It might be the peculiarity of our times that it requires a book-length study to vindicate Edmund Burke's credentials as a conservative and pro-imperial statesman. As the book's title makes clear, this is exactly what Daniel O'Neill's Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire sets out to establish. To the reader unfamiliar with the recent literature on “liberalism and empire,” the point of the book might appear obvious. However, against the recent scholarly predilection to paint Burke as a liberal anti-imperial critic, O'Neill's argument would seem nigh apostate.

O'Neill mounts a frontal objection to Burke's newly minted reputation as an untimely cosmopolitan who possessed an exceptional appreciation of cultural difference and expressed sympathy for the British Empire's mistreated subjects to the point of advocating imperial dismemberment. O'Neill concedes to these interpretations that Burke frequently criticized British imperial practice, as when he opposed the heavy-handed treatment of the American colonies, censured the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, and excoriated East India Company rule in Bengal. Yet he contends that these criticisms are better understood as part of a conservative agenda of reforming and retaining rather than retrenching the empire. Far from joining his liberal contemporaries in skepticism about imperial expansion, Burke rushed to empire's defense and asserted its sovereignty in the New World, the British Isles, and India.

Equally importantly, the book maintains, Burke's case for empire rested on distinctly conservative principles, which proved resourceful for revamping Britain's imperial ideology in line with its “swing to the East.” At a time when the acquisition of a territorial empire in India strained the broadly liberal self-understanding of the British Empire as “Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free,” Burke crafted a hierarchical vision of empire that could reconcile authority and liberty in a socially heterogeneous polity. His conception of “history as a civilizing process” enabled him to order the social diversity of the empire into a legible hierarchy and prescribe different governmental forms appropriate to the different stations occupied by Britain's subjects (42). Burke designated hereditary nobility and organized religion (together with their underlying principles of custom, prescription, and paternalism) as the condition of civilizational advancement and the index of imperial hierarchy. These ardently conservative commitments, O'Neill concludes, placed Burke's defense of empire “wholly outside the theoretical parameters and assumptions of liberalism” (169).

The key theoretical contribution of Conservative Logic of Empire resides in its innovative appropriation of “Orientalism” (Edward Said) and “Ornamentalism” (David Cannadine) as discursive logics of “othering” and “saming,” which Burke mobilized for navigating and knitting together the structural diversity of the empire (1–2). Following an introductory chapter that sets up the main argument, O'Neill tracks Burke's use of these twin logics through his writings, speeches, and correspondence on America, Ireland, and India. In chapter 2, O'Neill shows persuasively, if counterintuitively, that Burke used Orientalist strategies first in the Atlantic to mark off the barbarous Africans and savage Native Americans, thereby sanctioning their government by paternalist and despotic methods (64–78). By contrast, he presented white settlers in Ornamentalist light, as civilized “descendants of Englishmen” fiercely wedded to their inherited liberties, whom the British parliament therefore had to govern with practical leniency (54–62). Despite this call for a more prudent government of the colonies, however, Burke never veered from his belief, enshrined in the 1766 Declaratory Act, that the British imperial state exercised undisputed sovereignty over its overseas possessions, including the right to tax them.

Chapter 3 reconstructs Burke's Ornamentalist imagination in India, the principal (if not the exclusive) case that has informed the cosmopolitan depictions of Burke. O'Neill argues that India's “ancient constitution,” which comprised a hereditary nobility, Hindu religion, and caste system, rendered that country in Burke's view rather similar to Britain (94–106). His scorn for the East India Company centered on its policies of taxation and confiscation that subverted the independence of native Indian rulers and landowners, effectively upending India's own “Ancien Régime” (110–23). That being said, Burke wholeheartedly embraced the empire in the East as the fruit of rightful conquest (he had nothing but praise for Robert Clive), a providential responsibility and “trust,” and a potential source of wealth and power for Britain in its rivalry with France. Accordingly, he framed the plunder of India as a problem of corruption rather than imperialism, one that could be remedied through administrative reform. The solution to the misfortune of the Indians, in other words, lay in not less but more and better empire.

Chapter 4 returns the discussion to Burke's homeland, Ireland. Burke had been an inveterate critic of the “popery laws” by which the Protestant Ascendancy secured its political and economic supremacy over the Catholic majority of the island. The Ascendancy's arrogance and exclusion fueled popular discontent, which received a radical momentum from the French Revolution and culminated in the founding of the United Irishmen. O'Neill contends that Burke blamed the Ascendancy for alienating Ireland's non-Protestant population by continuing to act like a conquering, alien force even a century after the expropriations that produced it (153–64). Having failed to incorporate the Irish into an Ornamentalist imagination, the Ascendancy triggered a zealous movement agitating for political enfranchisement and independence. Burke dreaded both of these agendas. He reiterated England's sovereignty over Ireland as its “guardian angel” in the same breath as he proposed Catholic relief and free trade with Ireland in order to harness it closer to the empire (134–40).

Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire is a book with a mission. O'Neill makes a passionate case for Burke's conservative pro-imperialism while remaining judicious and broadly sympathetic in his engagement with opposing viewpoints. The book is carefully researched and deserves merit for incorporating all three flashpoints of Burke's encounter with the British imperial expansion in the last third of the eighteenth century. By the same token, it furnishes a coherent answer to Burke's puzzling defense of Indians next to his denigration of Africans and Native Americans—a riddle that other commentators have tended to play down or explain away. For O'Neill, there is nothing mysterious in Burke's discriminatory standards, which neatly follow from his view of each group's position in his civilizational scale. Viewed in this light, Burke's manner of judging non-European civilizations appears much closer to that of a liberal imperialist like James Mill, their disagreement on the status of India notwithstanding.

Beyond these exegetical insights, the book makes two distinct contributions to the study of empire and imperial ideologies. The first of these is to widen the aperture of political theory and empire beyond the dominant focus on liberalism by introducing conservatism (as others have done with republicanism) as a self-standing justification of imperial rule (169). Second, the book connects Burke's distinctly illiberal embrace of empire to the evolution of British imperial ideology in the nineteenth century. One such connection is the amenability of Ornamentalism to imperial strategies of indirect rule that claimed to recognize and respect the internal hierarchies of colonized societies and sought to govern them through their indigenous elites (170–72). Another is Burke's indictment of the Ascendancy for the trouble in Ireland (one could also add to this his denunciation of the East India Company over the devastation of India), which prefigured the nineteenth-century exonerations of imperialism by blaming unruly settlers for its most egregious atrocities (173–74).

There remain a few questions overlooked and opportunities missed in this book. Two are worth mentioning. First, in his fervent objection to Burke's liberal-cosmopolitan portrayals, O'Neill misses the manifest currents of economic liberalism in Burke's thought. After all, Burke self-identified as a student of political economy and Adam Smith declared to have found a kindred mind in Burke. The role of economic argument in Burke's defense of empire could further illuminate his appropriation of Scottish stadial history and the idea of civilizing mission. The second missed opportunity is to explore Burke's resort to Orientalist imagery for describing British misconduct. Famously, Burke decried the Company policies in India as “barbarous” on more than one occasion. While he certainly did not intend to reduce Company agents to the status of Africans or Native Americans, the usage itself suggests that just as Ornamentalist language could induce sympathy with distant societies, Orientalist arguments could partition familiar ones. Taken together, these two lines of inquiry could shed brighter light on what O'Neill advances as the final contribution of his study, namely, Burke's status as a “child of the (Scottish) Enlightenment,” albeit a peculiar one (174–75).