A01=Jennifer Pitts
Abolitionism
Algeria
Ambivalence
Analogy
Anti-imperialism
Author_Jennifer Pitts
Backwardness
Barbarian
British Empire
Category=NHTQ
Category=NHTR
Category=QDTS
Civilization
Colonialism
Colonization
Conjectural history
Consideration
Cosmopolitanism
Criticism
Democracy
Democracy in America
Democratization
Despotism
Dichotomy
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Ethics
Exclusion
Explanation
French Algeria
Good government
Governance
Hostility
Hypocrisy
Imperialism
Indigenous peoples
Institution
Intellectual
International law
International relations
James Mill
Jeremy Bentham
John Stuart Mill
Legislation
Legislator
Liberalism
Metropole
Montesquieu
Morality
Nationality
On Liberty
Patriotism
Philosopher
Political philosophy
Political science
Politics
Prejudice
Racism
Representative democracy
Rhetoric
Ruler
Scottish Enlightenment
Skepticism
Slavery
Social change
Sociology
Sovereignty
Suffrage
Suggestion
Superiority (short story)
Tax
The History of British India
Theory
Thought
Utilitarianism
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691127910
- Weight: 595g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 30 Jul 2006
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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A dramatic shift in British and French ideas about empire unfolded in the sixty years straddling the turn of the nineteenth century. As Jennifer Pitts shows in A Turn to Empire, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Jeremy Bentham were among many at the start of this period to criticize European empires as unjust as well as politically and economically disastrous for the conquering nations. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the most prominent British and French liberal thinkers, including John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, vigorously supported the conquest of non-European peoples. Pitts explains that this reflected a rise in civilizational self-confidence, as theories of human progress became more triumphalist, less nuanced, and less tolerant of cultural difference. At the same time, imperial expansion abroad came to be seen as a political project that might assist the emergence of stable liberal democracies within Europe. Pitts shows that liberal thinkers usually celebrated for respecting not only human equality and liberty but also pluralism supported an inegalitarian and decidedly nonhumanitarian international politics.
Yet such moments represent not a necessary feature of liberal thought but a striking departure from views shared by precisely those late-eighteenth-century thinkers whom Mill and Tocqueville saw as their forebears. Fluently written, A Turn to Empire offers a novel assessment of modern political thought and international justice, and an illuminating perspective on continuing debates over empire, intervention, and liberal political commitments.
Jennifer Pitts is Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University. She is the editor and translator of "Alexis de Tocqueville: Writings on Empire and Slavery".
