The aim of Francis Bacon's utopian society Bensalem is generally accepted as emblematic of his natural philosophy. The recovery of ‘Human Empire’ was an idea to which Bacon referred many times across the corpus of his work, from the ‘The Masculine Birth of Time’ (1601–2)to the New Atlantis (1627). Despite its significance, scholars have not placed Bacon's ideal of ‘Human Empire’ in the context of England's Atlantic colonial ventures. Yet Bacon had much to say about English colonization and exploration of the New World. He was a member of both the Virginia Company and the Newfoundland Company; he wrote essays on plantations and empire; he argued for the general naturalization of Irish subjects; and he gave advice to the Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth and then James I on the administration of the Irish plantations. Most significantly, Bacon used the term ‘empire’ to describe the central tenet of his project, The Great Instauration. This was the ideal of restoring man's original dominion over nature.

Was there any relationship between Bacon's conception of man's prelapsarian empire and his interest in the New World and colonization? The answer is both surprising and complex. Bacon's vision of the restoration of man's dominion over nature contained an important role for knowledge gleaned in the New World but, importantly, this knowledge was to be collected through exploration rather than through establishing colonies. There is no connection in Bacon's work between colonies and the restoration of man's empire, the latter of which is an epistemological rather than territorial pursuit.

Why, then, begin this book with a chapter on Bacon? Precisely because the absence of connection between colonies and man's prelapsarian empire in Bacon's work enables us to understand the degree and nature of historical change over the seventeenth century.