Chapter 1 - Victorian visions of global order: an introduction

Summary

INTRODUCTION

For much of the nineteenth-century Britain, standing at the heart of a vast and intricate network of power and patronage, dominated global politics. The Victorian empire was the largest that the world had ever known, spanning all the continents and oceans of the planet, and shaping the lives of hundreds of millions of people. The political, cultural, and economic dynamics of our own age bear the imprint of this tangled history.

The British empire is the subject of a vast scholarly literature. In recent years a fertile, and rapidly expanding, subfield has investigated the multiple ways in which empires have been theorised – imagined, explained, justified, and criticised. This dovetails neatly with a strand of scholarship that explores the development of international thought, analysing how thinkers of previous generations conceived of the nature and significance of political boundaries, and the relations between discrete communities. The spatial reorientation of intellectual history has been catalysed by two broader developments: a fixation, ranging across the social sciences and humanities, on the dynamics and normative status of globalisation, and more recently, a concern with the revival of empire, driven primarily by American foreign policy. As well as highlighting the richness of past thinking about empire and international relations, scholars have demonstrated that much of what has been greeted as exhilaratingly original in current thinking about global politics, has roots deep in the history of western political reflection.