Empire is the clash of bodies, weapons and ideas. When the rock musician Neil Young described a ‘white boat coming up the river’ in his arresting song ‘Powder-finger’, he could have been writing a metaphor for British imperialism. Armed with a gun and flying a flag, the boat's arrival heralds not negotiation but conquest. From the marshy coast of the Chesapeake to the rocky inlets of Sydney Harbour, the invasion of the white boat marked a new epoch in world history. Empires shaped the modern world and they still animate our political imagination.

Even in a post-colonial era we remain acutely conscious of the phenomenon of empire. Imperialism is one of the most prominent and contested concepts in understanding contemporary international politics. This fact contributes to its complexity, but also to its intellectual appeal. If, as Sankar Muthu wrote, one of the reasons we study the history of political thought is to ‘gain the perspective of another set of assumptions and arguments that are shaped by different historical sensibilities’ then there are few more compelling subjects than empire.

This book investigates how the idea of the British Empire came into being. What constellation of events and intellectual manoeuvres produced the conception of the British Empire that we hold today? Such a discussion of ideas might sound esoteric, even arcane. Intellectual historians are often accused of neglecting the material conditions of people's daily lives. This is a book about ideas, certainly. But it is not a book about ideas that had no influence upon the experiences of men and women. The subject of this study is a tradition of empire that helped found the theory of property that legitimized the transplantation – and dispossession – of people throughout the British colonies.

My project is to investigate a central part of the ideological origins of the British Empire. I want to understand the connection between an idea of empire as man's plenary dominion over the earth in the Garden of Eden, and the early English colonization of the Atlantic world.