Liberal Imperialism Research Articles

Изобретение традиционного общества: империя и истоки социальной теории

This is a Russian translation of the chapter "Inventing Traditional Society: Empire and the Origins of Social Theory," from the book by Karuna Mantena Alibis of Empire. Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton University Press, 2010). The author offers a detailed analysis of the emergence of social theory in the nineteenth century in the course of parallel transfor­mations of imperial ideology (from moral justifications to retroactive alibis) and the scientific views of society and social. Mantena traces the intellectual roots of late imperial ideology in the emergence of an ideal-typical model of traditional society - a central innovation of nineteenth-century social theory. In the chapter, the reciprocal relationship between empire and social theory are framed with a special focus on works of social thinkers and scholars such as Henry Maine, Benjamin Constant, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, Émile Durkheim, and others.

Afterword: All Сolonialisms May Be Different, But in the End All Are the Same

In his afterthoughts written in dialogue with the editors of Ab Imperio , Thomas Metcalf recollects how, in the course of his academic career and observations of the changing world of the 1950s, he has learned to appreciate the importance of studying British imperialism of the second part of the nineteenth century, when classical liberal imperialism had to be adjusted to the reality of a growing imperial state. The firsthand observation of decline of European colonial empires and the rise of the new superpower, the United States, also contributed to Metcalf's choice of research specialization. In recent years, he has been more active in the fields of global and comparative histories, while retaining his main focus on imperial polities and colonial regimes. Metcalf talks about the importance of a comparative approach, which allows one to make sense of multiple claims of uniqueness and exceptionalism. However, a comparative view acquires additional significance in light of the fact that imperial regimes of the second part of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries pursued mutually connected and dependent policies of imperial governance and legitimation of power. In the last part of the interview, Metcalf discusses how one can pursue a comparative history of modern empires, while avoiding the threat of simplification. Отвечая на вопросы редакторов Ab Imperio Томас Меткалф вспоминает, как в ходе своей научной карьеры и наблюдений за меняющимся миром 1950-х гг. он пришел к изучению истории британского империализма второй половины XIX века, когда настоятельно проявилась необходимость приспособить принципы классического либерального империализма к реальности растущего имперского государства. Дополнительным фактором выбора проблематики стал закат европейских колониальных империй и приход им на смену новой супердержавы — США. В последнее время Меткалф активно работает в области глобальной и сравнительной истории, оставаясь верным проблематике имперских политий и колониальных режимов. Он подчеркивает важность сравнительного подхода, который единственный позволяет разобраться с многочисленными заявками на уникальность и исключительность. Однако сравнительный взгляд еще более важен в связи с тем, что во второй половине XIX века и в веке XX политика управления и легитимации власти имперских режимов была взаимосвязанной. В последней части своих размышлений Меткалф делится соображениями о том, как можно заниматься сравнительной историей империй Нового времени, избегая упрощенных представлений о характере управления имперским пространством разнообразия.

“Their Dominion, or Their Depredations”

Book Review| January 01 2012 “Their Dominion, or Their Depredations”: Sovereignty, Governance, Law, and Liberalism in Recent Scholarship on the British Empire in India Stern, Philip, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011.Wilson, Jon, The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.Mantena, Karuna, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Jennifer Pitts Jennifer Pitts Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (2012) 2012 (112): 193–200. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-1416250 Connected Content Errata: Errata Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jennifer Pitts; “Their Dominion, or Their Depredations”: Sovereignty, Governance, Law, and Liberalism in Recent Scholarship on the British Empire in India. Radical History Review 1 January 2012; 2012 (112): 193–200. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-1416250 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsRadical History Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 by MARHO: The Radical Historians' Organization, Inc.2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

<em>Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism</em>, by Karuna Mantena

<em>Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism</em>, by Karuna Mantena

John Stuart Mill on Savagery, Slavery and Civilization

This paper explores the paradoxes of Mill’s defence of liberal imperialism. It does so by examining the stadial theory of societal development he inherited from Adam Smith and the contrast between savagery and civilization embedded within that theory. Particular attention is given to Mill’s theoretical and historical understanding of the institution of slavery and its place within his model of development.

Imperialism, territory, and liberation: on the dynamics of empire stemming from Europe

This article tries to understand the deeply ambivalent role in modern global world history of imperialism originating from Europe. It follows a long, genealogical narrative, beginning in the inherent structure and tensions of empire per se on the European mainland. Nonetheless, there was a partially successful attempt at empire in the primarily spiritual ‘imperial’ power emanating from Rome, which in due course evoked a matching response in religious-ideological opposition of the Reformation. The subsequent weakening of the prospects of mainland empire encouraged maritime empires in the form of sovereign states, while the profound opposition to top-down power per se survived in the derivatives of Protestantism, primarily in North America. A compromise with that opposition was sketched in Protestant-inspired Lockean Liberalism, which saw virtue in territorial expansion in so far as a key motif from the start was a sense of autonomous liberation achievable through expansion into open territory as the pursuit of God’s purpose. That grew sharper in North America, as Europeans seeking progress in European society envisioned their own freedom from the state in the ‘empty’ space granted by the colonializing state itself for colonization and enclosure. Colonists’ and migrants’ aspirations for liberation thus found expression in a modern vision of territorial expansion as freedom. USA’s continental expansion in the nineteenth, and more sharply global expansion in the twentieth century, reiterated that vision in extending an intrusive liberal imperialism. There emerged a US-centered, Western oppressive dynamic of liberation, which is still present in the dissemination of values individual liberty and into the integration in global open space.

Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism, by Karuna Mantena.

<i>Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism</i>, by Karuna Mantena.

Benevolent Cant? Kant's Liberal Imperialism

In a recent article in the journal International Security, I offered an explanation for a puzzling aspect of democratic America's post-Cold War foreign policy: its increasingly expansive and interventionist cast.1 Building upon Louis Hartz's famous argument about how America's tradition could paradoxically produce domestic illiberalism, I sought to explain recent manifestations of America's international illiberalism, such as the drive for hegemony and the willingness to intervene in various countries to remake the world in its own liberal political (democracy) and economic (free markets) image, as also rooted in American liberalism.2 The idea that liberalism, imperialism, and other forms of international illiberalism are not only compatible, but perhaps inextricably linked, has gained currency among many scholars. As Uday Singh Mehta puts in his study of the intellectual underpinnings of the British Empire: it is liberal thinkers . . . who, notwithstandingindeed, on account oftheir reforming schemes, endorse the empire as a legitimate form of political and commercial governance; who justify and accept its undemocratic and nonrepresentative structure; who invoke as politically relevant categories such as history, ethnicity, civilizational hierarchies, and occasional race and blood ties; and who fashion arguments for the empires' at least temporary necessity and foreseeable prolongation.3 Mehta's book is part of a burgeoning literature exploring the many compatibilities between liberal thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Alexis de

Amy Sternberg’s Historical Pageant The Performance of IODE Ideology during Canada’s Diamond Jubilee

In 1927, sixty-five chapters of the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (IODE) staged Amy Sternberg’s Historical Pageant in Toronto to celebrate Canada’s Diamond Jubilee. Accessing primary source documentation, this article argues that Sternberg’s production constructed and conveyed IODE ideology by placing female agency in the service of liberal imperialism. Specifically, the female allegorical and historical characters in the pageant provide an index of values that emphasized the role of women in creating a strong Canada closely aligned with a venerated British Empire. Beyond the script and the stage, the program for the production and press clippings suggest that the IODE used Historical Pageant to promote itself as a modern organization in which female leadership fostered civically engaged action while simultaneously and subtly re-inscribing the traditional hierarchical social structure of the British Empire within Canada. In these ways, Historical Pageant reminds historians of the necessity to consider how theatre has been used by Canadian women to assert their political views publicly even when those views espouse ideology that is no longer acceptable.

The Trollopian Geopolitical Aesthetic

Trollope’s reputation as a formally dull post-1848 realist persists even though the period of his Palliser series (1864–1879) was characterized by intense political and imperial dynamism. While most of Trollope’s novels during this period exemplify a historically engaged realism, The Eustace Diamonds is distinct for its rare meditation on empire in South Asia—a topic that Trollope seems purposely to have avoided. Trollope’s fourth Palliser novel captures the vexed ethics of a so-called liberal imperialism through two classic characters—Lucy Morris and Lord Fawn—and their interactions with the Sawab of Mygawb, a ‘‘non-character’’who marks the novel’s geopolitical unconscious. But the novel’s most formally distinct features revolve around representation of Lizzie Eustace, who figures Trollope’s uneasiness over the New Imperial era’s neo-feudal aesthetics. Trollope associated the New Imperialism with Benjamin Disraeli whose Jewish ethnicity he tied to a ‘‘conjuring’’ political agency that could master the theaters of mass democracy and imperial expansion. In The Eustace Diamonds, Lizzie becomes the embodiment of an actively performed New Imperial aesthetic. As a Disraeli-like schemer, she introduces a stylistic referentiality that is alien to Trollope’s ‘pellucid’ linguistic ideal. Where Trollope’s sociological and global capitalist novels offer nuanced aesthetic capture, Lizzie marks the representational limits of such realism. Like the Sawab, she is the sign of a Trollopian power to stretch form beyond the crude anti-realism of the racialized scapegoat. In this article, I want to revisit Trollope’s reputation as the Victorian novel’s most formal bore. In George Levine’s words, ‘the solidity and complacency of its narrative movement through time’ makes Trollopian realism the work of ‘sheer plod’ (203). Trollope’s reputation as a non-experimental and politically inert realist is characteristic of a long critical

Anglobal governance?

The ‘Anglosphere’ refers to a grouping of English-speaking states, nations and societies united by the language, values and institutions associated with the historical experience of England/Britain. After being introduced in 1999–2000 at two conferences convened by the Hudson Institute, the idea of the Anglosphere has become increasingly popular with various Anglophiles and especially with Anglo-American conservatives and neoconservatives. After a brief inquiry into the broader conceptual and historical foundations of this neologism, this article considers some ways in which the Anglosphere relates to the research programme on global governance in the field of international relations (IR). Using ‘liberal imperialism’ as a theoretical starting point, the article evaluates the Anglosphere as a tool for promoting greater attention to the role of race and racism in the emergence of the structure and processes of contemporary global governance. For all its political, logical and other ambiguities, when approached as an arena of critical analysis, an Anglosphere perspective can indeed help us comprehend the development and general patterns of the racialized world order. For that reason alone, Anglobal governance should be worthy of study in IR.

Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism, 1848–1884. By Matthew P. Fitzpatrick. Monographs in German History, volume 23. New York: Berghahn, 2008. Pp. x+238. $99.95.

<i>Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism, 1848–1884</i>. By Matthew P. Fitzpatrick. Monographs in German History, volume 23. New York: Berghahn, 2008. Pp. x+238. $99.95.

Alibis of empire: Henry Maine and the ends of liberal imperialism

Acknowledgments ix INTRODUCTION: The Ideological Origins of Indirect Rule 1 CHAPTER ONE: The Crisis of Liberal Imperialism 21 CHAPTER TWO: Inventing Traditional Society: Empire and the Origins of Social Theory 56 CHAPTER THREE: Codification in the East andWest 89 CHAPTER FOUR: The Nineteenth-Century Debate on Property 119 CHAPTER FIVE: Native Society in Crisis: Conceptual Foundations of Indirect Rule 148 CODA: Liberalism and Empire Reconsidered 179 Notes 189 Bibliography 227 Index 255

Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism, 1848-1884

Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism, 1848-1884

Pleasures of Benthamism: Victorian literature, utility, political economy

This book offers a fresh look at the often-censured but imperfectly understood traditions of Utilitarianism and political economy in their bearing for Victorian literature and culture. It treats writings by Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, James and John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Rabindranath Tagore. It sets texts in historical context, examines style as well as ideas, and aims to widen awareness of commonalities across seemingly divided expressions of the age. A work of 'new economic criticism,' it also treats Utilitarianism, close kin to political economy but even more poorly understood and poorly regarded. No other literary study addresses Bentham so fully. The book further contributes to study of Victorian literature-and-liberalism and Victorian liberalism-and-imperialism. It challenges a high-cultural perspective and a perspective of ideology-critique that derive from F. R. Leavis and Michel Foucault and inform the prevailing idea of Victorian literature: as contender against the repressive mentality of Mr. Gradgrind, Dickens's caricature of a Smith-Benthamite; against the 'carceral' social discipline of Bentham's Panopticon; and against the 'dismal science.' But 'utility' has the happier meaning of pleasure. This study presents a capitalist, liberal age pursuing utility in commerce, industry, and socioeconomic/political reforms; favourable to freedom; and 'leveling' as regards gender and class. What about empire? a question not generally so squarely confronted in works on Victorian literature-and-economics and Victorian literature-and-liberalism. Shown here is the surprising extent to which liberalism develops as liberalism through 'liberal imperialism'.

IMPERIAL LIBERALISM? RELIGION, EDUCATION, AND THE COLD WAR

A few years ago I found myself at the Ogden, Utah rodeo with thirty schoolteachers from all over the world. They were participants in a Fulbright-supported American studies institute, and the trip to Utah was part of a weeklong foray into a part of America quite different from Amherst, MA, where the bulk of lectures and discussions had taken place in the previous three weeks. Our visit happened to coincide with “Armed Services Day,” and the spectacle my students encountered proved even more impressive than the riding and roping they had expected. The principle feature of that spectacle had to do with the organizers’ almost total confounding of religion and patriotism. At the high point of the event, over the roar of military band music and military helicopters passing overhead, the booming voice of the announcer declared that “God's helicopters” were protecting America and the rest of the world from tyranny. The books under review here endeavor to explain the spectacle in Ogden on that summer day—along with the train of events that, over sixty years ago, launched a crusade against “godless communism” and, a few decades later, made “the Christian right” a major force in American politics.

Matthew P. Fitzpatrick . Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism, 1848–1884.(Monographs in German History, number 23.)New York : Berghahn Books . 2008 . Pp. 237. $99.95.

Matthew P. Fitzpatrick's elegant account of German liberal imperialism from 1848 until Otto von Bismarck's embrace of a colonial foreign policy in 1884 represents a timely and important contribution to the existing literature: timely, because Fitzpatrick's emphasis on the centrality of imperialist discourse to the liberal nation-state project from its very inception is absolutely in keeping with the postcolonial and transnational turns taken in recent years; important, because this argument represents a fundamental shift in focus. The book builds on the work of historians like Frank Lorenz Müller and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, but Fitzpatrick's contribution represents the most sustained attempt to reframe the argument. The leading treatments of German liberalism in English underplay its imperial yearnings to the point of omission, a trait shared by Thomas Nipperdey's magisterial, multivolume history of nineteenth-century Germany. While the social imperialism thesis posited by Hans-Ulrich Wehler places great emphasis on the domestic origins of German imperialism, it ignores what Fitzpatrick calls the longue durée of German imperialism (although whether this phrase should be applied to a mere four decades is open to question). Fitzpatrick overturns the first of these approaches and comprehensively revises the second. He argues that expansionist imperialist visions were central to German national liberalism from the 1840s and that the economic and demographic justifications underpinning these visions presented colonialism as a solution to the social question, not a diversion from it.

The Crisis of Liberal Imperialism

Au cours du XIX e &#160;si&#232;cle, les fondamentaux du lib&#233;ralisme imp&#233;rial furent profond&#233;ment &#233;branl&#233;s. La multiplication des rebellions et des r&#233;sistances et la mont&#233;e de l&#8217;instabilit&#233; politique dans les colonies entra&#238;n&#232;rent une crise g&#233;n&#233;rale, portant sur la nature et les objectifs de l&#8217;ordre imp&#233;rial, acc&#233;l&#233;rant le d&#233;clin des l&#233;gitimations morales de l&#8217;imp&#233;rialisme. Alors que les justifications &#233;thiques et politiques se faisaient plus h&#233;sitantes, les nouvelles formes du discours imp&#233;rial insistaient moins sur l&#8217;id&#233;ologie que sur le pragmatisme, se pr&#233;sentant comme des r&#233;ponses pratiques et des adaptations &#224; la nature des soci&#233;t&#233;s indig&#232;nes. Des th&#233;ories sociales, culturelles, raciales furent alors convoqu&#233;es pour expliquer et l&#233;gitimer l&#8217;Empire, v&#233;ritables alibis ent&#233;rinant le fait accompli imp&#233;rial. L&#8217;une des cons&#233;quences importantes sur l&#8217;id&#233;ologie imp&#233;riale a &#233;t&#233; l&#8217;abandon des ambitions transformatrices contenues dans le projet de &#171;&#160;mission civilisatrice&#160;&#187;, th&#232;me central du lib&#233;ralisme imp&#233;rial. En lieu et place du projet universaliste, reposant sur la croyance dans l&#8217;assimilation et l&#8217;am&#233;lioration des peuples indig&#232;nes, s&#8217;est impos&#233;e avec force la conscience d&#8217;une diff&#233;rence potentiellement insurmontable entre les peuples.&#160;

Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansion and Nationalism, 1848-1884, by Matthew P. Fitzpatrick.

<i>Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansion and Nationalism, 1848-1884</i>, by Matthew P. Fitzpatrick.

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this issue. Shaking Hands on the Fringe: Negotiating the Aboriginal World at King George's Sound. By Tiffany Shellam The French Explorers and Sydney 1788–1831. By Colin Dyer Servants Depots in Colonial South Australia. By Marie Steiner Australia Though Women's Eyes. By Ann Standish Showtime: A History of the Brisbane Exhibition. By Joanne Scott and Ross Laurie Gallipoli. The End of the Myth. By Robin Prior Shattered Anzacs: Living with the Scars of War. By Marina Larsson Destination Australia: Migration to Australia since 1901. By Eric Richards Divine Discontent: The Brotherhood of St Laurence: A History. By Colin Holden and Richard Trembath Political Tourists: Travellers from Australia to the Soviet Union in the 1920s–1940s. Edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Carolyn Rasmussen Father of the House: The Memoirs of Kim E. Beazley. By Kim E. Beazley, with annotations by Kim C. Beazley and John Bond Voices from the Ships: Australia's Seafarers and their Union. By Diane Kirkby Global Citizens: Australian Activists for Change. Edited by Geoffrey Stokes, Roderic Pitty and Gary Smith The State Of Industrial Relations. Edited by Christopher Sheil. Australian Social Attitudes 2: Citizenship, Work and Aspirations. Edited by David Denemark, Gabrielle Meagher, Shaun Wilson, Mark Western and Timothy Phillips The Collectors of Lost Souls. Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen. By Warwick Anderson Britain and the West New Guinea Dispute, 1949–1962. By Nicholas Tarling War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma. By Christopher Herbert Making History Now and Then: Discoveries, Controversies and Explorations. By David Cannadine Churchill: the Greatest Briton Unmasked. By Nigel Knight Liberal Imperialism in Germany. Expansionism and Nationalism 1848–1884. By Matthew P. Fitzpatrick The Oxford Handbook of Fascism. Edited by R.J.B. Bosworth The Hemingses of Monticello: an American Family. By Annette Gordon‐Reed The Malays. By Anthony Milner The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War. By David Halberstam Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory. By Scott Laderman The Power of Words in International Relations: Birth of an Anti‐Whaling Discourse. By Charlotte Epstein Charles Darwin on the Origin of Species: The Illustrated Edition. Edited by David Quammen Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re‐enchantment of the World. By George Levine