Reordering the World is a penetrating account of the complexity and contradictions found in liberal visions of empire. Focusing mainly on nineteenth-century Britain--at the time the largest empire in history and a key incubator of liberal political thought--Duncan Bell sheds new light on some of the most important themes in modern imperial ideology. The book ranges widely across Victorian intellectual life and beyond. The opening essays explore the nature of liberalism, varieties of imperial ideology, the uses and abuses of ancient history, the imaginative functions of the monarchy, and fantasies of Anglo-Saxon global domination. They are followed by illuminating studies of prominent thinkers, including J. A. Hobson, L. T. Hobhouse, John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, Herbert Spencer, and J. R. Seeley. While insisting that liberal attitudes to empire were multiple and varied, Bell emphasizes the liberal fascination with settler colonialism. It was in the settler empire that many liberal imperialists found the place of their political dreams. Reordering the World is a significant contribution to the history of modern political thought and political theory.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments xi 1. Introduction: Reordering the World 1 Political Thought and Empire 3 Structure of the Book 8 Part I: Frames 2. The Dream Machine: On Liberalism and Empire 19 Languages of Empire 20 Intertextual Empire: Writing Liberal Imperialism 26 On Settler Colonialism 32 The Tyranny of the Canon 48 3. What Is Liberalism? 62 Constructing Liberalism: Scholarly Purposes and Interpretive Protocols 65 A Summative Conception 69 Liberalism before Locke 73 Wars of Position: Consolidating Liberalism 81 Conclusion: Conscripts of Liberalism 90 4. Ideologies of Empire 91 Imperial Imaginaries 94 Ideologies of Justification 101 Ideologies of Governance 106 Ideologies of Resistance 110 Conclusions 115 Part II: Themes 5. Escape Velocity: Ancient History and the Empire of Time 119 The Time of Empire: Narratives of Decline and Fall 121 Harnessing the Time Spirit: On Imperial Progress 132 The Transfiguration of Empire 141 6. The Idea of a Patriot Queen? The Monarchy, the Constitution, and the Iconographic Order of Greater Britain, 1860-1900 148 Constitutional Patriotism and the Monarchy 152 Civic Republicanism and the Colonial Order 160 Conclusions 165 7. Imagined Spaces: Nation, State, and Territory in the British Colonial Empire, 1860-1914 166 Salvaging Empire 168 Remaking the People 173 Translocalism: Expanding the Public 178 Conclusions 181 8. The Project for a New Anglo Century: Race, Space, and Global Order 182 Empire, Nation, State: On Greater Britain 183 The Reunion of the Race: On Anglo-America 189 Afterlives of Empire: Anglo-America and Global Governance 196 Millennial Dreams, or, Back to the Future 204 Part III: Thinkers 9. John Stuart Mill on Colonies 211 On Systematic Colonization: From Domestic to Global 214 Colonial Autonomy, Character, and Civilization 224 Melancholic Colonialism and the Pathos of Distance 229 Conclusions 236 10. International Society in Victorian Political Thought: T. H. Green, Herbert Spencer, and Henry Sidgwick With Casper Sylvest 237 Progress, Justice, and Order: On Liberal Internationalism 239 International Society: Green, Spencer, Sidgwick 243 Civilization, Empire, and the Limits of International Morality 258 Conclusions 264 11. John Robert Seeley and the Political Theology of Empire 265 Enthusiasm for Humanity 268 On Nationalist Cosmopolitanism 276 Expanding England: Democracy, Federalism, and the World-State 281 Empire as Polychronicon: India and Ireland 290 12. Republican Imperialism: J. A. Froude and the Virtue of Empire 297 John Stuart Mill and Liberal Civilizing Imperialism 299 Republican Themes in Victorian Political Thought 302 J. A. Froude and the Pathologies of the Moderns 307 Dreaming of Rome: The Uses of History and the Future of "Oceana" 311 Conclusions 319 13. Alter Orbis: E. A. Freeman on Empire and Racial Destiny 321 Palimpsest: A World of Worlds 323 The "Dark Abyss": Freeman on Imperial Federation 327 On Racial Solidarity 334 14. Democracy and Empire: J. A. Hobson, L. T. Hobhouse, and the Crisis of Liberalism 341 Confronting Modernity 342 Hobhouse and the Ironies of Liberal History 345 Hobson and the Crisis of Liberalism 354 Conclusions 361 15. Coda: (De)Colonizing Liberalism 363 Bibliography 373 Index 431