A generation of recent scholarship has fundamentally revised understandings of liberalism's relation to empire and in particular of John Locke's relationship to settler colonialism in North America and beyond. What it might mean to be a theorist of empire was profoundly shaped by the experience and practices of imperialism in the two centuries between roughly 1757 and 1960: that is, from the beginning of European military dominance in South Asia to the first great wave of formal decolonization outside Europe. There can be no doubt that Locke was a specifically colonial thinker, if by that we mean simply someone who devoted much thought and attention to the settlement and governance of colonies. Locke's imperial vision was comparatively less wide-ranging than that of many contemporary English political economists. Locke can only be described as a theorist of empire in a narrowly restricted definition of that term.