ABSTRACT
This chapter tracks some of the evidence for and consequences of Bacon's alignment of new learning on the politics of an "imperial" expansionist project. It argues in particular that in the politics of colonial expansion and, equally importantly, in the writings on that expansion–the Histories, as their authors so often called them, Bacon found issues of method that completed those he knew from natural philosophy, rhetoric, and jurisprudence. Bacon's idea that knowledge was the same kind of process as the "enlargement of territories" thus changes a traditional notion of natural philosophy. Bacon, like everyone else at the court, would have known of Ralegh's Indians and doubtless met them–not that this matters much, since their presence only confirmed long-familiar assumptions, but they were physical reminders of the Americas' role in these assumptions. He always stressed the importance of finding a right language to express nature's works and pass on knowledge.
