ABSTRACT
Bruce McLeod is typical of cultural historians in regarding a Puritan culture of discipline as the ground-plot not just for early modern capitalism, but also for the colonial projects of the seventeenth century. Behind the widespread conception of early modern geometry and geography as ‘discipline’ lies a broad consensus in the recent cultural history of the English seventeenth century which casts the period as an age of individualism and economic reform. In the obsession with spatial discipline which McLeod finds in early Puritan writing, in particular, McLeod identifies the perspective of ‘yeomen, artisans, and gentry’, concerned to organize material and social space in the interests of improvement, productivity, and their own benefit. John Locke demonstrates a distinctly Baconian faith in science, and specifically mathematics, as the mark and means of human improvement, and the dividing line between natural and civil man.
