Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire

Sarah Irving

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138665224
• eBook ISBN: 9781317315216
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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.

1 ‘IN A PURE SOIL’: FRANCIS BACON’S EMPIRE OF KNOWLEDGE

The end of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.

Francis Bacon, New Atlantis (1627)¹

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. In the work of Bacon’s successors – the Hartlib Circle, Robert Boyle, the Royal Society and John Locke – the restoration of man’s Adamic empire became increasingly tied to the pursuit of English colonization. This is because over the course of the seventeenth century, one aspect of Adamic empire – the recovery of the earth’s fruitfulness – became more important than the recovery of man’s natural knowledge, and this agrarian dimension was intimately connected with the colonial ‘improvement’ of land. For Bacon, however, Adamic empire is about the recovery of perfect natural knowledge. Exploring Bacon’s work makes it possible to chart the historical shift in the conception of man’s dominion over the course of the seventeenth century.

Bacon’s work on ‘Humane Empire’ and its recovery is also illuminating on its own terms. The New World contained knowledge that would greatly advance the pursuit of restoring man’s natural knowledge, but Bacon doubted whether colonization was the best method for recreating this epistemic dominion. In fact, Bacon held humanist anxieties about the morality of colonization, and he proposed an explicitly non-colonial ideal of collecting knowledge in the New World. This is idealized in Bacon’s utopia, the New Atlantis (1627). Contrary to a great proportion of the scholarship which views this text as legitimating colonial possession, I will argue that Bacon’s New Atlantis challenged the idea that colonization was the best means of utilizing the New World in order to advance knowledge. Rather than establishing settler colonies, the people of Bensalem collected knowledge through the exploratory travels of scientists. These voyages of discovery represented Bacon’s ideal of a non-colonial means of recovering an epistemic empire, and they mirrored his real-life hope that the explorations of Elizabethan explorers could yield useful scientific information.

Bacon’s Language of Empire

It is useful to begin by outlining briefly the way that Bacon used the term ‘empire’ and noting some important linguistic ambiguities. Bacon’s primary use of the term was to denote man’s original power over the earth. The full title of Bacon’s ‘The Masculine Birth of Time’ (1602–3) is a good example. The Latin reads ‘Temporis Partus Masculus Sive Instauratio Magna Imperii Humani in Universum’,² which can be translated as ‘The Masculine Birth of Time or, The Great Instauration of the Empire of Man Over the Universe’. The full title of ‘Temporis Partus Masculus’ illustrates Bacon’s primary use of the term empire to mean the renewal (instauratio) of man’s original dominion over nature.

Four important points need to be made about Bacon’s use of the term ‘empire’. The first is that Bacon did not use the word to denote England’s overseas territories. In the early to mid seventeenth century, the meaning of ‘empire’ as territorial dominion of course existed, deriving from the Roman tradition in which ‘empire’ referred to Rome and her colonies. The key point here is the difference between ‘empire’ as a straightforward concrete noun, and empire as an abstract noun. At the time Bacon wrote, empire denoting a set of overseas colonies was used only to refer to the Roman Empire. It was not used to refer to England’s patchwork of Atlantic colonies until much later in the seventeenth century.³

Empire as an abstract noun, however, in the sense of having an empire over something, was more commonplace and could be used to denote power over the three kingdoms. This is the second point: not every time Bacon uses the term empire was he referring specifically to the plenary dominion of mankind over the earth. There are instances, for example, in which Bacon used the term as a straightforward metaphor for uncurtailed sovereignty, that is, in the Henrician tradition of ‘this realm of England is an empire’.⁴ The difference between the empire of Adam, and ‘this realm of England’, however, is one of context rather than meaning. That is, empire still denotes unlimited power. The use of the term to denote Adam’s empire, then, is a reference to a specific instance of that power as it related to man’s original dominion of knowledge over the creatures and resulting power over the earth. The fact that empire is a metaphor for unimpinged power draws our attention to a third point. For Bacon, dominion and empire were in most contexts synonyms.

The fourth point which we must keep in mind is that there is a profound ambiguity in Bacon’s work concerning who would reclaim man’s empire over the earth: mankind or England? Bacon’s language when he refers to Adam’s dominion, as we will see, is universal. Adam is a synecdoche for mankind. We know, however, that the overwhelming intention of Bacon’s work was to advance learning in order to enhance the power of England rather than mankind. This is an unresolved tension in Bacon’s work.

Although Bacon’s use of the language of empire was varied, the task of understanding his conception of Adamic empire is aided by the fact that he was not doing anything lexically new. What was new about Bacon’s work was his vision for the means of restoring man’s original empire through the collaboration of natural philosophers sponsored by the sovereign. The fact that this vision was accompanied by a scepticism about colonization compounds the significance of Bacon’s work to our understanding of the development of the concept of empire.

Bacon Scholarship Past and Present

Francis Bacon is not usually a figure included in histories of the British Empire. The lack of dialogue between the history of science and the intellectual history of the British Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is for the most part responsible. In recent years, however, a small number of histories of English colonization have included Bacon. One such is Andrew Fitzmaurice’s intellectual history, which brings the hitherto neglected context of humanism to bear upon colonization from the Tudor period onwards. Contrary to the assumption that English colonization was driven by the desire for profit, Fitzmaurice shows that early colonizers of America were often ‘skeptical of profit and nervous of foreign possessions at the same time that they saw both as possible sources of glory’.⁵ Fitzmaurice identifies a civic humanist language as the basis for Bacon’s concerns about ‘displanting’ indigenous people in his essay ‘Of Plantations’.⁶

In David Armitage’s Ideological Origins of the British Empire, the main significance of Bacon is as an author writing about the relationship between the three kingdoms in the mid sixteenth to early seventeenth century. Armitage shows Bacon ‘echoing King James’ aspirations’ in seeing the Ulster plantation as ‘a second brother to Union’,⁷ and then comparing the Virginia colony unfavourably to the Ulster plantation.⁸

While Bacon has not made much of an appearance in histories of British colonization and empire, he has a copious body of secondary literature devoted to his philosophy. The vast majority of this scholarship, however, does not see ventures into the Atlantic as playing any significant role in Bacon’s oeuvre. Aside from a few studies of the New Atlantis which see it, wrongly in my view, as a tract legitimating colonization, the common position is a fairly vague assumption about the analogous opening up of intellectual and geographic worlds.

Bacon scholarship has, however, paid close attention to the philosopher’s ideal of restoring dominion over the world. This was the aim of Bacon’s project, the Instauratio Magna, into which he incorporated most of his natural philosophy. The idea of the Great Instauration is the basis for Charles Webster’s seminal study of the Puritan influence upon seventeenth-century English science. For Webster, Bacon provides the original articulation of a project which shaped the following century of the natural philosophical innovation. ‘The fragmentary philosophical system bequeathed by Bacon became for puritan intellectuals both the basis for their conception of philosophical progress and the framework for their utopian social planning.’⁹ In short, the Great Instauration was the return of man’s complete dominion over nature.¹⁰

Webster notes that quotations from the book of Daniel appear frequently in Bacon’s early writings.¹¹ Daniel 12:4 is the source of Bacon’s epigraph on the title page of New Atlantis, ‘multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia’ – many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased. Webster is one of the few historians to recognize Bacon’s interest in the travels of his contemporaries Thomas Hariot and Walter Ralegh. This was particularly evident in New Atlantis, in which Bacon was ‘undoubtedly influenced by the imaginative and optimistic accounts of America and the Islands of the West Indies, published by Hakluyt, Raleigh and Harriot, or even by the stream of propaganda on the wonders of the New World issued by the promoters of the Virginia Company between 1606 and 1624’.¹² The focus of Webster’s book, however, is not upon Bacon but upon his legacy for the scientific revolution.

The work in which Bacon first articulated his idea of restoring dominion over the world was his ‘Temporis Partus Masculus’ (‘The Masculine Birth of Time’), written between 1601 and 1602, and first translated into English by Benjamin Farrington. The work is a critique of Aristotelian philosophy which relies heavily upon Biblical symbolism.¹³ Farrington’s commentary explores the idea, probably derived from Giordano Bruno, that ‘a new order of events was at hand, the specific quality of which would consist no longer in a mere imitation of nature but in her domination by man’.¹⁴

Bacon’s belief in the possibility of dominating – rather than imitating – nature was based upon an epistemological premise. This was the connection between man’s ability to know, and his capacity for making, for making was a way of dominating nature by reproducing its effects. Here the contrast between Bacon’s new method and scholastic philosophy is obvious. As Antonio Perez-Ramos has shown, Bacon’s philosophy is part of a tradition of ‘Maker’s Knowledge’.¹⁵ Brian Vickers explains that Bacon’s attitude towards rendering philosophy productive of human action ‘undoubtedly reflects that tendency in Renaissance thought to emphasize the power of the human will to make the vita activa the dominant model for man as a social animal’.¹⁶ Thus ‘to know something (a natural phenomenon) amounts to being able to (re)produce that very phenomenon on any material substratum susceptible of manifesting it’.¹⁷

The roots of Bacon’s idea of instauration are also informative. Charles Whitney demonstrates that the word instauration ‘alludes to the Vulgate’s [Bible’s] use of the term, which denoted the restoration of Solomon’s Temple’.¹⁸ The idea of instauration was not new to Bacon. Whitney showed that he ‘may have adopted the term after seeing Tycho Brahe’s Progymnasmatum Instauratae Astronomiae (Exercise of Renovated Astronomy, 1602), which, like the Instauratio Magna, is dedicated to King James’.¹⁹ Whitney argues that Bacon overlays a Roman idea of the cyclical renewal with a progressive and linear understanding of time. The Roman emperors used the term instauration as a way of claiming they would renew everything great about their empire.²⁰ It thus had a cyclical meaning. In the Biblical texts, however, there is a providential a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 ‘In a Pure Soil’: Francis Bacon’s Empire of Knowledge
• 2 Restoring Eden in America: The Hartlib Circle’s Pansophical Empire
• 3 Robert Boyle’s Protestant Colonial Project
• 4 The Royal Society and the Atlantic World
• 5 John Locke’s Language of Empire
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index