Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Imagining Great Britain: Union, Empire, and the burden of history, 1800–1830
- 2 Imagining a British India: history and the reconstruction of Empire
- 3 Imagining a Greater Britain: the Macaulays and the liberal romance of Empire
- 4 Re-imagining a Greater Britain: J. A. Froude: counter-romance and controversy
- 5 Greater Britain and the “lesser breeds”: liberalism, race, and evolutionary history
- 6 Indian liberals and Greater Britain: the search for union through history
- Epilogue: From liberal imperialism to Conservative Unionism: losing the thread of progress in history
- Index
- References
5 - Greater Britain and the “lesser breeds”: liberalism, race, and evolutionary history
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 April 2011
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Imagining Great Britain: Union, Empire, and the burden of history, 1800–1830
- 2 Imagining a British India: history and the reconstruction of Empire
- 3 Imagining a Greater Britain: the Macaulays and the liberal romance of Empire
- 4 Re-imagining a Greater Britain: J. A. Froude: counter-romance and controversy
- 5 Greater Britain and the “lesser breeds”: liberalism, race, and evolutionary history
- 6 Indian liberals and Greater Britain: the search for union through history
- Epilogue: From liberal imperialism to Conservative Unionism: losing the thread of progress in history
- Index
- References
Summary
The doctrine of evolution is nothing else than the historical method applied to the facts of nature; the historical method is nothing else than the doctrine of evolution applied to human societies and institutions.
F. Pollock, Oxford Lectures (Oxford, 1890), 41We are now in a position to trace out all that the Comparative method of inquiry has to tell us of the earliest political state of that branch of mankind to which we ourselves belong. We are now ready to stand face to face with our kinsmen … In this mighty drama of European and Aryan history, three lands, three races, stand before all others, as those to whom, each in its own day, the mission has been given to be the rulers and teachers of the world … The Greek, the Roman, and the Teuton, each in his own turn stands above the other nations of the Aryan family. Each in his turn has reached the highest stage alike of power and civilization that was to be had in his own age, and each has handed on his own store to be further enriched by successors who were at once conquerors and disciples.
E. A. Freeman, Comparative Politics [1873] (London, 1896), 24–5This would be a grand land if only every Irishman would kill a negro, and be hanged for it.
E. A. Freeman to F. H. Dickinson, New Haven, Connecticut, December 4, 1881, in W. R. Stephens, The Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman (London, 1895), II: 242- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical ImaginationNineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain, pp. 206 - 262Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
References
in The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “The Idea of Imperial Federation,” in and (eds.), Reappraisals in British Imperial History (London, 1975), 121–39Google Scholar
, “Narrative Time and Racial/Evolutionary Time in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Imperial History,” in and (eds.), Race, Nation, and Empire: Making Histories, 1750 to the Present (Manchester, 2010), 36–55Google Scholar
, Researches in the Physical History of Man, ed. and with introduction by (Chicago, 1973)Google Scholar
, The Death of Adam: Evolution and its Impact on Western Thought (Ames, 1959), 175–247Google Scholar
, “Capitalism, Race and Evolution in Imperial Britain: 1850–1900,” in , , and (eds.), Race Struggles (Champaign-Urbana, 2009), 48–79Google Scholar
, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago, 2000)Google Scholar
, Theories of Human Evolution: A Century of Debate, 1844–1944 (Baltimore, 1986), 25–35Google Scholar
, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945 (Cambridge, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man,” in (ed.), Images of Race (New York, 1979), 37–54Google Scholar
, Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization [1865] (London, 1870)Google Scholar
, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900 (Baltimore, 1983), 58–106Google Scholar
quoted in , Prelude to Imperialism: British Reactions to Central African Society, 1840–1890 (London, 1965), 90, 204–5, 207–14Google Scholar
Savage Africa, Being the Narrative of a Tour in Equatorial, Southwestern and Northwestern Africa (New York, 1864), 431–52
, At Last: Christmas in the West Indies [1871] (London, 1905), 16–28, 36–9, 51, 285–302Google Scholar
, The Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict: The Maori, the British and the New Zealand Wars (Montreal, 1986)Google Scholar
, Martial Races: The Military Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester, 2004)Google Scholar
(ed.), The Concept of Race in South Asia (Oxford, 1995)
Dictionary of National Biography, 22 vols. (London and New York, 1908–9), supplement XXI (New York, 1909), 383–5
, India as it May Be: A Proposed Government and Policy (London, 1853), 224–36, 394–438Google Scholar
, “The Tenure of Land in India,” in (ed.), Systems of Land Tenure in Various Countries (London, 1881), 213–90Google Scholar
Caste, Society and Politics in India: From the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge, 1999)
, “Race Matters: Orientalism and Religion, India and Beyond, c.1770–1880,” Modern Asian Studies, 41.3 (2007), 471–513CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, White and Black: The Outcome of a Visit to the United States (London, 1879), vi–xii, 111–99Google Scholar
The British Empire (London, 1887)
Address to the Anthropology Section of the British Association (London, 1886)
, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, 1999), 97–114Google Scholar
, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, 2005), 123–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “The Victorian Values of Sir Henry Maine,” in (ed.), The Victorian Achievement of Sir Henry Maine: A Centennial Reappraisal (Cambridge, 1991), 28–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship (Berkeley, 1987), 179–86
, , and , That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge, 1983), 209–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Freedom of Contract, the Market and Imperial Law-Making,” in and (eds.), Critiques of Capital in Modern Britain and America (London, 2002), 49–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “The Political Economy of Empire: Freedom of Contract and ‘Commercial Civilization’ in Colonial India,” in and (eds.), Worlds of Political Economy: Knowledge and Power in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London, 2004), 69–94Google Scholar
, “Law and ‘Tradition’: Henry Maine and the Theoretical Origins of Indirect Rule,” in and (eds.), Law and History, VI (Oxford, 2004), 159–88Google Scholar
, The Blue Mutiny: The Indigo Disturbances in Bengal, 1859–1862 (Philadelphia, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Modern Researches into the Origin and Early Phases of Civilization,” Calcutta Review, 75 (1882), 132–51Google Scholar
, The Pursuit of Progress: A Study of the Intellectual Development of Romesh Chunder Dutt, 1848–1888 (Calcutta, 1977), 39–74Google Scholar
, “British Applications of the Aryan Theory of Race to India, 1850–1870,” English Historical Review, 89.352 (July, 1974), 578–603CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1968), 141CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Discipline and Power: The University, History and the Making of an English Elite, 1870–1930 (Stanford, 1994)Google Scholar
, Modernizing England's Past: English History in the Age of Modernism: 1870–1970 (Cambridge, 2003), 1–91Google Scholar
, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven, 2006), 27–105Google Scholar
, “The Failure of Liberal Racialism: The Racial Ideas of E. A. Freeman,” The Historical Journal, 24.4 (1981), 825–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Cave Hunting: Researches on the Evidence of Caves Respecting the Early Inhabitants of Europe (London, 1874)Google Scholar
, “The Norman Yoke,” in Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in the Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1964), 50–122Google Scholar
, The Saxons in England: A History of the English Commonwealth till the Period of the Norman Conquest, 2 vols. (London, 1849), IGoogle Scholar
, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981), 164, 178–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Greater Greece and Greater Britain, and George Washington the Expander of England (London, 1886)Google Scholar
, The People's Historian: John Richard Green and the Writing of History in Victorian England (Westport, 1994)Google Scholar
Letters of John Richard Green, ed. (London, 1901), 1–206
Report of the Indian Education Commission (Calcutta, 1883), 270–2
, , and , Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender, and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, 2000)Google Scholar
“Narrating the Constitution: The Discourse of the ‘Real’ and the Fantasies of Nineteenth Century Constitutional History,” in (ed.), Re-Reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England's Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1996), 204–38
Letters of William Stubbs, ed. (London, 1904), 366
, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, 1994), 10–11, 171–205Google Scholar
, The Imperial and Colonial Constitutions of the Britannic Empire (London, 1872), 3, 36–7Google Scholar
Parliamentary Debates, 4th ser., III (London, 1892), 53–68