Dr Alex Middleton
I am a historian of modern Britain, mainly of nineteenth-century politics, intellectual culture, and international thought.
My teaching covers modern British and European history; imperial and global history; and historiography and historical methodology. I also supervise BA and Master’s dissertations on the history of modern Britain, and on its international and imperial relations.
Research Interests
- Nineteenth-century British politics and political ideas
- Modern European imperial and international thought
- History of political and social science
My research centres on British politics and political ideas, c. 1780-1920, in their international contexts. I am mainly interested in the ideological disputes created by British imperial and foreign policy, and in how entanglements and exchanges with other polities affected domestic thinking about government, society, and political order. In exploring these problems I cast a wide geographical net, ranging so far from northern Borneo, to French Algeria, to Habsburg Austria, to post-revolutionary Spanish America, and beyond. All my work sits at the intersection between practical politics, political argument, and elaborated political thought, and aims to make sense of the relations between these things.
I have particular interests in Liberalism, Whiggism, and the politics of the Liberal Party; in ideologies of empire and imperial expansion; in political and social thought, especially about arbitrary power; in British connections with Europe and Latin America; and in the histories of political concepts.
I am finishing a book called Rethinking Empire: English Liberalism and Imperial Government, 1820-1860, on early Victorian arguments about Britain's machinery of imperial rule, and their place in the formation of the Liberal Party. My next monograph will be a study of the interpretation of Latin American politics and society in Britain and Ireland, c. 1820-1920. It will argue that Latin America featured far more prominently than historians have realised in most of the nineteenth century’s headline debates about government, and that it opened up new questions about race, religion, bondage, colonial rule, national character, political sociology, and not least about the relative merits of republicanism, monarchy, and empire. The working title is Latin American Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain.
Alongside work for this project, I am preparing a series of essays on foreign empires in later-Victorian Liberal thought. Together, these will aim to show how interrogation of the internal workings of other imperial states – colonial and territorial, past and present – not only played a central role in shaping attitudes towards 'imperialism', but also had deeper structural ramifications for British political and intellectual culture. My plan is to collect these pieces into a book, in due course, under the working title Democracy and Despotism: Foreign Empires and the Liberal Mind, 1850-1900.
I also write on the historiographies of politics, ideas, and empire. My reviews and review articles have appeared in the English Historical Review, the Historical Journal, the Journal of British Studies, the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, the Journal of Modern History, Victorian Studies, Parliamentary History, Reviews in History, and Twentieth Century British History.
For links to some of my publications, please see the section elsewhere on this page. There is further information, and a list of my reviews, on my college webpage, https://www.st-hughs.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-alex-middleton/.
