Reordering the World – Essays on Liberalism and Empire

"This brilliant work of scholarship is the most detailed and comprehensive history of the languages of liberal imperialism by one of the preeminent scholars in the field. It is a must-read."--James Tully, University of Victoria

"Liberalism and empire were not born twins together but became conjoined over the course of the nineteenth century, with consequences that bedevil the liberal project to this day. Reordering the World is a magisterial study of their entanglement by a historian at the top of his game. Political theorists, intellectual historians, and students of empire are once again in Duncan Bell's debt for his deep research, elegant analysis, and consistently acute judgments."--David Armitage, Harvard University

"This collection of brilliant essays highlights the complexity and breadth of modern imperial ideology in Britain and beyond. Duncan Bell explores the entanglements of liberal thought with the politics of empire and the manifold historical narratives developed by influential thinkers--philosophers, sociologists, journalists, and historians--to justify and make sense of foreign conquest and settler colonialism. These far-ranging analyses reveal, in careful detail, both the tensions and ambiguities of their thought, the capaciousness of liberalism as an ideology, and the long-standing influence of this discomforted wrestling with empire on twentieth-century and contemporary politics. Reordering the World thus challenges political theorists to 'decolonize' liberalism as a category and, in the process, demonstrates precisely why Bell is one of the most important scholars writing about the history of political thought and empire today."--Jeanne Morefield, Whitman College

"This is a fine collection of essays that gives a compelling overview of a large number of issues, problems, and themes resulting from the juxtaposition of liberalism and empire."--Gregory Claeys, Royal Holloway, University of London

"Reordering the World is a collection of unusually thoughtful, incisive, and cogent essays that will interest a variety of scholars, from intellectual historians and scholars in British studies to historians of empire and political theorists. This book will be widely read and widely taught."--Andrew Sartori, New York University