The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain edited by Simon Gunn and James Vernon, and: Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century visions of a Greater Britain by Theodore Koditschek (review)

The “liberal” in a term such as “liberal modernity” often functions less as a qualifier of modernity than as a recognition that modernity as such has been deeply marked by liberalism. This conceptual braiding of liberalism and modernity has been especially marked in Foucauldian analyses in history and political theory, for instance, through the category of governmentality and associated understandings of liberal subjectivity, liberal technologies, and rationalities of rule. The two books under consideration pry apart these terms as they explore different faces of liberalism in the historical imagination and experience of nineteenth-century Britain. In so doing, they raise crucial questions about what is gained and lost by the ways in which we define liberalism substantively and use it analytically.

The uniformly accomplished essays comprising The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain, edited by Simon Gunn and James Vernon, are held together by a strong analytical framework that squarely faces the theoretical and historical conundrums posed by the category of liberal modernity. Each of the essays takes up this challenge—established in a superb introduction—and offer nuanced meditations on the nature of modernity in imperial Britain and the extent to which that modernity can be described as liberal. Some essays skillfully reconsider the key features of liberal modernity as a historical process, such as Chris Otter’s acute analysis of the distinctive environmental transformations that shaped it. The majority of the essays, however, question any easy equation of liberalism and modernity. The essays by Tom Crook (on secrecy and transparency) and Jon Lawrence (on paternalism and class) suggest that some important features of nineteenth-century liberal governance were anchored in and shaped by older forms of paternalistic and patrician modes of thought and practice. These essays continue a revisionist historiography that has contested the view of victorian Britain as the exemplar of a precocious and complete modernity. But, as Crook shows, this skepticism can be usefully extended to the ways in which we envision the rationality of liberal modernity itself; liberal governance, that is, may be less a slick or seamless governmentality than a “decidedly messy, politicized affair” (72).

A second line of analysis considers the internal and external limits of liberalism. Here the animating conundrum is whether the illiberal faces of liberalism—its tendencies toward exclusion and coercion—are constitutive contradictions or historical failures. Not surprisingly, these issues come to the fore most clearly in liberalism’s connection with its imperial history. The essays byJames Epstein, Gavin Rand, and Tony Bennett in particular raise doubts about the extent to which imperialism can be described as a successful liberal project in any meaningful sense. Making this claim, however, requires an attention to liberalism as an ideology or substantive political project and less as a general feature of modernity. These essays therefore explore the ways in which particular liberal ideals of free labor or improvement gave way to illiberal forms of racialization. If imperial governance rendered fragile the putative goals and utopian visions of a classical liberalism, then imperialism served as a limit of liberalism.

The ways in which the tensions and contradictions of imperial liberalism were addressed and taken up by nineteenth-century intellectuals is the central theme of Theodore Koditschek’s Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination. Koditschek’s work is a masterful account of the ways in which imperial agendas were reframed in a liberal idiom through the vehicle of historiography. The analysis focuses on the ways in which distinctive narratives of progress in romantic, constitutional, and scientific historiography work to establish and legitimate liberal imperialism. The central claim is that...