Covenants Without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire

Extract

Covenants Without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire. By Jeanne Morefield. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 280p. $39.50.

The entanglement of liberal political thought and European imperial expansion has received increasing attention in recent years, in work by David Armitage, Barbara Arneil, Uday Mehta, Richard Tuck, and James Tully, among others. Yet the phenomenon remains puzzling, for while many European liberals, especially from the mid–nineteenth century through the interwar period, enthusiastically promoted imperial rule, the reasons for their support varied widely: There is no single or consistent liberal imperialism. Jeanne Morefield has enriched this story considerably with her closely argued and elegantly written account of a hitherto largely neglected episode, which she calls “one of the most philosophically interesting moments when liberal thinkers and activists engaged in the politics of hierarchy and paternalism” (p. 2). Although Morefield's protagonists, Gilbert Murray and Alfred Zimmern, have not received much attention in previous scholarship, her narrative impressively complements the account in Martti Koskenniemi's recent book The Gentle Civiliser of Nations (2002). Both chronicle the activities and ideas of visionary internationalists who aspired to end the barbarities of war and erect a humane international system, but who also keenly supported European imperial expansion during its heyday.