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.

Duncan Bell is Reader in Political Thought and International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ's College. His books include The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860-1900 (Princeton).

Acknowledgments xi
1. Introduction: Reordering the World 1
Political Thought and Empire 3
Structure of the Book 8
Part I: Frames
2. The Dream Machine: On Liberalism and Empire 19
Languages of Empire 20
Intertextual Empire: Writing Liberal Imperialism 26
On Settler Colonialism 32
The Tyranny of the Canon 48
3. What Is Liberalism? 62
Constructing Liberalism: Scholarly Purposes and Interpretive Protocols 65
A Summative Conception 69
Liberalism before Locke 73
Wars of Position: Consolidating Liberalism 81
Conclusion: Conscripts of Liberalism 90
4. Ideologies of Empire 91
Imperial Imaginaries 94
Ideologies of Justification 101
Ideologies of Governance 106
Ideologies of Resistance 110
Conclusions 115
Part II: Themes
5. Escape Velocity: Ancient History and the Empire of Time 119
The Time of Empire: Narratives of Decline and Fall 121
Harnessing the Time Spirit: On Imperial Progress 132
The Transfiguration of Empire 141
6. The Idea of a Patriot Queen? The Monarchy, the Constitution, and the Iconographic Order of Greater Britain, 1860-1900 148
Constitutional Patriotism and the Monarchy 152
Civic Republicanism and the Colonial Order 160
Conclusions 165
7. Imagined Spaces: Nation, State, and Territory in the British Colonial Empire, 1860-1914 166
Salvaging Empire 168
Remaking the People 173
Translocalism: Expanding the Public 178
Conclusions 181
8. The Project for a New Anglo Century: Race, Space, and Global Order 182
Empire, Nation, State: On Greater Britain 183
The Reunion of the Race: On Anglo-America 189
Afterlives of Empire: Anglo-America and Global Governance 196
Millennial Dreams, or, Back to the Future 204
Part III: Thinkers
9. John Stuart Mill on Colonies 211
On Systematic Colonization: From Domestic to Global 214
Colonial Autonomy, Character, and Civilization 224
Melancholic Colonialism and the Pathos of Distance 229
Conclusions 236
10. International Society in Victorian Political Thought: T. H. Green, Herbert Spencer, and Henry Sidgwick With Casper Sylvest 237
Progress, Justice, and Order: On Liberal Internationalism 239
International Society: Green, Spencer, Sidgwick 243
Civilization, Empire, and the Limits of International Morality 258
Conclusions 264
11. John Robert Seeley and the Political Theology of Empire 265
Enthusiasm for Humanity 268
On Nationalist Cosmopolitanism 276
Expanding England: Democracy, Federalism, and the World-State 281
Empire as Polychronicon: India and Ireland 290
12. Republican Imperialism: J. A. Froude and the Virtue of Empire 297
John Stuart Mill and Liberal Civilizing Imperialism 299
Republican Themes in Victorian Political Thought 302
J. A. Froude and the Pathologies of the Moderns 307
Dreaming of Rome: The Uses of History and the Future of "Oceana" 311
Conclusions 319
13. Alter Orbis: E. A. Freeman on Empire and Racial Destiny 321
Palimpsest: A World of Worlds 323
The "Dark Abyss": Freeman on Imperial Federation 327
On Racial Solidarity 334
14. Democracy and Empire: J. A. Hobson, L. T. Hobhouse, and the Crisis of Liberalism 341
Confronting Modernity 342
Hobhouse and the Ironies of Liberal History 345
Hobson and the Crisis of Liberalism 354
Conclusions 361
15. Coda: (De)Colonizing Liberalism 363
Bibliography 373
Index 431