This book is a brilliantly successful attempt to account for the apparent transition from the fierce, bitter assault on the idea of empire by the writers of the second half of the eighteenth century—from Montesquieu and Adam Smith to Benjamin Constant—to the often self-congratulatory, high-minded endorsement of a new kind of imperial mission less than half a century later, here associated most clearly with the writings of John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville. To have identified this shift in the first place is not the least of Jennifer Pitts's merits. Much of the modern, postcolonial historiography of this period has assumed, generally without much argument, that it was the “Enlightenment” that provided the ideological inspiration for the evolution of the nineteenth-century European empires. True, Pitts has been greatly assisted by two previous works, Sankar Muthu's Enlightenment against Empire (2003) and Uday Mehta's Liberalism and Empire (1999), but although these have done much to establish the existence of an antiimperial Enlightenment, neither has anything much to say about the transformation in European imperial policy, and in European political theory, that followed the end of the French Revolution.

Not, as Pitts points out, that the transition was either abrupt or complete. Condorcet's Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain (1794), as Pitts says, “suggests a civilizing enterprise that might have looked something like the imperial liberalism of the decades to come” (p. 173). John Stuart Mill's father James, who exercised considerable influence over his son's writings on India, was deeply indebted to utilitarian and Scottish Enlightenment sources, yet developed a form of liberal imperialism that, in Pitts's view, “violated the subtleties and insights of both traditions” (p. 123). Nevertheless, the roughly 60-year period with which she is concerned saw a dramatic change in the perception of just what an empire was, how it should be run, and in whose interests. On Pitts's account it witnessed a radical shift, first, in how by the end of the eighteenth century that which had come to be called “civilization” was perceived, and secondly and perhaps more significantly, it ushered in a concern about how to maintain liberal, in some cases even democratic, governments within Europe, while keeping indigenous and settler populations overseas properly in their places. As always, it was the impact of the very existence of an empire on the metropolis that proved to be decisive. The great critics of empire in the eighteenth century, in particular Edmund Burke and Adam Smith in England (on both of whom Pitts has some highly significant and original things to say), had been far less concerned with the fate of the indigenes than they had with the continuing stability of what Burke called the “British Constitution.” Burke, like Montesquieu and Diderot before him, was overwhelmingly preoccupied with what happened to Europeans when they went overseas and the corrupting vices they might bring home with them.

For the liberals of the nineteenth century, for Mill and Tocqueville in particular, the problem was not so much one of corruption, as it had been for Burke, nor, as it was for Constant, the fear that the experience of nonconstraint of the colonies might give birth to new Napoleons in France. It was, rather, how to maintain levels of responsible participation in newly democratic societies while preventing the newly empowered “people” from becoming dangerously subversive. For Tocqueville, Algeria offered—as colonies had always done since Roman times—a conveniently remote home for what the sixteenth-century apologist of empire Richard Hakluyt had called “superfluous peoples,” but it also offered a means of persuading the French that their governments were worthy of their continuing loyalty. Hence, Tocqueville's continuing support, in 1841, of the French presence in Algeria, even after 11 years of unrelenting warfare. For to have given up would have been “in the eyes of the world … a certain declaration of the decadence [of France].” A decadent France could not hope to resist for long the revolutionary undertow that threatened constantly to tear the fragile new constitution apart as, indeed, it would do just seven years later. The same applied to Britain, despite Mill's greater confidence in the stability of its representative institutions. Hence, the fanfare surrounding Disraeli's investiture of Queen Victoria as Empress of India in 1876, at a moment when the popular fortunes of the monarchy had fallen to an all-time low in popular opinion. What Disraeli had called “those wretched colonies” might indeed have been, in many respects, “a millstone around the neck of the mother country.” But they were believed to be highly successful in deflecting the ever-unpredictable mob from disruption at home.

The advent of liberal society, and the massive technological progress of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had also had the effect of reinforcing the European sense—already deeply entrenched—of a social, intellectual, and ultimately religious superiority over the rest of the world. While the older European monarchies were still clinging to power, it was hard for many of the reformers, particularly in France, to be entirely certain of their own ascendancy. The great Enlightenment critics of empire had, therefore, placed their new cosmopolitan “empires of liberty” safely in a future in which Europe itself would have become transformed into a new enlightened world freed, in Condorcet's imagination, from the dead hands of priests and kings. For those like John Stuart Mill, writing only a few decades later, this world seemed already to have arrived. Empire could now be seen not as an always dubious act of usurpation but as a mission to provide Kipling's “new-caught sullen peoples, half devil and half child,” with the proper instruments of emancipation.

Pitts's finest pages, however, are on Tocqueville and the Algerian question. Those who are familiar only with Tocqueville's writings on democracy in America and ancien régime France are often puzzled, and shocked, to discover that the moral champion of representative government, and the critic of (American) slavery, should also have been a staunch defender of empire. The inconsistency is real, and Pitts's subtle reading makes no attempt to hide it. Although Tocqueville deplored the violence that conquest required, and cautioned the French against making too many enemies among the Arabs by attempting to transform them too rapidly into Frenchmen, his varied writings on Algeria glaringly lack the moral urgency that informs so much of his other sociological and political reflections. As Pitts says, Tocqueville himself “never confronted his own ambivalence” (p. 206). Her own explanation for this seeming dichotomy is that Tocqueville's apparent indifference to the fate of the peoples of North Africa derived precisely from his overriding concern with the “difficulty of maintaining political engagement in France in an age of democratization.” The future of France took priority over the present of the “barbarous” races of North Africa. This may be so, but it is, as Pitts is fully aware, only part of the answer. Tocqueville, like Mill, looked upon liberal government as suitable only for the truly civilized peoples of the world. For the rest, as Mill said, they would have to be content with “an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one.” The task of the British, said Tocqueville, was not to “dominate India, but to civilize it.” Yet domination was always a necessary precursor to civilization, the two being “closely connected.”

In the end democracy, old and new, is a creed intended for export. It had been for the Greeks of Periclean Athens. It was for Tocqueville and Mill. It still is today. As more and more is said, much of it delusional, about globalization as “Empire” and of the United States as the heir presumptive to the British Empire, an understanding of just what empire actually was, and how it was perceived when the Euroepan powers truly did control over nine-tenths of the world's populations, is of immense and pressing importance. A Turn to Empire has made that task a great deal easier.