Rarely do historians describe seventeenth-century English natural philosophers as colonialists. Rarely, too, has there been serious scholarly discussion of natural philosophers’ involvement in the intellectual and practical processes of English empire-building. This is a curious omission. It may surprise some historians of the British Empire to learn that Robert Boyle served on the board of the English East India Company, held shares in the Hudson's Bay Company, and served as President of the New England Company, a missionary society which sponsored the translation of the Bible into the indigenous Algonquian language. He also served on the Council for Foreign Plantations. Boyle's intellectual predecessor Francis Bacon held shares in the Virginia Company, the Newfoundland Company, and wrote extensively on the issue of colonizing Ireland. Moreover, many of Boyle's contemporaries in the Hartlib Circle, as well as those in the Royal Society of London such as Sir Hans Sloane and Henry Oldenburg, maintained an avid interest in the English colonies.

Natural philosophers’ colonial involvement, and their absence from histories of the British Empire's intellectual origins, compels a historical question. What understanding of empire did natural philosophers hold? The answer to this question is startling. In his tract, Of the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy, Boyle described his overarching project as the re-creation of ‘The Empire of Man over inferior Creatures’. This was the framework through which he understood his involvement in the institutions of English colonization.

Boyle's motivation for involving himself in English colonization was not that of establishing virtuous new commonwealths in North America. Nor was it primarily about the profit from the plantations in the Caribbean or in Ireland, the latter of which he was himself a direct beneficiary. It was not even England, as a realm under the unchallenged authority of King Charles II, which constituted Boyle's primary ideal of ‘empire’. Rather, the ‘empire of man over inferior creatures’ denoted the original dominion that Adam commanded over nature in the Garden of Eden.