The long nineteenth century saw a rolling series of revolutions in the intellectual history of empire. Novel commercial theories destabilised long-established logics behind colonial expansion; fierce challenges to European imperial rule inspired new ideas about the purposes, organisation, and future of empires; and new styles of historical, political-scientific, and anthropological analysis offered fresh ways of understanding imperial problems. Above all, the rapid advance of Liberalism across Europe – both as a political movement, and as a set of doctrines – threw up a mass of new tensions, paradoxes, and accommodations in imperial political thought. These developments had profound practical repercussions across the globe.
This Option Paper explores how British thinkers and theorists grappled with questions of imperial expansion and government, between the era of the American Revolution, and the decades of the internationally competitive ‘new imperialism’. Sitting at the heart of the largest and most powerful empire of the period, British writers made defining contributions to these debates. Covering both pro- and anti-imperial thinking, the paper centres on the ideas and writings of figures recognised as leading authorities at the time. Close attention is paid, however, to the political, social, and intellectual contexts in which they wrote. Some of these contexts are domestic; some are imperial; and some are European, since contemporaries devoted a huge amount of attention to other European nations’ imperial projects. The goal is to draw out the complex dynamics which underpinned the formulation of nineteenth-century imperial theories.
The six classes deal mainly with particular writers, many of them avowed Liberals. Some of the protagonists are very well-known – like Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, and J.S. Mill – and some less so. The organisation of classes is roughly chronological, to help make sense of conceptual change over time, but each class centres on a particular discipline, theme, or school of thought. Imperial theorising in nineteenth-century Britain was overwhelmingly a white, male pursuit, but all the central figures in the course were seriously interested in questions of class, race, and bondage, and these themes will be central to our discussions. Students are encouraged to set the figures in the loose canon outlined by this reading list alongside other contemporaries.
Much of the most innovative twenty-first-century scholarship on modern British intellectual history has been concerned with reconstructing its imperial and international dimensions, and this course is designed (in part) to act as an introduction to the methodological and conceptual issues opened up by this work. The course will be of particular interest to MSt students enrolled in the strands on Global and Imperial History; Intellectual History; British and European History, 1700-1850; and Modern British History, 1850 to the present.
