"A New Description of Empire": Edmund Burke and the Regicide Republic of Letters

In a departure from the extensive scholarship which focuses on Edmund Burke's writings on the British Empire, this essay explores Burke's diagnosis of an entirely new imperial formation: "the universal empire of the Regicide Republick of France." In order to account for the emergence of this novel form of empire and to explain the logic of its expansion, Burke returns to his early language theory from A Philosophical Enquiry (1757), modifying his analysis in the face of a burgeoning radical print culture. While the Enquiry celebrates the affective powers of language, Burke's Letters on a Regicide Peace (1795–97) deplores the transformative potential of print. Indeed, in Burke's final writings, "the Empire of Regicide" is inaugurated and sustained by a globalizing republic of letters.