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  • Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain by Theodore Koditschek
  • Ian Hesketh (bio)
Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain by Theodore Koditschek; pp. 351. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. $104.00 cloth.

It is a seeming paradox that during the nineteenth century, when the ideals of economic and political liberalism were being adopted and applied at home, a “second” British empire was being established abroad, an empire that was, in Theodore Koditschek’s measured words, “more extensive, farther-flung, and in many ways more coercive than the one that it replaced” (2). In the well-argued and richly nuanced Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination, Koditschek offers an explanation of this apparent conundrum by examining what he calls “narratives of progress,” the historical writing that was produced by historians, novelists, and politicians that helped to legitimate this new phase of empire that was so seemingly out of place in such a decidedly liberal age. To various degrees, the many historical writers analyzed throughout the book all embraced the enlightened view of progress that situated colonial subjects in a hierarchy of development, justifying imperialism as a burden and a right for the mutual benefit of ruler and ruled. Koditschek charts the way in which these narratives of progress shifted throughout the period to accommodate new, relevant theories (such as evolutionary biology and scientific racism) and new developments on the ground (such as the 1857 Indian Mutiny and the Irish Home Rule crisis) in an ever-changing imperial landscape.

The book is not, therefore, a high intellectual history of nineteenth-century liberal imperial theory, but neither is it merely a contextual analysis of key historiographical texts. Koditschek rather smartly chooses to examine figures who wrote explicitly about empire and history while also directly contributing to the reconstruction of Britain’s empire along liberal lines. More impressively still, along with analyzing the broader imperial events of the period, Koditschek also integrates his nuanced readings of the key progress [End Page 130] narratives with subtle analyses of personal and biographical details that clearly played a role in shaping such narratives. For instance, when Koditschek highlights the familial metaphors employed by such writers, he does so not just to indicate the unconscious gendered discourse of the time but also to show how conceptions of family life shaped the liberal imperial endeavour.

This method proves most fruitful in the chapters on Thomas Babington Macaulay and James Anthony Froude, two of the most popular nineteenth-century English historians. Even before Macaulay wrote the staggeringly successful History of England from the Accession of James II (five volumes, 1848–61), which would go on to sell more than one million copies by the end of the century, he served as a Whig member of Parliament, most notable for his articulate endorsement and defence of the 1832 Reform Bill, and then on the Supreme Council of India between 1834 and 1838. As Koditschek makes clear, however, Macaulay’s liberal imperialism was in many ways inherited from his anti-slavery activist father, Zachary Macaulay, who advocated the liberating potential of converting colonial subjects to Christianity in order to save their souls while offering the opportunity of upward mobility. The younger Macaulay would seek to accomplish what both he and his father could not as colonial administrators by writing a fact-based though far from dry-as-dust Anglocentric romance of England’s dynamic constitutional progress, thereby secularizing and historicizing his father’s civilizing imperial mission. The path from absolutism to liberty that Macaulay charts in his History of England is a universal one, to be taken by those willing to reject their own retrograde culture in favour of the political rights that were central to England’s historical progress. Although Macaulay’s narrative symbolized the apex of liberal imperialism, when colonial advancement seemed a distinct possibility in the very near future, it promoted Anglocentric assimilation as the only true escape from indigenous barbarism, an anti-orientalist message that ultimately replicated rather than transcended “the limitations of his father’s evangelical Protestantism” (149).

Macaulay’s progress narrative was a romance well fitted to the liberal hopes of expanding...

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