Nation, rights, and progress: The emergence of liberal imperialism, 1780--1850

Standard interpretations of the liberal tradition's position on empire make the mistake of believing that there is something about the structure of rights language, universalism, or the idea of progress that leads liberalism as such to produce a theory and politics of empire. In different times and under diverse circumstances in the history of the liberal tradition, however, liberals have been among imperialism's most prominent defenders and its sharpest critics. Anti-imperialist arguments appeared ascendant in the closing years of the eighteenth century: Diderot, Kant, Bentham, Burke, and Adam Smith all invoked a wide range of moral and practical arguments to denounce the European imperial project. Only fifty years later, however, Europe's prominent liberals were all strong supporters of imperial conquest and rule. The very fact of this dramatic shift in liberal opinions on empire in the decades between the late Enlightenment and the mid-nineteenth century is generally overlooked. By examining the understudied writings on empire of some of the most important political thinkers of this period---including Tocqueville's little-known but extensive writings in favor of French rule in Algeria, and Burke's and Mill's neglected writings on India and Ireland---this dissertation explores the ways in which the language of rights, theories of progress, and understandings of the nation affected thinkers' moral and political judgments of the European imperial project. I pay close attention to their responses to changing circumstances in domestic politics: in particular, to the pressing concerns of nineteenth-century thinkers such as Mill and Tocqueville about how to establish viable liberal governments in a democratic age. We must turn to the peculiar conditions of certain historical moments to understand how thinkers whom we understand to exist within a broad but identifiable tradition could have disagreed so thoroughly about one of the most important political developments of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the expansion of European colonial empires. Liberalism, that is, must be understood as a historical phenomenon, as a tradition that has changed dramatically in response to the varied political circumstances and the anxieties of particular thinkers.