Reviews of Books

Years ago, when I was just beginning work on the seventeenth-century English Atlantic world, I attended a conference on the British empire at the Institute for Historical Research at the University of London. Having thought of the conference as a fairly effortless introduction to British scholarship on empire, I was dismayed and a little sheepish to find that "the British Empire" meant the nineteenth-century empire. In session after session on everything from imperial policy to gendered discourse about the subaltern subject, everyone else knew that the empire dated after 1776 and centered in the Far East. When I asked about the earlier history of the empire, I was greeted with blank stares. I realized that just as early American historians were not then much interested in empire, imperial historians were not thinking about colonies in the Americas. On either side of the Atlantic, few shared my new interest in examining the early Anglo Atlantic as a manifestation of empire.	1
Much has changed since that time, as David Armitage's compelling study of The Ideological Origins of the British Empire makes plain. As he explains, it is no accident that the eighteenth-century British empire has been invisible to later generations. The very ideology that underpinned it served to mask its existence, in a dynamic reaching right to the heart of the imperial project that was the "first" British empire.	2
The Ideological Origins of the British Empire provides a learned and stimulating contribution to a number of areas of scholarly inquiry. As the title suggests, it offers an intellectual history of ideas about empire. It is firmly embedded in the "new British history" and is especially attentive to the history of early modern state building. Armitage also shares the rising interest in the Atlantic world, and he connects ideology to an emerging British identity in that world.	3
Armitage takes the "British" in his title seriously. Why, he asks, did the empire assume a "British," as opposed to "English" or "Scottish" cast? His focus is on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century trail of texts that led toward a British conceptualization. In this inquiry, the great Elizabethan champion of overseas expansion, Richard Hakluyt, takes second place to his compatriot and editor Samuel Purchas. Usually, the two men are seen as participants in a common project. In Armitage's view, "Purchas's attention to the Three Kingdoms of the Stuart multiple monarchy, his cosmopolitan historiography and his attempt to place British history within the wider schemes of theological time made his works strictly incomparable to Hakluyt" (p. 81). Tracing the intellectual reverberations Purchas set in motion, Armitage explicates those thinkers who contributed to the creation, by the early eighteenth century, of a conception of a political community encompassing both the British Isles and the territories beyond.	. . .