A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France

Extract

A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France. By Jennifer Pitts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 392p. $39.50.

This book is a brilliantly successful attempt to account for the apparent transition from the fierce, bitter assault on the idea of empire by the writers of the second half of the eighteenth century—from Montesquieu and Adam Smith to Benjamin Constant—to the often self-congratulatory, high-minded endorsement of a new kind of imperial mission less than half a century later, here associated most clearly with the writings of John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville. To have identified this shift in the first place is not the least of Jennifer Pitts's merits. Much of the modern, postcolonial historiography of this period has assumed, generally without much argument, that it was the “Enlightenment” that provided the ideological inspiration for the evolution of the nineteenth-century European empires. True, Pitts has been greatly assisted by two previous works, Sankar Muthu's Enlightenment against Empire (2003) and Uday Mehta's Liberalism and Empire (1999), but although these have done much to establish the existence of an antiimperial Enlightenment, neither has anything much to say about the transformation in European imperial policy, and in European political theory, that followed the end of the French Revolution.