LIBERALISM AND BRITISH IMPERIALISM or The Mind-Set of Liberal Imperialism in Britain (original) (raw)

or The Mind-S e t of Liberal Imp eri ali s m in Britai n . Micha el Levin (form e rly of Golds mit h s' Colleg e, University of London) 'Certainly the English avoid e d a logical, intellec tu al appro a c h to empir e.' (A.P.Thornto n, Doctrine s of Imperialis m , New York: Wiley, 1965, p.55). '…their liberalis m did not ext e n d to a belief in selfgovern m e n t .' (Eric Stoke s, The English Utilitarians and India , Delhi: Oxford University Press, 199 2, p. 2 8 3 ).

THE IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE, DAVI D ARMITAGE

The history of the rise, decline, and fall of the British Empire has most often been told as the story of an empire whose foundations lay in India during the second half of the eighteenth century. That empire formally encompassed parts of south Asia, Australasia, Africa and the Americas. Its ascent began with British victory at the battle of Plassey in continued almost unabated in South Asia and the Pacific until the end of the Napoleonic Wars resumed momentum in the latter half of the nineteenth century during the European ‘scramble for Africa’, and then unraveled definitively during and after the Second World War. William Pitt was its midwife, Lord Mountbatten its Sexton and Winston Churchill was its chief-mourner in Britain. Its ghost lives on in the form of the Commonwealth; its sole remains are the handful of United Kingdom Overseas Territories, from Bermuda to the Pitcairn Islands. In this account, the American Revolution, and its aftermath divided the two (supposedly distinct) Empires, chronologically, geographically and institutionally. The Peace of Paris that ended the Seven Years War marked the end of French imperial power in North America and South Asia. Twenty years later, the Peace of Paris by which Britain acknowledged the independence of the United States of America marked the beginnings of newly configured British Atlantic Empire, still including the Caribbean islands and the remaining parts of British North America; it also signaled the British Empire’s decisive ‘swing to the east’ into the Indian and Pacific oceans. Historians of the eighteenth-century British Empire have protested against any easy separation between the ‘First’ and ‘Second’ British Empires on the grounds that the two overlapped in time, that they shared common purposes and personnel, and that the differences between the maritime, commercial colonies of settlement in North America and the military, territorial colonies of conquest in India have been crudely overdrawn. Nevertheless, among historians, and more generally in the popular imagination, the British Empire still denotes that ‘Second’ Empire, which was founded in the late eighteenth century and whose character distinguished it decisively from the ‘Old Colonial System’ of the British Atlantic world that had gone before it.

Loading...

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

The Crisis of Liberal Imperialism

Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, edited by Duncan Bell, 2007