Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire
A leading scholar of British political thought explores the relationship between liberalism and empire

Reordering the World is a penetrating account of the complexity and contradictions found in liberal visions of empire. Focusing mainly on nineteenth-century Britain—at the time the largest empire in history and a key incubator of liberal political thought—Duncan Bell sheds new light on some of the most important themes in modern imperial ideology.

The book ranges widely across Victorian intellectual life and beyond. The opening essays explore the nature of liberalism, varieties of imperial ideology, the uses and abuses of ancient history, the imaginative functions of the monarchy, and fantasies of Anglo-Saxon global domination. They are followed by illuminating studies of prominent thinkers, including J. A. Hobson, L. T. Hobhouse, John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, Herbert Spencer, and J. R. Seeley. While insisting that liberal attitudes to empire were multiple and varied, Bell emphasizes the liberal fascination with settler colonialism. It was in the settler empire that many liberal imperialists found the place of their political dreams.

Reordering the World is a significant contribution to the history of modern political thought and political theory.

1123352092
Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire
A leading scholar of British political thought explores the relationship between liberalism and empire

Reordering the World is a penetrating account of the complexity and contradictions found in liberal visions of empire. Focusing mainly on nineteenth-century Britain—at the time the largest empire in history and a key incubator of liberal political thought—Duncan Bell sheds new light on some of the most important themes in modern imperial ideology.

The book ranges widely across Victorian intellectual life and beyond. The opening essays explore the nature of liberalism, varieties of imperial ideology, the uses and abuses of ancient history, the imaginative functions of the monarchy, and fantasies of Anglo-Saxon global domination. They are followed by illuminating studies of prominent thinkers, including J. A. Hobson, L. T. Hobhouse, John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, Herbert Spencer, and J. R. Seeley. While insisting that liberal attitudes to empire were multiple and varied, Bell emphasizes the liberal fascination with settler colonialism. It was in the settler empire that many liberal imperialists found the place of their political dreams.

Reordering the World is a significant contribution to the history of modern political thought and political theory.

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Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire

Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire

by Duncan Bell
Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire

Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire

by Duncan Bell

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Overview

A leading scholar of British political thought explores the relationship between liberalism and empire

Reordering the World is a penetrating account of the complexity and contradictions found in liberal visions of empire. Focusing mainly on nineteenth-century Britain—at the time the largest empire in history and a key incubator of liberal political thought—Duncan Bell sheds new light on some of the most important themes in modern imperial ideology.

The book ranges widely across Victorian intellectual life and beyond. The opening essays explore the nature of liberalism, varieties of imperial ideology, the uses and abuses of ancient history, the imaginative functions of the monarchy, and fantasies of Anglo-Saxon global domination. They are followed by illuminating studies of prominent thinkers, including J. A. Hobson, L. T. Hobhouse, John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, Herbert Spencer, and J. R. Seeley. While insisting that liberal attitudes to empire were multiple and varied, Bell emphasizes the liberal fascination with settler colonialism. It was in the settler empire that many liberal imperialists found the place of their political dreams.

Reordering the World is a significant contribution to the history of modern political thought and political theory.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780691197173
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication date: 10/22/2019
Pages: 456
Product dimensions: 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Duncan Bell is Reader in Political Thought and International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ's College. His books include The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton).

Table of 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

On 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 Patriot Queen? The Monarchy, the Constitution, and the Iconographic Order of Greater Britain, 1860–1900 148

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

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

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This brilliant work of scholarship is the most detailed and comprehensive history of the languages of liberal imperialism by one of the preeminent scholars in the field. It is a must-read."—James Tully, University of Victoria

"Liberalism and empire were not born twins together but became conjoined over the course of the nineteenth century, with consequences that bedevil the liberal project to this day. Reordering the World is a magisterial study of their entanglement by a historian at the top of his game. Political theorists, intellectual historians, and students of empire are once again in Duncan Bell's debt for his deep research, elegant analysis, and consistently acute judgments."—David Armitage, Harvard University

"This collection of brilliant essays highlights the complexity and breadth of modern imperial ideology in Britain and beyond. Duncan Bell explores the entanglements of liberal thought with the politics of empire and the manifold historical narratives developed by influential thinkers—philosophers, sociologists, journalists, and historians—to justify and make sense of foreign conquest and settler colonialism. These far-ranging analyses reveal, in careful detail, both the tensions and ambiguities of their thought, the capaciousness of liberalism as an ideology, and the long-standing influence of this discomforted wrestling with empire on twentieth-century and contemporary politics. Reordering the World thus challenges political theorists to 'decolonize' liberalism as a category and, in the process, demonstrates precisely why Bell is one of the most important scholars writing about the history of political thought and empire today."—Jeanne Morefield, Whitman College

"This is a fine collection of essays that gives a compelling overview of a large number of issues, problems, and themes resulting from the juxtaposition of liberalism and empire."—Gregory Claeys, Royal Holloway, University of London

"Reordering the World is a collection of unusually thoughtful, incisive, and cogent essays that will interest a variety of scholars, from intellectual historians and scholars in British studies to historians of empire and political theorists. This book will be widely read and widely taught."—Andrew Sartori, New York University

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