Lineages of Empire The Historical Roots of British Imperial Thought

by Kelly, Duncan

• ISBN13: 9780197264393
• ISBN10: 0197264395
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-08-17
• Publisher: British Academy

Summary

Recently there has been an explosion of academic and popular interest in the history of how Britons have thought about their Empire. This volume focuses on the ways in which the intellectual history and political thought of modern Britain have been saturated with imperial concerns.Chapters address thematic questions about size and scale, race, colonial emigration, and the ideological uses of the classical tradition, questions that are crucial for understanding the historical roots of British imperial thought. There are also studies of figures central to understanding thecharacter of intellectual debates about the British Empire from the 18th to the 20th centuries: Edmund Burke, James Steuart, Adam Smith, and Harold Laski.This volume also shows how an awareness of these histories of the imperial past can provide numerous lessons for understanding the strengths and weaknesses of much contemporary political thinking about empire and imperialism. In fact, whilst there are many studies of the British Empire, as well asinnumerable volumes on the imperial cast of much modern history, the thematic and chronological coherence of this volume makes it a unique statement of the latest thinking about these questions from internationally acclaimed political theorists and intellectual historians.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Genealogies of Empire

Lineages of Informal Imperialism

The Social Question and the Problem of History after Empire

Historical Debates

'Neither Masters nor Slaves': Small States and Empires in the Long Eighteenth Century

Virgil and the British Empire, 1760-1880Iain Hampsher-Monk: Edmund Burke and Empire

British India as a Problem in Political Economy: Comparing James Steuart and Adam Smith

Colonial Emigration, Public Policy and Tory Romanticism, 1783-1830

From Natural Science to Social Science: Race and the Language of Race-Relations in Late Victorian and Edwardian Discourse

Harold Laski on the Habits of Imperialism

Conclusion

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