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.