Jennifer Pitts

LIBERALISM AND EMPIRE IN A NINETEENTH-CENTURY ALGERIAN MIRROR *

Le Miroir , published in Paris in 1833 by Hamdan ben Othman Khodja ( c. 1773–1842), was the first Algerian contribution to French public deliberation about Frances emerging empire in North Africa. A work of a self-consciously liberal cosmopolitan, and modernizing, perspective, the Miroir was almost alone in French debates in making a principled argument for a complete French withdrawal from Algeria—what Khodja called a “liberal emancipation” of the country. The Miroir argued for an independent Algeria that might take its place in a nineteenth-century Europe of emerging nations, and that might engage with European states as a diplomatic equal. The work illustrates the constraints on those who sought to preserve some independence, discursive as well as political, in the face of European expansion, as well as the critical possibilities of liberal discourse at a moment when it was being marshaled in France and Britain in the service of empire.

Legislator of the world? A rereading of bentham on colonies

It has become almost commonplace to claim that utilitarianism was, from its inception, an imperialist theory. Many writers, from Bentham’s own followers to recent scholars, have suggested that from Bentham onward, utilitarians reveled in the opportunity that they believed despotic power provided for the establishment of perfectly rational laws and institutions. A closer look at Bentham’s own views on empire, however, reveals a sharp break between his position on European colonies and that of followers such as James and John Stuart Mill. For Bentham, the utilitarian doctrine led to criticisms of the empires of his day. Bentham is better understood as a participant in the late-eighteenth-century skepticism about imperial conquests and aspirations than he is as a proto-colonialist or a “Solon” of India. Once he is understood in this light, our picture of his successors, especially J. S. Mill, is revised as well.

Boundaries of Victorian international law

INTRODUCTION: THE NEW CENTRALITY OF THE SCOPE OF INTERNATIONAL LAW When John Stuart Mill wrote in 1859 that ‘[t]o characterize any conduct whatever towards a barbarous people as a violation of the law of nations, only shows that he who so speaks has never considered the subject’, he ignored, whether unwittingly, or more probably wilfully, a long history of legal and diplomatic relations with many non-European powers and of sophisticated philosophical and doctrinal inquiries into the universality or limits of the law of nations. Mills Victorian contemporaries almost universally concurred in his judgement that very few, if any, non-European states could be considered equal subjects of international law, but they debated the scope of international law and the grounds for its boundaries with an urgency that belies Mills self-assured dismissal of the very question. The question of the geographic scope of the law of nations was central for theorists of international law throughout the second half of the nineteenth century in a way that it had not been to the thinkers they recognised as the founders of their field – Grotius, Pufendorf, Wolff, or Vattel, for instance. In this chapter, I explore the preoccupation among Victorian thinkers, both international lawyers and participants in a broader public debate, with the question of the scope of international law and the extent to which it could be thought to apply to non-European societies, especially Asian commercial states.

Irony in Adam Smith’s Critical Global History

This essay argues that attention to Adam Smith’s ironic framing of his historical narratives in the Wealth of Nations shows his critique of modern commercial society to have been more radical than is generally recognized. These narratives traced the pathologies of European development and the complex chains of causation that linked Smith’s readers—with often destructive and even catastrophic results—to other human beings distant from themselves. While Smith gave reasons to doubt that sympathy for distant others could bring about reform, I argue that he used irony and what he called ridicule to make the book’s British audience aware of the violence of the global commercial system and their place in it as both abettors and lesser victims of its abuses.

International relations and the critical history of International Law

Just as the contemporary global structure is a product of nineteenth-century economic and political developments, namely, industrial capitalism and global empires dominated by European metropoles, a misleading conception of the international system as composed of formally equal sovereign states is a product of the same period, as Vattel’s conception of states as equal moral persons was taken up and transformed in the early nineteenth century, especially in imperial Britain. This model continues to shape interpretations of global politics in International Relations (IR), despite the persistence of the imperial legacy in the form of a stratified globe. Historical work informed by postcolonial studies and recent scholarship in International Law can give IR greater analytical and critical purchase on the current global order.