Introduction

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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.

— JENNIFER PITTS

From the earliest articulations of political thinking in the European tradition 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." 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." The ideological 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 survey 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 egalitarian 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 system, 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 pathologies and potentialities of empire, developing both ingenious defenses and biting critiques of assorted imperial projects. The conjunction of a vibrant intellectual 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 particular. The vast expanses of the British empire provided both a practical laboratory and a space of desire for liberal attempts to reorder the world.

Reordering the World collects together a selection of essays that I have written 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 historiographical puzzles about liberalism and empire. They are united by an ambition 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 correspondence. Such sources helped constitute the intellectual lifeblood of Victorian 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 newspapers. 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." During that period the empire assumed a newfound significance in political argument, looming large over debates on a plethora of issues from social policy to geopolitical strategy and beyond. However, I also explore earlier currents 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." It was dragged in from the cold during the 1980s as postcolonial scholarship percolated 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. Political theory, like political science more broadly, has proven rather more resistant to the imperial turn. During the postwar years the field was characterized by a revealing silence about both the history of empire and the wave of decolonization then overturning many of the governing norms and institutions that had shaped the architecture of world order for five centuries. Adam Smith remarked in the Wealth of Nations that the "discovery" of the Americas was one of the "most important events recorded in the history of mankind," and he and his contemporaries, as well as many of their nineteenth-century heirs, wrestled incessantly with its meaning and consequences. Political theorists barely registered its passing. Mainstream approaches to the subject, at least in the Anglo-American tradition, continue to argue about the nature of justice, democracy, and rights, while ignoring the ways in which many of the ideas and...