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Essays on Liberalism and Empire

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Essays on Liberalism and Empire CONTENTS • Acknowledgments xi 1. Introduction: Reordering the World 1 Political Thought and Empire 3 Structure of the Book 8 Part I: Frames 2. The Dream Machine: On Liberalism and Empire 19 Languages of Empire 20 Intertextual Empire: Writing Liberal Imperialism 26 O n Settler Colonialism 32 The Tyranny of the Canon 48 3. What Is Liberalism? 62 Constructing Liberalism: Scholarly Purposes and Interpretive Protocols 65 A Summative Conception 69 Liberalism before Locke 73 Wars of Position: Consolidating Liberalism 81 Conclusion: Conscripts of Liberalism 90 4. Ideologies of Empire 91 Imperial Imaginaries 94 Ideologies of Justification 101 Ideologies of Governance 106 Ideologies of Resistance 110 Conclusions 115 Part II: Themes 5. Escape Velocity: Ancient History and the Empire of Time 119 The Time of Empire: Narratives of Decline and Fall 121 Harnessing the Time Spirit: On Imperial Progress 132 The Transfiguration of Empire 141 6. The Idea of a atriotP Queen? The Monarchy, the Constitution, and the Iconographic Order of Greater Britain, 1860–1900 148 viii CONTENTS Constitutional Patriotism and the Monarchy 152 Civic Republicanism and the Colonial Order 160 Conclusions 165 7. Imagined Spaces: Nation, State, and Territory in the British Colonial Empire, 1860–1914 166 Salvaging Empire 168 Remaking the People 173 Translocalism: Expanding the Public 178 Conclusions 181 8. The Project for a New Anglo Century: Race, Space, and Global Order 182 Empire, Nation, State: On Greater Britain 183 The Reunion of the Race: On Anglo- America 189 Afterlives of Empire: Anglo- America and Global Governance 196 Millennial Dreams, or, Back to the Future 204 Part III: Thinkers 9. John Stuart Mill on Colonies 211 On Systematic Colonization: From Domestic to Global 214 Colonial Autonomy, Character, and Civilization 224 Melancholic Colonialism and the Pathos of Distance 229 Conclusions 236 10. International Society in Victorian Political Thought: T. H. Green, Herbert Spencer, and Henry Sidgwick With Casper Sylvest 237 Progress, Justice, and Order: On Liberal Internationalism 239 International Society: Green, Spencer, Sidgwick 243 Civilization, Empire, and the Limits of International Morality 258 Conclusions 264 11. John Robert Seeley and the Political Theology of Empire 265 Enthusiasm for Humanity 268 On Nationalist Cosmopolitanism 276 Expanding England: Democracy, Federalism, and the World-­State 281 Empire as Polychronicon: India and Ireland 290 12. Republican Imperialism: J. A. Froude and the Virtue of Empire 297 John Stuart Mill and Liberal Civilizing Imperialism 299 Republican Themes in Victorian Political Thought 302 J. A. Froude and the Pathologies of the Moderns 307 Dreaming of Rome: The Uses of History and the Future of “Oceana” 311 Conclusions 319 CONTENTS ix 13. Alter Orbis: E. A. Freeman on Empire and Racial Destiny 321 Palimpsest: A World of Worlds 323 The “Dark Abyss”: Freeman on Imperial Federation 327 On Racial Solidarity 334 14. Democracy and Empire: J. A. Hobson, L. T. Hobhouse, and the Crisis of Liberalism 341 Confronting Modernity 342 Hobhouse and the Ironies of Liberal History 345 Hobson and the Crisis of Liberalism 354 Conclusions 361 15. Coda: (De)Colonizing Liberalism 363 Bibliography 373 Index 431 CHAPTER 1 Introduction • Reordering the World [C]entral to the lives of all empires have been the ways in which they have been constituted through language and their own self- representations: the discourses that have arisen to describe, defend, and criticize them, and the historical narratives that have been invoked to make sense of them.1 —Jennifer Pitts rom the earliest articulations of political thinking in the European tradi- Ftion to its most recent iterations, the nature, justification, and criticism of foreign conquest and rule has been a staple theme of debate. Empires, after all, have been among the most common and the most durable political formations in world history. However, it was only during the long nineteenth century that the European empire- states developed sufficient technological superiority over the peoples of Africa, the Americas, and Asia to make occupation and governance on a planetary scale seem both feasible and desirable, even if the reality usually fell far short of the fantasy. As Jürgen Osterhammel reminds us, the nineteenth century was “much more an age of empire than . an age of nations and nation- states.”2 The largest of those empires was governed from London. Even the most abstract works of political theory, Quentin Skinner argues, “are never above the battle; they are always part of the battle itself.”3 The ideo- 1 Pitts, “Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism,” Annual Review of Political Science, 13 (2010), 226. 2 Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton, 2014), 392. On the nineteenth- century imperial order, see also C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford, 2004); Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World His- tory (Princeton, 2010), chs. 10–11. On some of the distinctive features of Victorian imperialism, see Duncan Bell, “Victorian Visions of Global Order,” in Victorian Visions of Global Order, ed. Bell (Cambridge, 2007), 1–25. 3 Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge, 2008), xvi. 2 CHAPTER 1 logical conflict I chart in the following pages was one fought over the bitterly contested terrain of empire. The main, though not the only, combatants I sur- vey are British liberal political thinkers—philosophers, historians, politicians, imperial administrators, political economists, journalists, even an occasional novelist or poet. Multifaceted and constantly mutating, liberalism was chiefly a product of the revolutionary ferment of the late eighteenth century, of the complex dialectic between existing patterns of thought and the new egalitar- ian and democratic visions pulsating through the Euro- Atlantic world. A squabbling family of philosophical doctrines, a popular creed, a resonant moral ideal, the creature of a party machine, a comprehensive economic sys- tem, a form of life: liberalism was all of these and more. Intellectuals were central to the propagation and renewal of this expansive ideology, though they were far from the only agents involved. From Bentham to Hobson, from Macaulay to Mill, from Spencer to Sidgwick, a long parade of thinkers helped sculpt the contours of the evolving tradition, elaborating influential accounts of individual freedom, moral psychology, social justice, economic theory, and constitutional design. Liberal thinkers wrote extensively about the patholo- gies and potentialities of empire, developing both ingenious defenses and biting critiques of assorted imperial projects. The conjunction of a vibrant in- tellectual culture and a massive and expanding imperial system makes nineteenth- century Britain a vital site for exploring the connections between political thought and empire in general, and liberal visions of empire in par- ticular. The vast expanses of the British empire provided both a practical labo- ratory and a space of desire for liberal attempts to reorder the world. Reordering the World collects together a selection of essays that I have writ- ten over the last decade. Some explore the ways in which prominent thinkers tackled the legitimacy of conquest and imperial rule, while others dissect themes that pervaded imperial discourse or address theoretical and historio- graphical puzzles about liberalism and empire. They are united by an ambi- tion to probe the intellectual justifications of empire during a key period in modern history. The materials I analyze are the product of elite metropolitan culture, including works of technical philosophy and recondite history, but also pamphlets, speeches, editorials, periodical articles, and personal corre- spondence. Such sources helped constitute the intellectual lifeblood of Victo- rian political discourse, feeding into the creation of a distinctive “imperial commons,” a globe- spanning though heavily stratified public constituted in part through the production and circulation of books, periodicals, and news- papers.4 The bulk of the volume focuses on the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, the years that Eric Hobsbawm once characterized as the “age of empire.”5 4 See Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr, “The Spine of Empire?,” inTen Books That Shaped the British Empire, ed. Burton and Hofmeyr (Durham, NC, 2014), 1–28. Later, of course, radio, cinema, and television added new dimensions to the imperial commons. 5 Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (London, 1987). INTRODUCTION 3 During that period the empire assumed a newfound significance in political argument, looming large over debates on a plethora of issues from social pol- icy to geopolitical strategy and beyond. However, I also explore earlier cur- rents of political thinking, and trace some of the echoes of nineteenth- century ideologies across the twentieth century and into the present. Political Thought and Empire As late as 2006 Anthony Pagden could write that the study of empire had until recently been “relegated to the wastelands of the academy.”6 It was dragged in from the cold during the 1980s as postcolonial scholarship perco- lated through the humanities (and more unevenly across the social sciences). Imperial history was rejuvenated, moving swiftly from the periphery to the center of historical research, where it remains ensconced to this day.7 Political theory, like political science more broadly, has proven rather more resistant to the imperial turn.
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