Reordering the World

Essays on Liberalism and Empire

Duncan Bell

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780691197173, 9780691138787
• eBook ISBN: 9781400881024
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A leading scholar of British political thought explores the relationship between liberalism and empire

Reordering the World is a penetrating account of the complexity and contradictions found in liberal visions of empire. Focusing mainly on nineteenth-century Britain—at the time the largest empire in history and a key incubator of liberal political thought—Duncan Bell sheds new light on some of the most important themes in modern imperial ideology.

The book ranges widely across Victorian intellectual life and beyond. The opening essays explore the nature of liberalism, varieties of imperial ideology, the uses and abuses of ancient history, the imaginative functions of the monarchy, and fantasies of Anglo-Saxon global domination. They are followed by illuminating studies of prominent thinkers, including J. A. Hobson, L. T. Hobhouse, John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, Herbert Spencer, and J. R. Seeley. While insisting that liberal attitudes to empire were multiple and varied, Bell emphasizes the liberal fascination with settler colonialism. It was in the settler empire that many liberal imperialists found the place of their political dreams.

Reordering the World is a significant contribution to the history of modern political thought and political theory.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Reordering the World

[C]entral to the lives of all empires have been the ways in which they have been constituted through language and their own self-representations: the discourses that have arisen to describe, defend, and criticize them, and the historical narratives that have been invoked to make sense of them.¹

—JENNIFER PITTS

From the earliest articulations of political thinking in the European tradition to its most recent iterations, the nature, justification, and criticism of foreign conquest and rule has been a staple theme of debate. Empires, after all, have been among the most common and the most durable political formations in world history. However, it was only during the long nineteenth century that the European empire-states developed sufficient technological superiority over the peoples of Africa, the Americas, and Asia to make occupation and governance on a planetary scale seem both feasible and desirable, even if the reality usually fell far short of the fantasy. As Jürgen Osterhammel reminds us, the nineteenth century was “much more an age of empire than … an age of nations and nation-states.”² The largest of those empires was governed from London.

Even the most abstract works of political theory, Quentin Skinner argues, “are never above the battle; they are always part of the battle itself.”³ The ideological conflict I chart in the following pages was one fought over the bitterly contested terrain of empire. The main, though not the only, combatants I survey are British liberal political thinkers—philosophers, historians, politicians, imperial administrators, political economists, journalists, even an occasional novelist or poet. Multifaceted and constantly mutating, liberalism was chiefly a product of the revolutionary ferment of the late eighteenth century, of the complex dialectic between existing patterns of thought and the new egalitarian and democratic visions pulsating through the Euro-Atlantic world. A squabbling family of philosophical doctrines, a popular creed, a resonant moral ideal, the creature of a party machine, a comprehensive economic system, a form of life: liberalism was all of these and more. Intellectuals were central to the propagation and renewal of this expansive ideology, though they were far from the only agents involved. From Bentham to Hobson, from Macaulay to Mill, from Spencer to Sidgwick, a long parade of thinkers helped sculpt the contours of the evolving tradition, elaborating influential accounts of individual freedom, moral psychology, social justice, economic theory, and constitutional design. Liberal thinkers wrote extensively about the pathologies and potentialities of empire, developing both ingenious defenses and biting critiques of assorted imperial projects. The conjunction of a vibrant intellectual culture and a massive and expanding imperial system makes nineteenth-century Britain a vital site for exploring the connections between political thought and empire in general, and liberal visions of empire in particular. The vast expanses of the British empire provided both a practical laboratory and a space of desire for liberal attempts to reorder the world.

Reordering the World collects together a selection of essays that I have written over the last decade. Some explore the ways in which prominent thinkers tackled the legitimacy of conquest and imperial rule, while others dissect themes that pervaded imperial discourse or address theoretical and historiographical puzzles about liberalism and empire. They are united by an ambition to probe the intellectual justifications of empire during a key period in modern history. The materials I analyze are the product of elite metropolitan culture, including works of technical philosophy and recondite history, but also pamphlets, speeches, editorials, periodical articles, and personal correspondence. Such sources helped constitute the intellectual lifeblood of Victorian political discourse, feeding into the creation of a distinctive “imperial commons,” a globe-spanning though heavily stratified public constituted in part through the production and circulation of books, periodicals, and newspapers.⁴ The bulk of the volume focuses on the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, the years that Eric Hobsbawm once characterized as the “age of empire.”⁵ During that period the empire assumed a newfound significance in political argument, looming large over debates on a plethora of issues from social policy to geopolitical strategy and beyond. However, I also explore earlier currents of political thinking, and trace some of the echoes of nineteenth-century ideologies across the twentieth century and into the present.

Political Thought and Empire

As late as 2006 Anthony Pagden could write that the study of empire had until recently been “relegated to the wastelands of the academy.”⁶ It was dragged in from the cold during the 1980s as postcolonial scholarship percolated through the humanities (and more unevenly across the social sciences). Imperial history was rejuvenated, moving swiftly from the periphery to the center of historical research, where it remains ensconced to this day.⁷ Political theory, like political science more broadly, has proven rather more resistant to the imperial turn. During the postwar years the field was characterized by a revealing silence about both the history of empire and the wave of decolonization then overturning many of the governing norms and institutions that had shaped the architecture of world order for five centuries.⁸ Adam Smith remarked in the Wealth of Nations that the “discovery” of the Americas was one of the “most important events recorded in the history of mankind,” and he and his contemporaries, as well as many of their nineteenth-century heirs, wrestled incessantly with its meaning and consequences.⁹ Political theorists barely registered its passing.¹⁰ Mainstream approaches to the subject, at least in the Anglo-American tradition, continue to argue about the nature of justice, democracy, and rights, while ignoring the ways in which many of the ideas and institutions of contemporary politics have been (de)formed or inflected by centuries of Western imperialism—“this half millennium of tyranny against diverse civilisational forms of self-reliance and association”¹¹—and the deep complicity in this enterprise of the canon from which they draw inspiration, concepts, arguments, and authority. While a persistent tattoo of criticism has been maintained by dissident scholars, it has made little impact on the core concerns or theoretical approaches of the field.¹²

Historians of political thought have been more willing to take empire and its multifarious legacies seriously, tracing the ways in which European thinkers grappled with projects of imperial conquest and governance.¹³ One of the guiding themes of this scholarship—sometimes rendered explicit, sometimes lurking in the wings—has been a concern with the relationship between liberal political thought and empire, between the dominant ideology of the contemporary Western world and some of the darkest, most consequential entanglements of its past.¹⁴ Both the political context for this scholarly reorientation and the stakes involved in it are clear. Against a backdrop of numerous “humanitarian intervention” operations, blood-letting in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond, the forever war against terror, challenges from competing theocratic fundamentalisms, the specter of neoliberal globalization, and a burgeoning interest in questions of global poverty and inequality, the ethico-political status of liberalism has been put in question. Is it necessarily an imperial doctrine or a welcome antidote to imperial ambition? Perhaps liberals should face up to their imperial obligations rather than ducking them? “Nobody likes empires,” Michael Ignatieff argues, “but there are some problems for which there are only imperial solutions.”¹⁵ If so, what are they? Alternatively, is it possible to foster anti-imperial forms of politics, liberal or otherwise, in an increasingly interdependent world? Such concerns permeate the febrile debate. In chapter 2 I discuss some of the main trends in the scholarship, as well as identifying some of its weaknesses

Throughout the book I treat liberalism chiefly as an actor’s category, a term to encompass thinkers, ideas, and movements that were regarded as liberal at the time. (In chapter 3, I discuss the origins and development of liberal discourse in Britain and the United States.) Nineteenth-century British liberalism drew on multiple sources and was splintered into a kaleidoscope of ideological positions, some of which overlapped considerably, while others pulled in different directions. Indeed one of the main purposes of Reordering the World is to highlight the ideological complexity and internal variability of liberalism, and in doing so to call into question sweeping generalizations about it. Benthamite utilitarianism, classical political economy, the historical sociology of the Scottish Enlightenment, Comtean positivism, partially digested German, French, and Greek philosophy, an emergent socialist tradition, the expansive legacies of republicanism, assorted forms of political theology, miscellaneous evolutionary theories, the democratic ethos inherited from the revolutionary era, the comforting embrace of Burkean organicism: all (and more) fed the cacophony. They cross-fertilised to spawn various identifiable articulations of liberal thinking, several of which are discussed in the following chapters. These include liberal Whig ideology (Macaulay, for example), forms of radical liberalism (including, in their different ways, Richard Cobden, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer), and late Victorian “new liberalism” (most notably J. A. Hobson and L. T. Hobhouse).¹⁶ This list is far from exhaustive, of course, and the period was also populated by multiple ideological hybrids, idiosyncratic figures whose ideas are hard to categorize, and less conspicuous or long-lived threads of political thinking. While they differed in many respects, including the philosophical foundations of their ideas and the public policies they endorsed, all shared a commitment to individual liberty, constitutional government, the rule of law, the ethical significance of nationality, a capitalist political economy, and belief in the possibility of moral and political progress.¹⁷ But the ways in which they interpreted, combined, and lexically ordered these abstract ideas, as well as the range of institutions they prescribed as necessary for their realization, varied greatly. So too did their attitudes to empire, though few rejected all its forms, and most (as I will argue) endorsed the formation of settler colonies.

British imperial expansion was never motivated by a single coherent ideology or a consistent strategic vision. This was the grain of truth in the historian J. R. Seeley’s famous quip that the empire seemed to have been “acquired in a fit of absence of mind.”¹⁸ Characterized by instability, chronically uncoordinated, and plagued by tensions between and within its widely dispersed elements, it was “unfinished, untidy, a mass of contradictions, aspirations and anomalies.”¹⁹ Yet despite this, or perhaps because of it, the empire was a subject of constant deliberation, celebration, denunciation, and anxiety.²⁰ It was, as Jennifer Pitts notes in the epigraph, partly constituted (and contested) through language and legitimating representations. One of the main goals of imperial ideologists was to impose order on the untidy mass, to construct a coherent view of the past, present, and future that served to justify the existence of the empire, while their critics repeatedly stressed the manifest dangers of embarking on foreign conquest and rule. Imperial themes were woven through the fabric of nineteenth-century British political thinking, from the abstract proclamations of philosophers to the vernacular of parliamentary debate through to quotidian expressions of popular culture. Conceptions of liberty, nationality, gender, and race, assumptions about moral equality and political rationality, debates over the scope and value of democracy, analyses of political economy, the prospects of “civilization” itself: all were inflected to varying degrees with imperial concerns, explicit or otherwise.

While each chapter can be read as a self-contained study of a particular topic, two general themes run through the book. The first is the pivotal importance of settler colonialism. As I argue in greater detail in chapter 2, the welcome revival of imperial history in the 1980s produced its own lapses and silences, one of the most significant of which was the sidelining of settler colonialism—or “colonization” as it was called at the time—in accounts of the long nineteenth century. There is a considerable historical irony involved in this redistribution of attention, given that the sub-discipline of imperial history was created at the turn of the twe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Reordering the World
• Part I: Frames
• Part II: Themes
• Part III: Thinkers
• Bibliography
• Index