Progress, Interrupted

Theodore Koditschek's Liberalism, Imperialism and the Historical Imagination is an ambitious contribution to the debate over the ways in which liberal concepts of progress influenced the intellectual and political life of modern Britain and empire. Its achievements suggest we are, indeed, getting somewhere. This impressively researched and, on the whole, elegantly realized study seeks to explore the mutually transformative relationship between historical writing and imperial agendas in the nineteenth century. To this end, it delves into the lives and work of three generations of literary and historical masterminds in England, Scotland, Ireland and India. The result is a sweeping examination of liberal progress narratives as they tangled with imperial politics from the Battle of Seringapatam and the Union of 1801 through the late-Victorian era.

Koditschek approaches his subject from two premises. First, a 'second' British Empire arose in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Second, such an empire - a spectacle of political inequality, slavery, expansion and coercion - must have presented gross challenges to liberal thinkers. Why, then, did that 'second' empire appear without inciting substantial protest or abhorrence on the part of liberal thinkers? How were liberal thinkers complicit in the life processes of the empire; and how did they live with themselves? The answer is that problems of imperial inequality 'could be managed, and sometimes provisionally resolved, by discourses about history' and particularly by 'the progress narrative . . . deployed over the course of the nineteenth century to explain and justify Britain's imperial activity within a liberal framework' (pp. 2-4). The 'historical imagination' in question, then, largely sprang from a series of intellectual urges: to manage contradiction, to justify inequity, and to resolve, if only provisionally, incendiary political and moral dilemmas.

The risks of this approach - mainly, that of argument preceding evidence - are mitigated by the sheer reach of Koditschek's analysis. Liberalism, Imperialism and the Historical Imagination opens with an analysis of Anglo-Irish and Scottish 'romances of British Union' as an ideal type 'to which later romances of Empire could aspire' (p. 55). The novels of Richard Edgeworth, his daughter Maria Edgeworth, and Sir Walter Scott laid the foundations for subsequent imperial progress narratives along three lines. Those narratives aimed at demonstrating that Britain and its colonial dependencies shared a common past and future destiny; that capitalist development moved forward in waves with political and cultural unity; and that true union could be achieved only if metropolitans reserved ample space and respect for the colonial cultural autonomy. The Edgeworths and Scott emphasized the scientific reform of peripheral communities and the need for education to lead toward consensual union. In the case of India, however, pitfalls rather than a clear progress narrative marked British historical thinking about India during the transition from company state to Raj. The East India Company's defeat of Tipu Sultan in 1799 may have been a chronological foil to the 1801 Act of Union, but rather than salving and selling centripetal movement, Koditschek tells us, writers on British India were compelled to 'devise a progress narrative to justify dictatorial rule' (p. 11). While the eighteenth century had seen the flourishing of orientalists such as William Jones and Warren Hastings, the nineteenth-century empire demanded the services of a more bureaucratic, utilitarian state. Yet, in history-writing, there were glimmers of a more accommodating stance. A 'new orientalism', dominated by Scottish administrators such as Mountstuart Elphinstone, James Tod and John Malcolm sought to establish British rule along lines of consensual, scientific development. When James Mill's radical assault on Indian civilization in The History of British India (1818) heralded the transition to wholesale Europeanization, the 'original orientalist vision that sought to mediate the British-Indian Union' found its afterlife in the dissenting voice of Rammohun Roy (p. 97).

This opening discussion is followed by two chapters on the most famous and controversial 'literary' historians of Victorian Britain, Thomas Babington Macaulay and James Anthony Froude. While these men of letters made imperial administration or activism...