In the last twenty-five years, our understanding of the historical evolution and normative value of liberalism has been fundamentally revised by scholarship on canonical liberals’ enthusiastic support for projects of imperial expansion and overseas colonization. Duncan Bell has been a consistent and influential presence in this literature, contributing both insightful conceptual analyses and careful intellectual histories of British liberalism, imperialism, and ideas of international order. This volume collects a number of previously published essays on these themes, offering readers an opportunity not only to benefit from Bell's interesting studies of important figures, but also to follow the red threads, both substantive and methodological, that run through his prolific work.

In an early chapter written especially for the volume, Bell reviews recent debates on the relationship between liberalism and empire, comparing “rejectionist,” “necessary,” and “contingency” theses. Rejectionist theses argue that, properly understood, liberalism is an inherently anti-imperial political philosophy. On this view, supposed liberals that have supported imperial projects actually abandoned or misconstrued liberal ideals to do so. By contrast, necessary theses insist that liberalism is inherently imperial. Here, characteristically liberal commitments to teleological theories of history, universalist conceptions of human nature, and the priority of individual rights are understood to predispose to or even entail support for empire. Finally, contingency theses posit that liberalism contains resources that can be mobilized in either imperial or anti-imperial ideologies, suggesting that the purposes to which liberal arguments are put depend in large part upon the circumstances within which individual liberals live and write. While acknowledging the many insights that proponents of each thesis have produced, Bell argues that both the debate and much of the historical scholarship that underpins it are marked by confused and limited definitions of its key terms. The nature of the relationship between liberalism and empire depends on who one concedes is a liberal and what one regards as an empire.

Defining liberalism is a notoriously vexed problem, as Bell illustrates in a chapter dedicated to describing the history of John Locke's present status as a foundational liberal thinker. Even in Britain, we learn, “Locke was not widely regarded as a liberal—let alone a paradigmatic one—until nearly a century after liberalism emerged as an explicit political doctrine” (76). Nineteenth-century liberals traced the origins of their own reformist outlook to the revolutions of the late eighteenth century. While John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, T. H. Green, Henry Sidgwick, and other leading lights respected Locke's contributions to epistemology, they regarded his ahistorical, contractarian, natural-rights-based political philosophy as incoherent and unrelated if not antithetical to their own political projects. However, as fascist and communist regimes rose to power in the early twentieth century, shaking liberals’ confidence in their vision of the end of history, British and, especially, North American academics responded by fashioning a longer intellectual pedigree for a broader ideology. They forged a new liberalism, defined by Lockean commitments to individual liberty and constitutional government, and presented it not as a radical credo, but as “the most authentic expression of the Western tradition” (89). The history of Locke's canonization presents a problem for the history of liberalism, implying that either our current account or the self-understanding of nineteenth-century liberals has mistaken the tradition's true nature and roots, but Bell suggests an alternative interpretation: “Locke became a liberal during the twentieth century” (81). More generally, Bell proposes that we define the liberal tradition as “the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognized as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, across time and space.” Liberalism, then, is neither a set of specific philosophical commitments nor a canon of thinkers, but an “evolving and contested historical phenomen[on], conjured into existence by the work of many hands, shaped by scholarly knowledge-production and pedagogical regimes, and often fashioned and remade with specific politico-intellectual purposes in mind” (70).

Bell does not make as much use of this innovative approach to defining intellectual traditions throughout the rest of the volume as readers might hope. Instead, as he sets about refining our understanding of the relationship between liberalism and empire, his main methodological prescription is the familiar Cambridge injunction to increase attention to less well-known figures whose influence on their contemporaries did not assure their subsequent canonization. Thus, we get chapters not only on Locke and Mill, but also on Green, Spencer, Sidgwick, John Robert Seely, J. A. Froude, E. A. Freeman, J. A. Hobson, and L. T. Hobhouse. These studies serve to demonstrate not only liberalism's internal ideological variations, but also the great variety of institutional arrangements that liberal imperialists have defended.

Two important points bear emphasizing here: first, liberal champions of British overseas expansion in the late nineteenth century were deeply concerned to escape the cycle of imperial expansion, overextension, corruption, and collapse that they associated with Rome. They defended the British Empire by reference not to its continuities but rather its advances upon previous models of imperial rule. For the most ambitious of these figures, the British Empire was “not really an empire at all, but rather a new form of political order that could circumvent the entropic degeneration of traditional imperial forms” (121). Second, and relatedly, while much of the literature on liberal imperialism in Britain focuses on India, Bell shows that British liberals, including some who have been lauded for their “anti-imperialist” positions in relation to India, looked much more favorably upon the settler colonies of North America, South Africa, and the Antipodes. These outposts offered institutionally blank slates upon which colonists who were culturally and racially fit to rule themselves could construct regimes that embodied liberal ideals to a degree that India never would. Influential liberals remained committed to the project even as the settler colonies began edging toward independence, proposing globe-spanning commonwealths, federations, and alliances of the Anglo-Saxon polities that would preserve the empire's integrity, permitting the metropole—now styled the “mother country”—to retain its international influence and achieve even greater civilizational advances.

This subtle, well-documented, and fine-grained, but still extraordinarily wide-ranging study of liberal imperialism in all its many shades would seem to position Bell well to take on the daunting task proposed at the end of this volume: “decolonizing liberalism” by finding “liberal forms of anti-imperialism suitable for the modern world” (371). But it is here that the limitations of Bell's approach come into view. For it seems unlikely that such an ideology has ever issued from a British pen, and despite all his well-founded criticisms of the canon and his insistence on variations of liberalism and forms of empire, Bell's attention rarely strays beyond the shores of Britain. Gandhi's and Fanon's influential and distinctive critiques of empire receive less than a page apiece. The volume considers no South American liberals, no East Asian imperialists, and no West African theorists of postimperial world order. Readers wishing to understand the relationship between liberalism and empire in these regions will have to look elsewhere, but they will be very well served if they do so having read Duncan Bell's important book first.