A certain historical irony resides in the fact that the concept of empire is a popular subject of historical, political and philosophical discourse, yet the extensive field of British Empire scholarship has insufficiently investigated its subject's conceptual origins. This book attempted to bring the history of early modern natural philosophy to bear upon the intellectual origins of the British Empire. The Biblical ideal of man's plenary empire over nature, central to the work of seventeenth-century natural philosophers, constitutes an intellectual tradition that has been overlooked by the scholarship. The British Empire has a neglected ideological lineage.

For Francis Bacon, writing during the first two decades of the century, there was no necessary connection between man's empire over nature and colonization. By the time John Locke's Two Treatises of Government was published in 1689, however, the connection existed. A number of intellectual manoeuvres established a nexus between the idea of man's empire over nature and what became the British Empire of colonies. During the course of the seventeenth century, the agrarian aspect of man's plenary empire – the injunction to cultivate the earth –superseded the epistemological ideal of recovering man's perfect knowledge of nature. It was the agrarian idea of restoring man's dominion over a fully cultivated earth which Locke drew upon in his theory of property.

Ideas of man's original dominion can be conceptualized as an intellectual tradition which, through its own vocabulary, stipulated a coherent theory of empire. The vocabulary of Adam's empire over nature broadens our understanding of the linguistic resources available in the seventeenth century. In doing so, it enables us to make that tradition the subject of further exploration. The fact that the idea of Adam's original empire was fundamental to the work of a number of thinkers from the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century – from Bacon to Locke – suggests that we should view ‘empire’ as a major organizing category of seventeenth-century thought. Indeed, as John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) illustrates, natural philosophical writing was not the only context influenced by the idea of man's original dominion over the earth.