Duncan Bell Knihy

The book delves into late 19th-century British political thought, focusing on the concept of Greater Britain, a proposed union between the UK and its settler colonies. It examines how various thinkers addressed anxieties around democracy, imperial challenges, and emerging global cooperation. Proposals ranged from ambitious nation-state ideas to practical strategies for strengthening colonial ties. By exploring themes of state, race, and nationality, the author sheds light on the intellectual landscape of the era and its implications for modern globalization debates.

The book explores the aspirations of influential thinkers in Britain and the United States between the late nineteenth century and World War I, who envisioned a unified English-speaking world based on Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism. It highlights the efforts of various figures, including Andrew Carnegie and H.G. Wells, to promote transatlantic cooperation through campaigns and publications. The proposals ranged from enhancing defense and economic ties to the radical idea of a single transatlantic state. Although these ideas lost traction by the mid-Edwardian era, their legacy persists today.

An account of the complexity and contradictions found in liberal visions of empire. Focusing mainly on nineteenth-century Britain--at the time the largest empire in history and a key incubator of liberal political thought--Duncan Bell sheds new light on some of the most important themes in modern imperial ideology. The book ranges widely across Victorian intellectual life and beyond. The opening essays explore the nature of liberalism, varieties of imperial ideology, the uses and abuses of ancient history, the imaginative functions of the monarchy, and fantasies of Anglo-Saxon global domination. They are followed by illuminating studies of prominent thinkers, including J. A. Hobson, L. T. Hobhouse, John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, Herbert Spencer, and J. R. Seeley. While insisting that liberal attitudes to empire were multiple and varied, Bell emphasizes the liberal fascination with settler colonialism. It was in the settler empire that many liberal imperialists found the place of their political dreams. Reordering the World is a significant contribution to the history of modern political thought and political theory.--Publisher

A magisterial study...by a historian at the top of his game. Political theorists, intellectual historians, and students of empire are once again in Duncan Bell's debt for his deep research, elegant analysis, and consistently acute judgments.--David Armitage, Harvard Universityrsity

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. -- Publisher description.