Represents a history of the British Empire that takes account of the sense of empire as intellectual as well as geographic dominion: the historiography of the British Empire, with its preoccupation of empire as geographically unchallenged sovereignty, overlooks the idea of empire as intellectual dominion.

Sarah Irving

Introduction; Chapter 1 'In a Pure Soil': Francis Bacon's Empire of Knowledge; Chapter 2 Restoring Eden in America: The Hartlib Circle's Pansophical Empire; Chapter 3 Robert Boyle's Protestant Colonial Project; Chapter 4 The Royal Society and the Atlantic World; Chapter 5 John Locke's Language of Empire; Chapter 6 Conclusion;