Theodore Koditschek has written an important book that goes a long way toward answering one of the most urgent and troubling questions about the nineteenth-century British Empire, namely, how such an avowedly and demonstrably liberal state could have maintained and justified such a patently illiberal empire for so long. This is a question that has been tackled with increasing frequency—most famously by Uday Singh Mehta in Liberalism and Empire (Chicago, 1999) and Jennifer Pitts in A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ, 2005), as well as by Catherine Hall in Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago, 2002)—but Koditschek adds enormously to the debate by focusing on the role that historians and historical writing played in establishing and justifying liberal imperialism.

The shift from an eighteenth-century mercantilist empire to a nineteenth-century liberal empire was not an easy one. The issue of legitimation—reconciling the disparity between the ideal of freedom and the reality of coercion—was especially difficult. Yet in this well-written, wide-ranging, thoroughly researched, and carefully constructed analysis, Koditschek demonstrates that the contradictions of liberal imperialism—justifying political inequality, limiting the spread of freedom—were managed and to some degree explained by discourses about history, especially England’s own historical past. Front and center was the idea of progress, which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also included discussions of race, civilization, religion, economics, social relations, and political rule.

It is to Koditschek’s great credit that he never labels as hypocrites the writers who are the focus of his analysis: novelists Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott; Orientalists and intellectuals such as William Jones, James Tod, James Mill, and Rammohun Roy; historians such as T. B. Macaulay, J. A. Froude, and J. R. Seeley; and political figures including William Gladstone and Mountstuart Elphinstone. Koditschek treats these figures not with condemnation but with sympathy and understanding, exploring their struggles to reconcile seemingly contradictory beliefs about liberty and empire. These and the many other writers whose views Koditschek dissects attempted to explain how and why Britain and its various colonies belonged together by constructing a common historical (and often evolutionary) past and by looking forward to a future (liberal) destiny.

William Jones, for example, attempted to synchronize Indian and European chronologies in order to demonstrate a shared “Indo-European” linguistic past that made Britons and Indians “distant cousins” who could be “reunited” by British imperialism (60). Similarly, James Tod drew parallels between ancient Hindu Rajputs and Scottish Highlanders. In the case of Mountstuart Elphinstone, he plumbed the depths of Sanskrit literature to argue, contra Mill, that Indian elites were not inherently deficient and were redeemable through British rule. For E. A. Freeman, who believed that Anglo-Saxons were destined to become the ruling race, racial mixing in India was interpreted through the lens of the Norman conquest. And the Macaulays, who linked British expansion with universal progress and equated the liberalization of the empire with British ascendancy, fit British India into their whiggish historical narrative but at the cost of seeing Indian progress in terms of Anglocentric assimilation and improvement. For them and for so many of their contemporaries, liberty was relative, not absolute, always contingent and provisional.

One of the many strengths of this book is Koditschek’s discussion of the role that Indians themselves played in the construction of this narrative, from Roy early in the nineteenth century to a generation of middle-class intellectuals at the University of Calcutta and in minor government offices, such as Keshub Chandra Sen, to more widely known Indian thinkers, such as the Tagores and Dadabhai Naoroji, the first person of Indian descent elected to the British Parliament. Here and elsewhere, Koditschek has succeeded in putting metropole and periphery in the same analytical plane, giving agency to both colonizer and colonized and relishing the dialectical relationship and blurred boundaries in between.

A particularly insightful subplot concerns the psychological contexts out of which many of these writers’ ideas emerged and the impact of familial drama on historical understandings of empire. Koditschek writes about an “Oedipal” (121, 126) quality to the young Macaulay’s attack on the elder Mill and the “traumatic nervous breakdown” (124) that influenced some of Macaulay’s most important writings on imperial matters. Elsewhere he delves into “Mill’s projection of cowardice onto the defenseless Hindu [of] his own cowardice” (84) and Froude’s “motherless home” (152). On occasion these come across as overly psychoanalytical explanations of intellectual positions, yet by drawing on published books and articles as well as private letters, Koditschek is nonetheless able to chart numerous close relationships between the personal and the substantive.

This book also impressively weaves together numerous recent historiographical strands, including the study of masculinity, national identity, and orientalism, as well as British domestic political history and imperial rule. Scotland and Ireland both receive their due as well, the former as the birthplace of so many imperial figures and historical writers, the latter as the geographically most proximate colony. Koditschek draws a beautiful series of linkages between the place of Ireland in Macaulay’s History of England (1848); the Great Famine of the 1840s, which occurred while Macaulay was writing the History; and Macaulay’s views of India and how he justified excluding Indians—and the Irish—from English liberty. Gladstone too drew on the Irish past (and present), forced to confront the fact that “the triumphs of British liberalism were disasters for Ireland” (317), leading to a radically different imperial policy in the 1880s than he had embraced earlier in his career.

There are combative moments, especially when Koditschek takes on the Saidian school of Orientalist critics. He demonstrates that Macaulay’s infamous 1835 Minute on Education, which is often cited as the model of European arrogance, also presumes that English and Indian schoolboys have equal intellectual potential. And, he suggests that while Said focused on how European scholars denigrated the East, given the respect with which William Jones and others treated Sanskrit texts, one could almost draw the opposite conclusion. There is also great cleverness, especially in some of the subsection titles: “Froudian Whips” and “The Strange Death of Liberal Imperialism” are but two examples.

In sum, Koditschek has moved impressively from the social history of class formation in Bradford, the subject of his prizewinning first book, to the intellectual and imperial focus of his current project. It impressively explores and explains the contradictions of nineteenth-century liberal imperialism with subtlety, sophistication, and sensitivity, adding considerably to our understanding of the Victorian Empire.