ABSTRACT

By the Restoration we can see ‘improvement’ entering into an established status which it maintained throughout the eighteenth century, to be applied not only to Britain but throughout its burgeoning empire. ‘Improvement’ had become the express mission of government, and the stated intention of laws. e whole surface of the land could be now assigned to two categories: ‘improved’ and ‘unimproved’. But such an ordering applied not just to land but to society as a whole: improved land was a particular aspect of the enterprise of improving England, which was equally a maritime task (as stated in Andrew Yarranton’s England’s Improvement by Land and Sea of 1677-81) and one that embraced

‘the improvement too of arts and sciences, and the conveniences of life’, in the words of John Locke’s First Treatise.4