Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

Empire and imperialism

duncan be l l

1 Introduction

Empire is one of the most contested terms in the modern political lexi-

con. Over the centuries it has carried a multiplicity of meanings; today it

still lacks a clear and consistent deﬁnition. Like so much of our political

vocabulary, its etymological roots lie in the ancient world. It originates with

the Latin term imperium, which designated initially the right of command

(held by magistrates) within the Roman state, and which was subsequently

extended to denote, in the age of Julius Caesar and Augustus, the phys-

ical space occupied by the territorial acquisitions of Rome, the Imperium

Romanum (Richardson 1991). Subsequent European empires never fully

escaped the obsession with ritual, virtue and glory, the sanction of reli-

gion, or the claims about spreading civilisation, which had been central

to the Roman vision. Until the eighteenth century, when it began to be

applied to foreign conquests and modes of rule, the term was employed

almost exclusively in European political thought to encompass either the

Holy Roman Empire or to designate the sovereign territories of individual

states.

However, the conceptual ﬁeld of empire has mutated over time, as

have the practices associated with it, assuming different forms across diverse

national and regional contexts.

In this chapter my focus will be limited to the political thought of Euro-

pean expansion during the nineteenth century. I explore, that is, some of

I would like t o thank the following for providing helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chap-

ter: Robert Aldrich, Peter Cain, Gregory Claeys, Istvan Hont, Beate Jahn, Karuna Mantena, Julia

Skorupska, Gareth Stedman Jones, Casper Sylvest, and Michael Taggart. All the usual disclaimers

apply.

1 On the history of the concept, and that of cognate terms such as ‘colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’, see

Burbank and Cooper 2010;Armitage2000, 2002; Duverger 1980; Finley 1976; Koebner and Schmidt

1964; Muldoon 1999;Pagden1995; Pocock 1990. For useful historical surveys of imperial forms, see

Alcock et al. 2001;Bayly2004;Lieven2000.

864

Empire and imperialism

the theories that confronted, justiﬁed and challenged the seizure and gov-

ernment of non-contiguous territories during a period that witnessed a

massive extension in the physical scale of empires. In 1800 the European

powers between them controlled 35 per cent of the landmass of the planet;

by 1878 this had grown to 67 per cent; by 1914 it reached a staggering

84 per cent (Kennedy 1987,pp.148–9). I will not be exploring the lega-

cies of ‘empire’ in the European context – for example the Holy Roman

Empire, dissolved by Napoleon in August 1806 – or non-Western modes

of imperialism. For much of the century, the military and commercial

dominance of Britain set the terms for much of European (and later Amer-

ican) discourse about empire. For this reason I will focus chieﬂy, although

not exclusively, on British political thought. Although individuals from all

points on the political spectrum offered arguments in favour of empire, the

most rigorous theoretical accounts, as well as the most ambitious visions,

tended to emanate from self-described liberal writers. For this reason I

focus mainly on liberals. The relationship between liberalism and empire

was complex and variable: it escapes casual generalisation. Forged in the

political and intellectual ﬁres of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth

centuries, liberalism was a multifaceted and constantly evolving constella-

tion of positions, intermingling and often fusing philosophical ideas (some

old, others new) and political-economic practices.

Liberals were amongst

the most ardent imperialists; they also offered many powerful criticisms of

empire. Despite claims to the contrary (Jahn 2005; Mehta 1999) there was

no singular or inherent liberal imperial ‘logic’, ‘impulse’ or ‘urge’. This

line of argument seems to suggest, minimally, that a special act of will

or theoretical circumspection was (and is) required to stop liberals from

becoming imperialists. Whilst true of some speciﬁc articulations of liberal-

ism, this does not paint an accurate portrait of the liberal tradition, which

was itself internally contested and diverse. European liberal thought was,

in general, theoretically indeterminate in regard to imperial expansion and

rule.

Questions of empire were woven through the fabric of nineteenth-

century political thought. Sometimes they were addressed directly, for

example in the discussions about the means and ends of despotic

2 On the difﬁculties of viewing liberalism simply as a normative political t heory, see Geuss 2002.For

variations on a liberal theme see also the chapters in this volume by Bayly, Claeys, Harrison, Jennings,

Mommsen, Rosen, Thompson, Vincent and Young.

865

Duncan Bell

government over subject peoples found in the writings of John Stuart Mill

and Alexis de Tocqueville, or in the withering criticisms of empire offered

by Benjamin Constant or Herbert Spencer. But empire also permeated, in a

less direct but no less important sense, many other aspects of social and polit-

ical thought, helping mould conceptions of liberty, nationality, gender and

race, supporting assumptions about moral equality and political rationality,

framing debates over the scope and value of democracy, and underpinning

analyses of the nature of political economy, progress, civilisation and the self.

Imperial ideology was diffused across an array of mediums and articulated

in a variety of registers, including the creation of colonial ‘knowledge’ –

anthropological, cartographic and technological. It shaped the development

of the sciences, natural and social. It infused literature and the visual arts.

Such polyphonic variation and ideological pervasiveness is hardly surpris-

ing given the pivotal role of empires in structuring world order. But the

tenor and tone of imperial thought differed widely between individuals and

theoretical positions, and often according to the relative power of the com-

munities from which it emanated. Nineteenth-century European thinkers

tended to exhibit great conﬁdence, and frequently unabashed arrogance, in

the perceived cultural and material achievements of their own ‘civilisation(s)’

in comparison with more ‘backward’ forms of life. This often translated into

a claim about moral superiority – and hence, for many, to the justiﬁcation of

suzerainty. There were nevertheless signiﬁcant national variations. For most

of the century the British were relatively secure in their assertion of imperial

power, although this was often accompanied by a nagging sense in some

quarters that decline (and possibly fall) was threatening, even imminent,

especially towards the end of the century; the French, on the other hand,

frequently directed an envious gaze across the Channel, the univer salistic

aspirations of post-revolutionary republicanism tempered by a recognition

of political realities. Later in the century, this combination of insecurity and

emulation pervaded much German, Italian and, to a lesser extent, American

political thinking. By the turn of the twentieth century many in Europe

were watching ner vously, torn between admiration and envy, as the United

States grew in political, economic and military might. A new and potentially

vast empire was looming on the horizon. The desire to compete successfully,

both in economic and geopolitical terms, drove many of the debates over

imperialism.

In order to illustrate the variety of imperial thought, I brieﬂy outline the

views of four inﬂuential thinkers: John Stuart Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville,

866

Empire and imperialism

Herbert Spencer, and J. A. Hobson.

Before doing this, however, I explore

some of the general issues motivating and giving shape to conceptions of

empire in the nineteenth century.

2 Mapping the imperial imagination

Nineteenth-century European thinkers often viewed the world through a

bifocal lens. Whatever their particular conceptions of empire, and indepen-

dently of their location on the political spectrum, they tended to divide the

peoples of the world into two categories: the civilised and the non-civilised

(‘savage’ or ‘barbarian’). This distinction did not preclude considerable vari-

ation within each category – it allowed, for example, the construction of

elaborate hierarchies of the ‘civilised’ states, as well as between the different

types of ‘savage’. But the most important line carved the world into two

spheres. This dualistic logic reached back to the Greek distinction between

those who spoke Greek and those, the ‘barbarian’ (barbaros), who did not. It

played a central role in the political thought of the eighteenth century, where

it was given sophisticated historical-sociological form by the stadial theo-

rists of development, most notably in Scotland (Hont 2005; Pocock 2005).

During the nineteenth century it was crucial. Each sphere was subjected to

different political, legal and ethical arguments. This bifocal world-view was,

in turn, given for mal expression by the majority of international lawyers

during the century (Anghie 2005; Koskenniemi 2001; Pitts 2007). However,

there existed no consensus about the deﬁnition of civilisation. It could be

characterised according to the dominant understandings of religion found

in a society, levels of technological sophistication, ascribed racial properties,

economic dynamism, the structure of legal and political institutions, posited

gender roles, and perceptions of individual moral and intellectual capacity,

or (as was typically the case) some combination of these. This division often

underpinned the justiﬁcation of empire. It did so in two ways. First, it meant

that ‘non-civilised’ political communities lacked the same protective rights

of sovereign independence as the ‘civilised’ powers; second, that in the name

of universal progress, or of a providential God, it was legitimate, and even

necessary, to aid the ‘immature’ peoples of the world reach ‘maturity’. The

3 Each of these thinkers is introduced in greater depth elsewhere in this volume, and for that reason

I will avoid providing general accounts of their political thought. See especially the chapters by

Harrison, Rosen, Jennings, Thompson and Vincent.

867

Duncan Bell

second did not automatically follow from the ﬁrst, but they were often yoked

together.

It was not only Br itish and French liberals who spoke the language of

civilisation, or employed it to defend imperialism. It was also a common

theme in socialist thought.

Although critical of the aggressive nationalism

displayed by many of his compatriots, Eduard Bernstein, a leading ‘revi-

sionist’ theorist of evolutionary socialism, argued in his polemical Vorausset-

zungen des Sozialismus that there was no good reason to view the acquisition

of colonies ‘as being reprehensible as such’. And he proceeded to argue

that ‘we can recognise only a conditional right of savages to the land they

occupy. Higher civilisation has ultimately a higher right’ (Bernstein 1993,

pp. 169–70).

Ensconced in his own long British exile and reﬂecting on

the awesome powers of capitalism, Karl Marx frequently employed forms

of civilisational classiﬁcation. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels

argued that the ‘bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of

production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws

all, even the most barbarian nations, into civilisation’ (Marx and Engels 2002,

p. 224). Although he was bitingly critical of most facets of European im-

perialism, highlighting both the pernicious motivations and the frequently

cruel results, Marx offered a qualiﬁed defence of the modernising dynamics

of empire. His views on this topic, which underwent a signiﬁcant change

towards the end of his life, were never fully developed, and are scattered

throughout his vast corpus of writings. In the early 1850s his arguments

about the British Empire in India, published in a series of articles in the

radical New York Daily Tribune, were shot through with ambivalence. On

the one hand, he castigated the brutality, oppressiveness, and greed of the

British – and indeed of all Western empires. He wrote that the ‘profound

hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation lies unveiled

before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms,

to the colonies, where it goes naked’ (Marx and Engels 1960b, p . 81). The

British were falsely cloaking their gluttony in the vocabulary of benev-

olence. On the other hand, the empire in India, and in particular the

unleashed vigour of capitalism, had generated beneﬁcial unintended conse-

quences, most notably in catalysing a ‘social revolution’ that was reshaping

4 On the var ieties of British ‘socialist-imperialism’ see Claeys 2010.

5 From 1887–1901 Ber nstein lived in London, having ﬂed an arrest warrant in his native Ger many.

Initially a close friend of Engels, his writings generated the ‘revisionist controversy’ over the future

direction of socialism during the late 1890s. His views on colonialism were attacked by Karl Kautsky

and Rosa Luxemburg, amongst others.

868

Empire and imperialism

a stagnant caste-bound society. The underpinnings of ‘Oriental despotism’

were being eroded, allowing for the future expression of the ‘grandeur and

historical energies’ of the Indian people (Marx and Engels 1960a, p. 36).

British civilisation was, he stated, ‘superior’ to that of the Hindus (Marx

and Engels 1960b, p. 77). Above all else, the British brought with them

railways, bureaucratic rationality and industrial modernity. ‘Modern indus-

try, resulting from the railway system, will dissolve the hereditary divisions

of labour, upon which rests the Indian castes, those decisive impediments

to Indian progress and Indian power’ (Marx and Engels 1960b, p. 80). The

empire was making the world afresh. In his chapter on ‘The Modern The-

ory of Colonisation’ in Capital (1954b, p. 758), meanwhile, Marx lambasted

capitalist practices of imperial acquisition while suggesting that the coloni-

sation of ‘virgin’ lands could in principle secure the freedom of labour.

From the 1870s onwards, however, Marx’s argument shifted in important

ways; his vision of empire was transformed as part of a general theoretical

reorientation. He now theorised a transition from ‘post-capitalism’ to ‘anti-

capitalism’, from conceiving of capitalism as a destabilising albeit necessary

step on the road to a socialist future to seeing it as almost wholly destructive.

Marx instead searched for, and eventually found, the best model for human

association in primordial communities. As such, and under the inﬂuence of

the ethnological writings of (amongst others) Lewis Henry Morgan, Marx’s

views on the effects of empire shifted from ambivalence to outright hostility

(Stedman Jones 2007b).

But they did so only by retur ning to a mythopoeic

pre-industrial idyll.

Civilisational arguments, then, were not conﬁned to liberalism; they

helped to structure various forms of universalistic thought. And nor were

they new, or unique to the West. The distinction between civilisation was

also common in Japan, China and the Islamic states (O’Brien 2006,p.18).

Such accounts did not lead inevitably to the advocacy of empire, although

they certainly helped to justify it. Civilisation was also a key category

for those critical of expansion. This argument took (at least) three forms.

First, it could be argued that the attempt to export civilisation would

invariably fail given the intrinsic difﬁculty of the task, and in particular

the perceived recalcitrance of the target communities. This argument was

increasingly popular towards the end of the century, as anthropological and

6 The main target for much of Marx’s musings on ethnology was the ‘blockhead John Bull’ Henry

Maine, whom Marx came to regard as fundamentally mistaken about the nature of ancient ‘village

communities’ (Marx 1972,p.324). On Maine, see Mantena 2010.

869

Duncan Bell

sociological accounts of the structure of ‘native’ communities became

prominent in imperial debate (Mantena 2010). Alternatively, even if the

spread of civilisation was both possible and universally beneﬁcial, there

were more efﬁcient and humane modes of transmission – a case made by

Richard Cobden, and many later liberal internationalists, for whom the

primary engine of transformation was inter national commerce (Hobson

1968,chs.8 and 13;Morley1910,pp.333–4). Finally, and most com-

monly, it could be argued that even if empire was an effective vehicle for

spreading civilisation it inevitably damaged the imperial metropole, polit-

ically, economically, socially and morally. The very quest for empire was,

as such, self-defeating as it challenged the forces of progress, and even the

accomplishments of civilisation itself. This was the lesson that many post-

Renaissance Europeans drew from the fall of Rome, and it formed a key

element of the criticisms of empire offered by Bentham, Constant, Cobden,

Spencer and a long line of nineteenth-century radicals.

Civilisational binaries were frequently complemented, supplanted and

occasionally undermined by other attempts to classify and order the world.

This often resulted from the difﬁculties faced in incorporating liminal soci-

eties, those that fell awkwardly between the categories of ‘civilised’ and

‘barbarian’. China, Japan, Russia, the rapidly declining Ottoman Empire,

the independent republics of Latin America freed from the mantle of a dis-

integrating Spanish empire between 1808 and 1826, even the countries of

Southern Europe – all generated contentious debate. Other ways of divid-

ing up the world cut across normative accounts of civilisation. For example,

it was also common to judge states within the civilised world according to

their purported levels of ‘greatness’, a label that was often but not always

related to physical size, or according to whether they were among the select

group of militarily dominant ‘great powers’.

It has recently been argued that during the early decades of t he nineteenth

century there was a ‘turn to empire’, a move characterised by increasing

support for imperial expansion and rule, especially amongst liberals. This

represented a radical break from late eighteenth-century political thought,

a period of ‘enlightenment against empire’ deﬁned by the views of thinkers

such as Bentham, Condorcet, Diderot, Herder, Hume, Kant, Smith and

Voltaire (Muthu 2003; Pitts 2005). There was, however, substantial conti-

nuity between the two periods. Firstly, numerous late eighteenth-century

commentators (albeit often those who fall outside of the retrospectively con-

structed canon) were proud adherents of the beneﬁcial ‘civilising’ effects of

empire. Burke was an ardent defender of a muniﬁcent vision of empire,

870

Empire and imperialism

arguing, for example, that the spread of Christianity was vital to lift indige-

nous populations, in particular in the West Indies and slaves in the Americas,

out of their moral and political slumber (Kohn and O’Neill 2006). Adam

Ferguson, another stern critic of Warren Hastings, defended a simultane-

ously monarchical and commercial empire. William Robertson, the author

of an extremely popular history of Charles V and the Spanish Empire,

argued in a manner that preﬁgured later liberal imperialism. Even Jeremy

Bentham, who was generally sceptical of empire, occasionally resorted to

outlining some of the possible beneﬁts of colonisation. The poetry of the

era can be seen in the same light: even in its most zealous anti-imperial

articulations, and most obviously amongst dissenters and evangelicals, it

left space for ‘moral rehabilitation as a language of revitalised imperialism’

(O’Brien 2001,p.292). And second, throughout the nineteenth century

numerous liberals vented stinging criticisms of empire, often in terms similar

to those adumbrated during the eighteenth century. There is, nevertheless,

something to be said for the argument that there was a turn towards empire,

at least in so far as conﬁdence in the ability of European powers to conquer

and to rule effectively increased throughout the ﬁrst half of the century,

generated by (and generating) a fur ther strengthening of the belief in the

moral superiority of European political institutions and culture. During the

nineteenth century the European powers vastly increased their economic

and military dominance over the rest of the world, and this helped underpin

an increasingly common argument that the ‘civilised’ had a duty – and not

simply a capacity or right – to directly intervene to assist the ‘backward’.

This view was summarised by the British radical politician and imperialist

Joseph Chamberlain in 1897: ‘the sense of possession has given place to a

different sentiment – the sense of obligation. We feel now that our rule

over their territories can only be justiﬁed if we can show that it adds to the

happiness and prospects of the people’ (Chamberlain 1897,p.3).

The same assumptions about European civilisational superiority were

usually shared by enthusiastic imperialists and critics of empire, although

they interpreted them in different ways. (This is one reason why the

labels ‘pro-imper ial’ and ‘anti-imperial’, whilst perhaps unavoidable in some

instances, are usually too crude for satisf actory historical and theoretical dis-

crimination.) Allied with other political and intellectual developments, sur-

veyed elsewhere in this book, including the increasing popularity of theories

of race, ideas about progress, and the development of the social sciences,

the material and normative foundations of imperial expansion became

ever more secure and deeply embedded over t he course of the century.

871

Duncan Bell

European political thought both reﬂected and helped reinforce the increased

conﬁdence in the potentially transformative powers of empire.

Empire assumed many different political and legal forms. British thinkers

tended to differentiate between settler colonies, such as those founded in

Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and the ‘dependent’ empire, including

most prominently India but also encompassing territories in the Caribbean

and Africa. The two categor ies were both imagined and ruled in a very

different manner, especially during the second half of the century; the

former seen essentially as civilised (or at least semi-civilised) outposts of the

‘mother country’; the latter as ‘backward’ communities in need of generous

but ﬁrm rule. As the historian J. R. Seeley wrote in his best-selling tract,

The Expansion of England:

The colonies and India are in opposite extremes. Whatever political maxims are most

applicable to one, are most inapplicable to the other. In the colonies everything is

brand-new. There you have the most progressive race put in the circumstances most

favourable to progress. There you have no past and an unbounded future. Government

and institutions are all ultra-English. All is liberty, industry, invention, innovation, and

as yet tranquillity. (Seeley 1883,p.176)

The settler colonies, that is, were already embedded within the sphere of

civilisation, and the most pressing concerns were not over how to drag

them to enlightenment but rather about the most efﬁcacious ways to reg-

ulate relations between the settlers and the indigenous communities – a

theme running through many liberal accounts in particular – and to secure

colonial loyalty to the ‘mother country’. Both forms of empire were fre-

quently justiﬁed using versions of a long-standing defence of territorial

acquisition, which stressed that ‘unoccupied’ or poorly utilised land could

be claimed.

Property rights were thus derived, at least in part, from modes

of production and forms of political organisation. The perceived differences

between the empire of settlement, which during the late nineteenth century

was often termed ‘Greater Britain’ (Dilke 1868;Bell2007), and the other

aspects of empire was further reinforced by the introduction of colonial

7 This is often referred to as a terra nullius, but it is important to recognise that this is an anachronistic

usage, and that the term (though not the concept or the practice) is of recent coinage (Fitzmaurice

2007). See, for uses of the concept, in historical context, Tuck 1999 and Tully 1993. It was not

only liberals who drew on such arguments. In his defence of colonialism Bernstein wrote that

‘[i]t is not conquest but the cultivation of land that confers an historical right to its use’ (Bernstein

1993,p.170). On British socialist uses of the argument, see also Claeys 2010. Another line of argument

suggested that at least some indigenous populations (most commonly Australian Aboriginals) were

heading inevitably for extinction, a process that should be lamented but accepted as a necessary

dimension of human progress: Brantlinger 2003.

872

Empire and imperialism

‘responsible government’ (essentially limited representative institutions) in

the mid-Victorian period. But the distinction between ‘dependencies’ and

‘dominions’ was not always clear-cut.

Caution is thus required in general-

ising about ‘the’ British Empire; in essence, there were a variety of different

though interpenetrating empires, the boundaries of which were sometimes

hard to discern.

Political thought during the era relied on a habit of comparison, the impe-

rial gaze stretching across the world and back through time. Other empires,

past and present, provided templates for ways of ruling, practices to emulate,

as well as lessons about what to avoid. The most common historical refer-

ence point was Rome, which was utilised to bolster an array of competing

and sometimes contradictory political arguments. The most common con-

temporary target was the British Empire, which generated both envy and

derision, albeit with the former predominating. Just as French constitu-

tional thinkers, at least since Montesquieu and up through Constant and

the doctrinaires, had looked across the Channel for a model of balance and

restraint, so French imperial thinkers frequently looked to the British for

lessons in empire, both positive and negative. In considering the best policy

for Algeria Tocqueville sought to learn from the experience of the British in

India, as well as from the American campaign of internal colonisation. One

of the key f actors motivating Wilhelmine German imperial ‘Weltpolitik’,

the quest for a ‘place in the sun’, during the 1890s was the belief that it was

necessary to compete on equal terms with the great European empires, and

in particular Britain.

At the end of the century numerous American impe-

rialists also looked to Britain for guidance on how to acquire and govern

their new territorial possessions, including Hawaii and the Philippines (both

annexed in 1898). Indeed, one of the key texts of American imperialism,

Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Inﬂuence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783

(1890), sought to model future American politics on the lessons that could

be drawn from the rise of the British Empire. It was in turn f

eted in Britain.

But the trafﬁc was not all one-way. Hobson drew heavily on both American

imperialism (especially in the Philippines) and American economic writings

to underpin his account of the roots of late nineteenth-century imperialism

(Hobson 1997,pp.76–9).

8 The difﬁculty of clearly delineating and labelling the elements of the British Empire was a recurrent

theme: Cornewall Lewis 1841;Mill1977b, p. 562; Mills 1856; and Jenkyns 1902,pp.1–9.

9 For a striking example of this, see the writings of the scholar and imperialist Carl Peters (Perras

2004).

873