Today’s economy is global, contemporary political rhetoric is universal, international political frameworks are built with the stated intent of helping poorer nations yet serve the interests of wealthy ones, and elites are getting richer in virtually every single country in the world. The resonance of imperial logics in our own world is clear. This is what drives the ever-growing engagement with colonial histories, defenders, and critics of empire, and those leaders who tried to overturn the hegemony of Eurocapitalist interests and powers. Many political theorists, myself included, have looked into the past to find mirrors of our own world and its dynamics of global expropriation, domination, and resistance.

A field of inquiry has reached maturation when it harbors interpretive struggles. Daniel O’Neill’s Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire stakes out its battle against political theorists who have taken Burke’s position outside the dominant notions of British empire to read him as anticolonial. O’Neill chastises his interlocutors: “In short, just because a thinker is occasionally the enemy of your enemies does not make him your friend.” (p. 178).

I take O’Neill’s argument about Burke as an excellent opportunity to reflect upon why there has been a flurry of work in the field of political theory about colonialism and empire over the last 15 years. Political theory is a field that evolves at a glacial pace; however, the explosion of conversations and books about colonialism and empire is a notable recent development that has helped to open related conversations about indigeneity and migration. The field is rejecting the assumption of social contracts and nation-states as norms that are more or less perfectly achieved, and instead seeing these two formulations as the anachronisms that history has proven them to be.

Most basically, writing about colonialism and empire gives us an opportunity to consider political dynamics on a global scale. What makes one entity able to dominate another? Does contact change either party; is mutual incomprehension the inevitable result; and is it possible to reverse the historical roles of dominated and dominator? And what kind of political frameworks are established to facilitate economic exchange or extraction (choose your word according to your view of global trade)?

Political theorists have focused on the ideologies that accompanied global roaming and pillage and have detailed how conquerors write the story of their invasions as civilizational triumphs, with all the selective interpretation and obfuscation such a practice inevitably requires. Uday Mehta’s book, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought and Practice , was significant in that it prodded its readers to see the commonalities in our universalist notions of world order and the logics of the British Empire as couched in enlightenment terminology. Many political theorists have been preoccupied with unveiling the partnership between modern progress and global exploitation, a particularly important project since it continues today under the same aegis.

O’Neill’s Burke is, in this way, a refreshing break from these now very familiar arguments in favor of domination, such as bringing civilization, human rights, the rule of law, progress, gender equity, and development to all parts of the world. Niall Ferguson has made his career hawking the salutary aspects of empire, as have other American figures such as Donald Kagan, explored in depth by Jeanne Morefield’s Empires without Imperialism: Anglo-American Decline and the Politics of Deflection . O’Neill establishes Burke’s defense of empire in detail, and it is a fascinating juxtaposition to most of the colonial rhetoric that has been parsed by political theorists. Burke wanted to use the British Empire to keep everything the same, or rather, intensely hierarchical and ordered. It is difficult to imagine a time when conservatism did not have to dress itself up as liberalism, but Burke was an unapologetic defender of aristocracy as the best method for maintaining civilization. Burke counseled the aristocracy to use religion and nationalism to bind their minions to their rule, creating social harmony based upon everyone knowing their respective status and obligations. According to Burke, it is not oppression if everyone accepts hierarchy as necessary and inevitable; it is instead “civilization.” He was an enthusiastic advocate of the caste system of India, so much so that while reading O’Neill’s book, I imagined Burke wishing that the Church of England had incorporated such a smart, Platonic element in its own structure.

Edmund Burke is known, as much as such a figure is known in our days of historical amnesia, for two stances: his rejection of the French Revolution and his relentless persecution of Warren Hastings for improprieties in India. O’Neill’s book sets out to explain how these two positions, which may initially seem inconsistent, are illustrative of his worldview.

Two very interesting themes in the book are Burke’s views on gender and religion as essential aspects of his conservative worldview. Like many imperialists, he saw the treatment of women as the marker of civilizational achievement. Burke was dismayed by the execution of Marie Antoinette, pointing out that Frenchmen had stooped to an unfathomable low of tribal behavior in North America, the very bottom of his civilizational pyramid. O’Neill’s earlier publication, The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate: Savagery, Civilization, and Democracy , explored the gendered aspects of Burke’s thought in debate with Mary Wollstonecraft, and his brief discussions of gender and empire here are lively and brilliant.

It is interesting to note that Burke was supportive of religion in all forms because he was not attached to their truths: “Burke was emphatically not interested in the metaphysical business of defending one among a number of competing claims to ontological certainty derived from the Christian, Muslim, or Hindu faiths” (p. 176). Instead, he embraced the functional role of religion in bolstering proper behavior. These positions help establish why he would have shuddered over the French Revolution and the mobs composed of men and women destroying the holy relics of cathedrals, but what was his objection to Hastings in India?

O’Neill lays out the history of the East India Company and reminds his readers that the most egregious abuses of power occurred under the rule of Robert Clive. Bribery and extortion were common, but most troubling was the Bengal famine produced by Clive’s policies: “In all, it is estimated that as a direct result of these policies at least one-third of the entire region’s population under Company control died during the Bengal famine, perhaps as many as 10 million people, victims of what has been rightly referred to as a preventable, human-made catastrophe” (p. 32). O’Neill points out that Burke defended Clive’s actions, and called him a genius on multiple occasions, even as the Bengal famine served to mobilize that other insurrectionary, Thomas Paine.

Hastings, on the other hand, became the object of Burke’s fervent persecution. In Burke’s eyes, Hastings’s unforgivable crime was his dismantling of the remnants of the Indian feudal order. Burke saw Hastings unleashing “Jacobin” influences in India by breaking down hierarchy: “In fact, Burke’s main goal was to restore as much as possible of the old Indian world that had been in the process of eroding subsequent to British imperial intervention” (p. 106). On the one hand, Burke’s position that robust intervention is needed to return Indian civilization to its oldest hierarchical orders seems counterproductive; colonialism and empire are nothing if not generative of change. On the other hand, there is something about his open desire to bolster elites around the world through international intervention that strikes me as prescient. Perhaps we have moved into a period when the elitist aims of foreign policy will again be articulated with such transparency.

Consider for a moment whether O’Neill’s Burke provides a harbinger of what comes when hegemonic ideologies are discarded, as it seems might be possible today. Burke interpreted his world as a space where one order was crumbling and chaos was being unleashed by the ascendance of liberalism. In his view, the breakdown of hierarchical order created dual figures: the tyrant and the rebel: “They originate from the wild, unbridled lewdness of arbitrary power. They arise from a contempt of the laws and institutions that bridle mankind. They arise from a contempt of public order. They arise from a harsh, cruel, and ferocious disposition, impatient of the rules of law, order and morality. And according as their relation varies, the man is a Tyrant if superior, a Rebel if inferior” (pp. 121–22). Hierarchy, religion, and civilization were his holy trinity; Burke was bound to be marginalized in a Great Britain that was elevating the pound sterling as the guiding principle of empire.

This is the great difference between Burke and the elitists that are ascendant today: He did not embrace capitalism. Today, commitment to capital seems firm even if the liberal window dressing attached to it seems seriously tattered. If neoliberal ideology is breaking down and pure elitism is taking its place, reckoning with Burke’s blunt conservatism might provide a helpful mirror. Political theorists have been occupied with revealing the obfuscations of empires through enlightenment rhetoric; O’Neill’s book is a prod to consider what we will do in the face of naked articulations of power.