Historians of political thought have lately made two great leaps towards expanding the scope of their inquiries. The first, the ‘international turn’, was long-heralded and has been immediately fruitful. Histories of international thought that treat reflection on the relations among states, nations, peoples, individuals and other corporate actors in the international arena have idiomatically reconstructed the norms that regulate (or have been supposed to regulate) their interactions. Over the course of barely a decade, this lively historiography has already established a robust canon of thinkers and problems. The second move, towards what might be called a ‘global turn’ in the history of political thought, is for the moment much less well developed. Political theorists, historians of philosophy and others have variously called for a transnational intellectual history or the globalisation of the history of political thought. Will this be a history of the convergence of intellectual traditions from around the world? Or of the global circulation of ideas? What is certain is that the possibilities for such a history – or even for multiple histories under this rubric – remain enticingly open-ended.

Any global history of political thought will surely have to include the history of political and other forms of thinking about global connections and about the phenomena variously subsumed under the umbrella term ‘globalisation’. Past thinkers who attempted to conceive the world, its peoples and its polities holistically will be indispensable to its inquiries. This chapter tackles one such thinker, Jeremy Bentham, with the larger goal of imagining a global history of political thought firmly in mind. Unlike some of his distinguished predecessors and contemporaries, such as Diderot, Turgot, Smith, Herder, Kant or Goethe, Bentham has not generally been considered in such global terms. Yet only by failing to take seriously his own self-conception have historians managed to overlook the global Bentham. On the day before his 83rd birthday in February 1831, he made the extent of his ambitions evident: ‘J. B. the most ambitious of the ambitious. His empire – the empire he aspires to – extending to and comprehending the whole human race, in all places, – in all habitable places of the earth, at all future time . . . Limits has it no other than those of the earth.’ These were also the dimensions his sympathetic contemporary, William Hazlitt, thought Bentham had attained.