Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination

Theodore Koditschek is Associate Professor of History at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

• Introduction; 1. Imagining Great Britain: Union, Empire and the burden of history: 1800–30; 2. Imagining a British India: history and the re-construction of Empire; 3. Imagining a Greater Britain: the Macaulays and the liberal romance of Empire; 4. Re-imagining a Greater Britain: J. A. Froude: counter-romance and controversy; 5. Greater Britain and the 'lesser breeds': liberalism, race and evolutionary history; 6. Indian liberals and Greater Britain: the search for union through history; Epilogue: from liberal imperialism to conservative unionism: losing the thread of progress in history.

'Exploring the troubled, sometimes paradoxical but persistent relationship between British liberalism and the empire has become a major scholarly preoccupation. In this arresting, highly intelligent work, Koditschek brings valuable new specificity and depth to this enquiry through a close reading of both familiar and unfamiliar writers. He examines the contributions of imperial officials and novelists, but especially leading Victorian historians. Most movingly, he traces the agonies of some late nineteenth-century Indian commentators, torn between incipient anti-imperial disquiet and deep attachment to perceived British liberal values.' Linda Colley, Shelby M. C. Davis 1958 Professor of History, Princeton University