Dr Alex Middleton

Associate Professor, Faculty of History

alex.middleton@history.ox.ac.uk

My research is on modern British politics and ideas, and on modern international and imperial thought.

I teach papers across British, European, and global history, as well as intellectual history options. I supervise research on modern British history, imperial and international history, and political and social thought.

My research is mainly on British politics and ideas in the nineteenth century. It asks how the globe's dominant power thought about global politics. My work explores the ideological divisions created by British imperial and foreign policy; visions of and interactions with other European, Atlantic, and colonial polities; and political, social, and legal thought in its international contexts. Much of my writing focuses on British Liberalism, but it embraces the whole political class, and casts a wide geographical net. I have a related interest in the international thought of nineteenth century France. I am more generally interested in the interfaces between politics, geopolitics, and intellectual culture, and in how ideas work in politics.

I am writing a book called Rethinking Empire: English Liberalism and Imperial Government, 1820-1860, which argues that debates about Britain's machinery of imperial rule underpinned the formation of British Liberalism and the Liberal Party. It makes the case that modern imperial political thought, and the problem of 'liberalism and empire', can be better understood when connected with party politics and schemes of inter-imperial comparison. My next book will examine British visions of Latin American politics, economics, and society, 1820-1920. It will argue that conceptions of the region responded to new convergences between Atlantic public spheres, and built bridges between the Iberian, Latin, and English-speaking worlds. But it will show that these visions also hinged on European geopolitical imperatives, and contested projects of 'informal empire', in the lengthening shadow of an imperially ambitious United States. After that, I plan to work on a wider study of British Liberalism in relation to global liberalisms and legal regimes.

I enjoy writing on the historiographies of politics, ideas, and empire. There is a list of my reviews and review essays here.

I am an editor of the English Historical Review, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. I assist with various schemes at St Hugh's College.

My undergraduate teaching covers British history since 1685; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European history; modern imperial and global History; modern intellectual history and the history of political thought; methodological and historiographical papers; and dissertation supervision.

I convene an MSt/MPhil Option Paper, ‘Imperial Political Thought in Britain, 1770-1900’.