The Ideological Origins of the British Empire

David Armitage presents the first comprehensive history of British conceptions of empire for half a century tracing the emergence of British imperial identity from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries. This book sheds new light on major British political thinkers from Sir Thomas Smith to David Hume by providing novel accounts of the British problem in the early modern period of the relationship between Protestantism and empire of theories of property liberty and political economy in imperial perspective and of the imperial contribution to the emergence of the British identity.