An insight into the climate of political thought surrounding the most powerful empire in history.

An insight into the climate of political thought surrounding the most powerful empire in history.

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.

In her study of the unsuccessful nineteenth-century emigrant, Tamara S. Wagner argues that failed emigration and return drive nineteenth-century writing in English in unexpected, culturally revealing ways. Wagner highlights the hitherto unexplored subgenre of anti-emigration writing that emerged as an important counter-current to a pervasive emigration propaganda machine that was pressing popular fiction into its service. The exportation of characters at the end of a novel indisputably formed a convenient narrative solution that at once mirrored and exaggerated public policies about so-called 'superfluous' or 'redundant' parts of society. Yet the very convenience of such pat endings was increasingly called into question. New starts overseas might not be so easily realizable; emigration destinations failed to live up to the inflated promises of pro-emigration rhetoric; the 'unwanted' might make a surprising reappearance. Wagner juxtaposes representations of emigration in the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Frances Trollope, and Charlotte Yonge with Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian settler fiction by Elizabeth Murray, Clara Cheeseman, and Susanna Moodie, offering a new literary history not just of nineteenth-century migration, but also of transoceanic exchanges and genre formation.

An international roster of top scholars explores the role of naval power and maritime trade in creating the modern international system. This book is both a history of maritime strategy, sea power, and seaborne commerce from the nineteenth century to the present day and an examination of current strategic issues.

"A magisterial study...by a historian at the top of his game. Political theorists, intellectual historians, and students of empire are once again in Duncan Bell's debt for his deep research, elegant analysis, and consistently acute judgments."--David Armitage, Harvard Universityrsity

A study of British and American Utopian writing of the 1800s in the context of developments in real architectural, political, and cultural life. The book studies utopian visions published in the UK and the USA in the 1800s by writers such Robert Owen, James Silk Buckingham, Edward Bellamy, and William Morris.

This edited volume presents a new, grand and global narrative for international relations (IR) history in the pivotal nineteenth century. Typically considered by IR scholars to be a long century of relative peace after 1815, the contributors offer a reconceptualization of IR in this century, arguing that it is temporally bifurcated, with very different patterns of behavior in the first and second halves. A mid-century discontinuity – a "pivot period" – marks the transition phase in Europe and globally when, in the space of a few years, a shift occurred from a comparatively calm, politically disconnected world under loose British free trade hegemony to one of scrambles for territory and keen interest in imperial possessions and conquest. All the book’s chapters deal with characterizing patterns of relations in the first half of the century or the second, with two addressing the discontinuity in the middle. In the first half aspects of regional orders are described (in Latin America, East Asia and Europe) alongside crucial developmental processes (missionaries and colonial expansion, the agency of regionally localized actors, of leading elites). In the second half, there is again discussion of regional developments (East Asia, Europe), but now under the onslaught and pressures of the latter half of the century, and spotlighting industrialization’s impact and the role of status competition and international law. In presenting this new narrative for the nineteenth century, it becomes clear that an era long considered uninteresting on Eurocentric grounds is in fact crucial and pivotal in global terms. This work will be of particular interest to students and scholars of the history of international relations.

In this book, Mathias Albert develops an ambitious theoretical framework that describes world politics as a specific social system set within the wider political system of world society. Albert's analysis of the historical evolution and contemporary form of world politics takes the theory of social differentiation as its starting point. World politics is a specific, relatively recent form of politics and Albert shows how the development of a distinct system of world politics first began during the long nineteenth century. The book goes on to identify the different forms of social differentiation that underlie the variety of contemporary forms of organizing political authority in world politics. Employing sociological and historical perspectives, A Theory of World Politics also reflects critically on its relation to accounts of world politics in the field of international relations and will appeal to a wide readership in a range of fields.

Ireland in an Imperial World interrogates the myriad ways through which Irish men and women experienced, participated in, and challenged empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most importantly, they were integral players simultaneously managing and undermining the British Empire, and through their diasporic communities, they built sophisticated arguments that aided challenges to other imperial projects. In emphasizing the interconnections between Ireland and the wider British and Irish worlds, this book argues that a greater appreciation of empire is essential for enriching our understanding of the development of Irish society at home. Moreover, these thirteen essays argue plainly that Ireland was on the cutting edge of broader global developments, both in configuring and dismantling Europe’s overseas empires.