Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire

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Sarah Irving

Empires in Perspective

Irving places seventeenth-century science in the context of England’s colonization of the Atlantic world. She argues that men of science held a conception of empire which has been overlooked by scholars. This was the idea of man’s original dominion over the earth. Endowed to Adam in the Garden of Eden, this mastery over the world consisted in his perfect knowledge of nature. In the Fall, however, Adam lost his omniscience and consequently his earthly empire.

Scientists, including Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle and John Locke, believed that it was England’s task to restore man’s dominion over nature. In this project, the Atlantic colonies were a repository of lost knowledge; a storehouse of information about climate, animals, plants and people. Bringing the history of early modern science to bear upon the intellectual origins of the British Empire, Irving investigates the way that England’s colonial empire became tied to the redemptive project of restoring man’s empire of knowledge.

Irving was awarded 2006 Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction for this book.

Sample pages

• Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire: Introduction
• Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire: Index

Readership

Empire Studies, History of Science, History of Travel and Exploration, Early Modern History

Contents

Introduction
1 ‘In a Pure Soil’: Francis Bacon and the Empire of Knowledge
2 The Hartlib Circle’s Pansophical Empire
3 Robert Boyle’s Programme for Empire
4 Museums and Natural Histories: The Royal Society and the Atlantic World 1660-1700
5 All Things Richly to Enjoy: John Locke and the Colonial Language of Improvement

Reviews

' ... draws in a number of intriguing and traditionally overlooked colonial aspects of the careers of eminent philosophers ... '
– James Delbourgo, British Journal for the History of Science

'provides 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, Church History

Related titles

• Early Biographies of Isaac Newton, 1660–1885
• The Historiography of the Chemical Revolution: Patterns of Interpretation in the History of Science
• Robert Boyle: By Himself and His Friends: With a Fragment of William Wotton's lost Life of Boyle
• The Correspondence of Robert Boyle, 1636–1691
• The Works of Robert Boyle
• The World of Carolus Clusius: Natural History in the Making, 1550–1610

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