UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

Francis Bacon on Imperial and Colonial Warfare

Zeitlin, Samuel Garrett; (2021) Francis Bacon on Imperial and Colonial Warfare. The Review of Politics , 83 (2) pp. 196-218. 10.1017/s0034670520001011. Green open access

[thumbnail of Zeitlin_francis-bacon-on-imperial-and-colonial-warfare.pdf]
Preview
Text
Zeitlin_francis-bacon-on-imperial-and-colonial-warfare.pdf

Download (241kB) | Preview

Abstract

This article offers a textual and historical reconstruction of Francis Bacon's thought on imperial and colonial warfare. Bacon holds that conquest, acquisition of peoples and territory through force, followed by subjugation, confers a legal right and title. Imperial expansion is justified both by arguments concerning the interstate balance of power and by arguments related to internal order and stability. On Bacon's view, a successful state must be expansionist, for two key reasons: first, as long as its rivals are expansionist, a state must keep up and even try to outpace them, and, second, a surplus population will foment civil war unless this “surcharge of people” is farmed out to colonies. These arguments for imperial state expansion are held to justify both internal and external colonization and empire. Paradoxically, Bacon holds that the internally colonized may be treated with greater severity, as suppressed rebels, than the externally colonized, who are more fitly a subject of the ius gentium. Bacon holds that toleration offers both an imperial stratagem and a comparative justification for why English and British imperial expansion is more desirable than Spanish imperial expansion. The article concludes with reflections about how one might understand the place of imperial and colonial projects in Bacon's thought, contending that these projects are central to an understanding of Bacon's political aims and thought more broadly.

Type: Article
Title: Francis Bacon on Imperial and Colonial Warfare
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1017/s0034670520001011
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034670520001011
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of University of Notre Dame. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Keywords: Francis Bacon, empire, colonies, war
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of History
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10176529
Downloads since deposit
Loading...
17Downloads
Download activity - last month
Loading...
Download activity - last 12 months
Loading...
Downloads by country - last 12 months
Loading...

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item