Francis Bacon on Imperial and Colonial Warfare

Samuel Garrett Zeitlin

doi:10.1017/s0034670520001011

Abstract

AbstractThis 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.

Highlights

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was deeply involved in various trans-Atlantic colonial projects,1 sitting as a member of Council for the Virginia Company of
Imperial expansion is justified both by arguments concerning the interstate balance of power and by arguments related to internal order and stability
Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was deeply involved in various trans-Atlantic colonial projects,1 sitting as a member of Council for the Virginia Company of Samuel Garrett Zeitlin is Hong Kong Link Early-Career Research Fellow and College Lecturer in Politics, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RH, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Summary

The Title of the Sword

Empire begins with acquisition through force, followed by subjugation, and Bacon’s thought on the matter begins with the title of conquest. Alliances made by colonies and “plantations,” for Bacon, writing on the Virginia Colony in “Of Plantations,” are sought by means of war In his parliamentary speech on behalf of the 1597 Subsidy Bill, Bacon would critique Spanish colonial rule for “the great and barbarous cruelties which they have committed upon the poor Indians”—where, in his presentation, the Spanish colonial power, and not the Native Americans, is described as “barbarous.” Across his political and literary career, from his parliamentary speeches in the 1590s to his writings after his fall from power, Bacon deployed his juxtaposition of his favored mode of English engagement with native populations in contrast to Spanish colonial administration as an ideological warrant for the superiority of English and British claims to empire over and against their Spanish opponents. Relative power diminishes and one risks the loss of one’s state

Plantations and the Bounds of Empire

The Irish Plantation

Toleration as a Stratagem of Empire

Conclusion