In the past decade, the scholarship on John Locke has recognized the influence of Locke's colonial interests upon his political writings. The ‘colonial reading’ of the Two Treatises of Government, pioneered by James Tully and Barbara Arneil in the early 1990s and more recently developed by Anthony Pagden, Duncan Ivison and David Armitage, has been the major contribution of this strand of scholarship. The majority of these historians have assumed, however, that Locke's interest in the American colonies was generated solely by his professional work for the Earl of Shaftesbury, the Council for Trade and Plantations, the Proprietors of the Carolina Company, and the Board of Trade. They assume that Locke's references to the Americas can be entirely explained by his political defence of colonies as sources of trade, population growth and, above all, property, in the context of a post-Restoration debate about the utility of colonization.

While helpful, this political context does not sufficiently explain Locke's ongoing fascination with colonization and the Americas. In fact this interpretation leaves us with a disjunction between the colonial Locke and Locke the philosopher, Locke the natural scientist and Locke the political economist. I want to suggest that there was another motivation behind Locke's interest in the American colonies and therefore another context in which we should understand his work. Deriving from Locke's concern for the correct use and ends of man's knowledge was his argument that the proper ‘Imployment’ of men, ‘lies in those Enquiries, and in that sort of Knowledge, which is most suited to our natural Capacities and carries in it our greatest interest, i.e. the Condition of our Eternal Estate’. Knowledge, therefore, should help man to extract from the earth the ‘Advantages of Ease and Health … thereby increas[ing] our stock of Conveniences for this Life’. This was an ethos for the improvement of both the earth and the condition of man.

The ethos of ‘improvement’, the cornerstone of Locke's political philosophy, was a language of empire. Locke articulated the idea of improvement in an explicitly religious context in which improving the earth would return man to his divinely ordained position of dominion over it.

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.

Introduction

In so far as the historical literature has identified a dialogue between Europeans and Indians in relation to the practice of modern astronomy in colonial India, the focus has for the most part been on the endeavours undertaken under the aegis of Indian princes. In particular, there has been mention of the observatory established at Lucknow under the King of Awadh. An example that has attracted somewhat less attention is the observatory that was built at Trivandrum under the Raja of Travancore. Hence evidence for engagement between Europeans and Indians in these observatories needs to be considered, the better to understand matters in Bombay and Calcutta. Indeed, despite being nodal points of European colonialism in India, the coastal metropolises have been neglected as sites of meaningful interaction in relation to the practice of modern astronomy. However, both in the observatory and in the field, European astronomers had to engage with Indians, not least due to the identified difficulties in undertaking the work at hand. Through tracing the fine grain of the source material for reconstructing the institutionalization of official astronomy in India – somewhat like the ethnomethodologist of SSK – it is possible to obtain a sense of this engagement. Moreover, the nature of the engagement demands a rethinking of the categories that have been used to describe it. Kapil Raj has advanced the concept of ‘co-construction’ or ‘co-constructive processes’ to describe collaborative structures in the development of modern science.

That so great a man as Charles Darwin could be so well liked by his contemporaries was due in no small part to his natural modesty. On scientific matters, as in everyday life, he was approachable, naturally tending throughout his life to assume the part of the eager student rather than the overbearing teacher. His modesty was nowhere more marked than in his attitude to botany. On being elected to the illustrious French Institute in 1878, he wrote to his old friend Asa Gray, ‘It is rather a good joke that I should be elected in the Botanical Section, as the extent of my knowledge is little more than that a daisy is a compositous plant, and a pea a leguminous one’. To the very end of his life he protested that he was not a botanist; or he would have people believe that he was, ‘one of those botanists who do not know one plant from another’. Such claims fooled few of his contemporaries. Charles was not as botanically naïve as he would have had others believe.

From earliest childhood, he had learned and read extensively about plants and the botanical discoveries of explorers, such as Joseph Banks and Alexander von Humbolt – he particularly admired the latter's books and re-read them several times. He did not study botany in any formal sense while at Cambridge, but he had forged an exceptionally close relationship with the Professor of Botany. After leaving the university, he had studied the plants of South America during the voyage of the Beagle and when he settled with Emma at Down House he immediately began to use his garden and greenhouse to make extensive observations on botanical phenomena as diverse as mechanisms of pollination and the dynamics of seedling establishment. As this and the next chapter will demonstrate, Charles's comments were, for once in his life, intended to mislead.

The previous chapters have characterized Ganot's physique and Atkinson's physics through the analysis of the structure, order and narrative in their textbooks. Their practices as writers and readers had a major role in the production of their textbook physics. They wrote for intended readers defined in collaboration with their publishers, and they intended to communicate specific meanings and forms of pedagogy, scientific practice and reading. However, they were not always successful. Their books were, in certain cases, intensively read by readers who were not part of the major readerships they addressed. And readers did not always subscribe to the meanings and follow the ways of reading intended by authors and publishers, but performed an active process of appropriation. The characterization of Ganot's physique and Atkinson's physics would be incomplete without taking into account their appropriation by readers. Accordingly, this chapter characterizes the readers of Ganot's and Atkinson's textbooks and their readings, and it examines their contribution to the shaping of nineteenth-century physics.

By 1881, having sold 204,000 copies of the Traité in eighteen editions and 51,500 copies of the Cours in seven editions, we can assume that Ganot's physique found roughly a similar or higher number of readers since the 1850s. The average life of the Traité's and Cours's editions was two and three years, respectively, periods in which, on average, around 11,000 copies of the former and 7,000 copies of the latter were purchased.

In October 1667, Henry Oldenburg, the Secretary of the Royal Society of London, wrote to John Winthrop Jr, the Governor of Connecticut, reminding him of his responsibility to help the Society ‘lay open … an Empire of Learning’ as Edmond Halley put it in the preface to the Philosophical Transactions in 1686.In the forty years following the Restoration, Winthrop was one of many correspondents of the Royal Society, sometimes Fellows themselves, who would send back ‘rarities’, ‘curiosities’ and detailed knowledge from the colonial periphery to London. This transfer of knowledge was tangible and haphazard; letters and wooden boxes were shipped across the Atlantic. The former recorded natural histories of places throughout the Americas and observations of weather patterns, while the wooden boxes contained berries, soil samples, rocks and occasionally even animal specimens.

This chapter explores the colonial dimension of the Royal Society's extensive correspondence with men throughout the New World. The colonial context is particularly illuminating: the Society conceived of correspondence with the New World as a vital part of its project to restore man'sepistemic dominion over nature.

The Royal Society engaged in two practices of knowledge collection and organization. The first was the attempt to create an encyclopedic natural history; a practice which relied heavily upon information sent from England's Atlantic and Caribbean possessions.

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.

Having been caught ‘at great personal hazard’ five years earlier off the coast of Africa, The Talking Fish arrived in Liverpool in early 1859 and was exhibited throughout January. In February it appeared in Manchester and by the 5 May 1859, The Talking and Performing Fish was on show at No. 191 Piccadilly, London. Its appearance was received with a mixture of great excitement, curiosity and amused scepticism, attracting large audiences and much attention in the press. The Fish was twelve feet in length, weighing eight hundredweights, with two rows of teeth, its body covered with fine hair, but its most striking feature was its ability to articulate the English words ‘Mama’, ‘Papa’ and ‘John’ (the name of its keeper). Although ‘ferocious and dangerous to its enemy’, it would kiss the face and hands of its owner, allowing itself to be viewed at close proximity and to be stroked by its astonished public. Soon after its initial appearance in Piccadilly, The Talking Fish began to develop a presence within other popular entertainments. At the Adelphi Theatre in London, the Fish became the subject of a comic play, and it was swiftly parodied and characterized as a vehicle for topical and political simile both in pantomime and in the satirical press. Indeed, the meaning of the Fish's short performing life was largely created through the plethora of playbills, press advertisements and reviews, satirical articles and illustrations.

The American School

Apart from the individual achievements of John Winthrop, Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush and Thomas Jefferson, the first real triumph of science in the New World was the formulation of polygenic theories of human origins by what became known as the American School. James Dekay proclaimed that as America had rid itself of ‘our colonial situation, [and] the embarrassments arising from our exposed and peculiar position … Those interested in Natural History were before then too widely scattered over this extensive country to allow of that familiar interchange of opinions which necessarily elicits further inquiries and discoveries’. This had changed by the end of the War of 1812. Major expeditions to map out the continent and ‘enlarge the boundaries of Natural science’ were undertaken. Improvements in communication and the growth of the population created the basis for natural history to become an area of serious inquiry in the United States. Already in 1826 Dekay could speak with nationalistic pride of the accomplishments of American naturalists and the

Eight years after the death of its author in 1870, the Royal Institution of Cornwall reissued Jonathan Couch's A Cornish Fauna. The Fauna had originally been published in three volumes from 1838 to 1844 and coauthored by Jonathan and his son Richard. The 1878 edition was published in one handy volume and combined the work of father and son with substantial additions from a new group of Cornish naturalists: Joshua B. Rowe, Thomas Cornish, E. H. Rodd and C. Spence Bates. In a revised preface, edited by his son Thomas after his death, Jonathan Couch made a forthright claim as to Cornwall's value to natural history more generally:

Couch also noted the lack of need for any defence of or apology for ‘the study of the natural productions of a limited region’, saying that: