Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire.

Cook, Harold J.

Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire. By Sarah Irving. Empires in Perspective 5. London: Picketing and Chatto, 2008. xiii + 183 pp. $99.00 cloth.

Twenty-five years ago, Christopher Hill titled a book The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), showing how Puritan ideas changed the world. In 2000, David Armitage titled his book The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), turning the argument around by demonstrating how worldly practices give rise to articulations of them. One of Armitage's most forceful arguments was that the British Empire never quite reconciled dominium (the property and associated rights of a landlord) with imperium (the powers and authority of a monarch), so that the tensions between ownership and sovereignty could explode, as famously happened in the North American colonies. Irving positions her work against that of Armitage, arguing that in "the biblical tradition of empire, these two ideas existed in harmony." To explore this biblical heritage, Irving examines the writings of Francis Bacon and his seventeenth-century successors, who argued that the restoration of "man's earthly sovereignty" arose from improvement of the land. To make her point, Irving draws on a century of English literature on natural science and North America, finding the improvement of nature to be a key concept. In giving her attention to such ideas rather than ideologies, and words rather than deeds, she also harkens to the intellectual history of authors like Hill.

There is much of interest in Irving's account of the way that Bacon and other English advocates for the new science developed their ideas about "epistemic empire." Readers of this journal may have their interests particularly piqued by Irving's fine account of the close relationship drawn by members of the Hartlib Circle--who are often termed Puritans--between a knowledge of nature and proper husbandry, and how that relationship was thought to be fundamental for the recovery of dominion over nature. She is clear and convincing in making points like the symmetry in Bacon's writing between improving man's mind and improving his lot on earth. From the middle of the century onward intellectual empire and colonization were firmly linked, and the keen interest in North American projects evidenced by the Royal Society, Robert Boyle, and John Locke are clearly set out. Irving begins her introduction by noting Bacon's shareholding in the Virginia Company and Newfoundland Company, and the active involvement of Boyle with many of the trading companies of his day; she later notes Locke's work as Secretary to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina and as Secretary to the Council of Trade. But since Irving remains preoccupied with explicit ideas rather than interests, these are mainly anecdotes that establish the attentiveness of the virtuosi to settlement in North America rather than possible sources of their views. Perhaps the implication of science in empire points to common underlying ideologies after all.

On the question of whether the ideas she recounts had their origin in any particular religious outlook, too, direct argument is weak. The implicit causal argument for how empire was built upon biblical injunctions about improving nature--bringing together dominium and imperium--therefore remains underdeveloped, an argumentative resource rather than a motivating force. She notes no obvious sources of opposition to empire aside from pointing to a difference between the intelligence-gathering activities of Bacon's New Atlantis and the promotion of English settlement (which may not prove him to have been "anti-colonial," as she maintains). The concern for knowing and improving nature would then seem to be an articulation of a widespread English ideology rather than an argumentative position. Jorge Canizares-Esguerra has shown that in arguing for their own rights to imperium based upon how they connected biblical history to the Americas, Spanish authors often gave voice to a view that can also be found in many of the English authors Irving treats. At the same time, the emphasis on improvement was not nearly as clearly stated in (Protestant) Dutch colonial ideologies, as Benjamin Schmidt has shown. Such comparisons suggest that the texts Irving investigates were shaped more by the national forms taken by overseas exploitation than by key concepts, either biblical or scientific. It should also be noted that since the English were also concerned with projects in many parts of the world, hers is a study of writing about a subset of both Britain and empire. Irving's book will not, then, change many minds on questions about the ideology of the British Empire. It does, however, provide an excellent foundation for identifying the ways in which the English virtuosi linked the North American ventures to ideas about the understanding and improvement of nature.

Harold J. Cook

Brown University

doi: 10.1017/S0009640711000989