Even twenty-five years ago, it might have been eccentric to ask whether John Locke was a theorist of empire. Within the shorthand histories of political thought, Locke was the grandfather of liberalism; in the standard histories of philosophy, he was the exemplar of empiricism. Liberalism had long been assumed to be inimical to empire, and the main links between empiricism and imperialism were found in the work of Francis Bacon and the seventeenth-century Royal Society. However, as the preceding chapter has shown, a generation of recent scholars have fundamentally revised understandings of liberalism’s relation to empire and in particular of Locke’s relationship to settler colonialism in North America and beyond. The impact of their work has been so widespread that, alongside Locke the founder of liberalism and Locke the pivotal empiricist, we now find the figure of ‘Locke, the champion of big property, empire, and appropriation of the lands of Amerindians’. Locke has finally joined the canon of theorists of empire: but how much does he deserve his place there?

What it might mean to be a theorist of empire was profoundly shaped by the experience and practices of imperialism in the two centuries after 1757: that is, from the beginnings of European military dominance in South Asia to the first great wave of formal decolonisation outside Europe. James Tully has succinctly summarised Europe’s imperial vision in this period: