Trade, Plunder And Settlement: Maritime Enterprise And The Genesis of The British Empire, 1480 1630

This book examines the cultural, economic, and social forces that shaped the development of the British empire in the eighteenth century. The empire is placed in a broad historiographical context informed by important recent work on the 'fiscal-military state', and 'gentlemanly capitalism'.

"Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire" represents a first 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. Conversely, historians of science have not investigated the way that seventeenth century natural philosophers' concept of empire was intimately connected to England's colonisation of the Atlantic.