Pitts - A Turn to Empire

A Turn to Empire

The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France

Medium: Buch

ISBN: 978-0-691-12791-0

Verlag: Princeton University Press

Erscheinungstermin: 30.07.2006

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A dramatic shift in British and French ideas about empire unfolded in the sixty years straddling the turn of the nineteenth century. As Jennifer Pitts shows in A Turn to Empire, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Jeremy Bentham were among many at the start of this period to criticize European empires as unjust as well as politically and economically disastrous for the conquering nations. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the most prominent British and French liberal thinkers, including John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, vigorously supported the conquest of non-European peoples. Pitts explains that this reflected a rise in civilizational self-confidence, as theories of human progress became more triumphalist, less nuanced, and less tolerant of cultural difference. At the same time, imperial expansion abroad came to be seen as a political project that might assist the emergence of stable liberal democracies within Europe. Pitts shows that liberal thinkers usually celebrated for respecting not only human equality and liberty but also pluralism supported an inegalitarian and decidedly nonhumanitarian international politics. Yet such moments represent not a necessary feature of liberal thought but a striking departure from views shared by precisely those late-eighteenth-century thinkers whom Mill and Tocqueville saw as their forebears. Fluently written, A Turn to Empire offers a novel assessment of modern political thought and international justice, and an illuminating perspective on continuing debates over empire, intervention, and liberal political commitments.

Produkteigenschaften

Artikelnummer: 9780691127910
Medium: Buch
ISBN: 978-0-691-12791-0
Verlag: Princeton University Press
Erscheinungstermin: 30.07.2006
Sprache(n): Englisch
Auflage: Erscheinungsjahr 2006
Produktform: Kartoniert, Paperback
Gewicht: 672 g
Seiten: 400
Format (B x H x T): 156 x 234 x 24 mm
Ausgabetyp: Kein, Unbekannt

Themen

Autoren

Acknowledgments ix

Abbreviations xiii

Chapter 1: Introduction 1

Liberalism, Pluralism, and Empire 3

Scope and Summary 7

Historical Contexts 11

PART 1: CRITICS OF EMPIRE 23

Chapter 2: Adam Smith on Societal Development and Colonial Rule 25

The Causes and Complexity of Development in Smith's Thought 27

Progress, Rationality, and the Early Social Stages 34

Moral Progress and Commercial Society 41

Moral Philosophy and Cross-Cultural Judgments 43

Smith's Critique of Colonies 52

Chapter 3: Edmund Burke's Peculiar Universalism 59

The Exclusions of Empire 59

Systematic Oppression in India 63

Moral Imagination: Empire and Social Criticism 71

Geographical Morality and Burke's Universalism 77

The Politics of Exclusion in Ireland 85

Burke as a Theorist of Nationality 96

PART 2: UTILITARIANS AND THE TURN TO EMPIRE IN BRITAIN 101

Chapter 4: Jeremy Bentham: Legislator of the World? 103

Utilitarians and the British Empire 103

Bentham's Critique of Colonial Rule 107

A Rereading of Bentham's Work on India 115

Chapter 5: James and John Stuart Mill: The Development of Imperial Liberalism in Britain 123

James Mill: An Uneasy Alliance of Utilitarianism and Conjectural History 123

J.S. Mill: Character and the Revision of the Benthamite Tradition 133

Nationality and Progressive Despotism 138

Civilizing Backward Societies: India and Ireland 146

Colonial Reform and the Governor Eyre Episode 150

Conclusion 160

PART 3: LIBERALS AND THE TURN TO EMPIRE IN FRANCE 163

Chapter 6: The Liberal Volte-Face in France 165

Shifting Political Contexts: Britain, France, and Imperial Projects 165

Condorcet: Progress and the Roots of the Mission Civilisatrice 168

Constant and the Distrust of Empire 173

Desjobert and the Marginalization of Anti-imperialism 185

Tocqueville's Sociology of Democracy and the Question of European Expansion 189

Expansion and Exclusion in America 196

Chapter 7: Tocqueville and the Algeria Question 204

Tocqueville as an Architect of French Algeria 204

From Assimilation to Domination: Tocqueville's Early

Colonial Vision 207

The British Empire as Rival and Model 219

Slavery in the French Empire 226

Universal Rights, Nation Building, and Progress 230

Chapter 8: Conclusion 240

Eighteenth-Century Criticism of Empire 242

Democracy and Liberal Anxieties in the Nineteenth Century 247

Late Liberal Misgivings about Imperial Injustice 254

Notes 259

Bibliography 343

Index 363

A Turn to Empire

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