During the tumultuous closing decades of the nineteenth century, as the prospect of democracy loomed and as intensified global economic and strategic competition reshaped the political imagination, British thinkers grappled with the question of how best to organize the empire. Many found an answer to the anxieties of the age in the idea of Greater Britain, a union of the United Kingdom and its settler colonies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and southern Africa. In The Idea of Greater Britain, Duncan Bell analyzes this fertile yet neglected debate, examining how a wide range of thinkers conceived of this vast "Anglo-Saxon" political community. Their proposals ranged from the fantastically ambitious--creating a globe-spanning nation-state--to the practical and mundane--reinforcing existing ties between the colonies and Britain. But all of these ideas were motivated by the disquiet generated by democracy, by challenges to British global supremacy, and by new possibilities for global cooperation and communication that anticipated today's globalization debates. Exploring attitudes toward the state, race, space, nationality, and empire, as well as highlighting the vital theoretical functions played by visions of Greece, Rome, and the United States, Bell illuminates important aspects of late-Victorian political thought and intellectual life.

"Historians have long understood that the notion of "the cold war" is richly metaphorical, if not paradoxical. The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was a war that fell ambiguously short of war, an armed truce that produced considerable bloodshed. Yet scholars in the rapidly expanding field of Cold War studies have seldom paused to consider the conceptual and chronological foundations of the idea of the Cold War itself. This stands in contrast to the study of other historical epochs that are governed by grand but ambivalent rubrics: the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, or the Industrial Revolution. In Uncertain Empire, a group of leading scholars takes up the challenge of making sense of the idea of the Cold War and its application to the writing of American history. They interrogate the concept from a wide range of disciplinary vantage points; the scope of these different positions illustrates the diversity of methods and approaches in contemporary Cold War studies. Among the disciplines on which the book draws are diplomatic history, the history of science, literary criticism, cultural history, and the history of religion.

Animating the volume as a whole is a question about the extent to which the Cold War was an American invention. Essays look at the Cold War as in need of a rigorous re-centering, after a decade in which historians have introduced expansive global and transnational perspectives on the conflict; as a uniquely American ideological project designed to legitimize the pursuit of an ambitious geopolitical agenda; as a geopolitical and transnational phenomenon; and other approaches. Uncertain Empire brings these debates into focus, and offers students of the Cold War a new framework for considering recent developments in the scholarship.

"Thought-provoking . An impressively wide-ranging and exceptionally coherent collection that simultaneously clarifies, problematizes, and advances our understanding of the United States and the Cold War." --Hugh Wilford, Journal of American History""

"Designed to appeal to teachers and students of international relations and political theory, this exciting, user-friendly text explores the ethical dimensions of some of the most complex problems in world politics.

The book opens with a discussion of different methods and approaches employed to study the subject, including analytical political theory, post-structuralism and critical theory. It then surveys some of the most prominent perspectives on global ethics, including cosmopolitanism, communitarianism of various kinds, theories of international society, realism, postcolonialism, feminism, and green political thought. Part III examines a variety of more specific issues, including immigration, democracy, human rights, the just war tradition and its critics, international law, and global poverty and inequality.

Reviews:

"Ethics and World Politics is the leading interdisciplinary introduction to justice beyond borders. Global poverty and inequality, democracy, war, terrorism, human rights, military intervention, immigration, national identity, and other vital issues are explored by some of our leading authors. The dominant theoretical frameworks for debating these topics are explained with unusual clarity. This is an excellent text for students working at the intersection of Politics, International Relations, and Philosophy on some of the most crucial questions in the world."

Leif Wenar, Kings College London

"Useful to both students and advanced scholars, this is a superb collection of essays by major contemporary thinkers in international politics and political theory. ... Highly recommended."

William E. Scheuerman, Indiana University

"This excellent volume explores many of the most important ethical dilemmas in world politics; provides a reliable and carefully organized guide to the diverse, and often conflicting, ways in which they have been addressed; and draws on the insights of a high-quality range of contributors. A highly recommended text for all those involved in teaching courses on ethics in world politics."

Andrew Hurrell, Oxford University

"""

Political realism dominated the study of international relations during the Cold War. Since then, however, its fortunes have been mixed: pushed onto the backfoot during 1990s, it has in recent years returned to the centre of scholarly debate in international relations. Yet despite its significance in international relations theory, realism plays little role in contemporary international political theory. It is often associated with a form of crude realpolitik that ignores the role of ethical considerations in political life. This book explores an alternative understanding of realism. The contributors view realism chiefly as a diverse and complex mode of political and ethical theorising rather than either a value-neutral branch of social science or the unreflective defence of the national interest. They analyse a variety of historical and philosophical themes, probing the potential and the pathologies of realist thought. A number of the chapters offer critical interpretations of key figures in the canon of twentieth century realism, including Hans Morgenthau, E. H. Carr, and Reinhold Niebuhr. Others seek to widen the lens through which realism is usually viewed, exploring the writings of Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss. Finally, a number of the contributors engage with general issues in political theory, including the meaning and value of pessimism, the relationship between power and ethics, the role of normative political theory, and what might constitute political 'reality.' Straddling international relations and political theory, this book makes a significant contribution to both fields.

This wide-ranging and original study provides an insight into the climate of political thought during the lifespan of what was, at this time, the most powerful empire in history. A distinguished group of contributors explores the way in which thinkers in Britain theorised influential views about empire and international relations, exploring topics such as the evolution of international law; the ways in which the world was notionally divided into the 'civilised' and the 'barbarian'; the role of India in shaping visions of civil society; grandiose ideas about a global imperial state; the development of an array of radical critiques of empire; the varieties of liberal imperialism; and the rise and fall of free trade. Together, the chapters form an analysis of political thought in this context; both of the famous (Bentham, Mill, Marx, and Hobson) and of those who, whilst influential at the time, are all but forgotten today.

"Perceptions of the past play a vital role in shaping the contemporary world. Memory, Trauma and World Politics brings together leading scholars from across the social sciences to investigate the varied and complex ways in which social memories of traumatic events, including war, genocide and political oppression, inform and construct individual and collective identities. Drawing on diverse theoretical perspectives, they analyse issues including the possibilities for post-conflict reconciliation on the Korean peninsula, Taiwan, and the former Yugoslavia, the function of memory and forgetting in the evolution of the modern state, the relationship between trauma and ressentiment, the role of the Holocaust in shaping both German and Israeli political culture, of apartheid in current South African politics, and of 9/11 in the new world order. Theoretically innovative and thematically wide-ranging, Memory, Trauma and World Politics addresses some of the most pressing issues facing analysts of world politics today.

"This collection, unusually integrated for an edited volume, treats questions of memory and trauma in world politics in a critical, interdisciplinary fashion. The range of conceptual and empirical material offered is both novel and rich, and specialists and students alike will benefit greatly from its scholarship." - Professor David Campbell, Durham University, UK

"The contributors to Memory, Trauma and World Politics present exciting, innovative work by introducing concepts of social and cultural trauma into the study of national and transnational politics. The volume represents an impressive diversity of methods and opinions and serves as an excellent guide to the field of collective memory and trauma studies."
- Wulf Kansteiner, Assistant Professor, Binghamton University, USA

"Memory, Trauma and World Politics is a fascinating and long overdue study of memory as a multidisciplinary phenomenon...a theoretically rich and imaginative volume that thoughtfully and convincingly navigates the reader through the multiple ways in which memory is proven to be indispensable for the understanding of modern politics." - Alla Mirzoyan, Political Studies Review ""

Liberalism is a term employed in a dizzying variety of ways across the humanities and social sciences. This essay seeks to reframe how the liberal tradition is understood. I start by delineating different types of response – prescriptive, comprehensive, explanatory – that are frequently conflated in answering the question “what is liberalism?” I then discuss assorted methodological strategies employed in the existing literature: after rejecting “stipulative” and “canonical” approaches, I outline a contextualist alternative. On this (comprehensive) account, liberalism is best characterised as the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, over time. In the remainder of the article I present an historical analysis of shifts in the meaning of liberalism in Anglo-American political thought between 1850 and 1950, focusing in particular on how John Locke came to be seen as a liberal. I also explore the emergence of the category of "liberal democracy". I argue that the scope of the liberal tradition was massively expanded during the middle decades of the twentieth century, such that it came to be seen by many as the constitutive ideology of the West. This capacious (and deeply confusing) understanding of liberalism was produced by a conjunction of the ideological wars fought against “totalitarianism” and assorted developments in the social sciences. Today we both inherit and inhabit it.

During the final quarter of the twentieth century, the democratic peace thesis - the idea that democracies do not fight one another - moved to the centre of scholarly and political debate throughout the Western world. Much of this work traces its origins to the European Enlightenment, and especially on Immanuel Kant. However, this historical narrative misses much of the subsequent discourse about democracy and war. In this essay I focus on some prominent, though now largely forgotten, strands of political thinking in the United States and Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, I dissect fin de siècle debates about democracy, empire, race, and interstate conflict. Section I delineates four popular visions of peace that circulated during the nineteenth century: structural-liberal, radical-liberal, socialist, and republican. Section II introduces what I call the ‘democratic war thesis’ and the ‘democratic empire thesis.’ The former identified the linkages between democratic political structures and inter-state conflict, the latter suggested that vast empires could co-operatively govern the world and abolish war.  Section III anatomises the racial peace thesis, which was propounded by a range of prominent figures,  including Andrew Carnegie, Cecil Rhodes and H. G. Wells. They argued, from different points on the political spectrum, that the 'Anglo-Saxon race' held the key to perpetual peace.

Debates about post-Westphalian forms of citizenship play a central role in contemporary political thought. I analyse a significant precursor to these debates, exploring fin de siècle conceptions of racial and imperial political membership. My argument has two main parts. First, I delineate different models of imperial citizenship: imperial-statist, institutional-imperial, racial-imperial, and isopolitan. Second, I dissect the notion of ‘isopolitan’ (or common) citizenship. Isopolity is a practice, derived from the ancient Greeks, in which independent states reciprocally grant citizenship rights to the members of other independent states, thus creating a loose form of political union. It was adapted at the turn of the twentieth century to theorise future Anglo-American relations. I examine the arguments of some prominent isopolitans, focusing on the constitutional theorist A. V. Dicey. ‘Anglo’ isopolitans challenged the isomorphic relationship between the territorial state, sovereignty and political membership. They did so through constructing a global white supremacist political vision.

This chapter provides an analytical survey of ideologies of imperialism, focusing mainly (though not exclusively) on British and American experience during the last two hundred years. It first distinguishes between imperial imaginaries, ideologies, and theories, and then discusses three different forms of ideology: justificatory, governance, and resistance.

"Philosophers and prophets have long dreamt of schemes to govern a violent and unpredictable world. This chapter sketches a synoptic intellectual history of a prominent variation on the theme: the attempt to unify the constituent elements of the ‘Anglo-world’ into a single globe-spanning community, and to harness their purported world-historical potential. Since the late nineteenth century numerous commentators have preached the benefits of unity, though they have often disagreed on the institutional form it should assume. These are projects for the creation of a new Anglo century.

Sections 2 & 3 explore overlapping elements of the fin de siècle Anglo-world discourse. Section 4 traces the echoes of these debates through the twentieth century, discussing imperial-commonwealth, Anglo-American, democratic unionist, and world federalist projects. Despite assorted differences amongst them, most versions of these grand supranational schemes were heirs of the earlier debates. Finally, Section 5 discusses contemporary accounts of Anglo-world supremacy. While none of the most radical plans came to fruition, the evolving debate over the nature and future of the Anglo-world formed a central element in the cultural construction of the “West,” and highlights the extravagant hopes that have been invested in the “Anglo-Saxons” over the course of a brutal century. Finally, I argue that contemporary ideas about the Leagues/Unions of Democracies - including the Princeton Project on National Security - can be traced back to earlier imperial discourses."
"

In this chapter I address the challenge that the ‘global turn’ in historical studies presents for intellectual history. I argue that historians should pay greater attention to what “globality” actually entails. Often the term is employed as a synonym for transnational or “non-western”, but these usages obscure more than they illuminate. I then present an answer to the question of how we might conceptualise Global Intellectual History (GIH). First, I suggest that the human sciences – including history – can be conceived of as the study of practices of “world-making”, of the plethora of ways in which human beings imaginatively construct worlds. And second, that GIH can be characterised as a mode of historical writing that focuses on a subset of such practices: those which attempt to encompass a given world (of whatever physical scale). This formulation concentrates attention on articulations of universality. The “global,” then, is not best seen as a geographical designation, or a place-holder for “non-Western,” but instead denotes the perceptual scope of an argument or other act of imagination. I flesh out this theoretical argument with three illustrative examples: first, my own work on how shifts in the perception of time and space generated new modes of political consciousness; second, how recent scholarship on the history of the social sciences highlights the “performative” dimensions of knowledge production; and third, how representations of the planet have shaped social and political visions throughout modern history.

An chapter analysing the dangers - political and theoretical - of importing biological theorising - and especially Evolutionary Psychology - into social and political analysis. (It updates my 2006 International Affairs 'In Biology we Trust')

"An assessment of James Tully's contribution to political thought/international political theory, focusing on his recent account of global citizenship. I examine (a) his view of empire, past and present, and (b) his understanding of political violence. I argue that his vision can be seen as a radical (agonistic) form of republicanism, oriented towards the expansion of democratic freedom. However, I suggest that there is a mismatch between his optimistic account of the potential for instituting novel forms of citizenship and his account of the grim legacy of western imperialism.

This is the volume:
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/on-global-citizenship-9781849664929/"

Recent scholarship on John Stuart Mill has illuminated his arguments about the normative legitimacy of imperial rule. However, it has tended to ignore or downplay his extensive writings on settler colonialism: the attempt to create permanent “civilized” communities, mainly in North America and the South Pacific. Mill defended colonization throughout his life, although his arguments about its character and justification shifted over time. While initially he regarded it as a solution to the “social problem” in Britain, he increasingly came to argue that its legitimacy resided in the universal benefits—civilization, peace, and prosperity—it generated for humanity. In the final years of his life Mill seemed to lose faith in the project. Finally recognizing the prevalence of colonial violence and the difficulty of realizing his grand ambitions, yet refusing to give up on colonization altogether, his colonial romance gave way to a form of melancholia.

A book chapter exploring how late c.19/early c.20 debates about imperial federation and Anglo-unity challenged the imaginative border between domestic/imperial/foreign policy, imagined a new form of globe-spanning public sphere - a precursor to more recent accounts - and implied a transnational conception of the 'people'

Memory is a defining feature of the human condition. But the vectors and social dynamics of memory, the linkages between the individual and the collective, and the roles that traces of the past play in constituting identities and in shaping political life are complex, varied and contested. So too are the ethical demands that memory makes on us. What is clear, though, is that violence – its grim modalities, its diffuse consequences, its representation and comprehension – must stand at the centre of any understanding of memory and politics. The articles in forum explore some of the intersections between memory, politics and violence. In this introduction I set the scene for them, examining some of the relevant issues at stake and outlining some of the key positions in the scholarly literature.

In order to grasp some of the key intellectual developments and trends that shaped the global politics of twentieth century and continue to shape our own world—neo-classical economics, modernization theory, deterrence theory, the democratic peace, among others—it is necessary to explore the history of the human sciences. It is important, in other words, to examine the role of the modern research university in producing and diffusing ideas about the self, society, the economy and world order. International Relations (IR), and political science more generally, played a significant role in this story. In recent years we have seen a growth of interest in the history of IR, though it is still an underdeveloped area of research. Among other things, scholars have shown that many of the foundational myths of the discipline—the views that inform textbook understandings of the past and present—are deeply flawed. This article first examines this recent work, highlighting its strengths and weaknesses, and then proceeds to offer some thoughts on future directions for research. It identifies a range of questions and topics that have yet to be adequately addressed, and draws on the latest methodological work in intellectual history, highlighting some new interpretative approaches that can enrich scholarship in this area.

In this article I pursue two main lines of argument. First, I seek to delineate two distinctive modes of justifying imperialism found in nineteenth-century political thought (and beyond). The 'liberal civilizational' model, articulated most prominently by John Stuart Mill, justified empire primarily in terms of the benefits that it brought to subject populations. Its proponents sought to 'civilize'lthe 'barbarian'. An alternative `republican' model focused instead on the benefits - glory, honour and power above all - that accrued to the imperial state. Less concerned with spreading civilization, its proponents concentrated on fortifying the imperial polity. Second, I offer a 'republican' interpretation of the writings of the historian and public moralist J.A. Froude (1818-94), arguing that he both diagnosed the problems of modern Britain and prescribed imperial solutions to those problems, based on his reading of the fate of the Roman republic.

The way in which societies institutionalize “collective memory” is one of the most important aspects of contemporary politics, feeding directly into the constitution of individual and communal identities, and creating sources of discord and dialogue. This essay explores some of the most significant issues at stake in debates over the political uses of the past. I suggest that it is important to distinguish between three modes of historical consciousness, memory, mythology, and critical history. I then offer a critique of Avishai Margalit’s "The Ethics of Memory" (2002), arguing that in failing to allow space for “acknowledging” the plurality of communal myths his strong communitarian conception of mnemonic ethics leaves room for the perpetuation of asymmetric power relations and the imposition of hegemonic identities. Developing this line of thought, the essay then explores some of the ways in which agonistic democratic theorists might think through the relationship between past and present, myth and history. I argue that it is necessary to avoid procedures and institutions that entrench diverse identities while simultaneously establishing conditions in which different communities can freely propound their historical identity-constitutive claims.

""In the closing decades of the nineteenth century the idea of Greater Britain, of the unity of the 'Anglo-Saxon' colonies and the ‘mother country’, became a topic of considerable interest and controversy amongst the metropolitan intellectual and political elite. This article examines the roles played by the monarchy in the debates. Queen Victoria, as both idea and institution, assumed two central functions. First, it was argued that the institution of the monarchy, stretching back over centuries, could supply an anchor of permanence and constitutional fidelity in a redesigned global polity. This would reassure critics of such schemes that their fears about fundamental transformation were unfounded; that a thread of historical continuity ran through the proposals. Secondly, Victoria – or at least an idealised representation of her – acted as the linchpin for a sense of global national identity. The prestige and admiration that she (and the institution of the monarchy itself) generated, it was contended, bound the distant peoples of her realm iin close communion. Moreover, the way in which she was sometimes represented in imperial debate harked back to (while modifying) an older civic humanist language of ‘patriot kingship’.""

This article argues that during the closing decades of the nineteenth century a significant group of British imperial thinkers broke with the long-standing conventions of political thought by deliberately eschewing the inspiration and intellectual authority provided by the examples of the ancient empires. While the early Victorian colonial reformers had looked to the template of Greece, and while many later Victorians compared the empire in India with the Roman empire, numerous proponents of Greater Britain (focusing on the settler colonies, and associated in particular with the movement for imperial federation) looked instead to the United States. I argue that the reason for this innovation, risky in a culture obsessed with the moral and prudential value of precedent and tradition, lies in contemporary understandings of history. Both Rome and Greece, despite their differences, were thought to demonstrate that empires were ultimately self-dissolving; as such, empires modelled on their templates were doomed to eventual failure, whether through internal decay or the peaceful independence of the colonies. Since the advocates of Greater Britain were determined to construct an enduring political community, a global Anglo-Saxon polity, they needed to escape the fate of previous empires. They tried instead to insert Greater Britain into a progressive narrative, one that did not doom them to repeat the failures of the past.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, British liberal ideology contained an open-ended vision of international order. The vision usually included a notion of an incipient or immanent international society composed of civilized nations. The fundamental distinction between civilized and barbarian nations meant that while this perceived society was international, in no sense was it global. In this essay we outline some of the broader characteristics of the internationalist outlook that many liberals shared and specifically discuss the claims about international society that they articulated. Liberal internationalism was a broad church and many (but not all) of its fundamental assumptions about the nature and direction of international progress and the importance of civilization were shared by large swathes of the intellectual elite. These assumptions are analysed by exploring the conceptions of international society found in three of the most influential thinkers of the time, T. H. Green, Herbert Spencer and Henry Sidgwick. Finally, the essay turns to the limitations of this vision of international society, especially in the context of the role of empire.

The disciplinary history of International Relations (IR) has been marked by confrontation between those who believe that the study of politics can and should be modelled on the natural sciences, a position defended most forcibly in the United States, and those who have dissented, viewing this ambition as methodologically unjustified and ethically undesirable. But the scientific template against which to judge such claims is constantly shifting. In this article it is suggested that mainstream IR theorists are likely to turn increasingly to the biological sciences for inspiration and intellectual legitimacy. Some of the possibilities and problems involved in this move are explored, focusing in particular on the prominent role played by evolutionary psychology in the social sciences. A variety of reasons are offered, political and theoretical, as to why IR scholars should be extremely wary of looking to the biological sciences to provide universalistic accounts of human behavioural patterns.

This article explores the international political thought of one of the most prominent late Victorian public intellectuals, John Robert Seeley (1834-95), the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, and author of the best-selling "The Expansion of England (1883)". Challenging conventional readings of Seeley, I argue that his vision of global politics must be located within the wider frame of his views on the sacred, and that he is seen best as articulating an intriguing political theology of international relations. In particular, I argue that instead of interpreting him as a realist, as has traditionally been the case, his position is classified most accurately as 'cosmopolitan nationalism'. Only by situating him in the intellectual context(s) of his time is it possible to provide an adequate account of the identity of his political thought.

This paper traces shifts in the understanding of time/space across the long nineteenth century, focusing in particular on the period of the 1860s. Contra David Harvey, I argue that this decade witnessed a radical shift in conceptions of the spatiality and temporality of the globe, thus providing the intellectual resources for the late Victorian theorisation of assorted forms of globe-spanning imperial polities. This moment laid the cognitive foundations for globalization.

In this (2003) paper I seek to challenge the dominant modes of conceiving the relationship between memory and national identity, and in so doing offer analysts of nationalism an improved understanding of the dynamics of national identity formation. The concept of collective memory is invoked regularly in attempts to explain the pervasiveness and power of nationalism. I argue that the concept is misused routinely in this context, and instead I employ a ‘social agency’ approach to theorizing, whereby memory is conceived in a more limited and cogent manner. I argue that it is important to distinguish clearly between memory and mythology, both of which are essential to understanding national identity, for not only are the two concepts distinct, they can also act in opposition to each other. Following from this I introduce the notion of a ‘mythscape’, the temporally and spatially extended discursive realm in which the myths of the nation are forged, transmitted, negotiated, and reconstructed constantly. Through employing the idea of a mythscape we can relate memory and mythology to each other in a theoretically profitable way.