Turn To Empire

Product Description

A dramatic shift in British & French ideas about empire unfolded in the sixty years straddling the turn of the nineteenth century. As Jennifer Pitts shows in A Turn to Empire" Adam Smith Edmund Burke & Jeremy Bentham were among many at the start of this period to criticize European empires as unjust as well as politically & economically disastrous for the conquering nations. By the mid-nineteenth century however the most prominent British & French liberal thinkers including John Stuart Mill & Alexis de Tocqueville vigorously supported the conquest of non-European people. Pitts explains that this reflected a rise in civilizational self-confidence as theories of human progress became more triumphalist less nuanced & less tolerant of cultural difference. At the same time imperial expansion abroad came to be seen as a political project that might assist the emergence of stable liberal democracies within Europe. Pitts shows that liberal thinkers usually celebrated for respecting not only human equality & liberty but also pluralism supported an inegalitarian & decidedly nonhumanitarian international politics. Yet such moments represent not a necessary feature of liberal thought but a striking departure from views shared by precisely those late-eighteenth-century thinkers whom Mill & Tocqueville saw as their forebears. Fluently written "A Turn to Empire" offers a novel assessment of modern political thought & international justice & an illuminating perspective on continuing debates over empire intervention & liberal political commitments."