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.