Dr Alex Middleton
My research is on political ideas, and their effects. It focuses on the interactions between British politics and ideas about politics overseas, c. 1750-1920. It also deals more broadly with modern political thought, particularly on empires, the Americas, and international order.
My teaching, at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, covers modern British and European history; modern intellectual history; imperial and global history; and historiography and historical methodology. I also supervise dissertations on the history of modern Britain, and its international and imperial relations.
Research Interests
My research centres on political ideas in Britain, c. 1750-1920. Most of it traces how political visions and governing strategies in the globe's dominant power responded to their international and imperial contexts, combining intellectual-historical, political-historical, and cross-cultural approaches. It argues that we can better understand political change by making new connections: between European and Atlantic public spheres, between the 'foreign' and 'imperial' realms, and between international thought and its practical ends. An allied goal is to forge closer links between British history and other (trans-) national historiographies.
My work has two main strands. The first deals with political-intellectual structures, and the patterns of connection behind the shifting convictions of the political classes and the British state. My research here examines the ideological disputes created by British imperial and foreign policy - how was Britain's empire-state to be governed, and how was its influence to be projected? - and the exchanges with other states and empires which shaped thinking about government, society, law, and history. Understanding the processes involved, I argue, means casting a wide geographical net, and my published pieces range from northern Borneo, to French Algeria, to Habsburg Austria, to post-revolutionary Spanish America, and beyond. The other strand of my work explores related themes from a more conventional history of political thought perspective, dealing with developed ideas about despotism, republicanism, and the science of international politics. Here I reach beyond Britain to the Iberian and Atlantic worlds. Much of my writing focuses on British Liberalism and its political strategies, arguing that its international foundations have not been properly understood, but I have published also on Conservatism, Radicalism, and the politically uncategorisable. In other research, I examine the construction of modern European political and intellectual traditions, and explore debates about historical theory and method.
I am finishing a book called Rethinking Empire: English Liberalism and Imperial Government, 1820-1860, which reconstructs the intellectual and political history of a series of seminal early Victorian debates about Britain's machinery of imperial rule, and their overlooked place in the formation of British Liberalism and the Liberal Party. It argues that the vexed problem of 'liberalism and empire' can be better understood from within the tangle of principles, practices, ideas, and opportunisms which constituted British domestic politics. My next monograph will be a study of the interpretation of Latin American politics and society in Britain and Ireland, c. 1807-1920. It will show that Latin America impacted far more significantly than historians have realised on the nineteenth century’s headline debates about government, civilization, and international relations, but its conceptual focus will be on the structural relations between political thought and geopolitical power. British visions of the region depended on intricate circulations of ideas between Atlantic public spheres, which took place within political, intellectual, and diplomatic frameworks shaped by deployments of British naval force on South American coasts and waterways. There is a rapid overview of some of the issues involved here. After that, I hope to produce a broader study of the Liberal mind and sciences of international politics, 1850-1900. Anchoring Britain in its European contexts, it will explore how competing codifications of world order redrew the boundaries of what was politically thinkable.
Finally, I enjoy writing on the historiographies of politics, ideas, and empire. My reviews and review articles have appeared in the English Historical Review, French History, the Historical Journal, History: the Journal of the Historical Association, Irish Historical Studies, the Journal of British Studies, the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, the Journal of Modern History, the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Victorian Studies, Parliamentary History, Reviews in History, and Twentieth Century British History. There is a list of these reviews on my college webpage.
