Reordering the World

Duncan Bell’s new book brings together a dozen essays which he has published over the last decade, accompanied by some framing remarks and one specially written piece. It is very much a companion volume to his first monograph, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (2007), focusing on the same broad topic of late nineteenth-century British imperial political thought, and especially on attitudes towards the settler colonies and the history of empire. Plus, the two books have (almost) identically designed dustjackets. This is a beautifully produced, generously referenced, and relatively inexpensive volume, which offers easy access to a number of essays which are already widely cited. But the question must be whether they work together as a collection, and what historians can learn from them which they did not already know from Greater Britain. The book is divided into three logically arranged parts. The first, ‘Frames’, begins with the new chapter—a valuable partisan review of recent literature on imperial political thought—and continues with essays on the meaning of liberalism and on justifications for empire. The second part, ‘Themes’, includes chapters on the historicism of Victorian imperial thought, on the symbolic role of the monarchy therein, on ideas of imperial space and on visions of Anglo-American world order. Both these sections are concerned with broad patterns of thought and a wide range of voices, as expressed primarily in political tracts, works of history and periodical articles (though not, for some reason, newspapers). The last and longest part of the book then deals with liberal ‘Thinkers’ and their views on empire and international order. The protagonists here are J.S. Mill, T.H. Green, Herbert Spencer, Henry Sidgwick, J.R. Seeley, J.A. Froude, E.A. Freeman, J.A. Hobson and L.T. Hobhouse, all but one of whom (Green) featured in Greater Britain in more summary fashion. There is some repeated material between chapters, which will help readers who pick and choose essays, at the cost of taxing those who read the book cover to cover. Redundancy aside, the chapters fit together neatly, thanks in part to revisions made to emphasise their interconnections

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