Saving civilization from empire: Belligerency, pacifism and the two faces of civilization during the Second Opium War

Abstract

Conventional accounts of international society’s expansion have traditionally emphasized the role played by ‘civilizing missions’ in facilitating and legitimating European aggression and imperial expansion. Conversely, in this article, I demonstrate that the relationship between imperial violence and the rhetoric of ‘civilizing missions’ was far more contested and contingent than International Relations scholars have generally assumed. Using the parliamentary debate surrounding Britain’s involvement in the Second Opium War as a case study, I reveal that civilizational rhetoric in the 1857 ‘China debate’ was equally implicated in both anti-imperialist and imperialist agendas. Richard Cobden’s victory in the debate over Palmerston’s pro-war ministry further illustrates the political potency of appeals to civilization as a brake — however temporary — on Britain’s imperial expansion. An appreciation of civilization’s janus-faced character — as a rhetorical commonplace that at different times abetted and inhibited imperial aggression — is therefore critical if we are to comprehend the halting and arrhythmic pattern of international society’s progressive expansion under British leadership in the mid-Victorian period.