Reordering the World : : Essays on Liberalism and Empire / / Duncan Bell.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press Complete eBook-Package 2016
• VerfasserIn: Bell, Duncan,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2016]; ©2016
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (456 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction. Reordering the world -- Part I: Frames -- 2. The Dream Machine -- 3. What Is Liberalism? -- 4. Ideologies of Empire -- Part II: Themes -- 5. Escape Velocity -- 6. The Idea of a Patriot Queen? -- 7. Imagined Spaces -- 8. The Project for a New Anglo Century -- Part III: Thinkers -- 9. John Stuart Mill on Colonies -- 10. International Society in Victorian Political Thought -- 11. John Robert Seeley and the Political Theology of Empire -- 12. Republican Imperialism -- 13. Alter Orbis -- 14. Democracy and Empire -- 15. Coda -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX