Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Chapter 1 Victorian visions of global order: an introduction
- Chapter 2 Free trade and global order: the rise and fall of a Victorian vision
- Chapter 3 The foundations of Victorian international law
- Chapter 4 Boundaries of Victorian international law
- Chapter 5 ‘A legislating empire’: Victorian political theorists, codes of law, and empire
- Chapter 6 The crisis of liberal imperialism
- Chapter 7 ‘Great’ versus ‘small’ nations: size and national greatness in Victorian political thought
- Chapter 8 The Victorian idea of a global state
- Chapter 9 Radicalism and the extra-European world: the case of Karl Marx
- Chapter 10 Radicalism, Gladstone, and the liberal critique of Disraelian ‘imperialism’
- Chapter 11 The ‘left’ and the critique of empire c. 1865–1900: three roots of humanitarian foreign policy
- Chapter 12 Consequentialist cosmopolitanism
- Index
- Ideas in Context
Chapter 1 - Victorian visions of global order: an introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Chapter 1 Victorian visions of global order: an introduction
- Chapter 2 Free trade and global order: the rise and fall of a Victorian vision
- Chapter 3 The foundations of Victorian international law
- Chapter 4 Boundaries of Victorian international law
- Chapter 5 ‘A legislating empire’: Victorian political theorists, codes of law, and empire
- Chapter 6 The crisis of liberal imperialism
- Chapter 7 ‘Great’ versus ‘small’ nations: size and national greatness in Victorian political thought
- Chapter 8 The Victorian idea of a global state
- Chapter 9 Radicalism and the extra-European world: the case of Karl Marx
- Chapter 10 Radicalism, Gladstone, and the liberal critique of Disraelian ‘imperialism’
- Chapter 11 The ‘left’ and the critique of empire c. 1865–1900: three roots of humanitarian foreign policy
- Chapter 12 Consequentialist cosmopolitanism
- Index
- Ideas in Context
Summary
INTRODUCTION
For much of the nineteenth-century Britain, standing at the heart of a vast and intricate network of power and patronage, dominated global politics. The Victorian empire was the largest that the world had ever known, spanning all the continents and oceans of the planet, and shaping the lives of hundreds of millions of people. The political, cultural, and economic dynamics of our own age bear the imprint of this tangled history.
The British empire is the subject of a vast scholarly literature. In recent years a fertile, and rapidly expanding, subfield has investigated the multiple ways in which empires have been theorised – imagined, explained, justified, and criticised. This dovetails neatly with a strand of scholarship that explores the development of international thought, analysing how thinkers of previous generations conceived of the nature and significance of political boundaries, and the relations between discrete communities. The spatial reorientation of intellectual history has been catalysed by two broader developments: a fixation, ranging across the social sciences and humanities, on the dynamics and normative status of globalisation, and more recently, a concern with the revival of empire, driven primarily by American foreign policy. As well as highlighting the richness of past thinking about empire and international relations, scholars have demonstrated that much of what has been greeted as exhilaratingly original in current thinking about global politics, has roots deep in the history of western political reflection.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Victorian Visions of Global OrderEmpire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, pp. 1 - 25Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
- 2
- Cited by