The historiography of Victorian politics has never been insular. Contemporary histories were studded with reflections on events overseas and their impacts in Britain, while historians working in the first half of the twentieth century were no less interested in these interactions. From the 1960s, however, examinations of the relationships between nineteenth-century British politics and the wider world took on new levels of scholarly sophistication, and expanded dramatically in quantity and scope.Footnote 1 Political biographers started to pay closer attention to their subjects’ ideas about other parts of the globe; accounts of ‘opinion’ about foreign and imperial matters grew into a modestly thriving sub-genre; and increasingly detailed discussions of Victorian attitudes towards international issues began to be found in studies of foreign, imperial, and defence policy. By the turn of the twenty-first century, historians were well aware that external political developments of all kinds – revolutions, abolitions, conflicts, conquests, massacres, unifications, constitutions, imperial crises, policy experiments – bore at a fundamental level upon the theory and practice of Victorian politics.
These issues have become far more prominent, however, in the last twenty years. No development in modern British historiography during the last two decades has been as conspicuous – or, arguably, as important – as the move towards emphasizing the imperial, transnational, and global forces implicated in the making of modern Britain.Footnote 2 Studies of the relations between nineteenth-century politics and the wider world have gained accordingly in popularity, and the impact of international connections on Britain's domestic political structures, cultures, and ideologies seems likely to remain a focus of research for some time to come. Given that no existing discussion of the historiography of Victorian politics treats these issues at all systematically, it is a good time to reflect on the state of play.Footnote 3
This review explores recent scholarship on the interactions between Victorian public politics and, in turn, Europe (especially France), the British empire, and the most politically salient parts of the ‘rest of the world’. It does not attempt to be exhaustive: the aim of the overview offered is to highlight historiographical tendencies, analogies, and gaps, which closer specialization might obscure. As nineteenth-century British political history is nowadays a relatively compact field of research, the names of certain leading figures necessarily appear semi-regularly in the footnotes. But efforts have been made to cast a wide net, and to draw attention to the work of emerging and international scholars. The piece ends with some thoughts on possible agendas for the future.
The review has two main themes. The first is that older scholarship still has much to teach us. For all the heat generated by the ‘global turn’ in modern British history, recent work has not overturned earlier models of how international issues operated in Victorian political life. Here as elsewhere in the literature on nineteenth-century politics, the methodological continuities between historiographical generations are at least as striking as the new departures.Footnote 4 The review's second theme is that political history might benefit from engaging more closely with the history of ideas. Intellectual historians have made huge strides in the last two decades in anatomizing more highly elaborated nineteenth-century thought about empire, international relations, and political order overseas. Yet it remains rare to find their work used by political historians, even where the latter focus squarely on political actors’ ideas and attitudes.Footnote 5 It is possible to imagine closer dialogue between these branches of scholarship casting new light on an old conceptual problem: how to connect political action with its intellectual contexts.Footnote 6
I
Europe was the most important external context for Victorian politics.Footnote 7 It was the main object of British foreign policy, the main foil for claims about British identity, and the part of the world beyond Britain with which Victorian political actors forged the closest social, political, and intellectual links. Students of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras have spent recent decades exploring the connections between continental issues and British domestic politics in painstaking detail, and with striking creativity.Footnote 8 Study of Europe's place in British politics after 1815 has been less exhaustive, and less well integrated into mainstream political historiography.Footnote 9 Work here has accumulated gradually over generations, responding to different methodological and conceptual imperatives at different points. This has left us with an impressively rich and varied literature, but also one which lacks a clear conceptual core. This probably helps to explain why historians have been so hesitant about synthesis. This section looks in turn at studies of France in British politics, at work on Britain and the rest of the continent, and at recent scholarship on the ‘politics of foreign policy’.
France demands separate treatment, since it was unquestionably the most significant European country in the Victorian political imagination. As Britain's nearest neighbour, and by turns its most important ally and its greatest threat, connections between French and British politics and society were uniquely intimate.Footnote 10 They have generated their own historiographical subfield, in which French historians, having maintained the most substantial tradition of writing on modern British political history left in continental academia, have been particularly prominent.Footnote 11 Strikingly, however, given the universally admitted political significance of the Anglo-French relationship, the literature on the subject remains poorly integrated, and there are few substantial studies of France in Victorian political culture.
Part of the problem, perhaps, is that historians have written such a huge amount about France incidentally. Monographs which touch on foreign relations in any degree cannot avoid doing so, while books on Victorian political ideas, assumptions, and worldviews can rarely omit the French connection entirely. This has been true since the 1950s, if not earlier, but the phenomenon has become increasingly pronounced as cultural and discursive approaches to politics have grown in popularity.Footnote 12 In other words, France is woven so tightly into the historiography of Victorian politics that its political effects are particularly hard to tease out.
Attempts to pin down France's impacts on British political life fall into three main categories. The first and largest covers accounts of attitudes towards specific phases in French politics. Here historians have been most interested in startling episodes of tumult and political experiment: mainly, revolutions. We have detailed studies of how the legacies of 1789 reached into the nineteenth century, and of how competing readings of the Revolution and its aftermath affected early nineteenth-century party identities.Footnote 13 There have been several attempts to assess the effects of France's ‘constitutional’ revolution of 1830 on the crisis surrounding the passage of the Great Reform Act, and of the revolution of 1848 on attitudes towards parliamentary reform and British national character.Footnote 14 Some of the most imaginative work in this area deals with partisan attitudes towards the Second Empire, governed by the Emperor Napoleon III between 1852 and 1870. Richard Koebner and H. D. Schmidt opened up the origins of the idea of ‘imperialism’ in this context in the 1960s, while Jonathan Parry's 2001 analysis of the impact of Napoleon III on mid-Victorian politics – primarily as a negative force promoting Liberal party unity – highlighted how much more there was to say on this subject.Footnote 15 British arguments about the subsequent Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune are less well covered, though there is valuable work on public opinion and on the responses of certain eminent Victorians to these episodes.Footnote 16 Common themes emerge from these studies, most prominently the significance of French political instability in underpinning belief in the virtues of British constitutionalism, and of French abstraction as a counterpoint to British political common sense. But even looking at all this research together, the overall trajectory of the Victorian encounter with French politics remains elusive.
The second kind of work on Britain and France emphasizes more material exchanges. English-language studies of British representations of Paris, and of critics’ performative outrage at the immorality of France's imaginative literature, have helped us to understand how wider assessments of French political culture were formed and supported.Footnote 17 But the most important recent work on these exchanges has been produced by historians based in France. Fabrice Bensimon has been central to these studies, not least in his own research, but also in co-editing a massive, vital, and sorely under-cited 2006 collection on Anglo-French political and cultural exchanges.Footnote 18 Further comparable volumes have been published since.Footnote 19 Even over the other side of the Channel, however, historians have yet to make much progress with the study of France as a social context for Victorian politics. It is well known that a large proportion of the Victorian elite, both political and literary, had connections in France, and spent significant amounts of time in the country. This must surely, in some cases, have borne more strongly upon their political activities and ideas than existing work indicates.Footnote 20 Recent studies which look through the other end of the telescope, at French exiles in Britain, certainly suggest that there must be important structural impacts to be uncovered.Footnote 21
Finally, there are intellectual-historical studies. Historians have written extensively on the ways in which British intellectuals, and ideologically minded politicians, engaged with political ideas and philosophies expounded in nineteenth-century France, especially Saint-Simonianism and Comtean Positivism.Footnote 22 Comparisons between British and French texts are becoming increasingly common in a new wave of work on Victorian political and historical thought.Footnote 23 In a different register, historians of political ideas have started to build up a picture of how leading British thinkers theorized France's politics, character, and place in the world, and of how their visions of France informed their schemes of political thought. The principal work here is now Georgios Varouxakis's Victorian political thought on France and the French (2002), which centres on John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold, while also offering glimpses at a wider world of periodical and newspaper analysis.Footnote 24 Studies of reflective politicians’ thinking on France, including that of the Tory J. W. Croker and the Liberal Richard Cobden, help fill out our picture of Victorian thinking about French politics.Footnote 25 The exercise of conceptualizing French politics drew in more British politicians and commentators than did similar efforts with regard to any other contemporary polity, including the United States.
The same rough tripartite division – attitudes, exchanges, ideas – could be used to carve up the literature on Victorian politics and other European countries. But given that no other European state has attracted such sustained attention, we can consider more broadly the historiography on the rest of the continent.
Historians have examined Europe's role in the Victorian political imagination from numerous different angles. They have looked at how seemingly endless continental upheavals cast a mood of fear and uncertainty across British politics during the early and mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 26 They have explored general perceptions of European political order, demonstrating both the wide purchase and political impact of stereotypes of Europe as bureaucratic, militaristic, and ominously Catholic.Footnote 27 They have considered the attitudes of particular groups in British politics towards any number of specific European developments, nations, and politicians.Footnote 28 They have unfolded the ways in which continental models and experiments were deployed in domestic policy debates, especially in the century's closing decades.Footnote 29 They are now becoming increasingly interested in the more concrete institutions and structures which helped to shape British thinking about European problems, not least the foreign political press in London, and foreign agents’ lobbying campaigns.Footnote 30 And they have thought to some extent about more reflective and highly theorized Victorian accounts of European politics, though Europe as a problem for intellectuals is considerably less well-served historiographically than is Europe as a problem for partisan argument and ‘public opinion’.Footnote 31
To a large extent, however, these studies exist in separate geographical and conceptual silos. ‘Europe in Victorian politics’ is not a distinct historical problem around which research arranges itself, in the way that it is for students of the era of the French Revolution. Rather, it is an issue which most historians encounter while looking at other questions, and the incidental character of much research means that there remain glaring gaps in our knowledge. Even having just come through a decade of wall-to-wall publication on the First World War, we still know strikingly little about Victorian thinking on German unification, or Bismarck.Footnote 32 Iberian interactions, too, are underserved, even for the period when the peninsula was wracked by civil wars in which a substantial number of Britons fought, in the 1830s and 1840s.Footnote 33
Coverage of European questions across the Victorian era is also far from even. The historiography of late nineteenth-century politics says comparatively little about European issues, probably because of the ingrained assumption that Ireland and the empire dominated the 1880s and 1890s. Much of the best literature, in fact, concentrates on the period between the 1840s and the 1860s. Europe took on unusual political significance in these decades, as domestic political conditions worked to amplify a series of continental political struggles into an existential conflict between liberty and order. There is a large and still-growing historiography on British responses to the 1848 revolutions, in which work dating from the 1940s and 1950s remains relevant.Footnote 34 There is an even bulkier set of studies on the political aftermaths of 1848. Attitudes towards the proto-national leaders who challenged the structures of continental autocracy – especially Lajos Kossuth, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Giuseppe Garibaldi – have been traced in some detail.Footnote 35 So too have the politics of European émigrés, and of the ‘refugee question’ in mid-Victorian Britain.Footnote 36 The place of Europe in Radical political argument and strategy after 1848 has attracted some particularly important and closely textured studies, among which Miles Taylor's The decline of British Radicalism (1995) still stands out.Footnote 37 Politics and ideas around the 1859 unification of Italy, not least because of its catalytic role in the formal establishment of the Liberal party, is also the subject of a substantial amount of work.Footnote 38 Historians of Victorian political thought who deal with Europe, finally, focus much of their attention on the mid-century, treating it as the crucible for the concepts of ‘nationality’ and ‘national character’.Footnote 39
Europe was also at the core of debates about foreign policy and Britain's world role.Footnote 40 More imaginative histories of diplomacy and foreign relations have reflected on the interactions between domestic politics and the conduct of British international relations since the early twentieth century.Footnote 41 But it is only since the 1980s that scholars have started to study in real depth how politicians’ conduct of Britain's foreign affairs, and their arguments about Britain's global responsibilities, were connected with their wider political agendas. Such studies of the ‘politics of foreign policy’ hold out the tantalizing prospect of relating the currents of ideas and opinion discussed above to the practice of politics, and the formation of policy.Footnote 42 The majority of work in this area has so far focused on ‘high politics’: the world of ministers, ministries, and arguments about strategy between members of the front benches. Lord Palmerston's political manoeuvrings have attracted considerable attention here, notably in the work of E. D. Steele and David Brown.Footnote 43 There is an even larger industry dealing with the high politics of Conservative foreign policy, among which the work of Geoffrey Hicks, Angus Hawkins, and now Jennifer Davey stands out, as does Jeremy Black's collection on the ‘deep history’ of the Tory foreign policy tradition.Footnote 44 Work on certain issues spans parties.Footnote 45 Other contributions to the literature on the ‘politics of foreign policy’ focus instead on public-facing arguments about how Britain should behave on the world stage, and on the role those arguments played in staking out political agendas and in the practice of political opposition: that is, they examine the intellectual contexts within which foreign policy was formulated, and the place of arguments about foreign policy within the wider firmament of political debate.Footnote 46 Most of this work has so far focused on Liberal and Radical ideas.
Easily the most important contribution to this side of literature, not least because it is the most conceptually ambitious, is Jonathan Parry's The politics of patriotism (2006).Footnote 47 The book represents one of the few sustained attempts since the 1990s to find a new way of relating political ideas and political practice. It argues that Liberals understood ostensibly distinct areas of policy – domestic, Irish, foreign, imperial – in terms of the same basic political objectives and imperatives, and that the political success of the Liberal party in the early and mid-Victorian period, rested on the projection of an uplifting vision of political purpose, which linked Britain's activities on the world stage to generally attractive sets of values. This situation, it suggests, served to limit the options plausibly available to the framers of foreign policy. The book focuses on Europe, but another of its innovations is that it sprawls geographically as well as politically – to America, the Ottoman world, Canada, and other settler colonies. This holistic approach must be one of the most promising paths forward for Victorian political history.
II
The British empire came to occupy an increasingly large proportion of the globe over the course of the nineteenth century. It has taken up a comparable share of historians’ energy in the last twenty years. The explosion of interest in manifestations of imperial power ‘at home’ means that there is now a huge literature probing the effects of empire on Victorian Britain. The vast majority of this work, however, has been cultural and social in emphasis.Footnote 48 The rise of the ‘new imperial history’ has not significantly affected how most Victorian political historians write about imperial questions, and accounts which seek systematically to place domestic and imperial politics within the ‘same analytic field’ have been rare.Footnote 49 As a result, older studies retain much of their value. Twenty-first-century work has offered important correctives, and opened up new questions, but the liveliest branches of the literature relating Victorian politics and British imperialism in recent years have been those on imperial intellectual and legal history.
Mid-twentieth-century scholars did a huge amount to elucidate how imperial problems operated in nineteenth-century politics. Many of their insights are, however, buried in detailed studies of aspects of colonial and Indian policy, which are now all but forgotten. Political historians would benefit from dusting off these volumes, which are often brilliantly astute, not to mention comprehensive, on issues of parliamentary manoeuvre and ministerial calculation. The work of W. P. Morrell offers something like a complete index to colonial debate between the 1830s and the 1870s.Footnote 50 Domestic political crises surrounding major imperial developments, and the public controversies they inspired, are particularly well-served in this older literature. Students of the early and mid-Victorian empire paid special attention to the crises around the Canadian rebellions, and the transition to self-government in the settler colonies.Footnote 51 Those who focused on the closing decades of the century, when empire was a more significant political issue, had more to deal with: not least Disraeli's ‘imperialism’, the ‘scramble for Africa’, and the Boer War.Footnote 52 In most of this literature, India is treated as a problem for policy-makers rather than as one for politicians, though there are studies of specific Indian issues in domestic politics.Footnote 53 Twentieth-century imperial history also offered in-depth excavations of public attitudes towards imperial expansion, economics, and government.Footnote 54 More elaborate ideologies of empire were not neglected.Footnote 55 There are few questions asked in more recent scholarship which are not anticipated in this older literature.
Imperial historians, however, all but abandoned the study of domestic politics in the 1980s.Footnote 56 A comprehensive grasp of the subtleties of British parties and policy cut little ice in the culturalist world of the ‘new imperial history’, and remains similarly blunt in the new world of global-imperial studies.Footnote 57 The torch passed, as a result, to political historians. Recent work on the empire in Victorian politics has thus responded even more readily to general trends in modern British political history: above all the shift away from cabinets, ministries, and parliaments, and towards languages, arguments, and cultures.
Within this paradigm, twenty-first-century scholarship on imperial politics has added considerably to our stores of knowledge. The ‘four nations’ dimension of the subject is now better understood.Footnote 58 We know much more about the imperial thinking of leading figures in domestic politics.Footnote 59 We are better informed about wider patterns of imperial argument within political parties, especially the Conservative party, in ways that help us understand why national leaders felt emboldened or compelled to adopt the positions they did.Footnote 60 Studies of the Irish Nationalist party have offered some of the most striking recent insights here.Footnote 61 Increasing numbers of studies, however, have sought to think across or beyond partisan boundaries. Some deal with imperially minded pressure groups, following a methodological trail blazed by Andrew Thompson's monograph Imperial Britain (2000).Footnote 62 Some examine the differences between ‘Liberal’, ‘Conservative’, and ‘Radical’ attitudes towards particular imperial possessions and issues.Footnote 63 Yet others aim to think even more broadly about imperial concepts and languages.Footnote 64 We might pick out here, in particular, the resurgent histories of slavery and anti-slavery, which have offered particularly valuable new perspectives. Catherine Hall's Civilising subjects (2002) offers a study of the relationships between empire and civic politics of a depth that has yet to be emulated,Footnote 65 while Richard Huzzey has ably explored the worldviews of the anti-slavery movement, and the contribution made by anti-slavery ideas to the political culture of nineteenth-century Britain.Footnote 66 More original still is the work of historians who have started to explore pro-slavery arguments: Michael Taylor's articles here represent a powerful challenge to assumptions about the driving forces behind Conservative politics in the early Victorian era.Footnote 67
The twenty-first century has also seen more energy devoted to assessing the empire's impacts on the British state.Footnote 68 Most such work is cast in a discursive mould, not least the repeated attempts to probe the role played by the empire in British constitutional and institutional reform, mainly in relation to the parliamentary Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867.Footnote 69 There have also, however, been efforts to get back to hard realities of politics, and to rethink the fundamental paradoxes and dilemmas which confronted the Victorian imperial state.Footnote 70 Among the most significant of these is Miles Taylor's article on ‘The 1848 revolutions and the British empire’ (2000), an exceptionally thought-provoking and carefully conceived attempt to connect in a concrete way the seemingly disparate global challenges facing imperial Britain.Footnote 71 Philip Harling's more recent articles on emigration and convict transportation represent similarly effective efforts to reinject institutional pressures and realities into the literature.Footnote 72 Work on the intra-imperial circulation of personnel, goods, and ideas, finally, has added importantly to our knowledge of the pressures involved in the formation of imperial policy.Footnote 73
So scholarship produced during the last twenty years has substantially improved our understanding of how political actors thought about empire and imperial policy, and our grasp of the ways in which imperial problems intersected ideologically with other concerns. The implications of all this work for our conceptualization of empire as an issue in nineteenth-century public politics, however, have not been revolutionary. In many ways, not much has changed: long-standing chronologies of, and explanations for, the fluctuating significance of imperial issues in nineteenth-century politics remain largely untroubled. We still await fresh explanations for, say, the ‘imperialization’ of political life after the 1870s.
One possible route forward may lie in more systematic engagement with the new historiography of Victorian imperial political thought. This field has changed beyond recognition over the last fifteen years, as Duncan Bell has traced in a number of elegant historiographical anatomies.Footnote 74 We now understand far better how nineteenth-century thinkers and scholars conceptualized imperial expansion and rule.Footnote 75 But the implications of their arguments and critiques for the practice of British politics, if any, have yet to be traced in any detail. Historians of imperial ideas rarely make the case for the influence of political thought on party politics or policy.Footnote 76 Political historians, in turn, often treat more highly elaborated varieties of political argument as beyond their remit.Footnote 77 However apparently gaping the methodological divides, historians of Victorian politics might do more with the questions opened up in this work.
We might pick out two of the more significant of these questions. The first is about the study of Liberalism. Much of the recent historiography of Victorian imperial thought revolves around the concepts of ‘liberal empire’ and ‘liberal imperialism’.Footnote 78 These can often appear somewhat free-floating, and to have only a limited amount in common with the versions of Liberalism interrogated by historians of Liberal party politics and ideas, even when the latter are talking about the management of imperial policy. It may be that there is a compromise to strike, in which imperial intellectual history is situated more robustly within the political environment of Victorian Britain, and pays more attention to the ‘Conservative’ or ‘Radical’ or ‘Socialist’ alternatives that ‘Liberal’ visions of empire were to some extent in dialogue with. Even the most explicitly ‘contextual’ accounts of ‘liberal imperial’ ideas have yet to achieve this goal.
Perhaps the most promising potential hinge between the intellectual and political histories of Victorian imperialism, however, can be found in the law. Studies of imperial and colonial legal thought are now being produced in ever greater numbers, just as historians of Victorian politics are starting to pay more attention to the role of legal training and ideas in shaping political decision-making and policy.Footnote 79 Work on imperial legal thought which remains focused on a restricted community of judges and scholars, as most still does, can probably only do so much for political historians.Footnote 80 But there have been a few pioneering attempts to bridge these divides. We might pick out Rande Kostal's brilliant A jurisprudence of power (2005), whose ground-breaking account of how legal structures and assumptions informed the debates over Governor Edward Eyre's suppression of the 1865 Jamaican Rebellion is unjustly under-cited in the historiography of Victorian politics.Footnote 81 The equally novel approach adopted in Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford's Rage for order (2016) may perhaps be more widely applicable, premised as it is on the ways in which an extraordinarily wide variety of historical actors participated in legal discourses (‘law talk’) in the early nineteenth century, thereby exercising tangible influence over processes of imperial reform.Footnote 82 Pinning down how popular assumptions about imperial law were constructed, and how they functioned in domestic politics, would be an important step forward.
III
Europe and the empire dominate the literature on international issues in nineteenth-century British politics. Other parts of the world, however, also played significant roles in the Victorian imagination. Some of these have well-established historiographies, while some are just beginning to emerge as subjects of interest to political and intellectual historians. There are opportunities here to open up new questions about the Victorian mind: a number of the most innovative and challenging recent contributions to the literature covered in this review address British engagement with less familiar parts of the globe. This section examines work on five countries, continents, and categories: the United States, Latin America, contemporary European colonial empires, the Ottoman empire, and East Asia.
Much the largest and deepest-rooted historiography here deals with the United States.Footnote 83 This relationship has been a subject of scholarly interest since the 1920s, and the literature has been discussed often enough that it can be covered in relatively summary fashion here.Footnote 84 British policy towards America was not usually, after the war of 1812 and with the significant exception of the Civil War, a major political issue. Historians have concentrated instead on the roles the United States played in the Victorian political imagination, in which it appeared in the overlapping guises of a former colony, an advanced democratic state, an example of a (mostly) functioning federal polity, a slave power, an industrial competitor, and the site of one of the century's deadliest civil conflicts. Work since the 1960s has demonstrated America's significance as an ideal, a test, and a warning, within British political discourse at all levels. Historians continue to be fascinated above all by a question first prised open by D. P. Crook: how the United States affected Victorian conceptions of democracy and constitutionalism.Footnote 85 There are growing literatures also on attitudes towards more specific developments in American politics, and on America as a subject in the more rarefied realms of political thought.Footnote 86 British ideas on the Civil War remains an evergreen topic, and new work continues to refine our understanding.Footnote 87 Lately, however, historians have started to pay closer attention to the workings of political movements, and movements of political ideas, between Britain and America. Studies of struggles over slavery and economic order, in particular, have underlined the significance of exchanges between British and American political actors.Footnote 88
Latin America's place in British politics is far less well understood. Britain's commercial and diplomatic relationships with that continent have generated substantial literatures, which dwell on the nature of ‘informal empire’.Footnote 89 As far as domestic politics and intellectual life are concerned, however, we hear virtually nothing about this part of the ‘New World’ after 1826, when George Canning ‘called [it] into existence, to redress the balance of the Old’, and when a significant proportion of the nation's capital (and Benjamin Disraeli's) was lost in doomed mining speculations.Footnote 90 The relationship has been left to cultural historians.Footnote 91 There is much more to say about Latin America as a political issue. It is true that the Victorians could be dismissive of its politics, with one writer in the 1860s calling them ‘the most uninteresting of any on the surface of the globe’.Footnote 92 But South America also presented the only large-scale nineteenth-century case-study in the process of imperial emancipation; a series of experiments in revolutionary republican versions of democracy; and the evolution of a species of ‘republican’ military dictatorship peculiar to the region. These were all, under certain circumstances, subjects of abundant interest to Victorian political commentators. Gabriel Paquette's work on British ideas about imperial Spain and the new republics in the nineteenth century's early decades hints at how the subject might be approached.Footnote 93 Elsewhere, historians of international law have noted British adventurers in South America offering highly coloured versions of their experiences to the domestic public in the hope of shifting British policy.Footnote 94 Studies of the intellectual and political encounter between France and the ‘Latin’ continent cast further light on the possibilities of the theme, though French engagement with the region was certainly more closely textured.Footnote 95
Investigations of British attitudes towards other empires have proceeded in fits and starts. Though the study of Victorian ideas about the empires of antiquity goes back a long way, the subject has become considerably more popular in the last two decades.Footnote 96 Historians have drawn out British thought on the analogies between the Indian empire and that of ancient Rome with particular thoroughness.Footnote 97 But there is still remarkably little literature on British thinking about other contemporary colonial empires.Footnote 98 Historians of several other European empires – and indeed of Japan and the United States – have begun to conduct detailed work on how imaginative engagement with other nineteenth-century imperial projects worked in party political struggles, and especially in imperial political thought.Footnote 99 Some of these studies are conceptualized in terms of the growing number of ‘hyphenated imperialisms’ – ‘trans-imperialism’, ‘co-imperialism’, ‘sub-imperialism’ – around which research into the global history of empire is increasingly arranged.Footnote 100 In Britain's case, however, work in this area is still limited to a handful of studies, clustered counter-intuitively in the early part of the nineteenth century, well before the emergence of the competitive ‘high’ or ‘new’ imperialism we might assume must have generated more acute forms of comparative consciousness.Footnote 101 Martin Thomas and Richard Toye's recent Arguing about empire (2017) marks out one path forward for inquiries of this kind, examining the workings of cross-imperial argument at the levels of high politics and diplomacy.Footnote 102 So far, historians of political thought have treated the theme only incidentally, probably because the more prominent figures in nineteenth-century intellectual life do not appear to have taken other contemporary European empires very seriously.Footnote 103 There is, however, a mass of material with which to investigate wider attitudes towards other contemporary imperial projects.Footnote 104
The Ottoman empire presented a different set of problems. The literature on the ‘Eastern Question’ is vast, and continues to unfold in new directions, though most recent work is concerned primarily with diplomacy and local politics.Footnote 105 There is a large historiography on British religious and aesthetic engagement with the Near East. But our understanding of the place of the Ottoman world in the Victorian political imagination, and especially of British attitudes towards Ottoman political order, remains underdeveloped. Olive Anderson's 1967 monograph about the politics of the Crimean War is still the most substantial study of these problems.Footnote 106 Other work is suggestive, but fragmented. Studies of the archaeologist-politician A. H. Layard, who made his name excavating the Assyrian palaces at Nineveh and Nimrud, hint at the intriguing ways in which a reputation for knowing the East could be deployed to domestic advantage.Footnote 107 Some accounts of Disraeli's career examine what his travels in, and writing about, the Ottoman dominions did for his politics – notably Miloš Ković's exceptionally detailed study of his ideas about the Eastern Question.Footnote 108 Intellectual historians have conducted slightly more wide-ranging investigations. They have become increasingly interested in concepts of ‘Oriental despotism’, which in this period depended to a significant extent on attempts to understand Ottoman practice.Footnote 109 Students of international law, most recently Jennifer Pitts, have also done important work on the ways in which the Ottoman state was understood by legal scholars and commentators.Footnote 110 Again, however, this is an area in which a huge amount of work remains to be done. Jonathan Parry's recent article on Disraeli's novel Tancred, which makes the simple yet wholly novel argument that Disraeli wrote a book about the Near East in part to make points about politics in the Near East, highlights just how poorly we currently understand Britain's political and intellectual relationships with the Ottoman world.Footnote 111
Looking towards East Asia, the literature is similarly disjointed. Neither the large historiography on British policy towards and activity in China, nor the numerous studies of China in British aesthetic and literary subcultures, comments extensively on domestic politics.Footnote 112 What work there is on the relations between Victorian public politics and China centres almost exclusively on the Opium Wars.Footnote 113 It is hard to imagine that subject ever being treated more authoritatively and imaginatively than it has been in J. Y. Wong's Deadly dreams (1998), which works through the politics of the 1850s ‘Arrow War’ in a series of formidably well-researched concentric circles.Footnote 114 This massive book is, in fact, one of the most impressive scholarly monuments in the whole of the literature reviewed here, and historians working on other regions would benefit from giving it closer attention. There is not yet much work on China as a subject in Victorian political thought, beyond commentaries on J. S. Mill's concept of ‘Chinese stationariness’, and it is not clear how substantial the problem is.Footnote 115 Even this fairly slight literature on China's role in the nineteenth-century British political imagination, however, goes well beyond what is available on Japan. This is as we would expect, given that Japan does not seem to have presented itself as a major political or intellectual problem until the very end of the nineteenth century, when it started winning military victories against rival powers. So far we have only hints about reflection on Japanese practices in policy debates, mainly in wider studies of attitudes towards Japanese culture.Footnote 116 As Chika Tonooka has recently demonstrated, however, Japan became after its startling defeat of Russia in 1905 a landmark in British political debates about political ‘modernization’ and ‘national efficiency’. It may be that we have misunderstood its Victorian role.Footnote 117
IV
Recent assessments of the state of Victorian political history have been sombre. In 2013, David Craig and James Thompson described the field as being in a ‘curiously unsatisfactory condition’, lacking in dynamism, and cluttered up with generations of forbiddingly detailed historiography.Footnote 118 This is hard to argue with. But it is certainly true that the study of the relationships between Victorian politics and the wider world is one of the field's bright spots, and that it holds particular promise as an area for future research. This review has already identified some blank spaces on the map of Victorian Britain's global political sympathies and demonologies. In conclusion, it reflects on some broader conceptual agendas, all beginning to take shape in more recent literature, which may emerge more clearly in the next generation of studies.
First, studies of opinion might think more systematically across geographical categories. It is clear that the attention of nineteenth-century politicians and commentators flitted between foreign polities, sometimes quite rapidly, as their domestic political salience rose and fell. This important point is only partially captured by a literature which still focuses mainly on attitudes towards specific states, and which mostly maintains a rigid division between ideas about ‘imperial’ and ‘foreign’ issues. Making sense of these shifts of interest, and of the shared principles which lay behind the analysis of different regions, is most straightforward when working on individuals or small groups: it is no surprise that political biographers and historians of political thought have done some of the best work showing how these parts fitted together.Footnote 119 Indeed, the very idea of studying ‘international thought’, still a relatively novel one, is an important step forward in tracing connections between nineteenth-century attitudes towards different parts of the world.Footnote 120 But how cross-regional thinking worked in relation to larger political alignments and themes remains elusive.Footnote 121 There is a need here both for better synthesis of existing scholarship, and for new studies based on new patterns of reading.
Similarly, historians might examine more closely the relationships between highly engaged, slowly evolving specialist debates about particular parts of the world, and the ways in which international issues functioned in mainstream public politics. Most of the existing literature deals with one or other of these problems. But external issues worked differently in Victorian politics in cases where political actors could draw on pre-existing expert analyses, as compared to cases where unheralded problems and sometimes whole continents seemed to emerge out of the ether. There was always a heightened flexibility inherent to the interpretation of political affairs over distance: but the freedom with which overseas developments could be read was constrained, to a greater or lesser extent, by established arguments and assumptions. This is one of the intersections at which intellectual history may prove of greatest benefit to political historians.
Second, there is more to say about direct interactions between Victorian public politics and those of other polities. Imperial historians interested in networks and circuits within the empire have made progress here; so have historians of Anglo-American relations, especially in work on allied pressure groups and expatriate enclaves. But this might become a much bigger theme, especially in the European context.Footnote 122 A point rarely emphasized strongly enough in work on representations of European politics is that British politicians and commentators were very often reading and responding to continental texts, newspapers, and letters. What they said about European politics and policy, not least European colonial policy, was often taken directly from the public presses in the countries concerned, rather than originating in a specifically British tradition of analysis. In addition to this cross-national fluidity in political argument, there was also more explicit engagement: London newspapers frequently entered into spats about domestic and imperial policy with their counterparts in other European capitals. Much the same was true of British debates about the United States, and, in different ways, about parts of the British empire. Sometimes the privileged access of certain states to certain regions introduced further distortions, which shaped Victorian thinking while rarely being explicitly discussed. Attitudes towards Latin American politics, for instance, owed much to copious and politically interested North American writing on the subject. Thinking more systematically about the international influences on, and audiences for, British political argument must strengthen our understanding of the architecture of Victorian politics. Again, this is a point that has not escaped historians of nineteenth-century British political thought, as they demonstrate when they consider the intellectual formation and global reception of certain canonical intellectuals, but it could be applied more widely.
Finally, at the very broadest level, historians might push ahead with efforts to immerse readings of Victorian politics more fully within wider European, imperial, and Atlantic trends. Continental scholars dating back to the generation of Élie Halévy have been willing to make moves in this direction, as to a lesser extent have American historians and political scientists.Footnote 123 Mainstream British scholarship, however, has rarely followed suit. Some commentators have suggested that there are ingrained cultural and institutional reasons for modern British historians’ reluctance to adopt comparative perspectives.Footnote 124 But this is perhaps starting to change: an increasing number of studies have appeared over the last decade which place nineteenth-century Britain's political experiences, both domestic and imperial, alongside those of other states.Footnote 125 Done judiciously, situating British political history within these broader frameworks has obvious interpretative benefits, and is likely to encourage further study of international interactions. Taking more systematic account of the wider world in these ways will at least help those of us who already care about Victorian political history to understand how it worked. Perhaps it may even help to raise the subject from its ‘curiously unsatisfactory condition’, by showing that it still has plenty to say on the larger global, transnational, and international questions which continue to preoccupy historians of modern Britain more generally.
