William Penn’s Imperial Landscape: Improvement, Political Economy, and Ecological Imperialism in the Pennsylvania Project

This paper examines William Penn’s imperial vision and his Pennsylvania project in the context of early modern British imperialism, particularly focusing on Penn’s exposure to contemporary discussions on political economy and natural philosophy and application of knowledge to his colonial enterprise. The emphasis in historiography on his religious motivation for the freedom of conscience and benign attitude towards Indian affairs  has obscured Penn’s commitment to the English empire and his role as an active colonizer in the Delaware Valley. Contextualizing Penn’s writings and practices on colonization in the increasing flow of knowledge economy about the human and natural worlds in the late-seventeenth-century England and its empire, this study shed fresh light on William Penn’s Pennsylvania Project in particular and the role of knowledge in the English colonization of North America in general.

In the age of England’s national and imperial expansion, the concept of “improvement” drove people to reform their material conditions as well as knowledge about the human and natural worlds. The practical use of knowledge, in the forms of agricultural treatises, natural history and political arithmetic, became popular until the mid-seventeenth century, and reformers and projectors brought their expertise to improve the condition of England’s colonial empire as well as the country’s domestic economy. The scrutiny of William Penn’s pamphlets and letters on his colonial project reveals that Penn formed his colonization schemes with the help of the discourse of reformed knowledge—in particular, political economy and agricultural improvement. This paper focuses particularly on Penn’s view on the natural world and its potential use to improve the condition of his colony—in other words, to produce profitable commodities. By examining Penn’s account on the natural world and engagement in agricultural experiments, I argue how knowledge contributed to ecological imperialism in late-seventeenth-century Pennsylvania.