I thank Keally McBride for her review of my book. McBride considers the broader question of why there has been so much recent work in political theory on issues of colonialism and imperialism. She accurately notes that one reason for my own foray into this field is what I see as the persistent tendency of recent scholarship to misinterpret Burke’s relationship to these phenomena. For most political theorists who write on empire (like Uday Mehta, who McBride mentions), Burke is something of a hero—a thinker who either explicitly opposes the imperial project, or (in Mehta’s case) one who effectively undermines its philosophical basis. This emerging consensus struck me as deeply inaccurate, and I set out to correct the record.

But, I also agree with McBride that there is a good deal more at stake in writing about empire than simply determining which canonical thinkers were for or against it. More broadly, it is striking that most of the work done by political theorists on empire has focused on how certain strands of liberalism have been used to justify it. Conversely, very little has been written on other ideological modes of imperial justification. So, in focusing on Burke, who was for a very long time regarded as the founding father of modern conservatism, my book attempts to distinguish an alternative theoretical rationale, or logic, utilized to defend imperialism and colonialism from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries.

Against this backdrop, I am very pleased that McBride is convinced by my description of Burke as a conservative. These days, calling Burke a conservative is even more heretical than calling him an imperialist. For example, in his monumental new intellectual biography of Burke, Richard Bourke accepts his subject’s commitment to empire, but steadfastly rejects classifying him as a conservative. Similarly, in his recent tome, David Bromwich scoffs at those who dare use the term to refer to Burke, and this is the tone of much additional contemporary scholarship.

Nevertheless, I continue to regard Burke’s view of history as a “civilizing process” guaranteed by a landed aristocracy and organized religious institutions connected to the state as deeply conservative. So, too, was his deep antipathy to democratization (built on a belief in natural human hierarchy that precluded equal political participation), his outright rejection of universal rights, his defense of the patriarchal family, and his depiction of cultural collapse with the advent of the French Revolution as a kind of egalitarian plague. I argue that in the imperial context Burke deployed his understanding of history simultaneously to stress cultural similarities between “civilized” societies as he understood them (what David Cannadine calls “Ornamentalism”), and to delineate the putative cultural differences distinguishing other societies as “savage” (Edward Said’s notion of “Orientalism”). In turn, Burke argued that more “civilized” societies (India, Ireland, colonial America) ought to be kept in the imperial fold on very different terms than their “savage” counterparts (African slaves in the American and Caribbean colonies, Native Americans), whose alterity made them ripe for a transformative civilizing mission.

Burke’s forgotten “Ornamentalist” approach to British imperialism, which sought to coopt indigenous elites, prefigured indirect rule in Africa, Asia, and the Near and Middle East, while his “Orientalism” (albeit in the New World) drew him much closer to a range of liberal thinkers usually critiqued by scholars of empire. For Burke, this dual approach was ultimately rooted in his particularistic appropriation and alteration of (Scottish) Enlightenment ideas, and he certainly did not see it as antithetical to Enlightenment values writ large, so much as an appropriate realization of them. It was also not necessarily opposed to aspects of the emerging capitalist order. For example, Burke was in many instances a defender of increased free trade, but as I argue in the book he saw it as a means of holding the British Empire together, especially in America and Ireland. So, while Burke was not exactly like Adam Smith (who opposed colonies), Marx nevertheless felt comfortable referring to him as “an out-and-out vulgar bourgeois.” In short, Burke’s relationship to the emergence of capitalism is highly complex and ambivalent, but far from wholly adversarial. This may make Burke’s commitment to empire on the basis of “Ornamentalist” solidarity among international elites even more evocative of our present, and even more troubling.