Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain

by Theodore Koditschek

Overview

This book examines the ways in which imperial agendas informed the writing of history in nineteenth-century Britain and how historical writing transformed imperial agendas. Using the published writings and personal papers of Walter Scott, J. A. Froude, James Mill, Rammohun Roy, T. B. Macaulay, E. A. Freeman, W. E. Gladstone, and J. R. Seeley among others, Theodore Koditschek sheds new light on the role of the historical imagination in the establishment and legitimation of liberal imperialism. He shows how both imperialists and the imperialized were drawn to reflect back on Empire's past as a result of the need to construct a modern, multi-national British imperial identity for a more economically expansive and enlightened present. By tracing the imperial lives and historical works of these pivotal figures, Theodore Koditschek illuminates the ways in which discourse altered practice, and vice versa, as well as how the history of Empire was continuously written and re-written.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107638273
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/14/2013
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	366
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Theodore Koditschek is Associate Professor of History at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. Imagining Great Britain: Union, Empire and the burden of history: 1800–30; 2. Imagining a British India: history and the re-construction of Empire; 3. Imagining a Greater Britain: the Macaulays and the liberal romance of Empire; 4. Re-imagining a Greater Britain: J. A. Froude: counter-romance and controversy; 5. Greater Britain and the 'lesser breeds': liberalism, race and evolutionary history; 6. Indian liberals and Greater Britain: the search for union through history; Epilogue: from liberal imperialism to conservative unionism: losing the thread of progress in history.

Editorial Reviews

"… outstanding: diligently researched, dispassionately considered, without any of the preconceptions that often bedevil this field, well written, and - for those of us who are as interested in the history of ideas as Koditschek is - fascinating and frequently suggestive … A fine and important work."
H-Empire

"This is a profoundly important piece of scholarship, one that - to use a hackneyed but, in this case, absolutely accurate phrase - no one in the field can afford to ignore."
Richard Price, Journal of Modern History

"Theodore Koditschek has written an important book that goes a long way toward answering one of the most urgent and troubling questions about the nineteenth-century British Empire, namely, how such an avowedly and demonstrably liberal state could have maintained and justified such a patently illiberal empire for so long … It impressively explores and explains the contradictions of nineteenth-century liberal imperialism with subtlety, sophistication, and sensitivity, adding considerably to our understanding of the Victorian Empire."
Jeffrey Auerbach, Journal of British Studies

"Theodore Koditschek's Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination is an ambitious contribution to the debate over the ways in which liberal concepts of progress influenced the intellectual and political life of modern Britain and empire. Its achievements suggest we are, indeed, getting somewhere."
History Workshop Journal

"Koditschek, in scope and depth, achieves a masterful synthesis that should make this book the standard work for understanding liberal imperial thinking in the nineteenth century."
Karuna Mantena, Victorian Studies

"This incisive study combines vivid biographical sketches with acute readings of texts to offer a nuanced and revealing portrait of liberalism's troubled marriage to the nineteenth-century British Empire."
Jennifer Pitts, American Historical Review

From the Publisher