’s HistoriaRegum Britanniæ () enshrined a vision of English dominance overBritain within his legendary history. Brutus’s eldest son, Locrine, ruledEngland; the younger sons paid homage to him on account of hisseniority, just as their respective kingdoms of Scotland and Wales wereheld to owe homage to England: seniority implied superiority within thepost-Brutan feudal composite monarchy.

Supporters of England’s claims over Scotland also used early Britishhistory to affirm the longevity of an English civilising mission withinBritain. The Galfridian history of early Britain provided the basis for theEnglish assertion in of feudal superiority over the Scottish Crown.The Declaration, Conteyning the Just Causes and Consyderations of This PresentWarre with the Scottis () issued by Henry VIII before his invasion ofScotland 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’’’, ScottishTradition, / (–), –, and, more specifically, Roger A. Mason, ‘The Scottish Refor-mation and the Origins of Anglo-British Imperialism,’ in Mason (ed.), Scots and Britons: ScottishPolitical 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, –.


ruptedly from the earliest times until the reign of the English king HenryVI. Before the arrival of Brutus, the author of the Declaration argued,Britain had been inhabited by a race of giants, ‘people without order orcivilitie’; 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 thesayd astates should depend’. Justice and peace replaced disorder andincivility as Scotland and Wales became dependent states within amultiple monarchy headed by England. John Elder, a Highlander andsupporter of Henry VIII’s dynastic policies in ‘Scotland, a part of yourHighnes empyre of England’, appealed to Henry’s treatment of theGaelic 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’ werebrought to ‘ordour and civilitie’ by Albanact’s rule in Scotland, soHenry could bring civility to Scotland’s Gaelic lords, and the true,Protestant, religion in place of ‘the papistical, curside spiritualitie ofScotland’. As would later be the case in Ireland, and in North Amer-ica, civility and Christianity were closely associated as the foundations oforder within a ‘British’ empire. However, in Elder’s case, at least, theassociation 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 marriageof the English Queen Mary to the Spanish Prince Philip, a ruler forwhom God had foreordained a worldwide empire (Cui Deus imperiumtotius destinat orbis), and who would ‘enriche [Mary’s] empyre of En-glande’.

The renewed attempts between – by the Edwardian regimes toenforce Anglo-Scottish dynastic union, whether by persuasion or by fireand sword, generated a conception of a British empire that was Protes-tant, commercially expansive, bounded by the sea, and inhabited by thesubjects 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 inDeffens of Their Public Veil, ed. J. A. H. Murray (London, ), .

John Elder, ‘A Proposal for Uniting Scotland with England, Addressed to King Henry VIII. ByJohn Elder, Clerke, a Reddshanke’ (c. ), BL MS Royal . . , in The BannatyneMiscellany, , 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 NobleMarryage of the Moste Illustre Prynce Philippe, Prynce of Spaine, to the Moste Excellente PrincesMarye Quene ofEngland (), in The Chronicle of Queen Jane, and of Two Years of Queen Mary, and Especially of theRebellion of Sir Thomas Wyat, ed. John Gough Nichols (London, ), , , .


to its first king, Brutus, and reunited the isle of Britain under a singleruler. The inhabitants of the island over which Brutus had ruled werethe original, ethnic Britons, though in due course they became mingledwith the Scots and the English. The ‘one sole Monarchie, shalbee calledBritayn’, and its subjects would ‘take the indifferent old name ofBritaynes again’. It could also be called an empire for good historicalreasons. Though the earliest Britons had ‘lost their name and Empire’through sin and discord, their English and Scottish descendants hadbeen 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 thatBritish empire remained as emblems of the English monarchy: the redcross, originally borne by Constantine, and ‘a close crowne Emperiall,in token that the lande is an empire free in it selfe, & subject to nosuperior but ’.

The most elaborate exposition of the Tudor claim to the Scots throne,Nicholas Bodrugan’sEpitome of the Title That the Kynges Majestie of Englande,Hath to the Sovereigntie of Scotlande (), recalled that Somerset’s supposedancestor, Eldulph de Samour, had repelled a Saxon invasion whereby‘this Realme was delivered from the tyrany of Saxons, and restored tothe whole Empire& name of great Briteigne’. That empire had its origins inBrutus’s monarchy, and had been affirmed later by the Scots’ receptionof English law, the ecclesiastical supremacy of the archbishop of Yorkover the Scottish bishops and the feudal submission of Scotland, anation ‘from the begynnyng inseparably appendaunt to the crowne ofthis realm’. The centuries of civil strife between the kingdoms ofEngland and Scotland had renewed the divisions within Britain. Itwould be the task of the English to restore unity to the island, as they haddone in the past. As the French ambassador reported, the differentkingdoms of England and Scotland would then be abolished, and ‘lesdeux royaumes unys et reduictz en ung empire quy sera dict et nommetousjours l’empire de la Grande Bretaigne et le prince dominateur d’icelluyempereur de la Grande Bretaigne’.

James Henrisoun, An Exhortacion to the Scottes to Conforme Themselves to the Honourable, Expedient, andGodly 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 KyngesMajestie of Englande, Hath to the Sovereigntie ofScotlande (London, ), sigs. aiiiv, [av]v, giiiv–gvv (my emphasis).

‘Memoire contenant les articles proposes au Comte de Huntley’ ( January ), in CorrespondancePolitique de Odet de Selve, Ambassadeur de France en Angleterre (–), ed. Germain Lefevre-Pontalis (Paris, ), (my emphasis).


The ‘Edwardian Moment’ of the s saw the birth of the concept ofthe ‘empire of Great Britain’ (or ‘l’empire de la Grande Bretaigne’); italso 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 toaccelerate reformation in Scotland. The return to the reformist pro-gramme of Protestantising England under Somerset offered new hopefor Scots sympathisers of the English like the Edinburgh merchantJames Henrisoun that ‘as these two Realmes should grow into one, soshould thei also agre in the concorde & unite of one religion, & the samethe pure, syncere & incorrupt religion of Christ’. William Patten, themilitantly Protestant judge of the Marshalsea Court who accompaniedSomerset’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’. TheGreeks, the Russians and other members of the Eastern Church wouldnot submit to his ‘insolent Impery’: why then should the Scots? Englishintervention in would in due course help to secure the ScottishReformation, and ensure the existence of Britain as a Protestant island;however, the enduring differences in theology and church governmentbetween the English and the Scottish Churches would render Protes-tantism more of a bone of contention than a bond of union between thetwo 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 persuadehis countryfolk that union with England would increase national secur-ity and that ‘the marchaunt might without feare goo abrode, and bryngin forreine commodities, into the realme’ and offered a set of economicproposals, 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 Henrisounsee Marcus Merriman, ‘James Henrisoun and ‘‘Great Britain’’: British Union and the ScottishCommonweal’, in Mason (ed.), Scotland and England, –.

William Patten, The Expedition into Scotland of the Most Worthily Fortunate Prince Edward, Duke ofSomerset (), in Tudor Tracts –, ed. A. F. Pollard (London, ), , .

Henrisoun,Exhortacion to the Scottes, in The Complaynt of Scotlande, ed. Murray, ; Henrisoun, ‘TheGodly and Golden Booke for Concorde of England and Scotland’ ( July ), in Calendar of StatePapers Relating to Scotland and Mary Queen of Scots –, ed. Joseph Bain et al., vols.(Edinburgh, –), , –.


Somerset’s Epistle or Exhortacion, to Unitie and Peace (), the regime’smost widely-circulated piece of propaganda, concluded its appeal witha promise to allow all Scots free access to English ports, and permissionto trade with England ‘as liberally and frely, & with the same, & noother custome or paimentes therefore then Englishmen, & the Kyngessubjectes’. The Scots would demand such freedom of trade afterJames VI’s accession to the English throne, in the early s, andrepeatedly throughout the seventeenth century as a precondition forunion with England, but they would only receive it – and access to theEnglish 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 ofthe 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 byseas from other nations’, and ‘of one nature tonge and bredd in one ilecompased with the sea’. Such arguments echoed Virgil’s first Eclogue,in which the Britons appeared as the furthest-flung inhabitants of theknown world, cut-off from the rest of civilised humanity ( penitus totodivisos orbe Britannos, Eclogues, . ). This Virgilian trope of Britain’sisolation would be used later in the sixteenth century as an explanationfor the British kingdoms’ lack of overseas territorial possessions, and ameans whereby the English and the Scots alike could congratulatethemselves on their indifference to the demeaning scramble for tradeand land that the powers of continental Europe pursued. In thecontext of the ‘Rough Wooing’, however, it offered an argument infavour of a union to create a British empire conceived as an insularcomposite monarchy. The conception of this British empire in the swas 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 LordProtector . . . To the Nobilitie, Gentlemen, and Commons, and Al Others the Inhabitauntes of the Realme ofScotlande ( 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, inThe Complaynt of Scotlande, ed. Murray, ; Patten,Expeditioninto Scotland, in Tudor Tracts, ed. Pollard, ; Henrisoun, ‘Godly and Golden Booke’, in Calendar ofState 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, ), , , –, .


insular, rather than expansionist; and nature set its limits, which theempire of Great Britain would naturally fill but not overflow.

A Protestant union would bring with it independence from thePapacy; a commercial union would be based on freedom of tradebetween the two kingdoms. These advantages provided an Englishpromise to the Scots that even feudal dependency within a compositemonarchy would not imply their own personal dependency within thenew empire of Great Britain. All appearances to the contrary, theEnglish did not intend to secure Anglo-Scottish union by force or rightof conquest, but rather by dynastic union, ‘which title enduceth noservitude, but fredome, libertie, concord and quietnesse’. The Frenchtowns of Therouanne and Tournai had indeed been conquered by forceof English arms in the reign of Henry VIII, argued Henrisoun, but theScots should instead be persuaded peaceably to join a union of equals.There had historically been two methods by which two nations could bejoined under a single ruler, Somerset’sEpistle 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, thatEngland sought ‘not the Mastership of you, but the Fellowship!’ Anglo-Scottish union would restore the historic unity of Britain, and bring toScotland the clear advantages of peace, prosperity and Protestantism.The Scots should therefore ‘laie doune their weapons, thus rashlyreceived, to fight against the mother of their awne nacion: I mean thisrealm now called Englande the onely supreme seat of thempire of greateBriteigne’.

The empire of Great Britain was therefore the invention of theunionist 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 andScotland. It would be British not only because it encompassed the wholeisland of Britain, but also because it would restore the integrity of themonarchy founded by Brutus, whose subjects had been named ‘Britons’in his honour. The supporters of this new British monarchy, in bothEngland and Scotland, were overwhelmingly Protestants who envisagedAnglo-Scottish union as the means to create a Protestant island. Thepolitical 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 TudorTracts (ed.) Pollard, (compare Cicero, De Officiis, .); Bodrugan, Epitome of the Title, sig. [av]v

(my emphasis).


designs of the French, and increase the British monarchy’s standingwithin Europe. This would guarantee stability and prosperity, andsecure the religious and political freedom of the two British nations.

Though many Scots, especially in the Lowlands, signed assurances ofcompliance with the English, the Scottish monarchy and the ScottishChurch resisted the pressure towards union, and in due course affirmedtheir French allegiance with the betrothal of Queen Mary to the Frenchdauphin rather than the English king. The Scottish Crown produced noofficial responses to Henry VIII’s Declaration, Somerset’s Epistle, or theassociated English propaganda. Two unofficial Scottish responses to theEnglish arguments did emerge from the intersection of courtly andecclesiastical circles. William Lamb, the author of ‘Ane Resonyng ofAne Scottis and Inglis Merchand Betuix Rowand and Lionis’ (), wasa parson, a senator of James V’s College of Justice, and later a memberof Mary of Guise’s administration. Robert Wedderburn, the presumedauthor of The Complaynt of Scotland (c. ), was a vicar in the ScottishChurch whose residence at Dundee had been burned by the Englisharmy after their victory at the battle of Pinkie in . The two authorsevidently knew each other, and Lamb seems to have drawn upon theComplaynt 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 reasonedcase against the English conception of an Anglo-Scottish empire withinBritain that would be Protestant, commercial, insular, and free.

Lamb brought the techniques of humanist source-criticism to bearupon the historical arguments for Scottish allegiance to England ar-rayed in Henry VIII’s Declaration. As the English merchant in hisdialogue paraphrased the Declaration’s arguments for English suzerainty,the Scottish merchant refuted them at even greater length with materialtaken from the Scots historian, Hector Boece, but most often from theItalian humanist, Polydore Vergil, ‘your awin liturate, autentik his-toriciane’. Polydore had shown in his Anglica Historia () that therewas no good evidence for the existence of Brutus, let alone for thedivision of the British monarchy after his death. The Romans, notBrutus, had brought ‘literatoure and . . . civiliteis’ to Britain, as Tacitus

Marcus Merriman, ‘The Assured Scots: Scottish Collaborators with England during the RoughWooing’, Scottish Historical Review, (), –.

William Lamb, Ane Resonyng of Ane Scottis and Inglis Merchand Betuix Rowand and Lionis (), BLCotton MS Caligula . vii, ff. r–v, ed. Roderick J. Lyall (Aberdeen, ), x–xvii; [Wedder-burn,] Complaynt of Scotland (ed.) Stewart, xi–xvi.


had shown in the Agricola. Later historians gave no credence to theargument that the Scots had been vassals of the English crown. The firstking to have ruled ‘totius Anglie imperium’ was Athelstan, but he had neverheld ‘totius Britanie imperium; be quhilk word Britanie wes than and alsonow is contenit bayth Ingland and Scotland’. There had therefore neverbeen a British empire within Britain, and certainly none over which theEnglish monarch had ruled as a feudal superior. In the absence of anygood historical evidence, there could be no foundation for Englishclaims to suzerainty over Scotland. English arguments from historycould not be trusted any more than English intentions in the present. Asthe merchants’ audience of three Catholic victims of Henry VIII (SirThomas More, Bishop John Fisher, and ‘the Good Man of Sion’, aBrigittine monk) pointed out, Henry had been a good king until ‘the newleirnyng of Germanie’ had entered his court. The English attempt torecover their specious British empire would bring with it persecutoryProtestantism; the refutation of claims to the former would be onemeans of preventing the latter.

The Complaynt of Scotland placed Anglo-Scottish relations within thelarger context of universal history, told as the rise and fall of empires andthe consequent translatio imperii from Assyria to Rome and from Rome tothe multiplicity of contemporary polities. Lucan had foretold that theweight of Rome would bring its downfall, ‘quhilk is the cause that themonarche of it, is dividit amang mony diverse princis’, just as all such‘dominions altris dechaeis ande cummis to subversione’. This was notthe effect of fortune, but of divine judgment. Just as God had used theAssyrians as a scourge for Israel, so he had given victory to the English atPinkie to punish the Scots for their apostasy. The Scots had now ‘todeffende the liberte and save the dominione’ of their homeland or fallunder the mastery of the English king: ‘fra the tyme that he getdominione of the cuntre ye sal be his sklavis in extreme servitude’, likethe inhabitants of Ireland. Any Scot who did not adopt a preciselyCiceronian conception of patriotism as the defence of ‘ther public veil,& ther native cuntre, to perreis al to gyddir . . . ar mair brutal nor brutalbeystus’. Wedderburn therefore rejected any natural, historical or eth-nic arguments for the unity of Great Britain which, he witheringlypointed out, ‘is nou callit ingland’. Least convincing of all were Englishappeals 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, ), ), .


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 settlementfrom a metropole in a foreign territory, but Wedderburn adopted theterm in the course of rebutting, rather than asserting, an imperial claimderived 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 calculatedrhetorical irony, John Elder had called himself ‘a wretch destitude of allgood lernynge and eloquence’, James Henrisoun asserted that ‘thereneedeth no subtile perswasions or finesse of woordes’ to convince theScots of the need for union, and Nicholas Bodrugan stated that ‘it wasnot my mynde to trifle with the fine flowers of Rethorike but to bryngrather 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 ofEnglish sovereignty over the Scots, and for the restitution of the historic‘empire of Great Britain’. In response, William Lamb adopted thetechniques of forensic oratory to refute the English Declaration of point by point, while Robert Wedderburn arrayed the Ciceronianconception of patriotism as loyalty to the res publica as a defence againstEnglish imperial claims; ‘the eloquent Cicero’ was the most frequentlycited source named in the Complaynt.

The Anglo-Scottish debate of the s introduced the concept of anempire of Great Britain into British political thought, and associated itfor 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, DeOfficiis, .; 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 ourelangage vitht part of termis drevyn fra lateen be rason that oure scottis tong is nocht sa copeus asis 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 RenaissanceScotland (Edinburgh, ), –.


in the Scottish rebuttals, the humanist historiography of PolydoreVergil. The use by both sides of the techniques of classical rhetoricforeshadowed the prominence of the ars rhetorica in the promotionalliterature later produced to encourage migration and settlement in theCaribbean and North America, though in this debate neo-classicalconceptions of patriotism and the res publicawere deployed in oppositionto the creation of a novel commonwealth cast in the form of a compositemonarchy, rather than as the inducements to create a multitude of newcommonwealths across the Atlantic Ocean. ‘The long struggle, intel-lectual as well as military, against English territorial ambitions, hadensured that the Scots were already the historical nation’, especially intheir use of the Roman historians begun by John Bellenden’s translationof Livy’s first five books in the early s. Wedderburn had reinforcedhis moral appeals to Ciceronian patriotism with a battery of historicalexamples drawn from ‘Crisp Salust’ and Livy’s Histories, as well as fromother 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 illeffects of disunity, ‘as by the civill warres between Silla and Marius theruine of Rome is sufficient example to all the worlde’. He had arguedthat the Scots should embrace true patriotism, ‘the love that Plato &Cicero require in you to be borne to your countrey’, and follow theEnglish into the creation of that new res publica, the empire of GreatBritain.

The Edwardian conception of an ‘empire of Great Britain’ did live onamong Welsh and Scots antiquaries. The Welsh antiquary, HumphreyLlwyd, in described King Arthur’s pan-Britannic monarchy in itsdeclining years under the last British kings as the ‘Britannicum imperium’;when his work appeared in English the following year, the translationreferred to ‘the Empyre’ and its decadence. This Galfridian

Andrew Fitzmaurice, ‘Classical Rhetoric and the Promotion of the New World’, Journal of theHistory of Ideas, (), –.

John MacQueen, ‘Aspects of Humanism in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Literature’, inMacQueen (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, ‘JohnDee, Humphrey Llwyd, and the Name ‘‘British Empire’’’, Huntington Library Quarterly, (),–; Peter Roberts, ‘Tudor Wales, National Identity and the British Inheritance’, in BrendanBradshaw and Peter Roberts (eds.), British Consciousness and Identity: TheMaking of Britain, –(Cambridge, ), –.


conception of an Arthurian British empire also lay at the heart of JohnDee’s appeals in the s to ‘this Incomparable Brytish Empire’ and itsinhabitants ‘the true and naturall born subjects of this Brytish Empire’.

Dee’s conception of the British Empire included among its dominionsIreland (which he claimed had been settled by Arthur’s Britons), Ice-land, Gotland, Orkney, Norway, Denmark and Gaul. Moreover, thisBritish empire encompassed the seas around Britain even as far as theFrench and German coasts, and the recently rediscovered lands on thenorth-east coast of America. However, at the heart of this enormousmonarchy lay ‘the Lawfull British, and English Jurisdiction over Scot-land’; ‘the Lawfull Possession as well as the Proprietie of the Supremacyover Scotland ’ had been vested in the English royal line from CEuntil , as Henry VIII’s ‘little Pamphlet’, the Declaration of , hadsufficiently proved. The Edwardian conception of the empire of GreatBritain would also be revived in , as proponents of Anglo-Scottishunion under James VI and I recalled approvingly Somerset’s argumentsin favour of a ‘perfect monarchie’ under ‘the comon name of Albion orBrytane’.

The neo-Roman conception of Britain as a new res publica had beenstrongly promoted by Sir Thomas Smith and William Cecil, two of theprominent Cambridge humanists who had been drafted into Somerset’sgovernment in the s. Smith, the Regius Professor of Civil Law andVice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, had been Cecil’s tutor, andbecame Clerk of the Privy Council in March . In that capacity, hewas put in charge of searching for the evidence of English suzeraintyover Scotland which would become the foundation of Bodrugan’sargument in his Epitome, a work which the Imperial ambassador at-tributed to Smith himself. In the autumn of , Smith, like Cecil, hadaccompanied 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 EnglishRenaissance (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 seeThe Jacobean Union, ed. Gallowayand Levack, –, , –, –, , –; Sir Thomas Craig, De Unione RegnorumBritanniæ Tractatus (), ed. C. Sanford Terry (Edinburgh, ), (Latin)/ (English),/, /;The Queen an Empress, and Her Three Kingdoms One Empire (London, ), ; ArthurH. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI (Edinburgh, ), , n. .

On the Cambridge ‘Athenians’ generally see Winthrop S. Hudson, The Cambridge Connection andthe Elizabethan Settlement of (Durham, NC, ), –.


Scots, though he was taken ill and had to sit out the campaign at York.

Despite Smith’s involvement with Somerset’s ideological offensiveagainst Scotland, the attempt to create an Anglo-Scottish union hadlittle effect on his political thought: that other English security problemand territorial claim, Calais, absorbed more of his legal and historicalattention, though he did show awareness of the Anglo-Scottish contextwithin which the Treaty of Cateau–Cambresis had been concluded.

He made no reference to Scotland in either his Discourse of theCommonweal of This Realm of England () or the De Republica Anglorum(–), though he was instrumental in the attempt to break the AuldAlliance during his time as ambassador in France in –. Among hiseffects at his death was a painting of ‘England, Scotland, and Ireland’.

Such a depiction of the ‘British’ isles was much closer to Cecil’s ownvision of Britain, which had grown initially from his involvement inSomerset’s campaign. Cecil, like William Patten, was a judge of theMarshalsea Court who had fought at the battle of Pinkie. He main-tained close and lasting relations with the Scots who wrote in support ofSomerset’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 hisawareness of England’s strategic weakness, especially after Mary,Queen of Scots’ marriage to the French dauphin, and the consequentrevival of French influence in Scotland, led him to form a uniquelywide-ranging vision of England as the centre of a Protestant Britishmonarchy encompassing both Scotland and Ireland.

Once the Scottish Reformation of – had achieved Cecil’s aimof creating a Protestant island, Smith and Cecil agreed on the necessityof drawing Ireland closer to England. ‘In my mind’, Smith wrote toCecil in , ‘it needeth nothing more than to have colonies. Toaugment 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 quibusplanum fit . . . Reges Scociae in fide fuisse Regum Anglie, regnumque Scocie, Reges Anglietanquam 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 toHave the Restitution of Calais’ ( April ), BL MS Harl. , ff. –; Dewar, Sir ThomasSmith, –.

John Strype, The Life of the Learned Sir Thomas Smith, Kt. D.C.L. Principal Secretary of State to KingEdward the Sixth, and Queen Elizabeth (London, ), –, ; Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith, –.

Jane E. A. Dawson, ‘William Cecil and the British Dimension of Early Elizabethan ForeignPolicy’, History, (), –; Stephen Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and theBritish Succession Crisis – (Cambridge, ), –, –.


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, SirHenry Sidney, the Lord Deputy of Ireland, also advised Cecil of thenecessity that ‘persuasion woolde be used emonges the nobiletie, andprincipal gentlemen of England, that there might . . . be induced heresome Collany’ at private expense. The term ‘colony’ had first ap-peared in Scots in the Complaynt of Scotland, where it had indicatedWedderburn’s knowledge of early Roman history; it had appeared forthe first time in English in Smith’s pupil Richard Eden’s translation ofthe Decades of Peter Martyr in , though Smith popularised it as apractical rather than an historical term. In the Discourse of theCommonweal, Smith affirmed that ‘among all nations of the world, theythat be politic and civil do master the rest’. This equation betweencivility and superiority informed Smith’s own colonising ventures. Be-tween and , Smith and his son, Thomas, sent three abortiveexpeditions to establish colonies in the north of Ireland, on the Ardspeninsula, ‘to make the same civill and peopled with naturall Englishemen 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 bythe arms-bearing soldier-farmers. Fortified towns would be plantedamidst these agricultural settlements as retreats for merchants andstrongholds against attack. The precedents for this were once againRoman: ‘Mark Rome, Carthage, Venice and all other where notablebeginning 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 inDewar, Sir Thomas Smith, .

Sir Henry Sidney to William Cecil, summer of , PRO //, quoted in Quinn, ‘SirThomas Smith (–) and the Beginnings of English Colonial Theory’, .

D. B. Quinn, ‘Renaissance Influences in English Colonization’, Transactions of the Royal HistoricalSociety, th ser., (), –; Peter Martyr, The Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India, trans.Richard Eden (London, ), (‘This ryver is calledDarien, uppon the bankes whereof . . . theyentended 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. ), inHistorical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of Lord de L’Isle and Dudley Preserved atPenshurst 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 andAddenda, ed. Arthur John Butler and Sophie Crawford Lomas (London, ), .


of overpopulation. They justified them on the grounds that the colon-ists would make productive use of land that others had allowed to fallvacant: if the colonists could live peacefully with the mainlanders, itwould be to the great advantage of both (utriusque populi bono); if not, theUtopians could legitimately make war upon them for leaving theirland waste and uncultivated. The Ulsterman Rowland White revivedthis agriculturalist argument in the s when he proposed thatfour thousand English ploughmen should be sent to Ireland ‘to takewast landes to inhabyte and tyll’, thereby to ‘profytt them selvesmuche and also provoke other to the furtherance of the comonwelth’. 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 persuadeEnglish settlers to migrate, Ireland ‘lacketh only inhabitants, ma-nurance, and pollicie’; the English coloni would be prevented fromdegenerating into barbarousness because civility ‘encreaseth more bykeeping men occupyed in Tyllage, than by idle followyng of heards, asthe Tartarians, Arabians, and Irishe men doo’. The settlers would berewarded with their own ‘peculiar gain’, but there would be obviousadvantages to the ‘common profite’ in having Ireland ‘replenishedwith building civill inhabitantes, and traffique with lawe justice, andgood order’. ‘How say you now have I not set forth to you anotherEutopia?’ the Smiths asked.

‘We live in Smith’s Commonwealth, not in More’s Utopia’, Smith’sclient 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 relativemerits of ruthless militarism and peaceful persuasion, with examplesdrawn from Livy’sHistories. Smith and Haddon had argued on behalf ofFabius’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. NicholasCanny, Irish Historical Studies, (), –.

[Sir Thomas Smith and Thomas Smith,] A Letter Sent by I. B. Gentleman unto his Very Frende MaysterR. 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 tantummodo phantasticus’: Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia,ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford-upon-Avon, ), . On Harvey and Smith see Dewar, SirThomas Smith, –.


of force. Smith’s advice to his son in to look to the examples ofRome, Carthage and Venice was evidently part of a series of lessons inwhich Smith had instructed his son in Roman history. His conception ofcolonies was also only one of his attempts to introduce Roman policyinto the respublica Anglorum. He had hoped to create a college of civil lawat Cambridge, and a ‘College of Civilians’ to advise the royal council.Smith the civilian and councillor may have been responsible for thenotorious Vagrancy Act of ( Edw. , c. ) which imposed slaveryfor able-bodied indigents who refused to work, in imitation of theprovision in the Corpus Iuris Civilis (XI. xxvi) condemning free-bornbeggars to the forced labour of a ‘perpetual colonate’ (colonatu perpetuo).

His De Republica Anglorum analysed the English commonwealth as amixed monarchy with descriptive categories drawn from Aristotle,Cicero, and Roman civil law, in order to distinguish England from thecountries of the civil law world. In the Discourse of the Commonweal, Smithhad in passing called England ‘this empire’, and in De Republica Anglorumhe referred to it as ‘great Brittaine, which is nowe called England’.‘Edward College’ came to naught; the Vagrancy Act was never enforcedbut rapidly repealed; Smith’s colonies in the Ards collapsed in the face ofresistance from the Irish and opposition from the Lord Deputy SirWilliam Fitzwilliam. Yet, despite his promotion of the Roman model ofcoloni in Ireland, and his conception of England as a new Rome for itscivilising mission, Smith firmly portrayed England ‘not in that sort asPlato made his common wealth . . . nor as Syr Thomas More his Utopiafeigned common wealths’, but as it was on March : the respublicaAnglorum, not an Imperium Britannorum.

There was no necessary connection between humanism and humani-tarianism. However, classical humanism, of the kind practised bySmith, Cecil and many of the mid-sixteenth-century proponents ofAnglo-Scottish union, did transmit important assumptions regardingthe superiority of civility over barbarism and the necessity for civilised

Lisa Jardine, ‘Mastering the Uncouth: Gabriel Harvey, Edmund Spenser and the EnglishExperience in Ireland’, in John Henry and Sarah Hutton (eds.), New Perspectives on RenaissanceThought: 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 HistoryReview, 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 ‘‘Informacion en Derecho’’ ’, inWolfgang Reinhard (ed.), Humanismus und Neue Welt (Bonn, ), –, .


polities to carry their civility to those they deemed barbarous. Though itwas true, as Robert Wedderburn noted in the Complaynt of Scotland,‘euere nations reputis vthers nations to be barbariens quhen there tuanatours 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 ofcolonisation in the s emerged from among the New English inMunster. Sir William Herbert, Richard Beacon and Edmund Spensereach produced a reform tract in the s: one a Latin treatise cast in theidiom of classical moral philosophy (dedicated to a veteran of Somerset’sScottish wars, Sir James Croft); one an allegorical dialogue set in theAthens of Solon; and the third an English dialogue set firmly in thepresent of the s. Only Spenser provided an ethnological justifica-tion for conquest; likewise, only he offered a vision of a unified Britishmonarchy within the Three Kingdoms, on ethnological as much aspolitical grounds.

Though Spenser made no explicit references to the British propa-ganda of the s, he shared with the Edwardian proponents ofAnglo-Scottish union an historical genealogy and an ethnology. In hisView of the Present State of Ireland (c. ) and his uncompleted epicThe FærieQueene (–), Spenser adopted the conception of the British Empirefound in the works of Humphrey Llwyd and John Dee, to show that theProtestant New English settlers were reviving the ‘British’ dominion inIreland which had originally been established by King Arthur. The NewEnglish were therefore restoring ‘British’ rule over the Gaelic Irish andthe Old English, rather than attempting to create a novel polity inIreland. Yet it was also clear from Spenser’s works that this would be butthe first step towards the recreation of the Arthurian imperium in northernEurope and across the Atlantic. Accordingly, he dedicated The FærieQueene ‘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 VincentCarey (Binghamton, ); [Edmund Spenser,] A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. ), ed.Rudolf Gottfried, in TheWorks of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, CharlesGrosvenor Osgood, Frederick Morgan Padelford and Ray Heffner, vols. (Baltimore, –),, –.

Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Robe and Sword in the Conquest of Ireland’, in Cross, Loades andScarisbrick (eds.), Law and Government in Tudor England, –, emphasises Spenser’s differencesfrom Herbert and Beacon in this respect, but exaggerates the differences between the threehumanists, largely in response to the argument of Nicholas Canny, ‘Edmund Spenser and theDevelopment of Anglo-Irish Identity’, Yearbook of English Studies, (), –.


by the Grace of God Queene of England Fraunce and Ireland and ofVirginia’, a unique expansion of the royal style (in Elizabeth’s lifetime, atleast) to incorporate the new English province in North America.

The neo-Galfridian vision of the empire of Great Britain, whencombined with the Aristotelian foundations of classical moral philos-ophy, provided the substance of Spenser’s Færie Queene. Spenser claimedfor his work the educational purpose of an ‘historical fiction’, andcompared it to Xenophon rather than Plato, ‘for that the one in theexquisite depth of his judgement formed a Commune welth such as itshould be, but the other in the person of Cyrus and the Persiansfashioned a government such as might best be’. He envisaged a planfor his poem that would carry his readers through a course of instructionin the private ethical virtues and the public political virtues. No utopianfiction, The Færie Queene would provide not only an example after which‘to fashion a gentleman’ but, like More’sUtopia, also offer a vision of thebest state of the commonwealth (optimum status reipublicae), which inSpenser’s case was the commonwealth of Britain, encompassing theislands of both Britain and Ireland. Spenser’s ethical purposes wereaccordingly at one with the aims English humanists hoped to achievethrough the study of the litteræ humaniores, while his political vision ofEnglish domination throughout the British Isles presented perhaps themost ambitious and hardline British imperial vision of its time.

Spenser’s conception of the British Empire remained strictly confinedto Britain and Ireland, within the historical limits set by Geoffrey ofMonmouth’s Historia, apart from that single flattering reference to thenew province across the Atlantic. The Galfridian history provided himwith the traditional genealogy underpinning the Tudor claim to theBritish Isles which he presented in his epic poem. In Books and ofTheFærie Queene, he traced the line of British kings from Brutus down toElizabeth I. In the beginning, ‘The land, which warlike Britons nowpossesse,/ And therein have their mightie empire raysd,/ In antiquetimes 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: TudorRepresentations of Irish Origins’, Irish Historical Studies, (), –, –.

Edmund Spenser, ‘A Letter of the Authors Expounding his Whole Intention in the Course ofthis Work’, in Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. Greenlaw, Osgood, Padelford and Heffner, , .

Compare the other political visions of Britain before described in Hiram Morgan, ‘BritishPolicies Before the British State’, in Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (eds.), The BritishProblem, c. –: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (Basingstoke, ), –.


–). According to Merlin’s prophecy, ‘a royall virgin’ would restorethe Arthurianempire in the British Isles, and ‘Thencefortheternall unionshall be made/ Between the nations different afore’ (FQ , . iii. ).There were ethnic Britons in England, Britons in Scotland and Britons inIreland. All traced their ancestry back to Brutus himself, and all would bereunited into a unitary British monarchy under Elizabeth. The ‘British’colonists of Ireland would be absorbed once more into their parentmonarchy, and the kingdoms formerly ruled by Albanact and Camberwould once again be rightly subdued to the senior kingdom of England.

Spenser’s conception of the British Empire appeared most forcibly inhis View of the Present State of Ireland, in which he used it to support hisargument for the cultural suppression of the Gaelic Irish and the reformof the ‘degenerated’ Old English settlers. Spenser traced the commonorigin of both the native Irish and the Scots to the migrations of theScythians, ‘for Scotlande and Irelande are all one and the same’ andmoreover ‘there are two Scottlandes’, one inhabited by migrants fromIreland, the other peopled from England. Spenser saw the divisionswithin the British Isles as both ethnic and cultural, ‘for the difference ofmanners and Customes dothe followe the difference of nacions andpeople’. The Old English could no longer be counted with the inhabit-ants of England itself, for they were ‘now muche more Lawles andLicentious then the verie wilde Irishe’, and would accordingly be subjectto 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 ofthe prince’, in the form of garrison government. In adopting thisforcible 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 thesemeasures, too, but without fear of the sword, and even its exercise, theywould not be enough to restore civility and the rule of law withinIreland. The extremity of some of his measures matched the uniformityof his imperial vision: there could be as little compromise with culturaldifference 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 moraland 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, , , , , .


death. The failure of both Spenser’s great designs was not coincidental.The worsening situation in Ireland in the opening years of Tyrone’srebellion may have convinced him that he should offer more pointedlypractical advice to achieve the British pacification of Ireland than anAristotelian programme of moral re-education could provide. He mayalso have lost faith in the effectiveness of such humanist ethical edifica-tion during the darkening years of Elizabeth’s last decade, a desperateperiod of Sturm und Drang on both sides of the Irish Sea. The politicalalternatives were becoming starker and more circumscribed, and Spen-ser handled them as directly as he could in the dialogic form of A View ofthe Present State of Ireland. The tension in his own political theory betweencivil-law arguments derived from rights of conquest and common-lawconceptions of property rights challenged the very foundations of Eng-lish policy in Ireland and rendered his moral justifications for a Britishempire unstable; as a result, few would follow him in finding anethnological, 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 inMunster, the Scottish Crown began to pursue its own programme ofcivilising the barbarian just across the North Channel. Like the EnglishCrown in Ireland, it couched its claims to authority over its depend-encies in the language of civility and barbarism, which was mappedonto the divide between Celtic and non-Celtic. The origins of Scottishcolonial policies lay in these attempts by the Crown to enforce Lowlandnorms 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 WesternIslands 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 paleof civility by means of pledges of security, military containment, andcultural 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’, inPatricia 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 BritishEmpire, , –.


mendations of New English theorists in Ireland when in he warnedhis infant son, Henry, about those that ‘dwelleth in the Iles, and arealluterly 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 amongthem; rooting out or transporting the barbarous and stubborne sort, andplanting civilitie in their roomes’. Two attempts to settle the island ofLewis with Lowland adventurers, in – and –, failed,though ultimately more aggressive means were urged to pacify theIslands by main force, and to suppress the ‘wilde savaiges voide of Godisfeare and our obedience’. Expeditions sent to the Islands in , ,, and culminated in two successive civilising missions, onemilitary, the other religious, in –, under the leadership of AndrewStewart, Lord Ochiltree (who had earlier operated a judicial commis-sion in the Anglo-Scottish Borders), and Andrew Knox, the bishop ofthe Isles. Ochiltree imprisoned Island chiefs, appointed outside commis-sioners, and demanded strategies to civilise the Islands. The Statutes ofIcolmkill () legislated for such strategies, which were designed torestore decayed religion, encourage hospitality, discourage idleness,begging, drunkenness and the keeping of firearms, and thereby toremedy the ‘grite crueltie and inhumane barbaritie’, ‘ignorance andincivilitie’ in the Islands, at the expense of the clans’ traditions ofsociability and militarism.

The origins of Scottish colonial theory and practice in the seven-teenth century lay in internal colonisation within the Stewart realm asJames 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 togreater efforts of ‘civilising’ than might otherwise have been the case, sothat internal colonisation provided an emulative bond of union betweenthe two kingdoms. The debate over James’s proposals for closer unionbetween 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 theWestern 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 ThreeKingdoms (Urbana, ), , –; James VI, ‘Instructions to the Commission to Improve theIsles’ ( 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, ), –.


theorists to redefine ‘Britain’ as an empire, and its monarch as apotential emperor. When the question of the royal style was debated inParliament in , the Welsh MP Sir William Maurice of Clenennauproposed that the king should proclaim himself ‘emperor of GreatBritain’, but the motion was rejected on the grounds that ‘The Name ofEmperor is impossible: – No particular Kingdom can make their Kingan Emperor’. Undaunted, the Scottish mathematician Robert Ponthailed the reduction of ‘this our Great Brittaine, Ireland and the adjoyn-ing Brittish isles . . . to the monarchicall obedience of one emperor’, ‘acompacting of all the Brittish isles and reducing them within the circle ofone diadem . . . so that the savadg wildnes of the Irish, and the barbarousfiercenes of the other ilanders shall easily be tamed’.

The Gaels of Ireland and of Scotland had originally been separateproblems for their respective monarchs; once the regal union hadcreated a new British multiple kingdom, they became a single target forthat monarchy’s policies of security and ‘civility’. The fruit of thisanxiety is evident in the colonisation of Ulster, which James promotedas a specifically British venture, an extension of his policies on thewestern seaboard of Scotland, to be sure, but one in which both hisScottish and his English subjects could participate as equal partners.Francis Bacon echoed James’s aspirations when he reckoned the Ulsterplantation ‘a second brother to Union’, the first cooperative Britishenterprise of James’s newly proclaimed Kingdom of Great Britain.

The Ulster planters were to be the first of a new race of Britons, whoselegal identities as Scots or English would be supplemented and, fortheir 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 toUlster’s ‘British families’, to the ‘British undertakers’ of ‘Brittish birthand descent’ and to their ‘British tenants’. From the roots of James’s HistoricalManuscripts 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 Identityand 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 GeorgeHill, An Historical Account of the Plantation in Ulster at the Commencement of the Seventeenth Century,– (Belfast, ), –.


civilising mission in Scotland grew the first ‘British’ plantations in hiskingdoms.

James intended the Ulster plantation to provide a buffer zone ofcivility 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 inReligion to breake foorth in rebellions’. It was therefore continuouswith the late Stewart monarchs’ campaigns to tame Gaeldom withintheir own dominions. Community of personnel in the plantation re-vealed that continuity of aim as, for example, Lord Ochiltree becameone of the major Scottish undertakers in the plantation, and AndrewKnox continued his campaign of ‘civility’ in Ulster as bishop of Raphoein Donegal from to . The majority of the Scottish under-takers were Lowland gentry and aristocracy who brought followers withthem to settle the lands escheated after the Flight of the Earls in . Asan emblem of the cooperative Britishness of the enterprise, the parcels ofland offered to Scots and English alike were roughly equal in size, ,acres in total for the Scots, , for the English. The Ulster plantationoffered opportunity and profit to Lowland Scots, as the earlier informalplantation of East Ulster had to their southwestern compatriots, andit had the backing of the Scottish Crown as a national enterprise, as wellas the aspiration of the new British king to be an undertaking to unite allof 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 apotentially pan-British enterprise. It also provided James with a testing-ground for the creation of Britons. Before the uprising of , it becamethe most successful fruit of James’s determination to create a unitedBritish monarchy, with common British enterprises, in the interests ofgenerating mutual recognition among his subjects as Britons. Neverthe-less, the fact that such self-identification only seems to have floweredamong 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 andGary 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 ScottishMigration to Ulster in the Reign of James I (London, ), , , –.

Raymond Gillespie, Colonial Ulster: The Settlement of East Ulster – (Cork, ).


a vision, even if colonisation did provide the only means to promote it.Ulster provided the only serious prospects for emigration, profit andcivility, 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 opiniondiffering as much from [Ulster], as Amadis de Gaul differs from Caesar’sCommentaries’.

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 kingshipof James VI, I and I, a British Caesar in his determined advocacy of hiscivilising mission, though never (despite the hopes of some of his Welshsubjects) a British emperor ruling a united British empire. James’sinterest in creating British plantations in Ulster immediately succeededhis disappointment at failing to create a united kingdom of GreatBritain. Only a handful of his most immediate courtiers, and all of themScots, thought of themselves as Britons within Britain itself; otherwise, inthe seventeenth century, Britons would only be found overseas, inIreland 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; thoughhe made no mention of Virginia among the King’s dominions, he didnote that ‘at this present in the newWorld of America a Colonie of is seated in that part now called ’. When Samuel Purchasdedicated his Pilgrimes to Prince Charles in , he recognised that thethree British kingdoms (and even the principality of Wales) each par-ticipated independently in the process of empire-building when heforesaw ‘Englands out of England . . . yea Royall Scotland, Ireland, andPrincely Wales, multiplying of new Scepters to his Majestie and HisHeires 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 asimperfect, contingent and various as the process of state-formation itself.

Francis Bacon, ‘Certain Considerations Touching the Plantation in Ireland, Presented to HisMajesty, ,’ in Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon, ed. Spedding, , ; compare Sir ArthurChichester, ‘I had rather labour with my hands in the plantation of Ulster than dance or play inthat of Virginia’, quoted in Philip Robinson, The Plantation of Ulster: British Settlement in an IrishLandscape – (Belfast, ), .

John Speed, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London, ), sig. []r, . Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, vols. (London, ), , sig. ¶ v.


As Purchas realised, just as there was no unitary British monarchy (ofthe kind hoped for by the Anglo-Scottish unionists of the s, andmore expansively by Edmund Spenser in the s, or by James VI andI 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, theCaribbean and Newfoundland; the Scots in Newfoundland and CapeBreton; the Welsh also in Newfoundland, or ‘Britanniol ’; the Irish on theAmazon – but they could no more create a pan-British empireabroad than they could create a pan-British monarchy at home, for thesame reasons, and with the same effects. British state-building andBritish empire-building were therefore continuous with one another intheir 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 acomposite 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 theNewfoundland (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 theThree Kingdoms, and hence the solution to the problem of diversitywithin the empire of Great Britain. The English proponents of Anglo-Scottish union in the s, and their Scottish agents, argued thattogether the two kingdoms of England and Scotland could be joined tocreate a single Protestant island. The imposition of a post-Reformationconception of an Anglo-British empire could thereby extend the processof the Anglo-Welsh union to join another partly Celtic dominion to theEnglish state, and thus form an insular bulwark against Roman Ca-tholicism. Similarly, the New English settlers in Ireland argued from thes that the extension of Protestantism could secure Ireland againstinvasion and even bring the Kingdom of Ireland into an archipelagicProtestant triumvirate. The integrative force of Protestantism couldpotentially serve as the bond of union between the civilised inhabitantsof the Three Kingdoms to create a uniquely post-Reformationterritorial and jurisdictional empire.

The judgments of later historians have followed the contours of thesearguments for Protestant integration, as the ideological origins of Eng-lish nationalism, British nationhood and, in turn, British imperialismhave all been traced back to the Protestant Reformations in Englandand Scotland. According to one recent student of primordial English

Richard Hakluyt the elder, ‘Inducements to the Liking of the Voyage Intended TowardsVirginia’ (), 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 andIreland c. – c. (Cambridge, ).

nationalism, Protestantism in the sixteenth century was ‘perhaps themost significant among the factors that furthered the development ofEnglish national consciousness’. The obvious failure to unite the ThreeKingdoms around a consensual version of Protestantism left the devel-opment of a broader British national identity as a task for the eighteenthcentury: in this period, ‘Great Britain might be made up of threeseparate nations, but under God it could also be one, united nation . . .Protestantism was the foundation that made the invention of GreatBritain possible.’ Looking back from this period to discern the origins ofthe eighteenth-century British Empire, ‘Christian providentialism’ hasbeen 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 theEnglish and Scottish Reformations, through the attempted religiousunification of the Stuart monarchies during the seventeenth century,across the Anglo-Scottish Parliamentary Union of and on to theUnited Kingdom of Great Britain that sat at the heart of the expandingBritish empire-state of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thatchronology was hardly continuous, nor the history seamless and unin-terrupted; nonetheless, Protestantism was the only thread joining thesethree mutually constitutive processes from state-formation to empire-building.

Despite the efflorescence of interest in post-Reformation religioushistory in recent years, little attempt has been made to relate the findingsof that historiography to the question of the origins of the BritishEmpire. Historians have investigated the effect of the New Worldexperience 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 havealmost 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 BritishEmpire, : The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, ), ; for a more sceptical assessment of thecontribution 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., ), .


by Protestantism to the ideological origins of the British Empire. This isa specific manifestation of the fact that the history of Protestant theoriesof empire more generally – in England, Scotland, the United Provinces,Sweden and France – remains largely unwritten. The neglect of suchconceptions of empire has allowed Catholic theories to appear norma-tive and Protestant theories exceptional; this has in turn helped toconfirm the impression that it was the Protestant empires like the Britishthat were acquired absent-mindedly: ‘what is there in English literaturethat can compare to the letters of Hernan Cortes or the ‘‘true history’’ ofBernal Diaz? . . . Where, in all the long centuries of European imperial-ism, was there a scene to equal the public debate staged at Valladolidbetween Juan Gines de Sepulveda and Las Casas?’

To return British imperial ideology to the context of theologicaldebate can help to answer such questions. The more one investigates therelationship between these two bodies of thought, the harder it becomesto trace any specifically and exclusively Protestant ideology of empire.The visceral anti-Catholicism to which a unifying British identity hasbeen attributed in the eighteenth century was mostly negative in con-tent, and hence could hardly be a source of positive arguments in favourof a particular mission or foundation for the British Empire. Least of allcould it, or post-Reformation theology more generally, provide a sol-ution to the problem of defining, justifying or correlating claims both tosovereignty (imperium) and property (dominium) as the ideological basis forthe Empire. In light also of the fact that distinctions within Protestantismcould divide confessed Protestants as much as it had the potential tounite them, and also that the national and international contexts withinwhich Protestant theorists operated shifted so dramatically and subtlyacross the course of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it

For exceptions to this generalisation see Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the NewWorld, ch. , ‘TheFinger of God: Religious Conceptions of the New World’; Alfred A. Cave, ‘Canaanites in aPromised Land: The American Indian and the Providential Theory of Empire’, American IndianQuarterly, (), –; Paul Stevens, ‘ ‘‘Leviticus Thinking’’ and the Rhetoric of EarlyModern Colonialism’, Criticism, (), –. The omission of any sustained treatment ofreligion 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 ScottishPolitics of Civilization, –’, Past and Present, (Feb. ), –; Simon Schama, TheEmbarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (London, ); FrankLestringant, Le Huguenot et le sauvage: l’Amerique et la controverse coloniale, en France, au temps des Guerres deReligion (–) (Paris, ); Michael Roberts, The Swedish Imperial Experience –(Cambridge, ).

D. A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State –(Cambridge, ), .


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 amplematerial for testing the hypothetical relationship between Protestantismand the ideological origins of the British Empire. As the bishop ofPeterborough, White Kennett, noted with pride in , ‘Mr. and Mr. (both Clergymen of the Church of England)’ wereindispensable providers of information and inspiration for the library hehad assembled under the auspices of the Society for the Propagation ofthe Gospel. Hakluyt – the rector of Wetheringsett in Norfolk, preben-dary of Bristol Cathedral and archdeacon of Westminster Abbey – andPurchas – vicar of Eastwood, chaplain to archbishop George Abbot,rector of St Martin’s, Ludgate, and of All Hallows, Bread Street – werealso not alone, of course, among the host of English Protestant clericswho chronicled and promoted trade, colonisation and conquest in thelate sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. For example, GeorgeBenson, Patrick Copland, Richard Crakanthorpe, William Crashaw,John Donne, Robert Gray and William Symonds all wrote on behalf ofthe Virginia Company, and deployed sermons as one of the majorgenres of promotional literature for the company. Moreover, the mostpenetrating treatments of the question of English property rights inNorth America came in the writings of the Rev. John White of Dorches-ter and the Puritan leader John Winthrop. John Locke later expandedupon 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.), ThePurchas 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 VirginiaColony –’, in K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny and P. E. H. Hair (eds.), The WestwardEnterprise: 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 theVirginia 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 HistoricalCollections, (), –; Wilcomb E. Washburn, ‘The Moral and Legal Justification forDispossessing the Indians’, in James Morton Smith (ed.), Seventeenth-Century America: Essays inColonial History (Chapel Hill, ), –; Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians,Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, ), –; Ruth Baynes Moynihan, ‘ThePatent and the Indians: The Problem of Jurisdiction in Seventeenth-Century New England’,American Indian Culture and Research Journal, (), –.


justifications for possession and those derived from the presumed stateof the souls of the dispossessed. To trace these arguments from the sto the s is to see just how small a part Protestant conceptions of themillennium, of the church and of salvation played in the development ofAnglo-British conceptions of empire; it is also to realise that, thoughProtestantism may not have been the only cause of imperial amnesia, itwas far from the well-spring of imperial identity some later historianshave discerned.

The British Empire was nevertheless obviously a post-Reformationempire, even in the territorial and dynastic sense examined in the lastchapter. ‘Between the opening ages of Spanish and British transatlanticcolonization’, J. H. Elliott has noted, ‘fell the great divide of the Protes-tant Reformation’. In particular, the institutional structure of the laterBritish 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, butalso finally more fragile than the Spanish Monarchy in the Indies, forexample. Ecclesiological dissension racked the Church of England anddoctrinal Protestantism penetrated unevenly throughout the Englishterritories. The English Crown recognised a Presbyterian establishedChurch in the Channel Islands after , even when it was mostferociously 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 compositemonarchy after was likewise transmitted to its overseas possessions.By the s, the Elizabethan state also effectively tolerated a powerfulCatholic minority (so long as they remained quiescent). Such pluralismand de facto toleration of diversity can help explain the entrenchment ofecclesiological diversity that characterised the British Atlantic Empire,especially since it was enshrined in fundamental law by the Treaty ofUnion in , which recognised the perpetual separation of the estab-lished Churches of England and Scotland. One major consequence forthe later British Empire of the Protestant Reformations was therefore

J. H. Elliott, ‘Empire and State in British and Spanish America,’ in Serge Gruzinski and NathanWachtel (eds.), Le Nouveau Monde – mondes nouveaux: l’experience americaine (Paris, ), .

A. F. McC. Madden, ‘, and All That: The Relevance of the English MedievalExperience of ‘‘Empire’’ to Later Imperial Constitutional Issues’, in John E. Flint and GlyndwrWilliams (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, (), –.


disunity rather than unity. The common Protestantism of the Empirewas not based on any shared conception of doctrines of salvation, thechurch or of Jesus’s divinity. Instead, and increasingly, it dependedupon a common anti-Catholicism that was more negative in contentthan 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 forthe Empire. The traditional genealogy of the British Empire located itsbeginnings in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I of England (thoughnot of James VI of Scotland). It was in this period that England – whichwas assumed to be the primary and only seat of empire in Britain –extended its commerce westwards across the Atlantic, began to sendsettlers across the ocean and planted its first colonies and, with them,laid the foundations of a British Empire. This chronology affirmed thedefining Protestantism of the British Empire by aligning its origins withthe period of the consolidation of the English Reformation in the wakeof the Elizabethan Settlement. Yet it also tended to displace the Scottishcontribution to the origins of a comprehensively British Empire byassuming that the driving force behind both Protestantism and empirecame from England alone. Just as Scotland after had becomesubsumed into an Anglo-British state, this narrative implied, so it couldhave made no contribution to the formation of the British Empire, norcould there have been any relationship between the multiple monarchyof 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 ofthe relations between the Three Kingdoms. One reason for the oblivioninto which Samuel Purchas fell may indeed have been his own commit-ment to the projects of British federalism and, later, British unionism inthe reigns of James VI and I and Charles I. It was always easier toassume that Anglican Protestantism defined an Anglo-British Empire,centred on London and superintended by London’s bishop. To acceptthe 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 accountsserved the ideological purposes of the later British Empire better thanPurchas’s.

For a rather different view of the religious character of the Empire see J. C. D. Clark, TheLanguage of Liberty –: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World(Cambridge, ).


The historical narrative of the Elizabethan, and hence English, ori-gins of the British Empire necessarily effaced the ideological origins ofthat empire in the period between Reformations. As we have seen, theconcept of an ‘Empire of Great Britain’ first emerged in the aftermathof 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 thefirst year of Elizabeth’s reign and asserted the Protestantism of theScottish Church by means of insurrection and coup d’etat during theScottish Reformation of . These crises created two unstable andpotentially short-lived Protestant monarchies in Britain that with hind-sight appeared as the harbingers of unification, as indeed some of thesupporters of Reformation in both England and Scotland during thisperiod hoped. As F. W. Maitland famously put it, ‘[a] new nation, aBritish nation, was in the making’ in the aftermath of . That nationwas decidedly Protestant and incipiently British with a glorious, globaldestiny ahead of it: ‘The fate of the Protestant Reformation was beingdecided, and the creed of unborn millions in undiscovered lands wasbeing determined’.

If Protestantism was the bond of Britishness, and out of Britishnationhood sprang British imperialism, the Reformation should logi-cally have been the ideological forcing-house for the British Empireitself. The British religious crises of – may have created twoProtestant kingdoms, and hence a Protestant island of Britain; however,they did not produce a common Protestantism, nor could they therebyhave provided a mutual foundation for a Protestant empire beyond theThree Kingdoms. ‘The great success of Anglo-Scottish Protestant cul-ture in promoting a measure of cultural integration between the tworealms was deeply deceptive’, because England and Scotland retainedtheir particular religious and political institutions, and remained inmore respects divided by Protestantism than united by it. Even thecontemporary 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 betweenthe 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, ), .


Robert Hayman, versified this problem when memorialising KingJames 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 theseunstable foundations.

The narrative of the late sixteenth-century origins of the BritishEmpire suppressed the fact that the post-Reformation Empire was also apost-Renaissance Empire. As we have also seen, both English propon-ents of Anglo-Scottish union and their Scottish opponents employedclassical rhetoric in the dispute over the creation of an ‘empire of GreatBritain’ in the s. Both sides appealed to Roman precedents tosupport their respective positions, and both used the neo-Roman lan-guage of empire (imperium) and colony (colonia) to describe the territorialconsolidation they envisaged or the jurisdictional subordination theyfeared. The Scots antagonists of English claims to suzerainty turned theweapons of critical humanism against the historical foundations of thoseclaims in the multiple monarchy of Brutus, while an Anglo-Briton likeEdmund Spenser could later unabashedly draw on the British history intandem with a neo-Aristotelian scheme for his truncated epic.

Both Hakluyt and Purchas identified the sixteenth-century revival ofclassical literature as a factor in encouraging commerce, colonisationand English settlement overseas. In the preface to his Principal Navigations(–), Hakluyt attributed the precedence of the Spanish and thePortuguese in the process of discovery in the Indies to their intellectualadvantages, not least ‘those bright lampes of learning (I meane the mostancient and best Philosophers, Historiographers and Geographers)’. Aquarter of a century later, Purchas located the origins of English expan-sion in ‘the late eruption of captived learning in the former age, andmore 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 ofNewfoundland’, 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 avertthe almost unavoidable confusion between this work and Purchas’s Pilgrimage () and hisPilgrim (), it is hereafter cited as Hakluytus Posthumus.


chas’s chronology of the origins of an Anglo-British empire in Eliza-beth’s reign would later become conventional, particularly when anemergent linguistic nationalism traced the origins of English literatureto the vernacular poetry and prose of this period. This association ofEnglishness (transmitted through literature) and empire (rooted in Eliza-bethan expansion) served at once to identify the origins of empire withthe late sixteenth century – and hence with activity outside the ThreeKingdoms – 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 theIndies and the recovery of the Greek and Latin classics. The peculiarEnglish version of this myth added the Protestant Reformation to therevival of ancient learning and the discovery of new worlds as a markerof the modern era. It was of course hardly fortuitous that the Tudordynasty 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, whichstrangely opened the manner of this . . . Besides strange alterations in theState Ecclesiasticall: Religion brought forth to be an Actor in thegreatest Designes of Ambition and Faction’. Daniel’s assessment of theconjunction was not entirely approving, but he did deem it decisive insettling England’s place in the longer span of European history. Later inthe 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 neerabout the same time, did very much alter the State of Affairs in theWorld’. The most famous formulation of this conjunction wasThomas Paine’s in : ‘The Reformation was preceded by the dis-covery of America; As if the Almighty graciously meant to open asanctuary to the persecuted in future years’. Gradually, the associationwith the Renaissance was forgotten in Protestant thought. It therebybecame 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. Av. A Declaration of His Highness . . . Setting Forth, On the Behalf of this Commonwealth, the Justice of their Causeagainst Spain (London, ), .

Thomas Paine, Common Sense; Addressed to the Inhabitants of America (Philadelphia, ), .


Empire as specifically Protestant, just as it became necessary to definethose origins as exclusively English, rather than collectively British.

Richard Hakluyt the younger was the major beneficiary of the narrativethat 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 Americanpossessions than to any man of that age’, according to William Robert-son. In the mid-nineteenth century, J. A. Froude succinctly combineda similarly high estimation of Hakluyt’s place in the history of the BritishEmpire with an assessment of his position in the history of literature inEnglish, and hence in the history of Englishness itself: in these terms,Froude memorably judged Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations to be nothingless than the ‘Prose Epic of the modern English nation’. Classical epichad been transformed into vernacular prose; colonial fact replacedimperial fiction; modernity, nationhood and Englishness could all betraced back to the reign of Elizabeth, where they had been plotted bythe pen of Hakluyt. Likewise, Hakluyt’s first scholarly biographerargued that ‘[t]he history of Hakluyt’s career is in large part theintellectual history of the beginnings of the British Empire’: muchtherefore depends on an accurate assessment of that career in anyunderstanding of the ideological origins of an empire which later tookhim to be its intellectual progenitor.

Hakluyt located the origins of his own vocation as the memorialist ofEnglish overseas enterprise in the juxtaposition of theology and geogra-phy. While he was ‘one of her Majesty’s scholars at Westminster’ inc. , he recalled, he visited the rooms of his cousin, Richard Hakluytthe 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 intothree parts after the olde account, and then according to the later & betterdistribution, 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’,TheWestminster 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, ), .


are plentifully supplied. From the Mappe he brought me to the Bible, andturning to the [th] Psalme, directed mee to the [rd] & [th] verses, whereI read, that they which go downe to the sea in ships, and occupy by the greatwaters, they see the works of the Lord, and his woonders in the deepe, &c.

Hakluyt represented this event in idiomatically Protestant terms, as anencounter with a prophetic text, guided by a layman and applied to thelife of an individual reader and believer. The elder Hakluyt’s cosmog-raphies revealed a world of discrete territories, each endowed with theirnatural products but also connected by their mutual need for oneanother’s goods. This confirmed the natural jurisprudential argumentthat God had so disposed the world’s commodities that the reciprocityof scarcity and abundance between states would promote ‘the benefit oftraffic and intercourse of merchants’. The Psalmists’ verses of courseoffered no scriptural foundation for this principle of natural rather thanrevealed religion; however, they did authorise Hakluyt’s own laterconception of his mission, both as an editor and as a cleric in theElizabethan Church. Nevertheless, Hakluyt’s account was somewhatdisingenuous for, as we shall see, his intellectual projects owed more tohis 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 orrhetorically. 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. Hepublished no sermons, intervened directly in no religious polemics andwrote no Biblical commentary. The most direct institutional source ofhis commitments was not the Elizabethan Church but rather the Cloth-workers’ Company. The company paid Hakluyt an annual pensionfrom to even when he was stationed in Paris as chaplain to theEnglish ambassador, Sir Edward Stafford, on and off between and. The company’s interest lay in replacing short-range Europeanand Mediterranean markets for English cloth with more expansivearenas of trade. The geographical range of Hakluyt’s various historiescertainly encouraged such a reorientation of English exports, both to theEast Indies and increasingly across the Atlantic. Such a programme Richard Hakluyt, ‘Epistle Dedicatory to Sir Francis Walsingham’, in Hakluyt (ed.), The PrincipallNavigations 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 HistoricalReview, nd ser., (), –.


may have been closer to Hakluyt’s intentions than his theologicalcommitments, 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’snational mission were most evident in his two longest and most closelylinked works, one the fruit of his position as an advisor to Sir FrancisWalsingham and Sir Walter Ralegh in the s, the other of his tutorialresponsibilities at Oxford. Since its first publication in the late nine-teenth century, the so-called ‘Discourse of Western Planting’ has beenthe major source for discussions of Hakluyt’s ideas and of Elizabethancolonial ideology more broadly. Hakluyt’s own title for the work – ‘Aparticuler discourse concerninge the greate necessitie and manifoldecomodyties that are like to growe to this Realme of Englande by theWesterne discoveries lately attempted’ – is usually forgotten, as are itsgenre and the context of its original reception. The ‘Discourse’ was aposition-paper, written at Walsingham’s request, and submitted toQueen Elizabeth in . As such, it was simultaneously an act ofcounsel, a rhetorical intervention into conciliar debate on policy and agift offered from suppliant to monarch in hopes of generating reciprocalreward. Yet it is also forgotten that the ‘Discourse’ was not Hakluyt’sonly such work at this time. In September , Hakluyt had presented‘a couple of bookes of myne in wryting, one in Latin upon Arystotlespoliticks, the other in English concerning Mr Rawley’s voyage’. As anattempt to influence conciliar policy, and to gain the Crown’s financialbacking for Ralegh’s Roanoke voyage, the ‘Discourse’ was clearly afailure. However, in tandem with Hakluyt’s ‘wryting . . . in Latin uponArystotles politicks’, it was impressive enough to gain him ‘the nextvacation of a prebend in Bristol’ in October .

The simultaneous presentation of the ‘Discourse’ and the Latinsynopsis of the Politics – the ‘Analysis, seu resolutio perpetua in octolibros 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 ElizabethanPolity: 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 MSRoyal . . . The only extended treatment of the ‘Analysis’ does not draw any intellectualconnection between it and the ‘Discourse’: Lawrence V. Ryan, ‘Richard Hakluyt’s Voyage intoAristotle’, Sixteenth Century Journal, (), –.


of its presentation to Elizabeth and her ministers. Like the ‘Discourse’, itwas a bid for patronage, and in this it was clearly successful. Unlike the‘Discourse’, it might be added, the ‘Analysis’ was a supreme example ofits genre, ‘[p]erhaps the most significant of all the manuscript materialsrelating to Aristotle coming from Oxford in the [Elizabethan] period’.

It was a characteristic product of the late sixteenth-century Oxfordcurriculum, and of the ‘humanistic, Aristotelian culture’ it fostered. Itderived from Hakluyt’s lectures on Aristotle at Christ Church in ,and he evidently continued to draw upon it beyond the time of hiscomposition of the ‘Discourse’, through the editing of his earliest geo-graphical works, and almost up to the moment when he published thefirst edition of the Principall Navigations, since he produced a second,almost identical, manuscript of it in . The exposition of the Politicswas therefore the one consistent thread in Hakluyt’s intellectual lifefrom to , a fact which confirms the importance of the ‘Analysis’to elucidate the context of the ‘Discourse’ with which he paired it forpresentation to Elizabeth in .

The ‘Analysis’ presented a complete recension of the Politics intoLatin, broken down into books, chapters and questions. For Hakluyt’sOxford students, it provided a pedagogical tool, adequate to their needto understand Aristotle’s work and to debate its meaning; for Elizabethand her counsellors, it functioned rather as an argument regarding thenature, capacities and purpose of the commonwealth, and in that formstood as a preface to the ‘Discourse’. Hakluyt’s summary of Aristotle’schapters entitled it ‘Octo librum Aristotelis de Republica’, and, as if tonudge his readers further in the direction of considering the work as acontribution to the Latin literature on the best state of thecommonwealth, he entitled Book , ‘De optima Republica’. Centralto the best state was Aristotle’s conception of self-sufficiency, recast inThomist terms as the defining feature of the communitas perfecta. In hissynopsis of Book of the Politics, Hakluyt translated Aristotle’s definitionof 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’sUtopia and the Language of Renaissance Humanism’,in Anthony Pagden (ed.),The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, ),–.


city is the perfect society, whose end is a sufficiency of all necessities andthe blessed life’). He reaffirmed it in his translation of the definition of thecivitas in Book as ‘multitudo . . . civium, ad vitae sufficientiam seipsacontenta’ (‘a mass of citizens, self-sufficient in the necessities of life’).

The ‘protestant scholasticism’ of Hakluyt’s thought is also evident in thefact that he cited Aquinas more often than any other modern commenta-tor on Aristotle. Though Hakluyt referred to himself as ‘verbi DeiMinister’ in his preface to Elizabeth, and dedicated the ‘Analysis’ on itsclosing leaf, ‘Deo Opt. Max. Honor Laus et Gloria’, he made only oneexplicit attempt to insert a Christian conception of religion into Aris-totle’s analysis when he added a marginal note to the discussion ofrebellion 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 andfamilies: therefore, the village is also the product of nature’). Suchmeanings would be obvious in conjunction with the ‘Discourse’. Totrained and committed humanists like Sir William Cecil or Elizabethherself, the significance of the juxtaposition would have been clear: ifEngland were to be a civitas perfecta, and its citizens capable of living thevita beata, they, like the citizens of the Aristotelian polis, would need to besupplied with virtue, a physical sufficiency and an abundance of fortune(‘Vita beata . . . est, quae cum virtute coniuncta, ea bonorum corporis etfortunæ copia habet’). One way to supply that, and to found a newcommonwealth, would be through the ‘natural’ activity of foundingvillages or coloniae, composed of families.

The ‘Discourse’ presented an argument both for the ‘necessitie’ ofplanting colonies across the Atlantic and for the ‘manifolde com-modyties’ that would arise from them. The necessity of colonisationarose 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 Voyageinto Aristotle’, , ; Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English ConformistThought 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 thatare Like to Growe to this Realme of Englande by the Westerne Discoveries Lately Attempted . . . Known asDiscourse of Western Planting (), ed. David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn (London, ). Theoriginal manuscript, of which this edition contains a facsimile, is in the New York Public Library.


of English markets abroad. The manifold commodities would thereforebe general and particular: general, in providing an outlet for surpluspopulation and production, and relief from those ‘very burdensome tothe common wealthe’; and particular, in the provision of new materialsand products for the English economy, ‘the vent of the masse of ourclothes and other commodities of England, and . . . receavinge backe ofthe nedefull commodities that wee nowe receave from all other places ofthe worlde’. The overall aim of the new colonies would be to returnthe economy of England itself to self-sufficiency by balancing its produc-tion, consumption and population. This could only be achieved by theexport of people, and the institution of new markets, all of which wouldbe 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 dojustice to the connection of the good of the commonwealth with thedemands of the vita beata, and hence of religion, in that document. In thepreface to his collection of Divers Voyages (), Hakluyt condemned ‘thepreposterous desire of seeking rather gaine then God’s glorie’, andcounselled that, ‘lasting riches do wait upon them that are jealous for theadvancement of the Kingdome of Christ, and the enlargement of hisglorious Gospell’. Like his elder cousin, therefore, he linked trade,religion and conquest as essential parts of the same enterprise, andhence teloi towards which English action in the Americas should bedirected. Just as the Politics, and hence Hakluyt’s synopsis of it, endedwith the necessity of education for the pursuit of the good life, whetherdefined as eudaimonia or beatitudo, so the ‘Discourse’ began with thequestion of ‘the inlarginge the gospell of Christe, and reducinge ofinfinite multitudes of these simple people that are in errour into therighte and perfecte waye of their salvacion’.

The ‘Analysis’ of Aristotle and the ‘Discourse’ on western plantingtherefore complemented each other, the ‘Discourse’ picking up in itsfirst chapter where Book of the ‘Analysis’ left off, in its considerationof 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 EnglishColonization, –’, 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, .


those in whom it might be encouraged. In the ‘Discourse’, Hakluytmoved between assessments of the native peoples of the Americas interms of their civil and religious capacities, as ‘Savages’ or ‘Infidells’.Yet, like so many of his contemporaries, he ultimately deemed the twoconditions to be inseparable: without civilisation, and hence inductioninto the classically-defined conception of life in the polis or the civitas,Christianity could not be implanted. As Hakluyt assured Sir WalterRalegh in , ‘[n]ihil enim ad posteros gloriosius nec honorificentiustransmitti potest, quam Barbaros domare, rudes & paganos ad vitaecivilis societatem revocare, . . . hominesq; atheos & a Deo alienos divininuminis reverentia imbuere’ (‘for nothing more glorious or honourablecan be handed down to the future than to tame the barbarian, to bringback the savage and the pagan to the fellowship of civil existence and toinduce reverence for the Holy Spirit into atheists and others distantfrom God’). Civilisation, defined in Ciceronian terms as the life of thecitizen, was therefore prior to, and indispensable for, Christian salva-tion. In just the same way Hakluyt’s conception of the civil life was priorto his conception of Christianity, and sprang from it, just as one wouldexpect from one of the most distinguished exponents of humanistAristotelianism and Protestant scholasticism in late sixteenth-centuryOxford.

This classical conception of the good life, and the conception of timeas bound by the existence of the polis, has greater relevance for anunderstanding of Hakluyt’s thought than any contemporary schemes ofeschatological history. There is little indication that Hakluyt conceivedof his own enterprise within the categories of sacred time, even thoughthe first edition of his Principall Navigations appeared in , in theimmediate aftermath of the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Hakluytcelebrated the victory and understood it as evidence of God’s judgmenton the Spanish; however, his work shows none of the resurgent apoca-lypticism that characterised English Protestant thought in the yearsafter . Even at this highly-charged and significant moment inEngland’s relationship with God, therefore, Hakluyt showed little signthat he believed ‘England was indeed the New Israel, God’s chosennation’. His sole reference to the Pope as ‘the greate Antechryste ofRome’ in was an entirely conventional expression of a Calvinistbinary, 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, ), –.


theology. Nor did he distinguish true and false churches from oneanother, except on the grounds of their saving mission. In the sixteenthcentury, and in the Americas, he noted, the Spanish had had greaterevangelical success, and hence had pressed a more convincing claim forthe truth of their church: now, it was time for the ‘Princes of theRelligion’ (Elizabeth I pre-eminent among them) to catch up, andreveal the truth of the Protestant Church through the active conversionof souls. None of these passing references amounts to evidence thatHakluyt reflected systematically upon eschatology, nor that the con-clusions of his theology – regarding the nature of the true church, theidentity 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 haveowed more to his classicism than to his Protestantism. The evangelicalsuccess of the Catholic monarchies in the New World confirmed hislack of confidence in God’s particular favour for England, the mostbelated 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 technicalmodels for those editions came from classical and contemporary ge-ography, particularly Ptolemy, Abraham Ortelius and the ‘perfect’history of Lancelot de la Popeliniere, whose L’Amiral de France ()appeared while Hakluyt was in Paris. Ptolemy encouraged the historyof travel (Peregrinationis historia) as the alternative to ‘universall cosmog-raphie’; Ortelius urged the combination of time and space to creategeographical histories; and La Popeliniere added exhortations fornational enterprise to such geographical history. Hakluyt in turnproduced a Latin edition of Peter Martyr’s Decades de Orbe Novo () inParis, and experimented with adding chronology to geography in thatedition as the prelude to his two collections of travels in the PrincipalNavigations.

Hakluyt, Particuler Discourse, ed. Quinn and Quinn, ; Peter Lake, ‘The Significance of theElizabethan 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 Popeliniere see Hakluyt, Principall Navigations (), sig. *v; Writings andCorrespondence, ed. Taylor, , and note, , ; Edward Arber (ed.), A Transcript of the Registersof the Company of Stationers of London; – A.D., vols. (London, ), , .


The specific models Hakluyt did acknowledge as sources for his ownhistoriography were three of ‘our owne Historians’: John Foxe, themartyrologist and compiler of the Acts and Monuments; John Bale, theapocalyptic historian, through his least apocalyptic work, the ScriptorumIllustrium Majoris Britanniæ . . . Catalogus (–); and Richard Eden, themid-sixteenth-century translator of early Spanish works relating to theAmericas. Hakluyt also took material relating to northern Germanyfrom the Commentaries () of another notable European apocalyptichistorian, John Sleidan. However, his debts to these various workswere not evidently theological. The two works by Bale and Sleidanfrom which he drew material were in each case the works of theirauthors least obviously shaped by their apocalypticism. Eden’s transla-tions had been produced mostly in the reign of the Catholic QueenMary, to whom he dedicated his translation of Peter Martyr’s Decades ofthe New World as a gift on the occasion of her marriage to the Spanishprince Philip, in celebration of the alliance of England with the SpanishMonarchy. Finally, Hakluyt’s most evident debt to Foxe was histreatment of personal narratives – of merchants and sailors in his case,of martyrs in Foxe’s – rather than in any larger scheme of salvation orreprobation within which they might be placed. None of his majorworks therefore depended upon, or contributed to, theological debateabout the structure of the English Church, the relationship betweentrue and false churches, the doctrine of salvation or the status of theEnglish as agents in apocalyptic time.

Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations were in due course carried on boardthe 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 Protestantparticularism, the antiquarian martyrologist whose greatest vernacularwork supposedly sustained the vision of England as the ‘elect nation’from the s into the eighteenth century, and beyond. But recentscholars have challenged the idea that England could have been theelect nation, rather than an elect nation, because election, within theCalvinist scheme of double predestination, was no respecter of nationalboundaries, 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, ).


rather than visible and earthly. As a result, Foxe no longer stands as theavatar of English elect nationalism. He clearly placed the history of theEnglish 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 themillennium firmly in the past and not in the future, for England oranywhere else. The fact that Francis Drake carried a copy of Foxe’sbook of martyrs on his circumnavigation – and amazed a Spanishprisoner by colouring the woodcuts during the voyage – seems lessfraught 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 argumentwithin English Protestantism also confirms the unlikelihood that itwould have been espoused by a writer like Hakluyt as a justification forthe promotion of English overseas trade and settlement. If the concep-tion of the ‘elect nation’ were a taproot – even the taproot – of Englishimperialism, then Hakluyt did not supply much nourishment for it togrow and flourish.

Far from exulting in God’s special favour for England, Hakluytpointed to God’s greater care for the Catholic monarchies. The belated-ness of the English in the competition for American colonies was a signto sixteenth-century English Protestants, at least, that Providence hadoffered Protestants no privileges. It was often recalled – albeit mistaken-ly – that Bartolome 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 insteadby the Castilian Crown. Hakluyt included two documents in thePrincipal Navigations recording Colon’s proposal, but drew from theepisode the unsettling conclusion that ‘God had reserved the sayd offer

Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, –; Katherine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in ReformationBritain – (Oxford, ), –; Jane Facey, ‘John Foxe and the Defence of the EnglishChurch’, in Peter Lake and Maria Dowling (eds.), Protestantism and the National Church in SixteenthCentury England (London, ), –; Palle J. Olsen, ‘Was John Foxe a Millenarian?’ Journal ofEcclesiastical 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; [RobertGray,] A Good Speed for Virginia (London, ), sig. B[]v; Daniel Price, Sauls Prohibition Staide(London, ), sig. Fr; Sir William Alexander, An Encouragement to Colonies (London, ), .


for Castile’. The subsequent success of the Catholic monarchies ineffecting conversion in South and Central America ‘may justly becoumpted rather a perversion’; nevertheless, the Protestant princescould offer no evidence that they had converted even one unbeliever torefute the claim that ‘they are the true Catholicke Churche because theyhave bene the onely converters of many millions of Infidells to Christi-anitie’. Hakluyt’s writings show no evidence of any interest in theprimitive Church or the antecedents of Protestantism before theEuropean Reformations. He offered no answer to that vexing questionapocryphally asked by every Catholic to any Protestant: ‘Where wasyour church before Luther?’ However, he was clearly troubled by thefact that God had allowed Catholics to convert native Americansunchecked, and had thereby endowed the Roman Church with themark of truth: a successful saving mission.

Hakluyt’s works remained thoroughly English and not British (letalone, British and Irish) in scope. His aim was to chronicle the voyages,traffics and navigations of the English nation alone. This in itself did notnecessarily make him an English nationalist, and there is no evidence inhis writings that he believed England to be the elect nation. However,his work revealed the limits that contemporary nationhood placed onhis historiographical and geographical horizons. He set ‘Britain’ firmlyin the distant past, as when he stated that the scattering of colonies inRoman Britain meant that the Romans did not ‘in effecte ha[ve] theBrittishe nation at commaundement’. The last truly British king, forHakluyt as for other commentators like John Dee and later John Selden,had been Edgar, ‘soveraigne lord of all the British seas, and of the wholeIsle of Britaine it selfe’. Beyond these references, there is no evidencein Hakluyt’s works that he espoused the British history that had been soprominent in Anglo-British propaganda in the s and that Spenserdeployed 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 Britishhistory. The use of that history in the Anglo-British propaganda of thes 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, –.


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, asocietas perfecta, or even a self-sufficient polis, not a composite monarchyor the metropolis of an expansive territorial imperium on the late Romanmodel. It was hardly surprising that William Robertson credited Hak-luyt with the inspiration for planting English colonies, nor that Froudeidentified him as the author of the English nation’s ‘prose epic’. It istherefore entirely fitting that the term ‘British Empire’ did not appear inany of his works.

With hindsight, and from the perspective of the mid-Victorian Angli-canism, Samuel Purchas could be praised alongside Hakluyt as theProtestant co-founder of a commercial empire:

Purchas . . . carried on most effectively . . . the work which Hakluyt had so wellbegun; and to those two clergymen of the Church of England every one whowould desire to see the earliest steps by which the commercial greatness of thisnation has been attained must ever turn with gratitude.

However, attention to Hakluyt and Purchas’s differing conceptions ofBritain, national election, anti-Catholicism, and eschatology preventsany facile assimilation of their respective projects. Purchas’s geographi-cal histories, unlike Hakluyt’s, placed England firmly in the context ofthe history of the Three Kingdoms, of Europe, and of a wider worldconceived within sacred time. Hakluyt took little interest in Ireland, andnone in Scotland; he made only the most glancing references to theschemes of church history; and he presented no apocalyptic justificationfor English trade and settlement. In contrast, Purchas’s attention to theThree Kingdoms of the Stuart multiple monarchy, his cosmopolitanhistoriography and his attempt to place British history within the widerschemes of theological time made his works strictly incomparable toHakluyt’s. For all their superficial similarities as memorialists of Englishoverseas enterprise, and in spite of Purchas’s acknowledged debt to hispredecessor, their conceptions of Britain, of empire, of history and timedistinguished Hakluyt and Purchas sharply from one another. Theywere linked most directly by their common effort to provide a naturaljurisprudential account of the legitimacy of English trade, conquest andplantation, 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 theBritish Empire, vols. (London, ), , , n. .


in this set of arguments, Purchas’s intellectual debts were wider, and hissources more broad ranging than Hakluyt’s.

Hakluyt and Purchas have usually been contrasted in their editorialmethods, rather than their intellectual frameworks, most often toPurchas’s disadvantage. Hakluyt, the scrupulous, logical editor whosewell-constructed narratives offered persuasive encouragement to Eng-lish overseas enterprise, has always been preferred to Purchas, thesupposedly indiscriminate accumulator of theological compendia,whose gargantuan collections, most especially Hakluytus Posthumus, orPurchas His Pilgrimes () were far too unwieldy, indigestible andarchaic in their religious imperatives to provide any inspiration forexpansion. Even the most sympathetic comparison concludes that, ‘ifRichard 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 inhistory (and, hence, no historical structure to his thought). UnlikeHakluyt, it has been further argued, Purchas ‘was steeped in religion.His symbols and allusions are biblical rather than classical for the mostpart’; accordingly, he could be of little interest to secular intellectualhistory, and his increasing marginality and irrelevance since the lateseventeenth 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 andhis attention to civil philosophy – is not entirely misplaced. Purchasstated in the introduction to his first major work, Purchas His Pilgrimage() that ‘Religion is my more proper aime’, and this could stand asthe epigraph to any of his major works. His crowning achievement wasthe four-volume compilation, Purchas His Pilgrimes, which he entitledHakluytus Posthumus, both to acknowledge the debt he owed to Hakluyt’smanuscript 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 ofRichard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas’, Studies in Philology, (), –.

L. E. Pennington, ‘Hakluytus Posthumus: Samuel Purchas and the Promotion of English OverseasExpansion’, Emporia State Research Studies, , (), .

John Parker, ‘Samuel Purchas, Spokesman for Empire’, in Ton Croiset van Uchelen, Koerst vander Horst and Gunter Schilder (eds.), Theatrum Orbis Librorum: Liber Amicorum Presented to Nico Israelon the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday (Utrecht, ), ; L. E. Pennington, ‘Samuel Purchas: HisReputation 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 Agesand Places Discovered, from the Creation to the Present (London, ), sig. [¶]r.


logically structured oeuvre he had elaborated over the preceding decadeand a half, from Purchas His Pilgrimage, via Purchas His Pilgrim () to theleast well-known of all his works, The Kings Towre (), a sermonpreached at St Paul’s Cross. In each of these works, Purchas situated theStuart composite monarchy of James VI and I and his heir, PrinceCharles, within the universal history of the struggle between the trueand the false churches, and in particular the history of the Protestantcause in northern Europe. The salient dates in that history were , and , the moments when the Protestant wind had scattered theSpanish Armada, when James VI had escaped assassination at thehands of the Earl of Gowrie and his brother at Perth, and when theKing, his family and his counsellors had been delivered from theCatholic menace of the Gunpowder Plot. Two of his early works can betied directly to this chronology of the Protestant triumphs over ‘thePaganisme of Antichristian Poperie’. Purchas dedicated his Pilgrimage tohis patron, the Calvinist archbishop, George Abbot, on November, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, ‘in thankfulnesse to for our later Deliverance’; meanwhile, he preachedThe Kings Towre on August , the anniversary of the foiling of the Gowrie Plot. Mostimportant in establishing Purchas’s anti-popish intent in his major work,Purchas noted that Hakluytus Posthumus (like The Kings Towre) had beencompiled over four summers of ‘His Majesties College at Chelsea’,which was ‘a place of argument to move me to enter these Lists’. Thiswas the college of controversial divinity led by the militant former deanof Exeter, Matthew Sutcliffe, and the very arsenal of anti-Catholicpolemic during James’s reign.

The bulk of Purchas’s work between and can therefore belinked directly to the purposes of polemical anti-Catholicism. This wasthe period of James’s policy of religious irenicism in Europe, andcomprehension in England was under greatest strain. During this time,English, and especially metropolitan, anti-Catholicism and oppositionto Spain peaked in the agitations surrounding the proposed ‘SpanishMatch’ between Prince Charles and the Spanish Infanta. Purchas

Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage, sigs. [¶]r–v, ; Samuel Purchas, The Kings Towre, And TriumphantArch 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 ControversialDivinity at Chelsea’, in Kennedy, Diana Robertson and Alexandra Walsham, Grounds ofControversy: Three Studies in Late th and Early th Century English Polemics (Melbourne, ),–.


preachedThe Kings Towre at the height of these agitations, and two of hisfellow St Paul’s Cross preachers were imprisoned and reprimanded inthe following ten days for criticising the match. The four majoreditorial 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 KingSALOMONS Navie sent from Eziongeber to Ophir’ (c. ); and ‘TheChurches Peregrination by this Holy Land way . . . or a Mysterie ofPapall iniquitie revealed’ (c. ) – all served the purposes of Purchas’santi-papal polemic. The last two, especially, provided the scheme ofsacred time within which English, British and more broadly Protestantenterprise had to be placed.

Purchas’s sacred chronology placed the apocalyptic battle betweenthe True Church and the Antichrist firmly in the present rather than thefuture. He followed post-millennial theologians like John Jewel, JamesUsher and George Downame to locate the beginnings of the reign ofAntichrist in the eleventh century CE, with the succession of the Hilde-brandine popes. At this point, Satan had been unbound from histhousand-year captivity, and the temporal pretensions of the Papacyhad grown in Italy, in Christendom more generally (where the Papacyasserted the powers of interdiction, excommunication and deposition ofprinces), 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 princeswhom God had enthroned, and hence that ‘the Man of sinne might exalthimselfe above all that is called God ’. This could only be the ambition of theAntichrist who, like Christ himself, embodied a church, the one, true,the other, false. This apocalyptic scheme not only distinguished hisproject qualitatively from Hakluyt’s; it may, in due course, have ac-counted for its obsolescence, so closely tied was it to the religiouspolemics 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 ThomasSmith’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 theSolemnizing of the Happie Inauguration of our Most Gracious and Religious Soveraigne King James (London,), sig. [G]r–v.


dered his works at once more elect-nationalist and more cosmopolitanthan Hakluyt’s. Unlike Hakluyt, who had no conception of the supposedplace of England in the scheme of divine election, Purchas identified itas a chosen nation, though not a uniquely chosen one, for it was onlyone component of ‘this Israel of Great Britaine’, the Stuart multiplemonarchy. Purchas’s conception of that monarchy changed over thecourse of the s and s, in light of British and Irish colonisation inthe Americas and in regard to the prospect of Prince Charles’s accessionto the thrones of the Three Kingdoms in . For example, in ,Purchas hailed the Virginia settlement as a ‘New Britaine’ and ‘thefoundation of aNew BritanianCommon-wealth’. Ten years later, inTheKings Towre, he marvelled ‘how great a part of wide and wilde America, isnow encompassed with this, and [ James’s] Crowne’. This was anextension of the British monarchy that had been secured by the union ofthe crowns in , and expanded in turn by the British plantations inUlster: ‘that Trinitie of England, Scotland, Ireland, [was] made an unitie’and thereby lost ‘the Barbarisme of Borderisme’. Two years later, inHakluytus Posthumus, Purchas tempered this cultural unionism with afederal vision of the British kingdoms’ extension across the Atlantic:‘(not to mention the New Wales there discovered) England hath herVirginia, Bermuda, New England; Scotland, a New Daughter of her ownename; yea, Ireland by the care of the present Deputie is now multiplyingalso in America, and his Majestie hath sowne the seedes of New King-domes in that New World’. As in the dedication of the Pilgrimes toPrince Charles, so here Purchas recognised the impossibility of creatinga 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 ventureswould ensure their constitutional separation from one another, as theirdifferences 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 Stuartsubjects – and could therefore be joined as limbs in the common causeof anti-popery, Christianity and European Christendom. If the BritishEmpire were to have any role in salvation history, it would achieve itthrough the efforts of its individual members, united within interna-tional Calvinism as adversaries of the Roman Church and the greatterritorial monarchies of contemporary Europe, but not as an apocalyp-

Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage, sig. [¶]r, , , . Purchas, The Kings Towre, , –. Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, , .


tic unit claiming a universal mission to be the last empire before the endof 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 novareperta: stirrups, guns, the compass and long-distance navigation. Thesewere the features of a common European enterprise, shared by theSpanish, the Portuguese, the French and the British in their commercialand colonial activities: ‘Nature hath yeelded herself to EuropaeanIndustry’, just as the Americas were ‘almost every where admittingEuropaean colonies’. Yet Christianity – even, and perhaps particularlythe divided Christendom bequeathed by the Reformation – was thefundamental marker of European distinction, and the guarantee ofEurope’s special place within sacred history: ‘Here are [God’s] Scrip-tures, Oratories, Sacraments, Ministers, Mysteries. Here that MysticallBabylon, and that Papacie (if that bee any glory) which challengeth boththe Bishopricke and Empire of the World; and here the victory over thatBeast (this indeed is glory) by Christian Reformation according to theScriptures.’ This conception of European Christendom was neithertriumphalist nor optimistic. Instead, Purchas’s researches into the relig-ions of the world, contained in Purchas His Pilgrimage and Purchas HisPilgrim, convinced him that Christianity was in retreat compared toIslam: ‘it is (in comparison) but a small part of the world, that soundeththe sacred name of ’. The prospects for Christian renewal were bleakso long as Christendom remained divided, and the Papacy powerful: ‘solittle 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 amongthem, and were as embattled as any. In the face of a Catholic league,and in the knowledge that Christendom as a whole was contracting, itwas essential to maintain a common front among Protestants, and evento recognise the commonalities among all members of the CatholicChristian 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 TheHistorie of Man (London, ), , .


aim, Purchas had to exculpate the Protestant Dutch for their attacks onEnglish 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 withininternational Calvinism itself at the outset of the Thirty Years War.Purchas added a preface to Hakluytus Posthumus to explain that theEnglish East India Company had made it necessary to mention theregrettable incident; in the spirit of Jacobean Protestant irenicism, heargued that the particular faults of individual Dutchmen could not betaken as general failings of the Dutch as a whole: ‘these are personallfaults of that East Indie Company, or some Commanders there, not ofthe whole Nation’.

In his treatments of Spain, the Dutch and the strategic competitionbetween the embattled forces of Protestantism and the threat of ananti-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 periodwhen Purchas wrote, compiled and published almost all of his majorworks – English foreign policy was markedly hispanophile, to the horrorof militant Protestants, such as Purchas’s patron, archbishop Abbot.

Support for the Protestant cause in Europe took on an ideological castthat identified the supporter with the opposition to James. Purchas trodthe fine line of opposition to the Catholic cause and support for royalpolicy by directing his polemical fire against the Papacy as the Anti-christ, rather than against the Spanish Monarchy itself. In the sameway, his measured response to the Amboyna massacre upheld theintegrity of the fragile Protestant cause without any denial of guilt on thepart 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 Jacobeanforeign policy, with its impact upon public opinion and thence uponPurchas’s major works, may provide another reason for Purchas’sinassimilability to later, starker narratives of the origins of the BritishEmpire 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, ).


This was not because he, like Hakluyt and others, could draw upon theBlack Legend of Spanish atrocities in the New World that was foundedin 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 theSpanish Thomist theologian, Francisco de Vitoria. In fact, Purchas wasthe early-modern British writer who showed the greatest familiarity withVitoria’s writings, and who made the most frequent use of them in hisassaults on the legitimacy of the papal authority by which Spanish rightsof dominium in the Americas had been asserted. In the Pilgrimage, he usedVitoria’s relectio De Indis (), ., to argue for the injustice of theSpanish presence in the Americas on the grounds that the ‘ChristianReligion had [not] beene propounded in a meet sort to the Indians’, andhence the Spanish claim to dominium based on the mission to evangelisewas, for this and other reasons, illegitimate. Elsewhere, he citedVitoria’s relectio De Potestate Civili (), ., to prove that all power comesfrom God, not from the community, and hence that resistance to thepowers that be was disobedience to divine command. Most decisively,he twice cited Vitoria’s first relectio De Potestate Ecclesiæ (), ., to showthat the Pope has no dominium over the lands of the infidel, since he onlyhas power within the Church. This was the key to Vitoria’s case ‘[t]hatthe Pope is not Lord of the World, [and] That the Temporall Powerdepends not of him’. This, in turn, provided a refutation of theargument that dominion depends upon grace, and hence that infidelitycan justify dispossession, ‘as if all the world were holden of the Pope inCatholike fee’, to which Purchas added the marginal note: ‘Read also aSpanish divine Fr. a Victoria in his Relect. de Pot. Ecc. & de Indis, He withmany arguments confuteth this pretended power of the Pope’. Pur-chas’s anti-popery was not therefore solely a reflex of his politics or aconventional and unexamined puritan binary, nor was it simply afunction of his ecclesiology. It may have served political purposes in theinternational 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 ofAnti-Spanish Sentiment, – (Durham, NC, ), –, –.

Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage, (compare Purchas,Hakluytus Posthumus, , ii, ); Francisco deVitoria, De Indis (), . , in Vitoria: Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and JeremyLawrance (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, , .


defender of the Protestant cause in Europe. However, it was far fromunreflective and depended instead upon originally Thomist anti-papal(and anti-Lutheran) arguments that could be turned as easily againstProtestants as Roman Catholics, in pursuit of conformity at home andlegitimate rights of possession abroad.

Purchas’s publications were therefore consistently anti-papal andonly incidentally anti-Spanish. To deny the legitimacy of papal dona-tion was not to deny the legitimacy of Spanish possessions in the NewWorld. Purchas confessed, ‘I question not the Right of the SpanishCrowne in those parts: Quis me constituit judicem? . . . I quarrell the Popeonely’, thereby echoing Hakluyt, who nearly forty years earlier hadrepeated Jesus’s question. This judicious reluctance to adjudicate wasof 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 indeedthe embodiment of the Antichrist, he also tried to sustain a commonChristian front against infidelity, in Europe and in the wider world. Theexpansion of commerce would be the conduit of Christianity, and wouldaid the realisation of Purchas’s cosmopolitan vision, in which ‘so manyNations as so many persons hold commerce and intercourse of amitiewithall . . . the West with the East, and the remotest parts of the worldare joyned in one band of humanitie, and why not also to Christian-itie?’ Similarly, though Purchas successfully avoided giving offence tothe authorities during the bouleversements of late Jacobean foreign policytowards the Dutch and the Spanish, he did attempt to open up juridicalspace within which the subjects of the Three Kingdoms could maketheir own claims both against competing European colonial powers andagainst the native Americans. Moreover, he reconciled the potentiallycolliding claims of those kingdoms by proposing a federal vision of aBritish union that had been secured by the accession of the Stuarts to thethrones of England and Ireland after . In all of these fraughtreconciliations, Purchas turned to a wide array of intellectual resourcesto provide a theologically informed, politically nuanced and constantlyrevised vision of Britain, its overseas possessions, and the wider contextof sacred and secular time within which they operated.

Purchas, ‘Animadversions on the Bull’, inHakluytus Posthumus, , i, ; compare Hakluyt, ParticulerDiscourse, ed. Quinn and Quinn, : ‘our saviour Christe beinge requested and intreated to makea laufull devision of inheritaunce betwene one and his brother, refused to do yt, sayenge Quis meconstituit Judicem inter vos?’ (quoting Luke : –).

Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, , –.


The contextual complexity of Purchas’s political and theologicalcommitments proved inassimilable in later periods, just as his enormouscompilations became increasingly indigestible. His later position as aprogenitor of the British Empire owed more to his reputation as acompiler of narratives than to his editorial arguments; however, thosearguments deserve to be taken more seriously, not only to recoverPurchas from the condescension of posterity, but also to reveal just howlittle part an apocalyptic conception of the British Empire would play inthe future, as the theologically reticent Hakluyt would be consistentlypreferred to the more intellectually eclectic Purchas. Each would beassimilated to the other as editors rather than as colonial theorists, andvalued more as compilers than as philosophers. Only belatedly, in theVictorian era, would they be recovered as progenitors of the BritishEmpire; for the intervening two centuries, John Locke’s lukewarmcommendation may stand: ‘To geography, books of travel may beadded. In that kind the collections made by our countrymen, Hakluytand Purchas, are very good.’

Despite their differing conceptions of history and of religion, of Englandand of Britain, Hakluyt and Purchas did agree that the first task of anyargument in favour of English or British colonisation should be therefutation of the papal donation of the Americas to Spain, and hence thePapacy’s powers of disposing dominion more generally. The rebuttal ofsuch arguments for the scope of papal authority in secular matters bothof sovereignty and property was not, of course, an exclusively Protestantenterprise, as Purchas’s use of Vitoria’s relectiones showed. However,once Spanish claims to dominium on the basis of the papal bulls had beenrefuted, it was still necessary for English (and Scottish) proponents ofcolonisation to provide alternative justifications for their rights of prop-erty and sovereignty in the Americas, especially. The effort to providesuch justifications demanded the elaboration of arguments for dominiumconsistent with Protestant doctrine, but not solely reliant upon it; how-ever, across the course of the seventeenth century, from Purchas toLocke, such arguments consistently avoided any appeal to what Purchashad 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 thisreference.) For Locke’s ownership of works by Hakluyt and Purchas see John Harrison and PeterLaslett, The Library of John Locke, nd edn (Oxford, ), items , .


property derived from the state of the possessor’s soul, just as thesoteriological state of the dispossessed could provide justification fortheir dispossession. As the concluding section of this chapter will show,the ideological origins of the British Empire were identifiably Protestantonly in so far as they related to rights of possession, and not as theyinformed the empire with a saving mission, a particular place withineschatological time or a distinctive location within what Locke called‘the Sacred Geography’.

Hakluyt, in the ‘Particuler Discourse’, differed from his successors inhis espousal of a version of the argument that dominion depended upongrace. In his refutation of the papal disposing power, Hakluyt chargedthat Alexander VI had mistaken the order of his priorities in donatingthe newly-discovered lands to the Spanish Monarchy: rather thancharge the Spanish king with a mission to evangelise the pagans, heshould first have preached to them himself; if they refused obstinately torepent,

he mighte have pronounced the severe and heavie judgemente of God againstethem shewinge out of the worde of God that one kingdomme is translated fromanother for the sinnes of the Inhabitantes of the same, and that God in hisjustice 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 classicCalvinist theory that God may send bad rulers as scourges to punish awicked people; however, he went on to support the papal claim todepose kings and dispose kingdoms – just the power that Purchas, andall later Protestant theorists, denied that the Papacy possessed, whetherin the New World or elsewehere. For Purchas, the papal assertionof deposing made Protestants ‘more happy than baptized Kings: forwe may enjoy our Possessions, our Professions as more free, at leastnot impaired by Baptisme’. With the threat of such power hangingover Catholic princes, it might in fact be better not to be baptisedat all. Hypocrites and heathens might have only a ‘Naturall right’ totheir property, while Christians had ‘publike and private civill rightsand 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’.


dispossession, ‘for they are villains not to us: but to our and theirLorde’.

Hakluyt, Purchas and their contemporaries faced the dilemma ofjustifying European possessions in the absence of any claims to papaldonation, or the derivation of dominium from grace. For both Hakluytand Purchas, the argument began with the authority of English land-holders and the English Crown in Ireland, rather than comparableclaims in America. Roman Catholic critics of Protestant arguments fordominium attempted to show that Spain’s claims in the New World wereas well grounded as English claims in Ireland because both relied uponpapal donation: the Spanish, upon the Alexandrine bulls of ; theEnglish, upon the bull Laudabiliter of . In reply, both Hakluyt andPurchas denied that English rights of property or authority in Irelanddescended from such donation. As Hakluyt noted, the bull was promul-gated after Henry II’s invasion, and had anyway been ignored by theIrish kings. Those kings had voluntarily submitted in , added Pur-chas, and the English conquest had been completed in : ‘by hisSword’, added Purchas, ‘not the Popes Keyes . . . together with thesubmission 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 Americasdepended upon ‘Discoverie . . . the Sword, Prescription, subjection of theInhabitants, long and quiet Possession’. Purchas’s theoretical interestin such claims extended only so far as they could be applied to European– not least British – assertions of dominium in the New World, particularlyagainst the claims of the native population. Whether they could besufficient to ensure enduring title was another matter, for the case ofIreland was hardly reassuring: as Sir John Davies had noted in , ‘theconquest was but slight and superficial, so the pope’s donation and theIrish submissions were but weak and fickle assurances’.

In comparison with five hundred years of English involvement inIreland, the halting attempts by the English to plant in Virginia since thes demanded far more strenuous justification. The records of aconciliar debate in utramque partem from the Council of the VirginiaCompany 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] BroughtUnder Obedience of the Crown of England Until the Beginning of His Majesty’s Happy Reign (), ed.James P. Myers, Jr (Washington, DC, ), .


teenth-century argument operated, especially in so far as such argumenthad to be consonant with Protestant Christianity. Those who supportedthe 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 Englishjustifications were ‘not only comparatively to be as good as ye Spaniards. . . but absolutely to be good agaynst ye Naturall people’. This entailedthe refutation of the ‘Donation of Alexander, which is so grounded uponthe principles of theyr religion that some of their best authors havepronounced yt Heresy to doubt yt’; it also demanded ideological justifi-cations that, in turn, would provide a more secure foundation for Englishrights of both imperium and dominium than those the Spanish had reliedupon. One participant recapitulated the history of Spanish argumentsfor dispossession since the early sixteenth century to show that even thebattery of intellectual resources marshalled by the Spanish Church, thereligious orders, and civil and canon lawyers had been incapable ofproviding 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 acceptabletitle, 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 denyingcommerce: from his Canonists by ye Donation: and from his Devines, bypreparation of religion, . . . can be gathered for him no title, of Dominion orProperty, but only a Magistracy, and Empire, by which he is allowed to removesuch impediments, as they had agaynst ye knowledge of Religion.

This astute summary of the Spanish debate over dispossessing thebarbarian concluded with the dilemma that would also bedevil theEnglish and Scottish Crowns, and their chartered agents, in their effortsto justify colonies in North America. Arguments derived from the civilor religious incapacity of the Indians might be sufficient, under theterms of a donation or charter which charged the necessity of conver-sion, to support claims of ‘a Magistracy, and Empire’, but did so in theface of almost universal agreement that grace does not confer ‘title, ofDominion 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 theDebate over the Property Rights of the American Indians’, in Pagden (ed.), Languages of PoliticalTheory in Early-Modern Europe, –.


decided not to offer a full-scale official defence of its dominium or itsimperium in Virginia. That task, at least in the case of the Virginiasettlement, would be left to an eclectic cast of promoters, preachers andpropagandists who would, in due course, like the Spanish, have toretreat from their original arguments and search for an ideologicaljustification for settlement that could overcome the crisis generated bythat initial eclecticism. The problem of uniting dominium and imperiumwould persist, however, as the fundamental and ultimately combustibledilemma at the core of British imperial ideology.

Biblical precedents provided ambivalent charters for the Scots andthe English to oppose the papal donation. God’s commands in the bookof Genesis to subdue the earth and to go forth and multiply providedjustifications for emigration and settlement in the New World on thegrounds that they were issued to all mankind, not simply to Adam or toAbraham and his seed (Genesis :, :). Combined with the othertwo most frequently cited texts from the New Testament, Matthew: (that the Gospel might be preached throughout the whole world toprepare for the last days) and Mark : (that it should be publishedamong all nations), scriptural precedent could sanction the English to‘plant as well as preach, and . . . subdue as well as teach’, in the words ofRichard Eburne. Protestant theorists, in particular, were keen toprove from scripture the legitimacy of any emigration and plantation.The first recorded ‘deduction and plantacion of a Colonie’ was that ofthe Jews under Moses, though even that was only a divinely-aidedexample of a process of multiplication and migration that had populatedthe whole world since the Flood. The problem with such arguments,reassuring though they may have been to those who doubted thescriptural basis for colonisation, whether in Ireland or North America,was that they were not solely applicable to Protestants. If there wereindeed 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, PlainePathway to Plantations, ed. Wright, –, –, , , ; [White,] The Planters Plea, –; SirRobert Gordon of Lochinvar, Encouragements. For Such as Shall Have Intention to Bee Undertakers in theNew 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 SouthermostPart of the Iland, Commonly Called Newfoundland (London, ), pt , .


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 theycould be turned to account against the native populations.

Apprehensions of the eschatological significance of British settlementremained 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 thearmies of Gog and Magog of Revelation :– would rise up from ‘theHemisphere against us’, that is, from the Americas. When an anxiousclerical correspondent, William Twisse, asked Mede whether the NewWorld, lately revealed by providence, would be the New Jerusalem orGog and Magog, Mede replied to the query by distinguishing betweenthe legitimacy of the plantations and their place in sacred time: ‘Con-cerning our Plantation in the American world, I wish them as well as anybody; though I differ from them far, both in other things, and in thegrounds they go upon.’ Mede expressed little hope that the nativepeoples could be converted to Christianity, not least because he thoughtthem a colony of Satan’s choosing, brought from the north into Amer-ica. It would be appropriate to ‘affront’ Satan in North America byplanting Protestants, but this in itself could not provide adequate‘grounds’ for the English colonies to ‘go upon’. Even those, like theDorchester patriarch, John White, who did identify the New World as aplace to ‘raise a bulworke against ye kingdom of antichrist wch ye Jesuitslabour to rere in all parts of ye world’, did not suggest that the EnglishChurch alone had an exclusive mission: ‘the church since christs tyme isto be considered universall without respect of countrey’. To remove toNew England would not therefore be a desertion of the English Church,but rather the edification of one ‘particular church’ as a branch of thechurch 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 seeespecially John Bowman, ‘Is America the New Jerusalem or Gog and Magog? A SeventeenthCentury 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 ofAnglo-American Missions – (Kampen, ), –.

[ John White,] ‘General Observations for ye Plantation of New England’ (?), PRO /,ff. r–r, printed in Frances Rose-Troup, JohnWhite, The Patriarch of Dorchester and the Founder ofMassachusetts – (London, ), , ; [White,] The Planters Plea, –, .


order to spread the Gospel, it, too, did not provide any grounds forEnglish colonies to go upon.

Even John Winthrop, during his dispute with Roger Williams overEnglish land-claims in Massachusetts, admitted this in defence of Eng-lish dominium and the Crown’s imperium in New England. Williams hadcharged that all of the English settlers ‘lye under a synne of unjustusurpation upon others possessions’, to which Winthrop replied: ‘ourtitle to what we possesse: it is not Religious (as he supposethe) neitherdothe our Kinge challenge any right heer by his Christianyty’. But, onthis point at least, Williams agreed with Winthrop: the ‘great sin’ in theNew England patents was the point ‘wherein Christian Kinds (so calld)are invested with Right by Virtue of their Christianitie, to take and giveaway 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 exclusivedominium, or the grounds for secular imperium, not least because theyapplied in the first instance to all human beings, and in the second, to allChristians. Christianity alone, as Winthrop and Williams agreed, couldnot be a sufficient basis for title to land or sovereignty. The claim thatGod’s grant of the earth to Adam (Genesis :) authorised all succeedinghumans to spread across the face of the earth paralleled Sir RobertFilmer’sargument that this divine commissionhadmadeAdam monarchof the wholeworld, andhis successors absolutemonarchs.Locke, in thefirstTreatise of Government (c. ), accused Filmer of thereby confoundingimperiumwith dominium, and further denied that ‘by this Grant God gavehim notPrivate Dominion over the Inferior Creatures, but right in commonwith all Mankind; so neither was he Monarch, upon the account of theProperty here given him’. Mere succession from Adam would not beargument 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 TheComplete Writings of Roger Williams, vols. (New York, ), , –; Williams, The Bloody TenentYet More Bloody (), in Williams, Complete Writings, , . On the context of the Williams–Winthrop dispute see Jennings, Invasion of America, –, and Moynihan, ‘The Patent and theIndians’, –.

Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha (c. ) and Observations Upon Aristotles Politiques (), in Filmer:Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge, ), , – (citing JohnSelden, Mare Clausum seu De Dominio Maris (London, ), Bk , ch. ).

John Locke, First Treatise of Government (c. ), §, in Locke: Two Treatises of Government, ed. PeterLaslett, rev. edn (Cambridge, ), ; James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and HisAdversaries (Cambridge, ), .


The ‘naturall right to replenish the whole earth’ as derived from thedivine injunctions of Genesis could still provide a charter for settlement,but only if such settlement took place in ‘vacant places’ (as Purchas putit). This argument added a scriptural command to the agriculturalistjustification for colonisation first propounded by Sir Thomas More in, and repeated by Rowland White and the Smiths in ElizabethanUlster. From the s to the s in Britain, and then in NorthAmerica, Australia and Africa well into the nineteenth century, theargument from vacancy (vacuum domicilium) or absence of ownership (terranullius) became a standard foundation for English and, later, Britishdispossession of indigenous peoples. On these grounds, God’s com-mands to replenish the earth and assert dominion over it provided asuperior right to possession for those who cultivated the land moreproductively 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. AsJames Tully and others have shown, Locke was heir to the tradition ofagriculturalist theorising derived from his seventeenth-century Protes-tant predecessors, as he elaborated a justification for rights of dominiumthat would hold equally well in England and America. What othercommentators seem not to have noticed, however, is that one reasonLocke needed to provide such an argument was that he had also offereda compelling refutation of the argument that dominion conferred gracein the Letter Concerning Toleration (), when he argued that such a claimdepended upon the wider argument that the civil power has authority inmatters of conscience: admit that, and there could be no limit to thepowers of the civil magistrate. ‘No man whatsoever ought therefore tobe 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 eitherin Body or in Goods for not imbracing our Faith and Worship. If they areperswaded 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 toPolitical Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge, ), –, –; Barbara Arneil, John Lockeand America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford, ), –, –; Alan Frost, ‘NewSouth Wales as Terra Nullius: The British Denial of Aboriginal Land Rights’,Historical Studies, (), –; and, more generally, Kent McNeil, Common Law Aboriginal Title (Oxford, ).


and that they shall obtain Happiness by that means, they are to be left untoGod and themselves.

The application of such an argument was universal: ‘For the reason ofthe thing is equal, both in America and Europe’. Just as there could be nodisposing power attributed to the Papacy, so no European prince couldbe 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 beconcernd in or Plantation are utterly strangers to Christianity whoseIdollatry Ignorance or mistake gives us noe right to expell or use ym

ill’. Other foundations, and better justification, would have to befound to justify rights of dominium in the New World, and the agricul-turalist argument, with its scriptural foundations, and its apparentapplicability to the perceived social structure of the Amerindians, of-fered just such an argument, with enduring effects for later theories ofproperty. Locke’s may therefore have been the first, and perhaps only,theory of property in seventeenth-century England that was explicitlyProtestant in its orientation (without falling into the error of equatinggrace with fitness for dominion) and applicable to colonial as well asmunicipal contexts.

In the long run, ‘[t]he real issue . . . was not private ownership butpublic sovereignty’, however, and hence imperium, not dominium. Thiswas not a question susceptible to a specifically Protestant answer,though its solution was attempted by many Protestants, often ordainedones, from the s to the s and beyond. Hakluyt’s exposition ofAristotle and his Thomistic commentators, Purchas’s reliance onVitoria, and the Virginia Company’s intimate interests in the history ofSpanish colonial ideology together attested the impossibility of derivingany specifically and exclusively Protestant origins for British imperialideology. Similarly, Hakluyt’s lack of interest in the dimensions of sacredtime, doctrines of election or eschatology more generally, and Purchas’scosmopolitan 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 printedversion, see John Milton, ‘John Locke and the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina’, LockeNewsletter, (), –.

Thomas Flanagan, ‘The Agricultural Argument and Original Appropriation: Indian Lands andPolitical Philosophy’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, (), ; compare Jennings,Invasion of America, –.


works to a conception of the British Empire as a millennial vehicle oreven as a community defined by any precise definition of Protestantism.Finally, the eclectic use of the Bible, as much as the impossibility offinding 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 Protestantorigins of British imperial ideology, and a religious genealogy for theBritish Empire would not emerge until the early eighteenth century, inthe bishop-bibliographer White Kennett’s Bibliothecæ Americanæ Primordiæ(). Britons, as much as Europeans, had to face the disarming factthat their sacred resources, as much as their secular ones, provided noconvincing means of squaring the circle by justifying imperium anddominium at the same time, and interdependently. For this reason, theideological origins of the British Empire remained fissured and unstableas 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 theorigins of the British Empire was the belief that it was an empire of theseas. The conventional chronology of the Empire’s origins, whichlocated them in the reign of Elizabeth I, nourished that belief andanchored it in a particular maritime history. The originating agents ofempire were the Elizabethan sea-dogs, Gloriana’s sailor-heroes whohad circumnavigated the globe, singed the King of Spain’s beard, sweptthe oceans of pirates and Catholics, and thereby opened up the sea-routes across which English migrants would travel, and English tradewould flow, until Britannia majestically ruled the waves. The myth waspersistent not least because it enshrined an inescapable truth: the BritishEmpire was an empire of the seas, and without the Royal Navy’smastery of the oceans, it could never have become the global empireupon which the sun never set. Yet that maritime mastery was notcomplete until the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and the force of themyth derives in large part from the nineteenth-century celebration of anoceanic hegemony whose origins were traced back to the exploits ofDrake, Hawkins and Ralegh. The myth was reassuring, not least in thetwo centuries before the Victorian zenith of the British Empire, becauseit served to distinguish the Empire from the territorial empires ofantiquity (especially Rome’s) and from contemporary land-empiressuch as the Holy Roman Empire or the Spanish Monarchy’s possessionsin the Americas. An empire of the seas would not be prey to theoverextension and military dictatorship which had hastened the col-

Sir William Petty, [‘Dominion of the Sea’] (), BL Add. MS , f. r (also in BL MSLansdowne , f. r).

lapse of the Roman Empire, nor would it bring the tyranny, depopula-tion and impoverishment which had hastened the decline of Spain. TheBritish empire of the seas was both historically novel and comparativelybenign; it could therefore escape the compulsions that destroyed allprevious land-based, and hence obviously military, empires. In short, itcould be an empire for liberty.

This enduring and encouraging myth was largely responsible for thecordon sanitaire erected between the history of the metropolitan state andthe history of an empire defined by its ultramarine existence. It wasenduring precisely because it provided both metropolitans and provin-cials with a bridge between the constituent parts of the Empire; it wasencouraging because it also divided the provinces and the metropole,allowing the former a degree of autonomy and the latter a prophylacticagainst the debilitating infections of extensive empire. These characteris-tics may also explain why British maritime ideology has been so littlestudied, and why its genesis has not been investigated historically. Thegeographical fact of Britain’s insularity implied that it would naturallybecome a maritime power, at once distinct from the ‘Continent’ ofEurope and linked oceanically to its extra-European empire. BecauseBritain’s maritime destiny seemed compelled by nature, it was bydefinition beyond historical analysis; similarly, because Britain’s naturalsituation divided it physically from the rest of Europe, its history could beseen as unavoidably exceptional. A fact so stubborn could hardly behistorical; a history so exceptional was inassimilable to other Europeannorms. British naval mastery came to seem as inevitable as the expansionof the British Empire, and each would be subject to the same complacentamnesia. If the myth indeed had a history, it would become morecontingent and hence less inspiring.

The conventional narrative of British maritime history has tended tofollow the history of the rise and fall of British naval mastery. It hastherefore been most often told as a story of the influence of sea-powerupon history, in the manner of Alfred Thayer Mahan, or, conversely, as astudy of the influence of history – meaning economics, politics andstrategy – upon sea-power. Only recently has the history of Britain itselfbeen 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 theSea (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, TheRise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London, ).

The empire of the seas

the Three Kingdoms and, not least, that of their territorial waters. Torewrite British history in this way is idiomatic for the late sixteenth andseventeenth centuries, for it was then that debates about the extent andform of the British kingdoms, and the limits of monarchical imperium anddominium, often turned on disputes regarding maritime jurisdiction. Boththe realm of England and the kingdom of the Scots were definedoceanically as well as territorially, and on occasion they collided with oneanother in the definitions of their respective boundaries. Claims tojurisdiction over the foreshore, home waters, fishing and navigationaround Britain were specifically British instances of wider Europeandebates which were conducted on a global scale, and most often in thelanguage of the laws of nature and of nations. Because such argumentslinked local disputeswithcosmopolitanconcerns, andbecause thehistoryof British maritime ideology extends from the most parochial issues ofcoastal jurisdiction to the broadest questions of property, commerce andthe freedom of the seas, the ideological history of the British Empire can,to a large extent, be reconstructed from the history of these maritimedisputes. Such a reconstructiondepends upon the reintegrationof Britisharguments with pan-European debates, and therefore parallels theprocess by which defining rule over the seas around Britain came, in duecourse, 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 ofmaritimesupremacyuntil the state itself hadbeendefinedas a collectivelyBritish kingdom; competing English and Scottish maritime ideologieswere either subsumed within, or survived alongside, comprehensivelyBritish conceptions throughout the course of these centuries. A majorachievement in the ideological history of the British Empire would be thecreationof just such a pan-British conceptionof the Empire as an oceanicentity, equipped with its own historical foundations and destiny, thoughthis would not come to full fruition until the late s, in Bolingbroke’sIdea of a Patriot King () and James Thomson’s ‘Rule, Britannia’ (),for instance. This demanded not only the integration of conflictingEnglish and Scottish conceptions of the empire of the seas, but also theelaboration of a series of distinct yet interlocking arguments regardingdominiumover the foreshoreandover territorialwaters, and theextent andlimits of fishing and navigation on the high seas.

N. A. M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, I: – (London, ).


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 ThreeKingdoms and of Europe, because the arguments over maritime im-perium and dominium were pan-European in scope, involving theoristsfrom England, Scotland, Spain, Portugal and the United Provinces,and just as often derived from disputes over herring-fishery in thehome waters of European states as from competition between thosestates and their trading-companies in the East or West Indies. Therelationship between British arguments in these disputes therefore fol-lows the contours of the ideological history of Britain as closely as ittracks the relationship of that history to the narrative of extra-European rivalry. It also reveals the indissoluble ideological connectionbetween 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 passagecited at some point by almost every later theorist of property, ‘there is noprivate 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 conditionor composition in peace’ (aut vetere occupatione, ut qui quondam in vacuavenerunt, aut victoria . . . aut lege, pactione, condicione). However, he con-tinued, everything produced by the earth is for the benefit of humanityas a whole, and humans are born to help one another (De Officiis, . . ).On such Stoic principles, private property would be sanctioned, andshould be protected, but the maxim of mutual assistance also providedthe basis for rights of traffic and commerce, to facilitate reciprocity andto strengthen the cosmopolitan bonds between peoples. The air and thesea, ‘so farre as they have not by possession of other men before, orotherwise by their own Nature cannot be appropriated, are NaturesCommons’, Samuel Purchas argued; by the law of nature and ofnations, ‘Nature within and without us, by everlasting Canons hathdecreed Communitie of trade the World thorow whereas by Nature allthe Earth was common Mother, and in equall community to be enjoyed

Cicero, De Officiis, . . ; Richard Eburne, A Plaine Pathway to Plantations (London, ), .


of all hers’. On such grounds, commerce should be free and the seasopen to all. This natural jurisprudential claim would become the basis ofall later British assertions of the freedom of the seas.

Purchas’s claims echoed those of Francisco de Vitoria in De Indis thatthe ius gentium guaranteed rights of travel, hospitality and commercethroughout the world. Vitoria had argued that the apparent contradic-tion between the division of property (divisio rerum) and these rights ofuniversal visitation and communication was only apparent, since ‘it wasnever the intention of nations to prevent men’s free mutual intercoursewith one another by this division’. The denial of such intercourse couldbe grounds for just war. To uphold that right against those who denied itwould be the Spaniards’ first just title in the New World. Likewise,according to the Institutes, . . –, the high seas, rivers and ports werethe common property of all, from which no one could be barred. By thedetermination of the natural, divine and human law, freedom of com-merce, and travel were as certain as the common right of all humanity tothe seas, whose products as res nullius become the property of the firstappropriator, as the Institutes, . . , recorded in the law Feræ Bestiæ.

Vitoria’s argument was intended to challenge both the universalism ofthe papacy and the supposedly Protestant claim that only grace confer-red dominium. As such, it proved useful to Purchas, for example, in hiscounterclaims to the papal donations and as the positive basis forfreedom of trade and navigation.

Vitoria’s attempted resolution of the tension between the necessity ofprivate property and the natural bond created by commerce was notsufficient to prevent debate regarding the relative merits of closed seas(mare clausum) and free seas (mare liberum), and hence over the extent ofboth imperium and dominium in the foreshore, territorial waters and thehigh seas. Disagreements between the Stuart monarchy and its NorthSea neighbours over the extent and limits on fishing rights converged onthe same problems, as did the juridical collisions between the Englishand the Dutch trading companies over rights of navigation in the EastIndies. The extent of royal dominium generated some of the fiercestpolitical arguments in the years preceding the English Civil Wars, notleast 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, HakluytusPosthumus, , : ‘Barbari sunt veri domini & publice & privatim. Jus autem gentium ut quod in nullius bonis est,occupanti cedat. d §. fere best.’


was likewise asserted over the inland counties for the support of the navyin the Ship-Money cases. These various arguments precipitated com-peting conceptions of England, Scotland, Britain and the British Empireas maritime communities. In due course, such conceptions also under-lay the ideological definition of Britain as a maritime power, with acommercial destiny based on its natural insularity. Britons would sup-port freedom of trade even as they ring-fenced the British AtlanticEmpire with the Navigation Acts; they would also assert the freedom ofthe seas while they claimed to rule the waves. This squaring of the circleto assimilate the conception of mare liberum with that of mare clausum wasone of the greatest ideological underpinnings of the later British Empire.The origins of that achievement lay in the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies, in debates of local significance within Britain that also par-ticipated in wider arguments of European and even global scope, fromthe reign of Elizabeth I to the eve of the Glorious Revolution.

The link between maritime ideology and the history of Britain firstappeared in the writings of John Dee. As we have seen, Dee’s concep-tion of the ‘Brytish Empire’ revived the Galfridian genealogy deployedin the propaganda for the ‘Rough Wooing’ and appealed to thatpropaganda 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 thisMonarchy of England, Ireland, and (by right) Scotland, and the Or-knayes allso’ marked a novel advance beyond the strictly territorialconception of the British Empire found in the earlier period. Thisaddition of maritime imperium in itself helps to explain the prominenceDee later assumed in accounts of the origins of the British Empire, andalso the oblivion into which the mid-sixteenth-century proponents of anexclusively territorial, Anglo-British empire fell. So long as the BritishEmpire was defined oceanically more than territorially, the search for itsideological origins would have to begin with those who explicitly con-ceived it as an empire of the seas. Though Dee was certainly not the firstto use the concept of the British Empire – and acknowledged his debt tothose among his predecessors who were the originators of the vernacu-lar term – he was the first to theorise the maritime conception of theBritish 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 theEnglish Renaissance (Amherst, Mass., ), –.


Dee expanded and elaborated his conception of the maritime dimen-sions of the British Empire over two decades, until it became thedefining feature of the empire itself. In his earliest extensive discussion ofthe boundaries of the British Empire (‘Brytanici Imperii Limites’ (),Dee was most concerned to establish the legality of Elizabeth’s claims tothe 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 ofScotland and to prove her rights of imperium over the eastern seaboard ofNorth America, ‘partlie Jure Gentium, partlie Jure Civilis; and partlie JureDivino’. This entailed the refutation of Spanish and Portuguese claimsmade on the basis of first discovery and papal donation, but did notinclude the assertion of the dominium maris over the intervening oceans.

The following year, Dee supplemented these territorial claims withmaritime ones in the General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arteof Navigation (), which advised Elizabeth to institute a ‘Petty NavyRoyal’ for the protection of the British seas, cited Pericles and Pompeythe Great on, respectively, Athenian naval supremacy and the Romanrecovery of the imperium maris, and concluded with what would become,for later writers, a standard aetiological appeal to the sea-sovereignty ofKing Edgar, ‘one of the perfect Imperiall Monarchs of this BrytishImpire’, over all of the oceans adjoining Britain, Ireland and the Britishisles. Yet even this was modest in comparison with the all-encompass-ing conception of maritime dominion Dee presented in his culminatingwork on the subject, the ‘HAKKASOJQASIA BQESSAMIJG’ (). On thebasis 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 ofNations; The Law of true and constant Amitie: Yea the Law of God’,Dee asserted Elizabeth’s ‘Sea Jurisdiction and soveraigntie absolute’ over theseas for one hundred miles around England’s coasts, the English Chan-nel, the western shore of Scotland and ‘a mighty portion of the SeaSovereigntie in that Ocean’ between Scotland and North America, aswell as over the ‘ : or ’ betweenEngland and Denmark, Friesland and Holland. No one until SirWilliam 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, –.


for an English or British mare clausum in European waters, and not untilthe s would even non-legal assertions of the oceanic ambit of theBritish Empire extend so far.

Dee’s conception of the British Empire as a compact territorial coreat the heart of a far-reaching Atlantic and northern European mareclausumwas anomalous in Elizabeth’s reign, and entirely at odds with theotherwise consistently maintained Tudor commitment to the freedomof the seas. Before the regal union of , the English and ScottishCrowns defined the maritime dimensions of their realms differently, andpromoted competing and incompatible conceptions of their imperiumand dominium. Thus, the English Crown argued for mare liberum on thenatural jurisprudential grounds that ‘all are at liberty to navigate thevast ocean, since the use of the sea and the air are common to all. Nonation or private person can have a right to the ocean, for neither thecourse of nature nor public usage permits any occupation of it’. Thisconception of negative community in which all could claim a commonright of navigation, because none could exercise exclusive dominion,was used in to refute Spanish claims of maritime imperium in theWest Indies. The Spanish ambassador had appealed for restitution ofproperty seized by Sir Francis Drake from Spanish settlements and shipsin the Americas, to which the English replied that it was against the lawof nations (contra ius gentium) for the Spanish to have excluded foreignersfrom commerce in the Indies; the papal donation was invalid since‘prescription without possession is not valid’ (præscriptio sine possessionehaud valeat); because the sea, like the air, could not be possessed, theSpanish could not therefore exclude the English from any part of it.

Like the more general arguments for British maritime supremacy, theseparticular assertions of the insufficiency of prescription to guaranteepossession and the freedom of the seas for navigation would becomestaples 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, (), ; ThomasWemyss Fulton, The Sovereignty of the Sea (Edinburgh, ), –. Compare Patricia Seed,Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World – (Cambridge, ), , whotruncates her citation of the same passage in order to show that the English mode of legalargument was different from the Spanish, and indeed any other European power’s, though theargument in favour of mare liberum (which Seed does not quote) was of course far from beingexclusively English.


and not even the Pope could deprive rulers and their subjects of this‘righte of navigation in the sea, & the right of traffique’ which wasavailable 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 notlawfull for the Pope, nor is it lawfull for the Spaniard, to prohibite othernations from the communication & participation of this lawe’. Hakluytspecifically cited Drake’s case as an example of the lawful pursuit oftrade and navigation, and concluded, in line with the English Crown’scase, that he and other English sailors had a right to ‘defend themselves,& lawfully continue traffique wth the Indians’. In this, Hakluyt’sassumption of mare liberum was more representative of Elizabethanpolicy than Dee’s vision of an English Atlantic mare clausum. The sameEnglish argument in favour of mare liberum appeared in in thecontext of fishing rights in the northern seas, over which the DanishCrown asserted mare clausum in an attempt to exclude the English. Onceagain, the English Crown claimed that the seas were open to all personsand hence all nations, and that the king of Denmark, like any other ruleror realm, might exercise jurisdiction over the sea adjacent to his terri-tory, in the interests of securing navigation against piracy and enemyaction; however, he could not claim dominium over it: the sea was as freeas the air, and all might therefore resort to it.

While the English Crown before the regal union of supportedmare 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 andoceanic fishing grounds. They also made comparatively little investmentin inter-oceanic trade beyond northern Europe, and therefore had lesscause than the English to dispute the freedom of the oceans. While theEnglish made common fishing agreements with their neighbours, theScots instead asserted their right to ‘reserved waters’, an exclusion zonearound the realm of or miles from the shore. Soon after hisaccession to the English throne in , James began to enforce Scottishpolicies of mare clausum in all of the ‘British’ seas around the coasts ofEngland and Scotland, and thus reversed the more liberal Elizabethanpolicies that had allowed foreign access to English waters for both

[Richard Hakluyt,] ‘Whither an Englishman may trade into the West Indies with certainanswers to the Popes Bull’ (c. –), PRO /, f. r, printed in The Original Writings andCorrespondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, ed. E. G. R. Taylor, vols. (London, ), , , .

Cheyney, ‘International Law under Queen Elizabeth’, .


fishing and navigation. This change of policy marked a shift bothtowards a pan-British conception of the adjacent seas, and hence onecloser to the earlier vision of John Dee in the s, and towards aconception of the British empire based on the royal prerogative, andincluding the territory of the Three Kingdoms as well as the seas aroundand between them.

The first major legal dispute involving James’s Kingdom of GreatBritain over this new policy immediately put this specifically Scoto-British assertion of mare clausum at the heart of the global argument overrights of dominion precipitated by the publication of Hugo Grotius’sMare Liberum in . In that year, James issued a proclamation banningunlicensed foreigners (meaning, particularly, the Dutch) from thecoastal fisheries around Britain and Ireland. This reversal of the Englishpolicy of mare liberum in favour of the Scottish practice of mare clausum hasbeen authoritatively described as ‘the beginning of the English preten-sion to the sovereignty of the sea’. It seemed hardly coincidental toJames’s subjects that an anonymous tract upholding mare liberum infavour of the Dutch appeared in Leiden in the same year. Though theEast Indian context was uppermost in Grotius’s argument, this did notprevent Britons from imagining that his claims to freedom of the seaswere made at the expense of their own demands for new restrictions onDutch fishing-rights: ‘K[ing] James coming in the Dutch put out MareLiberum, made as if aimed at mortifying the Spaniards’ usurpation in theW. and E. Indyes, but aimed indeed at England’, noted one commenta-tor in . Grotius’s work, a fragment of the larger treatise De JurePrædæ (On the Law of Plunder), had been written as an apology for thecapture in of the Portuguese carrack St Catharine by the Dutch EastIndia Company. Chapter was published as Mare Liberum at theinsistence of the Dutch East India Company in the context of thenegotiations towards what would become the Twelve Years’ Trucebetween Spain and the United Provinces. Grotius justified Dutch rightsof trade and navigation in the East Indies against the claims of thePortuguese by arguing from natural law principles that anything pub-licum – such as the air, the sea and the shore of that sea – was thecommon property of all, and hence could be the private property ofnone. The polemical purpose of this was clear: to deny that any statecould 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. .


navigation throughout the ocean, as a Dutch counterblast to Portugueseclaims of dominium over the seas on grounds of first discovery, papaldonation, rights of conquest or title of occupation.

The international debate on the sovereignty of the sea inspired byGrotius’s Mare Liberum provoked the most important ideologicalcounter-definitions of the European overseas empires of the earlyseventeenth century. It drew predictably hostile responses from JustoSeraphim de Freitas in Portugal and Juan Solorzano y Pereira inSpain. However, the first response to the work came from neitherSpain nor Portugal but from Scotland. William Welwod, the Professorof Civil Law at the University of St Andrews, had produced the firstindependent treatise on sea law in Britain in ; his chapter ‘Of theCommunitie and Proprietie of the Seas’, in An Abridgement of All Sea-Lawes (), answered Grotius by supporting British fishing rights andmare clausum, and indeed was the only response to Mare Liberum to whichGrotius himself replied. If God had meant the sea to be free, Welwodargued, he would not have charged humanity to subdue the earth andrule over the fish (Genesis :), ‘which could not be, but by subduingof the waters also’. As God had divided the earth after the Flood, so hehad divided the sea, which therefore could be distinguished by bound-aries, despite its fluidity. On these grounds, Welwod argued, princesmight claim dominium over the sea around their coasts, to reserve theirfishing stocks to their own kingdoms, even while the wider oceanremained ‘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 theSeventeenth Century’, in Hedley Bull, Benedict Kingsbury and Adam Roberts (eds.), HugoGrotius 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, ), –; RichardTuck, Philosophy and Government, – (Cambridge, ), –.

On Welwod see Fulton, Sovereignty of the Sea, –; T. Callander Wade, ‘Introduction’, in The SeaLaw 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, ‘DefensioCapitis Quinti Maris Liberi Oppugnati a Guilielmo Welwodo . . . Capite XXVII ejus Libri . . .cui Titulum Fecit Compendium Legum Maritimarum’ (), printed in Samuel Muller, MareClausum: 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’, inHerbert F. Wright, ‘Some Less Known Works of Hugo Grotius’, Bibliotheca Visseriana, (),–.


work. Welwod’s arguments foreshadowed the Portuguese response toGrotius by Seraphim de Freitas, as well as those of Selden’s MareClausum. Selden in fact owned both of Welwod’s works, and drew on DeDominio Maris when writing Mare Clausum to affirm ‘the Dominion orOwnership of the Sea, incompassing the Isle of Great Britain, as belongingto the Empire of the same’. That claim to the freedom of the seas wastherefore originally a Scoto-British maritime ideology, in which Scottishtheories were expanded to justify Anglo-British practices.

The British reception of Grotius’s Mare Liberum, not all of it asadversarial as Welwod’s, abounded with ironies. Grotius’s contentionswere obviously applicable to British arguments in their disputes with theDutch 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 calledMare liberum’ and appended citations from Welwod’s De Dominio Maristo show that the Scotsman had ‘materially’ refuted Grotius. Thusforearmed, it might be possible to rebut Dutch claims, based on Grotianarguments, for freedom of fishing in the British seas. Grotius’s argu-ments could also easily be turned against the Dutch in pursuit offreedom of navigation in the East Indies. In this context it is notable thatthe first English translation of theMare Liberum, ‘The Free Sea’, was alsothe last surviving work by Richard Hakluyt, and it was presumablyundertaken at the instigation of the East India Company. Relationsbetween 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 etMethodica (London, ); J. D. Alsop, ‘William Welwood, Anne of Denmark and the Sovereigntyof 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 InternationalLaw, (), –.

[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 areBodleian Library shelfmarks o G. . Jur. Seld., and ; the latter is quoted in Selden, MareClausum seu De Dominio Maris (London, ), –.

[Sir Julius Caesar,] ‘Notes Out of a Book Called Mare Liberum, sive De Jure Quod BatavisCompetit 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 Rightwch ye Hollanders Ought to Have to the Indian Marchandize for Trading’ (post ), InnerTemple Library, MS . Hakluyt translated other Dutch material (in Latin) relating to the EastIndies for the Company in : D. B. Quinn, ‘A Hakluyt Chronology’, in Quinn (ed.), TheHakluyt Handbook, vols. (London, ), , .


turn the principle of the freedom of the seas, which the Dutch hadrecently asserted against the Spanish and the Portuguese, against theDutch themselves; most ironically of all, that principle was thrown in theface 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 theEast Indies though they had earlier asserted mare clausum in the Britishseas, as the Dutch, ‘contrary to the generall law of nations whichadmitteth a communion and liberty of commerce, would seek as muchas 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 MareLiberum’s author, because the work had remained anonymous since itspublication four years earlier. The English rebuttal concluded with aquotation from the ‘assertor Maris liberi ’ to the effect that, under the iusgentium, 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, Grotiushimself replied that Dutch commercial restrictions relied upon treatieswith the Indian rulers, and (citing the fifth chapter of Mare Liberum) ‘theproponent of mare liberum does not disagree with this, and establishesliberty everywhere before agreement has been given’ (ubique libertatemstatuit ante consensum praestitum). Grotius’s self-defence (though he did notacknowledge it as such) was shrewd, not least because it left the largernatural jurisprudential claim to freedom of navigation and commerceunchallenged. It also marks a stage in the transition towards Grotius’smature theory of property in De Jure Belli ac Pacis (), in which heestablished the role of consent as fundamental to the transition fromuniversal community to private property. As this Anglo-Dutch disputerevealed, particular claims to imperium and dominium over seas and portsestablished by law or treaty remained in tension with the more generalassertion of mare liberum, in accordance with the law of nature and ofnations. 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 DutchCommissioners’ reply, May (O.S.), in G. N. Clark and W. J. M. van Eysinga,The ColonialConferences between England and the Netherlands in and , Bibliotheca Visseriana, (), ,. Curiously, Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Hugo Grotius and England’, in Trevor-Roper, FromCounter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution (London, ), –, overlooks Grotius’s role in thesediscussions.

Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, ), .


the wider European revival of natural law, especially as it was used toestablish rights of property, both for individuals and for states.

Anglo-Dutch rivalry later inspired the most famous Grotian responseto Grotius’s theory of mare liberum in John Selden’sMare Clausum. Seldenoriginally 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 digestGrotius’s De Jure Belli ac Pacis, and was therefore able to produce ‘adeeply Grotian work’. Selden, like so many of his predecessors, beganfrom the premise that God’s commission in Genesis :– had left theearth in common to all humanity, and also cited Cicero De Officiis,. . , to the effect that in nature there was no private property. Onlywhen men tired of this negative community did they wish to establishrights of individual possession; they did so by agreement, as Grotius hadshown in De Jure Belli ac Pacis, . . . Selden’s task was to prove, contratheMare Liberum, that the dominion over the sea could be demonstratedin law and had been established in fact. Selden showed at length that ‘bythe Customs of almost all and the more noble Nations that are known tous, such a Dominion of the Sea is every where admitted’, and hence thatthe sea was as capable of possession as the land or moveable goods, paceGrotius and the only other defender of the freedom of the seas Seldenacknowledged, the Spanish humanist jurist, Fernando Vasquez deMenchaca. Once this had been established, he could go on to theargument from fact, which proved that ‘the Britains were Lords of theNorthern Sea, before they were subdued by the Romans. And that the Seaand the Land were made one entire Bodie of the British Empire’ (‘. . .Et Mare& Tellurem unicum Imperii Britannici corpus constituisse’); that ‘[t]heEmpire of the waters ever followed the Dominion of the Island’ (‘Un-darum imperium insulae dominium semper secutum est’); and that the dominiummaris had been continuously exercised by the English kings since Edgar,as even Grotius had admitted, in his panegyric verses celebrating theaccession 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 Vasquez see especially Annabel Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights inLater 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, , , , –.


controversial (though Grotius himself never replied to it at length). Themain precedent for the conception of the Crown’s prerogative impliedby Selden’s conception of mare clausum derived from the English Crown’sproperty in the foreshore. From time immemorial until , the Eng-lish common law presumed that every man’s manor extended down tothe 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, ThomasDigges argued that the original negative community did not prevent anyassumption of dominium over nature’s commons, such as the sea or theforeshore:

True it is that Jure naturali the seaes are common so likewise is the earth andeverye other thinge whatsoever, for as Cicero saithe privatum natura nihil est [DeOfficiis, . . ]. But the Civile Lawes and all such as comment on them confessethat even as of olde time private men, eyther by first discoverie or antiquepossession, might purchase propertie in such particular tenements as theyepossessed and by lawe of nature were common, even so maie kings absolute princesand comon-weales does in the Seas adjacent to their Territories.

Digges maintained that, like ship-wrecks, treasure-trove, and waifs andstrays, the foreshore could not become the property of any particularsubject, and therefore fell under the dominium of the Crown. By thisargument for the extensive power of the royal prerogative, any wastelands became the property of the Crown. However, as Digges hastenedto point out, such a claim over the foreshore did not entail an extensionof royal imperium, ‘forasmutche as the princes Jurisdiction is as well onthe sea as on the lande, but it were an ill exchandge to lose Proprietye, forJurisdiction, 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 oneof the grievances complained of in the Grand Remonstrance of ,along with the ‘new unheard-of tax of ship-money’, which was alsojustified with reference to prerogative claims in Selden’s MareClausum.

Thomas Digges, ‘Arguments Prooving the Queenes Majesties Propertye in the Sea Landes, andSalt Shores Thereof, and that No Subject Can Lawfully Hould Eny Parte Thereof but by theKinges Especiall Graunte’ (c. –), BL MS Lansdowne , printed in Stuart A. Moore, TheHistory 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,Historyof the Foreshore, xxxi; W. P. Drever, ‘Udal Law and the Foreshore’, Juridical Review, (),–.


Ship-Money was one of two major political test cases that compelledthe English and the Scots to define their relative and mutual claims tomare clausum in the s, as Charles I demanded ‘British’ fishing rightsagainst the Dutch and as he simultaneously pressed his claim to marinetaxation over the inland counties of England. In the first case, the statusof the island of Britain as a maritime unit was denied; in the second, andrelatedly, the inescapably maritime nature of the English realm wasdefiantly asserted. Charles’s attempt to exclude the Dutch from Britishfishing grounds revealed the limitations of Anglo-Scottish maritimeco-operation. The Scottish royal burghs had originally petitionedCharles to prevent Dutch incursions into their coastal waters, to whichCharles responded with a plan for a British fishery allowing English,Scots, Irish and naturalised subjects equal access to all of the watersadjacent to the British Isles on the prerogative grounds that fishingrights in all of the Three Kingdoms ‘properlie belong to our imperiallcrowne’. The confederation of fishing associations – set up to monop-olize all the catching, processing and marketing of fish around the coastsof Britain and Ireland – collapsed under the impact of local Scottishresistance, especially in the western Isles, as the Scots objected to being‘confound[ed]’ with the English ‘under the name of great Britane althother be no unioun as yitt with England nor the style of Great Britanereceaved there’. The prerogative claim in this case to mare liberumclearly benefited the English more than the Scots, who therefore turnedthe 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 principleagainst the Dutch with the revision and publication of John Selden’sMare Clausum in . According to the Kentish antiquarian Sir RogerTwysden, the coincidence of the publication of Mare Clausum with theincreased exaction of Ship-Money led people to ‘imagin that booke wasnot set out so much to justyfy the clayme abroad, as the actyon ofraysing the money at home’. Twysden claimed that ‘[t]he booke itselfis in every man’s hands’; it was clearly in the hands of the judges whotried the Ship-Money case against the Buckinghamshire resister, JohnHampden, in , for they cited it six times to show that the king was

Allan I. Macinnes, Charles I and the Making of the CovenantingMovement, – (Edinburgh, ), (quoted); Fulton, Sovereignty of the Sea, –; John R. Elder, The Royal Fishery Companies of theSeventeenth Century (Glasgow, ), –.

The Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, nd ser., (–), ed. P. Hume Brown (Edinburgh,), .


lord of the sea as well as of the land, that he had dominium as well asimperium over it, and that it had been customary in England for theinland counties to be taxed for the defence of the sea in cases ofnecessity, according to the king’s determination. However, Selden’sarguments from law were more notorious, because of their associationwith the Ship-Money trial, and would be rendered obsolete by theCrown’s insistence on mare liberum after the Restoration.

The Crown justified the levying of Ship-Money, and its extension tothe inland counties, on grounds of national defence against the imminentthreats presented by ‘certain thieves, pirates, and sea-robbers, as well asTurks, enemies of Christianity, and others confederated together’. Thesecurity of the realm was therefore at stake, and the judgment that thiswas a case of sufficient danger to allow extraordinary taxation was left tothe king to make. The argument between Hampden’s lawyers and thejudges of the Court of Exchequer turned on the scope and limits of theking’s discretionary power when deciding what provisions should bemade for the national defence. Historians of political thought haveaccordingly treated it as an episode in the history of reason-of-stateargument, or as a moment in the definition of the respective powers ofkingandparliamenton the eve of the CivilWars. Itwas, 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 caseinsisted that the king had both dominion and jurisdiction over the seasaround England. The dominion of the sea had to be upheld, arguedLord Coventry, ‘for safety sake . . . The Wooden Walls are the best wallsof the kingdom; and if the riches and wealth of the kingdom be respectedfor that cause, the Dominion of the Sea ought to be respected’. Hethereby conflated two separate arguments, which defined both the

Sir Roger Twysden, quoted in Kenneth Fincham, ‘The Judges’ Decision on Ship Money inFebruary : 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 theExchequer, Charles I. A.D. ’, in A Complete Collection of State Trials . . . From the Earliest Periodto 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 MartinDzelzainis, ‘The Case of Ship-Money and its Aftermath’, in Dzelzainis, The Ideological Origins ofthe English Revolution (Cambridge, forthcoming). My thanks to Dr Dzelzainis for the opportunityto 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 theDevelopment of Henry Parker’s Parliamentary Absolutism’, The Historical Journal, (),–.


rights of the English Crown and the nature of the English nation. Sincethe prosperity and the safety of the nation depended upon the security ofits defences, those defences ought to be maintained by all necessarymeans. The greatest of those defences was the sea, and the sea was anappurtenance of the Crown of England, according to the Stuart prin-ciple of mare clausum. Decisions regarding the welfare of the realm werejudgments to be made according to the royal prerogative, and so thejudgment that England’s maritime safety was in danger, and hence thatextraordinary fiscal measures should be taken to protect it, was entirelyin the hands of the king. On the canonistic principle that what affects allshould be borne by all (quod omnes tangit, per omnes debet supportari),Coventry and his fellow-judges argued that the burden of maritimedefence should be carried by all the counties of England, whethercoastal or inland, so that even taxpayers in Buckinghamshire, like JohnHampden, would be liable for the cost of equipping and maintaining aship for the defence of the realm.

The justices who ruled against Hampden adjudged that all subjects ofthe Crown were liable for maritime defence because all benefited fromthe security and prosperity of the seas around England. Yet in doing sothey, like John Selden and earlier Thomas Digges, defined England as amaritime polity on the basis of the royal prerogative. By this argument,the English were necessarily a maritime nation in so far as they weresubject to a king whose dominions included the seas around his realm.Such a prerogative definition of dominium was questioned early in theCivil War, when those among Hampden’s judges who had decided infavour of the Crown were impeached in the Long Parliament. AsEdmund Waller argued in his speech against Sir Edward Crawley, theinvasion of the property-rights of Englishmen in the name of nationaldefence, when decided by the king alone without consulting Parliament,was a threat to liberty rather than the means to protect it: ‘God andnature have given us the sea’, he argued, ‘as our best guard against ourenemies; and our ships, as our greatest glory above other nations . . . howbarbarously 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. , , writof May ).

Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. Howell, , col. (compare Henry Parker, The Case ofShip-Mony Briefly Discoursed (London, ) ). Waller’s copy of the translation of Selden’sMareClausum is Folger Shakespeare Library shelfmark S.


There was therefore no necessary connection between the empire of theseas and the liberty of Englishmen, especially when that liberty wasdefined as security of property, the nation’s naval defence provided theexpedient for extraordinary fiscal exactions, and the maritime definitionof the realm depended on the extent of prerogative power.

These arguments in favour of the English Crown’s dominion over theseas nonetheless proved essential for the Rump Parliament just beforethe outbreak of the Anglo-Dutch War of . The Commonwealthprinted or reprinted tracts written to support the Stuart monarchy’ssovereignty of the seas in support of their own arguments against theDutch. 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 byfact ( factum) and right (ius), princes possessed dominium in, and imperiumover, 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 ofEnglandby immemorial prescription, continuall usage, and possession . . .have ever held the Soveraigne Lordship of the Seas of England’, whileKing Charles had now ‘enlarged his Dominions over a great part of theWesterne Indies; by meanes of which extent of Empire . . . the trade, andpersons of all Nations . . . must of necessitie, first, or last, come withincompasse of his power, and jurisdiction’. A year later, in , theCouncil of State paid Marchamont Nedham £ to translate the fullestversion of these arguments, in the form of Selden’s Mare Clausum. Byadopting Boroughs’s and Selden’s arguments, in the sovereignty of theseas, as in so many other matters, the Commonwealth and the Protector-ate republicanised the appurtenances of the Stuart monarchy. ThoughNedham admitted that Selden had revised his work ‘at the command ofthe late Tyrant ’, he nevertheless left his arguments from both law and factuntouched, and hence derived the Rump’s claim to dominion over theNarrow Seas from his claim that ‘the King of Great Britain is Lord of theSea flowing about, as an inseparable and perpetual Appendant of theBritish Empire’ (‘Serenissimum Magnae Britanniae Regem maris circumflui, utindividuæ 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. br; Selden, Of the Dominion, Or, Ownership of the Sea, trans. Nedham, sig.

(e)v.


The prefatory poem prefixed to Nedham’s translation ofMare Clausumrevealedambivalenceabout the project of defendinga republican regimeon the basis of a ‘British Empire’ defined by the extent of royal preroga-tive. ‘Neptune to the Common-Wealthof England’ elucidated the work’saccompanying engraving – the first representation of Britannia as theruler of the waves – as if it were part of an emblem-book. A submissiveand imploring Neptune begs assistance from the victorious Britannia,who is helmed and breast-plated as Minerva, treading the standards ofScotland and Ireland beneath her feet in the wake of Cromwell’s militaryconquest of the British Isles in –, and carrying a tiny Nike, like theAthena of the Parthenon, tutelary deity of the Athenian empire of theseas. Neptune implores Britannia not simply to preserve but to extendher sea-dominion, in order to claim the sovereignty of seas by right ofconquest rather than simply by inheritance from England’s kings: ‘ForSea-Dominion may as well bee gain’d/ By new acquests, as by descentmaintained’. This acknowledged the prerogative claim to Britain’scoastal waters which the Rump maintained, but also imagined theextension of sea-dominion in the name of the ‘Angliae Respub.’ beyondthe Narrow Seas and at the expense of the Dutch. This poem contrib-uted to the burgeoning maritime mythology of the eighteenth century invarious 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 overthe seas in the name of a ‘British Empire’. In May , rumour in Parishad it that Oliver Cromwell wanted to become ‘emperor of the seasoccidentalis . . . an old pretension of the kings that were heretofore ofEngland’ on the basis of Selden’s arguments in Mare Clausum. Thisechoed claims that circulated in – that Cromwell would becomeemperor 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 thepossible author of the poem, on the basis of the anagrammatic signature, ‘K��o��o�’:Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, – (Cambridge, ),, n. .

[Marchamont Nedham,] ‘Invocation of Neptune, and His Attendant Nereids, to Britannia, onthe Dominion of the Sea’ (n.p., n.d. [London, ?]), BL shelfmark . d. () (libretto forsetting by Friedrich Hartman Graf, ); Joseph Haydn,Mare Clausum (), ed. H. C. RobbinsLandon (Vienna, ), Hoboken a: .

Letter of intelligence, May , in A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, ed. ThomasBirch, vols. (London, ), , .


account, emperor of the West Indies, and recalled King Edgar’s styleas emperor of the British seas (revived by Selden and Boroughs, amongothers). This flurry of rumour came in the aftermath of the militarypacification of Ireland, the conquest of Scotland in – and theelevation of Cromwell to the position of Protector in December .The Cromwellian union achieved what the Stuart kings had failed toprovide: the consolidation of England, Ireland, Scotland and all theterritories belonging thereto into a political unit with a single head.However, it did so not least by relying on the prerogative powers ofdominium over the seas inherited from the Stuarts. An earlier Protector,the Duke of Somerset, had attempted to create an empire of GreatBritain by conquering Scotland, but it took Cromwell, another hammerof the Scots turned Protector, to fulfil his aim. Though the title of‘Emperor’, or ruler over multiple dominions, was never formallyawarded to Cromwell, the rumour that it might be hinted at a desire forequality with the other rulers of Europe, and a recognition of theCommonwealth’s unique achievement in creating an archipelagic statewithin the British Isles and over the seas adjacent to them. When theProtectoral warship, the Naseby (also known as the Great Oliver) waslaunched, 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 whichthese images relied was inevitably inflammatory after the Restoration.Cromwell’s image was torn from the Naseby, and the ship was renamedthe Royal Charles. Selden’s Mare Clausum itself had to be ‘restored’ to itsmonarchical purity by James Howell in , who warned readers thatNedham had foisted the translation upon them ‘in the name of aCommonwealth, instead of the kings of England ’. This was a relief to atleast 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 ausitalienischen 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, MareClausum, ; 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 tosupport republican sovereignty of the seas, and proposing a replacement for Selden’s MareClausum, see Howell to Council of State, [May ,] BL Add. MS , f. r.


translation to his bookseller in ‘to cause the title of my EnglishMareClausum to be changed and the new title, dedicated to the King, to be putto it, because I am ashamed to have the other seen dedicate[d] to theCommonwealth’.

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 tothe Commonwealth. In his highly Seldenian ‘Observations Concern-ing the Dominion and Sovereignty of the Seas’ (), which Meadowsoriginally presented to Charles II during the Third Anglo-Dutch War,he remarked that various peoples had historically claimed dominionover 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 hadheld that kings could claim dominium directum because they possessed theimperium over them. In his dedication of his manuscript to SamuelPepys, Meadows situated his work in the context of the Anglo-DutchWars, and stated his aim as the prevention of any excessive assumptionsby others regarding the powers of the Crown, not least by enemies likethe Dutch, who would construe expanded claims to the empire of theseas as advances towards universal monarchy. When he came topublish it in , he offered it as a means to prevent any misunder-standing between the Dutch and the English, in order to defend theBritish seas against the encroachments of ‘the Continent’ (meaning,presumably, France). Like Selden, he assumed the original communityof the earth on Ciceronian grounds; also like Selden, he attributed theorigins of private property to consent, as Grotius had argued; like SirWilliam Petty (as we shall see), he identified complete sea-sovereignty asthe amalgamation of dominium and imperium, property and supreme ruleand jurisdiction, based on law, rather than fact or force alone: ‘’tis onething to be Master of it in an Historical and Military sense, by aSuperiority of Power and Command, as the General of a VictoriousFleet is, another thing to be Master of it in a legal sense, by a PossessoryRight, 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 theSeas, –, greatly downplays Meadows’s Seldenian arguments.

Meadows, Observations Concerning the Dominion and Sovereignty of the Seas, ‘To the Reader’; sig. Bv, (quoting Cicero, De Officiis, . . ), , , –.


Meadows’s assimilation of dominium and imperium over the British seaswas perhaps the last such assertion of a whole-heartedly Seldenianconception of the empire of the seas. Both at the time of its composition,and at the moment of its publication in , his treatise captured theshifting associations of the empire of the seas in the post-Restoration era.The geopolitical competition between England and its continentalneighbours was cast in the idiom of universal monarchy, the attempt byeither Holland or France to achieve the hegemony of Europe bymaritime supremacy and commercial monopoly. In , Meadows hadattempted to allay any possibility that English pretensions to the sover-eignty of the seas could be interpreted as such an ambition for universalmonarchy 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 ofthe Glorious Revolution, such rivalry had ceased, as the decade and ahalf between and had seen the focus of English fears ofuniversal monarchy shift from the Dutch to the French. Any Englishassumptions ofmare clausumwere also abandoned in pursuit of a policy ofmare liberum across the oceans of the world. As a matter of law, Selden’sarguments 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 thesubject; as late as , James Oglethorpe, the promoter of the Georgiacolony, 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 theoreticalconundrum of combining imperium and dominium, over the sea as overland. Among the last seventeenth-century theorists to attempt a recon-ciliation in relation to the sea rather than for landed property was thepolitical economist Sir William Petty, who turned not to John Seldenbut rather to Thomas Hobbes (an early admirer of Mare Clausum) forassistance. The key to Petty’s theory was his Hobbesian understanding

Compare Sir Philip Meadows, ‘Reflections upon a Passage in Sr William Temple’s MemoirsRelating 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.), AUnion 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

(), inThe 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 ofThomas Hobbes, ed. Noel Malcolm, vols. (Oxford, ), , , .


of the commensurability of dominium and imperium. As he put it in theopening 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 allthings that are naturally possible. So as Empire in & over any certain scope orcircuit of Ground whether dry or covered with water signifies a Right & powerover ye lives Liberties & fortunes of all that Live within ye same & a right to allThings 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 ofye seas as any Landlord hath to ye Corne & Cattle accrewing from hisLands . . .

Petty’s plan offered the monarchy of James II the chance to become thearbiter of European affairs by asserting its dominance over theEuropean seas; the British monarch would thereby emerge as aHobbesian sovereign, guaranteeing protection in return for obedience,at least upon the seas. Petty argued that this was necessary because thevarious maritime states of northern Europe ‘are as to sea-affaires in ye

state of Nature and there is bellum omnium contra Omnes betweenethem . . . Whereas if all and every of them did transferre their Rightsunto some One of their Number, Peace & profitt would ensue’. Pettyconsistently maintained the necessity of a mare clausum as an essentialdefence for the Three Kingdoms in many of his reformative projects forthe restoration of Britain and Ireland, particularly in the s. Thiswould be an essential alternative to territorial conquest, and hence themeans to prevent military overstretch for the Stuart monarchy; it wouldalso not face the costs of continental commitments, and avoid thenuisance of internal disputes about sovereignty. Petty presented thealternatives in : ‘Whether it bee to ye King of Englands Interest toacquire More Territory then hee now hath or rather to bee EffectuallSoveraine of a reallMare Clausum attaineable only to himself ’. Thoughtheoretically potent, Petty’s plan was practically impossible: it might beplausible to combine imperium and dominium in the figure of a Leviathan-like dominus maris, but providing the rows of signal-ships – manned byconvicts 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,’ BLAdd. MS , f. r; Petty, ‘Of a Mare Clausum’ (), BL Add. MS , f. r.

Sir William Petty, ‘A Probleme’ (), BL Add. MS , f. v.


nets, and moored between the north of Ireland and Scotland, fromKinsale to the Scilly Islands, the Scillies to the French coast, betweennorthern 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 analternative to the plantation of colonies in North America, but ratheras a warning against English territorial ambitions in Europe. Yet hissuggestion was both backward looking and belated, because WilliamIII’s successful invasion of England and Ireland in – wouldultimately eliminate the Anglo-Dutch rivalry which had done so muchto encourage English attachment to a European mare clausum, and openan era in which the freedom of the seas again came to distinguishEnglish ideology and policy. However, Petty’s opposition between landand sea, and the armies and navies necessary to exercise dominium andimperium over them, also looked forward, as did his political-economicconception of Britain and Ireland as a unit within Northern Europe andthe wider Atlantic world. Both the navalist ideology implicit in Petty’swork and the coincident commitment to commerce would becomecrucial components of British imperial ideology in the decades followingthe Restoration. Not least, their confluence could provide a possiblesolution to one of the greatest of the historical conundrums that bedevil-led British conceptions of empire since the late sixteenth century: how toreconcile empire with liberty. The answer was clear, according to Petty.He quoted a Dutch student of naval architecture, who in turn hadappealed 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 imperiumand dominium; the rapprochement between imperium and libertas, twoclassically opposed but equally admired values, would be no less chal-lenging. The empire of the seas and freedom of commerce would be themajor 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, deWijze van Scheeps-timmeren, by Grieken en Romeynen (Amsterdam, ), sig. *r, quoted in Sir WilliamPetty, ‘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 andProvinciall.

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 claimsto property and jurisdiction: the one did not necessarily threaten theother, though, as the Spanish Monarchy had discovered decades beforethe English and Scottish Crowns would, the two claims were notdependent upon one another, and each needed a separate and distinctargument. A more intractable dilemma arose from the tension betweenthe competing demands of two overwhelmingly desirable but ultimatelyirreconcilable goals, liberty and empire. A variety of solutions to thisdilemma had emerged by the later seventeenth century and, as WilliamPetty noted in the s, it may have been more apparent than real.However, for the classical – above all, Roman – historical and moraltraditions within which the majority of early-modern British theoristshad been educated, libertas and imperium remained seemingly incompat-ible values. This was hardly confined to those who asserted the primacyof Roman moral and political thought as a means of contemporaryself-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 libertybecame a defining concern of British imperial ideology from the latesixteenth century onwards. This resulted in part from the reception ofMachiavelli’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 JamesHarrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, ), .

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 frequentlyturned. Nonetheless, they relied, as did Machiavelli himself, on Romanhistorians such as Sallust for their understanding of this persistentdilemma.

Both classical and contemporary history showed that liberty gavebirth to republics and that republics strove to safeguard that liberty bothinternally, for the flourishing of their citizens, and externally, for thesecurity and grandeur of the republic itself. Theory reinforced thehistorical connection between republican government and liberty. Thecommitment to liberty under the law, a liberty with responsibility for thecollective well-being of the community, has distinguished the republicantradition from its classical origins through to its contemporary revival.

Though the Machiavellian branch of the early-modern republicantradition affirmed this central commitment to liberty, it insisted equallystrongly on the primacy of greatness (grandezza) in defining the characterof 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 trulyremarkable to observe the grandezza which Athens attained in the spaceof a hundred years after it had been liberated from the tyranny ofPisistratus,’ he remarked in Discorsi, . : ‘But most marvellous of all is itto observe the grandezzaRome 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 citiesbecome great, for ‘it is beyond question that it is only in republics thatthe common good (il bene comune) is looked to properly in that all thatpromotes it is carried out’.

Machiavelli inherited this equation between greatness and republicanliberty from Sallust, the most popular of all classical historians inearly-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, ), –. Niccolo Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, ed. Giorgio Inglese (Milan, ),

(Discorsi, . ): ‘Ma sopra tutto maravigliosissima e a considerare a quanta grandezza venne Romapoi che la si libero da’ suoi Re. La ragione e facile a intendere, perche non il bene comune equello che fa grandi le citta’; compare Discorsi, . . On the Romans’ own dating of their civicliberty from the abolition of the monarchy see Chaim Wirszubski, Libertas as a Political Idea at Romeduring the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cambridge, ), .

Peter Burke, ‘A Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians, –’, History and Theory,


, Sallust argued that the establishment of the Republic in Rome hadreleased the talents of the Roman people which had formerly beenrepressed under the rule of the kings. So great was the popular thirst forglory that it was indeed remarkable (incredibile) how the civitas grew onceit had recovered its liberty. This passage from Sallust became the locusclassicus for the equation between republican liberty and the greatness ofa free state. Augustine cited it in his discussion in the City of God, . , ofthe divine favour which had allowed Rome to be the vehicle for theexpansion of Christianity; following Augustine, the author of the DeRegimine Principum, . . –, also quoted it and remarked further, inSallustian vein, that under republican government ‘when [persons] seethat the common good is not in the power of one, each attends to it as ifit were their own, not as if it were something pertaining to someoneelse’. Closer to Machiavelli’s own time and to his immediate politicalconcerns, both Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni deployed thesame passage in praise of the greatness of republican Florence.

This Sallustian and Machiavellian tradition encouraged the beliefthat 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 ofthat liberty both for the republic and for its citizens. The martial virtueand concern for the public good that the citizens exhibited when theyhad been freed from the repressions of monarchy may have propelledthe remarkable growth of the Roman Republic, but (as Sallust regret-fully reported) fortune then turned against Rome. The virtuous and thecourageous became greedy, ambitious and impious; the character of therepublic was changed, and the government itself became cruel andintolerable (Bellum Catilinæ, . –). Sallust located this declension quiteprecisely in Roman history during the dictatorship of Lucius Sulla.From that point onward, the pursuit of individual advantage replacedthe effort to protect the good of the community, the army which hadbeen sent to conquer distant lands became debilitated by luxury, and allof the former virtues that had sustained Rome in its acquisition of

(), –; Patricia Osmond, ‘Sallust and Machiavelli: From Civic Humanism to PoliticalPrudence’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, (), –.

Sallust, Bellum Catilinæ, . , in Sallust, ed. and trans. J. C. Rolfe (London, ), –; QuentinSkinner, 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 BeforeLiberalism, –.

Liberty and empire

territory and greatness were scorned and abandoned (Bellum Catilinæ, .–, . –).

Machiavelli followed Sallust not only in his account of the origins ofRoman grandezza but also in his analysis of Roman declension. Romehad used two methods to facilitate its territorial expansion. It had armedthe plebs and admitted foreigners to citizenship, but these methods hadled to tumults and hence to internal instability (Discorsi, . ). ThoughMachiavelli’s defence of such tumults marked his greatest departurefrom 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 expansiontowards the destruction of Roman liberty. Rome’s grandezza could nothave been achieved without the necessary extension of military com-mands, he argued, but this had led directly to servitude (servitu) for theRoman people; the liberty which had been won with the expulsion ofthe monarchy ended during the dictatorships of Sulla and Marius,which in turn provided the precedent for the tyranny of Julius Caesarand the loss of popular liberty under the emperors (Discorsi, . ).

Machiavelli’s major advance beyond the limits of Sallust’s argumentwas to show that it would be impossible for any state to avoid thecompulsions of expansion, and hence to escape the loss of its liberty.Rome could never have achieved grandezzawithout instituting the practi-cal measures that had led to internal dissension and hence to thedestruction of its republican liberty; likewise, those states that did notfollow the expansionist policies of the Romans rendered themselvesvulnerable to conquest by others and would still lose their liberty as theircompetitors 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 declinedto increase population by admitting foreigners to citizenship. Each hadhoped thereby to resist the temptation to expand in order to safeguardthe liberty of the commonwealth. Sparta remained stable for eighthundredyears until the Thebanrevolt checked its ambitions to occupyallthe cities of Greece; Venice similarly lost its liberty along with all of itsterritories 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, –. Niccolo 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, ).


‘What will happen to the others if this [republic] burned and froze in afew days only?’ Machiavelli asked. ‘And if justice and force and union forso great an impero did not avail?’ (Decennale, , –). The alternativeswere stark: a republic could pursue grandezza, or it could safeguard itsliberty and maintain tranquil but temporary security. Such securitycould not be guaranteed, because the republic would be forced to expandand all would be lost. Machiavelli’s recommendation was unequivocal:grandezza was a greater good than stability. ‘Wherefore’ (in the words ofJames 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 successfulmartial republic, he defined more precisely the means by which animpero 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 expansivepower keeping the headship of any league to itself, as Rome had done;or, least effectively of all, by simply annexing conquered territorywithout confederation, thus bringing instability and collapse upon re-publics like Athens and Sparta which could not support the weight ofnew conquest (Discorsi, . ). To hold such acquisitions, many soldiersand settlers would be needed, so every effort should be made to increasethe population. A small root could not support a great trunk, so ‘who-ever would make any City great, and apt for Dominion ( faccia grandeimperio), 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 toincrease the population; to ally with, and not to subject, other states; todispatch colonies into conquered territory; to put war-booty into thepublic coffers; to campaign by means of battles not sieges; to keepindividuals poor in order to increase public wealth; and to maintainmilitary discipline. The only viable alternative to taking the course of

Niccolo 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 ChiefWorks and Others, trans. Allan H. Gilbert, vols. (Durham, NC, ), , . Compare Machiavelli, Dell’asino d’oro, , –, inMachiavelli, Il teatro e gli scritti letterari, ed. Gaeta, –.

Harrington, Oceana, in Political Works, ed. Pocock, . Machiavelli, Discorsi, . , ed. Inglese, : ‘Quegli che disegnono che una citta 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 Englishtranslation of Machiavelli was the one most frequently quoted by British authors of theeighteenth century, and is therefore the one used here.

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Rome would be to rein in ambition, prohibit expansion, adopt adefensive posture, and make good internal laws, like thecommonwealths of Germany: ‘whoever takes any other course, ratherruines than advantages himself, for new Conquests are prejudicial athousand ways, and especially when your force does not encrease withyour 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 tobe capable of mastering its external environment. It would be shaken bypopular dissent, its life span would be limited, but it would nonethelessbe glorious and would ride the flux of time. The German republicspresented the second possibility, that of defensive stability and curbedambition, which seemed to have been successful, at least temporarily.Finally, the model of Sparta, Athens or Venice, which guaranteedinternal tranquillity and stability, could be followed, but only if neithernecessity nor greed forced the state to expand (Discorsi, . –). Machia-velli’s recommendation to follow the ordine romano instead was notunequivocal. The main reason to prefer the course of Rome was notglory but security in a world of change and ambition. The Romanmodel would incur the cost of dissent between the nobility and thepeople; most damagingly, the further the marches of the empire ext-ended away from the centre, the greater was the need to prolongmilitary commands. This would lead to partisanship in the army, givingsuch men as Marius, Sulla and Caesar the means to effect constitutionaloverthrow. The empire might not have expanded so rapidly withoutthat prolongation of commands, but it would not thereby have fallen soquickly into servitude (servitu) (Discorsi, . ). Imperio and liberta would,at last, be incompatible.

As Maurizio Viroli has suggested, ‘in recommending the Romanmodel, Machiavelli was actually sacrificing the substance of the viverepolitico in the pursuit of greatness’. One of Machiavelli’s most hostilecritics, 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; perche in mille modi e per molte cagioni gli acquisti sono dannosi. Perchegli sta molto bene insieme acquista imperio e non forze; e qui acuista imperio e non forzeinsieme, conviene che rovini’; trans. Neville, in Works of . . . Machiavel, . Compare MaurizioViroli, 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, .


Discorsi Politici () dismissed the Florentine’sDiscorsi as ‘already buriedin oblivion’, and asked, contrary to Machiavelli:

who can doubt but that the true end of a City is to have her Citizens livevertuously, not the inlarging of her Empire? . . . the perfection of Governmentlies in making a City vertuous, not in making her Mistress of many Countries.Nay the increasing of Territories, as it is commonly coupled with someinjustice, so it is remote from the true end of good Laws, which never part fromwhat is honest. Governments which aim at Empire are usually short lived;which denotes their imperfection.

Machiavelli would have answered Paruta’s charge by invoking theinescapable compulsions of necessita, ambizione and the flux of humanaffairs (Discorsi, . ). His crucial insight was to link the strength ofinternal institutions to the pressures of external policy, thereby to showthat ‘[t]he Conquests of Common-wealths that are ill Governed, andcontrary to the Mould of the Romans, do conduce more to the Ruine,than Advancement of their Affairs’ (Discorsi, . ). This was the lessontaught by Venice, Sparta and the Athenian commonwealth; thecommonwealths of contemporary Germany had not yet been tested inthis way, but Machiavelli believed that all rulers demand ever largerdominions, however aware they might be of the costs, and that they toowould be tried before too long.

Machiavelli’s distinction between the stable, defensive yet ultimatelyvulnerable commonwealth for preservation, and the tumultuous, ag-gressive, and finally servile commonwealth for expansion drew uponPolybius’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 intactand preserved his country’s liberty by equally dividing landed propertyand banning money, as well as by instituting military training. However,Lycurgus had not left any safeguards against territorial aggrandisementon the part of the Spartans, so that ‘when the Lacedaemonians attem-pted to win supremacy in Greece it was not long before they were indanger of losing their liberty’. Polybius’s conclusion was therefore theone 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 virtu 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, –, –.

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. . . 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 betempted to expand, and Rome would be debilitated by the seductions ofpetty competition for public office and the pleasures of indolent luxury.Machiavelli faced this pessimism squarely, but saw no alternative to theservitude compelled by overambitious expansion: that way destructionlay, but at least the bitter pill of servitude would be sweetened by thebrief taste of glory that came with grandezza.

The Machiavellian compound of Sallust’s moral account of Romandecline and Polybius’s constitutional analysis provided an enduringmodel for later republicans to understand the competing pressures ofliberty at home and expansion abroad. British republicans, in particu-lar, attempted to reconcile the convergent, but antagonistic, claims ofempire and liberty in the century between the Elizabethan fin-de-siecleand the Glorious Revolution, and beyond. The Machiavellian typologyof republics for expansion and those for stability first appeared as a toolto analyse English policy in when Richard Beacon, the disaffectedformer Queen’s Attorney for the Irish county of Munster, published hisMachiavellian ‘Politique Discourse’ on the state of Ireland, Solon HisFollie (). In a paraphrase of Discorsi, . , one of the interlocutorsin Beacon’s dialogue argued that a ‘peaceable & permanent’commonwealth should follow the example of the Spartans, in notadmitting foreigners, and that of the Venetians, in fortifying a naturallydefensible site; however, ‘such as shall ayme at honour and glory’, musttake the course of Rome, and naturalise foreigners, arm the people, andmake alliances. Yet neither form of commonwealth ‘may be founde sohappy and permanent, but at the last . . . they fall with their owne weightand poyse to the ground’, the difference being that the state aiming athonour (or, in Machiavelli’s terms, the commonwealth for expansion)‘leaveth the image of true glory, as a lively picture, to invest a perpetuallmemory of a worthy and excellent Institution’. In these terms, to be acommonwealth 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, andhence that it might be possible for a commonwealth to combine the

Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (Harmondsworth, ), ; onMachiavelli’s debt to Polybius see especially Gennaro Sasso, ‘Polibio e Machiavelli: costituzione,potenza, conquista’, in Sasso, Studi su Machiavelli (Naples, ), –.


liberty of a free state with territorial expansion. As one character in SolonHis Follie asked, ‘may not one selfesame common-weale, ayme at the oneand the other?’ ‘No, verily’, came the reply in the form of a paraphraseof Discorsi, . : a commonwealth for preservation was like a tree with aslender root – it could not stay upright for long if it extended itself too faror too fast. There could be no escape from the compulsions of Machia-velli’s categories. The dilemma remained: which form of state should beimitated, and hence in the end which form of destruction or decline toface?

The challenge of maintaining liberty while pursuing empire re-turned prominently in republican thought after . Sallust andMachiavelli in particular provided republicans with the means tounderstand the military successes of the Rump in Britain, Ireland andEurope, as well as with a series of warnings regarding the consequencesof territorial expansion for hard-won republican liberty. The republi-can moment of – – from the declaration of the Commonwealthto Cromwell’s forcible dissolution of the Long Parliament – inspired avariety of Englishmen to apply the lessons learnt from the classicalrepublics to their own political situation. John Lilburne, in exile, firstread Machiavelli, Livy and Plutarch in these years. In the sameperiod Marchamont Nedham’s The Case of the Commonwealth of EnglandStated (), and his editorials for the government organ MercuriusPoliticus in –, applied ancient history to modern politics, anddrew upon a wide range of classical and contemporary sources tocelebrate the successes of the Rump and to point the way forward forrepublican regeneration. During these years, John Milton acted aslicenser of Mercurius Politicus during the period when most of Nedham’srepublican editorials were published, and he seems to have begunreading Machiavelli’s Discorsi seriously in November , just as thefirst 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 Solutionto the Irish Problem: Richard Beacon’s Solon His Follie ()’, in Edward Chaney and PeterMack (eds.), England and the Continental Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J. B. Trapp (Woodbridge,), –; Markku Peltonen, ‘Classical Republicanism in Tudor England: The Case ofRichard Beacon’s Solon His Follie’, History of Political Thought, (), –; and specificallyon his debt to Discorsi, . , Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English PoliticalThought, – (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 PrivateStudies’, Publications of the Modern Languages Association of America, (), –; Maurice Kelley,‘Milton and Machiavelli’s Discorsi’, Studies in Bibliography, (–), –.

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example to the analysis of the English constitution, as Herman Myliusreported in January .

The relevance of Sallust’s analysis was not lost on either Milton orNedham. In the immediate aftermath of the regicide, they had highhopes of the potential for liberty to foster greatness, and both citedSallust to affirm this belief. In , on the title-page of Eikonoklastes,Milton displayed Sallust’s opinion that the monarchy had declined intotyranny, and hence that good men became suspect and their virtue adanger (Bellum Catilinæ, . , . –), a passage to which he had alsoalluded at the opening of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates a few monthsearlier. The following year, Nedham continued Sallust’s narrative onthe title-page of The Case of the Commonwealth of England Stated () withthe epigraph, ‘Incredibile est memoratu, quantum adepta libertate, inbrevi Romana civitas creverit’ (Bellum Catilinæ, . ), a verdict he repeat-ed elsewhere in The Case. Sallust’s words clearly informed Nedham’smost ringing endorsement of the Rump’s foreign policy in January :just as the loss of liberty debilitates a people morally, he told the readersof Mercurius Politicus, ‘so on the other side, the People ever grow mag-nanimous & gallant upon a recovery; witness at present the valiantSwisses, 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 evaporatedduring the course of the Cromwellian Protectorate. Both Nedham andMilton came to believe that the story of moral decline, from freedomwith greatness to servitude wrought by ambition, narrated by Sallustand warned against by Machiavelli, had – perhaps inevitably – run itscourse in Britain between and . The evidence for Nedham’sdisillusionment comes from the version of his republican editorialspublished as The Excellencie of a Free State in . When first published inMercurius Politicus in –, these articles presented a set of warnings tothe infant republic along with his celebrations of its fortitude. Liberty forthe 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 andQuentin Skinner (eds.), Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge, ), –.

Marchamont Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth of England Stated (London, ), . Mercurius Politicus, ( January ), .


kingship had been thoroughly uprooted; it could only be maintained ifthe exercise of power could be limited by rotation of civil and militaryoffice-holders. The reward for liberty and free assemblies would bepower abroad and the extension of the empire. Yet, like Machiavelli andSallust, Nedham warned that Rome’s expansion had brought in luxury,a standing army, and the extension of military commands. A successionof tyrants ensued. Liberty was lost, and with liberty, the Empire itself.

When reprinted in , these warnings looked like predictions, andthey became a stick with which to beat the Protector.

Sallust’s awed account of the achievements of Rome’s new-wonliberty had been celebratory when cited inThe 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 amendedin The Excellencie of a Free State, became a lament for the republicanopportunity which had been squandered by the Protector: ‘the Peopleever grow magnanimous & gallant upon a recovery [of freedom];witness at present the valiant Swisses, the Hollanders and not long sinceour own Nation when declared a Free-State, and a Re-establishment ofour 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 failureto secure the free-state in The Readie and Easie Way, as he put theachievement of republican grandezza firmly in the English past: ‘Norwere our actions less both at home and abroad then might become thehopes of a glorious rising Commonwealth; nor were the expressionsboth of the Army and of the People . . . other than such as testifi’d a spiritin this nation no less noble and well fitted to the liberty of a Comon-wealth, then in the ancient Greeks or Romans’. Like Nedham, hethought that the Dutch had not squandered their chance to be ‘a potentand flourishing Republick’, though England had conspicuously failed tobecome ‘another Rome in the west’.

Mercurius Politicus, ( November ), ; ( October ), ; ( December ), (compareMercurius 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 passagefrom Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth, ), (my emphases).

Milton, Complete Prose Works, , ; in the second edition of The Readie and Easie Way, ‘ouractions’ became ‘their actions’: Milton, Complete Prose Works, , .

Liberty and empire

Milton and Nedham’s jaundiced realisation that the British republichad failed in its promise to secure liberty sprang from their commondisillusionment 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 thedictator, Sulla, within the revival of the Sallustian and Machiavelliannarrative. Other opponents of the Protector thought him as bad as, oreven worse than, Sulla, a military dictator whose office had beenmade permanent, and had thereby paved the way for the return ofmonarchy. Milton seems to have shared this assessment. On thetitle-page of the second edition of The Readie and Easie Way, in April, he quoted Juvenal: ‘et nos/consilium dedimus Syllae, demuspopulo nunc’ (‘we, too, gave advice to Sulla; now we give it to thepeople’). Milton had offered counsel to the Protector in the quitepractical sense that he had been one of his Latin Secretaries, but alsoin 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 ofthe Commonwealth had fallen and, by , the Sallustian declinehad clearly been repeated.

The failure of Cromwell’s so-called Western Design against theSpanish Caribbean in – was a crucial moment in the decline ofrepublican faith in the Protectorate, just as it seems to have acceleratedthe Protector’s own loss of self-confidence. To many former adherentsof the ‘Good Old Cause’, it illustrated the declension predicted by Sallustand Machiavelli whenever any commonwealth for preservation tried tobecome a commonwealth for expansion. Henry Vane saw the Spanishvictory as a punishment for national sin brought in by the corruptedagent, Cromwell. Milton conspicuously failed to herald the foreignpolicy 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 OrdahlKupperman, ‘Errand to the Indies: Puritan Colonization from Providence Island throughthe 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, ), , –, –, –.


Andrew Marvell or Edmund Waller, for example. Nedham repub-lished the editorials from Mercurius Politicus, in which he lamented thewaste of the Rump’s achievements, to coincide with the Second Protec-toral Parliament in , where Cromwell attempted to justify hisproceedings against Spain. That Parliament also provided the opportun-ity for James Harrington to publish The Commonwealth of Oceana, anothermajor republican work critical of the Protectorate. The challenge ofcombining liberty and empire was central to the argument of theOceana.Harrington’s solution to the dilemma implicitly criticised the Protectorfor his failure to provide the constitutional settlement which would haveguaranteed 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 theBritish republic faced under the Protectorate. Harrington paraphrasedthe whole of Machiavelli’s discussion from Discorsi, . , on the groundsthat ‘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 onbegging’. The Oceana constituted an attempt to break free from com-pulsions of the Machiavellian categories that afflicted both static andexpansive republics by proposing measures that could maintain theinternal stability of an externally expanding commonwealth. Harring-ton proposed measures to prevent the kind of strife between the plebsand the nobility that had destroyed Roman liberty, thereby makingOceana ‘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 ofunequal leagues, in which the metropolitan state retained the leader-ship, rather than the subordination of conquered territory (like theAthenians or the Spartans) or confederation on the Tuscan model. To‘take the course of Rome’ would ensure the maintenance of libertyand the achievement of grandezza; Oceana might then became whatHarrington (contra Machiavelli) thought Rome to have been, ‘acommonwealth . . . both for increase and preservation’, as he put it inThe 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 inElsie Duncan-Jones, ‘Marvell, R. F. and the Authorship of ‘‘Blake’s Victory’’’, in Peter Beal andJeremy Griffiths (eds.), English Manuscript Studies, (London, ), –.

Harrington, Oceana, in Political Works, ed. Pocock, –. Harrington, Oceana, in Political Works, ed. Pocock, , .

Liberty and empire

Harrington’s Oceana could be a commonwealth both for increaseand preservation because it was theoretically and practically distinctfrom the territorial empires of the past. By adopting a policy of unequalleagues, Oceana could avert the dangers of military conquest. Thosedangers would be even easier to avoid because Oceana would primarilybe a maritime republic, as its name suggested. Yet, as Machiavelli hadrecalled, 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 seagiveth law unto the growth of Venice, but the growth of Oceana givethlaw unto the sea’. Moreover, Oceana would pursue a tutelary missionwhose purpose had been carefully defined by Cicero in De Officiis todistinguish it from a conquering and martial empire:

This is a commonwealth of the fabric that hath an open ear, and a publicconcernment. She is not made for herself only, but given as a magistrate of Godunto mankind, for the vindication of common right and the law of nature.Wherefore saith Cicero of the . . . Romans, Nos magis patronatum orbis terrarrumsuscepimus quam imperium, we have rather undertaken the patronage than theempire of the world.

Following Cicero further, Harrington noted that the Romans plantedcolonies, but also preserved the liberties of the territories they colonised;thus Rome, ‘in confirming of liberty, . . . propagated her empire’. ThisCiceronian reconciliation of libertas and imperium could be the model forany well-ordered republic to expand without endangering the liberty ofits own citizens, and would therefore be inspiration enough ‘to take thecourse of Rome’.

Harrington’s argument that power followed property – and hencethat imperium sprang from dominium – was more immediately successfulthan his attempted solution to the dilemma of protecting libertas whilealso extending imperium. His critics in the last years of the Protectorateironically compared Harrington’s republican utopia to Jamaica – thesole prize left from Cromwell’s Western Design – as the greatest whiteelephants of the British republic. One squib against the HarringtonianRota Club ordered ‘ThatHarrington’s Aphorisms and other political slipsbe recommended to the English Plantation in Jamaica, to try how they

Harrington,Oceana, in Political Works, ed. Pocock, , (quoting Cicero, De Officiis, . , withpatronatum substituted for Cicero’s patrocinium), –.

‘. . . there is no maxim more infallible and holding in any science, than this in politics: that empireis founded in property’: Henry Neville, Plato Redivivus (c. ), in Two English Republican Tracts, ed.Caroline Robbins (Cambridge, ), .


will agree with that Apocryphal Purchase’; Samuel Butler thought thatHarrington himself should be sent to Jamaica, to see whether Oceanacould be planted there. Such contemporary criticism makes it all themore 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 gavelaws to the sea and exported liberty across the globe. For example, J. A.Froude entitled his federalist travel-narrative Oceana; or England and HerColonies () in homage to Harrington’s supposed vision of the BritishEmpire as maritime and free. Historians have since rarely questionedFroude’s assessment of Oceana’s contribution to British imperial ideol-ogy, nor doubted that Harrington was ‘an important determinant in theintellectual pedigree of that system of colonies, dominions, and‘‘leagues’’ by which Britain came in time in truth to give ‘‘law unto theSea’’’, ‘a rip-roaring England-firster’, and ‘a prophet of the rule of thepropertied and of the British Empire’ after . Yet only in retrospectdid Harrington’s work become so fundamental to the Empire’s ideologi-cal origins. His work began as part of the republican critique of theProtectorate’s failure to safeguard liberty while expanding its imperium,and was consigned to oblivion by Harrington’s critics. Only when readout 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 hissuccessors abandoned the typology of expanding and non-expandingcommonwealths, ignored Machiavelli’s own account of the methodsand results of expansion, or ceased their own search for the means toreconcile liberty and empire. After the Restoration, Algernon Sidneyshared the republican analysis of the declension of the Commonwealth.He rehabilitated Machiavelli’s typology during the mid-s in hisCourt Maxims (c. –). Sidney’s spokesman for republicanism in thedialogue 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, ), ; [SamuelButler,] The Acts and Monuments of Our Late Parliament (London, ), ; see also Democritus TurnedStatesman (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 CambridgeHistory of Political Thought – (Cambridge, ), –.

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vulnerable to Europe’s aspiring universal monarch, Louis XIV. In sucha condition, any nation that could not aspire to hegemony must resist itat all costs, for ‘[f ]reedom is the greatest advantage next to dominion’.The spokesman for the court argues that it is not dominion alone thatshould be sought but rather that ‘enlargement of dominion and increaseof riches and power by conquest’ benefit a nation, to which thecommonwealthman makes the Machiavellian reply that only a nationconstituted for enlargement can profit, even temporarily, from expan-sion; moreover, ‘if government be constituted for other ends, that in asociety we may live free, happy and safe’, conquest would only be anadvantage if it promoted those quite precise goals. Conquests destroyedSparta and put an end to its ‘liberty and glory’; Venice and the SwissConfederation would be vulnerable if they expanded; even the SpanishMonarchy had been ‘weakened, dispeopled, and ruined by its ownconquests’. Only conquests that did not tend to corrupt the manners of anation could be justified. Once again, Rome was the great historicalexample. In the ‘fullness of liberty’, the law safeguarded the freedom ofindividuals, since ‘[t]he Roman virtue was the effect of their good lawsand 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 andavarice, raising some citizens above the power of the law. Then did thatvictorious people turn its conquering hand into its own bowels, and fellby its own sword.’

Sidney’s resuscitation of Machiavelli’s warnings about the moraldangers of expansion without adequate constitutional precautions wasintended less to school the readers of his manuscript in the best methodsto acquire a territorial empire, let alone a universal monarchy, than toaffirm the necessity of upholding fragile liberty in a world dominated byreason of state politics. When Sidney returned to the problems of libertyand empire in theDiscourses Concerning Government (–), he refused toadjudicate between states like Sparta that found ‘felicity rather in thefullness and stability of liberty, integrity, virtue and the enjoyment oftheir own than in riches, power, and dominion over others’ like Rome.This could be illustrated by the history of the commonwealths of Italythat fought so valiantly against Rome before they were absorbed intothe Republic: ‘[t]he power and virtue of the Italians grew up, decayedand 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, ), , , –, –.


the Romans, either as associates or subjects, they made the greateststrength that ever was in the world’. Sidney also repeated the Sallustianmaxim that the institution of republican liberty in England would leadto the same outburst of courage and industry that the ancient republicshad experienced on the recovery of their liberty: ‘Men would have thesame love to the publick as the Spartans and the Romans had, if therewas the same reason for it’ – witness the English Commonwealth in theearly s, the Swiss Confederation, and the Dutch Republic.

Despite his admiration for classical republics, Sidney accepted one ofthe major tenets of modern reason of state, that trade provided thesinews of war: ‘the best judges of these matters have always given thepreference to those constitutions that principally intend war, and makeuse of trade as assisting to that end’, since ‘those only can be safe who arestrong’. 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 majorreason of state. The political economists of the s agreed thatEuropean states, whether republics or monarchies, could no longerafford to choose whether they would be self-sufficient or expansive, norwhether they should be trading or war-making commonwealths. Theywere all now interdependent, so that the Spartan option of economicautarchy 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 challengedsome of the most cherished tenets of the republican tradition, but whichmight yet allow the reconciliation of liberty and empire. Charles Dav-enant, for one, expressed the moralistic concern that commerce wouldbring in luxury, and luxury, debility, but recognised that the commer-cial conditions of contemporary Europe rendered trade a ‘necessaryevil’ for every state. Commerce would now be the only guarantee ofeither stability or greatness, and since a nation could no longer be aSparta, it should take the course of Venice (and other commercialrepublics) in order to reach the eminence of Rome – but with one majorproviso, that it should not lead to the military expansion that had causedthe 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, .

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the nation’s safety, it ought to be no more encouraged here than it wasin Sparta: And it can never tend to make us safe, unless it be so managedas to make us encrease in shipping and in the breed of seamen’. Anempire of the seas could provide grandezza without the need for largearmies, extended military commands, or the takeover of civilian govern-ment by overmighty generals. Instead, maritime empire could enrichthe 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 andthe Dutch Republic had been so economically vibrant in the early-modern period strengthened the theoretical connection between libertyand commerce. For instance, Henry Parker in his Of a Free Trade ()had attributed that connection to the influence merchants had over theadministration in ‘popular states’, while Davenant later argued, with acrucial revision of Sallust’s analysis of the origins of greatness in liberty,that ‘industry has its first foundation in liberty’, and that the absolutemonarchies of contemporary Europe would fail in achieving commer-cial greatness just as their predecessors in ancient times had failed togain the glory of grandezza: ‘They who are either slaves, or who believetheir freedoms precarious, can neither succeed in trade nor meliorate acountry’; the territorial monarchies of Europe, for all their designs onuniversal monarchy, would inevitably fail because their hegemonicpower would lead to institutional absolutism and hence economicdecay: ‘all these great monarchies degenerate into tyranny, with whichtrade is incompatible’. Empire could only be compatible with liberty ifit were redefined as maritime and commercial, rather than territorialand military. As George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, had argued in thelate s, ‘Our Scituation hath made Greatnesse abroad by landConquests unnaturall things to us’, as the collapse of the cross-channelAngevin monarchy in the fifteenth century had shown. ‘[T]he reason-able enjoyments of a free people’, such as the English, had to bedistinguished from ‘one by which Empire is to bee extended at such anunnaturall price’. The only natural course for a state like England to Charles Davenant, An Essay upon the Ways andMeans of Supplying theWar () and An Essay upon theProbable Methods of Making the People Gainers in the Balance of Trade (), in The Political andCommercial Works of Charles Davenant LL.D., ed. Charles Whitworth, vols. (London, ), , , ,. On Davenant see especially Istvan Hont, ‘Free Trade and the Economic Limits to NationalPolitics: Neo-Machiavellian Political Economy Reconsidered’, in John Dunn (ed.), The EconomicLimits 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, , , , .


take would be one which sprang from its geographical situation andhistorical 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 ofLiberty’. On this analysis, not only would empire be at last reconciledwith 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 ofcommercial grandezza. This syllogism demanded the redefinition ofempire. As Nicholas Barbon put it in , ‘Trade may be Assistant tothe Inlarging of Empire; and if an Universal Empire, or Dominion ofvery Large Extent, can again be raised in the World, It seems moreprobable to be done by the help ofTrade; By the Increase of Ships at Sea,than by Arms at Land’. Any state aspiring to universal empire, whetherbenign or malign, should therefore look to the sea for its dominion, ‘Forthose Things that Obstruct the Growth of Empire at Land, do ratherPromote its Growth at Sea’: the sea has enough room for a greatpopulation, fortifications cannot hinder shipping, the diffusion of knowl-edge has ‘added an Unlimited Compass to the Naval Power’ and Gothicliberty ‘best argues with such an Empire’. Though Barbon gave theDutch their due for their seaborne challenge to Spanish and Frenchattempts ‘to Raise an Universal Empire upon the Land’, he affirmedthat England was the true seat of the empire of the sea. As an island, itneeded no military force for its defence; it was well supplied withharbours; and the people were naturally courageous. ‘The Monarchy isboth fitted for Trade and Empire.’ England could thus ‘extend itsDominion over all the Great Ocean: An Empire not less glorious, and ofa much larger Extent, than either Alexander’s or Caesar’s’.

The argument that trade depended upon liberty, and that libertycould therefore be the foundation of empire, became especially promi-nent in the so-called Standing Army debate that arose after the Treatyof Ryswick in . Though a large standing army had proved its worthas a check to the expansionist ambitions of that aspiring universalmonarch, Louis XIV, the nub of the debate was what should be donewith the victorious army in peacetime. Those who favoured its disband-ment, now that its contingent purpose had been served, juxtaposed theliberty of the citizen militia to the potential tyranny and slavery of astanding 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 TheWorks of George Savile Marquis of Halifax, ed. Mark N. Brown, vols. (Oxford, ), , , .

N[icholas] B[arbon], A Discourse of Trade (London, ), –, , , .

Liberty and empire

Trenchard and Walter Moyle, in the germinal pamphlet of the debate,the example of Rome presented a dire warning to Britain. Instead of astanding army, England should ‘give Laws to the Universe’ with herhardy 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 andNaval Power the Offspring of Civil Liberty only, and cannot subsistwithout it’. Trenchard agreed with Davenant that the whole commer-cial infrastructure of an absolute monarchy was precarious because itwas not protected from the depredations of the monarch by laws thatsecured property, and he also argued that the luxurious demands of thecourt necessarily distorted the productive capacity of the nation. How-ever, in a commonwealth where law did safeguard liberty, propertywould be secure, republican moderation would drive consumption, andthe demands of trade would ensure that the nation’s military needs wereupheld 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 guaranteesuccess in the competition for commercial grandezza, because ‘despotickmonarchs, though infinitely powerful at land, yet could never rivalNeptune, 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 withthe liberty of its government, distinguished territorial conquest from theunlimited potential of empire upon the sea, and thus laid the founda-tions for a blue-water policy designed to enrich England while defeatinguniversal monarchy in Europe. A typology thereby emerged whichwould hold sway for at least half a century. The Bourbon monarchieswere ambitious for universal monarchy, their designs lay on the conti-nent of Europe, their monarchies were absolute, and hence they couldnot flourish as commercial powers. England (and, after , GreatBritain) was a free government, which encouraged rather than depress-ed trade, and its destiny lay in the empire of the sea rather than interritorial conquest, which was a danger to liberty itself, as well as adiversion from the nation’s true commercial interests. Such arguments

[John Trenchard with Walter Moyle,] An Argument, Shewing that a Standing Army is Inconsistent with aFree 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, andOther Important Subjects, ed. Ronald Hamowy, vols. (Indianapolis, ), , , –, .


could, however, cut in two directions when applied to the competitiverelations among the Three Kingdoms themselves. They were adoptedby the Scottish republican, Andrew Fletcher, in his contribution to thedebate on the relative merits of militias and a standing army in ,when he counselled his countrymen: ‘The Sea is the only empire whichcan naturally belong to us. Conquest is not our interest’. This in turnprovided inspiration for the Scots to pursue their own commercialreason of state by attempting to create a maritime, commercial empirecentred on the isthmus of Darien. Yet the pursuit of independentcommerce by Scotland inevitably collided with the imperatives of Eng-lish trade. Three years later, at the beginning of the War of the SpanishSuccession, Fletcher warned the Scots of the dangers of English (andDutch) appeals to these same arguments: ‘Might they not for everestablish in themselves the empire of the sea, with an entire monopoly ofTrade?’ The empire of the seas could therefore provide a threat toliberty 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 libertyand empire remained incompletely resolved, even in an era of commer-cial reason of state and maritime expansion. The possibility that empirenow consisted of trade, and the wealth it generated, seemed to offer thechance for liberty to remain intact, as ships, rather than armies, andsailors, not soldiers, safeguarded the empire of the seas. Such a maritimeregime seemed naturally fitted to the situation of England – perhapseven of Britain – and would ensure that the corruptions and debilitieswhich had beset classical and modern republics (as they threatened theirstability by attempting expansion) need no longer destroy the liberty ofits citizens. Yet, because commercial compulsions were competitiverather than integrative, the ideological contribution of this argumentnecessarily remained limited until well after the British union of . Itcould only be applied to the British monarchy as a whole once thatmonarchy was conceived of as possessing a single set of commercialinterests, and could only be extended to the wider anglophone Atlanticworld when it, too, was perceived as possessing a similar community ofinterests. Andrew Fletcher, A Discourse of Government With Relation to Militia’s (Edinburgh, ), in AndrewFletcher: Political Works, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge, ), .

[Andrew Fletcher,] A Speech Upon the State of the Nation; In April (), in Political Works, ed.Robertson, .

Liberty and 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 increasinglyclear that the dilemma classically formulated by Sallust and pointedlyrevived by Machiavelli was coming under challenge as a prescription formodern Europe and its overseas possessions. The growth of commercemarked a novel epoch in human affairs, in which the Roman andneo-Roman apprehension that liberty might be threatened by empirewas less relevant, and less revealing, because the very definition of‘empire’ itself was changing. The warnings of classical and modernrepublicans, in this regard at least, might be of only limited guidance tounderstanding contemporary politics. As Nicholas Barbon argued in,

Livy, and those Antient Writers . . . have been very exact in describing theseveral forms of Military Discipline, but take no Notice of Trade; andMachiavel aModern Writer, and the best, though he lived in a Government, where theFamily of Medicis had advanced themselves to the Sovereignty by their Riches,acquired by Merchandizing, doth not mention Trade, as any way interested inthe 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 anyancient writer on politics, who has made mention of it. Even the have kept a profound silence with regard to it, though it hasnow engaged the chief attention, as well of ministers of state, as ofspeculative 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. Ar–v. David Hume, ‘Of Liberty and Despotism’ (), in Hume, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, ed.

Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, ), –.

Machiavelli, whose supposed silence on the matter of commerce Humeremarked upon in the late s: ‘There is not a word of Trade in allMatchiavell, which is strange considering that Florence rose only byTrade’. This note is found among Hume’s early memoranda, sand-wiched between quotations from Cicero’s De Officiis and Sir JosiahChild’s A New Discourse of Trade (), as if Hume were passing intellec-tually from an ancient world of republican mores to the more moderncompulsions of commercial society. Such a transition had been underway 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, becausenow more intellectually plausible, to argue that liberty and empiremight be reconciled, both theoretically and historically, within thediscourse of political economy.

Political economy as a distinct discipline, with a canon of classic textsand a set of definite problems, was the child of the nineteenth century;however, it had a longer heritage as a theoretical language that definedthe polity itself in terms of its fiscal, financial and commercial capacitiesrather than exclusively in relation to its constitution, the civic personal-ity of its citizens or its teleology. Karl Marx agreed with Hume that itsorigins could be found in the seventeenth century, and attributed itspaternity to Sir William Petty, and hence, by extension, to the emerg-ent disciplines of statistics and ‘political arithmetic’. However, Hume’sdescription of late seventeenth-century economic discourse was moreidiomatic to the period than Marx’s. The fundamental principle of lateseventeenth-century political economy was the recognition that com-merce was now, in Hume’s words, ‘an affair of state’ for every Europeanpolity. 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 Niccolo Machiavelli, ThePrince, 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 TercentenaryInterpretation’, History of Political Economy, (), . Terence Hutchison, Before Adam Smith:The Emergence of Political Economy, – (Oxford, ), , is sceptical of Marx’s attribution ofpaternity to Petty; Neal Wood, Foundations of Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Views on State andSociety (Berkeley, ), proposes instead mid-sixteenth-century English parentage.

Istvan Hont, ‘Free Trade and the Economic Limits to National Politics: Neo-MachiavellianPolitical Economy Reconsidered’, in John Dunn (ed.), The Economic Limits to Modern Politics(Cambridge, ), –.


it had become ‘a principal Piece of State-policy to know how to encreasetheir own and lessen their neighbours Trade . . . espousing the Interest ofTrade as the Darling of State’. ‘Is there anything in the World, thatshould be thought a Matter of State more than Trade, especially in anIsland . . .?’, asked Charles Davenant in . ‘It’s now beyond allControversie’, affirmed a Scottish commentator in the same year, ‘thatit is the Interest of all Nations to increase their Trade; the Increase ofwhich begetteth Wealth, and Riches, which now in the time of Warrdoth more contribute to the Preservation of a Nation, then the multi-tude and the valour of it’s Men’. With this central maxim, politicaleconomy provided the arguments with which the competing interests ofEngland, Scotland and Ireland could be promoted, as well as a broaderframework within which economic competition and integration couldbe understood.

Political economy was therefore not merely a technical discipline, butprovided the means to describe and explain the relationships among theThree Kingdoms, in the context of the wider Atlantic economy. Itwas both intellectually integrative and ideologically disintegrative: aseconomics linked the interests of the Three Kingdoms and the Atlanticworld, so politics sharpened the competition between those interests,especially in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution. This languageof interest and policy presented a new means to understand therelations among the Three Kingdoms, and to define their connectionswith the wider Atlantic world. Economic interests defined states andnations as well as empires, but they defined them competitively. AsJ. H. Elliott has noted, empire – in the modern sense of commerce,supported by independent fleets and plantations – could provide thealternative to subordination within a composite monarchy for akingdom like Scotland, as it had earlier for Portugal or the UnitedProvinces. In such circumstances, differing definitions of empire col-lided, and conceptual, as well as political, solutions had to be found fornovel dilemmas.

The triangular relations between England, Ireland and Scotlandprovided the shifting contexts for the economic redefinition of empire inthe decades following the Restoration. Ireland’s ambiguous status inEnglish 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. ), .


but economically a colonial dependency, generated a series of debateson the status of the Irish commerce, the powers of the Irish Parliamentand Ireland’s place in the Atlantic economy in which discussions ofstatehood and nationality were cast in the language of colony andempire. These discussions paralleled and at times intersected with thosearound Anglo-Scottish relations, especially in the aftermath of theGlorious Revolution. In this context, there was no doubt on either sidethat Scotland was an ancient kingdom and that its Parliament wassovereign; the precise nature of its relation to England was moredebatable, as feudal conceptions of dependency (reminiscent of thoseappealed to in the s) in the name of the English imperial crown weredeployed against economic arguments for independence, based on theimperium of the Scottish Parliament and the advantages of a separatecommercial empire for the Scots. These interlocking argumentsreached a climax early in the reign of Queen Anne during the debate onAnglo-Scottish Union. By the resulting Treaty of Union, Englandjoined Scotland in the United Kingdom of Great Britain with acommon legislature, a single crown and access to the commerce of anempire now British rather than just English. However, neither Irelandnor the American colonies were offered admission to the Union, andthey remained dependencies of a British state that stood at the heart of atransatlantic composite monarchy of unequal communities defined bythe Navigation Acts and, increasingly, by mercantilist legislation fromthe British Parliament. The Union of sharply distinguished a rangeof different available conceptions of empire, from the incorporatingunion of Great Britain, through the semi-colonial dependency of Ire-land to the colonial semi-autonomy enjoyed by the American andCaribbean colonies. It thus incorporated a yet sharper form of disunitywithin the British Empire than had existed before, even as it alsoenshrined diversity between the Churches and legal systems of Englandand Scotland.

Before the British Union of , the Navigation Acts had regulatedpolitical-economic relations between the Three Kingdoms as they hadalso formally defined the limits of the English commercial empire.Under the terms of the Acts, Scotland and Ireland had been treateddifferently, according to English assessments of their respective threatsto 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, (), –.


mercantile system defined by the Acts because it was held to be apotential rival to English commerce; Ireland, meanwhile, had beenincluded within the ambit of the Acts, as a docile dependency ofEngland, rather than a commercial competitor. This double standardwas evident to contemporaries. ‘[A]re we not all the Subjects of oneKing, and Members of the same Commonwealth?’ Richard Lawrenceasked rhetorically. ‘We may be the first’, he answered, ‘and not thesecond, though the Scots are Subjects to the same King’. All might besubjects within the Stuart composite monarchy, but that would notrender them equal citizens of the same commonwealth, let alone part-ners within a comprehensively British empire: commercial reasons ofstate dictated otherwise. In terms of political economy, the variouscommunities of Britain and Ireland were considered as economicallyand constitutionally distinct. The main question for English protection-ists was whether Ireland or Scotland could command an independentcommerce; for their Irish and Scottish counterparts, the question wasinstead 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 haveeconomic union without institutional – meaning, above all, parliamen-tary – union. This would, in due course, become a central question inrelations between the American colonies and Great Britain in themid-eighteenth century.

The dictates of economic reason of state ensured that the EnglishParliament judged Ireland’s commercial expansion to be a threat toEngland’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 havefuelled the economy. Ireland lacked banks and a mint, and hence bothcash and credit; the consequently high rates of interest stifled commer-cial enterprise. Though the Irish economy was expanding in the laterseventeenth century, these factors nonetheless limited the rate of itsgrowth and the nature of change. Recent scholarship has tended todownplay 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 andSocial History, (Dublin, ), –.


ance, at least in so far as that legislation is seen as the expression of adetermined state policy of mercantilist regulation in favour of Eng-land. Ireland was subject to discriminatory English legislationthroughout the latter half of the seventeenth century, however imper-fectly applied. It had been specifically included within the ambit of theNavigation Acts, but the inadequate enforcement of the StapleAct (which required that all enumerated articles be landed in Englandbefore re-export to Ireland) led in turn to the Staple Act, whicheffectively ended the direct legal flow of sugar and tobacco to Ireland.That Act lapsed in and was not restored until , when Englishtrading interests demanded that Ireland be treated not simply as acolonial dependency of the English economy but rather as a potentialcompetitor with England, especially in the Atlantic staple trade to thesugar islands of the Caribbean.

It was in this context that Sir William Petty conceived his Hobbesiansolution to the problem of competing sovereignties as a northernEuropean mare clausum centred on England. This maritime amalgama-tion of imperium and dominium was not his only attempt to reconceive therelations between England and Ireland in these years. His most drasticanswer to the dilemma of the unequal relationship between the twokingdoms came in his last major work, the ‘Treatise of Ireland’ (), inwhich he proposed the transplantation of the majority of the Irishpopulation into England. This would have left some , people inIreland to administer the country as a cattle-ranching dependency ofEngland. It would also deny Ireland the institutional autonomy it hadfitfully claimed through its own Parliament: ‘Whereas there are Disputesconcerning the Superiority of Parliament; now there will need noParliament in Ireland to make Laws among the Cow-Herds and Dairy-Women’. Petty’s proposal cut across the religious and ethnic divisions ofcontemporary Ireland by treating its inhabitants solely according to theireconomic relations with the Crown, their tenants and landlords,whether as employers or employees. His briefer version of the plan, ‘AProbleme’ (), 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 ExportProhibition 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 EconomicWritings of SirWilliam Petty, ed. Charles Henry Hull, vols. (Cambridge, ), , , .


a comprehensively British vision of population, power and profit, such asthe parallel proposal to depopulate the Scottish Highlands and leavethem to the care of , herdsmen, to the benefit of lowland Scotlandand England. Nevertheless, both redactions concluded with similarwarnings for the English empire as a whole – that it would not be inEngland’s interests to contemplate any further territorial expansion, andthat the substitute for a territorial empire (with all of the military, andhence fiscal, commitments that it raised) should be ‘a reallMare 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 empirevariously emphasised political and economic factors. For example, hespeculatively proposed a ‘grand House of Peers’ for a federal Parliamentincluding members from England, Ireland, Scotland and ‘ more outof ye rest of his Matys Dominions in Asia, Affrica & America, all men outof the best Estates within yr respective Provinces’. This was not intendedas a substitute for the various legislatures within the Three Kingdoms,or, indeed, for the colonial assemblies, ‘but doth equally superintendthem all’. He also envisaged a colonial council, with representation fromIreland, Scotland, the American colonies, Asia and Africa, to advise theEnglish Parliament. This would not have had the powers of his ‘Houseof Peers’, but, like that grander constitutional conception, it would haveassumed the equal dependence of the two British kingdoms and thevarious English overseas possessions upon the English Parliament. Pettydesigned colonial settlements which could readily be planted in eitherIreland or America, and debated with himself ‘Whether It bee better totransplant out of England into Ireland or America’? In the context of thes, his plans were visionary, but his speculations remained private.However, they did indicate, albeit precociously, the possibilities forreconsidering the relations between the Three Kingdoms and theAmerican colonies. In a stray note, Petty located the four parts of ‘TheKing of Englands Empire’ in ‘His European Islands’, the Americanislands and mainland colonies, and the Asian and East Indian trades.Such a comprehensive vision of empire – as territorial, colonial andcommercial – 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 EconomicWritings, ed. Hull, .

Petty, ‘A Probleme’, in Petty Papers, ed. Lansdowne, , ; Petty, ‘A Treatise of Ireland’, inEconomic Writings, ed. Hull, .


encompassed all of these elements within the regal imperium of theEnglish (not even yet a British) Crown.

Petty did not live to see the effects of the Glorious Revolutions on theThree Kingdoms. If he had, the experience might have dampened hisenthusiasm for non-sectarian, rationally-calculated solutions to theproblem of Anglo-Irish political and economic relations. However, hewould not have been surprised to see that the Three Kingdoms did notbenefit equally from the settlements of –. Only in England (and,possibly, some colonies on the American mainland) did the GloriousRevolution represent the victory of law, liberty and localism againstabsolutism, subordination and centralisation, and ‘Ireland did notexperience the Glorious Revolution in the sense in which the term isunderstood in the history of England and Scotland’. The EnglishParliament reaffirmed its claims to supremacy over the Irish Parliament,as it also reimposed and extended the post-Restoration restrictions onIrish 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 reassurethe Convention that the ‘English’ in Ireland knew to whom they owedtheir dutiful obedience at this contested moment, but admissions likethis opened the way more broadly for the assertion of English parlia-mentary supremacy not solely over the settler population in Ireland, butover 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 turnencouraged the potential for collision between the newly self-confidentlegislatures 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 agenerall 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 differencesbetween the Revolutions in England, Scotland and Ireland, and makes his Whiggish account ofthe ‘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 ,

–.


also bring no immediate advantage to Ireland was evident from the briefburst of unionist sentiment aroused by the uncertainties of the JacobiteWar after . The ‘Remarks shewing that it is not to the interest ofEngland that Ireland should remain a separate kingdom’ () arguedin the language of English whiggery that Ireland was the home ofarbitrary government and passive obedience, and that these Jacobitecorruptions could easily be reintroduced into England. The author wasless concerned with the potential benefits of union for Ireland than withthe 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 arbitrarygovernment from Ireland into the ‘English empire’, since it placed theultimate decision-making power in the hands of king and council ratherthan 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 theEnglish 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 newlyabsorbed kingdom ‘might be made more profitable to England than allthe foreign plantations’. The author presented the Irish economy less asa threat to the English, by virtue of its cheaper costs for labour,production and raw materials, than as the backdoor through whichhostile European powers might enter to oppose English economicinterests. This analysis was accordingly cast in a comparative geopoli-tical and historical framework, from the Anglo-Welsh union to thecontemporary Williamite wars in Europe; by specifically comparing theprofits from Ireland with those to be made from the ‘foreign planta-tions’, it intimated that the political-economic context for consideringIreland now encompassed the Atlantic as well as the Three Kingdoms.

The analogy between the economic benefits to be derived from theAmerican and Caribbean colonies and those from Ireland only encour-aged the belief among the English that Ireland should be treated less as akingdom than as a colony. In the aftermath of the Jacobite War, and inthe 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 separatekingdom’ (), in Calendar of State Papers, Domestic: –, ed. W. J. Hardy (London, ),–.


became easier for the English and the Anglo-Irish to claim that Irelandhad been conquered, and hence that it should be held in subjection toEngland. The distinction elaborated by Francis Annesley in , be-tween a ‘Colony for Trade’ and a ‘Colony for Empire’, was a telling onein the case of Ireland. The plantations of the West Indies and the fortsand factories of Africa and the East Indies were ‘Colonies for Trade’ inAnnesley’s terms, and comprised small groups of metropolitans, either‘sent forth to plant Commodities which your native Country does notproduce’ or ‘to negotiate a Trade with the Natives’. Their trade wouldtherefore be reserved to the metropolis, in return for which the colonistswould 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-classicalmodel, and were designed ‘to keep great Countries in subjection, andprevent the charge and hazard of constant Standing Armies’. Theircommerce would be unrestrained by the metropolis as a necessaryreward for the emigrants’ commitment to maintaining the dependencyof the conquered territory and its inhabitants.

Annesley’s two models were each inflected by post-Machiavelliancommercial 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 conquerIreland, your Countrymen, your Brothers, your Sons, your Relations,your Acquaintance’, he informed the English House of Lords: shouldthey then be subject to economic restrictions that had never even beenapplied to the ‘Irish and Popish’ population in Ireland? There wereonly two ways to keep a conquered country in subjection, by arms or bycolonies. The former was always too dangerous and too costly; the latterhad the sanction of history, and had not only been the method adoptedby Rome, but also what ‘our Ancestors did to secure Ireland, and is theeasiest, least chargeable, and least dangerous Method’. Annesley clearlydrew upon neo-classical and Machiavellian analyses of territorial ex-pansion, and warned with a Machiavellian metaphor that Rome’sconquests 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 IrishWoollen Export Prohibition Act of ’, , n. , in attributing it instead to Annesley.

[Annesley,] Some Thoughts on the Bill, , .


Trunk was not large enough to support its branches’; however, hisdeviations from Machiavelli’s prescriptions in theDiscorsiwere as signifi-cant as his additions. Though Machiavelli had indeed recommended inboth the Discorsi and the Principe that conquered territories should beheld by force of arms or, preferably, by colonies, he had also counselledthat the best way for a state to expand and maintain its impero would beby leagues, whether equal or unequal (Discorsi, . ; . ; . ; Principe, ).In the context of Anglo-Irish relations, this would have implied thenecessity of viceregal government or, at best, progress towards ever-closer incorporating union. This latter option entailed a recognitionthat Ireland was a separate but equal kingdom with sovereign institu-tions capable of making alliances; at least, it demanded the admissionthat Ireland and England should be partners in a British compositemonarchy, joined under the same head, albeit unequal in their relations.As the progress of the union debates in Ireland and Scotland wouldshow, this became increasingly implausible as a solution to the problemsof Anglo-Irish relations, even as it became the most realistic option forEngland and Scotland to pursue.

The continuing relevance of Machiavelli’s analysis of provincial gov-ernment, even in the age of political economy, reinforced the tendencyto think of Ireland as a colony, and hence to distinguish it fromScotland. Henry Maxwell’s Essay upon an Union of Ireland with England() argued that there were three ways of ‘maintaining Conquests, orannexed 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. Ifthe metropolitan state failed to change its military commanders, thenovermighty 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 wasclear: either ‘England must suffer Ireland to live in liberty, or else theymust maintain it in subjection to a constant force’, though this wouldcontradict and threaten England’s constitutional principles as a limitedmonarchy. There remained only three options: direct rule by England;strict regulation of Irish commerce to render it entirely dependent onEngland; and incorporating union, on the Welsh model. Maxwellrecommended 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 fromDiscorsi, . ), see The Present State of Ireland, –.


economically and politically beneficial to England: ‘as the wealth ofEngland Centres in London, so must the Wealth of Ireland Centre inEngland’.

William Molyneux, in The Case of Ireland . . . Stated (), had as-similated Ireland to Scotland as equal dominions under the Englishcrown, and therefore denied that Ireland should be conceived of in thesame terms as the plantations of the Americas: ‘Do not the Kings ofEngland bear the Stile of Ireland amongst the rest of their Kingdoms? Is thisAgreeable to the nature of a Colony? Do they use the Title of Kings ofVirginia, 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 didnot mean that it was impossible to imagine that the status of Ireland andof the plantations could be considered as constitutionally, politically oreconomically equal. Even after the Anglo-Scottish Union of , thecontinuing Anglo-Irish disputes over judicial appeals and Wood’sHalfpence exacerbated the tensions generated by the failure to extendto Ireland the union that incorporated Scotland with the Anglo-Welshstate. The Anglo-Scottish Union in fact made it even harder to imagineIreland as a kingdom, and (in the words of Patrick Kelly) ‘the tendencyto think of Ireland as merely the first of England’s colonies was greatlyreinforced’.

Against the English proponents of mercantilist restraint, Francis Annes-ley had argued that the Anglo-Irish had no desire to compete directlywith the English in the European race for commercial pre-eminence:‘They are not contending for Power or great Riches; they neither Tradeto the East Indies, Turkey, or Africa; they have neither Hamborough, Hud-sons-Bay, Green-land, or RussiaCompanies; they have no Fleets or Planta-tions; they ask only the common Benefits of Earth and Air.’ In thecontext of the late s, this was intended not simply as a reassuranceto the English Parliament, and to the economic interests representedtherein, that Ireland presented no threat to English colonial trade; it wasalso intended to drive a wedge between the perceived interests ofIreland 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, .


Scots had begun to pursue their own independent colonial ventures, indirect 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 aneconomic solution to the inequalities enshrined in the Union of theCrowns. The failure to create a Scottish colonial empire changed theterms of the problem and narrowed the political possibilities untilincorporating 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 imposedon the monarchy, and in the overhaul of the institutions of church andstate which accompanied it. In due course, the assertion of Scottishsovereignty set the English and the Scottish Parliaments against eachother, as each promoted the commercial reasons of state of theirrespective kingdoms. The Revolution Settlement in Scotland put theScottish Parliament on the defensive in support of its national interestsin the mid-s, especially when those interests were construed in theprevailing discourse of national wealth and independence. Scottishpolitical economists had come to realise in the wake of the Revolutionthat ‘Colonies for Trade’ offered an escape from the unequal relations ofcomposite monarchy as much as the means by which a province couldbe bound into it. They had learned their lessons from the English andthe Dutch, and argued that the best way to avoid provincial subjectionwithin the Williamite composite monarchy would be for Scotland topursue an independent colonial trade of its own by instituting its ownmercantile fleet and colonies. The Scottish Privy Council had beguninvestigating mercantilist means to promote national prosperity afterthe appointment of James, Duke of York, as lord high admiral ofScotland, and to this end they proposed a carrying trade, supported bythe 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 theresurgence of English Parliamentary mercantilism after . Therevival in of plans for an independent Scottish trade to challengethe English Acts initially made common cause with English merchantswho 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 HistoricalReview, (), –.


Anglo-Scottish trading group proposed setting up a joint-stock com-pany. The East India Company compelled its allies in the EnglishParliament to oppose the move; thus, Scottish investment alone fi-nanced the newly founded Company of Scotland trading to Africa andthe Indies.

The economic hardships of the s, including famine and therestrictive effects of the Navigation Acts, led the Scots into their firstencounter with the literature of economic improvement, and the Com-pany of Scotland’s proposed commercial empire centred on the isthmusof Panama was the most striking fruit of this encounter. The company’sDarien colony was intended to be the alternative to provincial depend-ency within the Williamite composite monarchy, as well as an economicdefence against the aspiring universal monarchs of contemporaryEurope. It was justified as a necessity in a world where the longestpurse and the largest population guaranteed military success, and inwhich the greatest empire to be captured was the empire of the seas. ‘Itis the interest and policy of all Governments to improve the naturallproduct of a Country and to encourage foreign trade . . . the experienceof all Nations makes appear that nothing contributes so effectually tothese ends as foreign plantations’. In an era of standing armies fi-nanced by public debt, money was now the sinews of war, and trade wasthe most reliable means of creating national wealth: ‘For as Trade is aricher and more dureable Mine than any in Mexico or Peru . . . so inproportion to its plenty of Money, will . . . [a nation] flourish at Home,and be terrible Abroad’. The main promoter of the colony, WilliamPaterson, justified the settlement as a free port, sustained by generalnaturalisation, its commercial wealth providing the key to the empire ofthe seas. With the large population such policies would create, Patersonargued, Scotland need have no fear of depopulation, ‘Trade will in-creass Trade, . . . money will begett money’ and, he concluded (echoingboth 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’, ScottishHistorical Review, (), –; Insh, ‘The Founders of the Company of Scotland’, ScottishHistorical Review, (), –.

David Armitage, ‘The Scottish Vision of Empire: Intellectual Origins of the Darien Venture’, inJohn 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 Archivesof Scotland, Dalhousie Muniments, //, ff. r–v; also in NAS, Leven and MelvilleMuniments, //.

C. K., Some Seasonable and Modest Thoughts Partly Occasioned By, and Partly Concerning the ScotsEast-India Company (Edinburgh, ), .


Seas, and the key of the universe with any thing of a Reasonablemanagement will of Course enable its proprietors to give Laws to bothOceans and to become Arbitrators of the Commerciall world, withoutbeing lyable to the fatigues, expences and dangers, or contracting theGuilt and blood of Alexander and Cesar’.

The attempt to settle a commercial emporium at Darien, and with itto bring Scottish commercial independence from England, ended indefeat, disaster and despair. However, the debate surrounding theCompany of Scotland was the most sophisticated and wide rangingcontroversy before the debate on the Union, and marked the beginningsof what would become the Scottish Enlightenment’s peculiarly creativeengagement 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 eighteenthcentury raised the strategic necessity of incorporating union betweenEngland and Scotland and lent the isthmus of Panama a new geopoliti-cal significance. Scottish pamphleteers executed an expedient volte-facein order to show the English that it was now in their interests to supportand participate with the Scots in their isthmian venture. Under theshadow of a potential Bourbon universal monarchy encompassing boththe 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 Englandand Scotland – from the Wars of Independence to the divergence inchurch government – could be smoothed over by the profits of trade, for‘an union of Interest is the likeliest way to procure ane union ofaffections’. Thus bound together by economic interest, and with tradi-tional dissensions tamed, the advantages of union would be clear: ‘weare united under the same crown, and together make the greatestBulwark of the Protestant Religion’.

On similar grounds, Paterson proposed that a free port at Dariencould 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., ), ; [GeorgeRidpath,] The Great Reasons and Interests Consider’d Anent the Spanish Monarchy (n.p., ), –.


emporium would benefit the Anglo-British imperium: united ‘into oneempire, whereof England [is] to be the centre country, and London tobe the centre city’ and ‘by means of these storehouses of the Indies, thisisland, as it seems by nature designed, will of course become theemporium of Europe’. A monarchy with a single crown, a state with asingle representative assembly, and a market with a single metropolitanemporium might safeguard the interests of both England and of Scot-land. Yet since the crown was to pass in a line of succession originallychosen by the English, the Parliament of Great Britain was to be held inWestminster, and the emporium based in London, it became clear thatthis was to be a British Empire founded on English terms, if notexclusively to England’s advantage.

Such an argument for the benefits of union to the metropolis ratherthan the province was anathema to the Scottish republican AndrewFletcher of Saltoun, an investor in the Company of Scotland and adyspeptic student of modern political economy, particularly in his lastworks in which he argued against the incorporating union of Englandand Scotland. As Fletcher lamented in , ‘trade is now become thegolden ball, for which all the nations of the world are contending, andthe occasion of so great partialities, that not only every nation isendeavouring to possess the trade of the whole world, but every city todraw all to itself ’. The logic of political economy compelled everynation to strive for the profits of a colonial empire; equally, that ruthlesslogic determined that some nations would remain, or at worst become,colonies, in so far as they and their populations were subordinated to theovermastering and unchallengeable economic interests of other nations.Fletcher feared that too ready a capitulation to this political-economiclogic by the Scots would lead them to cede their historic status as aseparate kingdom, only to be bullied and impoverished into dependencyas Ireland had been by England for centuries past. Fletcher drew manyof his arguments in the Account of a Conversation from the work of SirWilliam 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’, inLawrence 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 theCommon Good of Mankind (), in Andrew Fletcher: Political Works, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge,), .


Ireland should be transplanted to England to prevent any furthereconomic competition; from Molyneux, he drew the arguments thatIreland was founded on union, not conquest, and that the native Irishwere conquered, but the English colony was not, so that Ireland was stilla kingdom, and not a colony; and from Maxwell, Fletcher apparentlytook the Machiavellian arguments that the English ‘have never shownthe least disposition to unite with any other nation, though such as eitherstood upon equal terms with them, or such as they conquered, or evenplanted’.

This would be an enduring lesson from the era of the GloriousRevolution, the rise of political economy and the Anglo-Scottish andAnglo-Irish union debates, as the arguments from that era would set theterms of the debate for relations between Great Britain and its overseaspossessions for much of the succeeding century. Though there had beenvarious plans for a union among the English colonies in North Americaduring the seventeenth century, there were none for specifically im-perial union until the turn of the eighteenth century. For example, theEnglish man-midwife and economic projector, Hugh Chamberlen, pro-posed in incorporating not only England and Scotland but ‘alsoIreland, and the American Plantations, into one and the same Body, underthe same Liberties, and Legislative, as well as Executive Power’. BecauseChamberlen wrote five years before the Treaty of Union went intoeffect, he did not identify this legislative and defensive union as aspecifically ‘British’ empire. The anonymous author of The Queen anEmpress, and Her Three Kingdoms One Empire () did, however, andproposed an incorporating union of all Three Kingdoms under onemonarch, with a single legislature, a British Protestant church with apatriarchal seat in London, and a pan-British nobility headed by theeldest sons of the monarch, who would be the subordinate kings ofEngland, Scotland and Ireland and hold the titles of ‘Princes of the British Fletcher,Account of a Conversation, in PoliticalWorks, ed. Robertson, , , –: compare Petty,

‘A Treatise of Ireland’; Molyneux, The Case of Ireland, –; [Maxwell,] An Essay upon an Union ofIreland with England, – (cf. Machiavelli,Discorsi, . ). The parallels with Petty and Molyneux arenoted in Fletcher, Political Works, ed. Robertson, , n. ; , n. . The copy of Maxwell’sEssay 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 ofthe Promulgation of the Constitution of the United States, vols. (Philadelphia, ), , –; An Essayupon 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 unionagainst the French: Great Advantages to Both Kingdoms, .


Empire’. This ‘Empire of Great Britain’ could then be the Protestantcounterweight to French universal monarchy in Europe, an argumentwhose force was not lost on those who negotiated the Treaty of Unionbetween 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’ wouldbecome one empire; the transatlantic colonies would be no part of thisnew ‘British Empire’. Only after the Union of was it possible toimagine 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 notunited – presented a great stumbling-block to any integrative concept ofa British Empire.

English political economists in the s had seen both Ireland andScotland as threats to the supremacy of their own economy, but for verydifferent reasons. The possibility that Scotland’s potential success in theplantation trade might lead that kingdom to open up Ireland as itsprimary market made it imperative that Ireland be more closely subjec-ted to English economic regulation and thus treated as a ‘Colony forTrade’ as much as a ‘Colony for Empire’. If the Scots proposed to usethe sovereignty of their Parliament and the relative maturity of theirfinancial institutions to promote a colonial empire that might allowthem to declare their independence of the English Parliament and eventhe English Protestant succession, then Ireland must more firmly beregulated as a colony and not allowed to pursue its own independenteconomic destiny as yet another competitive kingdom. This line ofargument was pursued by the Bristol merchant John Cary, who perhapsdid more than any other English writer of the s to present thepolitical 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 somany Limbs or Counties belonging to it’, though he saw this Englishcolonial empire as being in competition with the Scots to the North andheld 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 onthe Present War Against France (Bristol, ), –.


treated as such. The two major recommendations of the Essay struck atIreland particularly, as Cary insisted that the plantation-trade should bemade more dependent upon England than hitherto, and that Englandshould become ‘a Market for all the Wool of Christendom’ in order thatEngland should have the economic capacity to continue the Williamitewar against France. Ireland should be treated on the same terms as theAmerican plantations by repealing the Cattle Acts, since they had onlyencouraged the Irish to seek foreign outlets for their products, and henceto become dangerously industrious. It should also have its woollen tradeconfined to the export of raw material to England so that, like the othercolonies, its interests could be entirely subordinated to England’s.

Cary became in due course one of the major proponents of theEnglish Parliament’s bill to restrict the exportation of Irish wool and wasone of five English authors to offer replies to William Molyneux’s TheCase of Ireland . . . Stated. However, his prominence in these debates hasdistracted 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 thosesections of his Essay that concerned not only Irish but also Scottishtrade. This publication suggests that Cary’s target was not solely theIrish woollen manufactory, but also the Scottish Parliament with itsplans for a joint-stock company. Cary notoriously used the reprint of theEssay to reaffirm his argument that the kingdom of Ireland should bereduced to the status of a colony and its products harnessed for thebenefit of England. He also drew his English readers’ attention to thestirrings of economic innovation in Scotland, where woollen manufac-tures, a fishery company and plantations were being proposed. Thoughhe discouraged the idea that any nation like Scotland which lacked avibrant manufacturing base could raise the capital to finance a planta-tion trade, he nonetheless realised the dangers of a second Britishkingdom’s possession of colonies for trade:

Cary, An Essay on the State of England, sigs. Av–[A]r; –, –; compare [Cary,] To theFreeholders and Burgesses of the City of Bristol (n.p., n.d. [Bristol, ?]), . A similar point about theCattle 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 byWilliamMolyneux ofDublin, Esq. (London, ); Patrick Kelly, ‘The Irish Woollen Export Prohibition Act’, –.Molyneux,The Case of Ireland . . . Stated, ed. Simms, –, lists the English replies, to which shouldbe added Charles Davenant, An Essay upon the Probable Means of Making a People Gainers in the Balanceof Trade (), in The Political and Commercial Works of Charles Davenant LL.D., ed. CharlesWhitworth, vols. (London, ), , –.

John Cary, A Discourse Concerning the Trade of Ireland and Scotland (London, ), comprises Cary,An Essay on the State of England, –.


I cannot see what advantage the Scotch can make at this time of day, by setlingPlantations; which if they do attempt we must be sure to take care of Ireland, andby 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 FrancisBrewster saw that the success of Scotland’s East India trade would onlydeprive England of such advantages as it had in the Irish market.

Cary’s ally and interlocutor, John Locke, from his vantage point on theEnglish Board of Trade, had at least as expansive a vision of the BritishAtlantic world’s commerce, even if he did not present a single, compre-hensive survey of its interrelations in the way that Cary did. ThoughLocke’s writings on interest and coinage form the most important partof his economic legacy, he also deserves respect for his attention to theworkings of the post-Revolutionary Atlantic economy. Locke was theofficial on the Board of Trade who paid closest heed to the progress ofthe Company of Scotland’s activities in the late s, and it wasLocke who co-ordinated the board’s efforts to promote linen manufac-ture in Ireland as an alternative to the Irish woollen industry. Locke’sinterest in the prospects for the English woollen industry had been acentral concern of his brief position-paper, ‘For a Generall Naturali-zation’ (), in which he had also shown himself aware of the dangersthat depopulation had posed to the Spanish monarchy’s possessions inthe Indies. In line with the prescriptions of other contemporary politicaleconomists, Locke argued that wealth no longer lay in land, but ratherin trade and hence also in the population necessary for extensivemanufactures. In the words of the manuscript addition he made to theSecond Treatise in the late s, ‘[t]his shews, how much numbers of menare 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 theExon 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 relatingto 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’ bythe Board of Trade: PRO /, f. v. For Board of Trade documents relating to the Irishwoollen 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, , –.


lands [sc., hands] and the right employing of them is the great art ofgovernment’. This would be a problem for an extended and compositecommonwealth, such as that formed by England and Ireland, as muchas for a unitary polity.

Locke’s arguments in the s showed his awareness of the largerarchipelagic and Atlantic context within which political-economic argu-ment was now necessarily being played out. Yet, as the disputes over theWoollen Bills and the Company of Scotland showed, economic argu-ment in the British Atlantic world after the Glorious Revolution readilybecame political and constitutional argument. The existence of threelegislatures within the Three Kingdoms, each of which could be used asthe instrument for the promotion of competing economic interests,inevitably led to collisions and confrontations, especially when the mostpowerful of them, the English Parliament, had such a freshly renewedsense of its own supremacy. An all-encompassing vision of politicaleconomy such as Cary’s or Locke’s at once allowed all of the Britishdominions to be seen as part of a single economic system, while thecompulsions of contemporary political-economic theory revealed thatthe parts of that system would necessarily remain in tension with eachother so long as they pursued separate economic interests.

Metropolitan analyses of the place of the colonies within an empirenow increasingly defined by the terms of political economy convergedon a series of common theoretical assumptions and historical lessons,many of which seemed to have been reaffirmed by recent Anglo-Irishand Anglo-Scottish relations. The three most influential analysts of thepolitical 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 themost important commodity for a flourishing polity, whether a state oran empire. The historical experience of the Dutch and the Spanishsupported this contention: the Dutch, a landless people, had increasedtheir wealth enormously by commerce, and had encouraged populationby 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 ofour Colonies and Plantations to Great Britain, and our Interest in Preserving and Encouragingthem, 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, .


Spanish, their former governors, had become impoverished and de-populated in Europe, so that their colonies had been a cause of declinerather than a source of greatness. All three authors therefore found itnecessary to refute the charge that England’s colonies would destroy themetropolis 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 theterms of the Navigation Acts: mercantilist protection, for the benefit ofthe metropolis, was the key to a flourishing empire, and any signs ofcolonial independence would have to be quashed, as they had been inIreland, 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 forconciliation between the colonies and the metropolis, ‘with a View ofshowing the Americans the Stake they risque in the present Contest’,

thereby confirming the apparent utility of this mercantilist analysis tothe metropolitan conception of the British Empire.

Politics and economics converged to provide the analytical frame-work within which the relations between England, Ireland, Scotlandand the American colonies would be understood for at least half acentury after the Glorious Revolution, an event that had not only‘deliver’d the People of Great Britain from Popery and Slavery’, as Woodnoted, but also ‘gave them that which is inseparable from their beingFreemen, a Liberty of Trading to any Part of the known World ’. Despite theunequal effects of the Glorious Revolution for the Three Kingdoms andfor the colonies, and despite the constitutional differences that weremade all the more obvious by the Union of , that association ofreligious and civil liberty with freedom of trade became an enduringideological foundation of the British Empire.

This argument found graphic expression in Sir James Thornhill’sdecoration 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, ), –, –.


and Mary spreading peace and liberty throughout Europe that coversthe ceiling of the Lower Hall of the Hospital, the Upper Hall’s paintingsaptly depicted the post-Revolutionary, and post-Union, Anglo-Britishimperial ideology. Neptune and Britannia, ‘attended by Reason of Stateand Love of her Country’, greet William III at Torbay; the four continentsand all the gods of the sea acclaim Queen Anne; justice and peaceaccompany George I’s landing at Greenwich, alongside St Georgecrushing the dragon of ‘Popery’ and the cringing figure of Jacobite‘Rebellion’. The argument of this suite of paintings concludes in twopaintings to show ‘that ourTrade,Commerce, and PublickWealth are chieflyowing to our ’, in the form of allegories of ‘Salus Publica’ and‘Securitas Publica’, each linking naval power, commerce and the good ofthe res publica. Thornhill’s neo-classical celebration of commercialreason of state showed that the discourse of political economy was notincompatible with neo-Roman conceptions of the res publica, nor was itnecessary to counterpose them. Reason of state could be cast as saluspublica, and public safety readily redefined in economic terms to suit thedemands of a modern state.

Confirmation that Barbon and Hume had been premature in theirannouncement 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 ofcolonial writings by combining Machiavellianism with political econ-omy in his Select Tracts Relating to Colonies (). The work was part of hiscampaign to promote the new settlement of Georgia, and justified thecolony with testimony from Francis Bacon’s essay ‘On Plantations’, theDutch political economist Pieter de la Court, William Penn, JosiahChild and Machiavelli. Oglethorpe skilfully excerpted ‘the FlorentineHistorian’ to show that he recommended a plan remarkably similar toOglethorpe’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 andSotheby,] 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 MaryQuarterly, rd ser., (), –. Compare James Edward Oglethorpe, Some Account of the Designof the Trustees for Establishing Colonys in America (), ed. Rodney M. Baine and Phinizy Spalding(Athens, Ga., ), –.


Machiavelli may have been mostly silent regarding commerce as areason of state, but he could certainly still supply pointed advice for thepromotion of a modern colony; such counsel could also be aptly com-bined with the most modern analyses of commercial compulsions, tooffer a rounded, and persuasive, account of the means and reasons forsettling new plantations at such a late date. Oglethorpe’s subtle rap-prochement between Machiavellianism and political economy offeredone resolution of the ancient dilemma of imperium and libertas, in linewith the recommendations of modern reason of state. It seemed fromthis, as also from Thornhill’s prominent representations of the post-Revolutionary British salus publica, that Barbon’s and Hume’sannouncements of the death of Machiavellianism in the modern com-mercial world were, perhaps, somewhat exaggerated.



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 earlys 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 andnational identity. They do so because this seems to be the moment atwhich British identity began to coalesce within Britain itself, a gener-ation after the Anglo-Scottish Union of , to mark ‘the birth of apowerfully self-confident British nationalism’. ‘It was precisely duringthese early conflicts in the formation of British markets that the symbolsof the British nation came into being’: the Union flag, ‘God Save theKing’, ‘Rule, Britannia’, the rules of cricket and Edmund Hoyle’scodification of whist, quadrille, backgammon and chess. At the sametime, it has been argued, marked the end of the period – roughlycorresponding to the length of a single lifetime – in which communica-tions around the British Atlantic world had changed substantially andirreversibly. From this point onward, a British Atlantic communitybecame conceivable in practice as ‘colonial leaders initiated changes inthe meaning of the word ‘‘empire’’ to include themselves and theirlocalities 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 OnceMore in Need of Revising’, Journal of American History, (), .

Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge,), –.

coming to be called the ‘‘British Empire’’’. All the British Empireneeded to overcome its institutional heterogeneity was a common ideol-ogy. This could readily be supplied in the form of the burgeoning Britishnationalism generated in the metropolis. However, the exchange fromthe metropolis to the provinces ultimately fostered dissolution ratherthan integration. In due course, the aggressiveness of that nationalism,the unredeemable promises made to the colonists in the form of therights of Englishmen, and the fissile consequences of the export ofBritish political theory together ensured that the British Atlantic Empirewould sunder and then be refashioned in the decades after the SevenYears War. It was in that period that, although ‘new concepts of empirewere slow to emerge, language and terminology began to change, asthose associated with the dominion of the seas based on liberty no longerseemed appropriate’.

During the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the anglophoneinhabitants of the Atlantic world began for the first time habitually todescribe their community as the ‘British Empire’. This British Empireincluded the United Kingdom of Great Britain and its dependencieswithin Europe; Britain’s insular possessions in the West Indies; and thecontinental colonies of British North America. Sometimes, though notalways, it also encompassed the slave-stations, factories and forts ofAfrica and the East Indies, and it was increasingly acknowledged that‘the general ofGreat Britain owes all itsEncrease and Splendor tothe Commerce of its American and African Colonies’, and hence to theslave-trade, ‘the next valuable Branch of Trade belonging to the BritishEmpire’. Such a conception of a united British Empire demanded theunion of a substantive idea of Britishness with a redefinition of inheritedideas of empire. That idea of a ‘British Empire’ also had to be sufficientlybroad to encompass the pluralism of a multinational and multi-denominational polity, while necessarily narrow enough to excludethose deemed unworthy of its political benefits. As we have seen, theconcept of the British Empire – as a particular kind of political communitythat incorporated various peoples and territories and which could bedescribed 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 inAmerica (London, ), , .


However, various conceptions of the British Empire continued to offercompeting ideological descriptions of that community. ‘The concepts wehave settle for us the form of the experience we have of the world’, thephilosopher Peter Winch has noted. ‘That is not to say that our conceptsmay not change; but when they do, that means that our concept of theworld has changed too’. This is perhaps especially true when suchconcepts define the nature and limits of the polity itself. Accordingly, if itis possible to pinpoint the emergence of a new language to describe theBritish Empire, then the examination of that language should reveal theexistence of a new conception of the Empire itself.

That the British Empire was conceived as a political communityincorporating Britain, Ireland and the plantations during the s canbe seen from the works of moral philosophers, historians, pamphleteersand poets across the whole range of private and public discourse. Bybeing conceived at this time – during the years of Sir Robert Walpole’stenure as chief minister – the British Empire acquired a distinctivehistory, genealogy and ideology. This conception was criticised andchallenged even at the moment it emerged. It was therefore originallyan ideology, not an identity; that is, it was a contribution to politicalargument, and not a normative self-conception. It may have become anidentity later, but that development should not obscure its beginnings inpolitical ideology, or the causes that ideology promoted. Both theground-breaking work of Kathleen Wilson and the recent magisterialsurvey of British imperial ‘identity’ in the long eighteenth century byJack P. Greene have each assumed the category of identity as anidiomatic and unproblematic one in this period. However, this begs thequestion of how it became possible for Britons to conceive of theAnglo-British monarchy and its overseas dependencies as members of asingle community at all, let alone how they adopted that conception as adistinctive ‘identity’. Clearly, such a conception demanded somethingmore geographically expansive than the perception of a contiguousterritorial 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: QuentinSkinner 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 ofAdmiral Vernon’, Past and Present, (Nov. ), –; Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics,Culture and Imperialism in England, – (Cambridge, ); Jack P. Greene, ‘Empire andIdentity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), TheOxford History of the British Empire, : The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, ), –.


though not contained within a British imperial church; it also had to beextended to encompass a more expansive conception of the nation.

The conception that emerged in the s defined Britain and theBritish Empire (at least for the generation after the War of Jenkins’s Ear)as Protestant, commercial, maritime and free. ‘This vision, predicatedon a mixture of adulterated mercantilism, nationalistic anxiety andlibertarian fervor, was clearly both rose-colored and self-serving’ and(no doubt for this reason) proved ‘immensely attractive to domesticpublics’ – and, it might be added, to many provincial publics, too. Itfound its greatest purchase in the oppositional polemics of the s andearly s, where it provided a counter-argument to the supposedpusillanimity of Walpole’s government, which had patiently refused tobe drawn into a commercial war with Spain until . James Thom-son’s ode ‘Rule, Britannia’ was the most lasting expression of thisconception. As might be expected from the aggressively Anglicisingson of a Scottish Whig mother and a Lowland Presbyterian ministerfather, Thomson defined the polity as ‘Britain’, the divinely-ordainedisland lifted from the sea ‘at heaven’s command’, destined to rule thewaves, whose people were promised both positive and negative liberty(‘Britons never will be slaves’; ‘thou shalt flourish great and free’). Thiscommercial 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 anempire of difference, defined by its oppositions, where men woulddefend women, freemen would not be slaves, liberty would defeattyranny, 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 theBritish Empire. Nonetheless, according to the best recent student ofearly 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 theAge 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 andRule, 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 Studyin Whig Political Propaganda in the British Theatre, –’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, (), –; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, – (New Haven, ), .


the ode. The prevalence during the anti-Walpolean agitations and longthereafter of the conception of the character of Britain and its empire asProtestant, commercial, maritime and free has rendered it seeminglynatural and inarguable, as no doubt its proponents intended it shouldbe. Though this conception persisted throughout the eighteenth cen-tury and has endured since, it did not stand alone or unchallenged as aconception of empire, either then or now. For these reasons, ‘God Savethe King’ – a product of the years of the War of the Austrian Succession,but more martial, more monarchical and more obviously hierarchicalthan ‘Rule, Britannia’, as befit its anti-Jacobite rather than preciselyanti-Walpolean or anti-Spanish origins – would be the preferredanthem during the British Empire’s late eighteenth-century period ofaristocratic authoritarianism. In light of these alternatives, and in theknowledge that the competition between conceptions of empire wouldburgeon in the years following the Peace of Paris of , it is moreimportant to historicise this conception, rather than accept that itbecame normative (as many historians have effectively done). Therebyit might be possible to understand where it came from, how it came tobe attached to a particular concept of the British Empire as an Atlanticcommunity, and indeed what were the effects of its endurance.

The limits to the emergence of an integrative conception of the BritishEmpire beyond the Three Kingdoms can be seen in the early topo-graphical histories of the English – later, British – empire. Such historiesassumed the economic importance of overseas possessions to England,but largely failed to see them as integral parts of a single polity. Forexample, 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 inAmerica’, thereby to delineate the ‘empire’ in the western hemisphereas a set of political communities distinct from, though subordinate to,the English monarchy. In , Crouch’s successor as an imperialtopographer, 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 NationalAnthem (London, ), –, ; on the supposed origins of ‘God Save the King’ as also acelebration 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 inthe West-Indies (London, ), .


ica’, to show the economic advantages of a commercial (rather than aterritorial) empire to Britain. Oldmixon acknowledged that it was diffi-cult ‘for an exact History of all the British Empire in the West-Indies to befram’d by one Man in America or Europe’. He adopted the mercantilistanalysis of Child and Davenant to confirm that migrants were not lost toBritain, that the plantations saved rather than expended money byvirtue of import-substitution, and that neo-classical anxieties aboutcolonisation were now analytically irrelevant: ‘the Arguments broughtfrom Antiquity will be of no use to the Enemies of Colonies’. Rome mayhave secured its conquests by colonies, but the British colonies wereeven more advantageous for the simple reason that ‘the Safety of aNation is of greater Consequence than its Extent of Empire’. Thesearguments remained largely unchanged when Oldmixon published anew 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 strategicallyvulnerable Georgia colony.

The concepts of the British Empire propagated by Crouch andOldmixon were firmly transatlantic, at least from the perspective of themetropolis. Their object of inquiry was the ‘British Empire in America’or the ‘British Empire of America’, not a collective or even collaborativeBritish Empire that incorporated the British plantations and coloniesinto a single community alongside the Three Kingdoms of Britain andIreland. Metropolitan attempts to rationalise the structure of theHanoverian dominions remained transatlantic. The first major surveyof the ‘State of the British Plantations in America’ since the Dominionof New England, produced for the Board of Trade in , had delin-eated George I’s ‘Plantations on the Continent of America’ colonyby colony (though omitting Newfoundland and Hudson’s Bay, becausenot under ‘civil government’) rather than attempt to describe anintegrated and pan-Atlantic British Empire. The report assumed nounity between the plantations and the metropolis, except in so far as allwere joined under the sovereignty of the crown. Yet if imperium wasunitary, dominium was divided, as various proprietors, patentees androyal governments claimed separate rights of property, based on theright 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, –.


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 thatimperium and dominium should be conjoined was not, of course, taken up.Its failure perpetuated a necessarily unstable conception of the BritishEmpire whose internal contradictions could be adroitly exploited bythose like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who could easily showthat, since first discovery had been undertaken by individuals and not bythe British state, Parliament could make no claims over the colonistswho were encompassed only by royal imperium.

The emergence of a pan-Atlantic conception of the British Empirecoincided with the next wave of reform of the colonial administration inthe s, and sprang initially from a cadre of imperial officials andprovincials, some of whom had been involved in the drafting of the report. ‘In the decade preceding the renewal of war with Spain andFrance, the home government took the first steps in conceiving andimplementing a theory of empire suitable for a mature colonial sys-tem’. Such a theory had to reconcile the paradox of a mercantilistcolonial system informed by post-Revolutionary political ideology,which promised the Anglo-British ‘rights of Englishmen’ to all freeinhabitants of the colonies while subordinating their economic activitiesto the needs of the metropolis. That it failed to do so had as much to dowith 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 ofWalpole’s government to relax the demands of metropolitan mercantil-ism in favour of greater autonomy for the colonists. The failure ofWalpole and his ministers to square the circle and fashion a suitabletheory of empire nonetheless had two important consequences. Thevery attempt encouraged various Britons throughout the Atlantic worldto conceive of themselves as partners in a single polity; meanwhile, thefailure of it left the responsibility for fashioning a mutually acceptableideology of empire to the opposition; anything as systematic as a theorywould have demanded the resolution of contradictions, as well as the ‘State of the British Plantations in America’ ( September ), in Documents Relative to the ColonialHistory 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 theExpense 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 inAmerican Revolutionary Thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas, (), –.

James A. Henretta, ‘Salutary Neglect’: Colonial Administration under the Duke of Newcastle (Princeton,), .


necessary reforms – whether to strengthen metropolitan control, or toallow greater colonial autonomy – to overcome the paradoxes.

A Scottish baronet and former deputy governor of Pennsylvania, SirWilliam Keith presents a good example of the shift that took placebetween the s and the late s. In , he had been one of theinformants behind the Board of Trade’s report, and in , in anothersurvey of the British American colonies, he firmly subordinated theinterests of the colonies to those of Britain, on the grounds that ‘a lesserpublick Good must give place to a greater’. Yet by , the impover-ished Keith had thrown in his lot with the opposition to Sir RobertWalpole. He dedicated his History of the British Plantations in America – thefirst volume of a projected series anatomising all of the British pos-sessions in the western hemisphere – to Frederick, Prince of Wales, andlater endorsed the ‘universal Satisfaction’ at the declaration of war withSpain in . In the introduction to his History, Keith offered abroadly civic-humanist account of the origins and development of civilgovernment in the British colonies. In line with the often-quoted pre-scriptions of the th of Cato’s Letters, Keith argued that only gentletreatment of the colonies by the metropolis could ensure that thebenefits of mercantilism would be sustained. He identified liberty as thepromotion of the common good, and by assuming that it was ‘altogetherimpracticable to separate and divide the Interest of the Subject in theBritish Plantations from that of the whole State’, he defined that good ascommon both to the metropolis and to the plantations. As he affirmedelsewhere in , ‘the common Interest of the British State orCommonwealth, most certainly includes the Subjects of America’. Thisconjunctive concept of the ‘British State or Commonwealth’ as includingthe subjects in the plantations sprang from Keith’s experience in thecolonies; it also reflected the priorities of the Opposition, for whomthose colonies were integral parts of the British possessions threatened On the general problem illustrated by this particular instance see Jack P. Greene, Peripheries andCenter: 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 PresentWar 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 StamptPaper and Parchment in All the British American Colonies’ (), in [Keith,] Two Papers on theSubject of Taxing the British Colonies in America (London, ), .


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 emergedat the same time in the Caribbean, as can be seen from the pamphlets ofthe Barbadian planter John Ashley. Ashley’s words from have oftenbeen cited as evidence of the emergence of a concept of ‘the BritishEmpire, taking all together as one body, viz. Great Britain, Ireland, and thePlantations and Fishery in America, besides its possessions in the East-Indiesand Africa’. Though this may have been a precocious example of aconcept that would become widespread in the aftermath of the SevenYears War, it was in fact somewhat belated among Ashley’s ownchanging concepts of the British Empire. For example, in he hadargued for increased metropolitan attention ‘to protect and cherish itsWest-India colonies, confound their Enemies, and assert and gloriouslymaintain The British Empire in America’. If his concept in waspan-Atlantic, in it had been firmly transatlantic, locating the BritishEmpire in the western hemisphere, as perhaps one among many con-centric British empires, though certainly as a British empire detachedfrom, albeit superintended by, the metropolis. By , in the third of hisinterventions into debate on West Indian tariffs and revenues, Ashleydefined the sugar colonies as ‘a Branch of the British Dominions onwhich the Wealth and Naval Power of Great Britain does in greatmeasure depend’, linked by British shipping, supplied with Britishgoods, and enriching Britain by its products, and hence inextricablybound together by a set of common interests to form one ‘BritishNation’. His remark of was therefore a restatement of this visionof pan-imperial interests in the British Atlantic world; only at that pointdid he define that congeries of interests as the British Empire.

The major dependency of the ‘British Empire in Europe’ was, ofcourse, 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 fromvarious 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 BritishColonies in America (London, ), (compare ibid., sigs. Av–Ar, ), cited in, for example,Koebner, Empire, , and P. J. Marshall, ‘Introduction’, in Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of theBritish 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 inAmerica (London, ), , .

Jean Louis de Lolme, The British Empire in Europe: Part the First, Containing an Account of the ConnectionBetween the Kingdoms of England and Ireland, Previous to the Year (Dublin, ).


Present State of Ireland () described Ireland as ‘one of the chiefestmembers of the British Empire’ and ‘like to prove profitable to thePrince, 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 Walshargued in for the transnational community of British and IrishCatholics, ‘those in this famous Empire of Great Britain, that continue inEcclesiastical Communion with the Catholick Bishop of old Rome’.

Walsh denied that there was any necessary collision between allegianceto the Stuart monarchy and communion with Rome, but such animperial perspective sat more comfortably with the Protestant Anglo-Irish argument in the s ‘that we are of one Religion, that we are aProvince of their Empire, and have neither Laws nor Governors but oftheir sending us’.

Though ‘[t]he s and s . . . represent the nadir for pro-unionsentiment on both sides of the Irish Sea’, Irish unionists did appeal to aconception of the British Empire cast in the idiom of political econ-omy. For example, Samuel Madden lamented the fact that Irelandhad failed to benefit from British prosperity, liberty and civility, andhence to profit from ‘the Inheritance of our Ancestors, who were senthither to enlarge the British Empire and Commerce’. He proposed,among other solutions, internal colonisation of the country to increasepopulation and production to ‘put our selves a Degree or two above theSavage 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 EnglishEmpire, wealth and strength in the World’. Madden drew upon thework of the Ulsterman, Arthur Dobbs, who, as a colonial governor andpromoter 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. Av–r, .

Peter Walsh, A Letter to the Catholicks of England, Ireland, Scotland, and All Other Dominions under HisGracious Majesty Charles II (London, ), .

[John Hovell,] A Discourse upon the Woollen Manufactury of Ireland and the Consequences of Prohibiting itsExportation (London, ), .

James Kelly, ‘The Origins of the Act of Union: An Examination of Unionist Opinion in Britainand 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 comparative ability of Ireland to ‘add considerably to the Power ofthe 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, hepresented Sir Robert Walpole with a comprehensive scheme for theeconomic development of the British American colonies, and he pro-posed British settlements in California and Easter Island as the key toBritish trade in the South Seas. Anglo-Irish union was the commercialand constitutional cornerstone of Dobbs’s concept of the British Em-pire, though that in itself revealed the range of concentric empireswithin the British Empire, each of which maintained different relationswith the metropolis.

The emergence of a pan-Atlantic concept of the British Empire wasthe product of an epistemological as much as a conceptual shift. Beforeit became necessary to conceive the nature of the connection betweenthe metropolis and the plantations, that connection had to be perceived.Progress towards such an apprehension of the nature of the BritishEmpire as a unity had undoubtedly been made during the course of theseventeenth century, whether in the creation of various British Atlanticcommunities by migration and communication, by the rise of mercan-tilist thought, or by the statutory prescriptions of Parliament which hadbound the colonies to the metropolis within a single trading system sincepromulgation of the first Navigation Acts. However, the precise natureof that epistemology of empire was not described until David Hume’sTreatise of Human Nature (–), which he researched and wrote duringthe 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 andin time affects the strength of our imagination, and hence the force ofour passions, ‘the consequences of a removal in space are much inferiorto those of a removal in time’. Thus, twenty years in the lifetime of oneperson 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 inEverything: 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 theCountries Adjoining to Hudson’s Bay, in the North-West Part of America (London, ), –; TrevorParkhill, ‘Arthur Dobbs: Colonial Undertaker and Governor of North Carolina’, in Rankin andNelson (eds.), Curious in Everything, –.


ution would come a parallel abatement of our sentiments regardingactions distant in time. However, a distance of a thousand leagues willnot have an effect proportional to a similar distance in time. Hume’sexample, though passing, was significant in the context of the emerg-ence of a pan-Atlantic concept of the British Empire: ‘A West-Indiamerchant will tell you’, he reported, ‘that he is not without concernabout what passes in Jamaica; tho’ few extend their views so far intofuturity, as to dread very remote accidents’. As we will see, Hume wasboth the acutest analyst of the concept of identity in British philosophyof the s and the sharpest critic of the emergent ideology with whichthe British Empire was being equipped at the same time. By thisexample, though, he showed, even fleetingly, that action at a distance –specifically, action at an imperial distance – could excite the passions andcreate intellectual connections. As Thomas Haskell, among others, hasargued, just such a conception of ‘action at a distance’ helps to providean epistemological explanation for the emergence of the abolitionistmovement in the s: without such an expansive conception of causa-tion, it was literally inconceivable that humanitarian sentiment couldhave acted effectively on a global, or at least hemispheric, scale. Humerevealed the connection between distance and sentiment that the econ-omic connections within an imperial community could create. He didnot share the sentiment of passionate connection he diagnosed in theWest India merchant, but he was aware that a concept of imperialcontiguity, even across Atlantic spaces, had emerged, and that it wasassociated in particular with those who had specific financial and com-mercial interests in the colonies, like the merchants of Glasgow and, nodoubt, planters like John Ashley.

The concept of the British Empire as a congeries of territories linked bytheir commerce, united with common interests and centred politicallyupon London, was therefore originally provincial, and arose amongunionists in Ireland, planters in the Caribbean and officials in themainland colonies over the course of the first quarter of the eighteenthcentury. 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’); CarloGinzburg, ‘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 HistoricalInterpretation (Berkeley, ).


interest with Britain was a necessary strategy to encourage equal treat-ment for their compatriots, whether under the terms of the NavigationActs or within the constitutional framework of the United Kingdom.Their concept of the British Empire, projected from the provinces backto a metropolitan audience, was both the expression of their owninterests and the means to develop a coincident appreciation of acommon interest among their British audiences. This strategic use of theBritish Empire as the conceptual realisation of these interests explainsthe widespread use among these provincials of the language of thecommon good, frequently cast (as in the work of Sir William Keith, forexample) in the idiom of neo-Roman republicanism. When metropoli-tans adopted their concept of the British Empire, as they began to dowith 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 theclassic conception of that empire as Protestant, commercial, maritimeand free.

The crucible of that conception was the agitations preceding theAnglo-Spanish War of Jenkins’s Ear, and the oppositional circles whichencouraged them. As Horatio Walpole later noted:

the depredations of the Spaniards upon the british Commerce in the WestIndies . . . had given a handle to the disaffected and discontented party en-creased by the accession of those in Parliament who belonged to the Court ofthe late weak, imprudent and undutiful prince of Wales, to raise a great fermentin the Nation to occasion warm debates in Parliament and strong resolutionsand addresses to the Crown . . .

As Adam Smith also pointed out, the succeeding conflict was in essencea ‘colony war’, fought to defend British possessions overseas and toprotect rights of free navigation on the high seas. The War of Jenkins’sEar became notorious in the later eighteenth century as an example ofpopular pressure overcoming governmental resolve and hence, onemight say, as a triumph of ideology over policy. In , EdmundBurke 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 ofthe Contest with America, February ’, in The Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. E. C. Mossnerand 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. IsaacKramnick (Harmondsworth, ), –.


moralised the force of public opinion in the opening stages of the warand in the push towards Walpole’s fall as a cynical process which hadbackfired on its perpetrators: ‘There has not been in this century anyforeign peace or war, in its origin, the fruit of popular desire, except thiswar that was made with Spain in ’. The execration of Walpole forcaving in to the opposition’s demands for war, and the opposition’s lateradmission that their conduct was insincere, showed that ‘[t]hey whostir up the people to improper desires, whether of peace or war, willbe condemned by themselves. They who weakly yield to them will becondemned by history.’

History fostered ideology. In the pamphlets preceding the war, theorigins of the British Empire were traced back to the Welsh PrinceMadoc and the discoveries of John and Sebastian Cabot to refuteSpanish claims of first discovery in the Americas, and Bartolome de LasCasas was liberally quoted as evidence of Spain’s destructive policiesthere. Anti-Spanish propaganda opposing the Spanish Match in ,which itself had made use of Elizabethan precedent, was reprinted asevidence of England’s long-standing defence of the Protestant religionand position as arbiter of Europe, keeping the balance of power incheck. The dangers of peace between France and Spain and theclaims of England’s West India trade were recalled in speeches given bySir Thomas Roe and Sir Benjamin Rudyerd in . Sir John Bor-oughs’s treatise defending Britain’s right to the seas from the time of thefirst Anglo-Dutch War was reprinted: ‘There needs no Apology forRepublishing, at this Time, the following excellent little Treatise’, wroteits editor. Anglo-Spanish tensions in and – were alsobrought to mind with the first publication of manuscript memorandarecommending 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 ofEdmund 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 aJustifiable Plea for a Vigorous War with Spain (London, ), –.

[John Reynolds,] Vox Coeli (London, ), sig. Ar–*r, –, –, reprinted in The Merchant’sComplaint 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, ), originallypublished as Sir Thomas Roe His Speech in Parliament (London, ); ibid., –, [Sir BenjaminRudyerd,] A Speech Concerning a West-India Association (London, ).

Sir John Boroughs, The Soveraignty of the British Seas (London, ), sig. Ar. A Proposal for Humbling Spain (London, ), –; [John Campbell (ed.),] Memoirs of the Duke ofRipperda, nd edn (London, ), –.


Empire, for ‘it was owing, in a great Measure, to that Great andGlorious Princess Queen Elizabeth . . . that Great-Britain, at present, is notonly so Rich a Kingdom, but so powerful at Sea, and Master of soconsiderable a Number of Islands and such vast Tracts of Land inAmerica’; her supposed speech at Tilbury was revived, and the Armadaof held before the public as a sign of lost valour.

The war had begun with patriot demands for a blue-water war in theWest Indies: ‘The Empire of the Seas is ours; we have been many Agesin Possession of it; we have had many Sea-Fights, at a vast Effusion ofBlood, and Expences of Treasure, to preserve it; and preserve it we stillmust, 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 AdmiralEdward Vernon destroyed the fortifications of Porto Bello in November, the news of which was greeted with a flood of poems, pageants andmedals that extolled the achievements of an admiral who had long beenan oppositional figure himself, and boosted the wider opposition toWalpole by inflaming public opinion against his half-hearted policiesand indifference to Britain’s true interests. ‘Rule, Britannia’ was firstsung just as Vernon was preparing a second fleet in August . Suchblue-water triumphalism was effective mainly as a response to thethreats of territorial universal monarchy in Europe, and the passage ofthe war was widely conceived in such terms, especially as the theatre ofconflict moved decisively from the Caribbean to central Europe. Onecynical commentator even suggested that the Anglo-Spanish War andthe war in Europe were both fomented by France, ‘the first with a viewto 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 Engagementsbetween the English and Spanish Fleets in the . . . Year MDLXXXVIII (London, ) presentedengravings 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 inHanoverian 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 (inwhich the Spanish Queen is seen proclaiming ‘France is my aid, the Universe my right’, and isopposed by Admiral Vernon with the motto ‘Thus we chastise our Insolent oppressors’ on arepresentation of the siege of Portobello), item , ‘The European Race, Heat IIId’, (in whichFleury is dressed as ‘Universal Monarchy’) and item , ‘The European State Jockies Runninga Heat for the Ballance of Power’ (in which Fleury tries to catch smoke, inscribed ‘UniversalMonarchy’, in a sack).


latter, to subjugate the Austrian opponent, who had long blocked up thepassage between France and universal empire’.

The public agitations which preceded the war formed the context forHenry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke’s Idea of a Patriot King () which,like Thomson’s ‘Rule, Britannia’, was originally written for the privatecircle of Frederick, Prince of Wales. Bolingbroke skilfully deployed theshibboleths of mercantilist libertarianism to argue that Britain wasnaturally a maritime and hence a commercial nation whose interestswould be best protected by the blue-water patriarchalism of a PatriotKing. Bolingbroke had elsewhere followed the Sallustian and Machia-vellian narrative that located the origins of Roman greatness in theacquisition of liberty after the expulsion of the Tarquins, but warnedthat ‘[a] wise and brave people will neither be cozened, nor bullied outof their liberty, but a wise and brave people may cease to be such; theymay degenerate’. In light of such a possibility, it would be necessary toerect a constitution that could prevent such corruption by protectingpopular liberty, while bearing in mind the compulsions of mercantilistpolitical economy. This was the task that Bolingbroke set himself whilewriting The Idea of a Patriot King. The Patriot King would hold thebalance between Britain’s political parties in order to prevent thecorruption of Parliament; Bolingbroke had argued throughout the earlys that such corruption would threaten liberty by denying popularpolitical participation, undermine property rights in pursuit of invasivetaxation and raise the spectre of permanent standing armies that mightbe turned against the British people rather than their enemies.

The Patriot King’s external policies would be consonant with theseinternal procedures by acknowledging the interests of Britain as anisland nation, and hence as a commercial republic, thereby providingthe foundations for prosperity and the survival of liberty. The sea wasBritain’s natural element and a navy its natural defence force. Conti-nental commitments in Europe would only encourage the growth of astanding army, while concentrating resources upon the navy wouldrender 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 LateGeneral War, vols. (London, –), , xiii; compare Impartial Representation, , –: ‘. . . whilethe house of Austria flourished in a condition to oppose the designs of France, the ballance ofpower was preserved, and the liberty of Europe remote from the destruction of an arbitrary anduniversal 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: PoliticalWritings, ed. David Armitage (Cambridge, ), .


of greatness would be commercial, not territorial: ‘To give ease andencouragement to a manufactory at home, to assist and protect tradeabroad, to improve and keep in heart the national colonies, like so manyfarms of the mother country, will be the principal and constant parts ofthe attention of such a prince’. Bolingbroke concluded that if such aprince could be found – or trained – nothing could be more inspiringthan ‘[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’. ThePatriot King’s reign would therefore reconcile the traditionally opposedideals of imperium and libertas, as the ruler of a free and prosperous peoplewhose colonies were farms of the mother-country and whose fleets ruledthe waves.

The allusion to ‘Rule, Britannia’ is not accidental, of course, becauseThomson may have had access to Bolingbroke’s manuscript throughthe medium of Alexander Pope. All that separated the two works wasthe news of naval victory in the Caribbean, which allowed Thomson tobuttress Bolingbroke’s confident counsel with the fact of amphibioustriumph. What they shared, of course, was the conception of the BritishEmpire as commercial, maritime and free – perhaps not explicitlyProtestant 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 onBolingbroke’s heterodoxy, but it lost favour during the British Empire’slate eighteenth-century, counter-revolutionary, authoritarian phase, asdid ‘Rule, Britannia’ – further evidence of the contingency of theconception of the British Empire contained therein, and of the competi-tion it faced later in the century. Bolingbroke’s solution to the dilemmaof empire and liberty was historically speculative and theoreticallyunstable. It was speculative because it depended so heavily on theunreliable reversionary interest of the heir to the throne, Frederick,Prince of Wales; moreover, it was unstable because it required theemergence 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 dissociabilesmiscuit, principatum et libertatem’, crucially revised by Francis Bacon in the Advancement of Learningas ‘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 Afterlivesof Bolingbroke’s Patriot King’, Journal of British Studies, (), .


would hence be that republican oxymoron, a patriot king. Though theauthority of monarchs was never deemed decisively incompatible with aneo-Roman conception of liberty, later British thinkers within therepublican and neo-Roman traditions found it increasingly difficult toidentify a patriot king or to endorse any particular monarch for theirNerva-like combination of empire and liberty.

The crisis of Walpole’s ministry provided the occasion for otherphilosophers to consider the relationship between a metropolitan stateand its colonies as a legitimate topic for moral and civil philosophy. Forexample, the anonymous author of the Essay on Civil Government ()apologised retrospectively for the prominence of colonial questions inhis 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. Theright 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 caseof the formerly ‘uninhabited and unpossessed places of America’. Thisright to property also authorised national defence of colonial possessionsagainst any ‘prince [who] aims at universal monarchy’ (as the SpanishMonarchy was repeatedly accused of planning to do before the War ofJenkins’s Ear). Commerce as much as land required such defence, theauthor continued, even if a true care for this crucial component ofnational wealth was lacking under the premiership of Walpole: ‘In somecountries, the navy is a chief strength’ for such defence; such was thecase in Britain. The author thus provided blue-water Lockeanism as afoundation for the British Empire, as a justification for war againstSpain, and as a stick with which to beat the Walpolean government. Injust 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 ofthe 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 theMeans ofAttaining Them. Part II. Of the Government and Commerce of England; with Reflections on Liberty and theMethod 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’.


eighteenth century – a vision of the British Empire as Protestant,commercial, maritime and free founded on the sanctity of property asmuch at home as abroad, in the metropolis and in the colonies.

Alongside the mercantilist and metrocentric strain in civil philosophyin the s, there was also an anti-imperial and philocolonial strand.

This was represented most notably by the Hiberno-Scot FrancisHutcheson’s A System of Moral Philosophy, which he composed between and , in the period before the anti-Spanish agitations but in theaftermath of the Excise Crisis and the darkest days of Walpole’s pre-miership. Hutcheson questioned the very foundations in rights ofdominium upon which the British Empire rested, and argued that ‘[n]operson or society . . . can by mere occupation acquire such a right in avast tract of land quite beyond their power to cultivate’. This denial ofthe juridical basis on which the British Empire in America was claimedwas in its own way as Lockean as that of the author of the Essay on CivilGovernment, but took seriously Locke’s sufficiency condition for legitimatepossession. 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, andform grand unwieldy empires, without regard to the obvious maxims ofhumanity, has been one great source of human misery’.

Hutcheson’s critique of ‘grand unwieldy empires’ and of propertyrights derived from first occupation formed the basis of David Hume’ssceptical response to the conception of the British Empire that wasbecoming normative during the Anglo-Spanish War. Hume’s Treatise onHuman Nature and the first two volumes of his Essays, Moral and Political(–) appeared during the last years of the Walpolean regime andthe 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,’ inJohn Brewer and Susan Staves (eds.), Early Modern Conceptions of Property (London, ), –.

Compare Guido Abbattista, Commercio, colonie e impero alla vigilia della Rivoluzione Americana: JohnCampbell 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 ofthe Environment and Politics of Francis Hutcheson (–)’, in Absolute Liberty: A Selection fromthe 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, (), –.


Succession. Hume judged foreign policy to be one of the major dividingissues between ministry and opposition. ‘Unnecessary wars, scandaloustreaties, profusion of public treasure, oppressive taxes, every kind ofmal-administration is ascribed to [Walpole]’ by the opposition, whilethe panegyrics on the minister show that ‘[t]he honour and interest ofthe nation supported abroad, public credit maintained at home, perse-cution restrained, faction subdued; the merit of all these blessings isascribed solely to the minister’. Yet in relation to foreign affairs in theyears immediately preceding the publication of the Essays, Hume’stypology may be seen as deliberately muddying the waters, because itwas the opposition which had called for ‘[t]he honour and interest of thenation [to be] supported abroad’, and the government which had stoodfirm against ‘[u]nnecessary wars’, especially against the Spanish. Humereferred even more pointedly to the battle over public opinion of theperiod as an illustration of the matter likely to cause most surprise to aforeigner 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 presentsituation of affairs, is infinitely preferable. If the passion of the ministrylie towards peace, our political writers breathe nothing but war anddevastation, and represent the pacific conduct of the government asmean and pusillanimous’ – as had been done by the opposition duringthe anti-Spanish agitations. The only hint of Hume’s partiality over thequestion of the war came in ‘A Character of Sir Robert Walpole’, inwhich he affirmed that ‘[d]uring his time trade has flourished, libertydeclined, and learning gone to ruin’. When asked to defend thisjudgement, Hume wrote that trade had flourished ‘so far as the adminis-tration has been pacific, and private property has been preservedinviolate’, thereby implicitly aligning himself with those who had urgedconciliation with Spain.

In his early memoranda from the late s, in his Essays and in theTreatise on Human Nature, Hume challenged the ideological foundationsof 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 ministerialmeanness and pusillanimity, compare [ Joseph Trapp,] The Ministerial Virtue: Or, Long-SufferingExtolled in a Great Man (London, ), an ironic sermon on Walpole’s ability to ‘turn the othercheek’.

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, (), .


of the whiggish view that ‘commerce can never flourish but in a freegovernment’, an argument which others had extended to the flourishingof the arts and sciences. Hume’s answer was to adduce the example ofFrance, even as a counter to the evidence that trade has always estab-lished itself in free governments from Tyre and Athens through tomodern Holland and England, the maritime powers whose rise hadlargely invalidated Machiavellian maxims. Politeness arises in monar-chies and courts, not in republics, and in particular the new ‘civilisedmonarchies’ of Europe (so different from the ‘little disorderly principali-ties of ’ that were Machiavelli’s concern) were great nurseries ofthe civilised arts, France among them, because favour comes from thesovereign, who must be impressed by the pleasant cultivation of anysupplicant. 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 thereasons presented by Trenchard and Gordon in Cato’s Letters, forexample), but rather less honourable, because ‘[b]irth, titles, and place,must be honoured above industry and riches’. Hume thus steered acourse away from a whiggish determinism that placed trade solely as thechild of liberty. ‘Multitudes of people, necessity, and liberty, havebegotten commerce in ’, but if those conditions were notessential for its growth, nor would they be sufficient to foster polite arts.

Hume shared none of the misgivings of those who saw in commerce aconduit of corruption; the target of his concern was extensive territorialempire, not trade. Though he admitted that ‘no probable reason can beassigned for the great power of the more ancient states above themodern, but their want of commerce and luxury’, a return to theancient maxims of policy in the interests of reason of state rather thanthe happiness of a state’s subjects would be impossible. To abolishcommerce would be both unnatural and demand violent restraints uponthe inclination of subjects: ‘Now, according to the most natural course ofthings, industry and arts and trade encrease the power of the sovereignas well as the happiness of the subjects’. Under these changed condi-tions, only the unequivocal testimony of history could persuade anyonethat 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 andSciences’ (), 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, .


support so many Spartans only because there was no desire for luxuryitems. Thereby, one part of the population had been condemned toabject submission under the authoritarian rule of another. As Humepointed out in ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, this meant that a freegovernment could never have been maintained, because the demandfor luxury items was the first link in a chain which ultimately fastensliberty. The demand for luxury stimulated commerce and industry; thepeasants 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 suchmen are ‘the best and firmest basis of public liberty’, that liberty isstrengthened.

Hume commended the ‘agreeable entertainment’ to be derived fromreading history, not least of which was ‘[t]o remark the rise, progress,declension, and final extinction of the most flourishing of empires’. Inone of his early memoranda he signalled his own interest in the pathol-ogy of empires in the comprehensive account he gave of the mechanismby which empires naturally expand and die:

There seems to be a natural Course of Things, which brings on the Destructionof great Empires. They push their Conquests till they come to barbarousNations, which stop their Progress, by the Difficulty of subsisting great Armies.After that, the Nobility & considerable Men of the conquering Nation & bestProvinces withdraw gradually from the frontier Army, by reason of its Distancefrom the Capital & barbarity of the Country, in which they quarter: Theyforget the Use of War. Their barbarous Soldiers become their Masters. Thesehave no Law but their Sword, both from their bad Education, & from theirdistance 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 ofimperial overstretch, both for the metropolis and the provinces. Freegovernments in particular are ‘ruinous and oppressive’ to their prov-inces, he argued, because such governments discriminate against theirnew subjects and turn a blind eye to the egregious abuses of provincialgovernors, 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, –: TheComplete Text’, ed. Ernest Campbell Mossner, Journal of the History of Ideas, (), .


Empire, like commerce, was a self-regulating system, however – once ithad reached its point of furthest extension, it must inevitably contractand 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 theBritish Isles, and claim it? ‘The empire of Great Britain seems to drawalong 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 notnaturally 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 forcurrent 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 contiguousempire, 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 Empirewas 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 acommon defence structure for the colonies, along with a ‘PlantationParliament’: ‘That we might be better secured, of their Dependance,and they, better intitled, to our Protection’, though all under theauthority of the Crown, ‘for the general protection and advantage ofthe 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 allEuropean Nations, as to their Claim of Lands in America’.

Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Selby-Bigge and Nidditch, , , note; compare Hume toWilliam 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 NorthAmerica’ ( December ), in Jack P. Greene, ‘Martin Bladen’s Blueprint for ColonialUnion’,William and Mary Quarterly, rd ser., (), , ; Julius Caesar, Commentaries, trans.Martin Bladen (London, ).


the aesthetic theorist Hildebrand Jacob in Brutus the Trojan; Founder of theBritish Empire (). In this poem, the British Empire was the ImperiumBritannicum, the monarchy of Great Britain bequeathed by Brutus to hissons. It was therefore strictly archipelagic in extent, and did not evenencompass 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 anallegory of the British deliverance from tyrannous subjection – Brutuslands 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 anyhistorical link between the peculiar constitutional and legal characterof the British state and the success of its overseas trade, and generated asubtle but sweeping critique of the whole enterprise of empire up to themid-eighteenth century, and with it, of the emergent conception of theBritish Empire itself. He questioned the very juridical basis upon whichthe English, the Scots and hence the British after based theirterritorial claims, especially in the supposedly ‘waste’ lands of NorthAmerica. He challenged the very denotation of the term ‘British Em-pire’, and returned it to a solely archipelagic construction which deniedthe 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 verypossibility of such an entity’s possessing any unitary character, ideologyor 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 theAnglo-British state still something less than a nation, but any widerconception of a British Empire beyond the island of Britain would havean even weaker claim to a settled or common identity. Yet if Humefeared for the ascendancy of the ‘British Empire’, he need not haveworried. The classic conception of the British Atlantic Empire as Prot-estant, commercial, maritime and free flourished for little more thanthree 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, TheLife of Alexander Pope, Esq. (London, ), , , (footnote). On ‘Brutus’, see Friedrich Brie,‘Pope’s Brutus’, Anglia, (), –; Donald J. Torchiana, ‘Brutus: Pope’s Last Hero’, inMaynard 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, .


cal career) to the mid-s, when the Atlantic Empire began to un-ravel in the aftermath of the Seven Years War. Indeed, Hume rejoicedat its dissolution even in his dying days.

Notwithstanding Hume’s scepticism, the ideological redefinition ofthe British Empire which took place in the late Walpolean era providedan enduring conception of that empire that was not confined to Britishobservers. Hume might have appreciated the fact that one of the mostresilient accounts of that concept came from Bordelais magistrateCharles 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 onFrench wine during the War of the Austrian Succession had forced thevigneron to retreat to his study, and complete his treatise. Montes-quieu argued that the compulsions diagnosed by Machiavelli were nolonger applicable to modern politics: ‘One has begun to be cured ofMachiavellianism (machiavelisme), and one will continue to be cured.’Princes had gradually abandoned this machiavelisme as they realised thatonly moderation brings prosperity, and that commerce was now thesole 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, Spartafor war, Israel for religion, Marseilles for trade, China for naturaltranquillity, and Rhodes for navigation. In particular, the separation ofpowers 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 knowledgethat they had nothing to fear from one another. Britain retained itsliberty at home by constitutional separation, while it maintained itsintegrity abroad by eschewing overseas conquest, which would weakenit, by planting colonies ‘to extend its commerce more than its domina-tion’, and by being defended by a navy, not by a standing army. ‘Asone 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, BasiaMiller and Harold Stone (Cambridge, ), –.

Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Biography (Oxford, ), , .


quieu continued, ‘it would give the form of its government to thepeople of its colonies’:

The dominant nation, inhabiting a big island and being in possession of a greatcommerce, would have all sorts of facilities for forces upon the seas; and as thepreservation of its liberty would require it to have neither strongholds, norfortresses, nor land armies, it would need an army on the sea to protect itselffrom 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 haveenough for a sea war.

A naval empire has always given the peoples who have possessed it a naturalpride, because, feeling themselves able to insult others everywhere, they believethat their power is as boundless as the ocean.

If its terrain were fertile, then the people would be self-sufficient, notambitious for conquest, and hence secure in the liberty their constitu-tion guaranteed for them. ‘This is the people’, he concluded, ‘who havebest known how to take advantage of these three great things at the sametime: religion, commerce, and liberty’. Liberty would foster com-merce, and Britain could become everything that the aspirant universalmonarchies of seventeenth-century Europe were not, and could not be –an empire for liberty.

The origins, the transferability and the contestability of the conceptionof the British Empire as Protestant, commercial, maritime and free arewhat mark it as an ideology – rather than as an identity. Only bystudying it as an ideology is it possible to understand why it failed toprovide an enduring and stable identity. This fact seems to have beenrealised, in two rather different ways, by John Adams, in the context ofthe American controversy of the s, and by G. W. F. Hegel ageneration after American Independence. As Adams famously pointedout in , ‘the terms ‘‘British Empire’’ are not the language of thecommon law, but the language of newspapers and political pamphlets’.The possessions of the British Crown could not be an empire, saidAdams, because that term smacked both of Imperial Rome and of thecivil law; nor could they be strictly called ‘British’, because most ofthe colonies in North America had been planted long before the Treatyof 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 WhigDoctrine,’ in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse in Early ModernBritain (Cambridge, ), –.


He thereby threw down a challenge to the ideological origins of theBritish Empire as they had appeared in the s and s, a chal-lenge almost as devastating as Hume’s, but more direct. The conceptof 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 firstappeared were more often provincial than metropolitan originally, butduring the Seven Years War the concept had been more widely dis-seminated, even if the prevailing conceptions of that empire changedand proliferated.

Hegel likewise understood the ideology of the British Empire not as aconcept but as a conception. In a crucial passage of his introductorylectures on the philosophy of world history, Hegel argued that the truehistory of a nation consists in the process whereby the Geist’s conceptionof itself is realised in the various, interconnected activities of that nation,such as the state, religion, art, justice and foreign affairs. All of thesespheres of life were not connected in all nations, he stated (citing Chinaand India), but where they were, the informing activity of the Geist couldbe felt in every area. Where these spheres were completely integrated,the self-consciousness of the nation would be realised in the lives of themembers of the state. The nation’s history would nourish that self-consciousness, just as that self-consciousness would be the realisation ofthe Geist itself. To illustrate this central point, Hegel turned to ‘England’for evidence. ‘If he is asked’, Hegel reported, ‘any Englishman will say ofhimself and his fellow citizens that it is they who rule the East Indies andthe oceans of the world, who dominate world trade, who have aparliament and trial by jury, etc. It is deeds such as these which give thenation its sense of self-esteem’ (Selbstgefuhl ).

Hegel’s illustration is remarkable for so accurately capturing whathad been a dominant, but not unchallenged, British conception ofempire 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 nationalself-consciousness, but this was perhaps less a ‘deed’ expressive of theBritish Geist than it was a direct expression of the informing Geist

[Adams and Leonard,] Novanglus and Massachusettensis, , . ‘Fragt man einen Englander, so wird jeder von sich und seinen Mitburgen sagen, sie seien die,

die Ostindien und das Weltmeer beherrschen, den Welthandel besitzen, Parlament und Ges-chworenengerichte haben usf. Diese Taten machen das Selbstgefuhl 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, ), –.


itself. This conception of ‘English’ identity could be traced back in itsclassic form to the anti-Walpolean ideology of the s and earlys, when it became attached for the first time to a concept of theBritish Empire as a single pan-Atlantic community. It was therefore thedominant 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 SevenYears War, the aftermath of the Peace of Paris and through the Ameri-can Revolution.

This conception found new leases of life in nineteenth-century arenasas varied as the cult of Nelson and the evangelical missionary move-ment. The expansion of British trade seemed to confirm Britain’scommercial destiny, especially since this was bolstered by the indispens-able and universally acknowledged supremacy of the Royal Navy on thesea-routes of the world after : ‘the magnitude and splendour of theresources which have been thus developed cannot fail to fill the mind ofevery British subject with exultation and gratitude to the Supreme Beingfor the numerous blessings conferred on this highly favoured nation’.

The success of the coincident campaigns for Parliamentary reform andthe abolition of slavery within the Empire merely confirmed whatBritons had known about themselves at least since : that they werethe greatest defenders of liberty within Europe, and throughout thewider British imperial world. Even rule over India came gradually tobe cast as benign, progressive tutelage expressive of Britain’s historicallyunique combination of empire and liberty – now increasingly cast asliberalism, especially in the imperial context. Under these conditions,the conception of the British Empire fostered the imperial amnesiadiagnosed 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 Quarterof the World, Including the East Indies, nd edn (London, ), .

Seymour Drescher, ‘Cart Whip and Billy Roller: Antislavery and Reform Symbolism inIndustrializing Britain’, Journal of Social History, (), –; Robin Blackburn,The Overthrow ofColonial 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, ).


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 perhapsrecognised, more than many recent historians, this conception of theBritish Empire was a classic example of an identity that was originally anideology.


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Bibliography

Index

abolitionist movement, Act in Restraint of Appeals (), , Act of Union () (Anglo-Scottish), , ,

, , , –Adams, John, , –Africa, agriculture, as means of colonisation, –,

, Alexander VI, Pope, bull (), , , , Amboyna massacre (), American colonies

Board of Trade report (), –compared with Ireland, proposals for union, , relationship to Great Britain, ,

American Revolution, , , –, Americas

Spanish claim to, , , , Spanish evangelical success in, , –

Anglo-Dutch rivalry, –and mare clausum theories, , ,

Anglo-Dutch Wars, , Anglo-Saxon empire, –Anglo-Scottish debate (s), , –, –Annesley, Francis, colonial models, –, anti-Catholicism, , ,

Purchas’s polemical, –, –apocalypticism, –, Aquinas, St Thomas, Aristotle, Hakluyt’s ‘Analysis’ of Politics, –,

–armies

standing, , –, as threat to liberty, ,

Arthur, King, pan-Britannic monarchy, –,

Ashley, John, Assyrian Empire, Athelstan, King (-), , , Athens, republican model, , Augustine, St,

Austrian Succession, War of (-), –

Bacon, Francis, , ‘On Plantations’,

Bale, John, barbarism

perception of, , –, , see also native inhabitants

Barbon, Nicholas, , , , Beacon, Richard, , –Benson, George, Bible

and commonality of earth and sea, –,

and precedents for colonisation, –, –Blackstone, William, , Bladen, Martin, Board of Trade (English),

report on ‘Plantations on the Continent ofAmerica’ (), –

Bodrugan, Nicholas, , , , Bolingbroke, Henry St John, Viscount, Idea of

a Patriot King (), , –Boroughs, Sir John, , Brewster, Francis, Britain, term derived from mythical king

Brutus, , Britannia, earliest representation, British Commonwealth, British Empire, –

association of liberty with free trade, –challenged by Hume, –chronological origins, –as commercial, maritime and free, , ,

, –, concept of, –, –, –effect on metropolis, –as enlargement of English state, , –,

extent (s), , federative nature of,

ideological origins of, –, , –, ,–

institutional weakness of, as maritime, , , –, , nature of connection of colonies and

metropolis, –nineteenth-century conception of, –,

–as pan-Atlantic, , , –, as Protestant, , , , –, provincial concept of, –Spenser’s conception of, –, , , as transatlantic, , –Tudor concept of, –, –under Brutus (mythical), , , , –use of term, see also England; Great Britain

British Empire, ‘First’, , fragility of, , –

British Empire, ‘Second’, , , continuities with First British Empire, imperial history as exclusive to, –

Britons, term used in Ulster plantations, –,

Bruni, Leonardo, Brutus of Troy, mythical British king, ,

–, , in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, –

Bryant, Arthur, Burke, Edmund, –, Butler, Samuel, Butterfield, Herbert,

Cabot, John and Sebastian, Calais, English claim to, Calvinism, and notion of elect nation, –Caribbean,

Cromwell’s Western Design against, ,

and pan-Atlantic British Empire, see also West Indies

Carolina, Constitutions of (), Carthage, colonial model, , Cary, John, Essay on the State of England (),

–Cateau-Cambresis, Treaty of, Catholic church, evangelical success in

Americas, , –Catholicism

and theories of empire, universalist claims of, , –

Cato’s Letters (-), , Cattle Acts ( and ), , Cecil, William, , Chamberlen, Hugh,

Charles I, King, , , Charles V of Spain, Holy Roman Emperor, Child, Sir Josiah, , , Christianity

and claim to land and sovereignty, and primacy of Europe, see also Bible; Catholicism; Protestantism

Church of England, , Churchill, Winston, , Cicero

conception of good life, conception of patriotism, , on private property, , reconciliation of libertas and imperium,

civilisationmission to spread, , , , –, as precondition for Christian salvation,

civility, assumption of superiority of, , –classical literature, knowledge of, , , Clothworkers’ Company, Cobden, Richard, Colon, Bartolome, colonia, use of term, , colonial council, Petty’s proposed, colonial elites

demand for autonomy, perception of ‘empire’, , –

colonial ruleadministrative reforms (s), nature of, –, , , –Petty’s concept of, –

colonialism, internal, , , –, –colonies

claims to independence, economic benefits of, , nature of connection with metropolis,

–for trade or empire, –

colonisationof conquered countries, economic argument for (Hakluyt), –humanist conception of, –militarism versus gradualism, –as mission to civilise, , , , , –Roman model of, –, –see also dominium; property rights

Columbus, Christopher, commerce see tradeCommonwealth (–),

disillusionment with, –and dominion over the seas, –foreign policy of Rump Parliament (),

, , –influence of Machiavelli and Sallust on,

–

Index

Company of Scotland, Darien Scheme, –

composite monarchies, –early-modern states as, , Stuart, , ,

confederacy, as means of expansion, , confederations, unequal, , –conquest seemilitary conquestconsent, to private property rights, –, Constantine, Emperor, , , context, and concept, –Copland, Patrick, cosmography, Hakluyt the elder’s interest in,

–Cox, Richard, Crakanthorpe, Richard, Crashaw, William, Crawley, Sir Edward, Croft, Sir James, Cromwell, Oliver,

as Protector, –Cromwell, Thomas, Crouch, Nathaniel, The English Empire in

America (), Crownimperium over foreshore, –property rights, , rights of English,

crowns, imperial (closed), ,

Daniel, Samuel, Darien Scheme, , –Davenant, Charles, , , , Davies, Sir John, Dee, John

conception of British Empire (s), , ,

maritime dimensions of empire, –, Denmark, fishing rights, Digges, Thomas, dominium over nature’s

commons, , Dobbs, Arthur, –dominium

attempts to combine with imperium, –,

claims to, divided, and imperium, –, –over nature’s commons, , over territorial waters,

Donne, John, Downame, George, Drake, Francis, , Dutch Republic, , , –

claims to navigation rights,

and fishing rights, hegemonic ambitions, and mare liberum policy, –maritime expansion, , rivalry with England, –, ,

earth, in common for all men, –, –, East India Company (Dutch), , East India Company (English), , , ,

–East Indies

Anglo-Dutch relations in, , –as colonies for trade,

Eden, Richard, , Edgar I, King (-), , ,

maritime dominium, , education, moral and political, , Edward I, King, Edward VI, King, , –, Elder, John, , , elect nation, concept of, –, Elizabeth I, Queen,

maritime jurisdiction, , and origins of British Empire, –, , –

Elizabethan Settlement (–), , , empire

concept of Great Britain as, –, –defined, economic redefinition of, , effect of state on, –, –incompatible with liberty, –, , language and symbolism of, novelty of British maritime, –Protestant theories of, –reconciled with liberty, –, –Roman legacy of imperium, –territorial definition of, , –see also British Empire; imperium; Roman

Empireempire-building, and state-formation, –empires, fate of classical, , England

as centre of empire, , , claim to overlordship of Ireland, , as composite monarchy, , , defined as maritime nation, –emergent linguistic nationalism, Galfridian history of, –, , identified as trading nation with free

government, –maritime jurisdiction, Tudor commitment to freedom of seas,

–see also British Empire; Great Britain; Three

Kingdoms

Index

Essay on Civil Government (anon. ), –ethnology, , Europe

Britain’s place in (Purchas), –hegemonic ambitions in, , and maritime jurisdictions, , nature of nation-states, states and empires, –,

expansioncompulsions to, , , Machiavelli’s analysis of, –need for constitutional safeguards, –

exploration, of new worlds, ,

Filmer, Sir Robert, fishing rights,

confederated British, Scots claims to, , ,

Fletcher, Andrew, , –Florence, , foreign policy, and political opposition, foreshore, jurisdiction over, , –mare clausum concept derived from,

Foxe, John, Acts and Monuments, –France, , , ,

alliance with Scotland, , Bourbon universal monarchy, , , ,

claim to independent imperium, –, as composite state, , hegemonic ambitions, , , , –

Frederick, Prince of Wales, , Freeman, E.A., Freitas, Seraphim de, , Froude, J.A., on Hakluyt, ,

Geoffrey of Monmouth,Historia RegumBritanniae (c.), –, ,

geography, sixteenth-century and classical,

Georgia, settlement, , Gerald of Wales, Geraldine rebellion (-), German republics, , Germany, empire, Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, Glorious Revolution (), ,

unequal effects of, , ‘God Save the King’, , good life, classical conception of, , Gordon, Thomas, , Gowrie, Earl of, plot against James VI, Grand Remonstrance (), Gray, Robert, Great Britain

concept of empire of, –, –, –,–

Cromwellian union of, earliest use of term, , growth of nationalism, –Jacobean foreign policy, Stuart composite monarchy, , , territorial waters, see also British Empire; England; Scotland;

Three KingdomsGreater Britain, concept of, –greatness

from commerce, –, greater good than stability, primacy of (Machiavelli), , –and republican liberty, –,

Greenwich Hospital, Thornhill’s paintings,–

Grotius, HugoAnglo-Dutch rivalry and, –Mare Liberum (), –Scottish response to, –Selden’s response, –,

Gunpowder Plot (),

Haddon, Walter, Hakluyt, Richard (the elder), –Hakluyt, Richard (the younger), , –,

‘Analysis . . .’ of Aristotle’s Politics, –, –Anglo-centric view, , , , –assumption of mare liberum, –classical influences on, , , compared with Purchas, –‘Discourse of Western Planting’, –, –and justification of property rights, , Principall Navigations (-), , , ,

–scant reference to religion, , –translation of Grotius’s Mare Liberum,

Halifax, George Savile, Marquis of, Hampden, John, Ship-Money case, –Harrington, James, , The Commonwealth of Oceana (), –

Harvey, Gabriel, Hayman, Robert, Hegel, G.W.F., , Henrisoun, James, , , Henry VII, King, Henry VIII, King

attempts at dynastic union with Scotland,, –

claim to imperial status, –, , Declaration: . . . [on] Warre with the Scottis

(), –, , invasion of Scotland, –

Index

Herbert, Sir William, historiography, –

of British sea-power, –of English religion, Imperial history as subfield, ‘New British History’, , –Seeley’s conflation of state and empire,

–separation of Imperial and national history,

–, , –Whig interpretations, –, ,

Hobbes, Thomas, combination of dominiumand imperium, –,

Hobson, J.A., history of empire, , –Holland, commerce in, Holy Roman Empire, , , Howell, James, humanism

and conception of colonisation, –and use of classical models, –,

Hume, David, –, , –Essays, Moral and Political, –, –opposition to empire, –Treatise of Human Nature (–), –,

–, Hutcheson, Francis, A System of Moral Philosophy

(c.–),

identityconcept of, , conception of national, –and ideology, –, –

ideologyas contestable world-view, –, fostered by history, –and identity, –, –of maritime history, –as model of society, and political theory,

Imperial Federation movement (s), imperium

attempts to combine with dominium, –,

and claim to universalism, and claims to dominium (property), , –,

–as concept of sovereignty, –, federal conception of, –as incompatible with liberty, –, , independent claims to, –maritime, , –original sense, –reconciled with liberty, –, , unitary, see also empire

imperium domi, imperium militiae, India, place in British Empire, –, –, Ireland, , ,

ambiguous status of, –, –, autonomous Parliament, , , , colonial status of, , –, , –, ,

–contribution to British Empire, –Cromwellian pacification of, discriminatory trade laws against, –, economic expansion, –, options for union, , –Petty’s proposals for, –, –place in pan-Atlantic British Empire,

–proposed agricultural colonisation of, –Protestant New English settlers in, , as province of composite state, and Spenser’s concept of British Empire,

–Ulster plantations, , –Union with Great Britain (–), unionism in, –Williamite Wars (–),

Irishas barbarians, , , as colonists, ,

Irish Kingship Act (), , Isidore of Seville, Italian city-states, Italy, empire,

Jacob, Hildebrand, Brutus the Trojan (), Jacobite War (), Jamaica, –James III, King of Scotland, –James IV, King of Scotland, James VI and I, King,

and Anglo-Scottish union, , –, colonial policy in Ireland, –, –foreign policy, policy of mare clausum, –

Jefferson, Thomas, Jenkins’s Ear, War of (-), , –,

–, –Jewel, John, Johnson, Samuel,

Keith, Sir William, –, Kennett, White, , kingdoms

defined, see also composite monarchies; multiple

kingdoms

Index

Knox, Andrew, bishop of the Isles, ,

la Court, Pieter de, La Popeliniere, Lancelot de, Lamb, William, –, Las Casas, Bartolome de, Lawrence, Richard, –, Left (political), and history of empire, –Lewis, Isle of, liberalism, liberty, ,

British perceptions of, and compulsions of expansion, , –and concept of Patriot King, –incompatible with empire, –, , and nature of British constitution, –as precondition for commerce, –as promotion of common good, , reconciled with empire, –, –, ,

and republican greatness, –, –and royal prerogative, and rule of law, as security of property, –,

Lilburne, John, literature

classical, –English, ,

Livy, , Llwyd, Humphrey, Welsh antiquary, –, Locke, John, First Treatise of Government (c.), Letter Concerning Toleration (), on property, –, –, –, , Second Treatise of Government (c.), , –

Louis XIV, King of France, , Lucan, Marcus Annaeus, luxury

as debilitating, , demand for,

Machiavelli, Niccolocompulsions of expansion, –, –continuing influence of, –, Discorsi, –influence on Commonwealth republicans,

–influence on Sidney, –reliance on Sallust, trade largely ignored by, –

Madden, Samuel, –Madoc, Welsh Prince, Mahan, Alfred Thayer, mare clausum, –

Scottish claims to, , , –, ,

Selden’s, –, –, theories of, –

mare liberum, , –, , –maritime empire

and commercial greatness, –exceptionalism of British, , –nature of Tudor empire of Great Britain,

–, preferred to military, , see also navies

maritime expansion, , –maritime supremacy, , ,

blue-water policy, , –Martyr, Peter, Decades of the New World, ,

Marvell, Andrew, Marx, Karl, Mary I, Queen, Mary, Queen of Scots, , , Massachusetts, land-claims in, Maurice, Sir William, Welsh MP, Maxwell, Henry, Essay upon an Union of Ireland with England,

–Meadows, Sir Philip, ‘Observations

Concerning the Dominion andSovereignty of the Seas’, –

Mede, Joseph, Clavis Apocalyptica, mercantilism,

Scottish, –of Walpole’s government, see also Oldmixon

militarismas means of colonisation, –, and territorial empire, –,

military conquest, , , , incompatible with liberty, –of Ireland, –as means of expansion, ,

millenarianism, –see also apocalypticism; time, sacred

Milton, John, The Readie and Easie Way, Molyneux, William, The Case of Ireland . . . Stated (),

monarchies, ideal of Patriot King, –monarchies, absolute, and commerce, ,

monarchies, composite, –, , Montesquieu, Charles Secondat, baron de,

–More, Sir Thomas, –, Mountbatten, Earl, Moyle, Walter, multiple kingdoms, , ,

Britain under James VI and I, ,

Index

nation, conception of identity (Hegel), –nation-states

federal nature of modern, in historiography, –

nationalism, British, –nations, defined, native inhabitants

civil incapacity of, and claims to ownership of colonies, –dispossession of, see also barbarism

naviesand commercial wealth, for defence of trade, , as no threat to liberty, , –,

Navigation Acts (, , , ), ,–, ,

navigation rights, , Nedham, MarchamontMercurius Politicus, –, The Case for the Commonwealth of England Stated

(), , , –The Excellencie of a Free State (), , translation of Mare Clausum (), –,

Nelson, Admiral, cult of,

Ochiltree, Andrew Stewart, Lord, , Oglethorpe, James, , , Oldmixon, John, topographer, origin, conceptual ambiguity of, –Orkney Islands, , Ortelius, Abraham,

Papacyas Antichrist, , claim to universalism, , ,

Papal BullsAlexander VI (), , , , Laudabiliter (),

Paris, Peace of (), , Paris, Peace of (), Parker, Henry, Of a Free Trade (), Paruta, Paolo, Discorsi Politici (), –Paterson, William, Darien Scheme, –Patriot King, ideal of, –patriotism, , , , –Patten, William, , , Penn, William, Pepys, Samuel, –Perkins, William, Petty, Sir William, , ,

conception of English empire, –and Hobbesian theory, –, and origins of political economy,

proposals to transplant Irish population,–, –

‘Treatise of Ireland’ (), Pinkie, Battle of, , Pitt, William, , Plassey, Battle of (), Pocock, J.G.A., ‘New British History’, –political economy, ,

and Anglo-Scottish union debate, –and classical models of colonisation, –origins of, –of plantations, –

political thoughtand concepts of empire, –, development of British, –

Polybius, on Roman republic, –Pont, Robert, Pope, Alexander, , population increase, to maintain colonial

settlements, , –populations, proposals to transplant, –,

–Portugal, , , Poynings’ Law, , Presbyterianism, press, freedom of British, property rights

of Crown, , Grotius’s theory of, –, and liberty, –Locke’s theory of, –, –, –, in nature, –over colonies, –, –, , in Protestantism, –, ,

Protestantism, and Anglo-Scottish union, –, as characteristic of British Empire, , , ,

–, diversity within, , , –, –and Elizabethan Settlement, , of New English settlers in Ireland, , and Presbyterianism, Purchas’s chronology of, –and rights of property, –, , in Scotland, , and status of Ireland, –theories of empire, –see also anti-Catholicism; Reformation

Ptolemy, public opinion, and War of Jenkins’s Ear,

–, Purchas, Samuel, , –,

anti-popery, –, –compared with Hakluyt, –Hakluytus Postumus (), –, , ,

Index

importance of revival of classical literature,–

and justification of property rights, , –,–

nature of British monarchy, –, , ,, –, –

Purchas His Pilgrim (), Purchas His Pilgrimage (), , religiosity of, –The Kings Towre (), –, use of Spanish sources, –

Radicalism, Ralegh, Sir Walter, , Rapin, Thoyras, Paul de, reason of state, , , , –Reformation, English, , , ,

and Renaissance, Reformation, Scottish (–), , , religion see Catholicism; Christianity;

ProtestantismRenaissance, European, , res publica

and commercial reason of state, patriotism towards, ,

Restoration, anti-republican reaction, –rhetoric, use of classical techniques of, , ,

rights

of travel and trade, see also fishing rights; property rights

Robertson, William, Roe, Sir Thomas, Roman Empire, –

Britain as province of, , –, decline of, –, –, liberty equated with greatness (Sallust),

–as model of colonisation, –, –, as model of expansion, –, , ,

–, –and Papacy, as precedent, ,

Roman Law, and imperium as sovereignty,–,

Roman political thought, influence of, , ,–,

Rome, imperium in City of, Royal Navy, Rudyerd, Sir Benjamin, ‘Rule Britannia’ (), , , –, ,

Ryswick, Treaty of (),

Sallust, , –, –

Salutati, Coluccio, Scotland, , ,

alliance with France, , ambiguous relationship with England, –,

, –, attempts at dynastic union with, , –,

–, claim to independent commerce, , ,

claim to independent imperium, –colonial ambitions, , –, –as composite monarchy, –, excluded from Navigation Acts, –internal colonialism, –, –maritime jurisdiction (mare clausum), , ,

–, , opposition to Tudor pressures for union,

–Presbyterian Protestantism of, , relationship with Ireland, –, see also Act of Union (); Three

KingdomsScots, as colonists, , Scottish Enlightenment, Scottish Reformation (–), , , sea(s)

attempt to combine dominium and imperium,–, , –

and maritime expansion, as natural common, –, , Tudor commitment to freedom of, –see also mare liberum; territorial waters, mareclausum

Seeley, J.R., Expansion of England (), –,,

Selden, John, , historical arguments for English imperium,

legal arguments, –, , , Mare Clausum (), , –Nedham’s translation (), –, –used to justify Ship-Money, –

self-sufficiency, Aristotelian concept of, , Seven Years’ War (-), , , , Shetland Islands, , Ship-Money cases

and extent of royal dominium, –ideological definition of England as

maritime state, justified by Selden’sMare Clausum, –

Sidney, Algernon, , –, Sidney, Henry, Lord Deputy of Ireland, slavery

abolition of, imposed by Vagrancy Act (),

Index

Sleidan, John, Commentaries, Smith, Adam, Smith, Sir Thomas, –De Republica Anglorum (-), and Ireland, –, –,

Smith, Thomas, colonies in Ireland, , –,

Solorzano y Pereira, Juan, Somerset, Edward, Duke of, Lord Protector

and English claim to Scotland, –, , ,–

Epistle . . . to Unitie and Peace (), , space, and time, –Spain, and War of Jenkins’s Ear (-), ,

–‘Spanish Match’ crisis (), –, Spanish Monarchy, , ,

claims based on Donation of Alexander, ,, ,

claims to maritime imperium in West Indies,–

empire, , , –, evangelical success in Americas, , –legitimacy of claims, –, –

Spanish Succession, War of, Sparta

lack of trade, , –safeguard of liberty, , , –

Speed, John, Spenser, Edmund

conception of British empire, –, , ,

Faerie Queene (-), –View of the Present State of Ireland (), , ,

stability

defensive, or expansion, –, –

Stafford, Sir Edward, Standing Army debate (s), Staple Acts ( and ), state

and concept of empire, –constituted as community, definitions, , , effect of empire on, –, –as perfect society, –see also composite monarchies; nation-states

state-formation, models of, –Statute of Wales (), , Statutes of Icolmkill (), Stone, Lawrence, Stuart Restoration, Sulla, dictatorship of, Sutcliffe, Matthew,

Sweden, empire, , Swiss Confederation, , symbolism

of empire, national,

Symonds, William,

Tacitus, Agricola, –territorial waters

defined by Dee, dominium over, ,

territorialityof empires, –of states, –

Thompson, E.P., Thomson, James, ‘Rule Britannia’ (), ,

, –, Thornhill, Sir James, allegorical paintings,

–Three Kingdoms

competitive economic interests, –,–, –

and concept of empire, , –confederated fishing grounds, internal union (after ), , interrelations between, , , , Purchas’s conception of, , ,

time, and space, –time, sacred, , –

Purchas’s conception of, –see also millenarianism

toleration, –topographical histories, Toryism, interpretation of history, Tournai, conquest of (), , trade, ,

and colonisation, –, –freedom of, , , , and liberty, –, , , –naval defence for, and origins of political economy, –as reason of state, , , , –as sinews of war, –, and Tudor proposals for Anglo-Scottish

Union, –Trenchard, John, , Tunstall, Cuthbert, Twisse, William, Twysden, Sir Roger, tyranny, and loss of liberty, –Tyrone’s rebellion,

Ulster, Anglo-Scottish colonisation of, , –United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

(post-), –

Index

United States of America, , , , universalism

claimed by Roman Church, , –of imperium, of Papacy, , ,

Usher, James,

Vagrancy Act (), Vane, Henry, Vasquez de Menchaca, Fernando, Venice, , , ,

as model of colonial settlement, , Vernon, Admiral Edward, Vergil, Polydore, –, , Virginia, colony, , , , , Virginia Company, , –, Vitoria, Francisco de, Political Writings

(-), ,

Wales, , , Wales, Statute of (), , Waller, Edmund, , Walpole, Horace, Walpole, Sir Robert, ,

opposition to, , –, , Walsh, Father Peter, Walsingham, Sir Francis, Wedderburn, Robert, The Complaynt of Scotland

(), , –, , Welsh, as colonists, , Welwod, William, –West Indies, –,

discovery of, , see also Caribbean

Western Isles, , Whig party, Whiggism

and constitutional history, –, and Ireland, –and property rights, –

White, Rev. John, , White, Rowland, , William III, King, , , William of Malmesbury, Williams, Roger, Winthrop, John, , Wood, William, , Wood’s Halfpence,

Index

Ideas in context

Edited by (General Editor), , and

, . . and (eds.)Philosophy in HistoryEssays in the historiography of philosophypb:

. . . Virtue, Commerce and HistoryEssays on political thougth and history, chiefly in the eighteenth centurypb:

. . Private Vices, Public BenefitsBernard Mandeville’s social and political thoughthb:

(ed.)The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europepb:

The Judgement of SenseRenaissance nationalism and the rise of aestheticspb:

Hegel: Religion, Economics and the Politics of Spirit, –pb:

Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Orderhb:

Gassendi the AtomistAdvocate of history in an age of sciencehb:

(ed.)Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europehb:

Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociologypb:

, . (eds.)Political Innovation and Conceptual Changepb:

et al.The Empire of ChanceHow probability changed science and everyday lifepb: X

That Noble DreamThe ‘objectivity question’ and the American historical professionpb:

The Province of Legislation DeterminedLegal theory in eighteenth-century Britainhb:

Faces of DegenerationA European disorder, c.–c.pb: X

Inventing the French RevolutionEssays in French political culture in the eighteenth centurypb:

The Taming of Chancepb:

, and (eds.)Machiavelli and Republicanismpb:

The Origins of American Social Sciencepb: X

The Rise of Neo-KantianismGerman Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivismhb:

Interpretation and Meaning in the RenaissanceThe Case of Lawhb:

From Politics to Reason of StateThe Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics –hb:

The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt –hb:

(eds.)Political Discourse in Early Modern Britainhb: X

An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contextpb:

Philosophy and Government –pb:

. Defining ScienceWilliam Whewell, Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britianhb:

The Court ArtistThe Ancestry of the Modern Artisthb:

. Defining the Common GoodEmpire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britianhb:

. The Idea of LuxuryA Conceptual and Historical Investigationpb:

. . The Enlightenment’s ‘Fable’Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Societyhb:

Englishness and the Study of PolitcsThe Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barkerhb:

Strategies of Economic OrderGerman Economic Discourse, –hb:

The Transformation of Natural PhilosophyThe Case of Philip Melancthonhb:

, and (eds.)Milton and Republicanismpb:

Classical Humaism and Republicanism in English Political Thought–hb:

The Social and Political Thought of Bertrand RussellThe Devolopment of an Aristocratic Liberalismhb:

, , and . Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politicshb:

Riches and PovertyAn Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, –pb:

A History of Sociological Research Methods in Americapb:

(ed.)Enlightenment and ReligionRational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britianhb:

. . . Adversaries and AuthoritiesInvestigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese Sciencepb:

The Reportage of Urban CultureRobert Park and the Chicago Schoolhb:

Liberty, Right and NatureIndividual Rights in Later Scholastic Thoughthb:

. (ed.)William Robertson and the Expansion of Empirehb:

Rousseau and GenevaFrom the First Discourse to the Social Contract, –hb:

Pluralism and the Personality of the Statehb:

Early Modern Liberalismhb:

Equal Freedom and UtilityHerbert Spencer’s Liberal Utilitarianismhb:

and (eds.)Pedagogy and PowerRhetorics of Classical Learninghb:

The Shaping of Deduction in Greek MathematicsA Study in Cognitive Historyhb:

and (eds.)Models as Mediatorspb:

Measurement in PsychologyA Critical History of a Methodological Concepthb:

. The American Language of Rightshb:

The development of Durkheim’s Social Realismhb:

Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth IQueen and Commonwealth –hb:

(ed.)Renaissance Civic HumanismReappraisals and Reflectionshb: X

. . Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenmenthb:

The Ideological Origins of the British Empirehb:

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