It is now a commonplace in the history of political thought that there has long been a mutually constitutive relationship between liberalism and colonialism. That relationship might not extend in time quite to the fifteenth-century origins of European settlement beyond Europe but it can now be seen to go back at least as far as the origins of liberalism within the tradition of subjective natural rights. From the early seventeenth century, European theorists who were later variously canonised as liberal elaborated their political theories to address contexts at once domestic and colonial. As Richard Tuck has argued, ‘the extraordinary burst of moral and political theorising in terms of natural rights which marks the seventeenth century, and which is associated particularly with the names of Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf and Locke, was primarily an attempt by European theorists to deal with the problem of deep cultural differences, both within their own community (following the wars of religion) and between Europe and the rest of the world (particularly the world of the various pre-agricultural peoples encountered around the globe)’. The successors of these seventeenth-century natural-rights theorists extended their interests beyond Europe, the East Indies and the Americas to South Asia, North Africa and Australia in following centuries. Not all liberals were complicit with colonialism and colonialism was not defended only by liberals. The rollcall of liberal theorists who were employed by overseas trading companies or who possessed specialised knowledge of extra-European settlement and commerce is nonetheless distinguished and diverse and runs from Grotius and Hobbes to Tocqueville and Mill.