INTRODUCTION

Recent studies of nineteenth-century political thought have focused on the salient relationship between liberalism and empire in this period. Scholars have sought to understand how liberalism, ostensibly grounded in universal and democratic principles, generated, at the same time, political and ethical justifications of imperial rule. In exploring this paradox, studies of ‘liberal imperialism’ have investigated tensions in liberalism that could justify a variety of forms of political exclusion. However, this exclusive focus on justifications of empire has tended to elide the ways in which liberalism and its relationship to empire underwent fundamental transformations throughout the nineteenth century. This chapter focuses precisely on one such transformative moment in imperial ideology, namely the crisis of liberal imperialism during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century – at the height of imperial power – moral and political justifications of empire, paradoxically, receded from the forefront of debates about the nature and purpose of imperial rule. Just as British expansion assumed its greatest geographic reach, an ethically orientated political theory of imperial legitimacy, exemplified in the liberal model of imperialism that had dominated British imperial discourse since the early nineteenth century, retreated in significance. Ethical justifications of empire were displaced as new sociological understandings of colonial societies began to function as de facto explanations for imperial rule.