International Origins of Social and Political Theory by Tarak Barkawi George Lawson

Author:Tarak Barkawi, George Lawson [Tarak Barkawi, George Lawson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Sociology, History
ISBN: 9781787147249
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2017-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

LATE-VICTORIAN EMPIRE, GREATER BRITAIN, AND THE MISSING ECONOMISTS

Bell (2007a, 2014a) has painstakingly documented the strains of late-Victorian and Edwardian imperial thought that embrace, in some fashion, a “global state,” imagined as an Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-American union or a federative empire: a Greater Britain. He recognizes that renewed interest in empire was a response partly to immediate events, particularly a sense of growing threat to Britain’s dominant political and economic position (Bell, 2007a, pp. 27, 34; 2016, pp. 166–167). The fact that empire might be reimagined in a federative form, perhaps prefiguring recent counter- or post-Westphalian scholarly and political projects, turned on a sense that space had been shrunk by new communications and transportation technologies (Bell, 2005, 2014b). Whatever be the catalysts, Bell sees Greater Britain as a distinctly political project. This strand of imperial political thought reimagines British political identity as a nation or race dispersed across space, advocates new federative institutions designed to encompass a dispersed Britishness, and justifies this project as much in civic and moral terms as geopolitical. Thus, many of the “colonial unionists” Bell surveys “sought to distinguish themselves sharply from what they saw as the corrosive liberalism of the ‘Manchester School’ and the utilitarian political economists” (Bell, 2007a, p. 17); they saw economists’ dogmatic support for free trade as a cosmopolitanism that undercuts the empire and their blindness to anything but material wealth as contributing to the unraveling of collective moral bonds (Bell, 2007a, pp. 44–45, 118).

But Greater Britain was more than a call for a return to some prior and less cosmopolitan era in which a sense of British national purpose might be rekindled. Rather, following Spencer and Maine, Greater Britain advocates recognized that England’s evolutionary advantage was built alongside the extension of social relations and markets across space, but most thinkers fully recognized that these same evolutionary processes entailed the possibility of imperial decline (Bell, 2007b, p. 163). As an alternative to the feared decline of British preeminence, they envisioned a “global” political “stage” on which a “trans-continental composite polity” might be built (Bell, 2007a, pp. 55, 261). This political stage remained divided into peoples and races that varying climate and circumstance created and distance perpetuated, in spite of the gradual overcoming of distance by new technologies (Bell, 2007a, pp. 63–91, 117; 2016, pp. 174–175). In short, severe limits to a “global consciousness” remained (Bell, 2007a, p. 260) so that the imagined political state, a Greater Britain, would encompass only Anglo-Saxon peoples: A distinctive racial or national group, in terms often used interchangeably, whose extension across space was effected by English settlements in North America and the Antipodes. This race would lead a Greater Britain, while settlers in Africa, the indigenous peoples of North America and colonized peoples of Asia, with India as the key reference point, would remain subordinated. Thus, the vision of a federated empire was as a narrow, though transnational, “racial polity” (Bell, 2007a, pp. 92, 101, 113–115, 222–226; 2007b, pp. 159–160, 167, 173; 2016, pp. 175–178, 186–196).

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